Exquisite Dreams is the first full account of Dorothea Tanning’s art and life. Rather than only focusing on her well-known surrealist paintings, this book gives equal weight to Tanning’s lesser-known but equally powerful sculptures, abstract paintings and films. Setting Tanning's writings, biography and art into the contexts of advertising, fashion, popular culture and art in New York and Paris, Lyford brings Tanning's ideas and feelings to life. Using new archival sources and analyses of Tanning's work in a variety of media, Lyford broadens our understanding of the artist. This amply illustrated book is an important contribution to the history of women artists, gender and sexuality studies, as well as the history of Surrealism. It will appeal to art historians and art lovers alike.

Exploring the complex interweaving of race, national identity, and the practice of sculpture, Amy Lyford takes us through a close examination of the early US career of the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). The years between 1930 and 1950 were perhaps some of the most fertile of Noguchi's career. Yet the work that he produced during this time has received little sustained attention. Weaving together new archival material, little-known or unrealized works, and those that are familiar, Lyford offers a fresh perspective on the significance of Noguchi's modernist sculpture to twentieth-century culture and art history. Through an examination of his work, this book tells a story about his relation to the most important cultural and political issues of his time. By focusing on Noguchi's reputation, and reception as an artist of Japanese American descent, Lyford analyzes the artist and his work within the context of a burgeoning desire at that time to define what modern American art might be--and confront unspoken assumptions that linked whiteness to Americanness. Lyford reveals how that reputation was both shaped by and helped define ideas about race, labor and national identity in twentieth-century American culture.

"Surrealist Masculinities "offers a fresh exploration of how surrealist visual production was shaped by constructions of gender and sexuality, particularly masculinity, in the 1920s and early 1930s. Amy Lyford builds on feminist critical approaches to surrealism, which have viewed the female body in surrealism as symptomatic of male misogyny; yet she also departs from such work by arguing that representations of an anxious, ambivalent, or perverse masculinity were integral to the movement's critique of France's "return to order" in the years following World War I. This book analyzes surrealist work in relation to the history of surrealism and investigates how surrealist artists and writers appropriated contemporary medical science, advertising, and sexology in their quest to undermine the status quo.