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Käthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin are among the exceptional artists associated with the emergence of Expressionism in Germany in the early decades of the 20th century. Each challenged prevailing ideals of feminine identity at a time of great societal change. As women, they were expected to marry and raise a family; some chose to, some did not. As ambitious artists, they wanted to work. As they rose to these challenges, their art further undermined co...

A handbook on contemporary Italian art This lavishly illustrated publication charts the history of Italian art over the last several decades, with a focus on iconic works by artists including Carla Accardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Schifano, Luigi Ghirri and Anna Maria Maiolino from the MAXXI collection in Rome.

This richly illustrated volume features expressive paintings by three East Asian and Asian American painters whose lives were fundamentally shaped by the major conflicts of the twentieth century. Internationally recognized Hong Kong artist, Chao Shao-an, shaped modernist approaches to Chinese ink painting. Through the metaphorical subjects of bird-and-flower paintings, he ruminated on events from the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 to the return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China...

An essential new look at the design philosophy that interrogated modern living against the turbulent political landscape of 1960s Italy In the mid-1960s, reacting to contemporary social and political upheaval, young Italian architects and designers began developing a new style that openly challenged Modernism. Known as “Radical design,” this movement probed possibilities for visually transforming the urban environment. Radical design’s proponents also applied it to items such as furniture and li...

An examination of the innovative portrayals of industry and leisure created by five avant-garde artists working at Asnières in the late nineteenth century From 1881 to 1890, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand chose Asnières, a suburb of Paris, as a site of artistic experimentation. Located on the Seine, Asnières became a popular destination for Parisians thanks to aquatic sports and festivals starting in the 1850s, facilitated by the arrival of new...

A fresh look at the Arts and Crafts Movement, charting its origins in reformist ideals, its engagement with commercial culture, and its ultimate place in everyday households  In its spread from Britain to the United States, the Arts and Crafts Movement evolved from its roots in individual craftsmanship to a mainstream trend increasingly adapted for mass production by American retailers. Inspired by John Ruskin in Britain in the 1840s in response to what he saw as the corrosive forces of industri...

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, Let me consider it from here features color reproductions of artworks by Saul Fletcher, Brook Hsu, and Tetsumi Kudo and transcriptions of the audio works of Constance DeJong, alongside newly commissioned poems by Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Simone White, and Lynn Xu, and an epilogue by Solveig Øvstebø. These artists frequently draw from their own histories, humors, and instincts as they grapple with or reimagine what’s happening in the world around...

In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950–1969 traces this unique school’s impact on American art during the mid-twentieth century. Accompanying a landmark exhibition, this catalogue documents Haystack’s innovative pedagogy and its role as a major force in the studio craft movement. Anni Albers, Robert Arneson, Dale Chihuly, Arline Fisch, Jack Lenor Larsen, Harvey Littleton, and Toshiko Takaezu are among the artists who helped define the school’s model of communally oriented, pro...

Over the course of the 18th century a great number of artists, ranging from established painters and sculptors to amateurs, experimented with etching, an accessible form of printmaking akin to drawing. In a period when artists strained to navigate the highly regulated Académie Royale and the increasingly discordant public spheres of the marketplace and the Salon, etching afforded them stylistic freedom and allowed them to produce exquisite works of art in a spirit of collaboration and experiment...

More than sixty years have passed since the critic Robert Coates, writing in The NewYorker in 1946, first used the term‘Abstract Expressionism’ to describe the richly coloured canvases of Hans Hofmann. The name stuck, and over the years it has come to designate the paintings and sculptures of artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman,Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and David Smith. The achievements of this generation, which put NewYork City on the map as the centr...

Artists in the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: either join the official academies and make art that conformed to the state’s aesthetic and ideological dictates, or attempt to develop alternative artistic practices and spheres for exhibiting their work. In the early 1970s, conceptual artists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov chose the latter option, turning their limited resources into an asset by pioneering an entirely new artistic genre: the album. Somewhere between drawings and novels,...

ON MY MODERN MET'S TOP TEN LIST OF BEST CREATIVE BOOKS TO CELEBRATE THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF MOON LANDING The moon—its face, color, and power—threads through the tapestry of American landscape painting, holding timeless allure for artists and beloved by viewers of paintings everywhere. The Hudson River Museum has organized The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art—the first major museum examination of the moon in American visual arts from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries...

Inspired by Paul Gauguin in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Nabis saw themselves as prophets of a new art. This vibrant illustrated book showcases rarely seen paintings, prints, and decorative arts by the visionary artists associated with the Nabis: Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Henri Evenepoel, Aristide Maillol, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Felix Vallotton, Edouard Vuillard, and others. Essays by leading scholars of European modernism explore the relationship between Nabi a...

The Three Philosophers by Giorgione (Italian, 1477 1510) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and St. Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1424/35 1516) in The Frick Collection, New York, are two of the most celebrated paintings of the Venetian Renaissance. Between at least 1525 and 1556 the two paintings were displayed together in the same house in Venice, the palazzo of Taddeo Contarini (ca. 1466 1540), a member of one of Venice's wealthiest patrician families. For the first tim...

With its rugged shoreline, magnificent Cathedral Woods, and rustic cedar-shingled homes, Monhegan Island is quintessential Maine. This historic fishing village situated 10 miles off the coast has long been a haven for artists drawn to the splendor of its ocean vistas and picturesque wildlands and for ecologists fascinated by its complex natural history. Merging art, science, and history, this book explores the broad arc of ecological events on the island the formation and abandonment of pasturel...

As the status of sound in art and music evolves and redefines itself, so too does sound art find new ways of describing its history. See This Sound compiles a huge number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic "eye music" of Hans Richter as...

Future Shock is the catalog accompanying SITE Santa Fe’s exhibition of the same title. The name is inspired by Alvin Toffler’s prophetic book Future Shock (published in 1970), in which he describes the profound impact of the acceleration of technological, social and structural change in contemporary life. Themes explored in the exhibition include: the role of technology in our lives and the effects of globalism, population growth, surveillance, privacy and the Anthropocene. With Toffler’s pred...