New Books
Updated: June 4, 2009
To submit new books, offer links to reviews for books already posted, or make suggestions concerning this page, please contact Anna Brzyski. The books are listed in the order in which they are received.
Art in Vilnius, 1900-1915
By Laima Lauckaite
The book attempts to reconstruct the history of the twentieth century art of Vilnius, and to cast a new light on its character and function in the society of that time. This is not easy to do because several nations have different visions and interpreations of the city's past. For Lithuanians it is the symbol of their self-dependence, the city of grand dukes, lost and dreamed of capital; for Poles it is the cradle of one of their richest cultural epoch - Romanticism; for Jews it is Lithuanian Jerusalem. The phenomena of the art of Vilnius are analyzed in the context of the art of Europe. The book emphasizes the close relationship of art in Vilnius with the processes of the Western art, the appearance of new trends, Modernism, Aestheticism and Symbolism and first artistic steps of the Avant-garde. The art of this period is presented as dynamic heritage, and the period itself is characterized in terms of openness to various cultural values. This monograph is based on abundant materials which have never been published before, including photographs and the reproductions of the works of art.
Vilnius: Baltos Lankos Publishers, 2008. English,199 pages, 234 b&w and color ills., ISBN: 978-9955-23-183-7.
Of 'Truths Impossible to Put in Words'
Max Beckmann Contextualized
Edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long & Maria Makela
Dismissing attempts to characterize his paintings and graphic work as connected to stylistic movements or to historical events, Max Beckmann positioned himself above the earthly realm and claimed that he painted 'truths impossible to put in words'. In contrast, this volume consists of essays that relate his work to the tangible circumstances of its production and reception. Unlike much earlier scholarship that has focused on stylistic analysis or on interpretations of the work's 'eternal truth', these essays contextualize aspects of Beckmann's early, middle, and late career by way of detailed reference to contemporary music, film, philosophy, theatre, history, sports, and exile. The anthology thus expands Beckmann scholarship, which only recently has begun to consider context in relation to his position as both a central and an outside figure in the history of modern art in the twentieth century.
Contents: Rose-Carol Washton Long/Maria Makela: Introduction - Jay A. Clarke: Space as Metaphor: Beckmann and the Conflicts of Secessionist Style in Berlin - Karen Lang: Max Beckmann's Inconceivable Modernism - Rose-Carol Washton Long: Ambivalence: Personal and Political: Max Beckmann's Print Portfolios, 1919-1924 - Marsha Morton: 'Painted Sounds': Music in the Art of Max Beckmann - Barbara C. Buenger: Some Portraits from Weimar-Era Frankfurt - James Van Dyke: Max Beckmann, Sport and the Field of Cultural Criticism - Peter Chametzky: Titanic Sinks, Departure Arrives: On Beckmann, Film and the Fall of History Painting and Rise of the Historical Object - Sabine Eckmann: Max Beckmann: From Space to Place - F. Forster-Hahn: Imagining the American West: Max Beckmann in St. Louis and California - David Ehrenpreis: Between Heaven and Earth: Max Beckmann's Last Representations of the Artist.
New York: Peter Lang, 2009. 436 pp., 9 coloured and 78 b/w ill.
ISBN 978-3-03910-704-9, $68 pb.
The book can be ordered through Peter Lang website
In the Shadow of Yalta:
Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989
By Piotr Piotrowski
Translated by Anna Brzyski
The book offers the first comprehensive comparative study of the artistic culture of the region once located between the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union, a part of Europe that due to the agreement signed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in 1945 found itself trapped within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Piotr Piotrowski chronicles the complex relation between the avant garde art practice and politics in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, East Germany, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of Communism in 1989.
Beginning with an analysis of post-war Surrealism in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary, Piotrowski examines the development of a number of different Modernist art strategies within the context of thawing Stalinism. He follows with an account of the emergence of the neo-avant-garde practices of body, performance, and conceptual art during the volatile political circumstances of the 1970s. The book’s epilogue examines the impact of end of the Communism on art that both witnessed and responded to the system’s demise.
Alongside the discussion of the frequently highly innovative art made in response to always challenging and sometimes nightmarish circumstances, In the Shadow of Yalta examines several common threads that bind the post war narrative of Eastern European art: the erosion of ideology, the rise of consumerism, and the emergence of political pragmatism.
Illustrated with hundreds of images of artworks from the region, few of which will be familiar to an Anglo-American audience, In the Shadow of Yalta offers new critical insights into the lives of artists, the politics of art and culture, and the character of the avant garde art practices behind the Iron Curtain during a crucial period in the history of modern Europe. This book has much to interest art historians and critics, as well as historians of the European political and cultural life.
