Category: news and announcements

OPPORTUNITIES

CFP

9^th EAM Conference “Avant-garde and War,” Jagiellonian University, Cracow,

September 17-19 2024

Panel Proposal

Cold-War Stories: Decolonizing the Post-1945 Avant-Garde

Chairs: Sascha Bru, University of Leuven, Belgium and Isabel Wünsche, Constructor University Bremen, Germany.

This panel seeks to move beyond the dominant discourse of the avant-garde as a typically Western phenomenon by exploring avant-garde practices since 1945 within the “peripheral” regions of the former Eastern bloc (including Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics, Balkans, Caucasus region, and Central Asia) as well as in relation to the liberation movement and the emergence of new independent states in Africa and Asia. The goal of this panel, which ties in with a larger project set up by the chairs (see: https://d-ag.weebly.com/), is to start decolonizing both the avant-garde’s perceived history since 1945, and the historically erroneous, West-centric view of the avant-garde more generally. We invite contributions on

• avant-garde practitioners across races and ethnicities who do not fit into the typical narrative of a Western avant-garde,
• the impact of avant-garde artists who worked behind the Iron Curtain forging alternative networks within and beyond the Eastern bloc,
• the often self-named, anti-colonial avant-garde initiatives of artists’ formations in the Global South that have asserted the existence of a self-conscious, non-Western avant-garde since 1945.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short bio of no more than 150 words until February 25, 2024 to sascha.bru@kuleuven.be and iwuensche@constructor.university

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Symposium: Translating the Sacred in the Nordic-Baltic Sphere from the Middle Ages to Modernity.

Riga, Art Academy of Latvia, and online.

Thursday 29-Friday 30 June 2023.

The Art Academy of Latvia, in cooperation with the National Museum of Denmark, is pleased to announce the upcoming Marie Skłodowska-Curie Symposium, “Translating the Sacred in the Nordic-Baltic Sphere from the Middle Ages to Modernity,” which will be held 29 and 30 June 2023 at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga, and online via Zoom. The symposium is made possible thanks to generous support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 842830 (TRANSLATIO), hosted by the National Museum of Denmark.

The international symposium brings together scholars from across the humanities who examine the art, architecture, and material culture of the Nordic-Baltic region—comprising areas of present-day Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Historically, this region represents an integrated and culturally heterogeneous maritime space, its territories and communities mutually and globally interconnected over centuries by trade, imperial expansion, immigration, and religious pluralism. These conditions drove circulations, transformations and entanglements of visual and material cultures, and ideologies, practices, and theologies of the sacred both amongst and within historical territories, through exchanges, migrations, conflicts, and transformations both synchronic and diachronic. Against this background, this symposium explores the agentive and mediating properties of sacred things as composite objects, interrogating how sacred objects from diverse religious traditions enable the movement of ideas, styles, practices, and beliefs, within and between communities and territories in the Nordic-Baltic sphere, from the late Middle Ages through the Modern era.

The symposium will be live-streamed via Zoom. The registration link to participate online via Zoom can be found here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAvfuqtqDgvGtxiWRZezlv1eHV3SZ7hT37c

Visit the symposium website to view the full program with abstracts: https://translationatmus.wordpress.com/symposium/

For more information and in-person registration to attend the symposium in Riga, please contact rno@natmus.dk.

Conference: Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700

University of Kent, UK, and online. 

Friday 30^th June – Saturday 1^st July 2023

We are pleased to announce the finalized programme for our two-day hybrid summer conference ‘Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700’ taking place at the University of Kent, UK, on 30^th June to 1^st July 2023.

A two-day conference to examine how the complex transcultural nature of Central and Eastern Europe was co-shaped, fostered, and reimagined by artefacts, materials and visual culture, from food to art and clothing to weapons. Home to Slavic, Germanic, Latin, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic peoples, Central and Eastern Europe sat astride a network of commercial routes, cultural interactions, and demographic flows that turned it into one of the most entangled regions of the early modern world. Papers explore this multiconfessional, multiethnic, and multilingual realm as a crossroads of cultures.

Full programme here: https://research.kent.ac.uk/emcentraleu/conference/

The registration link can be found directly here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUUwgEIviXskD7oIc0PZ6Qkr5i-B01klqFXGYwvGwGCZp9MQ/viewform

For in person attendance register by 5th June, and online attendance by 28th June.

Postgraduate/early-career bursaries available for conference attendance in return for help with blogging and social media. Apply via registration link.

We look forward to welcoming you to our conference and engaging in fruitful discussions and knowledge exchange.

Call for Applications:

47^th Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association

October 5-8, 2023, Montréal, Canada

The German Studies Association (GSA) welcomes applications for its next annual conference, to take place from October 5-8, 2023 in Montréal, Canada.

• The deadline for proposing a seminar for the 2023 conference is January 16, 2023.
• The Emerging Scholars Workshop, designed exclusively for graduate students, is accepting applications through January 29, 2023. This year’s Workshop, “German Studies Unbound,” will be facilitated by Randall Halle (University of Pittsburgh) and Jennifer Allen (Yale University).
• The deadline for panel, roundtable, and individual paper proposals is March 27, 2023. If you are interested in proposing a panel or roundtable and would like help finding participants, please fill out this form – your submitted information will be publicly available here.

You must be a current GSA member to submit proposals for the 2023 conference.

Call for Dissertation Information:

If you have recently completed a PhD in German Studies, please let us know by submitting your information here!

The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to announce two forthcoming award opportunities related to printmaking. Please see the announcements below for the following:

1) Association of Print Scholars Collaboration Grant ($1,000)

2) Schulman and Bullard Article Prize ($2,000)

Applications for both are due on January 31, 2023. Details can also be found at printscholars.org.

1) APS COLLABORATION GRANT

The APS Collaboration Grant funds public programs and projects that foster collaboration between members of the print community and/or encourage dialogue between the print community and the general public. The grant carries a maximum award of $1,000. Projects should provide new insights into printmaking and introduce prints to new audiences.

Examples of potential collaborative projects include, but are not limited to, the following:

• A multi-speaker conference or symposium;
• A single-speaker lecture;
• A workshop focused on identifying printmaking methods and techniques and/or print media;
• A study day with printmakers and paper conservators focused on printed materials;
• An educational program about printmaking intended for the general public.

Application Requirements and Review Criteria

Successful proposals must address all of the following criteria, which must be consolidated into a single PDF document titled with the applicant’s name:

1. Proposal narrative describing the collaborative project and identifying organizers and goals. Ideally, this should include: how the project will contribute towards advancing print scholarship; a list of speakers and their affiliations (if applicable); anticipated target audience; and, how the project will facilitate collaboration between members of the print community, and/or between the print community and the general public. In addition, this narrative should address the feasibility of realizing this project within the proposed time frame (500-1000 words).
2. Budget detailing how grant funding would be spent and how the project can be realized within the funding amount provided by APS. Please list any other grants for which the applicant(s) has applied, amounts, and the outcomes (if known).
3. Short CV(s) (fewer than 2 pages) for key applicant(s) involved in organizing this program or project.

The time frame for the grant is one year. The successful applicant will be notified by the end of March, and the grant must be applied to event costs within one year of notification. For full consideration, please send all required materials, organized in a single PDF document titled with the applicant’s name, by January 31, 2023 to the APS Grants Committee at grants@printscholars.org.

*The APS Collaboration Grant does not fund overhead or indirect costs. Indirect costs are costs for activities or services that support the organization as a whole, such as administrative costs not associated with the delivery of the grantee’s particular program or project services. Please note that funds awarded from the grant may only be applied to direct costs outlined in the submitted proposal budget. Acceptable project expenses and direct costs may include, but are not limited to, the following: professional fees/honoraria; travel and lodging expenses; supplies and materials; meetings and conference costs (i.e. space rental fees, etc.). Food or beverage expenses for receptions and dinners/lunches are excluded.

2) SCHULMAN AND BULLARD ARTICLE PRIZE

The Association of Print Scholars invites applications for the ninth Schulman and Bullard Article Prize. The Prize is given annually to an article published by an early-career scholar that features compelling and innovative research on fine art prints or printmaking. The award, which carries a $2,000 prize, is generously sponsored by Susan Schulman and Carolyn Bullard. Following the mission of the Association of Print Scholars, articles can feature aspects of printmaking across any geographic region and all chronological periods. Articles will be evaluated by a panel of advanced scholars for the author’s commitment to the use of original research and the article’s overall contribution to the field of fine print scholarship.

The Association of Print Scholars invites nominations and self-nominations for the 2023 Schulman and Bullard Article Prize that meet the following criteria:

• Authors must have graduated with an MA, MFA, or PhD fewer than 10 years prior to article publication and have less than 10 years of experience as a practicing professional in an academic or museum institution or as an independent scholar.
• Authors must be current members of APS.
• Articles must have been published in a journal, exhibition catalogue, or anthology between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022. Online publications will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
• Articles must be between 3,000 and 10,000 words, inclusive of footnotes and references.
• Entries for consideration must be in English, though the text of the original article may be in any language.

To submit an article for consideration, please send the completed nomination form along with an electronic or hard copy of the article to the APS Grants Committee at grants@printscholars.org by January 31, 2023.

Panelists sought for for an interdisciplinary stream of panels to be held at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies conference in Austin next April: “Everyday Life in the Danish Golden Age” https://scandinavianstudy.org/annual-meeting/austin/.

The deadline for submissions is December 9.

Stream description: Among the most successful authors of the Danish Golden Age was Thomasine Gyllembourg, who signed her works “Forfatteren til En Hverdags‐Historie.” The work referred to in her anonym is a slice of contemporary Copenhagen life, which many readers found refreshing and quite charming. Everyday life was also on the rise in the pictorial arts, as more and more commissions came in from bourgeois families, who insisted on being depicted in their domestic surroundings. Meanwhile, the musical repertoire evolved, with an uptick in pieces that could be played and performed in the home. Not everyone, however, was a friend of the everyday; Hans Christian Andersen’s novelistic narrators scoff at En Hverdags‐Historie, and Carl Bagger’s Min Broders Levnet goes to great lengths to affront bourgeois propriety in its depictions of working‐class revelry. “Everyday Life in the Danish Golden Age” will thus seek to explore the concept of the everyday through a variety of disciplinary lenses, as well as from a number of class and gender positions.

Call for Papers

Artium Quaestiones

Thematic Issue

Collecting in the North: Patterns, Networks, and Displays from the British Isles to Scandinavia and the Baltic Region

The present call for contributions aims to gather articles studying different aspects of collecting in Northern Europe up to World War I. The geographical area we intend to consider includes cultural contexts as diverse as the British Isles, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and the Baltic region. We are interested in both private and public collections of drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, artifacts, and memorabilia.

We intend to investigate three main aspects of collecting practices. First, the patterns of collecting that help to understand how collections are built and what models collectors rely on in assembling them. Crucial to our scope is the question of the sources and the references that are called into question through the practices of collecting. We would like to include essays that investigate, for instance, how visual and scholarly references are used and appropriated, but also how they are adapted to conform to collectors’ scopes and needs.

Secondly, we intend to cast light on the structure and development of the networks that make the formation of collections possible. Particular attention will be paid here to the interactions that determine the development of collections as well as to the individuals who gravitate to them. There is a need to research the diversity of a multi-faceted world which is not only bound to art dealers and collectors. We intend to consider the multiple actors linked to the act of collecting such as advisors, patrons, scholars working for collectors, mediators, and all sorts of “in-between” professions facilitating the activities of sellers and buyers and their interaction.

In this issue we intend to discuss displays and the dissemination of collections. The core question here is what is it that collectors and institutions intend to do with their holdings and how their collections are circulated. What are the mechanisms that make the existence of collections known? Why are collections available (or not) to the public? What are the criteria? What visual and scholarly information do collectors and institutions want to disseminate? Here we consider documents as diverse as pictorial representations of displays, arrangements, catalogs, notebooks, brochures, and all printed material giving evidence of these collections.

Essays are expected to be published in the Autumn 2023 issue and to be submitted to a double-blind peer-review process. Proposals of a maximum of 300 words are to be sent to Michal Mencfel (mmencfel@amu.edu.pl) and Camilla Murgia (camilla.murgia@unil.ch) with a copy to aq.redakcja@amu.edu.pl by December 10^th, 2022. Notice of acceptance of the contribution will be given as soon as possible in the following weeks. Essays of 6000-8000 words, with high resolution images (300 dpi) and permission to publish, will have to be sent by March 10^th 2023.

Call for Papers

In conjunction with the exhibition Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany, on view from October 29, 2022 through July 22, 2023, LACMA and the Association of Print Scholars are pleased to convene a one-day symposium exploring the role of graphic art during periods of political transformation. The symposium will bring together scholars, curators, and conservators to examine the exhibition’s themes in a broader geographical and temporal context.

About the Exhibition:

Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany explores the shared subjects and visual strategies of two key moments in 20th-century political printmaking: the revival of German Expressionist graphics in response to a nationwide revolution in 1918, and the formation of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Print Workshop) in Mexico City in the late 1930s. Although rooted in distinct social and historical contexts, artists in both countries responded to their respective upheavals in print to communicate to a mass audience in forceful visual terms.

Examining direct and indirect points of exchange, Pressing Politics considers the iconographic precedents for these artists’ political imagery, the range of printed works they produced, and the conditions that gave rise to their art. Drawn primarily from LACMA’s collection, the exhibition underscores the enduring power of the printed image and highlights the contributions of Mexican and German artists to a global iconography of political graphics.

About the Symposium:

The one-day convening will be held on April 29, 2023, at LACMA’s satellite gallery at Charles White Elementary School and will build on themes presented in Pressing Politics. Expanding beyond Germany and Mexico, the symposium will consider the role of print media during times of revolution and social change from a global perspective in the 20th and 21st centuries. It will also explore questions related to the materials and processes of print production in these contexts. Proposals beyond the exhibition’s geographic scope are encouraged.

Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

• The role of transnational political networks in the development of political graphics.
• The impact of the materiality of political prints on their meaning and reception.
• How digital technologies have transformed the material character and function of political graphics.
• The role of art collectives in graphic activism.
• The conservation of political graphics and ephemera, in particular the challenges of preserving modern political graphics and other ephemeral works on paper.  Proposed talks can also discuss graphics created in time-based or born-digital media.

Please send a 300-word abstract and a CV to events@printscholars.org by December 16, 2022. Notifications will be emailed in early to mid-January 2023. Funds for travel assistance will be available.

The exhibition is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through The Paper Project initiative. Additional support for the symposium is provided by the IFPDA Foundation and the Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation

Additional information can be found at the following link: https://mailchi.mp/33c52603f5e8/aps-lacma-2023-cfp?e=2dbc5cb7de

RFGVC Autumn 22-23 Programme (1)

Ongoing

Research Forum for German Visual Culture (RFGVC)

The Research Forum for German Visual Culture (RFGVC) is a network organisation that exists under the auspices of the Visual Arts Research Institute, Edinburgh (VARIE) based at the University of Edinburgh, and involving VARIE consortium partners – Edinburgh College of Art, the National Galleries of Scotland, National Museums Scotland, National Library of Scotland, University of Glasgow, and the University of St Andrews, as well as other partner institutions in the UK and abroad.

The RFGVC is inter- and multi- disciplinary, inter-school, inter-institutional, and international in orientation. The scope of research interest encompasses Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and while the central focus is likely to be on modern and contemporary visual culture, the forum does not exclude coverage of earlier periods.

In the first instance, the forum is designed to cohere and draw upon the considerable expertise and research networks of Germanists based in Scottish academic and art institutions, and to create various opportunities for knowledge transfer. Beyond this goal, it is intended as a key research exchange point encouraging Anglo-American-German relations within a matrix of international research institutions, centres, associations, and societies.

The RFGVC will encourage contact between British, American, and German art historians and curators, fostering and contributing to the development of national and international collaborative, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research by means of seminars, conferences, colloquia, and lectures. In due course, the RFGVC will also develop an active programme of film screenings and other events.

For information about the forum, and for details about forum events, visit the RFGVC website at http://rfgvc.tumblr.com/ 

The Research Center “Humanities, Modernity, Globalization” at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany invites applications for Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities

The position allows for independent research, but the successful applicant will be expected to contribute to the center’s research agenda; be involved in ongoing research initiatives; assist in project management, fund raising, and third-party funding applications. In addition, s/he will teach one course per semester, either a seminar related to topics of his/her expertise and/or an introductory course.

The research center is particularly interested in applicants whose scholarship focuses on contemporary issues, intercultural concepts, and global perspectives in fields such as art history, literature, cultural history, religious studies, media studies, anthropology, and philosophy. For further information regarding the research center, visit our website: http://www.jacobs-university.de/hmg

Successful applicants will hold a Ph.D. degree or equivalent in a humanities discipline. S/he will be responsible, self-motivated, and enjoy working in an international academic environment. In addition to excellent writing and presentation skills, organization and management skills are essential. Proven experience with project management and/or the acquisition of third party funds will be considered a definite plus. Fluency in English is a must, knowledge of other languages in as much as it is required by the candidate´s research interests. Candidates who do not speak German are encouraged to take part in the German courses offered by Jacobs University. Experience with ehumanities is especially welcome.

Jacobs University is a private, international, English-language University in Northern Germany. It is an equal opportunity employer and is certified “Family Friendly” by the Hertie Foundation. For further information see www.jacobs-university.de

Please sent your application as one PDF document to hmg@jacobs-university.de and include the following items:

• • Letter of application

• • Curriculum Vitae with list of publications

• • Names and contact information of three references

• A short description of three courses the candidate could teach, with indication of whether the course would be taught at an introductory or advanced level)

In addition to the PDF application, we ask you to provide us with electronic copies of two published articles or book chapters.

All correspondence should be addressed to:
Prof. Dr. Isabel Wünsche
Research Center “Humanities, Modernity, Globalization”
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Jacobs University gGmbH
Campus Ring 1, Research IV
28759 Bremen
Germany

Call for Manuscript Proposals: German History in Context

Camden House is pleased to launch a new series in German history entitled GERMAN HISTORY IN CONTEXT. We especially encourage submissions of monographs and edited collections on any aspect of post-1945 cultural, political, and social history. Investigations of the Third Reich, the Weimar Republic, and Imperial Germany are also welcomed. Of particular interest to the series editors are studies that explore their given historical topic in a wider perspective: for instance, by comparing cultural developments in East and West Germany; by seeking to understand developments in Germany in a transnational or global context; or by analyzing the degree to which events in postwar Germany were shaped by the legacy of earlier eras. All manuscripts will be peer reviewed and, if accepted for publication, copyedited and produced in line with the highest standards in academic publishing.

Series editor is BILL NIVEN, Professor of History at the Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Members of the editorial advisory board are Professor Stefan Berger of the University of Bochum, Professor Atina Grossmann of The Cooper Union, New York, and Professor Andrew Port of Wayne State University.

Proposal forms in both Word and pdf formats are found at: http://www.camden-house.com/authors_proposalform_camden.asp

Our preference is for the Word form, sent as an email attachment to Camden House Editorial Director Jim Walker at jwalker8751@charter.net.

CAMDEN HO– USE, an imprint of BOYDELL & BREWER
www.camden-house.com

ONGOING OPPORTUNITIES

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, “promote[s] academic cooperation between excellent scientists and scholars from abroad and from Germany.”

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is the largest funding organisation in the world supporting the international exchange of students and scholars. Since it was founded in 1925, more than 1.5 million scholars in Germany and abroad have received DAAD funding. It is a registered association and its members are German institutions of higher education and student bodies.

