History

By Anne-Marie O'Connor The true story that inspired the movie Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. The Award-Winning Nazi Art Theft SagaWinner of the Marfield National Award for Arts WritingWinner of a California Book Award “Fascinating. . . . A mesmerizing tale of art and the Holocaust.” —The Washington Post“Writing with a novelist’s dynamism, O’Connor resurrects fascinating individuals and tells a many-faceted, intensely affecting, and profoundly revelatory tale of the inciting power of art and the unending need for justice.”—Booklist, starred review“O’Connor skillfully filters Austria’s troubled twentieth century through the life of Klimt’s most beloved muse. . . . A nuanced view of a painting whose story transcends its own time.” —BookforumContributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O’Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece—the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government.When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, its decision had profound ramifications in the art world. Expertly researched, masterfully told, The Lady in Gold is at once a stunning depiction of fin-de siècle Vienna, a riveting tale of Nazi war crimes, and a fascinating glimpse into the high-stakes workings of the contemporary art world.Paperback349 pagesVintage Books, 20155.2 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9781101873120Art History, Nonfiction

The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece [Paperback]

By Rainer Metzger It was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, of brilliant book design, of the Bauhaus total work of art, of pioneering psychology, of drag balls, cabaret, Metropolis, and Marlene Dietrich’s rising star in theater and silent film. Between the paroxysms of two world wars, Berlin in the 1920s was a carpe diem cultural heyday, replete with groundbreaking art, invention, and thought.This book immerses readers in the freewheeling spirit of Berlin’s Weimar age. Through exemplary works in painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic design, photography, and film, we uncover the innovations, ideas, and precious dreams that characterized this unique cultural window. We take in the jazz bars and dance halls; the crowded Kinos and flapper fashion; the advances in technology and transport; the radio towers and rumbling trams and trains; the soaring buildings; the cinematic masterworks; and the newly independent women who smoked cigarettes, wore their hair short, and earned their own money.Featured works in this vivid cultural portrait include Hannah Höch’s Journalists; Lotte Jacobi’s Hands on the Typewriter; Otto Dix’s Portrait of Sylvia von Harden; Peter Behrens’s Project Alexanderplatz; and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, starring Dietrich as cabaret performer Lola Lola. Along the way, we explore both the utopian yearnings and the more ominous economic and political realities which fueled the era’s escapist, idealistic, or reactionary masterworks. Behind the bright lights and glitter dresses, we see the inflation, factory labor, and fragile political consensus that lurked beneath this golden era and would eventually spell its savage end with the rise of National Socialism.Hardcover96 pagesTaschen, 20178.4 x 0.5 x 10.3 inchesISBN 9783836550505Art History, German History

Berlin in the 1920s

By Stefan Zweig Translated by Anthea Bell Cover illustration by Edward Steichen Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture. His passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the edge of extinction. This new translation by award-winning Anthea Bell captures the spirit of Zweig’s writing in arguably his most revealing work. Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was born in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig traveled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide. Also available in German here. Paperback472 pagesNebraska University Press, 2013Originally published in 19415.5 x 1 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9780803226616Biography, History, Travel

The World of Yesterday

By Joseph RothTranslated by Michael Hoffmann "Nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance."—Jeffrey Eugenides, New York Times Book Review "A singular achievement of both journalism and literature, a travel guide composed by a...poet who captured a city at its most cosmopolitan—and on the brink of collapse."—Thane Rosenbaum, Washington Post Book World "There is a poem on every page of Joseph Roth."—Joseph Brodsky What I Saw, like no other existing work, records the violent social and political paroxysms that compromised and ultimately destroyed the precarious democracy that was the Weimar Republic. As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re-creates the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness. Against the traditional portrayal of Berlin as an entrepôt of fun and transport, of government, nightlife, and literary glamour, Joseph Roth’s gritty depiction chronicles the lives of the city’s forgotten inhabitants: the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues. Paperback240 pagesW.W. Norton & Co., 2004Originally Published in 19845.5 x 0.7 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9780393325829History, German History

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

By Carl E. Schorske “A profound work…on one of the most important chapters of modern intellectual history”—H.R. Trevor-Roper, front page, The New York Times Book Review“Invaluable to the social and political historian…as well as to those more concerned with the arts”—John Willett, The New York Review of Books“A work of original synthesis and scholarship. Engrossing.”—Newsweek A Pulitzer Prize Winner and landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born. Paperback432 pagesVintage, 19806.1 x 0.9 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780394744780Austrian History

Fin De Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture

By Eric R. Kandel “In a polymathic performance, a Nobel laureate weaves together the theories and practices of neuroscience, art and psychology to show how our creative brains perceive and engage art—and are consequently moved by it . . . A transformative work that joins the hands of Art and Science and makes them acknowledge their close kinship.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “A fascinating synthesis of art, history, and science that is also accessible to the general reader. A distinctive and important title that is also a pleasure to read”—Library Journal, Starred Review “Eric Kandel’s training as a psychiatrist and his vast knowledge of how the brain works enrich this thoroughly original exploration of the relationship between the birth of psychoanalysis, Austrian Expressionism, and Modernism in Vienna.”—Margaret Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art. Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers—Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele—inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today’s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history. Hardcover656 pagesRandom House Publishers, 20126.6 x 1.6 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9781400068715Austrian History, Art History, Psychology

The Age of Insight

By Mel Gordon When Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings.This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from the pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring performers, filmmakers, historians straight and gay, designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson. It is the visual scrapbook and inspired design source of hit television series, Babylon Berlin.Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new illustrated chapter “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” This edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts, Berlin fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit”), gay life (“A Wild-Boy Initiation!”), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister Crowley’s Berlin OTO secret society, and sex crime (“The Curious Career and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich”). Paperback300 pagesFeral House, 20088 x 0.8 x 11 inchesISBN 9780922915965German History

Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

By Volker WeidermannTranslated from German by Carol Brown Janeway “Intimate . . . Weidermann gives us a glimpse of what was, to many of these writers, a brief but rare home.”—Claire Hazelton, The Guardian“Potent and melancholy . . . Weidermann has combed letters, books, diaries, and reminiscences and used them to tell his sad tale as if it were a novel."—Michael Prodger, The Times, London“Dazzling. . . Graceful. For such a slim book to convey with such poignancy the extinction of a generation of ‘Great Europeans’ is a triumph.”—The Sunday Telegraph“Beautifully translated by Carol Brown Janeway . . . a short but vital calm-before-the-storm history, one that shines a valuable light on two of the 20th century’s finest writers . . . rich in insight and empathy. This is a sparkling gem.”—Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star-Tribune It’s the summer of 1936, and the writer Stefan Zweig is in crisis. His German publisher no longer wants him, his marriage is collapsing, and his house in Austria—searched by the police two years earlier—no longer feels like home. He’s been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town that is a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with fellow writer and semi-estranged close friend Joseph Roth, who is himself about to fall in love. For a moment, they create a fragile haven. But as Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn. In Ostend, Volker Weidermann lyrically recounts “the summer before the dark,” when a coterie of artists, intellectuals, drunks, revolutionaries, and madmen found themselves in limbo while Europe teetered on the edge of fascism and total war. Ostend is the true story of two of the twentieth century’s great writers, written with a novelist’s eye for pacing, chronology, and language—a dazzling work of historical nonfiction. Hardcover164 pagesPantheon, 2016 5.4 x 0.8 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781101870266Literature, Biography, European History

Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark

By Joseph RothTranslated by Michael HoffmannWith a Comment by Elie Wiesel "[A] book of impassioned reportage and polemic...it is impossible not to feel a sympathetic wonder."—Michael Andre Bernstein, The New Republic "In these disturbing yet strikingly illuminating pages, the truth of Jewish destiny from long ago vibrates and sings..."—Elie Wiesel "[C]aptures and encapsulates Europe in those uncertain hours before the upheaval of a continent and the annihilation of a civilization."—Cynthia Ozick, author of Quarrel and Quandary One of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century, Joseph Roth (1894-1939) wrote these evocative dispatches between the two World Wars. In them he warned of the false comforts of Jewish assimilation, laid bare the schism between Eastern and Western Jews, reflected on the concept of Jewish identity, and looked with foreboding at Germany’s future. The combined exigency and restrained contemplation of Roth’s writing have earned him comparisons to his more celebrated contemporaries Thomas Mann and Isaac Babel. Now brilliantly rendered by the award-wining translator Michael Hofmann, The Wandering Jews offers a unique view of the European Jewish experience at a critical juncture of world history. Paperback168 pagesW.W. Norton & Co., 2001Originally Published in 19275 x 0.5 x 7.5 inchesISBN 9780393322705History