London: Reaktion Books, 2009. 489 pages, 223 b&w illustrations, ISBN 978 1 86189 438 0(Hardback)
A Women's Berlin: Building the Modern City
By Despina Stratigakos
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity, both culturally and architecturally. Women located their lives and made their presence felt in the streets and institutions of this dynamic metropolis. From residences to restaurants, schools to exhibition halls, a visible network of women’s spaces arose to accommodate changing patterns of life and work.A Women’s Berlin retraces this largely forgotten city, which came into being in the years between German unification in 1871 and the demise of the monarchy in 1918 and laid the foundation for a novel experience of urban modernity. Although the phenomenon of women taking control of urban space was widespread in this period, Despina Stratigakos shows how Berlin’s concentration of women’s building projects produced a more fully realized vision of an alternative metropolis. Female clients called on female design professionals to help them define and articulate their architectural needs. Many of the projects analyzed in A Women’s Berlin represent a collaborative effort uniting female patrons, architects, and designers to explore the nature of female aesthetics and spaces.
At the same time that women were transforming the built environment, they were remaking Berlin in words and images. Female journalists, artists, political activists, and social reformers portrayed women as influential actors on the urban scene and encouraged female audiences to view their relationship to the city in a radically different light. Stratigakos reveals how women’s remapping of Berlin connected the imaginary to the physical, merged dreams and asphalt, and inextricably linked the creation of the modern woman with that of the modern city.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 256 pages with 77 b&w photos, $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8166-5323-2
Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth
Edited by Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder
This anthology is an English-language collection of sixteen innovative essays by leading international scholars that documents new and intriguing aspects of Kazimir Malevich’s art and biography. This latest research on the Russian modern artist appears after more than seventy years of political and cultural difficulties — including the East–West bifurcation of his artistic and written legacy — that impeded the study and understanding of his work. For the first time, the greater portion of Malevich’s work and writings was available for the scholarly research and study undertaken here.The result is a wealth of new details about this pioneer of abstraction, including explorations of his early art education; the differences in the reception of his abstract art by Western and Russian audiences; the appearance of his work in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art ; and the artist’s special relationship with Ukraine . The development of his art is considered alongside that of Vasily Kandinsky and Giorgio De Chirico, and his philosophy is examined in comparison with the ideas of Nikolai Fedorov and Ortega-y-Gasset. The history of Russian and Soviet art in the 1920s and 1930s is intricately interwoven with the revolutionary social changes taking place throughout the country. Here are details of the political maneuverings Malevich went through in Russia to protect his art and his friends; and his reaction to Lenin’s death in 1924 and the subsequent growth of the “Lenin myth.”
Rethinking Malevich reveals the complex early interweaving of Suprematism and Constructivism; considers little-researched aspects of the artist’s Post-Suprematist period; and the history of Malevich’s literary legacy. Not least, it demonstrates the various ways in which Malevich’s art continues to stimulate the highly unusual work of contemporary Russian artists.
Pindar Press, 2007: 360 pp.; 180 illus.; £75.00; ISBN 1 904597 48 3 Cloth Bound
Harmonie und Synthese:Die russische Moderne zwischen universellem Anspruch und nationaler kultureller Identität
by Isabel Wünsche
Isabel Wünsche geht in ihrem Buch der Frage der Teilhabe Russlands am Projekt der europäischen Mo derne nach, wobei sie sich insbe sondere mit dem Wechselverhältnis zwischen universellem Anspruch und nationalen kulturellen Werten in Wissenschaft, Geistesgeschichte und Kunst beschäftigt.
Mit dem Sieg über Napoleon war Russland nicht nur geographisch, son dern auch politisch und militärisch zu einer der führenden europäischen Großmächte der Moderne aufgestie gen. Die Frage, ob Russland auch in sozialer und kultureller Hinsicht zu Eu ropa gehöre, wurde von Slawophi len und Westlern jedoch höchst unter schiedlich beantwortet; sie bildete eine der brennendsten Fragen der russischen Geistesgeschichte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts.
Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008, 119 Seiten, kart., EUR 16.90 / CHF 31.00
ISBN: 978-3-7705-4686-2
When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and its Aftermath, 1867-1933
by Anthony Alofsin
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.
