This new book is an edited volume of essays that examine the legacy of architecture in a number of African countries soon after independence. It has its origins in an exhibition and symposium that focused on architecture as an element in Nordic countries' aid packages to newly independent states, but the expanded breadth of the essays includes work on other countries and architects. Drawing on ethnography, archival research and careful observations of buildings, remains and people, the case studies seek to connect the colonial and postcolonial origins of modernist architecture, the historical processes they underwent, and present use and habitation. It results from the 2015 seminar and exhibition Forms of Freedom at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway. The exhibition showed how modern Scandinavian architecture became an essential component of foreign aid to East Africa in the period 1960-80, and how the ideals of the Nordic welfare system found expression in a number of construction projects. The seminar, which built upon the exhibition as well as on a previous collaboration on the legacies of modernism in Africa between the Department of Anthropology of the University of Oslo and the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning from Ghent University, broadened the geographic scope of the discussion beyond the Scandinavian context, and set the ground for bringing together the disciplines of architectural history and social anthropology. Primary readership will be among architects and architectural historians, and graduate level architecture and urban studies students, for whom it will be valuable course material, as well as those in fields such as African studies and anthropology. It may also be of interest to those working or researching in public policy and political history.

Seen as a step toward addressing this gap, this catalogue seeks to position Mohidin within Berlin art circles of the 1960s, and unravel what could be contingently described as painting from within the tradition. The catalogue also explores the formative role of Mohidin's Pago Pago series not only in his oeuvre, but also in our very ability to write about Southeast Asian history.

The captivating tale of the plans and personalities behind one of New York City's most radical and recognizable buildings Considered the crowning achievement of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is often called iconic. But it is in fact iconoclastic, standing in stark contrast to the surrounding metropolis and setting a new standard for the postwar art museum. Commissioned to design the building in 1943 by the museum's founding curator, Baroness Hilla von Rebay, Wright established residence in the Plaza Hotel in order to oversee the project. Over the next 17 years, Wright continuously clashed with his clients over the cost and the design, a conflict that extended to the city of New York and its cultural establishment. Against all odds, Wright held fast to his radical design concept of an inverted ziggurat and spiraling ramp, built with a continuous beam-a shape recalling the form of an hourglass. Construction was only completed in 1959, six months after Wright's death. The building's initial critical response ultimately gave way to near-universal admiration, as it came to be seen as an architectural masterpiece. This essential text, offering a behind-the-scenes story of the Guggenheim along with a careful reading of its architecture, is beautifully illustrated with more than 150 images, including plans, drawings, and rare photographs of the building under construction.

Insane Acquaintances explores a range of exhibitions, organisations and institutions that mediated and promoted modernism in Britain. In a series of case studies on subjects ranging from the first Postimpressionist exhibition in London in 1910, the teaching of modernist art in schools, the decoration and design of the modernist home, the International Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936 and the Festival of Britain in 1951, Insane Acquaintances charts some of the ways in which modernism not only sought to improve the quality of art but also the quality of art's reception in Britain. It also provides an institutional history of some of the groups and organisations that fostered modernist art in Britain during that period.

In 1999, Akseli Gallen-Kallela's Lake Keitele (1905) became the first Finnish painting to enter the National Gallery and is now one of the most popular pictures in the collection. Although the artist and his work are relatively unknown to audiences outside of Finland, he was not only a leading figure in modern Finnish painting but an accomplished practitioner of the decorative arts and a key figure in the development of early twentieth-century Modernism. This book focuses on four versions of his shimmering depictions of Lake Keitele, north of Helsinki; a stylized lake composition which first appeared in the early 1880s, when the artist was still elaborating his own descriptive language, and continued to preoccupy him until well into the 1920s. Anne Robbins examines these abstract and modernist pictures in the light of the international avant gardes with which Gallen-Kallela was in contact for much of his career, and the ways in which his work expressed his fervent Finnish nationalism. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: National Gallery, London (11/15/17-02/04/18)