A teacher to Jacques Lacan, Andre Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojeve defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, "The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky," endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojeve suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the paintings are themselves complete universes as concrete as the natural world. Kojeve's text considers the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses the involuted question: What is beauty? Including personal letters between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojeve's life and writings.

This book places poetry by Ashbery (1927-2017), gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the "playlists" here offer representative samplings of music from these same years, culled from Ashbery's own library of recordings. Ashbery's poetry is frequently described as ekphrastic, though, rather than writing a poem "based on'' or "inspired" by the content of an artwork of or piece of music, he engages with how the experience of seeing it and the artistic strategies employed offer ways of thinking about it and through it. Many of the observations from Ashbery's art writing also offer keys to how we might read his poetry. Many of the recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases. Ashbery's poetry similarly plays with a diversity of poetic textures and sudden turns such that a reader might construct multiple narratives or pathways of meaning. He rarely offers linear stories or focuses on evocative descriptions of a scene or object. In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another.

What makes a work of art a masterpiece? Discover the answers in the fascinating stories of how these artworks came to be and the circumstances of their long-lasting impact on the world. Beginning with Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, we travel through time and a range of styles and stories - including theft, scandal, artistic reputation, politics and power - to Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, challenging the idea of what a masterpiece can be, and arriving in the twenty-first century with Amy Sherald's portrait of Michelle Obama, a modern-day masterpiece still to be tested by time. Each artwork has a tale that reveals making a masterpiece often involves much more than just a demonstration of artistic skill: their path to fame is only fully disclosed by looking beyond what the eye can see. Rather than trying to describe the elements of greatness, Making a Masterpiece takes account of the circumstances outside the frame that contribute to the perception of greatness and reveals that the journey from the easel to popular acclaim can be as compelling as the masterpiece itself. Featuring: Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci Judith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer Under the Wave off Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai Fifteen Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (Woman in Gold, Gustav Klimt American Gothic, Grant Wood Guernica, Pablo Picasso Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, Frida Kahlo Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, Amy Sherald Discover the stories of how, why and what makes a masterpiece in this compelling and comprehensive title.

Art, Truth, and Time is a book which endeavours to show that artistic creation depends as much upon the body, as it does the soul, and the soul's intelligent use of the body's way of understanding. When there occurs a complete disjunction between the two, as occurs in much of contemporary art, art is stripped of its inherent beauty, its wholeness. In this book the author considers the nature of art from its earliest manifestations to the present day, endeavouring to show that its truth transcends time and place through the unity of soul and body and man's awareness of this unity, not a barren unity, but a unity which is profoundly creative.

Arts Education institutions and programs create an excellent framework for personality development: learning knowledge, learning skills and learning life. Their attainment requires education to be a holistic concept of advancement that includes aesthetic practice and involvement with the arts. It challenges them to use their actions to think about the meaning of life, in as much as everyone can use artistic experiences to affirm and interrogate their self-image. The Research Program of the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy for the Arts in Development at the University of Hildesheim in Germany brought together experts from the Universities in Dar Es Salam, Kampala, Nairobi, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Casablanca and Tunis and further independent researchers to exchange concepts in Cultural Policy for Arts Education.

Locating a shared interest in the philosophy of "art for art's sake" in aestheticism and "modernismo," this study examines the changing role of art and artist during the turn-of-the-century period, offering a consideration of the multiple dichotomies of art and life, aesthetics and economics, production and consumption, and center and periphery.

How do we conceptualize the relationship between suffering, art, and aesthetics from within the broader framework of social, cultural, and political thought today? This book brings together a range of intellectuals from the social sciences and humanities to speak to theoretical debates around the questions of suffering in art and suffering and art.

This book has been a classic color theory reference in Europe for several years, and is available now, for the first time, in English translation. The book is arranged to follow light from a stimulus outside the human body, through the reaction of the visual organs of the body and ultimately to the occurrence of the visual experience in the brain. Colorful schematic drawings and photographs presented with explanatory captions demonstrate many elements of color theory from the organization of color to the perception of a rainbow. Beyond as explanation of the actual processes, Mr Zwimpfer demonstrates the total relationship which takes the perception of color beyond a mere passive registering, such as in photography, to a three-dimensional perception of our world. The book will fascinate and inform artists, photographers, students and others who are interested in color theory.