University of Chicago Press: 300 pages, 158 color plates, 52 halftones 8-1/2 x 11
Cloth $65.00 ISBN: 9780226015064 Published November 2006
Paper $45.00 ISBN: 9780226015071 Published November 2008
Terror and Toleration:The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850
Paula Sutter Fichtner
From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries the armies of the Ottoman empire brought terror, in the name of Islam, to much of the Christian world. Intermittently, but relentlessly, the Sultans’ forces raided, then conquered the Danube Valley as far as Budapest and beyond. Their inexorable progress westward eventually brought them into conflict with the dynastic confederation created in central and eastern Europe by the Austrian Habsburgs. Repeatedly faced with virtual annihilation by superior Muslim forces, the ruling powers in Vienna fought to mobilise the minds as well as the military resources of their subjects in order to save both their faith and their soil. The propaganda developed by both government and church, particularly the Roman Catholic variant, created, then reinforced many of the negative stereotypes of Muslims that are still familiar to Europeans today.Gradually, after the middle of the seventeenth century, Habsburg rulers and officials came to see that its political and military survival required solid information about the Muslim foe that prejudiced ideas did not supply. In Terror and Toleration, Paula Sutter Fichtner traces the story of this change of heart and mind in government and intellectual circles throughout the Habsburg empire. This episode shows, she argues, that it is possible to form and disseminate negative views of an enemy for political and strategic reasons, yet be able to reconfigure those views as circumstance and necessity dictates.
A highly original account of a fascinating historical and cultural encounter, this book gives readers a close view of how a Western empire not only survived Islamic aggression, but in the process learned how to consider and even work with Muslims positively and productively.
London: Reaktion Books, 2008. 256 pages, 20 b&w illustrations, ISBN 978 1 86189 340 6(Hardback)
Max Klinger – Wege zur Neubewertung (Schriften des Freundeskreises Max Klinger e.V., Band 1)
Edited by Richard Hüttel
This new anthology, whose release on July 4 marked the anniversary of the artist’s death, makes available the papers from the symposium held in May 2007 in Leipzig under the auspices of the Museum der bildenden Künste and the Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Leipzig. That event was conceived in conjunction with a major exhibition at the museum, Eine Liebe: Max Klinger und die Folgen, commemorating the 150th anniversary of Klinger’s birth, in order to showcase recent new research directions, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary topics. As with the exhibition, these papers contributed to a reevaluation and contextualization of the multi-media artist within central cultural developments of his day. Essays in the collection address topics that include Klinger’s relations with the poet Richard Dehmel (Björn Spiekermann) and the Hamburg Kunsthalle director Alfred Lichtwark (Henrike Junge-Gent), with themes of homoeroticism and male identity (Hansdieter Erbsmehl), hypnotism and neurasthenia (Marsha Morton), the use of photography (Barbara John), and the influence of commercial printing techniques(Christian Drude). New interpretations are offered on his mural paintings (Conny Dietrich), torso sculpture (Ina Gayk), his early student work (Holger Jacob-Friesen), his late print series Die Zelt (Evelina Juntunen), the centrality of Old Master sources (Michael Bringmann), and his Beethoven sculpture within a Wagnerian context (Thomas Strobel). The book, edited principally by Thomas Pöpper (who also contributed an essay), Pavla Langer, and Frank Zöllner, provides a lengthy bibliography and a report by Renate Hartleb on the transcription and digitization of Klinger’s letters. The completion of this lengthy project is anticipated to be in 2009.
Leipzig: Plöttner Verlag, 2008. 320 pages with 120 b & w illustrations, 15 Euros (cloth), ISBN 978-3-938442-56-2
Kursschwankungen Russische Kunst im Wertesystem der europäischen Moderne/Fluctuations: Russian Art in the Value System of European Modernism
Edited by Ada Raev and Isabel Wünsche
Still today, Russian art is the mysterious unknown in the Western world, always good for a surprise. The contributions to this volume examine the political, economic, aesthetic, and philosophical factors behind the !uctuating valuation of the role of Russian art within European Modernism. Particular emphasis is given to the investigation of presentational forms and perceptual patterns of Russian art in the primary canon-building medium of the exhibition and its positioning in the art market. Essential to this is the relationship between self-construction and foreign perception, which shaped the biographies and work of such border-crossing "gures as Orest Kiprenski, Wassily Kandinsky, and Ilya Kabakov. In contrast to the widely held view of the imitative character of Russian art, this volume opens our eyes to its unique vitality, which, at the latest, beginning with the revolutionary experiments
of the Russian avant-garde has been a driving force for innovation in the international art scene.
