John Heskett wants to transform the way we think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal, and the car we drive to work in, to the medical equipment used to save lives. Design combines 'need' and 'desire' in the form of a practical object that can also reflect the user's identity and aspirations through its form and decoration. This concise guide to contemporary design goes beyond style and taste to look at how different cultures and individuals personalize objects. Heskett also reveals how simple objects, such as a toothpick, can have their design modified to suit the specific cultural behaviour in different countries. There are also fascinating insights into how major companies such as Nokia, Ford, and Sony approach design. Finally, the author gives us an exciting vision of what design can offer us in the future, showing in particular how it can humanize new technology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In 1930 pioneering female gallerist Lucy Wertheim opened The Wertheim Gallery in London. Wertheim challenged the established art scene conventions; she was a woman without formal art training, driven by intuition and a belief that young British artists should have the same opportunities as their European counterparts. Adventure in Art is Lucy's 1947 autobiography, telling the story of her career in the British Modernist era. Republished by Unicorn to coincide with the forthcoming Towner Eastbourne exhibition, A Life in Art: Lucy Wertheim & Reuniting the Twenties Group (Summer 2022), this book brings to a contemporary audience the trials and tribulations of a key participant in the male-dominated art world in the first half of the twentieth century. Lucy Wertheim's discerning eye and business acumen helped to propel big names such as Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, Cedric Morris, Henry Moore and Frances Hodgkins into the mainstream. With three commissioned essays - the first by Frances Spalding (Lucy Wertheim - Her Gallery in Context); the second by Ariane Banks (Lucy Wertheim - A Pioneering Woman and Her Contemporaries); the third by Towner's Collections & Exhibitions Curator, Karen Taylor (Lucy Wertheim - Her 'Forty-One Year Experiment' [1930-71]) - this new edition not only brings Lucy Carrington Wertheim's words and deeds back into our conscience, but it also publishes over 70 artworks, many of which are featured in the Towner exhibition, as well as newly photographed ephemera from the Estate's extensive archive. Together, this exhibition and book will significantly reset the accepted narrative, and shine a light on a neglected corner of mid-twentieth century art history.

The photography of Julius Shulman (1910-2009) transported a West Coast dream around the world. His images of midcentury Southern Californian architecture captured not only the distinctive structural, functional, and design elements of a building but also the context of its surroundings and inhabitants in a holistic, evocative sense of lifestyle. Over time, Shulman's talents would take him around the world, steadily crafting one of the most compelling chronologies of modern architecture. Offering an immense cultural cache for an even lower price, this fresh edition of TASCHEN's Modernism Rediscovered features over 400 architectural treasures from the Shulman archives. Each project and photograph was personally selected from over 260,000 photographs by publisher Benedikt Taschen, who enjoyed a close relationship with Shulman and his work since first publishing Julius Shulman: Architecture and Its Photography (1998). Documenting the reach of modernist aesthetics, the projects span not only the West Coast but also the rest of the United States, as well as Mexico, Israel, and Hong Kong, all captured with Shulman's characteristic understanding of space and situation, as well as his brilliant and intuitive sense of composition. The pictures are contextualized with an introduction by photography critic Owen Edwards, an extensive biography by University of Southern California historian Philip J. Ethington, captions on decorative elements by Los Angeles Modern Auctions founder Peter Loughrey, and biographies of key architects. In addition, the book includes personal reflections from Shulman himself, with an oral history and portrait of the period crafted via months of interviews with arts writer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp.

A New American Sculpture, 1914-1945 is the first publication to situate the individual contributions of Gaston Lachaise, Robert Laurent, Elie Nadelman, and William Zorach into a compelling constellation of artists with shared aesthetic and social concerns. Although each European-born, American artist cultivated his own distinct style, their creative priorities were all deeply rooted in quiet composition, synthetic approaches to anatomy, and architectural unity of curves and volume. At a time when abstract forms were popular, Lachaise, Laurent, Nadelman, and Zorach were all ultimately in favor of maintaining the integrity of the human body to explore modernist styles. This handsome book underscores their unrelenting search for a novel American visual tradition at the intersection of modernism, historic visual culture, and contemporary popular imagery. Distributed for the Portland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Portland Museum of Art (05/26/17-09/08/17) Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee (10/14/17-01/07/18) Amon Carter Museum of American Art (02/17/18-05/13/18)