RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Max Liebermann and International Modernism: An Artist's Career from Empire to Third Reich
Edited by Marion Deshmukh, Françoise Forster-Hahn and Barbara Gaehtgens
Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. and the Centre Allemand d'histoire de l'art/Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Paris
Although Max Liebermann (1847–1935) began his career as a realist painter depicting scenes of rural labor, Dutch village life, and the countryside, by the turn of the century, his paintings had evolved into colorful images of bourgeois life and leisure that critics associated with French impressionism. During a time of increasing German nationalism, his paintings and cultural politics sparked numerous aesthetic and political controversies. His eminent career and his reputation intersected with the dramatic and violent events of modern German history from the Empire to the Third Reich. The Nazis’ persecution of modern and Jewish artists led to the obliteration of Liebermann from the narratives of modern art, but this volume contributes to the recent wave of scholarly literature that works to recover his role and his oeuvre from an international perspective.
Berghahn Books
ISBN 978-1-84545-662-7
3266 pages, 113 ills, bibliog., index
Price: Pb $39.95/£25.00 Published (May 2011)
http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=DeshmukhMax
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.
University of Chicago Press
ISBN 9780226981772
344 pages; 9 color plates, 134 halftones; 8-1/2 x 11; will publish July 2012
Price: Cloth $65.00
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.
Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2012
ISBN 978-3-412-20730-4
258 pages 35 b/w and 17 color illustrations format 24 x 17 cm, bound
Price: € 34.90 [D] / € 35.90 [A]
http://www.boehlau-verlag.com/978-3-412-20730-4.html
Architektur beim Wort nehmen. Bildhaft sprechende Baukunst des Habsburgerreiches und seiner Nachfolgestaaten 1867-1933
by Anthony Alofsin
Winner of the 2007 Vasari Award from the Dallas Museum of Art
In [When Buildings Speak,] Anthony Alofsin explores the rich yet often overlooked architecture of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states. He shows that several different styles emerged in this milieu during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, he contends that each of these styles communicates to us in a manner resembling language and its particular means of expression. Covering a wide range of buildings—from national theaters to crematoria, apartment buildings to warehouses, and sanatoria to postal savings banks—Alofsin proposes a new way of interpreting this language. He calls on viewers to read buildings in two ways: through their formal elements and through their political, social, and cultural contexts. By looking through Alofsin’s eyes, readers can see how myriad nations sought to express their autonomy by tapping into the limitless possibilities of art and architectural styles. And such architecture can still speak very powerfully to us today about the contradictory issues affecting parts of the former Habsburg Empire.
Salzburg, Germany; Anton Pustet Verlag. 368 pgs. 2011. 9783702506308.
The Court Art of Friedrich Sustris: Patronage in Late Renaissance Bavaria
by Susan Maxwell
Series: Visual Culture in Early Modernity
The Court Art of Friedrich Sustris is the first monograph on the court artist and artistic director of Duke Wilhelm V. Sustris' drawings inspire a broader inquiry into early modern patronage and collecting practices. Incorporating original archival material into close analysis of surviving projects, this study examines the meanings and functions of court art at the crucial moment when artists and patrons were establishing artistic theories in sixteenth-century Munich.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press. 250 pgs. 79 b&w illustrations. (May 2011) Hardback 978-0-7546-6887-9
Order online and receive a 10% discount! www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754668879
New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism
Bridging History
edited by Christian Weikop
New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History brings together highly-renowned international art historians in a scholarly work that offers the first full-length reassessment in English of the importance of the Brücke group to German modernism specifically and to international modernism more generally. It challenges, interrogates and updates existing orthodoxies in the field of Brücke studies by deploying new research combined with innovative interpretative approaches.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press. 342 pgs. 90 b&w illustrations. (July 2011) Hardback 978-1-4094-1203-8
Order online and receive a 10% discount! www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409412038
Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960
by Kimberly Elman Zarecor
Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s. With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country’s transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.
Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press. 7 x 10. 480 pages. 292 b&w Illustrations. (April 2011) Hardcover 9780822944041 $45.00
The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s
edited by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco
Images of flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, and trampky—all embodiments of the dashing New Woman—symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s is the first book to examine modern femininity's ongoing relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most influential new media: photography and film. This volume examines the ways in which novel ideas about women's roles in society and politics were disseminated through these technological media, and it probes the significance of radical changes in female fashion, appearance, and sexual identity. Additionally, these original essays explore the manner in which New Women artists used photography and film to respond creatively to gendered stereotypes and to reconceive of ways of being a woman in a rapidly modernizing world.
