These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played in the formation of modernism, and its theoretical importance between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in England and Germany. Ranging from Owen Jones to Ernst Gombrich through Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Loos, Henry van de Velde, and Hermann Muthesius, the contributors show how artistic theories are deeply related to the art practice of their own times, and how ornament is imbued with historical and social meaning.

The Bauhaus, the school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, brought together artists, architects and designers--among them Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stolzl--in an extraordinary conversation on the nature of art in the industrial age. Aiming to rethink the form of modern life, the Bauhaus became the site of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped the world today. "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity," published to accompany a major multimedia exhibition, is The Museum of Modern Art's first comprehensive treatment of the subject since its famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938, and offers a new generational perspective on the twentieth century's most influential experiment in artistic education. Organized in collaboration with the three major Bauhaus collections in Germany (the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassic Stiftung Weimar), "Bauhaus 1919-1933" examines the extraordinarily broad spectrum of the school's products, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting and sculpture. Many of the objects discussed and illustrated here have rarely if ever been seen or published outside Germany. Featuring approximately 400 color plates, richly complemented by documentary images, "Bauhaus 1919-1933" includes two overarching essays by the exhibition's curators, Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, that present new perspectives on the Bauhaus. Shorter essays by more than 20 leading scholars apply contemporary viewpoints to 30 key Bauhaus objects, and an illustrated narrative chronology provides a dynamic glimpse of the Bauhaus' lived history.

An urban history of modern Britain, and how the built environment shaped the nation's politics Foundations is a history of twentieth-century Britain told through the rise, fall, and reinvention of six different types of urban space: the industrial estate, shopping precinct, council estate, private flats, shopping mall, and suburban office park. Sam Wetherell shows how these spaces transformed Britain's politics, economy, and society, helping forge a midcentury developmental state and shaping the rise of neoliberalism after 1980. From the mid-twentieth century, spectacular new types of urban space were created in order to help remake Britain's economy and society. Government-financed industrial estates laid down infrastructure to entice footloose capitalists to move to depressed regions of the country. Shopping precincts allowed politicians to plan precisely for postwar consumer demand. Public housing modernized domestic life and attempted to create new communities out of erstwhile strangers. In the latter part of the twentieth century many of these spaces were privatized and reimagined as their developmental aims were abandoned. Industrial estates became suburban business parks. State-owned shopping precincts became private shopping malls. The council estate was securitized and enclosed. New types of urban space were imported from American suburbia, and planners and politicians became increasingly skeptical that the built environment could remake society. With the midcentury built environment becoming obsolete, British neoliberalism emerged in tense negotiation with the awkward remains of built spaces that had to be navigated and remade. Taking readers to almost every major British city as well as to places in the United States and Britain's empire, Foundations highlights how some of the major transformations of twentieth-century British history were forged in the everyday spaces where people lived, worked, and shopped.

Asmara, the capital of the small East African country of Eritrea, bordering the Red Sea, is one of the most important and exciting architectural 'discoveries' of recent years. Built almost entirely in the 1930s by the Italians, who transformed it into a hotbed of radical architectural innovation, Asmara has one of the highest concentrations of Modernist architecture anywhere in the world. This superb building-by-building survey, illustrated with previously unpublished archival material and specially commissioned photography, chronicles the colonial past and remarkable survival of a city that has evocatively been described as "the Miami of Africa."

Although race - a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination - has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. By analyzing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality - from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants - Race and Modern Architecture challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress.

This book complements the more textually-based Bauhaus scholarship with a practice-oriented and creative interpretive method, which makes it possible to consider Bauhaus-related works in an unconventional light. Edit Toth argues that focusing on the functionalist approach of the Bauhaus has hindered scholars from properly understanding its design work. With a global scope and under-studied topics, the book advances current scholarly discussions concerning the relationship between image technologies and the body by calling attention to the materiality of image production and strategies of re-channeling image culture into material processes and physical body space, the space of dimensionality and everyday activity.

The Barbican Centre in the City of London is the largest multi-disciplinary arts centre in Europe. Designed by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon as part of the Barbican Estate and to provide homes for both the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Shakespeare Company, the building is internationally renowned not only as an example of radical, visionary architecture in the Modernist tradition, but also for its outstanding programme of more than 2,000 cultural events each year: plays, concerts, films, exhibitions and more. A new title in the Pocket Photo Books series of immersive visual guides to the experience of place, this compact album of more than one hundred photographs by Harry Cory Wright presents the dramatic spaces, rich textures and carefully selected materials of the Barbican Centre in all their detail. From the flowing, multi-level space of the foyer and the calm wooden-panelled concert hall to the surprising intimacy of the theatre and the soaring jungle of the conservatory, the Barbican Centre offers the visitor an extraordinary variety of experiences within a single building. This book captures their full range, providing exceptional insights into one of the most significant and exciting modern buildings in Britain and a thriving cultural hub in the heart of London.