Content:
Introduction with essays by Isabel Wünsche, Ada Raev, and Waltraud Bayer
Cultural Promises of the “Other” with essays on Orest Kiprenski, Alexander Ivanov, Ivan Puni, Erich Mendelsohn, and Viktor Pivovarov by Antonia Napp, Iris Blochel-Dittrich, Magdalena Nieslony, Ita Heinze-Greenberg, and Wolfgang Schlott
Border-Crossing Figures with essays on Ilya Repin, Marc Chagall, Kazimir Malevich, Eduard Steinberg, and Maxim Kantor by Elina Knorpp, Karoline Hille, Christian Hufen, Claudia Beelitz, and Laura Gieser
Exhibitions as Instrument of Canon Building with essays on Der Sturm, the Russian avant-garde museums, the Biennale di Venezia in 1977 and 1995 by Marina Dmitrieva, Christiane Post, Valentina Parisi, and Sandra Frimmel
National Self-Constructions in Dialogue with essays on color and material in Russian avant-garde art, the spatial constructions of Pavel Florensky and El Lissitzky, the Russian avant-garde and painting in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period, the total installations and the western reception of Ilya Kabakov by Alexandra Köhring, Alexandra Käss, Dusan Buran, Ruth Langen-Wettengl, and Regine Rapp
The Expansion of Artistic Action with essays on fashion design, Moscow Conceptualism, and the role of the artist in Constructivism and in Conceptualism by Burcu Dogramaci, Sabine Hänsgen, and Manuela Schöpp
Berlin: Lukas Verlag für Kunst- und Geistesgeschichte, 2007; Paperback, 262 pages, 72 black-and-white illustrations; ISBN 978–3–86732–012–2. Book Orders: Fax +49-30-442 81 77
Partisan Canons
Edited by Anna Brzyski
Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon’s production and maintenance. The contributors explore how, where, why, and by whom canons are formed; how they function under particular circumstances; how they are maintained; and why they may undergo change.Focusing on various moments from the seventeenth century to the present, the contributors cover a broad geographic terrain, encompassing the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, and South Africa. Among the essays are examinations of the working and reworking of a canon by an influential nineteenth-century French critic, the limitations placed on what was acceptable as canonical in American textbooks produced during the Cold War, the failed attempt to define a canon of Rembrandt’s works, and the difficulties of constructing an artistic canon in parts of the globe marked by colonialism and the imposition of Eurocentric ideas of artistic value. The essays highlight the diverse factors that affect the production of art canons: market forces, aesthetic and political positions, nationalism and ingrained ideas concerning the cultural superiority of particular groups, perceptions of gender and race, artists’ efforts to negotiate their status within particular professional environments, and the dynamics of art history as an academic discipline and discourse. This volume is a call to historicize canons, acknowledging both their partisanship and its implications for the writing of art history.
Contributors: Jenny Anger, Marcia Brennan, Anna Brzyski, James Cutting, Paul Duro, James Elkins, Barbara Jaffee, Robert Jensen, Jane C. Ju, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Julie L. McGee, Terry Smith, Linda Stone-Ferrier, and Despina Stratigakos
Durham: Duke University Press, 2007; 376 pp; 38 ill.; ISBN13 978-0-8223-4085-0 (cloth), ISBN13 978-0-8223-4106-2 (paperback)
Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909-1939
By Mark Antliff
Investigating the central role that theories of the visual arts and creativity played in the development of fascism in France, Mark Antliff examines the aesthetic dimension of fascist myth-making within the history of the avant-garde. Between 1909 and 1939, a surprising array of modernists were implicated in this project, including such well-known figures as the symbolist painter Maurice Denis, the architects Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret, the sculptors Charles Despiau and Aristide Maillol, the “New Vision” photographer Germaine Krull, and the fauve Maurice Vlaminck.
Antliff considers three French fascists: Georges Valois, Philippe Lamour, and Thierry Maulnier, demonstrating how they appropriated the avant-garde aesthetics of cubism, futurism, surrealism, and the so-called Retour à l’Ordre (“Return to Order”), and, in one instance, even defined the “dynamism” of fascist ideology in terms of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage. For these fascists, modern art was the mythic harbinger of a regenerative revolution that would overthrow existing governmental institutions, inaugurate an anticapitalist new order, and awaken the creative and artistic potential of the fascist “new man.”In formulating the nexus of fascist ideology, aesthetics, and violence, Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier drew primarily on the writings of the French political theorist Georges Sorel, whose concept of revolutionary myth proved central to fascist theories of cultural and national regeneration in France. Antliff analyzes the impact of Sorel’s theory of myth on Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier. Valois created the first fascist movement in France; Lamour, a follower of Valois, established the short-lived Parti Fasciste Révolutionnaire in 1928 before founding two fascist-oriented journals; Maulnier forged a theory of fascism under the auspices of the journals Combat and Insurgé.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2007; 376 pp; 67 ill.; ISBN13 978-0-8223-4015-7 (cloth), ISBN13 978-0-8223-4034-8 (paperback)
Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935
by Steven A. Mansbach, with Wojciech Jan Siemaszkiewicz
The history of modern art and design has been written mostly from the perspectives of the European West or from an American vantage point. In this new book Steven Mansbach introduces and describes the radical early twentieth-century experiments in modern art and design that developed in Europe from the Baltic north to the Balkan south. The more than 50 works on paper discussed and illustrated here, by such artists as El Lissitzky, Karel Teige, Jerzy Hulewicz, Sirak Skitnik, France Kralj, Lajos Kassak, Victor Brauner, Niklavs Strunke, and Jaan Vahtra, represent a revolutionary attempt by the artists to create a new visual vocabulary appropriate for a modern era. Relying mostly on abstract compositions based on geometric forms, writers, poets, and visual artists collaborated to convey not only aesthetic ideals, but social content, at a time of major change after World War I and the emergence of newly independent states.Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935, with a visually stunning design, is illustrated in color with more than 50 examples of modernist publications. In addition to an overview essay about the progressive eastern European graphic artists and writers, by Steven Mansbach, Professor of the History of Twentieth-century Art at the University of Maryland, the volume also describes the growth and development of the Library’s collections in this field. A complete checklist of the exhibition, for which this is a companion volume, is also included.
