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When we look at the artworks on display in museums, there is always a real possibility that some of these objects once belonged to victims of the Nazis – a possibility that has remained unacknowledged for far too long. Countless artworks were seized or forcibly sold, with many ending up in museum collections around the world, even in countries which actively fought to defeat Nazi Germany. Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections equips readers with the knowledge and strategies essential for confronting the shadow of the Nazi past in museum collections. Jacques Schuhmacher provides the vital historical orientation required to understand the Nazis’ complex campaign of systematic disposses...
"Across the landscape that until 1939 housed most of the world's Jewish population, the closing decade of the 20th century witnessed dramatic upheavals: the overturning of the East European communist governments and the fall of the USSR, accompanied by a major Jewish emigration movement. The legacy of the Jewish presence in those countries, as viewed from today's vantage point, and the ways in which it became enmeshed in the quest by people of the region-Jews and non-Jews alike-to secure their prospects for the future, highlighted fundamental issues about the nature and quality of the politics of memory, national identity, and the continuity and relative stability of regimes in the region. If those questions were important even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, understanding their implications now seems even more crucial. In a field fraught with conflicting narratives, the challenges of social and political reconstruction are primary concerns for peoples and governments. The experts contributing to this volume apply interdisciplinary approaches to analyze and interpret a multiplicity of post-communist social realities and aid our understanding of recent events"--
This volume focuses on Jewish American identity within the context of Pop art in New York City during the sixties to reveal the multivalent identities and selves often ignored in Pop scholarship. Melissa L. Mednicov establishes her study within the context of prominent Jewish artists, dealers, institutions, and collectors in New York City in the Pop sixties. Mednicov incorporates the historiography of Jewish identity in Pop art—the ways by which identity is named or silenced—to better understand how Pop art made, or marked, different modes of identity in the sixties. By looking at a nexus of the art world in this period and the ways in which Jewish identity was registered or negated, Mednicov is able to further consider questions about the ways mass culture influenced Pop art and its participants—and, to a larger extent, formed further modes of identity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Jewish studies, and American studies.
The German writer and art critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. In Form as Revolt Sebastian Zeidler recovers Einstein's multifaceted career, offering the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Einstein in English.Einstein first emerged as a writer of experimental prose through his involvement with the anarchist journal Die Aktion. After a few limited forays into art criticism, he burst onto the art scene in 1915 with his book Negro Sculpture, at once a formalist intervention into the contemporary theory and practice of European sculpture and a manifesto for the soph...
Explore the tradition of the political essay with this brilliant anthology. David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics. In Writing Politics, Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history—revolution and war, racism, women’s rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and nonviolence, among them—and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, along with a wide-ranging introduction.
Marcel Broodthaers's (Belgian, 1924-1976) extraordinary output across mediums placed him at the center of international activity during the transformative decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout his career, from early objects variously made of mussels, eggshells, and books of his own poetry; to his most ambitious project, the Musée d'Art Moderne. Département des Aigles; and the Décors made at the end of his life, Broodthaers occupied a unique position, often operating as both innovator and commentator. Setting a precedent for what we call installation art today, his work has had a profound influence on a broad range of contemporary artists, and he remains vitally relevant to cultural d...
A strikingly original exploration of the profound impact of World War II on how we understand the art that survived it By the end of World War II an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books had been seized from their owners by Nazi forces; many were destroyed. The artworks and cultural artifacts that survived have traumatic, layered histories. This book traces the biographies of these objects--including paintings, sculpture, and Judaica--their rescue in the aftermath of the war, and their afterlives in museums and private collections and in our cultural understanding. In examining how this history affects the way we view these works, scholars discuss the moral and aesthetic impli...
The beautiful catalogue that accompanies the critically-acclaimed exhibition currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum Best known for her striking drawings of ocean surfaces, begun in 1968 and revisited over many years both in drawings and paintings, Vija Celmins (b. 1938) has been creating exquisitely detailed renderings of natural imagery for more than five decades. The oceans were followed by desert floors and night skies--all subjects in which vast, expansive distances are distilled into luminous, meticulous, and mesmerizing small-scale artworks. For Celmins, this obsessive "redescribing" of the world is a way to understand human consciousness in relation to lived experience. The firs...
Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022 Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense – economic and political, artistic and personal.
"The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington"--Colophon.