Global Modernism

In this comprehensive book, published to coincide with a groundbreaking Tate exhibition, leading scholars examine how "the Black Atlantic," a key concept in post-colonial studies coined by British academic Paul Gilroy in 1993, applies to art, and in doing so confirms the centrality of artists of African descent to the formation of modernity. Topics explored include the early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde; the Harlem Renaissance; the cultural links between Africa and Brazil; contemporary and "post-black" art; and the way Paul Gilroy's original concept of the Black Atlantic remains relevant to current discussions of migration and exploitation. The book includes works by leading artists from throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

The twentieth-century world of art has boiled with rebellion and experiment, each generation creating new forms of expression--from Cubism to abstract expressionism, from surrealism to superrealism. The Arts offers a sweeping look at this tumultuous, creative century, in a richly illustrated and accessibly written volume. With over 300 illustrations, many in full color, The Arts ranges across every field of fine art, painting a vivid portrait of the changing styles--and the money, politics, and intellectual trends that have shaped twentieth-century art. The authors examine social standards and politics, and discuss the rise of powerful institutions in the U.S. and Europe as well as the impact of state support and the superheated art market.

The authors of Art Since 1900 adopt a unique, year-by-year structure in which they present more than one hundred and twenty short essays, each focusing on crucial events and the creation of a seminal work, the publication of an artistic manifesto, or the opening of a major exhibition that tell the story of the dazzling diversity of practice and interpretation that characterizes art of this period. Each turning point and breakthrough of modernism and postmodernism is explored in depth, as are the frequent anti-modernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Art Since 1900 introduces students to the key theoretical approaches to modern and contemporary art in a way that enables them to comprehend the many "voices" of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This unique and authoritative reference work contains more than 2,000 clear and concise entries on all aspects of modern and contemporary art. Its impressive range of terms includes movements, styles, techniques, artists, critics, dealers, schools, and galleries. With international coverage, indications of public collections and publicly sited works, and in-depth entries for key topics, this dictionary is a fascinating and thorough guide for anyone with an interest in modern and contemporary culture, amateur or professional.

Modern Art takes the reader through individual movements from Impressionism to Conceptual Art, situating these within five broader chronological themes. Starting with Impressionism in 1860, Dempsey proceeds through the essentials of Modernism, the post-war New Disorder and beyond. The material is arranged with great care to lead the reader through over seventy essential topics of modern art in a practical and easy-to-navigate structure. Each boldly designed feature includes a clear definition of the theme, a list of key artists, features, media and collections, and expertly curated illustrations with explanatory captions.

Modernism and the Museum proposes an entirely new way of looking at the evolution of Modernist art and literature in the West. It shows that existing surveys of Modernism tend to treat the early stages of the movement as a purely European phenomenon, and fail to take account of the powerful and direct influence of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific islands operating via museums and exhibitions, particularly in London. The book positions the museums of London - and especially the British Museum - as the West's most significant hub of transcultural aesthetic exchange during the early Twentieth century. It essentially proposes that, far from representing a development rooted in provincial European culture, Modernism was in fact the result of an unprecedented willingness in the avant-garde of the West to engage with the rest of the world.

"The work of an artist is, in its largest sense, inseparable from history thought of in its largest sense." That is how eminent British art historian Christopher Green described his methodological approach. Art, he argued, needs to be understood as happening in history, not in a vacuum. Of Modernism presents original research by ten contemporary scholars of modern art who studied with Green and follow his historical method. Questions about modernism drive the ten essays, explicitly or otherwise, and they come in as many different shapes.

Between 1947 and 1967, institutions such as the Harmon Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and historically Black colleges and universities collected and exhibited works by many of the most important African artists of the mid-twentieth century. The inventive and irrefutably contemporary nature of these artists' paintings, sculptures, and works on paper defied typical Western narratives about African art being isolated in a "primitive" past. Providing an unprecedented examination of the complex connections between modern African artists and American patrons amid the interlocking histories of civil rights, decolonization, and the Cold War, this fascinating volume reveals a transcontinental network of artists, curators, and scholars that challenged assumptions about African art in the United States and encouraged American engagement with African artists as contemporaries.

Black South African artists have typically had their work labeled "African art" or "township art," qualifiers that, when contrasted with simply "modernist art," have been used to marginalize their work both in South Africa and internationally. This is the The first book to fully explore cosmopolitan modern art by black South Africans under apartheid.

This book examines the development of national emblems, photographic portraiture, oil painting, world expositions, modern spaces for art exhibitions, university programs of visual arts, and other agencies of modern art in Korea. With few books on modern art in Korea available in English, this book is an authoritative volume on the topic and provides a comparative perspective on Asian modernism including Japan, China, and India. In turn, these essays also shed a light on Asian reception of and response to the Orientalism and exoticism popular in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, the history of Asia, Asian studies, colonialism, nationalism, and cultural identity.

In the years between the two world wars, the enormous vogue of "things Mexican" reached its peak. Along with the popular appeal of its folkloric and pictorialist traditions, Mexican culture played a significant role in the formation of modernism in the United States. Mexico and American Modernism analyzes the complex social, intellectual, and artistic ramifications of interactions between avant-garde American artists and Mexico during this critical period.

Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents offers an unprecedented resource for the study of modernism: a compendium of critical art writings by twentieth-century Arab intellectuals and artists. The selection of texts--many of which appear here for the first time in English--includes manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, exhibition guest-book comments, letters, and more. Traversing empires and nation-states, diasporas and speculative cultural and political federations, these documents bring light to the formation of a global modernism, through debates on originality, public space, spiritualism and art, postcolonial exhibition politics, and Arab nationalism, among many other topics.

If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia's inimitable historical condition--its independence save for five years under Italian occupation--mean for its own modernist tradition? In Modernist Art in Ethiopia--the first book-length study of the topic--Elizabeth W. Giorgis recognizes that her home country's supposed singularity, particularly as it pertains to its history from 1900 to the present, cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy. She uses the evolution of modernist art in Ethiopia to open up the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of it in a pan-African context.