New York: New York Public Library, 2007. 80 pp;ISBN: 978-0-87104-459-4
Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945
By Matthew S. Witkovsky
Introduction by Peter Demetz
In the 1920s and 1930s, photography became an immense phenomenon across Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Poland. Through magazines and books, in advertisements and at exhibitions, from amateur clubs to avant-garde schools, photographs emerged as a key vehicle of modern consciousness.
This book and the exhibition it accompanies present the work of approximately one hundred individuals whose creations exemplify the potential of photography in Central Europe between the two World Wars. Foto brings together for the first time works by recognized masters such as the Russian El Lissitzky, the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy, and the German Hannah Hóch—all of whom developed their photographic ideas in Germany—with contemporaries like Karel Teige and Jaromír Funke (Czechoslovakia), Kazimierz Podsadecki (Poland), Károly Escher (Hungary), and Trude Fleischmann (Austria), who are less well known today.
Organized thematically, the book explores topics from photomontage and war to gender identity, modern living, and the spread of Surrealism. It shows the shared experience of modernity in the region, whereby recently founded nations and dismantled empires alike sought their place within the new world order established in the aftermath of World War I.Includes maps, biographies of the featured photographers, and a scholarly bibliography.
London and Washington, D.C.: Thames and Hudson (in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington), 2007. 312 pp; 251 illustrations, 192 in colour; ISBN 0500543372,ISBN-13 978-0500543375
K ostyantin Piskorsky
Edited by By Olena Novikova
The artist and art theorist Konstyantin Piskorsky (1892-1922) was one of those Ukrainian modernists who are still little known today. This volume, edited by Olena Novikova, is the first compilation of works by Piskorsky from Ukrainian museums and private collections. In their articles, Olena Novikova and Maria Guska give an art historical interpretation of the work of this extraordinary artist, which can be placed between symbolism and futurism. It is complemented by smaller contributions by John Bowlt and Dmytro Horbachev. The outstanding colour illustrations and numerous archival photos in this volume give a comprehensive image of this artist’s life and work.
Kiev: Rodovid 2006; 130 pp.; 105 ill., ISBN 966-7845-27-3
Local Strategies. International Ambitions. Modern Art and Central Europe 1918-1968
Edited by Vojtech Lahoda
Papers from the International Conference, organized by The Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and New York University in Prague 2003. Essays on Modernism and Avant-garde in Central and Eastern Europe, especially on Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Croatian, Slovenian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian Modern Art. Authors: Timothy O. Benson, Anna Brzyski, Linara Dovydaityte, Eva Forgács, Irina Genova, Tomasz Gryglewicz, Jeremy Howard, Giedre Jankeviciute, Eduards Klavinš, Liljana Kolešnik, Vojtech Lahoda, Esther Levinger, Christina Lodder, Marian Mazzone, Myroslava M. Mudrak, Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Martina Pachmanová, Damjan Prelovšek, Ivanka Reberski, Nicholas Sawicki, Deborah Schultz, Andrej Szczerski, Darko Šimicic, Maria Elena Versari, Annika Waennerberg, Anna Wierzbicka, Mathew S. Witkowsky, Isabel Wünsche, András Zwickl.Artefactum: Praha 2006. 245 pp., 4 col/165 mono illus; ISBN 80-86890-08-2; Price: 58 EURO; 77 USD; 40 GBP (+ Shipping Cost)
The book can be ordered via e-mail: ramesova@udu.cas.cz, by fax: +420222224654, or by post: Milada Ramešová, Institute of Art History ACSR, Husova 4, Prague 1, 11000, The Czech Republic
East European Art 1650-1950
By Jeremy Howard
The arts that flourished between the Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea and between Austria and Russian Alaska from the seventeenth to the twentieth century are some of the most potent in history. Yet they, and their cultural context, remain little known. East European Art addresses this by providing a sweeping view of key artistic developments and connections in the lands of the Romanov and Habsburg empires as well as their neighboring and successor states. And it argues that a greater appreciation of East European art will lead us to a much-needed fresh definition of 'European' art as a whole.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 272 pages, 65 color illus., 47 b/w illus., ISBN-13: 978-0-19-284224-4
Series: Oxford History of Art
East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe
Edited by IRWIN
The artistic map of Europe contains different degrees of detail and resolution. Italy, France, and Spain are presented in fine grain, but the Balkan peninsula is little more than a vague outline. England, Germany, and Scandinavia have many features filled in, but to the east of Germany things are blurred. Until recently, cities like Sofia, Odessa, Skopje, and Belgrade had next to no definition. Further to the East, Moscow comes into focus, but this is no compensation for the Baltics, sentenced for the last half-century to blank space.East Art Map is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the missing histories of contemporary art in Eastern Europe from an East European and artistic perspective. It is perhaps the widest ranging art documentation project ever undertaken by the East on the East, involving a large network of artists, scholars, curators and critics coordinated by the IRWIN group over several years. The editors invited eminent art critics, curators, and artists to present up to ten crucial art projects produced in their respective countries over the past 50 years. The choice of the particular artworks (many of them reproduced in color), artists, and events, as well as their presentation, was left exclusively to the individual selectors. In addition, the editors asked experts from both East and West to provide longer texts offering cross-cultural perspectives on the art of both regions.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 525 pp., 192 color illus. $45.00/£24.95 (PAPER); ISBN-10: 1-846380-05-7; ISBN-13: 978-1-84638-005-1
Die Schau des Fremden: Ausstellungskonzepte zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Wissenschaft, Geschichte
edited by Cordula Grewe.
