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This sweeping work, at once a panoramic overview and an ambitious critical reinterpretation of European modernism, provides a bold new perspective on a movement that defined the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. Walter L. Adamson embarks on a lucid, wide-ranging exploration of the avant-garde practices through which the modernist generations after 1900 resisted the rise of commodity culture as a threat to authentic cultural expression. Taking biographical approaches to numerous avant-garde leaders, Adamson charts the rise and fall of modernist aspirations in movements and individuals as diverse as Ruskin, Marinetti, Kandinsky, Bauhaus, Purism, and the art critic Herbert Read. In conclusion, Adamson rises to the defense of the modernists, suggesting that their ideas are relevant to current efforts to think through what it might mean to create a vibrant, aesthetically satisfying form of cultural democracy.
Tag Gronberg here presents the 1925 Paris Exhibition as a key moment in updating the image of Paris as 'capital of the 19th century'. He focuses on the Exhibition as a set of contesting representations of the modern city, stressing the importance of consumption and display for concepts of urban modernity.
In Place, Race, and Story, author Ned Kaufman has collected his own essays dedicated to the proposition of giving the next generation of preservationists not only a foundational knowledge of the field of study, but more ideas on where they can take it. Through both big-picture essays considering preservation across time, and descriptions of work on specific sites, the essays in this collection trace the themes of place, race, and story in ways that raise questions, stimulate discussion, and offer a different perspective on these common ideas. Including unpublished essays as well as established works by the author, Place, Race, and Story provides a new outline for a progressive preservation movement – the revitalized movement for social progress.
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Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over ...
This book examines how Massachusetts Normal Art School became the alma mater par excellence for generations of art educators, designers, and artists. The founding myth of American art education is the story of Walter Smith, the school’s first principal. This historical case study argues that Smith’s students formed the professional network to disperse art education across the United States, establishing college art departments and supervising school art for industrial cities. As administrative progressives they created institutions and set norms for the growing field of art education. Nineteenth-century artists argued that anyone could learn to draw; by the 1920s, every child was an artist whose creativity waited to be awakened. Arguments for systematic art instruction under careful direction gave way to charismatic artist-teachers who sought to release artistic spirits. The task for art education had been redefined in terms of living the good life within a consumer culture of work and leisure.
In Le Corbusier's Formative Years we learn what made Le Corbusier the person, and the designer that he was. Using twenty years of research, H. Allen Brooks has unearthed an incredible wealth of documents that show every facet of the formative years of this influential architect. "There is much in this fine volume for anyone interested not just in architecture, but in the roots of human creativity and in the origins of the most powerful artistic current of our century. . . . This book is a life's work of scholarship. It has been well spent."—Toronto Globe and Mail
Bringing to light the debt twentieth-century modernist architects owe to the vernacular building traditions of the Mediterranean region, this book considers architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1980s. The essays here situate Mediterranean modernism in relation to concepts such as regionalism, nationalism, internationalism, critical regionalism, and postmodernism - an alternative history of the modern architecture and urbanism of a critical period in the twentieth century.