Modernist Photography re-examines the classic period of twentieth-century photography using new critical approaches to consider five recurrent visual themes during the years 1915 to 1945. These themes cut across such stylistic movements as Pictorialism, Surrealism and the New Vision, and include the transformation of objects, experimental images of the body, visions of the city, the industrialization of the countryside and experimental directions in poster design and typography. This thematic approach fosters new perspectives on such key photographers as Bernice Abbott, Brassai, Walker Evans, Raoul Hausmann, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Man Ray and emphasizes the interactions between European and American practitioners. The catalogue will include chapters on each of the five themes by ICP Curators Christopher Phillips and Vanessa Rocco. It is based on a selection of 70 works from the Daniel Cowin Collection. The collection of about 1,600 images dates from 1860 to 1960 and includes a range of processes and formats--postcards, stereographs, carte-de-vistes, tintypes, albumen prints and gelatin silver prints.

Originally created to accompany the 2007 exhibition "Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Essential Modernism brings into focus the foundation and meaning of Modernism as the defining movement of the twentieth century. Surveying objects and images from many media and industries, the book traces the historic development of the modern form, starting with the post-World War I search for utopia and continuing through to the start of the Second World War.

An ambitious and revelatory investigation of the black female figure in modern art, tracing the legacy of Manet through to contemporary art This revelatory study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. Posing Modernity examines the legacy of Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic "other." Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of nineteenth-century Paris and the post-abolition community of free black Parisians. She traces the impact of Manet's reconsideration of the black model into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic, where Henri Matisse visited Harlem jazz clubs and later produced transformative portraits of black dancers as icons of modern beauty. These and other works by the artist are set in dialogue with the urbane "New Negro" portraiture style with which Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston and Laura Wheeler Waring defied racial stereotypes. The book concludes with a look at how Manet's and Matisse's depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimé Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices.   Featuring over 175 illustrations and profiles of several models, Posing Modernity illuminates long-obscured figures and proposes that a history of modernism cannot be complete until it examines the vital role of the black female muse within it.

This book features an enormous variety of artists and works that explore the impact of Nordic geography, history, social mores, and national identities on the region's painters. Focusing on the "core" countries--Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland--as well as the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the Danish-German border region, the authors present a thematically organised overview of Nordic art between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing from the most recent scholarship, the book considers the prevalent themes and subjects, such as landscapes, genre scenes, portraits, interiors, modern city life, and abstraction, and analyses various works by artists such as Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershoi, Helene Schjerfbeck, Johannes S. Kjarval, and Sigrid Hjerten. It looks at the rise of modernism in Nordic art and discusses the artistic interaction between North and Central Europe. A final chapter is devoted to the significance of Nordic painting today. Comprehensive and authoritative, this beautifully illustrated book is certain to become the standard volume on Nordic art. AUTHOR: Katharina Alsen studied art history at the University of Oxford and German and Scandinavian studies, theology, and philosophy at the University of Hamburg. Studies abroad led her to Copenhagen, Reykjavík, and Torshavn on the Faroe Islands. Alsen was a scholar at the research training group "InterArt" at the Freie Universitat Berlin and at the University of Copenhagen with a doctoral project on staged intimacy. In addition to modernist painting of the Nordic countries, her research interests include contemporary performance art and curatorial theories. She is a regular speaker on art history and theater studies. Annika Landmann studied art history and Italian language and literature at the University of Hamburg, where she wrote her PhD thesis on the self-portraits of Helene Schjerfbeck. She specialises in the painting of the Nordic countries between the 1880s and the 1940s. During her research, the German-Finnish scholar was a fellow at the University of Turku, Finland, and she currently works for various museums and cultural institutions, among other fields in the area of art education. 200 colour illustrations

Why were modernist works of art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews nevertheless interpreted as Jewish? In this book, Neil Levi explores how the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition "Degenerate Art." Levi then turns to James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary. Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projections--not only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite.

Modernism and Masculinity investigates the varied dimensions and manifestations of masculinity in the modernist period. Thirteen essays from leading scholars reframe critical trends in modernist studies by examining distinctive features of modernist literary and cultural work through the lens of masculinity and male privilege. The volume attends to masculinity as an unstable horizon of gendered ideologies, subjectivities and representational practices, allowing for fresh interdisciplinary treatments of celebrated and lesser-known authors, artists and theorists such as D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Henry Roth, Theodor Adorno and Paul Robeson as well as modernist avant-garde movements such as vorticism, surrealism and futurism. As diverse as the masculinities that were played out across the early twentieth century, the approaches and arguments featured in this collection will appeal especially to scholars and students of modernist literature and culture, gender studies and English literature more broadly.

Featuring new essays by established and emerging scholars, Intersections: Women artists/surrealism/modernism redefines conventional surrealist and modernist canons by focusing critical attention on women artists working in and with surrealism in the context of modernism. In doing so it redefines critical understanding of the complex relations between all three terms. The essays address work produced in a wide variety of international contexts and across several generations of surrealist production by women closely connected to the surrealist movement or more marginally influenced by it. Intersections explores work in a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to film and fashion, by artists including Susan Hiller, Maya Deren, Birgit Jurgenssen, Aube Elléouët, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, Elsa Schiaparelli, Joyce Mansour, Leonor Fini, Mimi Parent, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun and Eileen Agar.

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia accompanies an exhibition of the same title examining the art, architecture and design of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The catalogue surveys the radical experiments that challenged societal and professional norms while proposing new kinds of technological, ecological and political utopia. It includes the counter design proposals of Victor Papanek and the anti-design polemics of Global Tools; the radical architectural visions of Archigram, Superstudio, Haus Rucker Co and ONYX; the media-based installations of Ken Isaacs, Joan Hills and Mark Boyle and Helio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida; the experimental films of Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner and John Whitney; posters and prints by Emory Douglas, Corita Kent and Victor Moscoso; documentation of performances staged by the Diggers and the Cockettes; publications such as Oz Magazine and The Whole Earth Catalog and books by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller; and much, much more. While the turbulent social history of the 1960s is well known, its cultural production remains comparatively under-examined. In this substantial volume, scholars explore a range of practices such as radical architectural and anti-design movements emerging in Europe and North America; the print revolution in the experimental graphic design of books, posters and magazines; and new forms of cultural practice that merged street theater and radical politics. Through a profusion of illustrations, interviews with figures including Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan of USCO, Gunther Zamp Kelp of Haus Rucker Co, Ken Isaacs, Ron Williams and Woody Rainey of ONYX, Franco Raggi of Global Tools, Tony Martin, Clark Richert and Richard Kallweit of Drop City, and new scholarly writings, this book explores the hybrid conjunction of the countercultural ethos and the modernist desire to fuse art and life.