Museums of civilization (of ethnology, anthropology, folklore or natural history) are today undergoing major reevaluation, resulting in the reorganization of collections and the dissolution of some museums as well as the creation of new ones. At this critical moment in the history of these museums, this book explores the fraught space between art and artifact in relation to the disciplines of art history and anthropology and shifting museological contexts. Focusing on France, Germany, Belgium and the United States in the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the present, this essay collection creates an interdisciplinary dialogue between curators, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and art historians. It investigates the relationship of museums devoted to the “human” broadly conceived to the formation of new academic disciplines (such as anthropology) and novel practices of popular mass culture (from ethnographic spectacles and world fairs to the art market). From a diverse range of perspectives, the authors explore fundamental shifts within the overall composition of Western societies such as the rise and fall of imperialism and colonialism, the appearance of mass society and consumerism, or, most recently, globalization. Finally, the volume sheds new light on the ways in which a modern museology negotiates the problematic heritage of this field and finds new ways to exhibit “self” and “others.”
Stuttgart:Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006; 376 pp; 71 b&w ill; 16 color plates; ISBN 978-3-515-08843-5
Kandinsky Drawings: Catalogue Raisonne. Volume One. Individual Drawings
by Vivian Endicott Barnett
The first volume of the catalogue raisonné comprises 1236 works from all periods of Vasily Kandinsky's career. It begins with an addendum of fifteen watercolors and two oil-paintings, which were not included in the previous four volumes of the catalogue raisonné, followed by India ink drawings, sketches and individual works. There is complete provenance, exhibition history and bibliography for each catalogue entry as well as numerous commentaries discussing date, iconography and related works. Vivian Barnett has written a text on the artist's discovery of his own drawings in the early 1930s and his efforts to exhibit them during his lifetime. The volume concludes with a comprehensive list of one-person and group exhibitions, a selective bibliography and indexes. A second volume, which is devoted to Kandinsky's thirty-five sketchbooks that have remained intact, will appear in spring 2007.
Published in October 2006 by Philip Wilson Publishers, London and C.H. Beck Verlag, Munich. Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press; 600 pp.; 75 color plates and approx. 1300 black and white illustrations
Art, Design, and Architecture in Central Europe 1890-1920
By Elizabeth Clegg
The book offers a wide-ranging account of art, design, and architecture in the complex Central Europe of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during its momentous last decades. Comparing the situation in eight cities—among them Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Cracow, and Zagreb—the author highlights contrasts, rivalries, parallels, and interconnections across this colorful and important region. The book deals with all the chief ethnic/national categories of Austria-Hungary and embraces all the visual arts. Focusing on their public display, appraisal, and consumption, Clegg shows how the harmonious/antagonistic coexistence of institutions, publications, and events gave rise to the dynamic art life of a period that would end in a turning point for Central Europe. As vividly revealed, this was a time and place marked by a simultaneous fear and celebration of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity that has enormous international resonance a century later.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 356 p., 250 b/w + 50 color illus.; Cloth: $75.00; ISBN: 0300111207; ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11120-0
Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire
By Tom Sandqvist