The Wandering Jews: The Classic Portrait of A Vanished People

By Pieter M. Judson “Pieter M. Judson’s book informs and stimulates. If his account of Habsburg achievements, especially in the 18th century, is rather starry-eyed, it is a welcome corrective to the black legend usually presented. Lucid, elegant, full of surprising and illuminating details, it can be warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in modern European history.”—Tim Blanning, The Wall Street Journal“Crisply written and nuanced… With invigorating precision, [Judson] analyses how the state was built up by various forces working simultaneously from above and below. His view is not blurred by the unhelpful nostalgia with which so many accounts are suffused.”—Adam Zamoyski, Literary Review“Strongly revisionist and effortlessly wide-ranging, Judson’s book offers a strikingly original interpretation of Austria-Hungary as an empire rather than a collection of hostile national groups. This powerful insight should change how we think about European history.”—Robert Nemes, author of Another Hungary: The Nineteenth-Century Provinces in Eight Lives In a panoramic and pioneering reappraisal, Pieter Judson shows why the Habsburg Empire mattered so much, for so long, to millions of Central Europeans. Across divides of language, religion, region, and history, ordinary women and men felt a common attachment to “their empire,” while bureaucrats, soldiers, politicians, and academics devised inventive solutions to the challenges of governing Europe’s second largest state. In the decades before and after its dissolution, some observers belittled the Habsburg Empire as a dysfunctional patchwork of hostile ethnic groups and an anachronistic imperial relic. Judson examines their motives and explains just how wrong these rearguard critics were. Rejecting fragmented histories of nations in the making, this bold revision surveys the shared institutions that bridged difference and distance to bring stability and meaning to the far-flung empire. By supporting new schools, law courts, and railroads, along with scientific and artistic advances, the Habsburg monarchs sought to anchor their authority in the cultures and economies of Central Europe. A rising standard of living throughout the empire deepened the legitimacy of Habsburg rule, as citizens learned to use the empire’s administrative machinery to their local advantage. Nationalists developed distinctive ideas about cultural difference in the context of imperial institutions, yet all of them claimed the Habsburg state as their empire. The empire’s creative solutions to governing its many lands and peoples—as well as the intractable problems it could not solve—left an enduring imprint on its successor states in Central Europe. Its lessons remain no less important today. Paperback 592 pages Harvard University Press, 20186.2 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches ISBN 9780674986763Austrian History

The Habsburg Empire: A New History

At once an invaluable photographic record of life in Weimar Berlin and a timeless demonstration of the cinema's ability to enthrall on a purely visceral level, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City offers a kaleidoscopic view of a single day in the life of a bustling metropolis.Carl Mayer (The Last Laugh), influenced by the naturalistic Kammerspiel movement, envisioned "a melody of pictures" sprung from daily reality instead of the stylized artificiality of the studio-bound expressionist film. Following Mayer's rough outline, photographer Karl Freund deployed a team of cameramen to explore the avenues, alleyways and factories of Berlin and secure hidden-camera glimpses of the people and machinery that provide the city with its constant motion. The many hours of footage were then edited into a series of five acts, like movements of a symphony, by Walther Ruttmann as a continuation of his experiments with abstract motion.Berlin defined the formula of the "city symphony" film and according to John Grierson- the filmmaker/critic who coined the term "documentary" - "No film has been more influential, more imitated."Opus IA rare example of the German avant-garde cinema known as absoluter Film, Walther Ruttmann's hand-colored Opus I is an exploration of the geometry of movement within the frame and the sensory effect these abstract shapes evoke as they swell, streak and swim across the screen. Viewed alongside Berlin, Opus I seems a thumbnail sketch for the sweeping slice-of-life documentary, revealing the degree to which Ruttmann's 1923 film was more a spectacle of raw motion than a documentary portrait of Berlin's daily routines. Opus I is accompanied by Max Butting's 1922 score, adapted and conducted by Timothy Brock.Berlin, Symphony of a Great CityDirected by Walther RuttmanGermany 192762 MinutesBlack and WhiteSilentOpus IDirected by Walther RuttmannGermany 192210 MinutesColorSilent Flicker AlleyNTSC FormatISBN 889290092014Documentary, DVD

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City [DVD]

By Rose-Carol Washton Long "An indispensable anthology that immediately renders its predecessors obsolete. With its gathering of public and private documents, it carries us through the rise and fall of one of the great upheavals of modern art." —Robert Rosenblum, New York University"These essays, including many previously unavailable in English, are rich with startling new insights into the German Expressionist psyche. Elucidating the artists' view of government, the role of women in modern society, and their own ambivalence about the effectiveness of abstract art, this anthology is essential reading for all scholars and students of twentieth-century art." —Joan Marter, author of Alexander CalderGerman Expressionism, one of the most significant movements of early European modernism, was an enormously powerful element in Germany's cultural life from the end of the Wilhelmkine Empire to the Third Reich. While the movement embraced such diverse artists as E. L. Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Käthe Kollwitz, and George Grosz, all the participants shared an almost messianic belief in the power of art to change society. Rose-Carol Washton Long has drawn together over eighty documents crucial to the understanding of German Expressionism, many of them translated for the first time into English. Rose-Carol Washton Long is Professor of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among her books is Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style. Paperback 370 pagesUniversity of California Press, 19955.9 x 1 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9780520202641Art History, Expressionism

German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism

By John Michael Greer Take an enlightening journey through occult history, exploring 100 dramatic incidents, arcane knowledge, and key historical figures from around the world. John Michael Greer delves into two millennia of tradition, from the earliest alchemists to pagan rituals; from the Philosopher’s Stone to Cabala, the first tarot, and the Knights Templar; and from the first horoscopes to fortune-telling trials and the birth of modern witchcraft, or Wicca. Each entry features a stunning image or intriguing item of ephemera. Hardcover224 PagesSterling, 20177 x 1 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9781454925774History, Occult

The Occult Book: A Chronological Journey from Alchemy to Wicca

Edited by Dawn Ades The revolutionary Dada movement, though short-lived, produced a vast amount of creative work in both art and literature during the years that followed World War I. Rejecting all social and artistic conventions, Dadaists went to the extremes of provocative behavior, creating “anti-art” pieces that ridiculed and questioned the very nature of creative endeavor. To understand their movement’s heady mix of anarchy and nihilism—combined with a lethal dash of humor—it’s essential to engage with the artists’ most important writings and manifestos. And that is is precisely where this reader comes in. Bringing together key Dada texts, many of them translated into English for the first time, this volume immerses readers in some of the most famous (and infamous) periodicals of the time, from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire and Francis Picabia’s 391to Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man and Kurt Schwitters’s Merz. Published in Europe and the United States between 1916 and 1932, these journals constituted the movement’s lifeblood, communicating the desires and aspirations of the artists involved. In addition to providing the first representative selection of these texts, The Dada Reader also includes excerpts from many lesser-known American and Eastern European journals. Compiled with both students and general readers in mind, this volume is necessary reading for anyone interested in one of the most dynamic and influential movements of the twentieth century. Please note that Rare/Out-of-Print titles are very limited in stock. Paperback320 pagesUniversity Of Chicago Press, 20066 x 0.9 x 9 inchesISBN 9780226006987Dadaism

The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology

By Katharina von Ankum"A landmark work of German cultural studies. The richness of the material is dazzling: each of the essays opens up new areas of scholarly inquiry and connects, in surprising and illuminating ways, with other essays in the volume."—Maria Tatar, author of Lustmord"These are thought-provoking readings of the 'New Woman's' encounters with modernity in Weimar culture."—Atina Grossmann, author of Reforming SexBringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies. Paperback264 pagesUniversity of California Press, 19976 x 0.6 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9780520204652German History, Women's Studies, Gender Studies

Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture

Edited by Iain Boyd Whyte & David Frisby “Rich and engrossing. . . . Berlin’s transformation takes place vividly before our eyes.”—Andrew Mead, The Architectural Review"Metropolis Berlin is a superb collection of important texts. The selections are at once representative and delightfully off-beat; the editorial signposts are helpful but do not discourage rogue exploration or thematic innovation by the reader; and the presentation (from translation quality to layout design) is excellent. An absolute no-brainer, a must-have for every library, Germanist, and lover of Berlin."—Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature“Metropolis Berlin evokes a kaleidoscopic panorama of impressions, opinions, and utopian hopes that constituted Berlin from the end of Imperial Germany to the rise of National Socialism. Iain Boyd Whyte and the late David Frisby invite the reader to be a flâneur in a truly great city, to marvel at the vitality of its urban spaces, and to listen to the cacophony of its voices and sounds. This extraordinary anthology of hundreds of documents tells the story of metropolitan Berlin by letting its inhabitants, visitors, and critics speak. A must have for every personal bookshelf and library.”—Volker M. Welter, Professor for Architectural History, University of California at Santa Barbara Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940 reconstitutes the built environment of Berlin during the period of its classical modernity using over two hundred contemporary texts, virtually all of which are published in English translation for the first time. They are from the pens of those who created Berlin as one of the world’s great cities and those who observed this process: architects, city planners, sociologists, political theorists, historians, cultural critics, novelists, essayists, and journalists. Divided into nineteen sections, each prefaced by an introductory essay, the account unfolds chronologically, with the particular structural concerns of the moment addressed in sequence—be they department stores in 1900, housing in the 1920s, or parade grounds in 1940. Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940 not only details the construction of Berlin, but explores homes and workplaces, public spaces, circulation, commerce, and leisure in the German metropolis as seen through the eyes of all social classes, from the humblest inhabitants of the city slums, to the great visionaries of the modern city, and the demented dictator resolved to remodel Berlin as Germania. Hardcover632 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20126 x 2 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520270374German History, Architecture, Urban Studies

Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940

By Lynn H. NicholasWinner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardWinner of the 1999 Legion of HonorWinnter of the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award“Nicholas knows the art world as well as any military historian knows his battlefield . . . Her work deserves the widest reading.”—New York Times Book Review“At once fascinating and horrifying [with] a strong element of spine-chilling suspense.”—Los Angeles Times“Intriguing..suspenseful . . . a sensational story of moral courage and greatness of character in the face of pure evil.”—Houston ChronicleThe cast of characters includes Hitler and Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall—not to mention works by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. And the story told in this superbly researched and suspenseful book is that of the Third Reich's war on European culture and the Allies' desperate effort to preserve it.From the Nazi purges of "Degenerate Art" and Goering's shopping sprees in occupied Paris to the perilous journey of the Mona Lisa from Paris and the painstaking reclamation of the priceless treasures of liberated Italy, The Rape of Europa is a sweeping narrative of greed, philistinism, and heroism that combines superlative scholarship with a compelling drama. Paperback512 pagesVintage Books, 19955.2 x 1 x 8 inchesISBN 9780679756866Award-Winning, Art History

The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War

By Marsha Meskimmon Original Price: $31.95 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS Marsha Meskimmon furnishes a fresh perspective on the art of women in the Weimar Republic and in the process reclaims the lost history of a number of artists who have not received adequate attention—not only because they were women but also because they continued to align themselves with the modes of realistic representation the Expressionists regarded as reactionary. Reconsidering the traditional definitions of German modernism and its central issues of race politics, eugenics, and the city, Meskimmon explores the structures that marginalized the work of little known artists such as Lotte Laserstein, Jeanne Mammen, Gerta Overbeck and Grete Jurgens. She shows how these women's personal and professional experiences in the 1920s and 1930s relate to the visual imagery produced at that time. She also examines representations of different female roles—prostitute, mother, housewife, the "New Woman" and "garçonne"—that attracted the attention of these artists. Situating her exploration on a strong theoretical base, she ranges deftly over mass visual culture—from film to poster art and advertising—to create a vivid portrait of women living and creating in Weimar Germany.Paperback263 pagesUniversity of California Press, 19996.2 x 0.7 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780520221345Art History, German History, Gender Studies

We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism

By Otto DixOtto Dix (1891–1969) is considered one of the true lions of 20th-century art, a man who established himself as an uncompromising artist that refused to temper how he rendered the realities that he witnessed. Dix’s early works often depict the true brutalities of the WWI battlefields and trenches he served in for over three years, as well as the decadent underworld of 1920s Berlin.With the publication of this first of three volumes of an extensive selection of letters, the most comprehensive collection of Otto Dix texts at last comes into print in English. Encompassing well over 1,000 letters, and ranging from friends and family to other artists, collectors, colleagues, critics & biographers, the letters offer a personal portrait of six decades of the 20th century.Dix himself was a controversial figure throughout his life, and while he claimed never to write self-testimonials, the artist had much to say about the widest range of subjects in his private correspondence. Therein, we discover much about a figure who exhibited a gruff, often abrasive persona to many, a man who depicted war with unrepentant brutality yet who could at the same time pen the most romantic, schmaltzy letters to his wife and sketch amusing caricatures to his daughter.Following his experiences throughout WWI, Dix immediately took up with the dadaists in Dresden in 1919 and became an established figure as part of the Sezession. A few years later, after his first portrait commission in Dusseldorf in 1922, Dix met his future wife, Martha, with whom he would go on to raise three children, and who is one of the principle correspondents in this volume of letters. Some of his most significant work was produced in the 1920s, including his powerful Krieg (War) portfolio, for which the Nazis branded him a “degenerate artist” and forced him to resign his professorship in 1933. Condemned to internal exile, Dix thereafter resided in Hemmenhofen, in the extreme southwest part of Germany. Twelve years later, he would suffer further indignities from the Nazis when ordered to join the Volkssturm in 1945. Dix ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp, again a survivor of a second harrowing cataclysm. After his release, from 1946 onwards, the painter lived between East and West Germany, never truly at home in either ideologically, yet he remained prolific, continuing to produce art until the end of his life, having lived through two World Wars as well as the “Cold War.”​This first volume covers the period 1904–1927 and the heart of it is a selection of Dix’s postcards from the WWI front written to his school friend in Dresden, Helene Jakob, a form of artistic reportage of uncanny power. Recipient of the Die schönsten Deutschen Bücher shortlist in 2014, Dix’s letters will prove to be of considerable interest to art historians, scholars of Expressionism, and aficionados of Dix, all of whom will encounter the artist as never before.Hardcover284 pages Contra Mundum Press, 20165.98 x 0.75 x 9.02 inchesISBN 9781940625188History, Literary Letters

Letters, Vol. 1 (Otto Dix)

By Elana Shapria "[Shapira] maps the possibility of thinking about Jewish agency in the arts while avoiding the temptation to essentialise Jewish identity, to homogenise Jewish attitudes, or to represent "the Jew" as a total personality whose positions are governed entirely by the fact of their Jewishness. Instead, she demonstrates how patrons were thinking through their Jewishness at the same time as they were positioning themselves in terms of class, gender and sexual identity, and were doing so at a time when all of these were topics of substantial dispute."—The Art Newspaper"Authoritative. . . . Shapira's documentation in primary and secondary sources is exhaustive. . . . Recommended."—Choice"Compelling and important. . . .Working from a truly astounding range of primary and archival sources, she brings to life the protagonists of her story with intimacy and richness of detail. Rarely has the active role of Jewish patronage been explored in such depth."—Ars Judaica A recent surge of interest in Jewish patronage during the golden years of Vienna has led to the question, Would modernism in Vienna have developed in the same fashion had Jewish patrons not been involved? In this provocative reexamination of the roots of Viennese modernism, Elana Shapira analyzes the central role of Jewish businessmen, professionals, and writers in the evolution of the city's architecture and design from the 1860s to the 1910s. According to Shapira, these patrons negotiated their relationship with their non-Jewish surrounding and clarified their position within Viennese society by inscribing Jewish elements into the buildings, interiors, furniture, and design objects that they financed, produced, and co-designed. This book uniquely treats Jewish identification within Viennese modernism as a matter of Jews' active fashioning of a new language to convey their aims for emancipation, along with their claims of cultural authority. Paperback336 pagesBrandeis University Press, 20166 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9781611689211Austrian History, Modernism, Design

Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna

By Ehrhard Bahr “Each chapter in Bahr's book is capable of standing alone, but the author also invokes ideas, incidents and personalities in each chapter that strike sparks off the material in other chapters. . . . Weimar on the Pacific is a brilliant tour de force of intellectual history and cultural criticism, both audacious and accomplished.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review“This is a wonderful book. . . . The writing is distinguished by a profound knowledge of its many subjects, an infectious interest, and a sharp eye for telling details, all of which bring the material alive.”—Modern Language Review“This important book--of meticulous and impressive research, refined analysis, and lucid organization and writing--is demanding, a challenge to the author’s peers and yet rewarding also for the generally educated reader.”—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions.Weimar on the Pacific is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Döblin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angeles’s influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through. Paperback382 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20085.9 x 1 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9780520257955German History, Literature

Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism

By Michael White "With Generation Dada, White has presented readers with a powerful new portrait of an avant-garde that flourished in one of the most fraught cities of the early twentieth century." —Catherine Craft, Burlington Magazine“In a well researched, detailed examination of the Berlin avant-garde in the context of WWI, White . . . offers a fresh analysis of the key events and personal relationships that helped form the artistic practices of some of the central figures of the German Dada movement. In an informative but refreshingly accessible style, the author manages to pay close attention to the intricacies of cultural and historical context as well as the formal elements of the works themselves . . . demonstrating a keen eye for the relationship between content and form.” —ChoiceFor the Berlin Dadaists, their identity as a collective—Club Dada, to members—was an integral part of their artistic practice. But the circumstances that brought together the likes of George Grosz, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, and Johannes Baader—renamed Propaganda Marshall, Monteurdada, Dadasoph, and Oberdada within the organization—have remained largely unexamined until now. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book documents the group'ss beginnings in wartime Berlin and reveals how these relationships influenced its provocative acts, which were inextricably tied to the era's chaos and brutality. Studying how the Dadaists saw themselves as a new generation—in contrast to their pacifist forebears, the Expressionists—the book sheds light on key developments and events, such as the First International Dada Fair, held in Berlin in 1920. It also offers the first serious consideration of the group's role in constructing its own legacy, even as the works were deliberately rooted in the ephemeral.Michael White is reader in the history of art at the University of York and is best known internationally for his research on the early-20th-century De Stijl group in the Netherlands. Hardcover382 pages | 20 color and 130 black-and-white illustrationsYale University Press, 20137.8 x 1.2 x 10 inchesISBN 9780300169034Art History, Dada, German History

Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War

By Peter Gay “Not a single paragraph is superfluous. His inquiry rivets without let up, powered by its unremitting candor.”—Frederic Morton, Los Angeles Times Book Review“[Gay’s] writing is smooth, a sound historian’s instrument…Gay’s story could hardly be anything other than interesting, and one is glad about the happy outcome of his family’s afflictions and his own feeling that his gift has been ‘an astonishing gift.’”—Frank Kermode, The New York Times Book Review"Peter Gay’s account of his boyhood in Nazi Germany is written with the sensitivity for hidden meanings and implications one would expect of him. . . . It is becoming ever more difficult to recapture the dire atmosphere of the 1930s, and the analytical abstractions of present-day historiography are sometimes deficient in realism. Gay’s book provides a valuable antidote."—Edgar Feuchtwanger, Journal of Jewish Studies In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939—"the story, " says Peter Gay, 'of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.' Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings—then and now—toward Germany and the Germans. Even before the events of 1938-39, culminating in Kristallnacht, the family was convinced that they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out the agonizing emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family's mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay's account—marked by candor, modesty, and insight—adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry. Paperback208 pagesYale University Press, 19999.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inchesISBN 9780300080704Autobiographical, Memoir, German History

My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin

By Peter Chametzky “Chametzky’s book offers an interesting theoretical analysis of German art. Its sources and documentation are abundant. Chametzky’s knowledge of German art is impressive.”—Yves Laberge, German Studies Review“Compelling. . . . [Chametzky includes] appropriate critical/theoretical and cultural/historical background throughout.”—Shelley Cordulack, Millikin University European Legacy"This engaging book asks fundamental questions about the object in history and how meaning in art is produced and altered over time. Seamlessly weaving together discourses on gender, the body, ethnicity, film, mass media, and art history, Chametzky deftly explores German art from modernism to post-modernism through cogent case studies drawn from the Wilhelmine, Weimar, Nazi, Cold War, and Reunification eras. His perceptive ventures into such areas as Dada, the machine, and hitherto overlooked Jewish utopian thought provide fresh insights on German art and culture."—Timothy O. Benson, author of Raoul Hausmann and Berlin DadaThis book provides a stimulating overview of twentieth-century German art, focusing on some of the period's key works by Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Willi Baumeister, Arno Breker, Joseph Beuys, and Gerhard Richter. In Peter Chametzky's innovative approach, these works become representatives rather than representations of twentieth-century history. That is, the art here does not simply illustrate an argument, the art is the argument. Chametzky draws on both scholarly and popular sources to demonstrate how the works (and in some cases, the artists themselves) interacted with, and even enacted, historical events, processes, and ideas. He asserts the continued historical role of material art works in an era when less material forms—photography, film, television, video, digital images—have assumed the function of visually depicting contemporary history.Hardcover 286 pagesUniversity of California Press, 201010 x 6.8 x 1.1 inchesISBN 9780520260429Art History, German History

Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art

By Peter Gay “A masterful work of cultural history . . . and it’s truly a pleasure to read.”—Mia Fineman, Slate“A sweeping survey . . . offering shrewd analyses.”—William Grimes, The New York Times “Peter Gay is perhaps our leading historian of culture and ideas.”—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles TimesModernism explores the shocking cultural rebellion that, beginning in the late 1850's, transformed the staid worlds of art, literature, music and architecture with its relentless assault on traditional forms. In chronicling the artistic revolution, Modernism is a celebration of many of our most memorable and prominent subversives who forever changed the course of Western culture.Hardcover 610 pagesWW Norton & Co., 20076.6 x 1.8 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9780393333961Art History, Modernism

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy; From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond

By Katya Moytl “In her superb new study of Viennese women, Motyl explores the real-life practices of a range of ‘new women’ during and after the First World War. Moving beyond approaches that treat the ‘new woman’ as a discursive or political phenomenon, she instead explores women’s everyday life practices. By tracing her subjects’ bodily routines, Motyl’s remarkably original work gives radical new meanings to the concept of a ‘new woman.’” ―Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History Explores the emergence of a new womanhood in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In Embodied Histories, historian Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit. Paperback304 pages | 50 halftonesUniversity of Chicago Press, 20246 x 0.73 x 9 inchesISBN 9780226832166 Women's History, Vienna

Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894-1934

By Frank Tallis "Stunning in its breadth and depth, this is a magisterial treatment of a towering thinker." - Publisher's Weekly (starred review)"Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring―among the best of innumerable Freud bios." - Kirkus (starred review)A chronicle of Vienna's Golden Age and the influence of Sigmund Freud on the modern world by a clinical psychologist whose mystery novels form the basis of PBS's Vienna Blood series.Some cities are like stars. When the conditions are right, they ignite, and burn with such fierce intensity that they outshine every other city on the planet. Vienna was one such city and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the birthplace of the modern mind and the way we live today. Long coffee menus and celebrity interviews are Viennese inventions. ‘Modern’ buildings were appearing in Vienna long before they started appearing in New York and the idea of practical modern home design originated in the work of Viennese architect Adolf Loos. The place, however, where one finds the most indelible and profound impression of Viennese influence is inside your head. How we think about ourselves has been largely determined by Vienna’s most celebrated resident, Sigmund Freud.In Mortal Secrets, Frank Tallis brilliantly illuminates Sigmund Freud and his times, taking readers into the mind of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, chronicling the evolution of psychoanalysis and opening up Freud’s life to embrace the Vienna he lived in and the lives of the people he mingled with from Gustav Klimt to Arnold Schönberg, Egon Schiele to Gustav Mahler. Mortal Secrets is a thrilling book about a heady time in one of the world’s most beautiful cities and its long shadow that extends through the twentieth century up until the present day.Hardcover 496 PagesSt. Martin's Press, 20246.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9781250288950 Austrian History

Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind

Edited by Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke “Excellent and engaging…It is a collection best read, in my opinion, from cover to cover, for this is the only way to fully appreciate how well its chapters cohere around its fragmented and protean subject.” ―Journal of Austrian Studies Sissi's World offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the Habsburg Empress Elisabeth of Austria. It investigates the myths, legends, and representations across literature, art, film, and other media of one of the most popular, revered, and misunderstood female figures in European cultural history.Sissi's World explores the cultural foundations for the endurance of the Sissi legends and the continuing fascination with the beautiful empress: a Bavarian duchess born in 1837, the longest-serving Austrian empress, and the queen of Hungary who died in 1898 at the hands of a crazed anarchist.Despite the continuing fascination with “the beloved Sissi," the Habsburg empress, her impact, and legacy have received scant attention from scholars. This collection will go beyond the popular biographical accounts, recountings of her mythic beauty, and scattered studies of her well-known eccentricities to offer transdisciplinary cultural perspectives across art, film, fashion, history, literature, and media.Paperback408 pages | 30 black-and-white illustrationsBloomsbury Publishing, 20209 x 6 inchesISBN 9781501361685Austrian Royal History, Habsburg Empire