With a foreword from the eminent feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, this collection includes contributions by Jan Bardsley,Matthew Biro, Gianna Carotenuto, Melody Davis, Kristine Harris, Karla Huebner, Kristen Lubben, Maria Makela, Elizabeth Otto, Martha H. Patterson, Vanessa Rocco, Clare I. Rogan, Despina Stratigakos, Brett M. Van Hoesen, Kathleen M. Vernon, and Lisa Jaye Young.
Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. 6 x 9. 368 pgs. 92 B&W photographs. (2011) Cloth 978-0-472-07104-3 $75.00S
Visit www.press.umich.edu and use the promotion code NW2011 for a 40% discount. Also, "The New Woman International" facebook page has updated info on programs related to the book.
Biocentrism and Modernism
edited by Oliver A.I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche
Examining the intersections between art and scientific approaches to the natural world, Biocentrism and Modernism reveals another side to Modernism’s development. While historians have usually framed this movement as being mechanistic and “against” nature, the essays in this collection illuminate the role that nature-centric ideologies played in late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century Modernism. Looking at philosophy and application, this volume features case studies of artists such as Duchamp-Villon, Klee, Kandinsky, and Pollock.
Surrey, UK: Ashgate Press. 282 pgs. (March 2011) Cloth 978-1-4094-0050-9 £65.00
Reinterpreting the Past: Traditionalist Artistic Trends in Central and Eastern Europe of the 1920s and 1930s.
Proceedings of an international conference organized by the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw) and the Institute of Art History of the Jagiellonian University (Krakow), Warsaw-Krakow, 21-23 September, 2006.
edited by Irena Kossowska
Traditionalism and its diversified framings constitute the focus of the "Reinterpreting the Past" discourse, which inter-relates methodological approaches and discursive positions adopted by specialists in the field of interwar culture, active in Central and Eastern Europe and in the United States. The publication has been intended to unleash concerns and attune the reader to the intricacies of traditionalism developed in the eastern territories of Europe, which up to the 1990s was considered peripheral, marginalized and suppressed in the cultural history of the Continent.
As a collection of loosely intertwined articles, the book demonstrates a rich array of artistic attitudes assumed under the overlapping labels of Traditionalism, Neo-Classicism, Neo-Realism, and Neo-Humanism. The multi-thread narrative encapsulates explorations of diverse idioms of classicism and realism evolving throughout the central and eastern regions of Europe, while contextualizing these phenomena within the artistic developments initiated in the West prior to and after the Great War.
The conference debate was meant to account for idiosyncratic changes, and to present numerous variations of Paris-, Rome-, and Berlin-derived artistic trends that spread throughout Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia and Ukraine during the interwar period, to be modified within the local sociopolitical setting, where they absorbed national, ethnic, and regional identities and vernacular particularities.
The objective of the conference was to discuss the need (that a host of artists from the eastern territories of Europe had expressed) for reliance on the past and for employing historic representational idioms to make comments on modernity and to confront contemporary sociopolitical and existential problems. The discussants examined the issue of manifold relationships between state institutions and the art scene, and engaged with the question of politicized aesthetics and ideological appropriation of art by state authorities.
While dwelling on the intricacies of blending Italian, German, and French idioms with vernacular traditions in East-Central Europe, "Reinterpreting the Past" contributes to a broader discourse of artistic exchange and transformation on the Continent. By embracing the rich artistic heritage of East-Central Europe, the publication compensates for the abjection of the traditionalist artistic tendencies emerging in the region, expands the range of artists that are missing from western textbooks in an attempt to revise the paradigms of the discipline, and to reconstruct the artistic geography of Europe.
Warsaw: Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IS PAN), 2010. 364 pages, ISBN: 83-89101-96-3. To order online: www.arspolona.com.pl
Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919-45
by James A. van Dyke
What was Nazi art? For the most part, we think of traditionally painted scenes of peasants plowing; blonde German girls with or without clothes; and heroically posed, square-jawed soldiers. When we think of modern art in Nazi Germany, we typically think above all of the infamous exhibition "Degenerate Art," which opened in Munich in July 1937. While these associations are not entirely wrong, the relationship between modern German art and National Socialism is considerably more complex than has generally been understood. In Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–45, James A. van Dyke tells the story of a well-known modern artist who regarded modernity and civilization with deep ambivalence during the 1920s and then for a time became a strong supporter of National Socialism. Radziwill's art, politics, and career are embedded in the debates about the definition of German art and state art policy in and after Hitler's rise. Challenging the monolithic view of "the Nazis," this book details how a painter could be championed by certain powerful National Socialists and be seen as a "degenerate" artist by others, how he could criticize the state and yet fight for the Fatherland, and how the unevenness of Hitler's state could foster hope and resistance even in a man who ultimately was deeply distressed by events.