The book shows that Dada did not spring full-grown from a Zurich literary salon but grew out of an already vibrant artistic tradition in Eastern Europe -- particularly Romania -- that was transposed to Switzerland when a group of Romanian modernists settled in Zurich. Bucharest and other cities in Romania had been the scene of Dada-like poetry, prose, and spectacle in the years before World War I. One of the leading lights was Tristan Tzara, who began his career in avant-garde literature at fifteen when he cofounded the magazine Simbolul. Tzara -- who himself coined the term "Dada," inspired by an obscure connection of his birthday to an Orthodox saint -- was at the Cabaret Voltaire that night, along with fellow Romanians Marcel, Jules, and Georges Janco and Arthur Segal. It's not a coincidence, Sandqvist argues, that so many of the first dadaist group were Romanians. Sandqvist traces the artistic and personal transformations that took place in the "little Paris of the Balkans" before they took center stage elsewhere, finding sources as varied as symbolism, futurism, and folklore. He points to a connection between Romanian modernists and the Eastern European Yiddish tradition; Tzara, the Janco brothers, and Segal all grew up within Jewish culture and traditions.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 448 pp., 75 illus., 16 page color insert; $45.00/£29.95 (CLOTH); ISBN-10: 0-262-19507-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-262-19507-2
New Casalini Libri catalogue of Eastern & Central European art & architecture books
Early Polish Modern Art: Unity in Multiplicity
By Marek Bartelik
This work examines four avant-garde groups that emerged in Poland towards the end of World War I; the Poznan Expressionists, the Young Yiddish, the Formists, and the Futurists. It is the first extensive study to bring these four groups together, and in doing so it establishes interconnections between them, and discusses their work in light of socio-political and cultural currents in Poland and wider Europe in the interwar period.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. 272 pp; 40 b&w illustrations; cloth: £60.00; ISBN: 0-7190-6352-3
Galka E. Scheyer & The Blue Four, Correspondence 1924-1945
Edited by Isabel Wunsche
This publication includes a selection of approximately one hundred letters and other extant documents covering the history of the Blue Four, and the interactions between the artists (Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jewlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee) and their American representative, Galka E. Scheyer, the woman who made it her mission to introduce their work to the American public.
Bern: Benteli, 2006. 400 pages, 15 color and 89 black and white illustrations, paperback, price €39
English edition: Galka E. Scheyer & The Blue Four: Correspondence, 1924-1945
ISBN 3-7165-1438-1; ISBN 978-3-7165-1438-2
German edition: Galka E. Scheyer & Die Blaue Vier: Briefwechsel, 1924-1945
ISBN 3-7165-1429-2; ISBN 978-3-7165-1429-0
Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany
By Frederic Schwartz
This book is the first to focus on the extraordinary symbiosis between Critical Theory and other discourses of the visual in the first half of the twentieth century. In four extended case studies, Frederic J. Schwartz traces the way central concepts of the aesthetics later termed “Frankfurt School” were deeply rooted in contemporary developments in painting, photography, architecture, and film, as well as psychology, advertising, and the discipline of art history as it was practiced by figures such as Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Wilhelm Pinder, and Hans Sedlmayr.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 320 p., 93 b/w illus.; cloth: $45.00; ISBN: 030010829X
Time and Place: The Geohistory of Art
Edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Elizabeth Pilliod
This book proposes to return anew to the approach of artistic geography, which had been largely neglected from the Second World War until recently, and to reevaluate the possibilities it provides through a selection of case studies that discuss the connection between art and its place. The introduction and first essay deal with the historiography of the geography of art. Five essays take up specific questions ranging from France and the Low Countries to Mexico and China. The final three essays consider contemporary and broader theoretical issues concerning art in time and place.
Contents
Introduction, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann; Jacob Burckhardt and the 'Renaissance' north of the Alps, Bruce Boucher; Styles and manners: reflections on the longue durée in the history of architecture, Jean Guillaume; Unity and discontinuity in the architecture of the Low Countries, 1530-1700, Konrad A. Ottenheym; Alchemy of wind and water: Amsterdam, 1200-1700, Elisabeth de Bièvre; At the center on the frontier: the Jesuit Tarahumara missions of New Spain, Clara Bargellini; Placing Chinese painting history: the cultural production of the geohistory of painting practice in China, Jennifer Purtle; Between place and time: a critical geography of 'new' Central Europe, Piotr Piotrowski; 'Independent of time and place': on the rise and decline of a modernist ideal, Dario Gamboni; Arbitrariness and authority: how art makes cultures, David Summers; Index.
