The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise.Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.

    Focusing on this American period, Conversations with Mies van der Rohe, the latest addition to our Conversations series, gives fresh credence to this claim by presenting the architect's most important design concerns in his own words. In this collectionof interviews Mies talks freely about his relationship with clients, the common language he aimed for in his architecturalprojects, the influences on his work, and the synthesis of architecture and technology that he advanced in his designs and built works.Conversations with Mies van der Rohe makes an important contribution to the corpus of Mies scholarship. It presents a vivid picture of a master of modernism, bringing his artistic biography to a close while completing the scope of his style in terms of techniques, scale, use of materials, and typology. An essay by Iaki balos provides a context for these interviews and looks at Mies's legacy from a contemporary perspective.

    His astonishing large-scale color photographs of the landscapes of mining, quarrying, railcutting, recycling, oil refining, and shipbreaking uncover a stark, almost sublime beauty in the residue of industrial “progress.” The implicit social and environmental upheavals that underlie these images make them powerful emblems of our times.This handsome catalogue of the first major retrospective of Burtynsky’s work features essays by Lori Pauli, Kenneth Baker, and Mark Haworth-Booth, as well as a wide-ranging interview with the artist by Michael Torosian. The book includes sixty-four color plates.

    It also relates the extraordinary history of the museum's collection, a collection that has enabled the Van Gogh Museum to evolve into a world-renowned centre of knowledge about Van Gogh's work and the art of his time.

    In 1926, Halpert, just twenty-six years old, opened one of the first art galleries in Greenwich Village and set about turning the art world upside down. Her Downtown Gallery, which she ran for forty-four years, laid the groundwork for the art market's modern era, and its aggressive promotion and sales tactics. Halpert cultivated the most illustrious art collectors of the day, invented the market for folk art, and pushed the first group of American artists working in a modern vernacular into the history books, including Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Dove. Despite all this, Edith Halpert herself has been lost to history. Until now. In The Girl with the Gallery, journalist Lindsay Pollock brings Halpert and her era vividly back to life, tracing the story of how this remarkable woman, who started out a penniless Jewish immigrant, made it her mission to fight for American art and artists. Illlustrated with eight pages of full color photographs, this is biography at its finest, an unforgettable story of class, money, vanity, jealousy, and tragic loss.

    It has influenced a generation of students and critics interested in the formation of attitudes, themes, and forms which were characteristic of artists and architects working primarily in Europe between 1900 and 1930 under the compulsion of new technological developments in the first machine age.

    It has been out of print for many years and until the release of this brand new edition was as rare as hen's teeth, with some old copies fetching prices of up to USD $600.00. This new edition features a beautiful new cover and has been revised and updated by the author. Know this: I, Mercurius, have set down a full, true and infallible account of the Great Work. But I give you fair warning that unless you seek the true philosophical gold and not the gold of the vulgar; unless your heart is fixed with unbending intent on the true Stone of the Philosophers, unless you are steadfast in your quest, abiding by God s laws in all faith and humility and eschewing all vanity, conceit, falsehood, intemperance, pride, lust and faintheartedness, read no further lest I prove fatal to you. In 1952 a country clergyman called Smith begins his tortuous quest for the Holy Grail of alchemy - the Philosophers' Stone which transmutes base metal to gold and confers immortality. As he pits himself against the bizarre perils of the GreatWork, it becomes clear that his arcane transformations are as much spiritual as chemical. Gradually the shadow of alchemy falls over those around him; a young girl whose sudden pregnancy is a local scandal; Janet, trapped in a barren marriage; and Robert who pursues his own quest for the legendary blue glass of Chartres. Thirty years later, Eileen comes to live in Smith's vicarage. In the medieval cellar she unearths a hidden manuscript and begins to read of secret fire and mysterious prime matter, a green lion and a raven's head, a fatal conjunction of king and queen, a descent into Blackness and putrefaction. As she penetrates farther into the alchemical labyrinth, she is haunted both by her own history and by that of her neighbours, the menacing Mrs Zetterberg and the disfigured Pluto - and, finally, by the enigma of Smith himself. In separate but interwoven accounts, Smith and Eileen strive towards the one thing necessary for the Work's success -the great Secret guarded by the paradoxical Mercurius, who leads them to the zero point where Heaven is wedded to Earth and the miraculous Stone appears at the intersection of time and eternity. By reconstructing a highly sophisticated but almost forgotten world-view, Mercurius restores to us our own spiritual heritage which, rooted in the alchemists' dark retorts, will perhaps flower in the light of the future.

    

    The impressive photographs of works from all visual arts movements are at the center of these richly illustrated volumes. The books successfully provide an overview of the artistic diversity of the individual periods, and they couldn't have been written and illustrated any more clearly. The informative and interesting texts have been written by renowned authors from the fields of history, architecture and art history, providing a multifaceted view of each period. These books are a real pleasure for anyone with an interest in art.