Sissi’s World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth

By Katy Hessel "Sweeping . . . Part revisionist history, part coffee-table book, part collective portrait, part archival treasure hunt."—Tiana Reid, The New York Times "The Story of Art Without Men is an extraordinary achievement that will have a disruptive cultural legacy and help determine the landscape for years to come." —Helena Lee, Harper’s Bazaar"[The Story of Art Without Men] should become a founding text in the history of art by women . . . Inspiring and indispensable."—Bidisha Mamta, GuardianInstant New York Times bestsellerThe story of art as it’s never been told before, from the Renaissance to the present day, with more than 300 works of art.How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway?Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States and the artist who really invented the “readymade.” Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned and your eyes opened to many artforms often ignored or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it’s never been told before.Hardcover512 pagesW. W. Norton, 20236.4 x 9.6 inchesISBN 9780393881868 Art History, Women's Studies

The Story of Art Without Men

By Robert Musil & Klaus AmannTranslated by Genese Grill Literature and Politics presents Robert Musil's writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism. In essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on contemporary events, Musil charts the increasing dangers to artists and ethical thinkers of extreme ideological conscription, the subtle and not so subtle changes in public and political discourse, the epoch-making events and dire existential threats of his times. Musil acts as a cultural seismographer, interrogating causes and symptoms in himself and his world, as he moves between Nazi Germany and pre- and post-Anschluß Austria, ultimately escaping to Switzerland where he and his Jewish wife, Martha, lived in exile until his death in 1942. The writings question concepts of race, identity, and nation, and untangle the complex relationship between nation and artist and between the individual and the collective, celebrating the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society.Klaus Amann provides an invaluable introduction to Musil's political thought and his struggle, during the war years, to come to terms, to survive, and to find some way to bear witness. Amann recounts Musil's political trajectory, from fairly indifferent aesthete to socially-engaged supporter of the Weimar Republic and its liberal reforms, to critic of Nazi and Communist Totalitarianisms, and as prescient sceptic about the "cultural optimism" of the Soviet experiment. Musil's ultimate stance—as a thinker who radically resists taking final stances - is that politics endangers culture and humanity by dictating to artists how they should write, think, paint, compose, and by instrumentalizing art in the interest of ideology. Paperback562 pagesContra Mundum Press, 20235 x 1.25 x 8 inchesISBN 9781940625546Literature, History

Literature & Politics

By Agatha Schwartz, Helga Thorson This study offers an overview and critical analysis of emerging women's movements and of a feminist consciousness in women's literature across the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between its constitution as a Dual Monarchy in 1867 and its demise in 1918. It is the first one, on the one hand, to assemble, in the English language, information pertaining to the women's movement on the whole territory of Austria-Hungary while adding new and original research data to it; and to present, on the other hand, a selection from original feminist documents and women's literary texts in English translation from German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Italian. Taking into account the National, regional, trans-regional as well as international aspects of the various strands of the women's movement within the monarchy, the authors demonstrate the variety of women's emancipatory activism, ideas and creative output in this complex multiethnic and multi-lingual state, a topic, that on the whole is still little known within the English-speaking world. A comprehensive study of this kind is a unique contribution to both the history of the international women's movement and to women's writing. It offers a succinct analysis of the developments regarding the fight for women's educational, professional, and political rights among the many nationalities of the monarchy while also presenting original texts in translation that illustrate these and other struggles faced by women striving for emancipation during the last decades if the 19th and the beginning if the 20th century. Paperback 320 pages Ariadne Press, 20155.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches ISBN 9781572411876 Women's Studies, Criticism, History

Shaking the Empire, Shaking Patriarchy : The Growth of a Feminist Consciousness Across the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

By Rudolf Kuenzli Dada developed in distinct periods and locations, providing the structure of the book. From Europe and New York during the First World War it spread to Eastern Europe and Japan in the 1920s. Its re-emergence as Neo-Dada in the 1950s and influence on Fluxus in the 1960s was linked to emigres such as Marcel Duchamp and Hans Richter. Survey: International Dada expert Rudolf Kuenzli surveys Dada in its historical context and examines its significant impact and resonance in art and culture today. Linking visual art, performance and literature, this is a fresh treatement of Dada as the Dadaists saw it. A reassessment of one of the twentieth century's most revolutionary movements in the arts, Kuenzli's clear style is accessible to the scholar and the general reader. Works: Each image is accompanied by an extended caption. The book is organized chronologically and geographically around major explosions of Dada activity. From its inception in Zurich during the First World War, we follow Dada to New York, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Paris, Central and Eastern Europe, and Japan, finally looking at Neo-Dada. Arp's Automatic Drawing; Marcel Duchamp's readymades and Man Ray's assemblages; Francis Picabia's paintings linking machine and human form; collage with political comment from Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch; Kurt Schwitters' all-encompassing concept of Merz; Max Ernst; from the East, the graphics of Lajos Kassak and El Lissitzky; Okada Tatsuo's constructions and fireworks attached to the cover of Mavo magazine. A look at Neo-Dada includes Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning and the Happenings of Hi Red Center. Documents include a comprehensive collection of original Dada writings, researched at the International Dada Archive and sourced from around the world. Poetry, manifestos and statements are presented together with letters between Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp; Beatrice Wood describes 'The Richard Mutt Case' (the first exhibition of a urinal) to her readers of The Blind Man in 1917; and in recent interviews artists such as Allan Kaprow and Arman relate their Dada inheritance. Please note that Rare/Out-of-Print titles are very limited in stock Hardcover304 pagesPhaidon Press, 200610.2 x 1.5 x 11.8 inchesISBN 9780714844237Dadaism, Movements

Dada (Themes and Movements)

By Peter Jelavich “In Peter Jelavich’s important work, the study of cultural history moves beyond the sphere of textual interpretation to analyze the complex interplay of multiple media in the making of modern German culture.”—History: Reviews of New Books"Jelavich’s study provides rich documentation of the 'death of Weimar culture,' drawing on archival documents of the Weimar government, the trade press of the broadcasting and movie industries, the daily press, and specialized literary journals of the time. Much of this background has been marshaled before by German scholars, but rarely has it been set out in English and never in such a readable, compelling story around the fate of a single literary text."—Journal of Modern History"Jelavich has written a fascinating study of mass media and censorship in the Weimar Republic, using Alfred Doblin's work as a case study."—German Studies Review This fascinating exploration of a work that was the epitome of German literary modernism illuminates in chilling detail the death of the Weimar Republic's left-leaning culture of innovation and experimentation. Peter Jelavich examines Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), a novel that questioned the autonomy and coherence of the human personality in the modern metropolis, and traces the radical discrepancies that came with its adaptation into a radio play (1930) and a film (1931). Jelavich explains these discrepancies by examining not only the varying demands of genre and technology but also the political and economic contexts of the media—in particular, the censorship practices in German radio and film. His analysis culminates in a richly textured discussion of the complex factors that led to the demise of Weimar culture, as Nazi intimidation and the economic strains of the Depression induced producers to depoliticize their works. Jelavich's book becomes a cautionary tale about how fear of outspoken right-wing politicians can curtail and eliminate the arts as a critical counterforce to politics—all in the name of entertainment. Paperback320 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20096 x 0.8 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9780520259973German History, Film, Literary Criticism

Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture

By Éva Forgács “I was unable to put down [this book]; one that will be used by those interested in the field for a long time to come.” —Dr. Oliver Botar, Hungarian Cultural Studies"Éva Forgács is a brilliant guide to the history of modern and contemporary art in Hungary. These essays—whether appraising the achievements of Modern Movement heroes like László Moholy-Nagy or excavating the overlooked practices of neo-avant-garde artists of the 1970s and 1980s—combine deep understanding of modern art with a critical perspective on the many myths which have been attached to it. Hungarian modernism now seems far more vivid." David Crowley, Royal College of Art"Éva Forgács has a remarkable ability to condense her cosmopolitan breadth of scholarship into admirably coherent, easily comprehensible writing. She situates the subject of her research within the broader sociocultural context of its times in such a readable manner that it is informative for the layperson and professional alike. We come away with the feeling that our time has been well spent indeed. Her publications exemplify art history at its best." —Hattula Moholy-Nagy Insightful essays and rarely-seen images tracing, from birth to maturation, several generations of Hungarian modernism, from the avant-garde to neo-avant-garde. This wide-ranging collection by Éva Forgács, a leading scholar of Modernism, corrects long-standing misconceptions about Hungarian art while examining the social milieu and work of dozens of important Hungarian artists, including László Moholy-Nagy and Lajos Kassák. This book paints a fascinating image of twentieth-century Budapest as a microcosm of the social and political turmoil raging across twentieth-century Europe. Paperback320 pagesDoppelHouse Press, 20176 x 0.8 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9780997003413Art History, Essays

Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement

By Karl Toepfer "A massive achievement. . . . Toepfer respects the body, wants to understand movement as the primary medium of ideas, and gives women the central role they actually played in this aesthetic and intellectual discourse."—Marcia B. Siegel, author of The Shapes of Change Empire of Ecstasy offers a novel interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars—nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of "modern identity."The modern body, radiating freedom and power, appeared to Weimar artists and intelligentsia to be the source of a transgressive energy, as well as the sign and manifestation of powerful, mysterious "inner" conditions. Toepfer shows how this view of the modern body sought to extend the aesthetic experience beyond the boundaries imposed by rationalized life and to transcend these limits in search of ecstasy. With the help of much unpublished or long-forgotten archival material (including many little-known photographs), he investigates the process of constructing an "empire" of appropriative impulses toward ecstasy.Toepfer presents the work of such well-known figures as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Oskar Schlemmer, along with less-known but equally fascinating body culture practitioners. His book is certain to become required reading for historians of dance, body culture, and modernism. Hardcover439 pagesUniversity of California Press; 19976 x 1.2 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520206632German History, Art History

Empire of Ecstasy

Original Price: $55.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS Edited by Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Sabine Breitwieser History is constructed through the continual reinterpretation of artifacts that preserve historical events. But can these artifacts be taken as objective facts? For centuries, artists have offered through their work contrary meanings for both historical and contemporary events. In times or places of crisis, the power of art to depict harsh realities and new ways of understanding history have been particularly pronounced.Art/Histories looks at history through the lens of artworks from the sixteenth century to the present, including works from Otto Dix, Anselm Kiefer, Käthe Kollwitz, Alice Creischer, Jörg Immendorff, Felix Droese, and many others. Drawing on the world-class collections of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Sabine Breitwieser examines the stories these works tell about the events depicted, as well as the artists’ involvement with them. With nearly three hundred full-color illustrations, the book challenges many of the tools currently used to examine and evaluate history. Paperback204 PagesText in German and English Hirmer Publishers, 20149.5 x 0.8 x 11 inchesISBN 9783777422794History, Art History

Kunst/Geschichten Art/Histories

By Abigail Gillman "Gillman's book is as rich and paradoxical as Jewish assimilation itself, for the author is at once telling a particularly Jewish and a larger European story of aesthetic, cultural, and sometimes even political engagement with tradition."—William Donahue, Duke University“Argued with verve and originality, this book calls for a 'more inclusive understanding of the place of Jewish writing' in the modernist tradition. Illustrations and notes, including the German originals of the passages cited, add to the book's appeal. "-AND. Wickersham, Choice"Viennese Jewish Modernism is a major accomplishment and provides a wealth of new ideas and information."—Alison Rose, Journal of Jewish IdentitiesIn Viennese Jewish Modernism, Abigail Gillman challenges the conventional understanding of modernism as simply a break from tradition. Until recently, the study of Jewish modernism has centered on questions of Jewish and non-Jewish identity, generally ignoring the role Judaism played in the formulation of European modernism as a whole. By focusing on the works of major Viennese authors and thinkers -- Freud, Hofmannstahl, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler -- both within and outside the context of Jewish identity, Abigail Gillman provides a profound new perspective on modernism. Viennese Jewish Modernism draws together three central turn-of-the-century cultural phenomena: the breakdown of traditional modes of transmitting the past to the present; the unprecedented Jewish contribution to Viennese culture as a whole; and the development of a specifically Jewish modernism in Europe. Through her consideration of the larger questions of memorialism and memory, the construction of history and identity, and the nature of modernism, Gillman demonstrates that modernism is powerfully drawn to the past and actively engaged with tradition.Paperback223 pagesPenn State University Press, 20097 x 9.5 x .75 InchesISBN 9780271034096Austrian History, Modernism

Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannstahl, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler

by James J. Sheehan "Sheehan covers a wide swath of aesthetic, architectural, and social history in his discussion of the growth, the purpose, and the reception of museums by the public in nineteenth-century Germany...[T]he author deftly presents the role of German art museums in all their complexity, yet succinctly summarizes their importance both for nineteenth-century Germans and their legacy today."—The Historian"James Sheehan is indeed a master of the historical craft. Clear organization, lucid prose, and the ability to balance a broadly sweeping narrative with close readings of specific subjects....This book is especially timely considering the revamping of Berlin museums. Relates such an important and intriguing history that one wishes the story were continued in detail up through the third Reich and into the postwar period."—Central European History"A fine survey...bringing together and properly ordering a wide range of material concerning the intellectual and institutional premises of the changing role of museums in the German art world."—The New Criterion Combining the history of ideas, institutions, and architecture, this study shows how the museum both reflected and shaped the place of art in German culture from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. On a broader level, it illuminates the origin and character of the museum's central role in modern culture.James Sheehan begins by describing the establishment of the first public galleries during the last decades of Germany's old regime. He then examines the revolutionary upheaval that swept Germany between 1789 and 1815, arguing that the first great German museums reflected the nation's revolutionary aspirations. By the mid-nineteenth century, the climate had changed; museums constructed in this period affirmed historical continuities and celebrated political accomplishments. During the next several years, however, Germans became disillusioned with conventional definitions of art and lost interest in monumental museums. By the turn of the century, the museum had become a site for the political and cultural controversies caused by the rise of artistic modernism. In this context, Sheehan argues, we can see the first signs of what would become the modern style of museum architecture and modes of display.The first study of its kind, this highly accessible book will appeal to historians, museum professionals, and anyone interested in the relationship between art, politics, and culture. Hardcover272 pages, 34 halftonesOxford University Press9.2 x 6.1 x 0.7 inchesISBN 9780195135725German History, Museum Studies

Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism

Original Price: $15.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Rudolf H. Bock This is the autobiographical story of a medical doctor, an ophthalmologist who, when the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, was interrupted in his last semester of Medical School in Vienna—four exams short of his M.D.—and forced to flee the country. As the title suggests, the beleaguered author's generally positive attitude toward life, as well as many extraordinary and illuminating incidents, allow him to look back 'gratefully' on his life during that extended period of struggle. His key insight is: there are far more kind and helpful people in the world—Orient as well as Occident—than you may imagine! Paperback125 pagesAriadne Press, 20025.5 x 0.2 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9781572411104Biography, Austrian History

Gratefully Looking Back: A Doctor's Special Journey

Editied by Phillip Prodger Between 1925 and 1938, photographer E.O. Hoppé traveled the length and breadth of Germany, recording people and places at one of the most tumultuous times in the country’s history. He photographed movie stars and captains of industry, workers and peasants, and captured the birth of the Autobahn and UFA film studios in its heyday. He saw the rise of fascism, the creation of vast new suburbs, and the displacement of people from their traditional ways of life. With unprecedented access to the country’s world-famous factories and industrial installations, he witnessed Germany as few others could—barreling headlong into the unknown. Moving, insightful, and deeply revealing, the full significance of Hoppé’s German work has been unknown until now. This volume combines photographs published in Hoppé’s legendary book of 1930, Deutsche Arbeit, with many new pictures never previously seen. From factory floor to the commuters of Berlin and Munich, Hoppé’s photographs reveal the profound social and economic tensions that preceded the Second World War. This publication uncovers Hoppé as a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century photography, who introduced for the first time elements of typology, seriality and sequence, which have become key elements of contemporary photographic practice. Hoppé used his experience in Germany to develop a modern new style of photography—showing not just how things looked, but how it felt to be there. Hardcover240 pagesSteidl, 201511 x 1.2 x 12 inchesISBN 9783869309378Photography, German History, Documentary