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 7 x 10. 340 pgs. 60 page plate section; 56 B&W photos, 4 color photos, 2 line drawings. (2010) Cloth 978-0-472-11628-7 $80.00
Malarstwo polskie. Symbolizm i Mloda Polska [Polish Painting: Symbolism and Young Poland]
by Irena Kossowska and Lukasz Kossowski
The authors, while making references to the extensive literature on Symbolism, reinterpret Polish painting of the turn of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, placing it both within the context of the native artistic tradition and European early modernism. By juxtaposing the notions of ‘Symbolism’ and ‘Young Poland’, they bring forth Symbolism as the tendency dominating in the process of modernist transformations embedded in the cultural formation of Young Poland which encompassed several disciplines of thought and art, and a variety of artistic attitudes not bound by a single goal and one exclusive program. The book’s discourse refers to Young Poland as a broad current that spans the Romantic legacy of the passing century with the ambitions of the young generation of artists sensitive to the innovative aura of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. A culmination in the development of national culture, Young Poland summed up the intellectual accomplishments of the nineteenth century, at the same time opening up a perspective of artistic experimentation to be yielded in the decades to come.
The Authors, while making references to the extensive literature on Symbolism, reinterpret Polish painting of the turn of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, placing it both within the context of the native artistic tradition and European early modernism. By juxtaposing the notions of ‘Symbolism’ and ‘Young Poland’, they bring forth Symbolism as the tendency dominating in the process of modernist transformations embedded in the cultural formation of Young Poland which encompassed several disciplines of thought and art, and a variety of artistic attitudes not bound by a single goal and one exclusive program. The book’s discourse refers to Young Poland as a broad current that spans the Romantic legacy of the passing century with the ambitions of the young generation of artists sensitive to the innovative aura of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg.
The book presents Polish Symbolism as a perfect synthesis of idiosyncratic national components and aesthetic formulae adopted from European modernism. The Authors disclose a specific syncretism of the trend consisting in amalgamation of iconographic motifs, morphological elements and expressive qualities frequently regarded as antithetic factors. They modify the well-established chronological caesurae marking the beginning and the end of Polish Symbolism, and analyze the process in which this multilayered trend of diversified genealogy, rich subject matter, and heterogeneous morphology was shaped. While enhancing the main tendencies inherent to Symbolism (historicism, mysticism, pantheism, proto-expressionism, intimism, Japonism), they also explore artistic phenomena that diverged from the Symbolist presumptions, yet coexisted with Symbolism as an integral component of the Young Poland movement.
The narrative pinpoints topics peculiar to Polish Symbolism, while emphasizing the artists’ search for new visual language, and showing both convergent and opposing artistic approaches. Based on purposefully constructed sequences of images, it leads to the cultural centre of Young Poland, i.e. Krakow, it speaks of syncretistic interpretations of ancient myths and folk legends, evokes the decadent poetics of death, eroticism and Satanism, provides a glimpse at Parisian nooks haunted by demons and artificial paradises of bourgeois drawing-rooms, shows sunlit Italian sights, and severe Breton, Scandinavian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian landscapes, explores the mythicized enclave of Polish countryside. The Authors also describe the internal evolution of Polish Symbolism and a gradual fading away of catastrophic comprehension of history manifest in the trend. Initiated by metaphors of the nation’s tragic fate and eschatological visions rendered in monumental formats it concluded with intimate images of home Arcadia. In the 1910s everyday reality was returning to art, though no longer in a mimetic formula, as in the paintings of nineteenth century naturalists, but in a stylized and decorative manner, being engaged in a dialogue with the European artistic tradition and the aesthetic predilections of the Parisian Post-Impressionists and the Nabis.
Polish edition (English edition forthcoming). Warsaw: Arkady, 2010. 407 pp; 427 illustrations in color; ISBN 978-83-213-4597-0 (cloth); ISBN 978-83-213-4669-4 (case) www.arkady.eu