This volume commemorates the 100th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh's death. Major van Gogh scholars present essays that reexamine the painter's place in the art world of his time, the phenomenal growth in his reputation, and his influence on later art movements and individual artists. At the time of his death and for some years after, there was a question as to whether van Gogh's approach would gain recognition. Today, he is seen as one of the most popular and recognized of the world's artists, and his impact on 20th-century art is unquestioned. How and why this occurred is a major theme throughout this essay collection.

Among the topics examined are iconography; van Gogh's poetry as well as the literature that influenced him and that he, in turn, influenced; psychological and religious aspects of van Gogh's painting and self-imaging; and how van Gogh has been interpreted. A section on his legacy in art concludes this major reassessment of van Gogh's place in art history. An important collection for art scholars and researchers as well as public library patrons.

Metaphysical thought has been excluded from much of the discourse on modern art, especially abstract painting. By connecting ideas about faith with the initiators of abstract painting, Joseph Masheck reveals how an underlying religiosity informed some of our most important abstract painters. Covering Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and El Lissitzky, Masheck shows how ‘revealed religion’ has been an underlying but fundamental determinant of the thinking and practice of abstract painting from its originators down to the present. He contextualizes their art within some of the historical moments of the early 20th century, including the Russian revolution and the Stalinist period, and explores the appeal of certain themes, such as the Passion of Christ. A radical new theorization of the influence of religion over visual art, Faith in Art asks why metaphysics has been eliminated from the discussion where it might have something to say. This is a new way of thinking about a hundred years of abstract painting.

Building-Art: Modern Architecture Under Cultural Construction is an anthology of essays by noted critic Joseph Masheck. Considering topics in nineteenth and twentieth century architecture, its theory and practice, as well as selected achievements by such great modernists as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn, Masheck also analyzes important monuments and architectural ideas of such artists as Giorgio di Chirico and Tony Smith. Contextualizing and culturally speculative, these studies address such issues as the distinction between architecture and "mere" building, and architecture and engineering, frequently drawing the reader into architectural problems that have persisted for at least two centuries. Demonstrating a concern with on-going modernism, Masheck's essays guide the reader through the anti-modernist polemics of the 1970s and 1980s, which are particularly relevant in light of Postmodernism's demise. Joseph Masheck, editor-in-chief of Artforum from 1977-1980, is Associate Professor of Art History and coordinator of the graduate humanities program at Hofstra University. He is the author of several books and many articles.

First published in 1899, Arthur Wesley Dow's "Composition" has probably influenced more Americans than any other text to think of visual form and composition in relation to artistic modernity. While Dow is known as the mentor of Georgia O'Keeffe and Max Weber, his legacy as a proponent of modern art has suffered undeserved neglect by recent artists and art historians. In "Composition" Dow develops a system for teaching students to create freely constructed images on the basis of harmonic relations between lines, colors, and dark and light patterns. Greatly influenced by Japanese art, he expounds a theory of "flat" formal equilibrium as an essential component of telling pictorial creation. Generations of teachers and their public school pupils learned from Dow's orientalism and adopted basic postimpressionist principles without even knowing the term. The reappearance of Dow's practical, well-illustrated guide, enhanced by Joseph Masheck's discussion of its historical ramifications, is an important event for all concerned with the visual arts and the intellectual antecedents of American modernism.

Widely regarded as one of the most significant prophets of modern architecture, Adolf Loos was a star in his own time. His work was emblematic of the turn-of-the-century generation that was torn between the traditional culture of the nineteenth century and the innovative modernism of the twentieth. His essay 'Ornament and Crime' equated superfluous ornament and 'decorative arts' with underclass tattooing in an attempt to tell modern Europeans that they should know better. But the negation of ornament was supposed to reveal, not negate, good style; and an incorrigible ironist has been taken too literally in denying architecture as a fine art. Without normalizing his edgy radicality, Masheck argues that Loos's masterful "astylistic architecture" was an appreciation of tradition and utility and not, as most architectural historians have argued, a mere repudiation of the florid style of the Vienna Secession. Masheck has reads Loos as a witty, ironic rhetorician who has all too often been taken at face value. Far from being the anti-architect of the modern era, Masheck's Loos is 'an unruly yet integrally canonical artist-architect'. He believed in culture, comfort, intimacy and privacy and advocated the evolution of artful architecture. This is a brilliantly written revisionist reading of a perennially popular architect.

Best known for cheeky conceptual works--like his signed urinals ("R. Mutt") and his graffitioed Mona Lisa--Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was also an extraordinary painter and sculptor ("Nude Descending a Staircase") who changed the language of twentieth-century art and reigns with Picasso and Matisse as one of its greatest influences. Joseph Masheck has compiled a sampler of the best writing on Duchamp, with pieces that include Duchamp's obituary from "Artforum," written by Jasper Johns; Octavio Paz on the ready-mades; a Duchamp post-mortem by Hans Richter; Donald Judd's investigation of Rrose Selavy; a "Counter-Avant-Garde" by Clement Greenberg; a consideration by Guillaume Apollinaire; and John Cage's "26 Statements on Marcel Duchamp." Illustrated with photographs of Duchamp's seminal pieces, and updated with a substantial preface that offers new scholarship as well as a fascinating consideration of why Duchamp's popularity has exponentially increased since this book first appeared, this is an essential volume for the Duchamp devotee.