The German Work

By Catherine M. Soussloff “It is immensely satisfying to read a book about portraits which attempts to treat them with the gravity warranted by the sheer volume and intensity of their production in European art practice. Soussloff’s exploration of portraits in various media—her examples are drawn from painting, caricature and photography—does help to illuminate her field and argument.”—Lara Perry, ArtBook“Soussloff's theoretical approach is genealogical, and the scholarly task she sets for herself is both important and demanding.”—Katerina Reed-Tsocha, British Journal of Aesthetics“The Subject in Art is a challenging book, and sometimes while reading it, it seems easy to get lost in the details, but the main points are rewarding, and they present in total an important addition to the modern theory of the subject. The book is a valuable read. . . .”—Brian E. Butler, Consciousness, Literature and the Arts Challenging prevailing theories regarding the birth of the subject, Catherine M. Soussloff argues that the modern subject did not emerge from psychoanalysis or existential philosophy but rather in the theory and practice of portraiture in early-twentieth-century Vienna. Soussloff traces the development in Vienna of an ethics of representation that emphasized subjects as socially and historically constructed selves who could only be understood—and understand themselves—in relation to others, including the portrait painters and the viewers. In this beautifully illustrated book, she demonstrates both how portrait painters began to focus on the interior lives of their subjects and how the discipline of art history developed around the genre of portraiture. Soussloff combines a historically grounded examination of art and art historical thinking in Vienna with subsequent theories of portraiture and a careful historiography of philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to human consciousness from Hegel to Sartre and from Freud to Lacan. She chronicles the emergence of a social theory of art among the art historians of the Vienna School, demonstrates how the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka depicted the Jewish subject, and explores the development of pictorialist photography. Reflecting on the implications of the visualized, modern subject for textual and linguistic analyses of subjectivity, Soussloff concludes that the Viennese art historians, photographers, and painters will henceforth have to be recognized as precursors to such better-known theorists of the subject as Sartre, Foucault, and Lacan. Paperback175 pagesDuke University Press, 20066.2 x 0.2 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780822336709Art History, Theory

The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern

By Alessandra Comini ''This erudite, mostly engaging self-portrait charts the making of an art historian and professional 'seer,' whose passion and wit enabled her to become a noted teacher and scholar at Southern Methodist University. Comini helped unearth centuries of overlooked women in art and wrote landmark studies of the Austrian painter Egon Schiele and of musical iconography. For someone engaged in a life of the mind, she has lived much of it in motion, and the art of travel and close consideration of cultural context have been her keys to learning and teaching. She is at her riveting best when she reveals her discoveries about Schiele in his Vienna prison cell, Winckelmann in Rome and Trieste, the composer Edvard Grieg in Norway, and the painter Akseli Gallen-Kalella in Finland. Her short essays dazzle the most when they reveal her keen eye, such as when she discerns how the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, in a bust of herself, 'used the resolute features of her own aging face as a spiritual topography for courage and resignation.''' --Booklist Overflowing with passion for her work as a scholar and teacher, Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, Alessandra Comini reminisces through six decades as an unconventional art historian in this illustrated memoir. The author of award-winning books on Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Ludwig van Beethoven, Comini draws on her sixty years of daily journals, sharing research-related anecdotes as she reflects on the formation and flowering of her distinguished career. Beginning with her colorful background as a refugee from Franco's Spain, then Mussolini's Italy, she describes her music-loving family's sometimes humorous, sometimes painful adjustment to a World War II Texas. A series of fortuitous experiences at Interlochen's National Music Camp, Barnard College, the University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia University later leads to what would ultimately be a turning point in her life as well as in Schiele scholarship. She discovered the actual cell in which Schiele had been imprisoned in a provincial Austrian jail half a century earlier. Comini invites readers to join her in the same zestful and persistent pursuit of cultural history that has repeatedly earned her the honor of being voted "outstanding" professor, by her students at Columbia University and later at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Her research and quests take the reader around the world and back. From the islands of Corfu, Madeira, R gen, and Tahiti to the cities of Lisbon, Rome, Oslo, and St. Petersburg, Comini pursues such diverse and distinctive personalities as Rosa Bonheur, Gustav and Alma Mahler, Pablo Picasso, Eleonora Duse, Edvard Munch, K the Kollwitz, Vaslav Nijinski, and Egon Schiele. Alessandra Comini's memoir will inspire readers with its sincere and compelling account of an extraordinary life and career still passionately in progress. Retirement for her has meant discovering a joyful new profession: writing art history murder mystery novels that take her eighty-year-old pseudonymous heroine Megan Crespi from the top of Europe down to Antarctica in pursuit of murderous purloiners of artworks by Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Munch, and Kollwitz. Paperback242 pagesSunstone Press, 20166 x 0.55 x 9 inchesISBN 9781632931405History

In Passionate Pursuit

By Christophe Koné“Uncanny Creatures contributes a new and novel theory of dolls and their relationship to the concept of the uncanny. It also contributes to the ongoing/emerging scholarship on gender and queer studies to the fields of German studies and art history.” — Nathan Timpano, University of Miami Germany held a monopoly on the manufacture and export of bisque toy dolls in Europe before WWI. Yet, dolls’ omnipresence in the material, visual, and literary culture of the modern German-speaking world has so far not been properly addressed. In demonstrating this cultural affinity for dolls, Christophe Koné draws upon a range of stories and seminal essays on dolls, as well as toys, sculptures, paintings, and photographs. He examines how E.T.A. Hoffmann’s romantic tale The Sandman (1815) has been a major source of inspiration for German-speaking doll makers because of how it centers imagination and inventiveness. Using Hoffmann’s tale as an early example of an amalgam between doll thinking and making in German culture, Koné shows how it initiated a genealogy of doll thinkers (Freud & Jentsch), writers (Rilke), painters (Kokoschka), photographers (Bellmer), and makers (Pritzel). Uncanny Creatures then explores how this unusual interest in human-like figures continues a long tradition of thought devoted to conceptualizing “things,” from Immanuel Kant’s theory of the thing-in-itself to Martin Heidegger’s lecture on the thing, and Eduard Mörike or Rainer Maria Rilke’s thing-poems. Because dolls occupy a liminal space—not quite things and more than mere objects—they appear as uncanny creatures which have held a fascination for writers, thinkers, and artists alike. Uncanny Creatures moves past the Freudian discourse of fetishism to propose a new reading of doll artifacts in German culture centered on their ability to evoke a feeling of uncertainty and unsettlement in the viewer. Paperback184 PagesUniversity of Michigan Press, 20246 x 0.6 x 9 inchesISBN 9780472039739 German History & Theory

Uncanny Creatures: Doll Thinking in Modern German Culture

By Susan Funkenstein Imagine yourself in Weimar Germany: you are visually inundated with depictions of dance. Perusing a women’s magazine, you find photograph after photograph of leggy revue starlets, clad in sequins and feathers, coquettishly smiling at you. When you attend an art exhibition, you encounter Otto Dix’s six-foot-tall triptych Metropolis, featuring Charleston dancers in the latest luxurious fashions, or Emil Nolde’s watercolors of Mary Wigman, with their luminous blues and purples evoking her choreographies’ mystery and expressivity. Invited to the Bauhaus, you participate in the Metallic Festival, and witness the school’s transformation into a humorous, shiny, technological total work of art; you costume yourself by strapping a metal plate to your head, admire your reflection in the tin balls hanging from the ceiling, and dance the Bauhaus’ signature step in which you vigorously hop and stomp late into the night. Yet behind the razzle dazzle of these depictions and experiences was one far more complex involving issues of gender and the body during a tumultuous period in history, Germany’s first democracy (1918-1933). Rather than mere titillation, the images copiously illustrated and analyzed in Marking Modern Movement illuminate how visual artists and dancers befriended one another and collaborated together. In many ways because of these bonds, artists and dancers forged a new path in which images revealed artists’ deep understanding of dance, their dynamic engagement with popular culture, and out of that, a possibility of representing women dancers as cultural authorities to be respected. Through six case studies, Marking Modern Movement explores how and why these complex dynamics occurred in ways specific to their historical moment. Paperback342 pagesUniversity of Michigan Press, 20206 x 0.8 x 9 inchesISBN 9780472054619 History, Weimar Germany

