For self-made artist and soldier Horace Pippin-who served in the 369th all-black infantry in World War I until he was wounded-war provided a formative experience that defined much of his life and work. His ability to transform combat service into canvases of emotive power, psychological depth, and realism showed not only how he viewed the world but also his mastery as a painter. In Suffering and Sunset, Celeste-Marie Bernier painstakingly traces Pippin's life story of art as a life story of war. Illustrated with more than sixty photographs, including works in various mediums-many in full color-this is the first intellectual history and cultural biography of Pippin. Working from newly discovered archives and unpublished materials, Bernier provides an in-depth investigation into the artist's development of an alternative visual and textual lexicon and sheds light on his work in its aesthetic, social, and political contexts. Suffering and Sunset illustrates Pippin's status as a groundbreaking artist as it shows how this African American painter suffered from but also staged many artful resistances to racism in a white-dominated art world.

During states of emergency, normal rules and rights are suspended, and force can often prevail. In these precarious intervals, when the human potential for violence can be released and rehearsed, images may also emerge. This book asks: what happens to art during a state of emergency? Investigating the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and political history, Emilia Terracciano traces a genealogy of modernism in colonial and postcolonial India; she explores catastrophic turning points in the history of twentieth-century India, via the art works which emerged from them. Art and Emergency reveals how the suspended, diagonal, fugitive lines of Nasreen Mohamedi's abstract compositions echo Partition's traumatic legacy; how the theatrical choreographies of Sunil Janah's photographs document desperate famine; and how Gaganendranath Tagore's lithographs respond to the wake of massacre. Making an innovative, important intervention into current debates on visual culture in South Asia, this book also furthers our understanding of the history of modernism.

The first publication to focus on the Art Institute's outstanding collection of American modernism, this volume includes over 175 important paintings, sculptures, decorative-art objects, and works on paper made in North America between World War II and 1955. Together they fully reflect the history of American art in these decades, including examples of early modernism, Social Realism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Among the paintings are such iconic works as Hopper's Nighthawks and Wood's American Gothic, along with notable pieces by Davis, De Kooning, Hartley, Lawrence, Marin, O'Keeffe, Pollock, and Sheeler. Among the sculptors represented are Calder, Cornell, and Noguchi. Spectacular decorative artwork by the Eameses, Grotell, Neutra, Saarinen, F. L. Wright, and Zeisel are also featured. Reproduced in full color, each work is accompanied by an accessible and up-to-date text, complete with comparative illustrations. The introduction traces the formation of this important collection by a number of noted curators, collectors, and patrons. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago

Short-listed for the Fage & Oliver Prize for outstanding scholarly work published on Africa. Finalist, African Studies Association Book Prize. Finalist, ASA Bethwell A. Ogot Prize for best book in east African studies. If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia's inimitable historical condition--its independence save for five years under Italian occupation--mean for its own modernist tradition? In Modernist Art in Ethiopia--the first book-length study of the topic--Elizabeth W. Giorgis recognizes that her home country's supposed singularity, particularly as it pertains to its history from 1900 to the present, cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy. She uses the evolution of modernist art in Ethiopia to open up the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of it in a pan-African context. Giorgis explores the varied precedents of the country's political and intellectual history to understand the ways in which the import and range of visual narratives were mediated across different moments, and to reveal the conditions that account for the extraordinary dynamism of the visual arts in Ethiopia. In locating its arguments at the intersection of visual culture and literary and performance studies, Modernist Art in Ethiopia details how innovations in visual art intersected with shifts in philosophical and ideological narratives of modernity. The result is profoundly innovative work--a bold intellectual, cultural, and political history of Ethiopia, with art as its centerpiece.

