Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945)

..". a landmark work, the first attempt to write a pre-history of minimalism that embraces all the arts. Its importance cannot be overestimated." --K. Robert Schwarz, Institute for Studies in American Music

"All told, this book is mandatory reading for anyone who wishes to understand the history and nature of minimalism." --i/e NINE

"The death of Minimalism is announced regularly, which may be the surest testimonial to its staying power," says Strickland in this study, the first to examine in detail Minimalist tendencies in the plastic arts and music. Investigating the origins...

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874--1927) is considered by many to be the first American dadaist as well as the mother of dada. An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, "the Baroness" was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances. Some thought her merely crazed, others thought her a genius. The editor Margaret Anderson called her "perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary." Yet despite her great notoriety and influence, until recently her story and work have been little known outside the circle of...

There is not one Marcel Duchamp, but several. Within his oeuvre Duchamp practiced a variety of modernist idioms and invented an array of contradictory personas: artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, chess champion and dreamer, dandy and recluse.In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. Taking into account underacknowledged works and focusing on the conjunction of the machine and the commodity in Duchamp's art, Joselit...

This interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts reads the twentieth century by listening to it--to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aurality at the center of the history of the arts, he...

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), one of the most celebrated artists of the last third of the twentieth century, owes his unique place in the history of visual culture not to the mastery of a single medium but to the exercise of multiple media and roles. A legendary art world figure, he worked as an artist, filmmaker, photographer, collector, author, and designer. Beginning in the 1950s as a commercial artist, he went on to produce work for exhibition in galleries and museums. The range of his efforts soon expanded to the making of films, photography, video, and books. Warhol first came to public...

Among the many books written on or by Salvador Dali, this is the first to give a complete, well-documented picture of his life and art. Carlos Rojas's approach to Dali is somewhere between biography, Freudian analysis, and art and literary interpretation. Dali is haunted from earliest childhood by the specter of his elder brother who died as a toddler shortly before Dali was conceived (both brothers and the father bore the same name), as he is haunted by the devouring phantom of his mother, that praying mantis on whose portrait he would like to spit. Dali is seen as endlessly struggling to...

The pace and scale of the exchange of cultural goods of all sorts--paintings, furniture, even ladies' fans--increased sharply in nineteenth-century Spain, and new institutions and practices for exhibiting as well as valorizing "art" were soon formed. Oscar Vazquez maps this cultural landscape, tracing the connections between the growth of art markets and changing patterns of collecting. Unlike many earlier students of collecting, he focuses not upon questions of taste but rather upon the discursive and institutional frameworks that came to regulate art's economic and symbolic worth at all...

Although interest in the painter, poet, and art writer Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) has been growing in recent years, Art and Its Discontents is the first biographical study of this pivotal figure in British modernism. Focused on Stokes's formative years, the book offers important new insights into his intellectual development, his growing commitment to the arts, and his eventual turn to the art criticism that would win him international renown.

Even as Richard Read follows Stokes from his London childhood to his travels in Italy and his psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein, he...

In France of the early twentieth-century, the term art negre was as likely to refer to the black music and dance of America as to the sculpture of Africa. Indeed, music and dance, which both racial theorists and novelists portrayed as the "primitive" arts par excellence, were widely believed to exemplify the "genius" of blacks. In Le Tumulte noir, Jody Blake traces the profound impact African sculpture and African American music and dance had upon Parisian popular entertainment as well as upon avant-garde, modernist art, literature, and theater.

Through her...

The news media have given us potent demonstrations of the ambiguity of ostensibly truthful representations of public events. Jordana Mendelson uses this ambiguity as a framework for the study of Spanish visual culture from 1929 to 1939--a decade marked, on the one hand, by dictatorship, civil war, and Franco's rise to power and, on the other, by a surge in the production of documentaries of various types, from films and photographs to international exhibitions.

Mendelson begins with an examination of El Pueblo Espanol, a model Spanish village featured at the 1929 International...

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) has attained lasting fame for paintings and prints--above all The Scream-- that express the isolation and anxieties of the modern condition. Recently, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired a large Munch painting, Mermaid, little known outside a small circle of experts because it had never been displayed in museums or galleries. To introduce this important work to the public, the Museum has organized an exhibition that presents Mermaid alongside related paintings, drawings, and prints.

Edvard Munch's Mermaid, which...

William Bartram's love of nature led him to explore the environs of the American Southeast between 1773 and 1777. Here he collected plants and seeds, kept a journal of his observations of nature, and made drawings of the plants and animals he encountered. The completed drawings were sent to his patron in London, and these make up the bulk of the collection held at London's Natural History Museum.

The Art and Science of William Bartram brings together, for the first time, all sixty-eight drawings by Bartram held at the Natural History Museum, along with works by some of the...

Our view of modernism in the arts has been largely shaped by the prominence of painting and, in particular, by a succession of major painters working in Paris--from Courbet and Manet to the Cubists. Moreover, modernist aesthetics has come to be equated with the concept of formalism, which has been both advocated and attacked in the critical roster of the twentieth century. Adrian Stokes offered a singular critical voice challenging us to think differently about modernism. Guided by his personal interpretation of the early Renaissance and by insights derived from psychoanalytic theory,...

The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures traces the three-thousand-year history of the emperor's imperial collection, from the Bronze Age to the present. The tortuous story of these treasures involves a succession of dynasties, invasion and conquest, and civil war, resulting in valiant attempts to rescue and preserve the collection. Throughout history, different Chinese regimes used the imperial collection to bolster their own political legitimacy, domestically and internationally.

The narrative follows the gradual formation of the Peking Palace Museum in 1925, then its...

The Wadsworth Atheneum's remarkable collection of twentieth-century art is due to a succession of adventurous directors and curators. This beautiful book showcases the museum's holdings and provides fascinating details about their acquisition.

In 1931, the famed Chick Austin, director of the Atheneum from 1929 to 1944, purchased works by Dali, Calder, Picasso, Ernst, and others. Austin's successor, Charles Cunningham, added works by Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, Maillol, and Marini. In more recent years, examples of American modernists and expressionists such as Georgia O'Keeffe,...