This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948-1951). Although the name stood for the organizers' home cities, the Cobra artists hailed from countries in Europe, Africa, and the United States. This book investigates how a group of struggling young artists attempted to reinvent the international avant-garde after the devastation of the Second World War, to create artistic experiments capable of facing the challenges of postwar society. It explores how Cobra's experimental, often collective art works and publications relate to broader debates in Europe about the use of images to commemorate violent events, the possibility of free expression in an art world constrained by Cold War politics, the breakdown of primitivism in an era of colonial independence movements, and the importance of spontaneity in a society increasingly dominated by the mass media. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, 20th-century modern art, avant-garde arts, and European history.

Art as Organism shows that the digital image was a rich and expansive artistic medium of modernism. Linking its emergence to the dispersion of biocentric aesthetic philosophies developed by Bauhaus pedagogue Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, from 1920s Berlin to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, Charissa Terranova uncovers seminal but overlooked references to biology, the organism, feedback loops, emotions, and the Gestalt, along with an intricate genealogy of related thinkers across disciplines. Unearthing a forgotten narrative of modernism, one which charts the influence that biology, General Systems Theory, and cybernetics had on modern art, Terranova interprets new major art movements such as the Bauhaus, Op Art, and Experiments in Art and Technology by referencing contemporary insights from architects, embryologists, electrical engineers, and computer scientists. From kinetic and interactive art to early computer art and installations spanning an entire city, this book charts complex connections between visual culture, science and technology that comprise the deep history of 20th-century art.

Reconsidering the status and meaning of Bauhaus objects in relation to the multiple re-tellings of the schoola (TM)s history, this volume positions art objects of the Bauhaus within the theoretical, artistic, historical, and cultural concerns in which they were produced and received.

Contributions from leading scholars writing in the field today - including Frederic J. Schwartz, Magdalena Droste, and Alina Payne - offer an entirely new treatment of the Bauhaus. Issues such as art and design pedagogy, the practice of photography, copyright law, and critical theory are discussed. Through a strong thematic structure, new archival research and innovative methodologies, the questions and subsequent conclusions presented here re-examine the history of the Bauhaus and its continuing legacy. Essential reading for anyone studying the Bauhaus, modern art and design.

This innovative study considers one of the most important art and design movements of the 20th century, the Bauhaus, in conjunction with current research in public relations and organizational communication, elaborating on the mechanisms of internal and external communication available to influence the stakeholders in politics, society, industry, and the art world. In a movement where a substantial share of productivity ran in measures to highlight the public value of the institution funded by the taxpayer, the directors, and other persons in charge, the Bauhaus developed comprehensive strategies to communicate their messages to a variety of target groups such as politicians and economic leaders, intellectuals and other artists, current and prospective students, and the general public. To achieve this goal, the Bauhaus anticipated many instruments of modern public relations and corporate communications, including press releases, staging of events, media publications, community building, lobbying, and the creation of nationwide public presence. Roessler argues that as an organization, the Bauhaus cultivated corporate behavior and, most prominently, a corporate design which unfolded revolutionary power. The basic achievements of new typography (a label coined at the Bauhaus) determine visual communication to this day, while the Bauhaus moved from an institutional organization to a community. Beginning with an overview of the Bauhaus' corporate identity and a close examination of the respective directors' roles for internal and external communication, this book visits exhibitions, events, and the media attention they evoked in newspapers and contemporary periodicals, along with media products designed at the Bauhaus such as magazines, books, and bank notes.

The main character of this extraordinary graphic novel is not a person but an idea-the school of Bauhaus, which arose in the wake of World War I, and emerged as the fundamental reference point for virtually every avant-garde artistic movement that followed. Visually arresting illustrations and engaging texts place the novel's protagonist squarely in the middle of the twentieth-century debate on the relationship between technology and culture. The novel is divided into three chapters that trace the evolution of the Bauhaus, as its center moved across Germany-from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin-and as its philosophy responded to this economically, politically and intellectually highly charged era in Europe. Sergio Varbella's inventive drawings bring to life the theories of founder Walter Gropius, as well as the basic design ideals of unity and equity. Valentina Grande's thoughtful texts highlight crucial moments within the movement's history and in the lives of principal figures such as Klee, Kandinsky, Albers, and Mies van der Rohe. The perfect introduction to a radical but highly influential chapter in the history of design, this novel shows how the Bauhaus school broke down barriers and built up ideals that are still applied today.