The recent rise of 'new nature writing' has renewed the question of how a landscape can be written. This book intervenes in this debate by proposing innovative methodologies for writing place that recognize and make use of the contradictions, fractures and coincidences found in a modern landscape. In doing so, it develops original readings of modernist artists and writers who were associated with the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, including Vanessa Bell, Paul Nash, Eric Benfield and Mary Butts. Their work is set alongside embodied practices of leisure and labour such as sea bathing, beachcombing, quarrying, tourism and scientific fieldwork, as well as the material and geological features of the environment with which such activities are allied. By showing the Isle of Purbeck to be a site where versions of modernity were actively generated and contested, the book contributes to a reassessment of the significance of rural locations for English modernism.

This book argues for a renewed understanding of the fundamentally uncanny quality of the medium of photography. It especially makes the case for the capacity of certain photographs-precisely through their uncanniness-to contest structures of political and social dominance. The uncanny as a quality that unsettles the perception of home emerges as a symptom of modern and contemporary society and also as an aesthetic apparatus by which some key photographs critique the hegemony of capitalist and industrialist domains. The book's historical scope is large, beginning with William Henry Fox Talbot and closing with contemporary indigenous photographer Bear Allison and contemporary African American photographer Devin Allen. Through close readings, exegesis, of individual photographs and careful deployment of contemporary political and aesthetic theory, The Photographic Uncanny argues for a re-envisioning of the political capacity of photography to expose the haunted, homeless, condition of modernity.

Philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman is one of the most innovative and influential critical thinkers writing today. This book is the first English-language study of his writing on images. An image is a form of representation, but what are the philosophical frameworks supporting it? The book considers how Didi-Huberman takes up this question repeatedly over the course of his career. Placing his project in relation to major historical and intellectual contexts, it shows not only how he modifies dominant disciplinary traditions, but also how the study of images is central to a new way of thinking about poststructuralist-inspired art history. -- .

Virgina Woolf's collection of writings on visual arts offer a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author. Despite wide interest in Woolf's writings, her circle, and her relationship with the visual arts, there is no accessible edition or selection of essays dedicated to her writings on art. This newest edition in David Zwirner Books's ekphrasis series collects such essays including "Walter Sickert: A Conversation" (1934), "Pictures" (1925), and "Pictures and Portraits" (1920). These formally inventive texts examine the connection between the literary writer and the visual artist and are innovative in their treatment of ideas about color and modern art as experienced in picture galleries. In these essays, Woolf looks at the complex and interdependent relationship between the artist and society. She also provides sharp and astute commentary on specific works of art and the relationship between art and writing. An introduction by Claudia Tobin situates the essays within their cultural contexts.

This book presents a historical panorama of the Polish avant-garde in Berlin from 19th century historical avant-garde until the recent art. Looking at specific artistic strategies and development of modernist paradigm both in the pre- and post-Second World War period from the perspective of the migration experience, this book offers a deep insight into mechanisms, relations and identity programmes of particular artists or groups. It also reveals the dynamics of eventual cultural exchange or alternative forms of artistic transformation and message that Polish artists imprinted in the Berlin's art scene. Whether historical avant-garde or the neo-avant-garde, the component of novelty inscribed in the term itself ceases to be a sheer, one-dimensional slogan and reveals a whole range of cultural projections that artist-migrants are both creators and the subject of. Here the notion of exoticism, wilderness, but also critical and ironical approach often constitute the perception of Polish art in the Berlin milieu.

In his third book, Strauss delves into the mysterious process whereby an idea is born in the mind and materialized through the hand in the expression of an artwork. How exactly does this happen? It's a question so basic, an act so fundamental to art-making, that it has rarely received attention. It makes an ideal topic for Strauss, a writer with an exceptional ability to animate art's philosophical dimensions in a clear, persuasive manner. During this time when craft and the direct manipulation of materials by the artist appear to be in eclipse, Strauss comes to their defense in a spirited cri de coeur.
Featuring over 35 illustrations, the book examines a wide variety of media and individual examples. It explores the works of sculptors Martin Puryear, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Donald Lipski; painters Leon Golub and Ron Gorchov; and writers Robert Duncan, Robert Kelly, Guy Davenport, John Berger, and Leo Steinberg. In addition, there are essays on Joseph Beuys's 7000 Oaks in Ireland, contemporary Haida carvers Reg Davidson and Jim Hart, Cecilia Vicuna's "memory of the fingers," and the influence of curators Harald Szeemann and Walter Hopps on the staging of contemporary art exhibitions.
Known primarily for his writings on photography and politics, Strauss here focuses on the least mediated arts--painting, sculpture, and writing. His claims are supported by a series of close readings which succeed in recovering the immediacy of the hand and revitalizing contemporary art's connection to the past."