    . .out, out, out he runs! flying through the garden--marigold, geranium, blackberry, raspberry--past the church with its tall steeple, down rolling hills and sandy paths meant for sheep, He dives at last into the velvety, violet heath, snuggles under a blanket of sapphire sky, and looks up, up, up . . . to visit with the stars. Vincent van Gogh often found himself unable to sleep and wandered under starlit skies. Those nighttime experiences provided the inspiration for many of his paintings, including his most famous, The Starry Night. Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime--but he continued to pursue his unique vision, and ultimately became one of the most beloved artists of all time.

    The book comprises a string of dramatic and evocative locales, each embodying specific artistic tendencies and together spanning the modern era--from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarme to the Folies-Bergere, attend a lecture by Emerson, and visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Ranciere uses these sites and events--some famous, others forgotten--to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the distinctions between the different arts along with the borders separating them from ordinary experience.This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from conventional understandings of modernism.

    First published in Germany in 1925, it presents unforgettable images from the tense and dynamic Weimar period, rendered in 100 woodcuts of remarkable force and beauty.A pacifist during World War I, Belgian-born Frans Masereel (1889-1972) sympathized with the struggles of the working classes and strived to make his art accessible to ordinary people. His evocative woodcuts convey scenes of work and leisure, wealth and deprivation, and joy and loneliness. Banned by the Nazis, Masereel's works were championed in Communist countries; however, the artist steered clear of political affiliations. His clarity of vision transcends any propagandist use of the images, which stand as timeless indictments of oppression and injustice.Thomas Mann described Masereel's works as "so strangely compelling, so deeply felt, so rich in ideas that one never tires of looking at them." Epic and unflinching in its scope, The City continues to influence modern fine and graphic art, while recapturing the mood of a vanished era.

    Thisoften leads exasperated viewers to exclaim--is this really art?In this invaluable primer on aesthetics, Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are so highly valued in art, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many engrossing examples. Writing clearly and perceptively, she explores the cultural meanings of art in different contexts, and highlights the continuities of tradition that stretch from modern, often sensational, works back to the ancient halls of the Parthenon, to the medieval cathedral of Chartres, and to African nkisi nkondi fetish statues. She explores the difficulties of interpretation, examines recent scientific research into the ways the brain perceives art, and looks to the still-emerging worlds of art on the web, video art, art museum CD-ROMS, and much more. In addition, Freeland guides us through the various theorists of art, from Aristotle and Kant to Baudrillard. Lastly, throughout this nuanced account of theories, artists, and works, Freeland provides us with a rich understanding of how cultural significance is captured in a physical medium, and why challenging our perceptions is, and always has been, central to the whole endeavor.It is instructive to recall that Henri Matisse himself was originally derided as a "wild beast." To horrified critics, his bold colors and distorted forms were outrageous. A century later, what was once shocking is now considered beautiful. And that, writes Freeland, is art.

    Even today remembered primarily as the mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, the once infamous photographer, Wagstaff, in fact, had an incalculable—and largely overlooked—influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century.  Born in New York City in 1921 into a notable family, Wagstaff followed an arc that was typical of a young man of his class. He attended both Hotchkiss and Yale, served in the navy, and would follow in step with his Ivy League classmates to the "gentleman's profession," as an ad executive on Madison Avenue. With his unmistakably good looks, he projected an aura of glamour and was cited by newspapers as one of the most eligible bachelors of the late 1940s. Such accounts proved deceiving, for Wagstaff was forced to live in the closet, his homosexuality only revealed to a small circle of friends. Increasingly uncomfortable with his career and this double life, he abandoned advertising, turned to the formal study of art history, and embarked on a radical personal transformation that was in perfect harmony with the tumultuous social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s.Accordingly, Wagstaff became a curator, in 1961, at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, where he mounted both "Black, White, and Gray"—the first museum show of minimal art—and the sculptor Tony Smith's first museum show, while lending his early support to artists Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, and Richard Tuttle, among many others. Later, as a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, he brought the avant-garde to a regional museum, offending its more staid trustees in the process.After returning to New York City in 1972, the fifty-year-old Wagstaff met the twenty-five-year-old Queens-born Robert Mapplethorpe, then living with Patti Smith. What at first appeared to be a sexual dalliance became their now historic lifelong romance, in which Mapplethorpe would foster Wagstaff's own burgeoning interest in contemporary photography and Wagstaff would help secure Mapplethorpe's reputation in the art world. In spite of their profound class differences, the artistic union between the philanthropically inclined Wagstaff and the prodigiously talented Mapplethorpe would rival that of Stieglitz and O’Keefe, or Rivera and Kahlo, in their ability to help reshape contemporary art history.Positioning Wagstaff's personal life against the rise of photography as a major art form and the simultaneous formation of the gay rights movement, Philip Gefter's absorbing biography provides a searing portrait of New York just before and during the age of AIDS. The result is a definitive and memorable portrait of a man and an era.

    In the book he argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography." - wikipedia