This book explores how popular photography influenced the representation of travel in Britain in the period from the Kodak-led emergence of compact cameras in 1888, to 1939. The book examines the implications of people's increasing familiarity with the language and possibilities of photography on the representation of travel as educational concerns gave way to commercial imperatives. Sara Dominici takes as a touchstone the first fifty years of activity of the Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA), a London-based philanthropic-turned-commercial travel firm. As the book reveals, the relationship between popular photography and travel marketing was shaped by the different desires and expectations that consumers and institutions bestowed on photography: this was the struggle for the interpretation of the travel image.

The Wilhelmine Empire's opening decades (1870s - 1880s) were crucial transitional years in the development of German modernism, both politically and culturally. Here Marsha Morton argues that no artist represented the shift from tradition to unsettling innovation more compellingly than Max Klinger. The author examines Klinger's early prints and drawings within the context of intellectual and material transformations in Wilhelmine society through an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses Darwinism, ethnography, dreams and hypnosis, the literary Romantic grotesque, criminology, and the urban experience. His work, in advance of Expressionism, revealed the psychological and biological underpinnings of modern rational man whose drives and passions undermined bourgeois constructions of material progress, social stability, and class status at a time when Germans were engaged in defining themselves following unification. This book is the first full-length study of Klinger in English and the first to consistently address his art using methodologies adopted from cultural history. With an emphasis on the popular illustrated media, Morton draws upon information from reviews and early books on the artist, writings by Klinger and his colleagues, and unpublished archival sources. The book is intended for an academic readership interested in European art history, social science, literature, and cultural studies.

This innovative study considers one of the most important art and design movements of the 20th century, the Bauhaus, in conjunction with current research in public relations and organizational communication, elaborating on the mechanisms of internal and external communication available to influence the stakeholders in politics, society, industry, and the art world. In a movement where a substantial share of productivity ran in measures to highlight the public value of the institution funded by the taxpayer, the directors, and other persons in charge, the Bauhaus developed comprehensive strategies to communicate their messages to a variety of target groups such as politicians and economic leaders, intellectuals and other artists, current and prospective students, and the general public. To achieve this goal, the Bauhaus anticipated many instruments of modern public relations and corporate communications, including press releases, staging of events, media publications, community building, lobbying, and the creation of nationwide public presence. Roessler argues that as an organization, the Bauhaus cultivated corporate behavior and, most prominently, a corporate design which unfolded revolutionary power. The basic achievements of new typography (a label coined at the Bauhaus) determine visual communication to this day, while the Bauhaus moved from an institutional organization to a community. Beginning with an overview of the Bauhaus' corporate identity and a close examination of the respective directors' roles for internal and external communication, this book visits exhibitions, events, and the media attention they evoked in newspapers and contemporary periodicals, along with media products designed at the Bauhaus such as magazines, books, and bank notes.

Most known for her bold and darkly painted portraits, Brooks was revolutionary in her feminist renderings of women in resistance. Openly queer, she challenged conceptions of gender and sexuality in her art, which also served as her refuge. While many of her male counterparts were disfiguring and cubing their subjects-often women-Brooks gave personhood and power to the figures she painted. Her frank approach to her complicated relationship with her mother, faith, wealth, sexuality, and gender is complemented by a keen wit that echoes the gray tones of her work. Though her paintings are held in major collections, Brooks's influence in modernist circles of the early twentieth century is largely underexplored. This new publication, guided by Brooks's own impressionistic musings, bridges an important gap between the art and the artist. An introduction by Lauren O'Neill-Butler explores Brooks's role as an artist in the early twentieth century through the lens of gender and sexuality.

For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed the architectural ornament of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) and the majority of his theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. In this study, Lauren Weingarden reveals Sullivan's eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices - literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic - and thus rescues Sullivan and his legacy from the narrow role imposed on him as a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. Using three interpretive models, discourse theory, poststructural semiotic analysis, and a pragmatic concept of sign-functions, she restores the integrity of Sullivan's artistic choices and his historical position as a culminating figure within nineteenth-century romanticism. By giving equal weight to Louis Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden shows how he translated both Ruskin's tenets of Gothic naturalism and Whitman's poetry of the American landscape into elemental structural forms and organic ornamentation. Viewed as a site where various romantic discourses converged, Sullivan's oeuvre demands a cross-disciplinary exploration of each discursive practice, and its "rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation." The overarching theme of this study is the interrogation and restitution of those Foucauldian rules that enabled Sullivan to articulate architecture as a pictorial mode of landscape art, which he considered co-equal with the spiritual and didactic functions of landscape poetry.