London, Ashgate Press, 2005. 69 b&w illustrations; 249 pages; Hardback; ISBN: 0 7546 0873 5
Painterly Enlightenment: The Art of Franz Anton Maulbertsch, 1724-1796
By Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724-1796) was an Austrian fresco painter known for his bold use of color. Although he has been recognized in the Central European regions where he worked, Maulbertsch has remained outside the general canon of art history. With Painterly Enlightenment, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann recovers the story of Maulbertsch, offering the first comprehensive English-language study of the long-neglected artist.Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 208 pp., 36 color and 52 b&w illus., 1 map, notes, index, with color inserts; $34.95 cloth; ISBN 0-8078-2956-0
Artists of World War II
by Barbara McCloskey
The first global survey of art in World War II, this volume features selected biographies of artists and detailed discussions of war-era art worlds in China, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Spain, and the United States. Readers can compare and contrast artists' experiences of war in these different countries. They will observe the artists' wide range of responses to war, from producing art works that actively supported the war effort, to criticism of death and destruction.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. 248 pages; photos; Hardcover ISBN: 0-313-32153-1; List Price: $59.95 (UK Sterling Price: £33.99)
Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890-1920
By John V. Maciuika
Offering a thorough new analysis of German architectural history that draws upon long-standing debates in Wilhelmine German history, this book revises our understanding of the roots of the Bauhaus and, by extension, the historical roots of twentieth-century German architecture and design. Region-by-region investigations of architecture and applied arts policies combine with the study of individual imperial ministries to place organizations like the Deutscher Werkbund, along with such leading figures as Walter Gropius, Hermann Muthesius, and Henry van de Velde in an entirely new light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 (392 pp.; 129 illus.; 2 appendices; Hardback ISBN-10: 0521790042, ISBN-13: 9780521790048.
Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945:Politics and Cultural Identity
Edited by Shulamith Behr and Marian MaletThis volume focuses on the contribution of refugees from Nazism to the Arts in Britain. The essays examine the much neglected theme of art in internment and address the spheres of photography, political satire, sculpture, architecture, artists’ organizations, institutional models, dealership and conservation. These are considered under the broad headings ‘Art as Politics’, ‘Between the Public and the Domestic’ and ‘Creating Frameworks’. Such categories assist in posing questions regarding the politics of identity and gender, as well as providing an opportunity to explore the complex issues of cultural formation.
The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 6; 377 pp.; € 76,-/ US $ 95; Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi 2005.
ISBN: 90-420-1786-4
Wzorce Tozsamosci. Recepcja Sztuki Brytyjskiej w Europie Srodkowej Okolo Roku 1900 [Models of Identity. Reception of British Art in Central Europe Around 1900]
by Andrzej SzczerskiThe book, published as part of the series ARS Vetus et Nova edited by Wojciech Balus, examines the ways in which British art, and in particular the philosophy of Arts and Crafts was understood, received and absorbed by Central European artists in the decades framing the end of the nineteenth century. Reviewed in Centropa 5:2 (May 2005).
Polish edition, with English summary. 550 pages, 125 illustrations, Krakow: Universitas [http://www.universitas.com.pl/index.php?PST=ksiazka&id=1737], 2002. ISBN:83-242-0082-7
link to English summary (7.74 MB pdf)
Avantgarda w Cieniu Jalty: Sztuka w Europie Srodkowo-Wschodniej w latach 1945-1989 [Avant Garde in the Shadow of Yalta: Art in East Central Europe 1945-1989]
by Piotr PiotrowskiA comparative study of art produced in the area of East-Central Europe (Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria) during the period from 1945-1989.Polish edition, with English summary. 502 pages, 224 black-and-white illustrations. Poznan: REBIS Publishing House Ltd. [http://www.rebis.com.pl/rebis/start.html], 2005; ISBN: 83-7301-422-5
link to English summary (1.2 MB pdf)
Religion - Macht - Kunst. Die Nazarener
Exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt Kunsthalle. Edited by Max Hollein and Christa Steinle. With a foreword by Max Hollein and texts by Bazon Brock, Cordula Grewe, Rainer Metzger, Cornelia Reiter, Christa Steinle, Michael Thimann, and Beat Wyss.
German edition, 288 pages, 90 color and 79 black-and-white illustrations. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2005.
ISBN 3-88375-940-6; €29,80
Between Ruin and Renewal. Egon Schiele’s Landscapes
by Kimberly A. Smith
A provocative look at Schiele’s landscapes that sheds new light on the artist's work and on Viennese modernism.
232 p.; 8 1/2 x 11; 41 b/w + 48 color illus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
ISBN: Cloth 0300097484; $50.00
Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London. Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere
by Keith HolzA generously illustrated account of Germany's exiled artists in Paris, Prague, and London,and their uphill battle to promote new interpretations of modern German art
7 x 10. 384 pgs. 86 B&W photographs, 6 color photographs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
ISBN: Cloth 0-472-11370-4; $75.00
Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art
by Jenny Anger
A major assessment of the significance and implications of the "decorative" for the work and reception of Paul Klee.
342 pages; 11 line diagrams, 64 half-tones, 8 colour plates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
ISBN: Cloth 0521822505
Toward a Geography of Art
by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
An investigation of the geographical dimension of art history through a series of case studies dealing with the early modern period in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
504 p.; 91 halftones; 6 x 9. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
ISBN: Cloth0-226-13311-7; Paper 0-226-13312-5
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