As a result of its aspiration to design the world comprehensively and to take action pedagogically based on the arts, the Bauhaus established an inseparable link between architecture, design, art, and pedagogy. The effects of this in-depth desire for reform can also still be recognized in art, architecture, design, and contemporary processes of aesthetic education one hundred years after the school's founding. The resonance of the Bauhaus is thus the topic of this book. The various texts reflect on the Bauhaus from the perspectives of the history of art and design, art education, and educational science with respect to the aspects: reception in popular culture, education through design, material in teaching, and the Bauhaus as a regulative idea in the digital age.

"The marvelous story of one of New York City's most unique buildings
"Critics hated it. The public feared it would fall over. Passersby were knocked down by the winds. But even before it was completed, the Flatiron Building had become an unforgettable part of New York City.

Alice Sparberg Alexiou chronicles not just the story of the building, but the heady times in which it was built. It was the dawn of the twentieth century, a time when Madison Square Park shifted from a promenade for rich women to one for gay prostitutes; when photography became an art; motion pictures came into existence; the booming economy suffered increasing depressions; jazz came to the forefront of popular music--and all within steps of one of the city's best-known and best-loved buildings.

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of three men and an extraordinary deception: the revered artist Johannes Vermeer; the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him years later; and the con man's mark, Hermann Goering, the fanatical art collector and one of Nazi Germany's most reviled leaders.

Walter Gropius's Bauhaus Dessau was, from 1925 to 1932, the headquarters of the famous Bauhaus School of Design. After a dozen years of National Socialist use and then half a century's worth of restoration, it is now a UNESCO world cultural-heritage site, attracting some 80,000 visitors a year who seek the roots of twentieth century Modernism. This is the first book of photographs to document Gropius's masterpiece since its renovation, and it features more than 110 black-and-white images of the building and its wide range of architectural and artistic textures. It illustrates its history, its architectural elements and the interior design created for it by the Bauhaus artists, as well as its functions then and since: "Bauhaus Dessau" describes the work carried out in the former workshops and their most important products. For its original denizens--and again, at last, for those who visit today--the architecture, design and philosophy of the Bauhaus itself are inseparably connected to one another.

Das Terrassenhaus entspricht als Bautyp modernen Wohnbau-Anforderungen: es ist oekonomisch und bietet bei geringem Bodenverbrauch hohen Wohnkomfort mit Terrasse und Garten. Popular geworden mit den sozialen Bewegungen in den 1960er-Jahren, geriet es mit der fortschreitenden Erosion der Idee von Gesellschaft wieder in Vergessenheit und wurde gar als Bausunde abqualifiziert. Doch die anhaltende Bewohnerzufriedenheit und die oekologischen Vorteile eines begrunten Hauses machen das Terrassenhaus mehr denn je attraktiv. Die im Buch untersuchten Bauten sind heute nicht nur architektonische Ikonen; man kann auch von ihnen immer noch lernen, was der Wohnungsbau heute braucht. Ein Vertreter dieses Bautyps war Harry Gluck, dessen Pladoyer fur die grune Stadt hier in Teilen abgedruckt wird.

Light as Experience and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times synthesizes and interpretates the experience of light as revealed in a wide range of art and literature from medieval to modern times. The true subject of the book is making sense of the individual's relationship with light, rather than the investigation of light's essential nature. It tells the story of light "seducing" individuals from the Middle Ages to our modern times. Consequently, it is not concerned with the "progress" of scientific inquiries into the physical properties and behavior of light (optical science), but rather with subjective reactions as reflected in art, architecture, and literature. Instead of its evolution, this book celebrates the complexity of our relation to light's character. No individual experience of light being "truer" than any other.

In his most ambitious endeavour since Freud, acclaimed cultural historian Peter Gay traces and explores the rise of Modernism in the arts, the cultural movement that heralded and shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century. He traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York, presenting along the way a thrilling pageant of hereitcs that includes Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Walter Gropius and Any Warhol. The result is a work unique in its breadth and brilliance. Lavishly illustrated, Modernism is a superb achievement by one of our greatest historians.