Situated in a Mediterranean landscape, the Maeght Foundation is a unique Modernist museum, product of an extraordinary collaboration between the architect, Jose Luis Sert, and the artists whose work was to be displayed there. The architecture, garden design and art offer a rare opportunity to see work in settings conceived in active collaboration with the artists themselves. By focusing on the relationship between this art foundation and its Arcadian setting, including Joan Miro's labyrinth, George Braque's pool, Tal-Coat's mosaic wall and Giacometti's terrace, Jan K. Birksted demonstrates how the building articulates many of the ideas that preoccupied this group of artists during the culminating years of their lives. The study pays special attention to the ways in which architecture can shape the experience of time, and addresses the Modernist desire for wilderness and its problematic roots in the classical Mediterranean ideal. In showing how the design of the Maeght Foundation is a Modernist representation of Mediterranean culture, the author has developed an interpretation of architecture that accommodates not only the architect's handling of material or function, but shows as well how it can be the embodiment of a particular vision of space and time.

The fascinating untold story of how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to build a model "Aryan" society in Norway during World War II Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway, plans to remake the country into a model "Aryan" society fired the imaginations of Hitler, his architect Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders. In Hitler's Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos provides the first major history of Nazi efforts to build a Nordic empire-one that they believed would improve their genetic stock and confirm their destiny as a new order of Vikings. Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well as newspapers from the period, Hitler's Northern Utopia tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway's Atlantic coast. These ventures included maternity centers, cultural and recreational facilities for German soldiers, and a plan to create quintessential National Socialist communities out of twenty-three towns damaged in the German invasion, an overhaul Norwegian architects were expected to lead. The most ambitious scheme-a German cultural capital and naval base-remained a closely guarded secret for fear of provoking Norwegian resistance. A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway, Hitler's Northern Utopia reveals a haunting vision of what might have been-a world colonized under the swastika.

In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus School of Art and Design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from film to theater, sculpture to ceramics. This book is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum fur Gestaltung in Berlin, the world's largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 550 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a "total" work of art. As we approach the Bauhaus centennial, this is a defining account of its energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. Featured artists include Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Lilly Reich.

Through archival work and storytelling, Musical Migration and Imperial New York revises many inherited narratives about experimental music and art in postwar New York. From the urban street level of music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book redraws the map of experimental art to reveal the imperial dynamics and citizenship struggles that continue to shape music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years, Brigid Cohen looks at a wide range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Edgard Varese, Charles Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity. Cohen links them with other migrant creators vital to the city's postwar culture boom, creators whose stories have seldom been told (Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, Vladimir Ussachevsky). She also gives sustained and serious treatment to the work of Yoko Ono, something long overdue in music scholarship. Musical Migration and Imperial New York is indispensable reading, offering a new understanding of global avant-gardes and American experimental music as well as the contrasting feelings of belonging and exclusion on which they were built.

"Fair Park Deco" is a fascinating tour of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. Like every American exposition in the 1930s, it began in economic depression. Although its economy had been buoyed by major oil discoveries in the early '30s, Texas agriculture was hard hit by the Great Depression. By the middle of the decade, state officials had set their sights on a great centennial celebration to help stimulate the economy and attract tourist dollars. "If during the next six months the people of the state could become filled with the idea of holding a big celebration on the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Texas independence," the state's centennial commission speculated in July, 1934, "it would have the effect of creating a general forward-looking spirit through the state. It would be more stimulating than anything we can think of, and this effect would be immediate."

This book focuses specifically on the Art Deco art and architecture of Fair Park--the public spaces, buildings, sculptures and murals that were designed for the 1936 exposition. Most of the chapters in the book represent different areas of Fair Park, with buildings and artwork effectively arranged in the same order that a visitor to the Texas Centennial Exposition might have seen them. The art and architecture are featured in original photography by Jim Parsons and David Bush as well as in historic photographs.

Fair Park is one of the finest collections of Deco architecture in the country, but it is so much more: the embodiment of Texan swagger, it is a testament to the Texanic task of creating a dazzling spectacle in the darkest days of the Depression.