Making Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic

Ecrit par Armelle WeirichCélèbre en Autriche pour son salon au sein duquel elle accueillait les plus grands artistes et intellectuels de son temps – Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, Stefan Zweig –, Berta Zuckerkandl fut elle-même une critique d’art majeure qui a impulsé et soutenu le développement de l’art moderne au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles.Paperback294 pagesText in FrenchPu Rennes, 20236.69 x .59 x 9.65ISBN 9782753592391Viennese Salons, Austrian Writer

Berta Zuckerkandl: De Klimt à Rodin, une salonnière et critique d'art entre Vienne et Paris

By Frederic J. Schwartz “Once again Frederic Schwartz trains his bright light on the unstable frameworks of judgment: in early twentieth-century Germany they assumed a particular form – legal cases unveiled to the public. Aesthetics squirm and yield up new orders of morality. Political questions rise up, unbidden. One cannot ask for more. This is a most timely book.”–Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art on the Mary Conover Mellon Chair at Vassar College; author of The Pragmatism in the History of Art “This magnificent book cuts through the history of early-twentieth-century culture with a new epistemological instrument—the case—and shows what it meant to perceive the social world in cases. Everyone interested in the art and science of the 1920s has to read it.”–Anke te Heesen, Professor and Chair of the History of Science, Humboldt University, BerlinHow artists in twentieth-century Germany adapted the idea of the medical or legal case as an artistic strategy to push to the fore sexualities, scandals, and crimes that were otherwise concealed.In early twentieth-century Germany, the artistic avant-garde borrowed procedures from the medical and juridical realms to expose and debate matters that society preferred remain hidden and unspoken. Frederic J. Schwartz explores how the evocation or creation of a “case” provided artists with a means to engage themes that ranged from blasphemy to Lustmord, or sexual murder. Shedding light on the case as a cultural form, Schwartz shows its profound effect on artists and the ways it dovetailed with methods used by these figures to exploit fundamental changes taking place across the mass media of their time.As Schwartz shows, the case was a common denominator that connected seemingly disparate works. George Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter drew on it for their violent visual art, as did architect Adolf Loos when he equated ornament with crime. Expressionists, meanwhile, approached the question of whether the so-called “mad” shared a right of public expression with those deemed sane, and examined medical and legal approaches to what society labeled as insanity. The case also took on a personal dimension when artists found themselves confronted with, or chose to engage with, the legal system. German courts prosecuted John Heartfield and others for their provocative works, while Bertolt Brecht created publicity for himself by suing the firm to whom he sold the film rights to The Threepenny Opera. Provocative and insightful, The Culture of the Case offers a privileged view of the spaces of representation in which images—in some instances, as cases—functioned at a key moment of modernity.Hardcover432 pages | 30 color, 80 black-and-white illustrationsThe MIT Press, 20236 x 10 inchesISBN 9780262047708Art History, German Art

The Culture of the Case: Madness, Crime, and Justice in Modern German Art

By Rainer J. Hanshe"With its ingenious orchestration of the archive and its sensitivity to both the depths and inadvertencies of the creative process, Closing Melodies maps the twin stories of the last days of Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh within a phantasmagoria of space, time, and vision. Rainer J. Hanshe has an unparalleled grasp of what might be called the analytics of genius." - Nicholas Birns, New York UniversityAs the 19th century comes to a close, Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh unknowingly traverse proximate geographical terrain, nearly circling one another like close but distant stars as the philosopher wanders between Nizza, Sils Maria, and Torino, and the painter wanders between Paris, Arles, and Saint-Rémy. In the midst of their philosophical and artistic pursuits, simultaneously, the Eiffel Tower, symbol of artistic progress and industrialization, begins to rise in Paris amidst clamors of protest and praise.Through intertwining letters written to (& sometimes by) friends, family, and others, the philosopher and painter are brought into ever-greater proximity as we witness their daily personal and artistic struggles. Woven between and interrupting this panoply of voices are a series of intervals, short illuminating blasts, like a camera’s exploding flash powder, of artistic, scientific, political, and other events spanning 1888 to 1890, drawing Nietzsche and Van Gogh in and out of the wider expanses of history.As construction of the Eiffel Tower comes to completion in Paris and Elisabeth Förster, the sister of the philosopher of the will to power, tries to found a utopic race colony in South America, the lives of Nietzsche and Van Gogh come to their terrible denouements. Her brother now a full-fledged zombie, the former queen of Nueva Germania seizes the reins of his living corpse and rides him into the future.With no deus ex machina in sight, and none possible, WWI and the terrors and the beauties of the 20th century crack the horizon.Paperback836 pagesContra Mundum Press, 20236 x 1.85 x 9 inchesISBN 9781940625522History, Biography

Closing Melodies

Edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Maria Makela Material Modernity explores creative innovation in German art, design, and architecture during the Weimar Republic, charting both the rise of new media and the re-fashioning of old media. Weimar became famous for the explosion of creative ingenuity across the arts in Germany, due to experiments with new techniques (including the move towards abstraction in painting and sculpture) and inventive work in such new media as paper and plastic, which utilized both new and old methods of art production. Individual chapters in this book consider inventions such as the camera and materials like celluloid, examine the role of new materials including concrete composites in opening up fresh avenues in the plastic arts, and relate advances in the understanding of color perception and psychology to an increased interest in visual perception and the latent potential of color as both architectural ornament and carrier of emotional force in space.While art historians usually argue that experimentation in the Weimar Republic was the result of an intentional rejection of traditional modes of expression in the conscious attempt to invent a modern art and architecture unshackled from historic media and methods, this volume shows that the drivers for innovation were often far more complex and nuanced. It first of all describes how the material shortages precipitated by the First World War, along with the devastation to industrial infrastructure and disruption of historic trade routes, affected art, as did a spirit of experimentation that permeated interwar German culture. It then analyzes new challenges in the 1920s to artistic conventions in traditional art modes like painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture, textiles, and print-making and simultaneously probes the likely causes of innovative new methods of artistic production that appeared, such as photomontage, assemblage, mechanical art, and multi-media art. In doing so, Material Modernity fills a significant gap in Weimar scholarship and art history literature.Paperback240 pages | 8 color and 54 black-and-white illustrationsBloomsburg Publishing, 20249 x 6 inchesISBN 9781350228740Weimar Germany, Art History, Artist Material Studies

Material Modernity: Innovations in Art, Design, and Architecture in the Weimar Republic

By Annemarie SchwarzenbachTranslated from the German by Lucy Renner JonesSince the rediscovery of her work in the late 1980s, Annemarie Schwarzenbach—journalist, traveler, archaeologist, opium addict, and antifascist novelist—has become a European cult figure among free spirited bohemians. Available in English for the first time and beautifully translated by Lucy Renner Jones, Death in Persia is a collage of the political and the private, documenting Schwarzenbach’s intimate feelings and public ideas during four trips to Persia between 1933 and 1939. From her reflections on individual responsibility in the lead-up to World War II to her reactions to accusations from her friends of having deserted Europe and the antifascist cause for Tehran, Schwarzenbach recorded a great deal about daily life in Persia, and, most personally, her ill-fated love affair with Jalé, the daughter of the Turkish ambassador. Chronologically preceding Schwarzenbach’s exquisite travelogue All the Roads are Open, an account of her automobile journey from Geneva to Afghanistan in 1939, Death in Persia is the enthralling diary of an astute observer standing at the crossroads of major events in history and a gorgeous new addition to Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s growing English-language oeuvre.Paperback156 pagesSeagull Books, 20215 x 0.4 x 8 InchesISBN 9780857428233Travel Writing, Swiss Writer

Death in Persia

By Robert StorrEdited with introduction by Francesca Pietropaolo The first collection of essays by one of America’s decisive and most lucid critical voices Following on from the much-lauded Robert Storr: Interviews on Art, Heni presents the first in a two-volume publication featuring the collected writings of Robert Storr, one of the world’s leading art critics and curators. Featuring the best of Storr’s criticism—reviews, articles and essays—from the 1980s to the mid-2000s, this publication includes texts on a wide range of artists such as Jean-Michel Baquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Carroll Dunham, Eva Hesse, Ilya Kabakov, Martin Puryear, Louise Lawler, Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, Jackson Pollock, Chéri Samba, Nancy Spero, Yvonne Rainer and Rachel Whiteread (among many others). Writings on Art offers fresh insights on some of the most influential artists of our era, and is a must-read for curators and students, artists, exhibition-goers and all those interested in the art and culture of today. Hardcover672 pages | 161 color illustrations6 x 9.5 inchesHeni Publishing, 2020ISBN 9781912122288Art Criticism, Essays

Shop at Neue History