This richly illustrated book details the wide-ranging construction and urban planning projects launched across Germany after the Nazi Party seized power. Hagen and Ostergren show that it was far more than just an architectural and stylistic enterprise. Instead, it was a series of interrelated programs intended to thoroughly reorganize Germany's economic, cultural, and political landscapes. The authors trace the specific roles of its component parts-the monumental redevelopment and cleansing of cities; the construction of new civic landscapes for educational, athletic, and leisure pursuits; the improvement of transportation, industrial, and military infrastructures; and the creation of networked landscapes of fear, slave labor, and genocide. Through distinctive examples, the book draws out the ways in which combinations of place, space, and architecture were utilized as a cumulative means of undergirding the regime and its ambitions. The authors consider how these reshaped spaces were actually experienced and perceived by ordinary Germans, and in some cases the world at large, as the regime intentionally built a new Nazi Germany.

How Gyorgy Kepes, the last disciple of Bauhaus modernism, became the single most significant artist within a network of scientific experts and elites. Gyorgy Kepes (1906-2001) was the last disciple of Bauhaus modernism, an acolyte of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and a self-styled revolutionary artist. But by midcentury, transplanted to America, Kepes found he was trapped in the military-industrial-aesthetic complex. In this first book-length study of Kepes, John Blakinger argues that Kepes, by opening the research laboratory to the arts, established a new paradigm for creative practice: the artist as technocrat. First at Chicago's New Bauhaus and then for many years at MIT, Kepes pioneered interdisciplinary collaboration between the arts and sciences-what he termed "interthinking" and "interseeing." Kepes and his colleagues-ranging from metallurgists to mathematicians-became part of an important but little-explored constellation: the Cold War avant-garde. Blakinger traces Kepes's career in the United States through a series of episodes: Kepes's work with the military on camouflage techniques; his development of a visual design pedagogy, as seen in the exhibition The New Landscape and his book The New Landscape in Art and Science; his encyclopedic Vision + Value series; his unpublished magnum opus, the Light Book; the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), an art-science research institute established by Kepes at MIT in 1967; and the Center's proposals for massive environmental installations that would animate the urban landscape. CAVS was entangled in the antiwar politics of the late 1960s, as many students and faculty protested MIT's partnerships with defense contractors-some of whom had ties to the Center. In attempting to "undream" the Bauhaus into existence in the postwar world, Kepes faced profound resistance. Generously illustrated, drawing on the vast archive of Kepes's papers at Stanford and MIT's CAVS Special Collection, this book supplies a missing chapter in our understanding of midcentury modern and Cold War visual culture.

In 1908 Peter Behrens recruited the young Walter Gropius in his architect's office - but threw him out again in 1910. Gestalt und Hinterhalt [Form and Attack] places a tongue-in-cheek focus on relationships among artists that revolved around the Bauhaus and Darmstadt's artists' colony Mathildenhoehe, Germany. We gain insights into the numerous love affairs of Alma Mahler, and follow Herbert Bayer, who set off from Darmstadt to Weimar, and soon toppled Walter Gropius's second marriage. This book narrates the story of Bauhaus in a way never told before - through not only the successes and talents of those involved, but also through their failures and failings. Text in German.

This book provides a bidirectional investigation of Asia's spatiotemporality by asking how Asia is located and how localities are Asianized. Historical and theoretical inquiries into architecture and urbanism in order to trace a notional "common divisor" are integrated with readings of this Asian imagery. Such a common divisor is conditioned to Asia's phenomenal postcolonial subjectivation and showcases Asia's unique character. This book contends that the postcolonial condition of architecture in Asia suggests a potential and critical bridge to better understanding of the region. Theoretically, "display-ness" is a strategic and allegoric carrier that is in the focus of this book in order to emphasize the quality of display in a broader sense of time and space. Asia's architectural and urban spectacle thus is meaningly magnified and intensified with this notion of display-ness to ground the cohesive abstraction among ideological discourse production, innovative theorizations, and empirical phenomena in contemporary scholarship.