The Gerda Henkel Foundation was established in 1976 by Lisa Maskell (1914 – 1998) in memory of her mother Gerda Henkel. Headquartered in Düsseldorf, the Gerda Henkel Foundation is a charitable organisation under private law that is independent of today’s Henkel Group. The Foundation supports national and international academic projects in the following subjects: Archaeology, History, Historical Islamic Studies, Art History, History of Law, and Pre- and Protohistory. The Foundation is active both inside and outside Germany.

NEWS & EVENTS

HGSCEA at CAA Chicago 2024

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HGSCEA is proud to support the series From Kyivan Rus’ to Modern Ukraine: Virtual Conversations on History, Art, and Cultural Heritage.

From Kyivan Rus’ to Modern Ukraine: Virtual Conversations on History, Art, and Cultural Heritage

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Sept. 9, 2021  Rosemarie Haag Bletter Interview with BBC Radio 4 on the history of glass in architecture and Paul Scheerbart’s and Bruno Taut’s proposals for utopian glass architecture for a Program, “The Dreams We Live In”, to be broadcast in late September.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH EVENT

Can Artists Still Break the Rules? Revisiting Strategy: Get Arts

Mon 30 Aug 11:30 – 12:30, The New York Times Theatre (in Sculpture Court)

Can Artists Still Break the Rules? Revisiting Strategy: Get Arts | What’s On | Edinburgh International Book Festival From Mon 30 Aug – In August 1970, Richard Demarco collaborated with the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf to stage Strategy: Get Arts, an exhibition at the Edinburgh College of Art. It featured works by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard… www.edbookfest.co.uk

The Great Women Artists Podcast announces a new episode: Paula Modersohn Becker, with author Diane Radycki and podcaster Katy Hessel.  

(Hessel, creator of The Great Women Artists Podcast (London, 2015), has been selected one of Forbes 30 Under 30 successful young Europeans in Art and Culture to watch in 2021.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/diane-radycki-on-paula-modersohn-becker/id1480259187?i=1000515088928

Michelle Facos will give the 2021 Raoul Wallenberg lecture at the Nordic Museum in Seattle on 13 June at 12:30 pm Pacific Time. The topic is “Jews and the Formations of a Swedish National Identity,” and will be accessible on Zoom via the Nordic Museum website.

On 14 August at 10 am Pacific Time, she will give a lecture “Sisters of the Brush: Scandinavian Women Painters in the Impressionist Era” in connection with the Nordic Museum’s exhibition Among Forests and Lakes: Masterpieces from the Finnish National Gallery, which runs 6 May-26 October 2021. This will also be via Zoom and accessible the Nordic Museum website.

Book Launch: Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, eds. Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson

You are cordially invited to a book launch party on Saturday April 17 celebrating the release of our book Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe.  This anthology features essays by many HGSCEA members and was initially developed from the HGSCEA session, “Representing Race”  chaired by Allison Morehead at CAA  in 2018.  The book launch will feature brief presentations by the authors followed by a Q&A.  Further information is provided in the registration link below.  We hope that you can attend!

Apr 17, 2021 3:00 PM  Eastern Standard Time
See email for details on how to register.

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented
On view through April 10, 2021 

Friday, March 5, 7:00 – 8:30 pm EST

You are invited to a special walkthrough of MoMA’s Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented with exhibition organizers, Jodi Hauptman and Adrian Sudhalter, followed by a discussion moderated by HGSCEA President James Van Dyke.  The exhibition traverses much of HGSCEA’s geographic terrain and numerous HGSCEA members contributed to the catalogue.  This special event — organized exclusively for HGSCEA — is open to current members and is free of charge (renew your membership here).  It will take place on Friday, March 5, from 7:00–8:30 p.m. (EST).  This is a by-registration-only event. To register check your email.

http://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=1129&EventID=429569&PK=

Robert Gore Rifkind dies at age 91; His legacy continues through the Rifkind Scholars-in-Residence Program.

The renowned collector of German Expressionist art and donor of the eponymous study center at LACMA, Robert Gore Rifkind, died on October 20 at the age of 91. A graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, he was a pioneer of the boutique law firm model and established the first single-focused case securities law practice in Los Angeles in 1978. He was awarded the Order of Merit, First Class by the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of his extraordinary efforts in spearheading the understanding of German Expressionist art in the U.S. His philanthropy included HGCEA at a crucial juncture in 2004 as well as grants to many of its members through the Rifkind Scholars-in-Residence program.

Rifkind was assisted in building his collection by dealer Orrel P. Reed Jr. and scholar Peter Gunther, among others, and the library was enriched by the expertise of Jake Zeitlin in Los Angeles, Elmar W. Seibel in Boston, and Hans Bolliger in Zurich. His 1983 donation of German Expressionist prints, drawings, and library led to the creation of the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, an extensive and growing collection of more than 6,000 prints and drawings and a research library of over 10,000 volumes, documented in the 1989 volume Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies by Bruce Davis, which includes Mr. Rifkind’s interview of Oskar Kokoschka.

Oskar Kokoschka and Robert Gore Rifkind, 1978.

LACMA’s exhibition program includes nearly continuous rotations and thematic installations from the Rifkind collection—often complemented by works from other LACMA departments—most recently the exhibition, Fantasies and Fairy Tales. The Rifkind Center has also contributed to major international loan shows ranging from German Expressionist Sculpture (1983), The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Ludwig Meidner (1989), “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (1991), Expressionist Utopias (1993), and Exiles + Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (1997), to Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (2014).

The Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation under the able leadership of Mr. Rifkind’s son, Max Rifkind-Barron, supports art and library acquisitions, LACMA exhibitions such as Hans Richter: Encounters (2013) and New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933 (2016), public programming, and a Scholar-in-Residence program that allows specialists from the U.S. and abroad to conduct research in the Center. These activities will continue throughout the construction of LACMA’s new Peter Zumthor building to be completed in 2023.

The Scholars-in-Residence program has supported generations of scholars beginning with Herschel B. Chipp, Wolf-Dieter Dube, Alexander Dückers, Naomi Jackson- Groves, Paul Raabe, Günther Thiem, and extending through Rose-Carol Washton Long, Sherwin Simmons, Olaf Peters and many others up to young scholars and students just beginning their careers today. The Scholar-in-Residence program is currently accepting applications for Summer 2020 and beyond. A link to this program is found at: https://www.lacma.org/learn/research-library/rifkind-center

RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOKS

Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth

Edited by Jay A. Clarke, Jill Lloyd-Peppiatt, Trine Otte Bak Nielsen

Contributions by Ali Smith, Jay A. Clarke, Jill Lloyd-Peppiatt, Trine Otte Bak Nielsen and Arne Johan Vetlesen

A thought-provoking volume on Edvard Munch’s often neglected pictures of nature, exploring the Norwegian artist’s landscapes, seascapes, and existential environments in light of his own time and ours

This richly illustrated catalogue provides a multifaceted perspective on the pictures of nature and landscape by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944). This important topic has been neglected in scholarship on Munch, despite the fact that it is a major motif in his oeuvre. This volume is the first to explore the theme in its full breadth throughout Munch’s corpus, including his paintings, lithographs, watercolors, and woodcuts. His depictions of forests, farmland, and the seashore, as well as paintings of sea storms, snow, and other extreme weather, present us with undulating forms that animate nature. They likewise provide an example of Munch’s preference for liminal spaces where transformations take place, often celebrating human interaction with nature in its many manifestations. The book also considers Munch’s less conventional landscapes, and particularly those where his famous Scream motif occurs. These environments depict nature in an existential way, suggesting that the artist held a deep concern for nature’s destruction by humans—a concern no less relevant today. A complementary look at his writings as primary sources alongside his images shows how Munch mixed a scientific perspective on nature with metaphysical and spiritual notions of rebirth that permeate other parts of his corpus. The book also includes a engaging short story by award-winning author Ali Smith that was inspired by Munch’s work.

Book Details

Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media

Foreword by Michael Govan. Text by Bruno Cabanes, Santanu Das, Anton Kaes, Jeffrey T. Sammons, Catherine Speck, David A. Welch

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and DelMonico Books, 2023

How the first global media war impacted art, graphic design, and cinema, from Otto Dix to Kathe Kollwitz.

The media spectacle in which we live today has origins in the Great War (1914–18) and the burgeoning mediascape of newspapers, ephemera, photography and the new medium of cinema that made it the first global media war. The war’s battlefields and contingent spaces became perhaps the most international human endeavor hitherto undertaken, with most Eastern and Western European countries and the Ottoman Empire involved, as well as forces from Australia, Canada, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and Indigenous peoples including Maori, First Peoples and Choctaw “code talkers.” This book examines the war through paintings, sculpture, posters, photographs, film stills and the graphic arts, showing how it affected the arts between 1914 and 1930, and the role of media in constructing a global “imagined community” that could be accepted as part of the war effort.

Artists include: Johannes Baader, Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, George Bellows, Edith Collier, Raymond Desvarreux, Otto Dix, Raoul Dufy, Lyonel Feininger, Natalia Goncharova, George Grosz, Mary Riter Hamilton, Hannah Höch, Willy Jaeckel, Kathe Kollwitz, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Moriz Melzer, and many others.

Exhibition: This volume accompanies the exhibition Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), December 3, 2023-July 7, 2024.

https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/imagined-fronts-great-war-and-global-media

Transcultural things and the spectre of Orientalism in early modern Poland-Lithuania

By Tomasz Grusiecki

Manchester University Press, 2023 (Dec. 9)

Transcultural things examines four sets of artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: maps pointing to Poland-Lithuania’s roots in the supposedly ‘Oriental’ land of Sarmatia, portrayals of fashions that purport to trace Polish culture back to a distant and revered past, Ottomanesque costumes worn by Polish ambassadors and carpets labelled as Polish despite their foreign provenance.

These examples of invented tradition borrowed from abroad played a significant role in narrating and visualising the cultural landscape of Polish-Lithuanian elites. But while modern scholarship defines these objects as exemplars of national heritage, early modern beholders treated them with more flexibility, seeing no contradiction in framing material things as local cultural forms while simultaneously acknowledging their foreign derivation.

The book reveals how artefacts began to signify as vernacular idioms in the first place, often through obscuring their non-local origin and tainting subsequent discussions of the imagined purity of national culture as a result.

https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526164360/transcultural-things-and-the-spectre-of-orientalism-in-early-modern-poland-lithuania/

Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury

by Benjamin Benus

RIT Press, 2023

Between 1947 and 1953, the Austrian-born, Bauhaus-trained artist Herbert Bayer (1900–1985) oversaw the design and production of the World Geo-Graphic Atlas, a landmark work of graphic design and data visualization. Commissioned by Container Corporation of America to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chicago-based company’s founding, the Atlas would ultimately become much more than the promotional publication its patrons had initially envisioned. The Atlas’s imaginative presentation methods have had a lasting impact within the fields of information design and visual education, transforming the look and character of subsequent geographic atlases and popular scientific illustration. Characterized by Bayer as “the concept of a ‘visualist,’” the Atlas’s graphic presentations made complex and specialized information comprehensible and engaging for readers—a point he underscored in giving the Atlas’s title its distinctive, hyphenated formulation “geo-graphic.” The Atlas’s narrative proved to be prescient as well, highlighting challenges related to economic globalization and human-caused environmental destruction—crises that have only grown more acute in the seventy years since its publication.

In Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury, Benjamin Benus tells the story behind this work’s creation. Richly illustrated and drawing on extensive archival documentation, Benus’s account reconstructs the working methods and intellectual exchanges through which Bayer and his circle of scientific collaborators realized this remarkable work. Reflecting on Bayer’s attempt to balance and resolve the commissioned work’s educational and advertising functions, Benus’s study offers broader insights into the roles twentieth-century artists and designers played in popularizing scientific knowledge and shaping audiences’ geographical worldviews.

Book Details

Art, Exhibition and Erasure in Nazi Vienna

By Laura Morowitz

Visual Culture and Pandemic Disease since 1750 

Edited by Marsha Morton and Ann-Marie Akeshurst

Routledge, July 2023

Through case studies, this book investigates the pictorial imaging of epidemics globally, especially from the late eighteenth century through the 1920s when, amidst expanding Western industrialism, colonialism, and scientific research, the world endured a succession of pandemics in tandem with the rise of popular visual culture and new media.

Images discussed range from the depiction of people and places to the invisible realms of pathogens and emotions, while topics include the messaging of disease prevention and containment in public health initiatives, the motivations of governments to ensure control, the criticism of authority in graphic satire, and the private experience of illness in the domestic realm. Essays explore biomedical conditions as well as the recurrent constructed social narratives of bias, blame, and othering regarding race, gender, and class that are frequently highlighted in visual representations.

This volume offers a pictured genealogy of pandemic experience that has continuing resonance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, history of medicine, and medical humanities.

https://www.routledge.com/Visual-Culture-and-Pandemic-Disease-Since-1750-Capturing-Contagion/Morton-Akehurst/p/book/9781032261072

Picturing the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads: Modernist and Avant-Garde Engagement with Sport in Central Europe and the USSR, 1920-1932

By Przemysław Strożek

This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin.

During the 1920s and 1930s, two organisations of workers’ sport operated: the Lucerne Sport International/Socialist Workers’ Sport International and the Red Sport International, which held the socialist Workers’ Olympics and the communist Spartakiads, respectively. These events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilising workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This book examines the visual propaganda of the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads expressed through paintings, sculptures, prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, photographs, films, theatre and architectural projects. It emphasises the significance of workers’ sport for the artistic and social changes within a utopian project of a new culture, as visualised by the modernist and avant-garde artists, including Varvara Stepanova, Gustav Klucis, and Otto Nagel.

This volume is of great use to students and scholars of the history of sport, art history and cultural history in interwar Europe and the Soviet Union.

https://www.routledge.com/Picturing-the-Workers-Olympics-and-the-Spartakiads-Modernist-and-Avant-Garde/Strozek/p/book/9781032010595

Käthe Kollwitz in Los Angeles 1937.  Eine Ausstellung zwischen antiquarischen Büchern und der Hollywood Anti-Nazi League

By Françoise Forster-Hahn

Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, 2022

Im Juni 1937 eröffnete Jacob Zeitlin in seiner Buchladen-Galerie in Los Angeles eine Ausstellung mit Grafiken von Käthe Kollwitz. Es war die erste Ausstellung von Kollwitz’ Werk in Südkalifornien. Co-Sponsor der Ausstellung und der glamourösen Vernissage war die Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy. Die Redner des Abends waren der deutsche Schriftsteller und Aktivist Ernst Toller und der amerikanische Komponist George Antheil. Zu den illustren Gästen gehörten Fritz Lang, Richard Neutra, Arnold Schönberg, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill und andere Berühmtheiten der Filmindustrie und der deutschösterreichischen Exilgemeinde. Die Kollwitz-Ausstellung wurde zum Dreh- und Angelpunkt der zentralen Konfliktfelder der Stadt: Sie war nicht bloß ein kulturelles Ereignis in Zeitlins Buchladen-Galerie, sondern vor allem eine gezielte politische Aktion der Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Kollwitz’ Schaffen geriet damit ins Kreuzfeuer der Auseinandersetzungen zwischen dem antifaschistischen Kampf der Anti-Nazi League und den gewalttätigen Aktionen nationalsozialistischer Gruppen in Los Angeles. In diesem politischen Spannungsfeld wurde Käthe Kollwitz als »anti-Nazi artist« wahrgenommen und ihrer Ausstellung eine aktive Rolle im Kampf gegen Hitler zugeschrieben. Die Kapitel des Buches zeichnen nach, wie die Ausstellung zum Kreuzungspunkt von vier Biografien wurde: Käthe Kollwitz, Jacob Zeitlin, Ernst Toller und George Antheil.

https://dfk-paris.org/en/publication/k%C3%A4the-kollwitz-los-angeles-1937-3397.html

Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form

By  Jeffrey Saletnik

University of Chicago Press, 2022

An incisive analysis of the pedagogy of influential artist and teacher Josef Albers.

An extraordinary teacher whose influence continues today, Josef Albers helped shape the Bauhaus school in Germany and established the art and design programs at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Yale University. His books about color theory have informed generations, and his artworks are included in the canon of high-modernist non-representational art. The pedagogy Albers developed was a dynamic approach to teaching that transcended the modernist agendas and cultivated a material way of thinking among his students.

With this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores the origins of Albers’s teaching practices and their significance in conveying attitudes about form, material, and sensory understanding to artists Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. He demonstrates how pedagogy is a framework that establishes the possibility for artistic discourse and how the methods through which artists learn are manifested in their individual practices. Tracing through lines from Albers’s training in German educational traditions to his influence on American postwar art, Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form positions Albers’s pedagogy as central to the life of modernism. 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo153386905.html

https://www.amphilsoc.org/publications/chicago-lawyer-arthur-jerome-eddy-and-his-eclectic-art-collection

Free Berlin: Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life

By Briana J. Smith

An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity.

In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city.

These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects.

With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.

Book Details

Women Artists in Expressionism: From Empire to Emancipation

By Shulamith Behr

Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022

Women Artists in Expressionism explores how women negotiated the competitive world of modern art during the late Wilhelmine and early Weimar periods in Germany. Their stories challenge predominantly male-oriented narratives of Expressionism and shed light on the divergent artistic responses of women to the dramatic events of the early twentieth century.

Shulamith Behr shows how the posthumous critical reception of Paula Modersohn-Becker cast her as a prime agent of the feminization of the movement, and how Käthe Kollwitz used printmaking as a vehicle for technical innovation and sociopolitical commentary. She looks at the dynamic relationship between Marianne Werefkin and Gabriele Münter, whose different paths in life led them to the Blaue Reiter, a group of Expressionist artists that included Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Behr examines Nell Walden’s role as an influential art dealer, collector, and artist, who promoted women Expressionists during the First World War, and discusses how Dutch artist Jacoba van Heemskerck’s spiritual abstraction earned her the status of an honorary German Expressionist. She demonstrates how figures such as Rosa Schapire and Johanna Ey contributed to the development of the movement as spectators, critics, and collectors of male avant-gardism.

Richly illustrated, Women Artists in Expressionism is a women-centered history that reveals the importance of emancipative ideals to the shaping of modernity and the avant-garde.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691044620/women-artists-in-expressionism

Compressed Utterances: Collage in a Germanic Context After 1912

Edited by Cole Collins

Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022  

This volume, which takes its title from a Hannah Höch quote of 1971, contains essays by current and former HGSCEA members including Brett M. Van Hoesen, Lisa Lee, Adrian Sudhalter, and Michael White.

From the dust jacket:

“Compressed Utterances brings focused attention to collage in a Germanic context, whose contours and impact are still so little appreciated. As this stunning volume shows, collage serves as a key medium not only for understanding art historical developments but social and political transformations as well, often embodying the dynamic forces of avant-garde criticality.”

— Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts

“A deep dive into the paradigmatic medium of the twentieth century, Compressed Utterances is the foundational text of the growing field of collage studies. The book’s established and emerging authors investigate an astonishing range of previously unknown collage work to explore German artists’ and writers’ deployment of this medium as appropriative, intertextual, alienating, and temporally slippery.”

— Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York

https://www.peterlang.com/document/1220625

The Architecture of Social Reform: Housing, Tradition, and German Modernism

The architecture of social reform explores the fascinating intellectual origins of modern architecture’s obsession with domesticity. Copiously illustrated, Rousset’s revealing analysis demonstrates how questions over aesthetics, style, urbanization, and technology that gripped the modernist imagination were deeply ingrained in a larger concern to reform society through housing. The increasing demand for new housing in Germany’s rapidly growing cities fostered critical exchanges between a heterogeneous group of actors, including architects, urban theorists, planners, and social scientists, who called for society to be freed from class antagonism through the provision of good, modest, traditionally-minded domestic design. Offering a compelling account of architecture’s ability to act socially, the book provocatively argues that architectural theory underwent its most critical epistemological transformation in relation to the dynamics of modern class politics long before the arrival of the avant-garde.

Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany

Sara Blaylock

MIT Press, 2022

How East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life.

Experimental artists in the final years of the German Democratic Republic did not practice their art in the shadows, on the margins, hiding away from the Stasi’s prying eyes. In fact, as Sara Blaylock shows, many cultivated a critical influence over the very bureaucracies meant to keep them in line, undermining state authority through forthright rather than covert projects. In Parallel Public, Blaylock describes how some East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life, creating an alternative to the crumbling collective underpinnings of the state.

Blaylock examines the work of artists who used body-based practices—including performance, film, and photography—to create new vocabularies of representation, sharing their projects through independent networks of dissemination and display. From the collective films and fashion shows of Erfurt’s Women Artists Group, which fused art with feminist political action, to Gino Hahnemann, the queer filmmaker and poet who set nudes alight in city parks, these creators were as bold in their ventures as they were indifferent to state power.

Parallel Public is the first work of its kind on experimental art in East Germany to be written in English. Blaylock draws on extensive interviews with artists, art historians, and organizers; artist-made publications; official reports from the Union of Fine Artists; and Stasi surveillance records. As she recounts the role culture played in the GDR’s rapid decline, she reveals East German artists as dissenters and witnesses, citizens and agents, their work both antidote to and diagnosis of a weakening state.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-public

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/Y/bo185906313.html

Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction

Edited by Anne Umland and Walburga Krupp with Charlotte Healy

New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2021

The City as Subject: Public Art and Urban Discourse in Berlin

Carolyn S. Loeb

Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines distinctive bodies of public art in Berlin: legal and illegal murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, post-reunification public sculptures, and images and sites from the street art scene. Her careful analyses show how these developed new architectural and spatial vocabularies that drew on the city’s infrastructure and daily urban experience. These works challenged mainstream urban development practices and engaged with citizen activism and with a wider civic discourse about what a city can be.

Loeb extends this urban focus to her examination of the extensive outdoor installation of the Berlin Wall Memorial and its mandate to represent the history of the city’s division. She studies its surrounding neighborhoods to show that, while the Memorial adopts many of the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art she examines, it truncates the story of urban division, which stretches beyond the Wall’s existence. Loeb suggests that, by embracing more multi-vocal perspectives, the Memorial could encourage the kind of participatory and heterogeneous construction of the city championed by the earlier works of public art.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/city-as-subject-9781350258600/

Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 2020-2021: The Société Anonyme at 100 

Frauke V. Josenhans (ed.) with contributions by Jenny Anger, Carlotta Castellani, Lucia Colombari, Francesca Ferrari, Joanna Fiduccia, Megan Fontanella, Choghakate Kazarian, Talia Kwartler, Helke Smet, Cynthia Schwarz, Marcin Szelag, Isabel Wünsche

New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 2022

The Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin publishes original scholarship on works in the museum’s collection, contributed by curators, conservators, and fellows, as well as art historians and specialists. This special double issue of the Bulletin celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Société Anonyme, Inc., with new research and a special focus on female artists and others who, in the past, have received less attention than some of their amply studied colleagues. Founded in 1920 by Katherine S. Dreier (1877–1952), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), and Man Ray (1890–1976), the Société Anonyme set out to introduce modern art to the United States by amassing an important collection of objects that was shown across the country through a variety of innovative programs, exhibitions, and publications. Gifted to Yale University and entrusted to the care of the Gallery in two settlements, in 1941 and in 1953, much of the collection—which features works by some of the 20th century’s most renowned artists—now belongs to the museum. Spanning styles as varied as abstraction, Constructivism, Cubism, Dada, De Stijl, Expressionism, Futurism, Neoplasticism, and Surrealism, the Société Anonyme Collection is a distinctive testimony to artistic production in the first half of the 20th century due to both its depth and the variety of artists represented. The 12 articles in this issue showcase the exciting research that the collection continues to inspire, uniting both emerging and established scholars, from the United States and Europe, who vividly illustrate through their articles on movements, artists, and artworks the need to critically question and rewrite the discourse around modern art.

 Malevich and Interwar Modernism. Russian Art and the International of the Square

by Éva Forgács (Bloomsbury, 2022)

This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understood as a symbol of a new internationalism and modernity and while Forgács uses it as part of her overall narrative, she focuses on it and its journey across borders to follow its significance, how it was used by the above key artists and how its meaning became modified in Western Europe.

It is unusual to discuss interwar modernism and its postwar survival, but this book’s chapters work together to argue that the interwar developments signified a turning point in twentieth-century art that led to much creativity and innovation. Forgács supports her theory with newly found and newly interpreted documents that prove how this exciting legacy was shaped by three major agents: Malevich, Lissitzsky and van Doesburg. She offers a wider interpretation of modernism that examines its postwar significance, reception and history up until the emergence of the New Left in 1956 and the seismic events of 1968.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/malevich-and-interwar-modernism-9781350204188/

Based on close archival research, Christian Weikop uncovers unknown and exciting narratives, as well as artist networks, concerning this provocative 1970 exhibition, held at ECA. The author has previously considered the British press reception of SGA in an article for Tate Papers, but this Studies in Photography-EUP book publication goes far beyond that article and any other scholarship on the exhibition by taking into account the contributions of all 35 artists based in Düsseldorf, and incorporating testimony of individuals who were involved in this landmark exhibition, or who were later engaged in archive exhibitions or recreation projects. Weikop explores the formation of the exhibition in the context of a late 1960s culture of protests and occupations, and demonstrates that SGA was a pivotal ‘Shock of the New’ moment that would leave its mark on art education.

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-strategy-get-arts.html

Private Passion, Civic Spirit: Robert Gore Rifkind and German Expressionism.

Edited by Stephanie Barron and Timothy O Benson

(Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021)

This volume includes numerous remembrances of the late Robert Gore Rifkind and his collection of German Expressionist prints and library from the scholars, colleagues, and dealers who were involved with the collection during its formation in the 1970s and 80s. Unlike many of the émigrés who founded German Expressionist collections in America, Rifkind – a Los Angeles native and successful lawyer—had little familiarity with German culture when he was drawn to the visually intense graphic art of this socially engaged modernist movement. To build the world class collection and library which is now his legacy, Rifkind sought out leading dealers, curators, and scholars in the field for advice, developing along the way an admiration for scholarship that led him to invite many experts to Los Angeles. Thus was begun the Scholars-in-Residence Program funded by the Rifkind Foundation that now thrives at the Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art founded through his philanthropy in 1983. Fittingly this volume includes three longer essays by Alessandra Comini, Megan R. Luke, and Christian Weikop which explore Expressionism and its echoes into the Post-Cold-War era.

Preface / Stephanie Barron, Timothy O. Benson — From private collection to public resource: creating the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies / Timothy O. Benson — Remembrances. Ida Katherine Rigby: when German Expressionism was a cause — Ralph Jentsch — Karin Breuer — Joan Weinstein — Alessandra Comini — Rose-Carol Washton Long: a reminiscence as a tribute — Shulamith Behr — Stephanie Barron — Wolf-Dieter Dube: a salute — An album of personal photographs, 1975-1983 — Compelling Käthe Kollwitz / Alessandra Comini — A withdrawal from appearance: George Grosz and Kurt Schwitters / Megan R. Luke — The art of Georg Baselitz: Expressionism remixed? / Christian Weikop — Exhibition history and Rifkind scholars-in-residence — Contributors — Photograph credits.

Softbound, 95 pages: illustrations (chiefly color), portraits; 24 cm.

https://www.thelacmastore.org/products/private-passion-civic-spirit-robert-gore-rifkind-and-german-expressionism

Das Bild der Natur in der Romantik

Edited by Nina Amstutz, Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, Mareike Hennig, Gregor Wedekind  (Brill/Wilhelm Fink, 2021)

Der Band geht der wechselseitigen Durchdringung von visuellen Künsten und Naturwissenschaften bzw. Naturphilosophie im Kontext der europäischen Romantik nach. 

Die Romantik als eine geistige Bewegung entfaltete sich in Europa auf Grundlage der allgemeinen Überzeugung, dass Kunst eine Form von Wissenschaft sei und umgekehrt. Viele Dichter und Künstler sowie Naturwissenschaftler waren bestrebt, empirische und kreative Formen der Welterkundung miteinander zu verbinden. Die Aufsätze in diesem Sammelband untersuchen die Entstehung einer „romantischen Wissenschaft“ und ihre Beziehung zur bildenden Kunst, worin objektive und subjektive Formen der Forschung gleichgestellt wurden.

https://brill.com/view/title/58505?language=de

Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic

By Karla Huebner

(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902–80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen’s early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in three avant-garde groups—Devětsil, Prague surrealism, and Paris surrealism—yet, unusually for a female artist of her generation, Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work. Despite her importance and ground-breaking work, Toyen has been notoriously difficult to study. Using primary sources gathered from disparate disciplines and studies of the artist’s own work, Magnetic Woman is organized both chronologically and thematically, moving through Toyen’s career with attention to specific historical circumstances and intellectual developments approximately as they entered her life. Karla Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women’s roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.

Magnetic Woman

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930

Edited by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson (Bloomsbury, 2021)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/constructing-race-on-the-borders-of-europe-9781350182325/

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art

By Peter Chametzky

The first book to examine multicultural visual art in Germany, discussing more than thirty contemporary artists and arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness.

With Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the usual suspects—those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel—and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this first book-length examination of Germany’s multicultural art scene, Chametzky explores the work of more than thirty German artists who are (among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/turks-jews-and-other-germans-contemporary-art

Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900-1960

Edited By Kerry Greaves (Routledge 2021)

This transnational volume examines innovative women artists who were from, or worked in, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sápmi, and Sweden from the emergence of modernism until the feminist movement took shape in the 1960s.

The book addresses the culturally specific conditions that shaped Nordic artists’ contributions, brings the latest methodological and feminist approaches to bear on Nordic art history, and engages a wide international audience through the contributors’ subject matter and analysis. Rather than introducing a new history of “rediscovered” women artists, the book is more concerned with understanding the mechanisms and structures that affected women artists and their work, while suggesting alternative ways of constructing women’s art histories. Artists covered include Else Alfelt, Pia Arke, Franciska Clausen, Jessie Kleemann, Hilma af Klint, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Greta Knutson, Aase Texmon Rygh, Hannah Ryggen, Júlíana Sveinsdóttir, Ellen Thesleff, and Astri Aasen.

The target audience includes scholars working in art history, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, curatorial studies, Nordic studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.　

Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy

Vanessa Rocco (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020)

Photography and fascism in interwar Europe developed into a highly toxic and combustible formula. Particularly in concert with aggressive display techniques, the European fascists were utterly convinced of their ability to use the medium of photography to manufacture consent among their publics. Unfortunately, as we know in hindsight, they succeeded. Other dictatorial regimes in the 1930s harnessed this powerful combination of photography and exhibitions for their own odious purposes. But this book, for the first time, focuses on the particularly consequential dialectic between Germany and Italy in the early-to-mid 1930s, and within each of those countries vis-à-vis display culture.

The 1930s provides a potent case study for every generation, and it is as urgent as ever in our global political environment to deeply understand the central role of visual imagery in what transpired. Photofascism demonstrates precisely how dictatorial regimes use photographic mass media, methodically and in combination with display, to persuade the public with often times highly destructive-even catastrophic-results.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/photofascism-9781501347061/

Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture

Jacqueline E. Jung (Yale University Press, July 14, 2020)

A radical reassessment of the role of movement, emotion, and the viewing experience in Gothic sculpture

Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe dazzle visitors with arrays of sculpted saints, angels, and noble patrons adorning their portals and interiors. In this highly original and erudite volume, Jacqueline E. Jung explores how medieval sculptors used a form of bodily poetics—involving facial expression, gesture, stance, and torsion—to create meanings beyond conventional iconography and to subtly manipulate spatial dynamics, forging connections between the sculptures and beholders. Filled with more than 500 images that capture the suppleness and dynamism of cathedral sculpture, often through multiple angles, Eloquent Bodies demonstrates how viewers confronted and, in turn, were addressed by sculptures at major cathedrals in France and Germany, from Chartres and Reims to Strasbourg, Bamberg, Magdeburg, and Naumburg. Shedding new light on the charismatic and kinetic qualities of Gothic sculpture, this book also illuminates the ways artistic ingenuity and technical skill converged to enliven sacred spaces.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300214017/eloquent-bodies

German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter and its Legacies

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented: 1918–1938 

Edited by Jodi Hauptman and Adrian Sudhalter
The Museum of Modern Art, New York  (2020)

How the modernist avant-gardes from Dada to constructivism reconceived their roles, working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, graphic designers, curators and more, to create new visual languages for a radically changed world

“We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things … we put our works together like fitters.” So declared the artist Hannah Höch, describing a radically new approach to artmaking in the 1920s and ’30s. Such wholesale reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art took place in lockstep with that era’s shifts in industry, technology, and labor, and amid the profound impact of momentous events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of fascism. Highlighting figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, John Heartfield and Fré Cohen, and European avant-gardes of the interwar years―Dada, the Bauhaus, futurism, constructivism and de Stijl―Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world.

These “engineers,” “agitators,” “constructors,” “photomonteurs,” “workers”―all designations adopted by the artists themselves―turned away from traditional forms of painting and sculpture and invented new visual languages. Central among them was photomontage, in which photographs and images from newspapers and magazines were cut, remixed, and pasted together. Working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, editors, architects, theater designers and curators, these artists engaged with expanded audiences in novel ways, establishing distinctive infrastructures for presenting and distributing their work.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition, Engineer, Agitator, Constructor marks the transformative addition to MoMA from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, one of the great private collections of political art. Illuminating the essential role of women in avant-garde activities while mapping vital networks across Europe, this richly illustrated book presents the social engagement, fearless experimentation and utopian aspirations that defined the early 20th century, and how these strategies still reverberate today.

The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy

Megan Brandow-Faller

Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna’s “female Secession” created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art” and “craft,” “decorative” and “profound,” and “masculine” and “feminine” in art.

Tracing the history of the women’s art movement in Secessionist Vienna—from its origins in 1897, at the Women’s Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst—Brandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women’s art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft, and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria’s women’s art movement apart and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group’s ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel.

Engagingly written and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as “works from women’s hands.” It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.

http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08504-3.html

Caspar David Friedrich: Nature and the Self

Nina Amstutz, (Yale University Press, 2020).

A revelatory look at how the mature work of Caspar David Friedrich engaged with concurrent developments in natural science and philosophy

Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich’s often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape.

In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich’s mature work. Drawing connections between the artist’s anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich’s work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300246162/caspar-david-friedrich

Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints Collected by László Moholy-Nagy. Edited by Jan Tichy and Robin Schuldenfrei (Chicago: IIT Institute of Design, 2019)

Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints Collected by László Moholy-Nagy offers a unique insight into one of the less familiar sides of the Bauhaus at large and Moholy-Nagy in particular. In May 1926, thirteen Bauhaus professors and students created handprints that were preserved by László Moholy-Nagy. This publication brings together for the first time all of the so-called Bauhaus handprints in their historical and contemporary contexts with scholars and artists touching upon and responding to the Bauhaus legacy.

BAUHAUS DIASPORA: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture,

Edited  by Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Equist, Isabel Wünsche, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing; Sydney: Power Publications, 2019

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Carl Einstein  A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, Translated by Charles W. Haxthausen, University of Chicago Press (2019)

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo41676069.html

A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades.

Eds. Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, Michaela Marek. (Das östliche Europa. Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 9.) Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2019, 280 pp. 

How did the Eastern European and Soviet states write their respective histories of art and architecture during 1940s–1960s? The articles address both the Stalinist period and the Khrushchev Thaw, when the Marxist-Leninist discourse on art history was „invented“ and refined. Although this discourse was inevitably „Sovietized“ in a process dictated from Moscow, a variety of distinct interpretations emerged from across the Soviet bloc in the light of local traditions, cultural politics and decisions of individual authors. Although the new „official“ discourse often left space open for national concerns, it also gave rise to a countermovement in response to the aggressive ideologization of art and the preeminence assigned to (Socialist) Realist aesthetics.

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art.

Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan, eds., New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. 

While the connected, international character of today’s art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century.

Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century.

Capturing the full material diversity of eighteenth-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside far more numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of eighteenth-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on globalized map of the eighteenth-century art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for future studies in global art history.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/eighteenth-century-art-worlds-9781501335495/

Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics

By Elizabeth Otto (MIT Press, 2019)

An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures.

The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school’s engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.

The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members’ spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school’s Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.

With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/haunted-bauhaus

Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective

By: Elizabeth Otto & Patrick Rössler (Bloomsbury/Herbert Press, 2019) 

Forty five key women of the Bauhaus movement.

Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective reclaims the other half of Bauhaus history, yielding a new understanding of the radical experiments in art and life undertaken at the Bauhaus and the innovations that continue to resonate with viewers around the world today. 

The story of the Bauhaus has usually been kept narrow, localized to its original time and place and associated with only a few famous men such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. 

Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective bursts the bounds of this slim history by revealing fresh Bauhaus faces: Forty-five Bauhaus women unjustifiably forgotten by most history books. Moving chronologically from the first women to enter the school to those who helped lead it through its last days in 1933, this book also widens the lens to reveal how the Bauhaus drew women from many parts of Europe and beyond, and how, through these cosmopolitan female designers, artists, and architects, it sent the Bauhaus message out into the world and to a global audience.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bauhaus-women-a-global-perspective-9781912217960/

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Self-Portrait

Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, 

Editor(s): Elizabeth Otto, Patrick Rössler, 2019

Luxury and Modernism examines the status of the object within the context of Wilhelmine and Weimar architectural culture and theory. It argues that modernism responded to and reflected the norms and desires of a bourgeois elite—and that new and old forms of luxury are embedded accordingly in its materials, its showcasing of technology, and its discourses. This monograph looks specifically at such aspects as: the design and marketing of AEG electrical appliances by Peter Behrens and the notion of electricity as luxury in this period; the relationship between the design and materials of Bauhaus architecture and objects and failed efforts at affordable mass production of them; and notions of materiality and interiority in the domestic commissions of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Methodologically, this study reinterrogates key components of the canonical history of modernism using economic history, cultural studies, social history, sociology, and German history, to reveal new meanings in familiar objects of modernism.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175126/luxury-and-modernism

Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History.

Michael Yonan, London: Routledge, 2018.

This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) known as his “Character Heads.” These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art.　 Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculptures are simultaneously explorations of art’s power and also critiques of the aesthetic limits that would be placed on that power.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315448404

London 1938: Defending ‘degenerate’ art. With Kandinsky, Liebermann and Nolde against Hitler

By Lucy Wasensteiner  and Martin Faass, 2018

As a programmatic action of the Nazi cultural policy was opened in July 1937, the propaganda show “degenerate art” Munich and then wandered through several major German cities. In response to this campaign against modernity was the exhibition “20th Century German Art”, which was shown in 1938 in London and collected nearly 300 masterpieces of modern German art. The project was originally conceived by two women who run galleries in London and Zurich: Noel Norton and Irmgard Buchard. Then came Paul Westheim, the former ex-publisher of the “Kunstblatt” living in exile in Paris, before the British art critic Herbert Read won the prestigious New Burlington Galleries as an exhibition venue. About half of the exhibits came from German emigrants and artists, which were branded as “degenerate” by the National Socialists or persecuted as Jews. The spectrum of works ranged from Liebermann’s impressionism to the expressionism of the “Blaue Reiter” to the Bauhaus artists Paul Klee, Kandin sky and Schlemmer. Also represented were Max Beckmann and Nolde or the sculptors Barlach and Lehmbruck. The exhibition thus surpassed in scope and quality density even the legendary show of the New York Museum of Modern Art of 1931, but was forgotten by the soon after breaking out of World War II. As the most important cultural manifesto against the policies of the National Socialists, this event, which dates back to 2018 eighty years ago, is to be rediscovered. The Liebermann Villa in Berlin takes this anniversary as an opportunity to reconstruct the exhibition. In the run-up to the Berlin show, the Wiener Library, London, is showing a documentary exhibition with documents, plans and photographic interior views, thus closing a gap in German-British art history. The bilingual catalog is introduced by prefaces by Minister of State Monika GruVonters and Sebastian Wood, the British Ambassador to Germany.

Against the background of acute political tensions in London in the summer of 1938: Twentieth Century German Art. It is not only the first major retrospective of German modernist art in the English-speaking world. It was the first international response to the Nazi campaign against socially degenerate art. Published to mark the eightieth anniversary of this important cultural event, this catalog tells the story of the exhibition: the context in which it was staged, the circumstances of its organization, and its impact on Britain and further afield. The catalog accompanies two exhibitions taking place during 2018, at the Vienna Library in London and at the Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee in Berlin.

Bilingual German-English Bilingual edition in English and German

http://www.nimbusbooks.ch/buch/london-1938

Art and Resistance in Germany, Editor(s): Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Elizabeth Otto, 2018

In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism in numerous political contexts and in the face of resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, this book investigates how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression in Germany, a country which has seen a dramatic range of political extremes during the past century.

While the current turn to nationalist populism is global, it is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its history with its stormy first democracy in the interwar Weimar Republic; its infamous National Socialist (Nazi) period of the 1930s and 1940s; and its split Cold-War existence, with Marxist-Leninist Totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany’s barely-hidden ties to the Nazi past.

Equally important, Germans have long considered art and culture critical to constructions of national identity, which meant that they were frequently implicated in political action. This book therefore examines a range of work by artists from the early twentieth century to the present, work created in an array of contexts and media that demonstrates a wide range of possible resistance.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/art-and-resistance-in-germany-9781501344862/

The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context, Edited by Isabel Wünsche, 2018

The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century.

Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production.

Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Expressionism-in-a-Transnational-Context/Wunsche/p/book/9781138712553

Joyce Tsai Laszlo Moholy-NagyPainting after Photography, University of  California Press, 2018

This provocative book examines crucial philosophical questions László Moholy-Nagy explored in theory and practice throughout his career. Why paint in a photographic age? Why work by hand when technology holds so much promise? The stakes of painting, or not painting, were tied to much larger considerations of the ways art, life, and modernity were linked for Moholy and his avant-garde peers. Joyce Tsai’s close analysis reveals how Moholy’s experience in exile led to his attempt to recuperate painting, not merely as an artistic medium but as the space where the trace of human touch might survive the catastrophes of war. László Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography will significantly reshape our view of the artist’s oeuvre, providing a new understanding of cultural modernism and the avant-garde.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520290679/laszlo-moholy-nagy

Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology

Ana Janevski, Roxana Marcoci, and Ksenia Nouril, editors, 2018

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ripple effects felt over the following years from Bucharest to Prague to Moscow demarcate a significant moment when artists were able to publicly reassess their histories and question the opposition between the former East and the former West. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe takes the pivotal political changes between 1989 and 1991 as its departure point to reflect on the effects that communism’s disintegration across Central and Eastern Europe—including the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics—had on the art practices, criticism, and cultural production of the following decades. This book presents a selection of the period’s key voices that have introduced recent critical perspectives. Particular attention is given to the research and viewpoints of a new generation of artists, scholars, and curators who have advanced fresh critical perspectives and who are rewriting their own histories. Their examination of artistic practices and systems of cultural production proposes distinct outlooks for acting in the contemporary world while simultaneously rethinking the significance of the socialist legacy on art today. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe is an indispensable volume on modern and contemporary art and theory from the region.

Contributors: Branislava Andjelkovic, Edit András, Inke Arns, Marius Babias, Zdenka Badovinac, Ivana Bago, Zbynek Baladrán, Claire Bishop, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Andreas Broeckmann, Boris Buden, Ilya Budraitskis, Ondrej Chrobák, Keti Chukhrov, Kim Conaty, Cosmin Costinas, Eda Cufer, Bojana Cvejic, Ekaterina Degot, Branislav Dimitrijevic, Michelle Elligott, Octavian Esanu, Yevgeniy Fiks, Meghan Forbes, Maja Fowkes, Reuben Fowkes, Boris Groys, Daniel Grún, Marina Gržinic, Vít Havránek, Jon Hendricks, IRWIN (Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik), Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Janevski, David Joselit, Tímea Junghaus, Klara Kemp-Welch, Juliet Kinchin, Zofia Kulik, Andres Kurg, Katalin Ladik, Václav Magid, Eva Majewska, David Maljkovic, Roxana Marcoci, Lina Michelkevice, Aldo Milohnic, Viktor Misiano, Rastko Mocnik, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Deimantas Narkevicius, Ksenia Nouril, Ewa Opalka, Martina Pachmanová, Bojana Pejic, Dan Perjovschi, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Piotr Piotrowski, Bojana Piškur, David Platzker, Paulina Pobocha, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Lýdia Pribišová, Oleksiy Radynski, Karol Radziszewski, Christian Rattemeyer, Cristina Ricupero, Georg Schöllhammer, David Senior, Alina ?erban, Slavs and Tatars, Sven Spieker, Tamas St.Auby, Zuzana Štefková, Jakub Stejskal, Mladen Stilinovic, subREAL, Tomás Svoboda, Ovidiu Ṯichindeleanu, Margarita Tupitsyn, Gediminas Urbonas, Nomeda Urbonas, Jonas Valatkevicius, Jelena Vesic, Dmitry Vilensky, Raluca Voinea, What, How & for Whom (Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Nataša Ilic, and Sabina Sabolovic), Igor Zabel, Artur Zmijewski

https://www.dukeupress.edu/art-and-theory-of-post-1989-central-and-eastern-europe

Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme
By Jenny Anger, 2018

“Where do the roots of art lie?” asked Der Sturm founder Herwarth Walden. “In the people? Behind the mountains? Behind the planets. He who has eyes to hear, feels.” Walden’s Der Sturm—the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin (1910–1932)—has never before been the subject of a book-length study in English. Four Metaphors of Modernism positions Der Sturm at the center of the avant-garde and as an integral part of Euro-American modern art, theory, and practice.

Jenny Anger traces Walden’s aesthetic and intellectual roots to Franz Liszt and Friedrich Nietzsche—forebears who led him to embrace a literal and figurative mixing of the arts. She then places Der Sturm in conversation with New York’s Société Anonyme (1920–1950), an American avant-garde group modeled on Der Sturm and founded by Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Working against the tendency to examine artworks and artist groups in isolation, Anger underscores the significance of both organizations to the development and circulation of international modernism.

Focusing on the recurring metaphors of piano, glass, water, and home, Four Metaphors of Modernism interweaves a historical analysis of these two prominent organizations with an aesthetic analysis of the metaphors that shaped their practices, reconceiving modernism itself. Presented here is a modernism that is embodied, gendered, multisensory, and deeply committed to metaphor and a restoration of abstraction’s connection with the real.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/four-metaphors-of-modernism

Megan Brandow-Faller (Ed.) Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-Present, Bloomsbury, 2017

Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary ‘material turn’ and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern ‘invention’ of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design–Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented – critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture.
Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children’s use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.

https://bloomsbury.com/us/childhood-by-design-9781501332043/

Øystein Sjastad, Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, University of Washington Press, 2017

The Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1852-1925) is best known for his highly political paintings of workers, prostitutes, and Skagen fishermen of the 1880s and for serving as a mentor to Edvard Munch. One of the Nordic countries’ most avant-garde naturalist artists, he was highly influenced by French thinkers, including Emile Zola, Claude Bernard, and Hippolyte Taine, and shocked the provincial sensibilities of his time. Krohg’s work reached beyond the art world when his book Albertineand its related paintings were banned upon publication. The story of a young seamstress who turns to a life of prostitution, it galvanized support for outlawing prostitution in Norway, but Krohg was punished for its sexual content.

In Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, Oystein Sjastad examines the theories of Krohg and his fellow naturalists and their reception in Scandinavian intellectual circles, viewing Krohg from an international perspective and demonstrating how Krohg’s art made a striking contribution to European naturalism. In the process, he provides the definitive account of Krohg’s art in the English language.

http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/SJACHR.html

Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope By Frauke V. Josenhans
With essays by Marijeta Bozovic, Joseph Leo Koerner, and Megan R. Luke

This timely book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated study of exiled artists from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to individuals who have often been relegated to the margins of publications on exile in art history. The artworks featured here, including photography, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, present an expanded view of the conditions of exile—forced or voluntary—as an agent for both trauma and ingenuity.

The introduction outlines the history and perception of exile in art over the last 200 years, and the book’s four sections explore its aesthetic impact through the themes of home and mobility, nostalgia, transfer and adjustment, and identity. Essays and catalogue entries in each section showcase diverse artists, including not only European ones—like Jacques-Louis David, Paul Gauguin, George Grosz, and Kurt Schwitters—but also female, African American, East Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern artists, such as Elizabeth Catlett, Harold Cousins, Mona Hatoum, Lotte Jacobi, An-My Lê, Matta, Ana Mendieta, Abelardo Morell, Mu Xin, and Shirin Neshat.

Book Details

SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE: A Century of Social Photography
Edited by Donna Gustafson, Andrés Mario Zervigón

Generously illustrated with photographs from early twentieth century reformers to contemporary artists, this collection of essays re-examines the genre of social documentary photography through the shifting lens of photographic objectivity, modes of dissemination, and the passions animating documentary projects.

While the public’s acceptance of photographs as visual evidence made documentary photography possible, canny interventions employed by image makers and their editors alternately exploit and dismantle assumptions of the medium’s transparency, testing our wish to see pictures inspire social change.
Among the photographers included in the exhibition and book are Berenice Abbott, Max Alpert, William Castellana, Walker Evans, Larry Fink, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Hine, Boris Ignatovich, Dorothea Lange, Igor Moukhin, Gordon Parks, Alexander Rodchenko, Arthur Rothstein, Sebastião Salgado, Arkady Shaikhet, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Weegee et al.

http://www.hirmerverlag.de/us/titel-1-1/subjective_objective-1609/

Photography and Doubt
Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel, Andrés Mario Zervigón

Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place.

Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism?

Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Doubt is the first multi-authored collection specifically designed to explore these questions. Its 13 original essays, illustrated with 73 color images, explore cases when the link between the photographic image and its referent was placed under stress, and whenphotography was as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to its claims to authenticity.

Photography and Doubt will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, philosophy, and the history of science and technology.

https://www.routledge.com/Photography-and-Doubt/Kriebel-Zervigon/p/book/9781138914612

Photography and Germany
By Andrés Mario Zervigón

The meeting of photography and Germany evokes pioneering modernist pictures from the Weimar era and colossal digital prints that define the medium’s art practice today. It also recalls horrifying documents of wartime atrocity and the relentless surveillance of East German citizens. Photography and Germany broadens these perceptions by examining photography’s multi-faceted relationship with Germany’s turbulent cultural, political and social history. It shows how many of the same phenomena that helped generate the country’s most recognizable photographs also led to a range of lesser-known pictures that similarly documented or negotiated Germany’s cultural identity and historical ruptures.

The book rethinks the photography we commonly associate with the country by focus­ing on how the medium heavily defined the notion of ‘German’. As a product of the modern age, photography intervened in a fraught project of national imagining, largely productively but sometimes catastrophically. Photography and Germany covers this history chronologically, from early experiments in light-sensitive chemicals to the tension between analogue and digital technologies that have stimulated the famous contemporary art photography associated with the country.

Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this is the first single-authored history of German photography.

http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781780237480

Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle
Edited by Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche

Marianne Werefkin and the Women traces the relationships between the modernist artists in Werefkin’s circle, including Erma Bossi, Elisabeth Epstein, Natalia Goncharova, Elizaveta Kruglikova, Else Lasker-Schüler, Marta Liepiņa-Skulme, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and Maria Marc. The book demonstrates that their interactions were dominated not primarily by national ties, but rather by their artistic ideas, intellectual convictions, and gender roles; it offers an analysis of the various artistic scenes, the places of exchange, and the artists’ sources of inspiration. Specifically focusing on issues of cosmopolitan culture, transcultural dialogue, gender roles, and the building of new artistic networks, the collection of essays re-evaluates the contributions of these artists to the development of modern art. Contributors: Shulamith Behr, Marina Dmitrieva, Simone Ewald, Bernd Fäthke, Olga Furman, Petra Lanfermann, Tanja Malycheva, Galina Mardilovich, Antonia Napp, Carla Pellegrini Rocca, Dorothy Price, Hildegard Reinhardt, Kornelia Röder, Kimberly A. Smith, Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė, Baiba Vanaga, and Isabel Wünsche

Open Access: http://www.brill.com/products/book/marianne-werefkin-and-women-artists-her-circle

Friedrich Feigl, 1884-1965
Edited by Nicholas Sawicki, with contributions by Rachel Dickson, Zuzana Duchková, Arno Pařík, Sarah MacDougall, and Nicholas Sawicki

Friedrich Feigl was a pivotal figure in the history of modern art in the Czech lands and central Europe. A painter, printmaker, and illustrator of extraordinarily broad scope and vision, Feigl was among the most prolific and internationally connected modern artists to emerge from Prague in the first half of the twentieth century. Active in Prague and Berlin, Feigl exhibited widely and gained particular attention for his innovative graphic art and book illustrations, and his work on biblical motifs. As the political situation in Germany worsened in 1933, Feigl traveled briefly to Palestine before returning to Prague. He remained there until the German occupation in 1939, when he left Czechoslovakia for London. There he gradually rebuilt his artistic career, joining the large community of émigrés displaced to England by Nazi oppression, many of them Jewish like himself. The present monograph traces the complex, often turbulent story of Feigl’s life and work, from his beginnings in Prague and Berlin through his later years in London. It is published in association with the exhibition Friedrich Feigl: The Eye Sees the World (Friedrich Feigl: Oko vidí svět), held at the Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu (30 June-25 September 2016) and Alšova jihočeská galerie in České Budějovice (27 January-16 April 2017).

http://cupress.cuni.cz/ink2_ext/index.jsp?include=podrobnosti&id=312253

Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation
Editors: Isabel Wünsche, Wiebke Gronemeyer. With contributions by Isabel Wünsche, Naomi Hume, Rose-Carol Washton Long, Viktoria Schindler, Aarnoud Rommens, Nieves Acedo del Barrio, Gordon Monro, Birgit Mersmann, Dorothea Schöne, Elena Korowin, Marilyn Martin, Wendy Kelly, Wiebke Gronemeyer, Pamela C. Scorzin

Recent decades have seen a renewed interest in the phenomenon of abstract art, particularly regarding its ability to speak to the political, social, and cultural conditions of our times. This collection of essays, which looks at historical examples of artistic practice from the early pioneers of abstraction to late modernism, investigates the ambivalent role that abstraction has played in the visual arts and cultures of the last hundred years. In addition, it explores various theoretical and critical narratives that seek to articulate new perspectives on its legacy in the visual arts. From metaphysical considerations and philosophical reflections to debates on interculturality and global perspectives, the contributors examine and reconsider abstraction in the visual arts from a contemporary point of view that acknowledges the many social, economic, cultural, and political aspects of artistic practice. As such, the volume progressively expands the boundaries of thinking about abstract art by engaging it in its increasingly diverse cultural environment.

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/practices-of-abstract-art

Dadaglobe Reconstructed
With Contributions by Adrian Sudhalter, Michel Sanouillet, Cathérine Hug, Samantha Friedman, Lee Ann Daffner, and Karl D. Buchberg

Dadaglobe was to be the definitive anthology of the Dada movement. Had it been published in 1921 as planned, it would have constituted more than one hundred artworks by some thirty artists from seven countries, showing Dada to be an artistic and literary movement with truly global reach. Yet, mainly due to a lack of funding, it remained unpublished, a remarkable void in the literature on this early-twentieth-century movement.
On the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Dada in Zurich, Dadaglobe Reconstructed restores this fascinating literary artifact with reproductions of the works of art received by the Romanian poet and cofounder of the Dada movement Tristan Tzara. Tzara’s call for submissions in four categories—drawings, photographs of artworks, photographic self-portraits, and book layouts—was met not merely with existing works. In fact, the parameters for production also served as a catalyst for the creation of many new ones, including some of the Dada movement’s most iconic works. For the first time, the collection is presented here in full color and alongside essays examining Tzara’s concept and the history of Dada and Dadaglobe.
Based on years of extensive research by American scholar Adrian Sudhalter, Dadaglobe Reconstructed provides a remarkable view of Dada, with a wealth of previously unpublished material. It will be essential—and fascinating—reading for anyone interested in the first truly international avant-garde movement.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo23398461.html

Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism)
Umberto Boccioni, Introduction by Maria Elena Versari, Translation by Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari

Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), a truly radical book by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), claimed a central position in artistic debates of the 1910s and 1920s, exerting a powerful influence on the Italian Futurist movement as well as on the entire European historical avant-garde, including Dada and Constructivism.
Today, Boccioni is best known as an artist whose paintings and sculptures are prized for their revolutionary aesthetic by American and European museums. But Futurist Painting Sculpture demonstrates that he was also the foremost avant-garde theorist of his time. In his distinctive, exhilarating prose style, Boccioni not only articulates his own ideas about the Italian movement’s underpinnings and goals but also systematizes the principles expressed in the vast array of manifestos that the Futurists had already produced. Featuring photographs of fifty-one key works and a large selection of manifestos devoted to the visual arts, Boccioni’s book established the canon of Italian Futurist art for many years to come.
First published in Italian in 1914, Futurist Painting Sculpture has never been available in English—until now. This edition includes a critical introduction by Maria Elena Versari. Drawing on the extensive Futurist archives at the Getty Research Institute, Versari systematically retraces, for the first time, the evolution of Boccioni’s ideas and arguments; his attitude toward contemporary political, racial, philosophical, and scientific debates; and his polemical view of Futurism’s role in the development of modern art.

http://shop.getty.edu/products/futurist-painting-sculpture-plastic-dynamism-978-1606064757

Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany
Marion F. Deshmukh

Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany is the first English-language examination of this German impressionist painter whose long life and career spanned nine decades. Through a close reading of key paintings and by a discussion of his many cultural networks across Germany and throughout Europe, this study by Marion Deshmukh illuminates Liebermann’s importance as a pioneer of German modernism. Critics and admirers alike saw his art as representing aesthetic European modernism at its best. His subjects included dispassionate depictions of the rural Dutch countryside, his colorful garden at the Wannsee, and his many portraits of Germany’s cultural, political, and military elites. Liebermann was the largest collector of French Impressionism in Germany – and his cosmopolitan outlook and his art created strong antipathies towards both by political and cultural conservatives.

https://www.routledge.com/Max-Liebermann-Modern-Art-and-Modern-Germany/Deshmukh/p/book/9781472434159

The search for cultural identity in Eastern and Central Europe 1919-2014
Edited by Irena Kossowska

The topic of this volume was inspired by Milan Kundera’s famous article published in 1983 under the title Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe Centrale: a text which revived the dispute over the geopolitical and geo-cultural concepts of Central Europe. “The search for cultural identity” is a polyphonic voice in this debate, though the articles included here do not offer any final conclusion to the boundaries and the character – historical, political, and cultural – of the macro-region in question.
The chronological frame of this volume opens up with the year 1919, when France, Italy and Germany adopted the “return to order” ideology, which rapidly spread in the newly established states of Central and Eastern Europe in a form of idiosyncratic nationalisms. The year 2014 was, in turn, a time of retrospection in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, which (re)gained democracy being at the same time subject to the pressure of outside factors (economic, legal and cultural in the first place) that were different from the pre-1989 ones. The years of political and economic transformation in Europe after the Fall of Berlin Wall were marked by a renewal of interest in the paradigm of national/regional/local identity and the return of traditions which were abandoned/lost during the Cold War as well as the time of worldwide globalization and cultural integration of the Continent. On the opposite side of the national/ethnic/religious self-identification, feminism, Gender and Queer Studies have strengthened their positions, and the tension emerging among the aforementioned stances generates a wide field for discourse on the contemporary condition of a human being, and the idioms of activity/contestation within the democratic society.
“The search for cultural identity” diagnoses diverse attempts to revive or create national/local narratives, as well as various formulae of emphasizing sexual identity with regard to the interwar period, the time of the Iron Curtain and the twenty-five years which have gone by since the abolition of the Cold War demarcation of Europe. What is of equal importance for the discourse of this book is the individual artistic experience, perceived here in the context of increasingly conspicuous resistance to global homogenization and neocolonialism in the cultural sphere. The phenomena of glocalization, to use the terminology of the social sciences, cushioning the effects of the dominance of western cultural models, constitute an important point of reference in the articles incorporated into this volume: a point which enables enhancing the value of local specificity and cultural distinctiveness.

http://www.wydawnictwoumk.pl/

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered
by Maya Benton

Drawn from the International Center of Photography’s vast holdings of work by Roman Vishniac (1897–1990), this generously illustrated and expansive volume offers a new and profound consideration of this key modernist photographer. In addition to featuring Vishniac’s best-known work—the iconic images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust—this publication also introduces many previously unpublished photographs spanning more than six decades of Vishniac’s work. These include newly discovered images of prewar Berlin, rare film footage from rural Jewish communities in Carpathian Ruthenia, documentation of postwar ruins and Displaced Persons’ camps, and vivid coverage of Jewish life in America in the 1940s and ’50s.
Essays by world-renowned scholars of photography, Jewish history and culture address these newfound images and consider them in the context of modernist tendencies in Berlin in the 1920s and ’30s; the rise of Nazi power in Germany and Eastern Europe; the uses of social documentary photography for relief organizations; the experiences of exile, displacement, and assimilation; and the impact of Vishniac’s pioneering scientific research in color photomicroscopy in the 1950s and ’60s. This first retrospective monograph on Roman Vishniac offers many new perspectives on the work and career of this important photographer, positioning him as one of the great modernists and social documentary photographers of the last century.

http://www.randomhouse.de/book/Roman-Vishniac-Rediscovered/Maya-Benton/e466540.rhd?pub=58500

The Views of Albion: The Reception of British Art and Design in Central Europe, 1890–1918
by Andrzej Szczerski

Views of Albion is the first comprehensive study of the reception of British art and design in Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The author proposes a new map of European Art Nouveau, where direct contacts between peripheral cultures were more significant than the influence of Paris. These new patterns of artistic exchange, often without historic precedence, gave art during this period its unique character and dynamism. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of Central Europe, the book examines knowledge about British art and design in the region. In subsequent chapters the author looks at the reception of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting and graphic arts as well as analysing diverse responses to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Germany, Austria, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary and Southern Slavic countries. The epilogue reveals the British interest in Central Europe, echoed in the designs Walter Crane, Charles Robert Ashbee and publications of The Studio. The book questions the insularity of British culture and offers new insights into art and design of Central Europe at the fin de siècle. It presents the region as a vital part of the international Art Nouveau, but also shows its specific features, visible in the works of artists such as Alfons Mucha, Gustav Klimt and Stanisław Wyspiański.

http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=77860&cid=448&concordeid=431742

The Paintings of Moholy-Nagy: The Shape of Things to Come
by Joyce Tsai

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) became notorious for the declarations he made about the end of painting, encouraging artists to exchange brush, pigment, and canvas for camera, film, and searchlight. Even as he made these radical claims, he painted throughout his career. The practice of painting enabled Moholy-Nagy to imagine generative relationships between art and technology, and to describe the shape that future possibilities might take. Joyce Tsai illuminates the evolution of painting’s role for Moholy-Nagy through key periods in his career: at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the early 1930s, and as director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the last decade of his life. The book also includes an introduction to the history, qualities, and significance of plastic materials that Moholy-Nagy used over the course of his career, and an essay on how his project of shaping habitable space in his art and writing resonated with artists and industrial designers in the 1960s and 1970s.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300209976.html

Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible
by Annie Bourneuf

The fact that Paul Klee (1879–1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered—until now. In Paul Klee, Annie Bourneuf offers the first full account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee’s works from the 1910s and 1920s.

Bourneuf argues that Klee joined these elements to invite a manner of viewing that would unfold in time, a process analogous to reading. From his elaborate titles to the small scale he favored to his metaphoric play with materials, Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen to threaten slow, contemplative viewing. Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in the early twentieth century, Bourneuf shows how Klee reconceptualized abstraction at a key moment in its development.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo17239318.html

Heimat Photography in Austria: A Politicized Vision of Peasants and Skiers / Heimatfotografie in Österreich: eine politisierte Sicht von Bauern und Skifahren
by Elizabeth Cronin

Photographs of peasants, churchgoers, skiers, and alpine landscapes in magazines, books, and exhibitions informed the visual culture of Austria in the 1930s. Used by the authoritarian Ständestaat to glorify traditional values and establish a backward-looking Austrian identity, the same pictures of pristine mountain idylls, picturesque work in the fields, and local costume groups also served to massively propagate Austria as a tourist destination. Aesthetically demanding and partly influenced by the New Vision movement, the Heimat photographs of the main protagonists—Rudolf Koppitz, Peter Paul Atzwanger, Simon Moser, Stefan Kruckenhauser, Adalbert Defner, and Wilhelm Angerer—were, irrespective of political discontinuities, widely disseminated well into postwar Austria.

German-language edition translated by Wolfgang Astelbauer

http://www.fotohof.at/content.php?id=29&buchid=878 (English); http://www.fotohof.at/content.php?id=29&buchid=879 (German)

The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order
by Barbara McCloskey

The Exile of George Grosz examines the life and work of George Grosz after he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and sought to re-establish his artistic career under changed circumstances in New York. It situates Grosz’s American production specifically within the cultural politics of German exile in the United States during World War II and the Cold War. Basing her study on extensive archival research and using theories of exile, migrancy, and cosmopolitanism, McCloskey explores how Grosz’s art illuminates the changing cultural politics of exile. She also foregrounds the terms on which German exile helped to define both the limits and possibilities of American visions of a one world order under U.S. leadership that emerged during this period. This book presents Grosz’s work in relation to that of other prominent figures of the German emigration, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, as the exile community agonized over its measure of responsibility for the Nazi atrocity German culture had become and debated what Germany’s postwar future should be. Important too at this time were Grosz’s interactions with the American art world. His historical allegories, self-portraits, and other works are analyzed as confrontational responses to the New York art world’s consolidating consensus around Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism during and after World War II. This nuanced study recounts the controversial repatriation of Grosz’s work, and the exile culture of which it was a part, to a German nation perilously divided between East and West in the Cold War.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520281943

Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts
by Oliver Botar

Life in the digital economy of information and images enriches us but often induces a sense of being overwhelmed. Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts considers the impact of technology by exploring ways it was addressed in the practice of the Hungarian polymath artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a prominent professor at the Bauhaus and a key fi gure in the history of Modernism. Moholy-Nagy felt that people needed guidance to cope with the onslaught of sensory input in an increasingly technologized, mediatized, hyper-stimulating environment. His ideas informed media theorists such as Walter Benjamin, John Cage, Sigfried Giedion, and Marshall McLuhan, who anticipated digital culture as it emerged. Should we then regard Moholy-Nagy as a pioneer of the digital? His aesthetic engagement with the technology/body problematic broached the notions of immersion, interactivity and bodily participation, innately offering a critique of today’s disembodiment. Was he then both a pioneer and a proto-critic of the digital? This book is intended to introduce this seminal fi gure of post-medial practices to younger generations and, by including responses to his work by contemporary artists, to refl ect on the ways in which his work is relevant to artistic practice now.

http://www.lars-mueller-publishers.com/en/sensing-the-future

Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin
by Emily Pugh

On August 13, 1961, under the cover of darkness, East German authorities sealed the border between East and West Berlin using a hastily constructed barbed wire fence. Over the next twenty-eight years of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall grew to become an ever-present physical and psychological divider in this capital city and a powerful symbol of Cold War tensions. Similarly, stark polarities arose in nearly every aspect of public and private life, including the built environment.

In Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in both halves of Berlin during the Wall era, revealing the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities. Pugh uncovers the roles played by organizations such as the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage and the Building Academy in conveying the political narrative of their respective states through constructed spaces. She also provides an overview of earlier notable architectural works, to show the precursors for design aesthetics in Berlin at large, and considers projects in the post-Wall period, to demonstrate the ongoing effects of the Cold War.

Overall, Pugh offers a compelling case study of a divided city poised between powerful contending political and ideological forces, and she highlights the effort expended by each side to influence public opinion in Europe and around the World through the manipulation of the built environment.

http://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36407

Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture: On the Threshold of German Modernism
by Marsha Morton

The Wilhelmine Empire’s opening decades (1870s – 1880s) were crucial transitional years in the development of German modernism, both politically and culturally. Here Marsha Morton argues that no artist represented the shift from tradition to unsettling innovation more compellingly than Max Klinger. The author examines Klinger’s early prints and drawings within the context of intellectual and material transformations in Wilhelmine society through an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses Darwinism, ethnography, dreams and hypnosis, the literary Romantic grotesque, criminology, and the urban experience. His work, in advance of Expressionism, revealed the psychological and biological underpinnings of modern rational man whose drives and passions undermined bourgeois constructions of material progress, social stability, and class status at a time when Germans were engaged in defining themselves following unification.

This book is the first full-length study of Klinger in English and the first to consistently address his art using methodologies adopted from cultural history. With an emphasis on the popular illustrated media, Morton draws upon information from reviews and early books on the artist, writings by Klinger and his colleagues, and unpublished archival sources. The book is intended for an academic readership interested in European art history, social science, literature, and cultural studies.

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=1208920900&edition_id=1208925602

Na cestě k modernosti: Umělecké sdružení Osma a její okruh v letech 1900-1910 (On a Path to Modernity: The Eight and Its Circle in the Years 1900-1910)
by Nicholas Sawicki

Formed in the first decade of the 20th century, the modernist group known as the ‘Eight’, which referred to itself by the Czech name ‘Osma’ and the German ‘Die Acht’, was one of the most influential artistic movements in Prague before the First World War. Comprising artists of Czech, German and Jewish backgrounds, it included such prominent painters as Vincenc Beneš, Friedrich Feigl, Emil Filla, Max Horb, Otakar Kubín, Bohumil Kubišta, Willi Nowak, Emil Pittermann, Antonín Procházka and Linka Scheithauerová. The Eight played a fundamental role in the development of modern art and modernism in Prague and its environs, and its members and affiliates have long been recognized as foundational figures in the history of 20th-century Czech art.

Relying on new archival, textual and visual sources, “On a Path to Modernity,” presents a close examination of the artists and their work, and of the social and cultural context in which they operated. The book traces the shared practices, beliefs and concerns that brought the Eight together, and considers aspects of the group’s history that have not yet been documented in scholarship. In particular, it examines the relationship that the Eight had with the public, critics and institutions of Prague, and the reception that the group garnered from audiences and the press. It also investigates the group’s mixed ethnic composition, which voluntarily brought together artists of both Czech and German identity, Christian as well as Jewish, at a time when Prague and late imperial Austria-Hungary were strongly divided along national lines.

http://www.cupress.cuni.cz/ink2_ext/index.jsp?include=podrobnosti&id=232209

Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile
by Megan Luke

German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile.

Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters’s experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters’s aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo16956324.html

Władcy snów. Symbolizm na ziemiach czeskich 1880-1914 / Masters of Dreams: Symbolism in the Bohemian Lands 1880-1914
by Otto M. Urban, Irena Kossowska, and Adam Hnojil

“Masters of Dreams” has been published on the occasion of a comprehensive presentation of Bohemian art of the turn of the 19th century at the gallery of the International Cultural Centre in Krakow, being an effect of a long-lasting cooperation between the Centre and the Olomouc Museum of Art. The narrative of the book emphasizes the contribution of numerous artists active in the Bohemian lands to the complex mapping of the art scene in Europe of the late 1890s and the first two decades of the 20th century. The authors’ discourse contextualizes Bohemian Symbolism in relation to the West European art trends as well as confronts Czech developments with the exponents of Young Poland. Thus both the special cultural position of Prague seen in the context of the Austria-Hungary Empire and the interconnections with the artistic milieu in Krakow have been open to question.

“Masters of Dreams” expounds the idiosyncratic features, the richness and the universal dimension of Bohemian Symbolism, an important chapter of the European avant-garde, at the threshold of the First World War. Symbolism paved the way for Czech artists to the salons of Europe – a path followed by Alfons Mucha and Karel Hlaváček, Jan Preisler and František Kupka. Around 1900 the Bohemian lands exemplified economic success on a European scale, and the wealthy Bohemian bourgeois eagerly supported the buoyant burgeoning of artistic life. Prague – the scene of rivalry between Bohemian and German cultures; Prague – one of the key artistic metropolises of contemporary Europe – also became the center of the Czech national awakening.

http://www.mck.krakow.pl/exhibitionPage/about-the-exhibition-15

Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber
by Bibiana K. Obler

This compelling examination of the work and lives of Expressionist artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter and Dadaists Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber illuminates the roles of gender and the applied arts in abstraction’s early days. Both couples, like Expressionism and Dada more generally, strived to transcend the fragmented individualism promoted by capitalism. Through abstraction and by unsettling the boundaries between the decorative and fine arts, they negotiated tensions between the philosophical and commercial aspects of their production. Both pairs were feminist—the women ambitious and the men supportive of their work—but theirs was a feminism that embraced differences between the sexes. This innovative look at the personal relationships of two influential artist couples shows how everyday life—mundane concerns along with spiritual and intellectual endeavors—informed the development of abstraction.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300195798

Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield
by Sabine T. Kriebel

Revolutionary Beauty offers the first sustained study of the German artist John Heartfield’s groundbreaking political photomontages, published in the left-wing weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) during the 1930s. Sabine T. Kriebel foregrounds the critical artistic practices with which Heartfield directly confronted the turbulent, ideologically charged currents of interwar Europe, exposing the cultural politics of the crucial historical moment that witnessed the consolidation of National Socialism. In this period of radicalization and mass mobilization, the medium of photomontage—the cut-and-paste assemblage of photograph and text—offered a way to deconstruct the visual world and galvanize beholders on a mass scale.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520276185

Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist
by Diane Radycki

Considered one of the most important of the early German modernists, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) challenged traditional representations of the female body in art. She was the first modern woman artist to paint herself nude, as well as mothers and children nude. She also created the first self-portrait while pregnant in the history of art. Modersohn-Becker painted the life she was living as a woman and artist and led the way for generations of women artists. Tragically, her life and career were cut short at age thirty-one, following complications from childbirth.

Diane Radycki examines the artist’s fascinating biography, highlighting her friendships with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff as well as her personal anguish, including years in an unconsummated marriage, a disappointing affair, and irresolution about motherhood. Radycki also details the genres of Modersohn-Becker’s work: figure (especially nudes), still life, and landscape; and the reception of her work following her death. This new book is an authoritative source on Modersohn-Becker, who Radycki convincingly portrays as the first significant woman artist in the history of modernism.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300185300

Reviews:

Telehor: the International New Vision, Facsimile reprint and Commentary
edited by Klemens Gruber and Oliver Botar

In 1936 the first and only issue of the magazine telehor (Greek for tele-vision) was released in four languages, as a special edition on and by László Moholy-Nagy. The facsimile reprint of the magazine is accompanied by a commentary volume. The reprint makes the magazine accessible again in terms of its artistic and theoretical-historical dimensions. Particular attention has been paid to the production process. Thus the volume appears spiral-bound, an ultramodern technique in the mid-1930s. The commentary contains an editorial statement that places the magazine, telehor, in the context of the art and media of the 1920s and 1930s and unlocks the position of the artistic avant-garde at the intersection of two epochs.

It also contains new translations of the original texts: in Mandarin, Russian, Hungarian and Spanish.

http://www.lars-mueller-publishers.com/en/catalogue-art/telehor

After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne avant-garde
by Dorothy Rowe

What happened in 1920s Cologne ‘after Dada’? Whilst most standard accounts of Cologne Dada simply stop with Max Ernst’s departure from the city for a new life as a surrealist in Paris, this book reveals the untold stories of the Cologne avant-garde that prospered after Dada but whose legacies have been largely forgotten or neglected. It focuses on the little-known Magical Realist painter Marta Hegemann (1894–1970). By re-inserting her into the histories of avant-garde modernism, a fuller picture of the gendered networks of artistic and cultural exchange within Weimar Germany can be revealed. This book embeds her activities as an artist within a gendered network of artistic exchange and influence in which Ernst continues to play a vital role amongst many others including his first wife, art critic Lou Straus-Ernst; photographers August Sander and Hannes Flach; artists Angelika Fick, Heinrich Hoerle, Willy Fick and the Cologne Progressives and visitors such as Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier.

The book offers a significant addition to research on Weimar visual culture and will be invaluable to students and specialists in the field.

http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719090073

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume III: Europe 1880 – 1940
edited by Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop

The third of three volumes devoted to the cultural history of the modernist magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection contains fifty-six original essays on the role of ‘little magazines’ and independent periodicals in Europe in the period 1880-1940. It demonstrates how these publications were instrumental in founding and advancing developments in European modernism and the avant-garde.

Expert discussion of approaching 300 magazines, accompanied by an illuminating variety of cover images, from France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe will significantly extend and strengthen the understanding of modernism and modernity. The chapters are organised into six main sections with contextual introductions specific to national, regional histories, and magazine cultures. Introductions and chapters combine to elucidate the part played by magazines in the broader formations associated with Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism in a period of fundamental social and geo-political change. Individual essays, situated in relation to metropolitan centres bring focussed attention to a range of celebrated and less well-known magazines, including Le Chat Noir, La Revue blanche, Le Festin d’Esope, La Nouvelle Revue Française, La Révolution Surréaliste, Documents,De Stijl, Ultra, Lacerba, Energie Nouve, Klingen, Exlex, flamman, Der Blaue Reiter, Der Sturm, Der Dada, Ver Sacrum, Cabaret Voltaire, 391, ReD, Zenit, Ma, Contemporanul, Formisci, Zdroj, Lef, and Novy Lef.

The magazines disclose a world where the material constraints of costs, internal rivalries, and anxieties over censorship ran alongside the excitement of new work, collaboration on a new manifesto and the birth of a new movement. This collection therefore confirms the value of magazine culture to the expanding field of modernist studies, providing a rich and hitherto under-examined resource which helps bring to life the dynamics out of which the modernist avant-garde evolved.

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199659586.do#.UYE1XLVlnNs

Bruno Schulz: rzeczywistość przesunięta / Bruno Schulz: Shifted Reality
by Jan Gondowicz, Jerzy Jarzębski, Irena Kossowska, and Łukasz Kossowski

The Museum of Literature in Warsaw houses the largest collection of Bruno Schulz’s works worldwide. A selection of the artits’s prints and drawings has already been shown in many important centers, such as the museums of Paris, Nancy, Madrid, London, Dusseldorf, Trieste, Genoa, Istanbul, Brussels and Jerusalem. The year 2012 marked the 120th anniversary of Schulz’s birth and the 70th of his death. On this occasion the Museum of Literature organized a special exhibition meant to show for the first time the work of the great visionary in the context of Polish interwar art. The exhibition embraced over 200 paintings, prints and drawings as well as assemblages, visualizations and films by a significant body of artists.

When writing about the Polish version of surrealism – or rather about the not quite definable trend of the Polish interwar art which occupied a borderland between magical realism, grotesque and expressionism – Joanna Pollakówna called it “the painting of a shifted reality”. This strange realism was a peculiar equivalent of the Italian pittura metafisica and German Neue Sachlichkeit. It seems that only a “shifted reality” makes it possible to place Schulz in the framework of his epoch. By stepping out of the usual interpretational patterns and reaching beyond the time when he lived and worked, the book looks for antecedents and followers and immerses him in the poetics of photomontage and film.

The essays in this exhibition catalogue define the “shifted reality” created by Schulz in various ways. Jerzy Jarzębski locates it in a discontinuity, in the tension between a center and a periphery. Irena Kossowska discusses its European background, pointing out the metaphysical paintings and drawings by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà as the missing link in the interpretational contexts of Schulz’s work. Jan Gondowicz shows how Schulz tried to tame the cosmic perspective of the predicted apocalypse by viewing it through the anachronistic raster of 19th-century engravings. Thus the reality questioned by the artist is analyzed from three different points of view. 

http://muzeumliteratury.pl/bruno-schulz-rzeczywistosc-przesunieta-%E2%80%93-katalog-wystawy/

Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory
edited by Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche

Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation “of.” Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense—the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs), covering three categories: classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction); post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments); and the broader historical and philosophical scope.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415899932/ 

War Culture and the Contest of Images
by Dora Apel

Series: New Directions in International Studies

War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. Simultaneously, she explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images. As a result of the global visual culture in which anyone may produce as well as consume public imagery, the wide variety of visual and documentary practices present realities that would otherwise be invisible or officially off-limits. In our digital era, the prohibition and control of images has become nearly impossible to maintain. Using carefully chosen case studies—such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video projections and public works in response to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the performance works of Coco Fusco and Regina Galindo, and the practices of Israeli and Palestinian artists—Apel posits that contemporary war images serve as mediating agents in social relations and as a source of protection or refuge for those robbed of formal or state-sanctioned citizenship. While never suggesting that documentary practices are objective translations of reality, Apel shows that they are powerful polemical tools both for legitimizing war and for making its devastating effects visible. In modern warfare and in the accompanying culture of war that capitalism produces as a permanent feature of modern society, she asserts that the contest of images is as critical as the war on the ground.

 October 2012
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/War-Culture-and-the-Contest-of-Images,1199.aspx

John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage
by Andrés Mario Zervigón

Working in Germany in the interwar era, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. A pioneer of modern photomontage, he assembled images that transformed the meaning of the mass-media photos from which they were taken. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of this brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and the propaganda of politicians made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture.

Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic, when his work appeared on everything from campaign posters to book covers. He explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world, and the result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history.

November 2012
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo12953902.html

Art & Life: Mikhail Matiushin and the Russian Avant-Garde in St. Petersburg
by Isabel Wünsche

Mikhail Matiushin (1861-1934), best known as composer of the music for the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913), was not only a successful musician but also an influential painter and theoretician. Together with Elena Guro he founded the artists’ group Union of Youth in 1910, and the couple’s house became a central meeting place of the pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg avant-garde. Matiushin developed his organic approach to art together with Nikolai Kulbin, Pavel Filonov, and Kazimir Malevich. After the 1917 October Revolution, he established the Studio of Spatial Realism at the Art Academy and organized the Department of Organic Culture at the State Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad. In the 1930s, he worked in the field of color theory and its practical application in art, architecture, and design. This monograph is the first comprehensive study of Matiushin’s multifaceted artistic and theoretical œuvre.

http://www.boehlau-verlag.com/978-3-412-20730-4.html

Nina Amstutz, Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, Mareike Hennig, Gregor Wedekind, eds, . Paderborn: Brill/Wilhelm Fink, 2021.

Der Band geht der wechselseitigen Durchdringung von visuellen Künsten und Naturwissenschaften bzw. Naturphilosophie im Kontext der europäischen Romantik nach. 

Die Romantik als eine geistige Bewegung entfaltete sich in Europa auf Grundlage der allgemeinen Überzeugung, dass Kunst eine Form von Wissenschaft sei und umgekehrt. Viele Dichter und Künstler sowie Naturwissenschaftler waren bestrebt, empirische und kreative Formen der Welterkundung miteinander zu verbinden. Die Aufsätze in diesem Sammelband untersuchen die Entstehung einer „romantischen Wissenschaft“ und ihre Beziehung zur bildenden Kunst, worin objektive und subjektive Formen der Forschung gleichgestellt wurden.

https://brill.com/view/title/58505?language=de

Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic

By Karla Huebner

(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902–80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen’s early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in three avant-garde groups—Devětsil, Prague surrealism, and Paris surrealism—yet, unusually for a female artist of her generation, Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work. Despite her importance and ground-breaking work, Toyen has been notoriously difficult to study. Using primary sources gathered from disparate disciplines and studies of the artist’s own work, Magnetic Woman is organized both chronologically and thematically, moving through Toyen’s career with attention to specific historical circumstances and intellectual developments approximately as they entered her life. Karla Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women’s roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.

Magnetic Woman

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930

Edited by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson (Bloomsbury, 2021)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/constructing-race-on-the-borders-of-europe-9781350182325/

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art

By Peter Chametzky

The first book to examine multicultural visual art in Germany, discussing more than thirty contemporary artists and arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness.

With Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the usual suspects—those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel—and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this first book-length examination of Germany’s multicultural art scene, Chametzky explores the work of more than thirty German artists who are (among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/turks-jews-and-other-germans-contemporary-art

Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900-1960

Edited By Kerry Greaves (Routledge 2021)

This transnational volume examines innovative women artists who were from, or worked in, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sápmi, and Sweden from the emergence of modernism until the feminist movement took shape in the 1960s.

The book addresses the culturally specific conditions that shaped Nordic artists’ contributions, brings the latest methodological and feminist approaches to bear on Nordic art history, and engages a wide international audience through the contributors’ subject matter and analysis. Rather than introducing a new history of “rediscovered” women artists, the book is more concerned with understanding the mechanisms and structures that affected women artists and their work, while suggesting alternative ways of constructing women’s art histories. Artists covered include Else Alfelt, Pia Arke, Franciska Clausen, Jessie Kleemann, Hilma af Klint, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Greta Knutson, Aase Texmon Rygh, Hannah Ryggen, Júlíana Sveinsdóttir, Ellen Thesleff, and Astri Aasen.

The target audience includes scholars working in art history, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, curatorial studies, Nordic studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.　

Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy

Vanessa Rocco (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020)

Photography and fascism in interwar Europe developed into a highly toxic and combustible formula. Particularly in concert with aggressive display techniques, the European fascists were utterly convinced of their ability to use the medium of photography to manufacture consent among their publics. Unfortunately, as we know in hindsight, they succeeded. Other dictatorial regimes in the 1930s harnessed this powerful combination of photography and exhibitions for their own odious purposes. But this book, for the first time, focuses on the particularly consequential dialectic between Germany and Italy in the early-to-mid 1930s, and within each of those countries vis-à-vis display culture.

The 1930s provides a potent case study for every generation, and it is as urgent as ever in our global political environment to deeply understand the central role of visual imagery in what transpired. Photofascism demonstrates precisely how dictatorial regimes use photographic mass media, methodically and in combination with display, to persuade the public with often times highly destructive-even catastrophic-results.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/photofascism-9781501347061/

Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture

Jacqueline E. Jung (Yale University Press, July 14, 2020)

A radical reassessment of the role of movement, emotion, and the viewing experience in Gothic sculpture

Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe dazzle visitors with arrays of sculpted saints, angels, and noble patrons adorning their portals and interiors. In this highly original and erudite volume, Jacqueline E. Jung explores how medieval sculptors used a form of bodily poetics—involving facial expression, gesture, stance, and torsion—to create meanings beyond conventional iconography and to subtly manipulate spatial dynamics, forging connections between the sculptures and beholders. Filled with more than 500 images that capture the suppleness and dynamism of cathedral sculpture, often through multiple angles, Eloquent Bodies demonstrates how viewers confronted and, in turn, were addressed by sculptures at major cathedrals in France and Germany, from Chartres and Reims to Strasbourg, Bamberg, Magdeburg, and Naumburg. Shedding new light on the charismatic and kinetic qualities of Gothic sculpture, this book also illuminates the ways artistic ingenuity and technical skill converged to enliven sacred spaces.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300214017/eloquent-bodies

German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter and its Legacies

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented: 1918–1938 

Edited by Jodi Hauptman and Adrian Sudhalter
The Museum of Modern Art, New York  (2020)

How the modernist avant-gardes from Dada to constructivism reconceived their roles, working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, graphic designers, curators and more, to create new visual languages for a radically changed world

“We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things … we put our works together like fitters.” So declared the artist Hannah Höch, describing a radically new approach to artmaking in the 1920s and ’30s. Such wholesale reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art took place in lockstep with that era’s shifts in industry, technology, and labor, and amid the profound impact of momentous events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of fascism. Highlighting figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, John Heartfield and Fré Cohen, and European avant-gardes of the interwar years―Dada, the Bauhaus, futurism, constructivism and de Stijl―Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world.

These “engineers,” “agitators,” “constructors,” “photomonteurs,” “workers”―all designations adopted by the artists themselves―turned away from traditional forms of painting and sculpture and invented new visual languages. Central among them was photomontage, in which photographs and images from newspapers and magazines were cut, remixed, and pasted together. Working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, editors, architects, theater designers and curators, these artists engaged with expanded audiences in novel ways, establishing distinctive infrastructures for presenting and distributing their work.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition, Engineer, Agitator, Constructor marks the transformative addition to MoMA from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, one of the great private collections of political art. Illuminating the essential role of women in avant-garde activities while mapping vital networks across Europe, this richly illustrated book presents the social engagement, fearless experimentation and utopian aspirations that defined the early 20th century, and how these strategies still reverberate today.

The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy

Megan Brandow-Faller

Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna’s “female Secession” created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art” and “craft,” “decorative” and “profound,” and “masculine” and “feminine” in art.

Tracing the history of the women’s art movement in Secessionist Vienna—from its origins in 1897, at the Women’s Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst—Brandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women’s art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft, and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria’s women’s art movement apart and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group’s ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel.

Engagingly written and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as “works from women’s hands.” It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.

http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08504-3.html

Caspar David Friedrich: Nature and the Self

Nina Amstutz, (Yale University Press, 2020).

A revelatory look at how the mature work of Caspar David Friedrich engaged with concurrent developments in natural science and philosophy

Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich’s often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape.

In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich’s mature work. Drawing connections between the artist’s anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich’s work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300246162/caspar-david-friedrich

Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints Collected by László Moholy-Nagy. Edited by Jan Tichy and Robin Schuldenfrei (Chicago: IIT Institute of Design, 2019)

Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints Collected by László Moholy-Nagy offers a unique insight into one of the less familiar sides of the Bauhaus at large and Moholy-Nagy in particular. In May 1926, thirteen Bauhaus professors and students created handprints that were preserved by László Moholy-Nagy. This publication brings together for the first time all of the so-called Bauhaus handprints in their historical and contemporary contexts with scholars and artists touching upon and responding to the Bauhaus legacy.

BAUHAUS DIASPORA: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture,

Edited  by Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Equist, Isabel Wünsche, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing; Sydney: Power Publications, 2019

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Carl Einstein  A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, Translated by Charles W. Haxthausen, University of Chicago Press (2019)

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo41676069.html

A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades.

Eds. Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, Michaela Marek. (Das östliche Europa. Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 9.) Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2019, 280 pp. 

How did the Eastern European and Soviet states write their respective histories of art and architecture during 1940s–1960s? The articles address both the Stalinist period and the Khrushchev Thaw, when the Marxist-Leninist discourse on art history was „invented“ and refined. Although this discourse was inevitably „Sovietized“ in a process dictated from Moscow, a variety of distinct interpretations emerged from across the Soviet bloc in the light of local traditions, cultural politics and decisions of individual authors. Although the new „official“ discourse often left space open for national concerns, it also gave rise to a countermovement in response to the aggressive ideologization of art and the preeminence assigned to (Socialist) Realist aesthetics.

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art.

Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan, eds., New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. 

While the connected, international character of today’s art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century.

Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century.

Capturing the full material diversity of eighteenth-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside far more numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of eighteenth-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on globalized map of the eighteenth-century art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for future studies in global art history.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/eighteenth-century-art-worlds-9781501335495/

Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics

By Elizabeth Otto (MIT Press, 2019)

An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures.

The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school’s engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.

The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members’ spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school’s Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.

With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/haunted-bauhaus

Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective

By: Elizabeth Otto & Patrick Rössler (Bloomsbury/Herbert Press, 2019) 

Forty five key women of the Bauhaus movement.

Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective reclaims the other half of Bauhaus history, yielding a new understanding of the radical experiments in art and life undertaken at the Bauhaus and the innovations that continue to resonate with viewers around the world today. 

The story of the Bauhaus has usually been kept narrow, localized to its original time and place and associated with only a few famous men such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. 

Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective bursts the bounds of this slim history by revealing fresh Bauhaus faces: Forty-five Bauhaus women unjustifiably forgotten by most history books. Moving chronologically from the first women to enter the school to those who helped lead it through its last days in 1933, this book also widens the lens to reveal how the Bauhaus drew women from many parts of Europe and beyond, and how, through these cosmopolitan female designers, artists, and architects, it sent the Bauhaus message out into the world and to a global audience.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bauhaus-women-a-global-perspective-9781912217960/

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Self-Portrait

Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, 

Editor(s): Elizabeth Otto, Patrick Rössler, 2019

Luxury and Modernism examines the status of the object within the context of Wilhelmine and Weimar architectural culture and theory. It argues that modernism responded to and reflected the norms and desires of a bourgeois elite—and that new and old forms of luxury are embedded accordingly in its materials, its showcasing of technology, and its discourses. This monograph looks specifically at such aspects as: the design and marketing of AEG electrical appliances by Peter Behrens and the notion of electricity as luxury in this period; the relationship between the design and materials of Bauhaus architecture and objects and failed efforts at affordable mass production of them; and notions of materiality and interiority in the domestic commissions of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Methodologically, this study reinterrogates key components of the canonical history of modernism using economic history, cultural studies, social history, sociology, and German history, to reveal new meanings in familiar objects of modernism.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175126/luxury-and-modernism

Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History.

Michael Yonan, London: Routledge, 2018.

This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) known as his “Character Heads.” These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art.　 Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculptures are simultaneously explorations of art’s power and also critiques of the aesthetic limits that would be placed on that power.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315448404

London 1938: Defending ‘degenerate’ art. With Kandinsky, Liebermann and Nolde against Hitler

By Lucy Wasensteiner  and Martin Faass, 2018

As a programmatic action of the Nazi cultural policy was opened in July 1937, the propaganda show “degenerate art” Munich and then wandered through several major German cities. In response to this campaign against modernity was the exhibition “20th Century German Art”, which was shown in 1938 in London and collected nearly 300 masterpieces of modern German art. The project was originally conceived by two women who run galleries in London and Zurich: Noel Norton and Irmgard Buchard. Then came Paul Westheim, the former ex-publisher of the “Kunstblatt” living in exile in Paris, before the British art critic Herbert Read won the prestigious New Burlington Galleries as an exhibition venue. About half of the exhibits came from German emigrants and artists, which were branded as “degenerate” by the National Socialists or persecuted as Jews. The spectrum of works ranged from Liebermann’s impressionism to the expressionism of the “Blaue Reiter” to the Bauhaus artists Paul Klee, Kandin sky and Schlemmer. Also represented were Max Beckmann and Nolde or the sculptors Barlach and Lehmbruck. The exhibition thus surpassed in scope and quality density even the legendary show of the New York Museum of Modern Art of 1931, but was forgotten by the soon after breaking out of World War II. As the most important cultural manifesto against the policies of the National Socialists, this event, which dates back to 2018 eighty years ago, is to be rediscovered. The Liebermann Villa in Berlin takes this anniversary as an opportunity to reconstruct the exhibition. In the run-up to the Berlin show, the Wiener Library, London, is showing a documentary exhibition with documents, plans and photographic interior views, thus closing a gap in German-British art history. The bilingual catalog is introduced by prefaces by Minister of State Monika GruVonters and Sebastian Wood, the British Ambassador to Germany.

Against the background of acute political tensions in London in the summer of 1938: Twentieth Century German Art. It is not only the first major retrospective of German modernist art in the English-speaking world. It was the first international response to the Nazi campaign against socially degenerate art. Published to mark the eightieth anniversary of this important cultural event, this catalog tells the story of the exhibition: the context in which it was staged, the circumstances of its organization, and its impact on Britain and further afield. The catalog accompanies two exhibitions taking place during 2018, at the Vienna Library in London and at the Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee in Berlin.

Bilingual German-English Bilingual edition in English and German

http://www.nimbusbooks.ch/buch/london-1938

Art and Resistance in Germany, Editor(s): Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Elizabeth Otto, 2018

In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism in numerous political contexts and in the face of resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, this book investigates how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression in Germany, a country which has seen a dramatic range of political extremes during the past century.

While the current turn to nationalist populism is global, it is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its history with its stormy first democracy in the interwar Weimar Republic; its infamous National Socialist (Nazi) period of the 1930s and 1940s; and its split Cold-War existence, with Marxist-Leninist Totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany’s barely-hidden ties to the Nazi past.

Equally important, Germans have long considered art and culture critical to constructions of national identity, which meant that they were frequently implicated in political action. This book therefore examines a range of work by artists from the early twentieth century to the present, work created in an array of contexts and media that demonstrates a wide range of possible resistance.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/art-and-resistance-in-germany-9781501344862/

The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context, Edited by Isabel Wünsche, 2018

The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century.

Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production.

Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Expressionism-in-a-Transnational-Context/Wunsche/p/book/9781138712553

Joyce Tsai Laszlo Moholy-NagyPainting after Photography, University of  California Press, 2018

This provocative book examines crucial philosophical questions László Moholy-Nagy explored in theory and practice throughout his career. Why paint in a photographic age? Why work by hand when technology holds so much promise? The stakes of painting, or not painting, were tied to much larger considerations of the ways art, life, and modernity were linked for Moholy and his avant-garde peers. Joyce Tsai’s close analysis reveals how Moholy’s experience in exile led to his attempt to recuperate painting, not merely as an artistic medium but as the space where the trace of human touch might survive the catastrophes of war. László Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography will significantly reshape our view of the artist’s oeuvre, providing a new understanding of cultural modernism and the avant-garde.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520290679/laszlo-moholy-nagy

Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology

Ana Janevski, Roxana Marcoci, and Ksenia Nouril, editors, 2018

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ripple effects felt over the following years from Bucharest to Prague to Moscow demarcate a significant moment when artists were able to publicly reassess their histories and question the opposition between the former East and the former West. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe takes the pivotal political changes between 1989 and 1991 as its departure point to reflect on the effects that communism’s disintegration across Central and Eastern Europe—including the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics—had on the art practices, criticism, and cultural production of the following decades. This book presents a selection of the period’s key voices that have introduced recent critical perspectives. Particular attention is given to the research and viewpoints of a new generation of artists, scholars, and curators who have advanced fresh critical perspectives and who are rewriting their own histories. Their examination of artistic practices and systems of cultural production proposes distinct outlooks for acting in the contemporary world while simultaneously rethinking the significance of the socialist legacy on art today. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe is an indispensable volume on modern and contemporary art and theory from the region.

Contributors: Branislava Andjelkovic, Edit András, Inke Arns, Marius Babias, Zdenka Badovinac, Ivana Bago, Zbynek Baladrán, Claire Bishop, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Andreas Broeckmann, Boris Buden, Ilya Budraitskis, Ondrej Chrobák, Keti Chukhrov, Kim Conaty, Cosmin Costinas, Eda Cufer, Bojana Cvejic, Ekaterina Degot, Branislav Dimitrijevic, Michelle Elligott, Octavian Esanu, Yevgeniy Fiks, Meghan Forbes, Maja Fowkes, Reuben Fowkes, Boris Groys, Daniel Grún, Marina Gržinic, Vít Havránek, Jon Hendricks, IRWIN (Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik), Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Janevski, David Joselit, Tímea Junghaus, Klara Kemp-Welch, Juliet Kinchin, Zofia Kulik, Andres Kurg, Katalin Ladik, Václav Magid, Eva Majewska, David Maljkovic, Roxana Marcoci, Lina Michelkevice, Aldo Milohnic, Viktor Misiano, Rastko Mocnik, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Deimantas Narkevicius, Ksenia Nouril, Ewa Opalka, Martina Pachmanová, Bojana Pejic, Dan Perjovschi, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Piotr Piotrowski, Bojana Piškur, David Platzker, Paulina Pobocha, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Lýdia Pribišová, Oleksiy Radynski, Karol Radziszewski, Christian Rattemeyer, Cristina Ricupero, Georg Schöllhammer, David Senior, Alina ?erban, Slavs and Tatars, Sven Spieker, Tamas St.Auby, Zuzana Štefková, Jakub Stejskal, Mladen Stilinovic, subREAL, Tomás Svoboda, Ovidiu Ṯichindeleanu, Margarita Tupitsyn, Gediminas Urbonas, Nomeda Urbonas, Jonas Valatkevicius, Jelena Vesic, Dmitry Vilensky, Raluca Voinea, What, How & for Whom (Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Nataša Ilic, and Sabina Sabolovic), Igor Zabel, Artur Zmijewski

https://www.dukeupress.edu/art-and-theory-of-post-1989-central-and-eastern-europe

Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme
By Jenny Anger, 2018

“Where do the roots of art lie?” asked Der Sturm founder Herwarth Walden. “In the people? Behind the mountains? Behind the planets. He who has eyes to hear, feels.” Walden’s Der Sturm—the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin (1910–1932)—has never before been the subject of a book-length study in English. Four Metaphors of Modernism positions Der Sturm at the center of the avant-garde and as an integral part of Euro-American modern art, theory, and practice.

Jenny Anger traces Walden’s aesthetic and intellectual roots to Franz Liszt and Friedrich Nietzsche—forebears who led him to embrace a literal and figurative mixing of the arts. She then places Der Sturm in conversation with New York’s Société Anonyme (1920–1950), an American avant-garde group modeled on Der Sturm and founded by Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Working against the tendency to examine artworks and artist groups in isolation, Anger underscores the significance of both organizations to the development and circulation of international modernism.

Focusing on the recurring metaphors of piano, glass, water, and home, Four Metaphors of Modernism interweaves a historical analysis of these two prominent organizations with an aesthetic analysis of the metaphors that shaped their practices, reconceiving modernism itself. Presented here is a modernism that is embodied, gendered, multisensory, and deeply committed to metaphor and a restoration of abstraction’s connection with the real.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/four-metaphors-of-modernism

Megan Brandow-Faller (Ed.) Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-Present, Bloomsbury, 2017

Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary ‘material turn’ and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern ‘invention’ of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design–Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented – critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture.
Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children’s use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.

https://bloomsbury.com/us/childhood-by-design-9781501332043/

Øystein Sjastad, Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, University of Washington Press, 2017

The Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1852-1925) is best known for his highly political paintings of workers, prostitutes, and Skagen fishermen of the 1880s and for serving as a mentor to Edvard Munch. One of the Nordic countries’ most avant-garde naturalist artists, he was highly influenced by French thinkers, including Emile Zola, Claude Bernard, and Hippolyte Taine, and shocked the provincial sensibilities of his time. Krohg’s work reached beyond the art world when his book Albertineand its related paintings were banned upon publication. The story of a young seamstress who turns to a life of prostitution, it galvanized support for outlawing prostitution in Norway, but Krohg was punished for its sexual content.

In Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, Oystein Sjastad examines the theories of Krohg and his fellow naturalists and their reception in Scandinavian intellectual circles, viewing Krohg from an international perspective and demonstrating how Krohg’s art made a striking contribution to European naturalism. In the process, he provides the definitive account of Krohg’s art in the English language.

http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/SJACHR.html

Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope By Frauke V. Josenhans
With essays by Marijeta Bozovic, Joseph Leo Koerner, and Megan R. Luke

This timely book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated study of exiled artists from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to individuals who have often been relegated to the margins of publications on exile in art history. The artworks featured here, including photography, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, present an expanded view of the conditions of exile—forced or voluntary—as an agent for both trauma and ingenuity.

The introduction outlines the history and perception of exile in art over the last 200 years, and the book’s four sections explore its aesthetic impact through the themes of home and mobility, nostalgia, transfer and adjustment, and identity. Essays and catalogue entries in each section showcase diverse artists, including not only European ones—like Jacques-Louis David, Paul Gauguin, George Grosz, and Kurt Schwitters—but also female, African American, East Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern artists, such as Elizabeth Catlett, Harold Cousins, Mona Hatoum, Lotte Jacobi, An-My Lê, Matta, Ana Mendieta, Abelardo Morell, Mu Xin, and Shirin Neshat.

Book Details

SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE: A Century of Social Photography
Edited by Donna Gustafson, Andrés Mario Zervigón

Generously illustrated with photographs from early twentieth century reformers to contemporary artists, this collection of essays re-examines the genre of social documentary photography through the shifting lens of photographic objectivity, modes of dissemination, and the passions animating documentary projects.

While the public’s acceptance of photographs as visual evidence made documentary photography possible, canny interventions employed by image makers and their editors alternately exploit and dismantle assumptions of the medium’s transparency, testing our wish to see pictures inspire social change.
Among the photographers included in the exhibition and book are Berenice Abbott, Max Alpert, William Castellana, Walker Evans, Larry Fink, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Hine, Boris Ignatovich, Dorothea Lange, Igor Moukhin, Gordon Parks, Alexander Rodchenko, Arthur Rothstein, Sebastião Salgado, Arkady Shaikhet, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Weegee et al.

http://www.hirmerverlag.de/us/titel-1-1/subjective_objective-1609/

Photography and Doubt
Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel, Andrés Mario Zervigón

Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place.

Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism?

Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Doubt is the first multi-authored collection specifically designed to explore these questions. Its 13 original essays, illustrated with 73 color images, explore cases when the link between the photographic image and its referent was placed under stress, and whenphotography was as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to its claims to authenticity.

Photography and Doubt will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, philosophy, and the history of science and technology.

https://www.routledge.com/Photography-and-Doubt/Kriebel-Zervigon/p/book/9781138914612

Photography and Germany
By Andrés Mario Zervigón

The meeting of photography and Germany evokes pioneering modernist pictures from the Weimar era and colossal digital prints that define the medium’s art practice today. It also recalls horrifying documents of wartime atrocity and the relentless surveillance of East German citizens. Photography and Germany broadens these perceptions by examining photography’s multi-faceted relationship with Germany’s turbulent cultural, political and social history. It shows how many of the same phenomena that helped generate the country’s most recognizable photographs also led to a range of lesser-known pictures that similarly documented or negotiated Germany’s cultural identity and historical ruptures.

The book rethinks the photography we commonly associate with the country by focus­ing on how the medium heavily defined the notion of ‘German’. As a product of the modern age, photography intervened in a fraught project of national imagining, largely productively but sometimes catastrophically. Photography and Germany covers this history chronologically, from early experiments in light-sensitive chemicals to the tension between analogue and digital technologies that have stimulated the famous contemporary art photography associated with the country.

Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this is the first single-authored history of German photography.

http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781780237480

Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle
Edited by Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche

Marianne Werefkin and the Women traces the relationships between the modernist artists in Werefkin’s circle, including Erma Bossi, Elisabeth Epstein, Natalia Goncharova, Elizaveta Kruglikova, Else Lasker-Schüler, Marta Liepiņa-Skulme, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and Maria Marc. The book demonstrates that their interactions were dominated not primarily by national ties, but rather by their artistic ideas, intellectual convictions, and gender roles; it offers an analysis of the various artistic scenes, the places of exchange, and the artists’ sources of inspiration. Specifically focusing on issues of cosmopolitan culture, transcultural dialogue, gender roles, and the building of new artistic networks, the collection of essays re-evaluates the contributions of these artists to the development of modern art. Contributors: Shulamith Behr, Marina Dmitrieva, Simone Ewald, Bernd Fäthke, Olga Furman, Petra Lanfermann, Tanja Malycheva, Galina Mardilovich, Antonia Napp, Carla Pellegrini Rocca, Dorothy Price, Hildegard Reinhardt, Kornelia Röder, Kimberly A. Smith, Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė, Baiba Vanaga, and Isabel Wünsche

Open Access: http://www.brill.com/products/book/marianne-werefkin-and-women-artists-her-circle

Friedrich Feigl, 1884-1965
Edited by Nicholas Sawicki, with contributions by Rachel Dickson, Zuzana Duchková, Arno Pařík, Sarah MacDougall, and Nicholas Sawicki

Friedrich Feigl was a pivotal figure in the history of modern art in the Czech lands and central Europe. A painter, printmaker, and illustrator of extraordinarily broad scope and vision, Feigl was among the most prolific and internationally connected modern artists to emerge from Prague in the first half of the twentieth century. Active in Prague and Berlin, Feigl exhibited widely and gained particular attention for his innovative graphic art and book illustrations, and his work on biblical motifs. As the political situation in Germany worsened in 1933, Feigl traveled briefly to Palestine before returning to Prague. He remained there until the German occupation in 1939, when he left Czechoslovakia for London. There he gradually rebuilt his artistic career, joining the large community of émigrés displaced to England by Nazi oppression, many of them Jewish like himself. The present monograph traces the complex, often turbulent story of Feigl’s life and work, from his beginnings in Prague and Berlin through his later years in London. It is published in association with the exhibition Friedrich Feigl: The Eye Sees the World (Friedrich Feigl: Oko vidí svět), held at the Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu (30 June-25 September 2016) and Alšova jihočeská galerie in České Budějovice (27 January-16 April 2017).

http://cupress.cuni.cz/ink2_ext/index.jsp?include=podrobnosti&id=312253

Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation
Editors: Isabel Wünsche, Wiebke Gronemeyer. With contributions by Isabel Wünsche, Naomi Hume, Rose-Carol Washton Long, Viktoria Schindler, Aarnoud Rommens, Nieves Acedo del Barrio, Gordon Monro, Birgit Mersmann, Dorothea Schöne, Elena Korowin, Marilyn Martin, Wendy Kelly, Wiebke Gronemeyer, Pamela C. Scorzin

Recent decades have seen a renewed interest in the phenomenon of abstract art, particularly regarding its ability to speak to the political, social, and cultural conditions of our times. This collection of essays, which looks at historical examples of artistic practice from the early pioneers of abstraction to late modernism, investigates the ambivalent role that abstraction has played in the visual arts and cultures of the last hundred years. In addition, it explores various theoretical and critical narratives that seek to articulate new perspectives on its legacy in the visual arts. From metaphysical considerations and philosophical reflections to debates on interculturality and global perspectives, the contributors examine and reconsider abstraction in the visual arts from a contemporary point of view that acknowledges the many social, economic, cultural, and political aspects of artistic practice. As such, the volume progressively expands the boundaries of thinking about abstract art by engaging it in its increasingly diverse cultural environment.

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/practices-of-abstract-art

Dadaglobe Reconstructed
With Contributions by Adrian Sudhalter, Michel Sanouillet, Cathérine Hug, Samantha Friedman, Lee Ann Daffner, and Karl D. Buchberg

Dadaglobe was to be the definitive anthology of the Dada movement. Had it been published in 1921 as planned, it would have constituted more than one hundred artworks by some thirty artists from seven countries, showing Dada to be an artistic and literary movement with truly global reach. Yet, mainly due to a lack of funding, it remained unpublished, a remarkable void in the literature on this early-twentieth-century movement.
On the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Dada in Zurich, Dadaglobe Reconstructed restores this fascinating literary artifact with reproductions of the works of art received by the Romanian poet and cofounder of the Dada movement Tristan Tzara. Tzara’s call for submissions in four categories—drawings, photographs of artworks, photographic self-portraits, and book layouts—was met not merely with existing works. In fact, the parameters for production also served as a catalyst for the creation of many new ones, including some of the Dada movement’s most iconic works. For the first time, the collection is presented here in full color and alongside essays examining Tzara’s concept and the history of Dada and Dadaglobe.
Based on years of extensive research by American scholar Adrian Sudhalter, Dadaglobe Reconstructed provides a remarkable view of Dada, with a wealth of previously unpublished material. It will be essential—and fascinating—reading for anyone interested in the first truly international avant-garde movement.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo23398461.html

Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism)
Umberto Boccioni, Introduction by Maria Elena Versari, Translation by Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari

Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), a truly radical book by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), claimed a central position in artistic debates of the 1910s and 1920s, exerting a powerful influence on the Italian Futurist movement as well as on the entire European historical avant-garde, including Dada and Constructivism.
Today, Boccioni is best known as an artist whose paintings and sculptures are prized for their revolutionary aesthetic by American and European museums. But Futurist Painting Sculpture demonstrates that he was also the foremost avant-garde theorist of his time. In his distinctive, exhilarating prose style, Boccioni not only articulates his own ideas about the Italian movement’s underpinnings and goals but also systematizes the principles expressed in the vast array of manifestos that the Futurists had already produced. Featuring photographs of fifty-one key works and a large selection of manifestos devoted to the visual arts, Boccioni’s book established the canon of Italian Futurist art for many years to come.
First published in Italian in 1914, Futurist Painting Sculpture has never been available in English—until now. This edition includes a critical introduction by Maria Elena Versari. Drawing on the extensive Futurist archives at the Getty Research Institute, Versari systematically retraces, for the first time, the evolution of Boccioni’s ideas and arguments; his attitude toward contemporary political, racial, philosophical, and scientific debates; and his polemical view of Futurism’s role in the development of modern art.

http://shop.getty.edu/products/futurist-painting-sculpture-plastic-dynamism-978-1606064757

Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany
Marion F. Deshmukh

Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany is the first English-language examination of this German impressionist painter whose long life and career spanned nine decades. Through a close reading of key paintings and by a discussion of his many cultural networks across Germany and throughout Europe, this study by Marion Deshmukh illuminates Liebermann’s importance as a pioneer of German modernism. Critics and admirers alike saw his art as representing aesthetic European modernism at its best. His subjects included dispassionate depictions of the rural Dutch countryside, his colorful garden at the Wannsee, and his many portraits of Germany’s cultural, political, and military elites. Liebermann was the largest collector of French Impressionism in Germany – and his cosmopolitan outlook and his art created strong antipathies towards both by political and cultural conservatives.

https://www.routledge.com/Max-Liebermann-Modern-Art-and-Modern-Germany/Deshmukh/p/book/9781472434159

The search for cultural identity in Eastern and Central Europe 1919-2014
Edited by Irena Kossowska

The topic of this volume was inspired by Milan Kundera’s famous article published in 1983 under the title Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe Centrale: a text which revived the dispute over the geopolitical and geo-cultural concepts of Central Europe. “The search for cultural identity” is a polyphonic voice in this debate, though the articles included here do not offer any final conclusion to the boundaries and the character – historical, political, and cultural – of the macro-region in question.
The chronological frame of this volume opens up with the year 1919, when France, Italy and Germany adopted the “return to order” ideology, which rapidly spread in the newly established states of Central and Eastern Europe in a form of idiosyncratic nationalisms. The year 2014 was, in turn, a time of retrospection in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, which (re)gained democracy being at the same time subject to the pressure of outside factors (economic, legal and cultural in the first place) that were different from the pre-1989 ones. The years of political and economic transformation in Europe after the Fall of Berlin Wall were marked by a renewal of interest in the paradigm of national/regional/local identity and the return of traditions which were abandoned/lost during the Cold War as well as the time of worldwide globalization and cultural integration of the Continent. On the opposite side of the national/ethnic/religious self-identification, feminism, Gender and Queer Studies have strengthened their positions, and the tension emerging among the aforementioned stances generates a wide field for discourse on the contemporary condition of a human being, and the idioms of activity/contestation within the democratic society.
“The search for cultural identity” diagnoses diverse attempts to revive or create national/local narratives, as well as various formulae of emphasizing sexual identity with regard to the interwar period, the time of the Iron Curtain and the twenty-five years which have gone by since the abolition of the Cold War demarcation of Europe. What is of equal importance for the discourse of this book is the individual artistic experience, perceived here in the context of increasingly conspicuous resistance to global homogenization and neocolonialism in the cultural sphere. The phenomena of glocalization, to use the terminology of the social sciences, cushioning the effects of the dominance of western cultural models, constitute an important point of reference in the articles incorporated into this volume: a point which enables enhancing the value of local specificity and cultural distinctiveness.



http://www.wydawnictwoumk.pl/

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered
by Maya Benton

Drawn from the International Center of Photography’s vast holdings of work by Roman Vishniac (1897–1990), this generously illustrated and expansive volume offers a new and profound consideration of this key modernist photographer. In addition to featuring Vishniac’s best-known work—the iconic images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust—this publication also introduces many previously unpublished photographs spanning more than six decades of Vishniac’s work. These include newly discovered images of prewar Berlin, rare film footage from rural Jewish communities in Carpathian Ruthenia, documentation of postwar ruins and Displaced Persons’ camps, and vivid coverage of Jewish life in America in the 1940s and ’50s.
Essays by world-renowned scholars of photography, Jewish history and culture address these newfound images and consider them in the context of modernist tendencies in Berlin in the 1920s and ’30s; the rise of Nazi power in Germany and Eastern Europe; the uses of social documentary photography for relief organizations; the experiences of exile, displacement, and assimilation; and the impact of Vishniac’s pioneering scientific research in color photomicroscopy in the 1950s and ’60s. This first retrospective monograph on Roman Vishniac offers many new perspectives on the work and career of this important photographer, positioning him as one of the great modernists and social documentary photographers of the last century.

http://www.randomhouse.de/book/Roman-Vishniac-Rediscovered/Maya-Benton/e466540.rhd?pub=58500

The Views of Albion: The Reception of British Art and Design in Central Europe, 1890–1918
by Andrzej Szczerski

Views of Albion is the first comprehensive study of the reception of British art and design in Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The author proposes a new map of European Art Nouveau, where direct contacts between peripheral cultures were more significant than the influence of Paris. These new patterns of artistic exchange, often without historic precedence, gave art during this period its unique character and dynamism. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of Central Europe, the book examines knowledge about British art and design in the region. In subsequent chapters the author looks at the reception of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting and graphic arts as well as analysing diverse responses to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Germany, Austria, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary and Southern Slavic countries. The epilogue reveals the British interest in Central Europe, echoed in the designs Walter Crane, Charles Robert Ashbee and publications of The Studio. The book questions the insularity of British culture and offers new insights into art and design of Central Europe at the fin de siècle. It presents the region as a vital part of the international Art Nouveau, but also shows its specific features, visible in the works of artists such as Alfons Mucha, Gustav Klimt and Stanisław Wyspiański.

http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=77860&cid=448&concordeid=431742

The Paintings of Moholy-Nagy: The Shape of Things to Come
by Joyce Tsai

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) became notorious for the declarations he made about the end of painting, encouraging artists to exchange brush, pigment, and canvas for camera, film, and searchlight. Even as he made these radical claims, he painted throughout his career. The practice of painting enabled Moholy-Nagy to imagine generative relationships between art and technology, and to describe the shape that future possibilities might take. Joyce Tsai illuminates the evolution of painting’s role for Moholy-Nagy through key periods in his career: at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the early 1930s, and as director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the last decade of his life. The book also includes an introduction to the history, qualities, and significance of plastic materials that Moholy-Nagy used over the course of his career, and an essay on how his project of shaping habitable space in his art and writing resonated with artists and industrial designers in the 1960s and 1970s.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300209976.html

Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible
by Annie Bourneuf

The fact that Paul Klee (1879–1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered—until now. In Paul Klee, Annie Bourneuf offers the first full account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee’s works from the 1910s and 1920s.

Bourneuf argues that Klee joined these elements to invite a manner of viewing that would unfold in time, a process analogous to reading. From his elaborate titles to the small scale he favored to his metaphoric play with materials, Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen to threaten slow, contemplative viewing. Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in the early twentieth century, Bourneuf shows how Klee reconceptualized abstraction at a key moment in its development.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo17239318.html

Heimat Photography in Austria: A Politicized Vision of Peasants and Skiers / Heimatfotografie in Österreich: eine politisierte Sicht von Bauern und Skifahren
by Elizabeth Cronin

Photographs of peasants, churchgoers, skiers, and alpine landscapes in magazines, books, and exhibitions informed the visual culture of Austria in the 1930s. Used by the authoritarian Ständestaat to glorify traditional values and establish a backward-looking Austrian identity, the same pictures of pristine mountain idylls, picturesque work in the fields, and local costume groups also served to massively propagate Austria as a tourist destination. Aesthetically demanding and partly influenced by the New Vision movement, the Heimat photographs of the main protagonists—Rudolf Koppitz, Peter Paul Atzwanger, Simon Moser, Stefan Kruckenhauser, Adalbert Defner, and Wilhelm Angerer—were, irrespective of political discontinuities, widely disseminated well into postwar Austria.

German-language edition translated by Wolfgang Astelbauer

http://www.fotohof.at/content.php?id=29&buchid=878 (English); http://www.fotohof.at/content.php?id=29&buchid=879 (German)

The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order
by Barbara McCloskey

The Exile of George Grosz examines the life and work of George Grosz after he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and sought to re-establish his artistic career under changed circumstances in New York. It situates Grosz’s American production specifically within the cultural politics of German exile in the United States during World War II and the Cold War. Basing her study on extensive archival research and using theories of exile, migrancy, and cosmopolitanism, McCloskey explores how Grosz’s art illuminates the changing cultural politics of exile. She also foregrounds the terms on which German exile helped to define both the limits and possibilities of American visions of a one world order under U.S. leadership that emerged during this period. This book presents Grosz’s work in relation to that of other prominent figures of the German emigration, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, as the exile community agonized over its measure of responsibility for the Nazi atrocity German culture had become and debated what Germany’s postwar future should be. Important too at this time were Grosz’s interactions with the American art world. His historical allegories, self-portraits, and other works are analyzed as confrontational responses to the New York art world’s consolidating consensus around Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism during and after World War II. This nuanced study recounts the controversial repatriation of Grosz’s work, and the exile culture of which it was a part, to a German nation perilously divided between East and West in the Cold War.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520281943

Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts
by Oliver Botar

Life in the digital economy of information and images enriches us but often induces a sense of being overwhelmed. Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts considers the impact of technology by exploring ways it was addressed in the practice of the Hungarian polymath artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a prominent professor at the Bauhaus and a key fi gure in the history of Modernism. Moholy-Nagy felt that people needed guidance to cope with the onslaught of sensory input in an increasingly technologized, mediatized, hyper-stimulating environment. His ideas informed media theorists such as Walter Benjamin, John Cage, Sigfried Giedion, and Marshall McLuhan, who anticipated digital culture as it emerged. Should we then regard Moholy-Nagy as a pioneer of the digital? His aesthetic engagement with the technology/body problematic broached the notions of immersion, interactivity and bodily participation, innately offering a critique of today’s disembodiment. Was he then both a pioneer and a proto-critic of the digital? This book is intended to introduce this seminal fi gure of post-medial practices to younger generations and, by including responses to his work by contemporary artists, to refl ect on the ways in which his work is relevant to artistic practice now.

http://www.lars-mueller-publishers.com/en/sensing-the-future

Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin
by Emily Pugh

On August 13, 1961, under the cover of darkness, East German authorities sealed the border between East and West Berlin using a hastily constructed barbed wire fence. Over the next twenty-eight years of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall grew to become an ever-present physical and psychological divider in this capital city and a powerful symbol of Cold War tensions. Similarly, stark polarities arose in nearly every aspect of public and private life, including the built environment.

In Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in both halves of Berlin during the Wall era, revealing the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities. Pugh uncovers the roles played by organizations such as the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage and the Building Academy in conveying the political narrative of their respective states through constructed spaces. She also provides an overview of earlier notable architectural works, to show the precursors for design aesthetics in Berlin at large, and considers projects in the post-Wall period, to demonstrate the ongoing effects of the Cold War.

Overall, Pugh offers a compelling case study of a divided city poised between powerful contending political and ideological forces, and she highlights the effort expended by each side to influence public opinion in Europe and around the World through the manipulation of the built environment.

http://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36407

Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture: On the Threshold of German Modernism
by Marsha Morton

The Wilhelmine Empire’s opening decades (1870s – 1880s) were crucial transitional years in the development of German modernism, both politically and culturally. Here Marsha Morton argues that no artist represented the shift from tradition to unsettling innovation more compellingly than Max Klinger. The author examines Klinger’s early prints and drawings within the context of intellectual and material transformations in Wilhelmine society through an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses Darwinism, ethnography, dreams and hypnosis, the literary Romantic grotesque, criminology, and the urban experience. His work, in advance of Expressionism, revealed the psychological and biological underpinnings of modern rational man whose drives and passions undermined bourgeois constructions of material progress, social stability, and class status at a time when Germans were engaged in defining themselves following unification.

This book is the first full-length study of Klinger in English and the first to consistently address his art using methodologies adopted from cultural history. With an emphasis on the popular illustrated media, Morton draws upon information from reviews and early books on the artist, writings by Klinger and his colleagues, and unpublished archival sources. The book is intended for an academic readership interested in European art history, social science, literature, and cultural studies.

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=1208920900&edition_id=1208925602

Na cestě k modernosti: Umělecké sdružení Osma a její okruh v letech 1900-1910 (On a Path to Modernity: The Eight and Its Circle in the Years 1900-1910)
by Nicholas Sawicki

Formed in the first decade of the 20th century, the modernist group known as the ‘Eight’, which referred to itself by the Czech name ‘Osma’ and the German ‘Die Acht’, was one of the most influential artistic movements in Prague before the First World War. Comprising artists of Czech, German and Jewish backgrounds, it included such prominent painters as Vincenc Beneš, Friedrich Feigl, Emil Filla, Max Horb, Otakar Kubín, Bohumil Kubišta, Willi Nowak, Emil Pittermann, Antonín Procházka and Linka Scheithauerová. The Eight played a fundamental role in the development of modern art and modernism in Prague and its environs, and its members and affiliates have long been recognized as foundational figures in the history of 20th-century Czech art.

Relying on new archival, textual and visual sources, “On a Path to Modernity,” presents a close examination of the artists and their work, and of the social and cultural context in which they operated. The book traces the shared practices, beliefs and concerns that brought the Eight together, and considers aspects of the group’s history that have not yet been documented in scholarship. In particular, it examines the relationship that the Eight had with the public, critics and institutions of Prague, and the reception that the group garnered from audiences and the press. It also investigates the group’s mixed ethnic composition, which voluntarily brought together artists of both Czech and German identity, Christian as well as Jewish, at a time when Prague and late imperial Austria-Hungary were strongly divided along national lines.

http://www.cupress.cuni.cz/ink2_ext/index.jsp?include=podrobnosti&id=232209

Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile
by Megan Luke

German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile.

Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters’s experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters’s aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo16956324.html

Władcy snów. Symbolizm na ziemiach czeskich 1880-1914 / Masters of Dreams: Symbolism in the Bohemian Lands 1880-1914
by Otto M. Urban, Irena Kossowska, and Adam Hnojil

“Masters of Dreams” has been published on the occasion of a comprehensive presentation of Bohemian art of the turn of the 19th century at the gallery of the International Cultural Centre in Krakow, being an effect of a long-lasting cooperation between the Centre and the Olomouc Museum of Art. The narrative of the book emphasizes the contribution of numerous artists active in the Bohemian lands to the complex mapping of the art scene in Europe of the late 1890s and the first two decades of the 20th century. The authors’ discourse contextualizes Bohemian Symbolism in relation to the West European art trends as well as confronts Czech developments with the exponents of Young Poland. Thus both the special cultural position of Prague seen in the context of the Austria-Hungary Empire and the interconnections with the artistic milieu in Krakow have been open to question.

“Masters of Dreams” expounds the idiosyncratic features, the richness and the universal dimension of Bohemian Symbolism, an important chapter of the European avant-garde, at the threshold of the First World War. Symbolism paved the way for Czech artists to the salons of Europe – a path followed by Alfons Mucha and Karel Hlaváček, Jan Preisler and František Kupka. Around 1900 the Bohemian lands exemplified economic success on a European scale, and the wealthy Bohemian bourgeois eagerly supported the buoyant burgeoning of artistic life. Prague – the scene of rivalry between Bohemian and German cultures; Prague – one of the key artistic metropolises of contemporary Europe – also became the center of the Czech national awakening.

http://www.mck.krakow.pl/exhibitionPage/about-the-exhibition-15

Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber
by Bibiana K. Obler

This compelling examination of the work and lives of Expressionist artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter and Dadaists Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber illuminates the roles of gender and the applied arts in abstraction’s early days. Both couples, like Expressionism and Dada more generally, strived to transcend the fragmented individualism promoted by capitalism. Through abstraction and by unsettling the boundaries between the decorative and fine arts, they negotiated tensions between the philosophical and commercial aspects of their production. Both pairs were feminist—the women ambitious and the men supportive of their work—but theirs was a feminism that embraced differences between the sexes. This innovative look at the personal relationships of two influential artist couples shows how everyday life—mundane concerns along with spiritual and intellectual endeavors—informed the development of abstraction.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300195798

Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield
by Sabine T. Kriebel

Revolutionary Beauty offers the first sustained study of the German artist John Heartfield’s groundbreaking political photomontages, published in the left-wing weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) during the 1930s. Sabine T. Kriebel foregrounds the critical artistic practices with which Heartfield directly confronted the turbulent, ideologically charged currents of interwar Europe, exposing the cultural politics of the crucial historical moment that witnessed the consolidation of National Socialism. In this period of radicalization and mass mobilization, the medium of photomontage—the cut-and-paste assemblage of photograph and text—offered a way to deconstruct the visual world and galvanize beholders on a mass scale.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520276185

Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist
by Diane Radycki

Considered one of the most important of the early German modernists, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) challenged traditional representations of the female body in art. She was the first modern woman artist to paint herself nude, as well as mothers and children nude. She also created the first self-portrait while pregnant in the history of art. Modersohn-Becker painted the life she was living as a woman and artist and led the way for generations of women artists. Tragically, her life and career were cut short at age thirty-one, following complications from childbirth.

Diane Radycki examines the artist’s fascinating biography, highlighting her friendships with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff as well as her personal anguish, including years in an unconsummated marriage, a disappointing affair, and irresolution about motherhood. Radycki also details the genres of Modersohn-Becker’s work: figure (especially nudes), still life, and landscape; and the reception of her work following her death. This new book is an authoritative source on Modersohn-Becker, who Radycki convincingly portrays as the first significant woman artist in the history of modernism.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300185300

Reviews:

Telehor: the International New Vision, Facsimile reprint and Commentary
edited by Klemens Gruber and Oliver Botar

In 1936 the first and only issue of the magazine telehor (Greek for tele-vision) was released in four languages, as a special edition on and by László Moholy-Nagy. The facsimile reprint of the magazine is accompanied by a commentary volume. The reprint makes the magazine accessible again in terms of its artistic and theoretical-historical dimensions. Particular attention has been paid to the production process. Thus the volume appears spiral-bound, an ultramodern technique in the mid-1930s. The commentary contains an editorial statement that places the magazine, telehor, in the context of the art and media of the 1920s and 1930s and unlocks the position of the artistic avant-garde at the intersection of two epochs.

It also contains new translations of the original texts: in Mandarin, Russian, Hungarian and Spanish.

http://www.lars-mueller-publishers.com/en/catalogue-art/telehor

After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne avant-garde
by Dorothy Rowe

What happened in 1920s Cologne ‘after Dada’? Whilst most standard accounts of Cologne Dada simply stop with Max Ernst’s departure from the city for a new life as a surrealist in Paris, this book reveals the untold stories of the Cologne avant-garde that prospered after Dada but whose legacies have been largely forgotten or neglected. It focuses on the little-known Magical Realist painter Marta Hegemann (1894–1970). By re-inserting her into the histories of avant-garde modernism, a fuller picture of the gendered networks of artistic and cultural exchange within Weimar Germany can be revealed. This book embeds her activities as an artist within a gendered network of artistic exchange and influence in which Ernst continues to play a vital role amongst many others including his first wife, art critic Lou Straus-Ernst; photographers August Sander and Hannes Flach; artists Angelika Fick, Heinrich Hoerle, Willy Fick and the Cologne Progressives and visitors such as Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier.

The book offers a significant addition to research on Weimar visual culture and will be invaluable to students and specialists in the field.

http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719090073

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume III: Europe 1880 – 1940
edited by Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop

The third of three volumes devoted to the cultural history of the modernist magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection contains fifty-six original essays on the role of ‘little magazines’ and independent periodicals in Europe in the period 1880-1940. It demonstrates how these publications were instrumental in founding and advancing developments in European modernism and the avant-garde.

Expert discussion of approaching 300 magazines, accompanied by an illuminating variety of cover images, from France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe will significantly extend and strengthen the understanding of modernism and modernity. The chapters are organised into six main sections with contextual introductions specific to national, regional histories, and magazine cultures. Introductions and chapters combine to elucidate the part played by magazines in the broader formations associated with Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism in a period of fundamental social and geo-political change. Individual essays, situated in relation to metropolitan centres bring focussed attention to a range of celebrated and less well-known magazines, including Le Chat Noir, La Revue blanche, Le Festin d’Esope, La Nouvelle Revue Française, La Révolution Surréaliste, Documents,De Stijl, Ultra, Lacerba, Energie Nouve, Klingen, Exlex, flamman, Der Blaue Reiter, Der Sturm, Der Dada, Ver Sacrum, Cabaret Voltaire, 391, ReD, Zenit, Ma, Contemporanul, Formisci, Zdroj, Lef, and Novy Lef.

The magazines disclose a world where the material constraints of costs, internal rivalries, and anxieties over censorship ran alongside the excitement of new work, collaboration on a new manifesto and the birth of a new movement. This collection therefore confirms the value of magazine culture to the expanding field of modernist studies, providing a rich and hitherto under-examined resource which helps bring to life the dynamics out of which the modernist avant-garde evolved.

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199659586.do#.UYE1XLVlnNs

Bruno Schulz: rzeczywistość przesunięta / Bruno Schulz: Shifted Reality
by Jan Gondowicz, Jerzy Jarzębski, Irena Kossowska, and Łukasz Kossowski

The Museum of Literature in Warsaw houses the largest collection of Bruno Schulz’s works worldwide. A selection of the artits’s prints and drawings has already been shown in many important centers, such as the museums of Paris, Nancy, Madrid, London, Dusseldorf, Trieste, Genoa, Istanbul, Brussels and Jerusalem. The year 2012 marked the 120th anniversary of Schulz’s birth and the 70th of his death. On this occasion the Museum of Literature organized a special exhibition meant to show for the first time the work of the great visionary in the context of Polish interwar art. The exhibition embraced over 200 paintings, prints and drawings as well as assemblages, visualizations and films by a significant body of artists.

When writing about the Polish version of surrealism – or rather about the not quite definable trend of the Polish interwar art which occupied a borderland between magical realism, grotesque and expressionism – Joanna Pollakówna called it “the painting of a shifted reality”. This strange realism was a peculiar equivalent of the Italian pittura metafisica and German Neue Sachlichkeit. It seems that only a “shifted reality” makes it possible to place Schulz in the framework of his epoch. By stepping out of the usual interpretational patterns and reaching beyond the time when he lived and worked, the book looks for antecedents and followers and immerses him in the poetics of photomontage and film.

The essays in this exhibition catalogue define the “shifted reality” created by Schulz in various ways. Jerzy Jarzębski locates it in a discontinuity, in the tension between a center and a periphery. Irena Kossowska discusses its European background, pointing out the metaphysical paintings and drawings by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà as the missing link in the interpretational contexts of Schulz’s work. Jan Gondowicz shows how Schulz tried to tame the cosmic perspective of the predicted apocalypse by viewing it through the anachronistic raster of 19th-century engravings. Thus the reality questioned by the artist is analyzed from three different points of view. 

http://muzeumliteratury.pl/bruno-schulz-rzeczywistosc-przesunieta-%E2%80%93-katalog-wystawy/

Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory
edited by Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche

Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation “of.” Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense—the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs), covering three categories: classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction); post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments); and the broader historical and philosophical scope.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415899932/ 

War Culture and the Contest of Images
by Dora Apel

Series: New Directions in International Studies

War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. Simultaneously, she explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images. As a result of the global visual culture in which anyone may produce as well as consume public imagery, the wide variety of visual and documentary practices present realities that would otherwise be invisible or officially off-limits. In our digital era, the prohibition and control of images has become nearly impossible to maintain. Using carefully chosen case studies—such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video projections and public works in response to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the performance works of Coco Fusco and Regina Galindo, and the practices of Israeli and Palestinian artists—Apel posits that contemporary war images serve as mediating agents in social relations and as a source of protection or refuge for those robbed of formal or state-sanctioned citizenship. While never suggesting that documentary practices are objective translations of reality, Apel shows that they are powerful polemical tools both for legitimizing war and for making its devastating effects visible. In modern warfare and in the accompanying culture of war that capitalism produces as a permanent feature of modern society, she asserts that the contest of images is as critical as the war on the ground.

 October 2012
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/War-Culture-and-the-Contest-of-Images,1199.aspx

John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage
by Andrés Mario Zervigón

Working in Germany in the interwar era, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. A pioneer of modern photomontage, he assembled images that transformed the meaning of the mass-media photos from which they were taken. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of this brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and the propaganda of politicians made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture.

Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic, when his work appeared on everything from campaign posters to book covers. He explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world, and the result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history.

November 2012
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo12953902.html

Art & Life: Mikhail Matiushin and the Russian Avant-Garde in St. Petersburg
by Isabel Wünsche

Mikhail Matiushin (1861-1934), best known as composer of the music for the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913), was not only a successful musician but also an influential painter and theoretician. Together with Elena Guro he founded the artists’ group Union of Youth in 1910, and the couple’s house became a central meeting place of the pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg avant-garde. Matiushin developed his organic approach to art together with Nikolai Kulbin, Pavel Filonov, and Kazimir Malevich. After the 1917 October Revolution, he established the Studio of Spatial Realism at the Art Academy and organized the Department of Organic Culture at the State Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad. In the 1930s, he worked in the field of color theory and its practical application in art, architecture, and design. This monograph is the first comprehensive study of Matiushin’s multifaceted artistic and theoretical œuvre.

http://www.boehlau-verlag.com/978-3-412-20730-4.html