The essential guide to colour theory and mixing for artists.

Full of beautiful, intricate handpainted colour wheels and practical advice on using and mixing colour, this book is a must-have for any artist working with pigment and paint. Starting from the basics of colour and working up to the complexities of tonality, harmony, opacity and pigment, artist Ian Goldsmith explores and explains all the key elements of colour and what it can do. A comprehensive paint index at the back of the book provides an indispensable reference guide for choosing and purchasing materials that no practising artist should be without.

Including:

• Understanding the colour wheel
• Primaries, secondaries and tertiaries
• Colour temperature
• Hue, value and saturation
• Opacity and transparency
• Materials and pigments

This study is an analysis of 'high' and 'late' modernist criticism in New York during the 1960s and early 1970s. Through a close reading of a selection of key critics of the period-which will expand the remit beyond the canonical texts-the book examines the ways that modernist criticism's discourse remains of especial disciplinary interest. Despite its alleged narrowness and exclusion, the debates of the 1960s raised fundamental questions concerning the nature of art writing. Those include arguments around the nature of value and judgement; the relationship between art criticism and art history; and the related problem of what we mean by the 'contemporary.' Stephen Moonie argues that within those often-fractious debates, there exists a shared discourse. And further, contrary to the current consensus that modernists were elitist, dogmatic, and irrelevant to contemporary debates on art, the study shows that there is much that we can learn from reconsidering their writings. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, modern art, art criticism, and literary studies.

This book explores the contemporary legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following the passage of three quarters of a century, and the role of art and activism in maintaining a critical perspective on the dangers of the nuclear age. It closely interrogates the political and cultural shifts that have accompanied the transition to a nuclearised world. Beginning with the contemporary socio-political and cultural interpretations of the impact and legacy of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the chapters examine the challenges posed by committed opponents in the cultural and activist fields to the ongoing development of nuclear weapons and the expanding industrial uses of nuclear power. It explores how the aphorism that "all art is political" is borne out in the close relation between art and activism. This multi-disciplinary approach to the socio-political and cultural exploration of nuclear energy in relation to Hiroshima/Nagasaki via the arts will be of interest to students and scholars of peace and conflict studies, social political and cultural studies, fine arts, and art and aesthetic studies.

This innovative book takes the concept of translation beyond its traditional boundaries, adding to the growing body of literature which challenges the idea of translation as a primarily linguistic transfer. To gain a fresh perspective on the work of translation in the complex processes of meaning-making across physical, social and cultural domains (conceptualized as translationality), Piotr Blumczynski revisits one of the earliest and most fundamental senses of translation: corporeal transfer. His study of translated religious officials and translated relics reframes our understanding of translation as a process creating a sense of connection with another time, place, object or person. He argues that a promise of translationality animates a broad spectrum of cultural, artistic and commercial endeavours: it is invoked, for example, in museum exhibitions, art galleries, celebrity endorsements, and the manufacturing of musical instruments. Translationality offers a way to reimagine the dynamic entanglements of matter and meaning, space and time, past and present. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies as well as related disciplines such as the history of religion, anthropology of art, and material culture.

Includes discussion of works of art of all kinds, including painting, literature, music and architecture. Interdisciplinary analysis of the significance of art to the psyche.

There are three main strands. There is a Jewish professor who had taken his family to America when he saw danger at home; they thrived in their new life but he did not, and has returned alone. There is an entrepreneur, of Greek descent, who is returning to a city where he believes he will find business and social openings. And there is an American girl, the daughter of immigrants, who has been sent to stay with relations in the hope that it would pull her out of what seemed to be apathy with her life.And in consequence there are three very different stories, told in different styles.(Amazon review)