Barbara Rae

Barbara Rae

Author: Barbara Rae

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13:

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Wherever she is working outside, from the remote coastline of her native Scotland to the mountains of Andalucia and the Arizona desert, this artist responds to what she sees in her sketchbooks. Published here, these studies provide themes and motifs for her paintings and prints, but they also stand alone as sensuous evocations of the landscapes to which she is so attached.


Notebooks: 1936-1947

Notebooks: 1936-1947

Author: Victor Serge

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 1681372703

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Available for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works. In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses himself in the country’s history and culture. He looks back on his life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds reason to hope. Serge’s Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.


Abstract Painting and Abstraction

Abstract Painting and Abstraction

Author: Emyr Williams

Publisher: The Crowood Press

Published: 2017-11-20

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1785003623

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Abstract painting and abstraction can be a daunting and frustrating genre of art. How should you approach a surface? How can you use colour effectively? How can you make better, more expressive paintings? This inspiring book answers these questions and many more. By looking at his own work, Emyr Williams covers the practical issues of abstract art before explaining techniques to develop your own personal style and approach. He emphasizes the relationship of colour to surface and the importance of seeking a profound connection with your art. The book will help you to learn about the difference between abstract and abstraction and see how an artist has developed expressive art in many different ways. Superbly illustrated with 167 colour images.


Practices of Abstract Art

Practices of Abstract Art

Author: Wiebke Gronemeyer

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-12-14

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 144385686X

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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.


Abstract Painting in Canada

Abstract Painting in Canada

Author: Roald Nasgaard

Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9781553653943

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In the tradition of the distinguished Douglas & McIntyre art program, this lavishly illustrated and superbly printed book is a rich, readable history of abstract painting in Canada. The story begins in the 1920s with the sometimes eccentric but remarkable work, rooted in symbolism and theosophy, of pioneers such as Kathleen Munn, Bertram Brooker and Lawren Harris. Two decades later the Automatistes-Canada's first truly independent avant-garde art movement-burst onto the scene in Montreal. After the Second World War, the urge to abstraction spread across Canada, manifesting itself in significant regional movements. Vancouver painters retained a British flavour, while in Toronto, the Painters Eleven looked south to New York. Montreal's Plasticiens launched their own razor-edged interpretation of the European tradition of geometric abstraction. In the sixties and seventies, the Prairies were influenced by Clement Greenberg's post-painterly abstraction, while Halifax became a hub of conceptual art and concrete painting. The book continues through the eighties and nineties, during which critics largely denounced painting, and concludes in the twenty-first century, with abstract painting alive and well again in the studios of Canada's young artists. A monumental tome containing 200 color reproductions, it mines a rich vein of art history ripe for international discovery.


Modern Art: A Critical Introduction

Modern Art: A Critical Introduction

Author: Pam Meecham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1317972473

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A revised and updated edition of one of the most successful 'Critical Introductions' textbooks New features include marginal notes and colour photos New innovative structure, based on feed-back from teachers, focusing on how modern art has been understood rather than a straight chronological account of movements


Notebooks of the Mind

Notebooks of the Mind

Author: Vera John-Steiner

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0195108965

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To approach her subject, John-Steiner goes directly to the source, assembling the thoughts of "experienced thinkers" - artists, philosophers, writers, and scientists able to reflect on their own imaginative patterns. More than fifty interviews (with figures ranging from Jessica Mitford to Aaron Copland), along with excerpts from the diaries, letters, and autobiographies of such gifted giants as Leo Tolstoy, Marie Curie, and Diego Rivera, among others, provide illuminating insights into creative activity.


John Rothenstein in the Interwar Years

John Rothenstein in the Interwar Years

Author: David McCann

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2023-07-12

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1527501493

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Appointed in 1938, Sir John Rothenstein was the first director of the Tate to embrace modern art, mounting a series of daring exhibitions and procuring a procession of audacious masterworks that, in the words of one contemporary, ‘completely knocked the stuffiness out of that veritable institution.' So why, since he died in 1991, has his name become a byword for reactionary conservatism? The answer is that from the outset of his career, Rothenstein refused to bow to the patriarchs of the avant-garde. In the 1920s, while they were busy decrying the figurative tradition, Rothenstein was championing a brilliant generation of artists whose work remained firmly rooted within it. In the 1930s, while they advocated a geometrical art of the utmost austerity, Rothenstein used his first curatorial positions to promote a new wave of exciting young British realists. Pitted against the progressives of Hampstead and Bloomsbury and inspired by the anti-vanguardism of his father and Wyndham Lewis, this book charts Rothenstein's earliest efforts to champion modern realistic painting in an age of abstraction. Along the way, it uncovers his selfless and pioneering patronage of artists as diverse as Stanley Spencer, Edward Bawden, Evelyn Dunbar, Paul Nash, Charles Mahoney, and Eric Ravilious. In so doing, it also establishes his importance in the reassessment of twentieth-century figuration going on today.


Collectivism After Modernism

Collectivism After Modernism

Author: Blake Stimson

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published:

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1452909202

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“Don’t start an art collective until you read this book.” —Guerrilla Girls “Ever since Web 2.0 with its wikis, blogs and social networks the art of collaboration is back on the agenda. Collectivism after Modernism convincingly proves that art collectives did not stop after the proclaimed death of the historical avant-gardes. Like never before technology reinvents the social and artists claim the steering wheel!” —Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam “This examination of the succession of post-war avant-gardes and collectives is new, important, and engaged.” — Stephen F. Eisenman, author of The Abu Ghraib Effect “Collectivism after Modernism crucially helps us understand what artists and others can do in mushy, stinky times like ours. What can the seemingly powerless do in the face of mighty forces that seem to have their act really together? Here, Stimson and Sholette put forth many good answers.” —Yes Men Spanning the globe from Europe, Japan, and the United States to Africa, Cuba, and Mexico, Collectivism after Modernism explores the ways in which collectives function within cultural norms, social conventions, and corporate or state-sanctioned art. Together, these essays demonstrate that collectivism survives as an influential artistic practice despite the art world’s star system of individuality. Collectivism after Modernism provides the historical understanding necessary for thinking through postmodern collective practice, now and into the future. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, Jesse Drew, Okwui Enwezor, Rubn Gallo, Chris Gilbert, Brian Holmes, Alan Moore, Jelena Stojanovi´c, Reiko Tomii, Rachel Weiss. Blake Stimson is associate professor of art history at the University of California Davis, the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, and coeditor of Visual Worlds and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and cofounder of collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory. He is coeditor of The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. “To understand the various forms of postwar collectivism as historically determined phenomena and to articulate the possibilities for contemporary collectivist art production is the aim of Collectivism after Modernism. The essays assembled in this anthology argue that to make truly collective art means to reconsider the relation between art and public; examples from the Situationist International and Group Material to Paper Tiger Television and the Congolese collective Le Groupe Amos make the point. To construct an art of shared experience means to go beyond projecting what Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette call the “imagined community”: a collective has to be more than an ideal, and more than communal craft; it has to be a truly social enterprise. Not only does it use unconventional forms and media to communicate the issues and experiences usually excluded from artistic representation, but it gives voice to a multiplicity of perspectives. At its best it relies on the participation of the audience to actively contribute to the work, carrying forth the dialogue it inspires.” —BOMB