ART 4362: Modern European Art (1860-1960): Books

European modernism underwent a massive change from 1930 to 1960, as war altered the cultural landscape. This account of artists and writers in France and England explores how modernism survived under authoritarianism, whether Fascism, National Socialism, or Stalinism, and how these artists endured by balancing complicity and resistance.

This handsomely illustrated volume is the public debut of the Surrealist photography collection of David Raymond that was recently acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Photography and its many techniques--photograms, montage, collage--played a vital role amongst Surrealist artists who sought to mine the unconscious and unsettle the everyday. Raymond’s collection is distinctive in its breadth and quality and reflects the adventurous spirit of the movement’s founder, André Breton. This book presents 178 vintage prints from the 1920s through the 1940s by artists from 14 countries. Works by notable artists including Brassaï, László Moholy-Nagy, Dora Maar, and Man Ray are joined by rare examples by equally provocative but less well-known photographers. Essays by scholars Tom E. Hinson, Ian Walker, and Lisa Kurzner provide analysis and context, exploring the philosophy behind Raymond’s selections as well as the history, techniques, and symbolism of the photographs.

This comprehensive, international examination of the Modernist movement across all the arts is now available in paperback. nbsp; Between 1914 and 1939, Modernism flourished through the work of creative visionaries who believed in the transformative power of art on society and its ability to shape a better world. The first book of its kind, Modernism: Designing a New World approaches one of the most important movements of the 20th century from a truly international perspective and reveals the scope of Modernism’s impact across all the arts. nbsp; Christopher Wilk reveals the fundamental ways in which Modernism has continued to shape our world and its visual culture and illustrates the extensive reach of the movement.

Also available as an ebook: http://bearcat.baylor.edu:80/record=b2129420~S10.

This book explores how traditional relations among the arts have changed in our time, focusing on the radical transformation of Paul Cezanne.

Focusing on the period 1905-1913, this provocative and groundbreaking new book refutes the popular view of Matisse as the painter of relaxed pleasures, the master of decorative line and sensuous color. Alastair Wright discovers a darker, more complex side to Matisse: an artist whose work, caught in the uneasy space between modernism and tradition, was fundamentally engaged with the most pressing of modernity's artistic and ideological debates. Presenting a series of brilliant and highly original analyses of Matisse's most important early paintings, Wright locates the artist within a wider cultural field in which the identities of modernism--and of its viewers--were highly contested. Wright offers a penetrating examination of the public response to Matisse's work, arguing that his early-twentieth-century audience found in his painting a deeply disturbing challenge to contemporary concepts of the self, of the nation, and of the West. This sumptuously illustrated book positions the work of Matisse and a number of his contemporaries in relation to key aspects of modernity--the commodification of the individual, the dislocation of cultural identity, and the effacement of racial boundaries under the pressure of imperial expansion--and provides a compelling account of how these contradictory historical materials fused to give birth to Matisse's modernism. What emerges is a renewed sense of the rich complexity of an artistic practice suspended between the seductive potential of pure color and an always ambivalent engagement with tradition. Tracing the interplay between Matisse's painting and discourses of art and subjectivity, Wright offers a significant new reading of one of the central figures of early-twentieth-century modernism.

In this book, Nancy J.Troy argues that the decorative arts are vitally important to understanding early 20th century modernism. She examines the effects of industrialization and international competition on the development of decorative arts in France during the period that began with Art Nouveau in 1895 and culminated in the Art Deco exhibition of 1925.

This volume is part of a four-volume series about art and its interpretation in the 19th and 20th centuries. The books provide an introduction to modern European and American art and criticism that should be valuable both to students and to the general reader.

This volume presents an original study of the visual and literary aesthetics of influential modernist women writers, in particular Virginia Woolf, HD (Hilda Doolittle), and Dorothy Richardson. Maggie Humm focuses on the neglected (often intimate) domestic photographs of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; on Woolf's essay "The Cinema" in the context of cinema journalism by other modernists; and on the influence of photography on Woolf's Three Guineas, her short visual fictions (particularly "Portraits"), and her modernist essays. Humm examines how modernist women explore a freer range of aesthetics than their male counterparts by looking at not only what has been called women's work at the margins of modernity, but also at what might be called the even more marginalized material within those boundaries-photo albums and image-texts. More than one thousand of Virginia Woolf's uncatalogued photographs, and a similar number of Vanessa Bell's, have been sitting in archives scarcely touched until now. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures makes many of these photographs available for the first time. Both the photographs and this fresh analysis will prove fascinating to anyone interested in the many cultures of modernism.

The writers and artists of the Spanish avant-garde, enthralled with the streamlined, mass-produced commodities of the Machine Age, incorporated these objects into their literary and visual works. In doing so, they launched a broad inquiry into the relations between mind and matter, people and things, words and world. In Modernism and Its Merchandise, Juli Highfill traces that dissonant but productive line of inquiry by focusing on the objects of obsession for the Spanish vanguardists-starting with the fruit bowls of cubist still life; continuing with the merchandise, machines, and fashions of the 1920s; and concluding with objects of ruin and decay. The trajectory moves from the natural to the technological domains, from the newfangled to the outmoded. Throughout this study, objects appear ever in motion, engaging and altering their human subjects-whether as objects of exchange, as prosthetic organs, or as triggers for powerful affective responses, such as appetite, taste, and disgust. The insights that arise from these encounters with material things anticipate the knowledge emerging today in the fields of material culture, technology studies, and network theory.

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siecle field of "physiological aesthetics," which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself."