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In the autumn if 1898, Joseph Conrad met for the first time Ford Madox Ford. A quarter of a century later in the summer of 1924, Jean Rhys entered on her brief affair with Ford in Paris. These two intense, stormy encounters provide the environment in which a remarkable series of modernist masterpieces of fiction first took shape. To Ford the two meetings seemed linked together because both appear to be steps in what he called, in his Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924) and his The March of Literature from Confucius to Modern Times (1938), the movement of modern literature toward Impressionism.
An important dimension of impressionist literature is the "opening" of the canon. Readers of Charlotte Bront"s Jane Eyre thought they had closed the book and understood it well, until Rhys gave them Wide Sargasso Sea. Readers of Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's School-days (1856) though they had solved the mystique of the British officer class, until Lord Jim reopened the question. The impressionist text typically stands in a critical relation to earlier texts, forcing us to rethink our judgments. It follows that Ford's literary criticism in The March of Literature from Confucius to Modern Times is a revaluation, a systematic reopening of the whole canon of Western literature. ... Read more

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He was the founding father of modern art, the grand master who pointed painting forward on its way from Impressionism to the 20th century: Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). In Paris, but above all in Provence, he quested tirelessly for "a harmony parallel to nature" - discovering it in still lifes of apples, in bathers, or in the renowned landscapes of his beloved Montagne Sainte-Victoire. This book discusses this extraordinary artist's major works and his theories of painting and colour. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Not Quite as Fine ...
... as many of the inexpensive Taschen series, in terms of the quality of the reproductions. The colors seem 'heavier' than my memories of the originals, but perhaps it's all a question of scale. Cézanne is among my long-time favorite painters, and I've spent happy hours looking at his works in museums from Paris to Berlin to Tokyo to Philadelphia. I once drove from Philly to Columbus Ohio just to see one painting by Cézanne.

But I didn't pick up this Taschen to refresh memories of Cézanne's paintings. I was interested in the text by Ulrike Becks-Malorny, specifically her discussion of the life-long friendship between the artist and the writer Emile Zola, which began when they were boys but which was dampened when Zola portrayed a 'struggling' painter in his novel "L'Oeuvre" in 1886. I've undertaken to read all twenty of Zola's 'Macquart-Rougon' novels in order, but I may need to jump ahead to "L'Oeuvre" because of my great love of Cézanne. The Taschen text is not enough.

What is it about Cézanne's painting that make it more compelling for me than that of the other Impressionists and even post-Impressionists? It's totally subjective, I suppose, but when I look long enough at a Cézanne landscape, I feel radiantly happy. I believe once again in the solidity of things and in the capacity of my senses to 'order' reality. Madame Becks-Malorny describes Cézanne's painstakingly slow method of painting in terms of asserting 'order' through balanced composition, modifying or modulating 'what he saw' until it became 'what he really saw' as a creator.

Why Should I?You don't help me!
This is an inexpensive way to get a good art education.I have read some of the material, and although I don't always agree with the writer, I respect their opinion and the selections of their examples.On a broader scope, I am miffed that when I complained about receiving only a partial fulfillment of an order (Biography of R. E. Lee, FOUR VOLUMES!) you did nothing about it when I did not get the final and fourth volume.The "vendor" wrote back to me complaining of a "death" in the "family" and blaming you, Amazon, for not receiving the full order which was horse feathers.If you are not going to help me resolve these crooked dealings, why should I "help" you by writing review or discussing unfulfilled orders!?!The heck with you: I am not going to give you any feedback when it doesn't mean anything! ... Read more

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Cezanne's Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint discusses an epochal shift in the representation of sexuality in modern art with the images of nudes made by Paul Cezanne. Cezanne was the first painter of the twentieth century who, through careful study of avant-garde precedents including Manet and Courbet, would transform the material qualities of his art into an erotics of paint--that is to say, an eroticization of medium, of the liquidity of paint and the resistance of the canvas, of the trembling of the contour, of the oiliness of the pigment, and of countless other painterly effects. By dislocating the erotics of his subject from the bodies he depicted and transposing it onto these formal qualities, Cezanne set the stage for the explorations of a number of later artists, including Henri Matisse, who saw in Cezanne the possibilities of the modern painting of the nude.<

Cezanne's Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint proposes a new way of reading Cezanne's biography not simply as a form of myth-making but also as a form of art criticism; at the same time, it proposes a reading of Cezanne's images of bathers that accounts for their strangenesses and for the pleasures they produce. It is a book that is fiercely engaged with arguments about these paintings that have come before, mining the writings of figures such as Meyer Schapiro, Tamar Garb, and T. J. Clark to discover a new way of looking at these strange works. ... Read more

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Situating post-WWII New York literature within the material context of American urban history, this work analyzes how literary movements such as the Beat Generation, the New York poets and Black Arts Moment criticized the spatial restructuring of post-WWII New York City. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Impressive but Impractical
This is a very good book (for what it is), but it is quite a difficult read, with much content that has little practical value for most of us.It is a scholarly (i.e., academic) history of opinions and processes that informed Impressionist painting.It is undeniably impressive in its scholarship, its substantive weight, and its physical dimensions--this is a big book having large oversize pages full of single-spaced small print.Its research and detail are, I think, remarkable.Indeed it presents detail upon detail upon technical detail.It is both exhaustive and exhausting.It thoroughly covers many topics that I simply have no need or desire to know about.This is a book for art-history professors.

I had wanted to see this book for two reasons:I wanted to learn to paint like the Impressionists, and I hoped to see their paintings in superior reproductions.In each case, I was disappointed.

The quality of the reproductions is very good (more than adequate to illustrate the text's points), but NOT outstanding.And this definitely is not a how-to-paint lesson manual.If, from this book, you ever learn to paint like the Masters, it will only be indirectly, from inference rather than from clear instruction.And you will need to dig through some fairly thick and sometimes diffuse language to find information you might consider useful.In fact, many of the opinions and processes discussed in the book are contradictory--and (to her credit) the author does not offer her opinion about which ways and opinions were best.

Believe it or not, the foregoing is not meant to disparage the book per se, because it is excellent, FOR WHAT IT IS (and on those particular terms it deserves 4 stars).I have only meant to tell prospective buyers just what it is.This book was not very helpful to me, and I think it would not be very useful to most readers, including most painters and art aficionados.

I'm glad the book exists--it is a genuine scholarly achievement--and if someone were to give it to me as a gift, I'd gratefully recieve it (and I'd probably look at it once in a while).But I would not pay much to buy it.(Borrow it from a public library before deciding to buy.)

Wonderful Research and Insight!
Anthea Callen trained as a painter.She writes with a painter's insight. She also has a brilliant mind. The book is thoroughly researched. It is written with more emphasis on the materials and physical techniques of the Impressionists than on sociological or philosophical analysis.When she does go into those areas she does so with restraint and great intelligence. I give this book the highest recommendation particularly as a book for painters or for those interested in the intricacies of painting. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, NM), published by The Santa Fe New Mexican on October 24, 2008. The length of the article is 595 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: PASA REVIEWS SANTA FE NEW MUSIC PRESENTS DAVID LANG AND THE POST-CLASSICALS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS, OCT. 18 THE NEW-MUSIC ZOO REVUE.(Pasatiempo)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication: The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, NM) (Newspaper)
Date: October 24, 2008
Publisher: The Santa Fe New Mexican
Page: PA-10

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

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Adam Parkes investigates the literary and cultural implications of the censorship with which several major works of modern fiction were received in their time. He situates modernism in the context of this reception, examining the relations between such authors as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf and the public controversies generated by their fictional explorations of modern sexual themes. These authors located "obscenity" at the level of stylistic and formal experiment. Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, and Orlando dramatized problems of sexuality and expression in ways that subverted the moral, political, and aesthetic premises on which their censors operated. In showing how modernism evolved within a culture of censorship, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship suggests that modern novelists, while shaped by their culture, attempted to reshape it. ... Read more

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Post-war Cinema and Modernity explores the relationship between film and modernity in the second half of the twentieth century. Its distinguishing feature is the focus on the close connections between history, theory and textual criticism. The first section, on Film Theory and Film Form, begins with a sustained group of theory readings. Bazin and Telotte critique new post-war forms of film narrative, while Metz and Birch respond to the filmic innovations of the 1960s and the question of modernism. Pasolini's landmark polemic on the cinema of poetry is a vital springboard for the later critiques by Deleuze and Tarkovsky of time and the image, and for Kawin and De Lauretis of subjectivities and their narrative transformation, while Jameson deals with the topical question of film and postmodernity. There follows a series of essays grouped around different aspects of film form. General discussion of changes in film technology and cinematic perception can be seen in the essays by Virilio, Wollen, Aumont and Bukatman, and is extended to a discussion of film documentary.Finally, there is a focus on cinematographers and their filmic collaboration, with a specially commissioned essay on post-war British cinematography, and readings featuring the work of Michael Chapman with Martin Scorsese and Nestor Almendros with Terrence Malick.The second section looks at International Cinema, placing filmmaking and filmmakers in a social and a national context, as well as taking up many aspects of film theory. It brings together landmark essays which contextualise feature films historically, yet also highlight their aesthetic power and their wider cultural importance. Filmmakers discussed include Ozu, Bresson, Hitchcock, Godard, Fassbinder and Zhang Yimou. There is a new translation of Kieslowski's essay on Bergman's The Silence and an essay specially commissioned for the volume on the work of Theo Angelopoulos.Features * Filmmaking and filmmakers are placed in social, national and historical context * The selections address many aspects of film theory and film form * Topics include Film and Narrativity, Representation and Reflexivity, Time and the Image, Subjectivity and Perception, Film and Painting, Gender and Identity * Readings on individual directors - Welles, Antonioni, Rocher, Sembene, Greenaway and Egoyan ... Read more

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Suppressed by the former communist governments and overshadowed by a focus on German and Dutch early modernism, the outstanding achievements of functionalist architects in Eastern Europe have been largely ignored by historians and critics. this book is the first retrospective ever published of functionalist buildings completed between the wars, the "Golden Age" of modernism, in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. It is illustrated with rare archival and current photographs of the most famous and exemplary projects in each country:sanatoriums, hotels, sports facilities, private houses, offices, and religious and governmental buildings. Among the illustrious architects whose work is presented here are Karel Teige, Bohuslav Fuchs, and Josef Gocar of Czechoslovakia; Alfred Forbat and Jozsef Fischer of Hungary; and Lucian Korngold, Barbara and Stanislaw Brukalski, and Bohdeon Lachert of Poland. An introductory essay examines functionalism in Eastern Europe from an international perspective; essays by prominent architectural historians from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland explore competing ideas and functionalism in each country.
... Read more

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The book focuses on three interrelated issues: the relationship between modernism and postmodernism; visuality and visual culture; and the relation between the East (former European socialist countries) and the West as regards aesthetics, globalization, culture, and the mechanisms of the presentation and representation of contemporary visual art. In the first part the author reflects upon some of the less noticed issues of modernism and its dominant theoretical narratives regarding art: its privileging of truth and its obfuscation of some segments of European art. One of his central tenets is that recent postsocialist politicized postmodern visual art contradicts Peter Bürger's canonical theory about the avant-garde art of the previous century. The art and culture discussed throughout this volume predominantly concern the visual. For this reason, in the second part visual culture and its uneasy relationship with art and art history are an object of reflection, a topic which is then complemented with that of the embodied eye in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Photography, its relation to truth, and the problematic expectation that an ontology of photography is possible or necessary is the theme of the closing chapter of this part of the book. In the third part the author offers a global view on philosophy of art, visual culture, and the institutions that disseminate them. ... Read more

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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 attentionnot 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 rolesprostitute, mother, housewife, the "New Woman" and "garonne"that attracted the attention of these artists. Situating her exploration on a strong theoretical base, she ranges deftly over mass visual culturefrom film to poster art and advertisingto create a vivid portrait of women living and creating in Weimar Germany. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Forgotten History
The years between the two World Wars in Germany were marked by a degree of turmoil in the nation's politics, economics and culture that was unprecedented at the time and remains unmatched to this day in the rest ofWestern European and American history. Unlike the 1960s, when socialmovements took place against a background of affluence, the rampantinflation and unemployment of the Weimar Republic meant there was nosecurity whatsoever to counterbalance the tremendous changes penetrating toevery corner of society. Everything which had once been fixed and solidbecame fluid and insubstantial; in Marx's words,"All that is solid meltsinto air". Gender roles in particular, which until that time had beenenshrined as a kind of divine division of labour, were transformed frominstitutions into issues. Language lagged behind the pace of change: thus,that new breed of woman who cut her hair, played sport, took a job andfollowed fashion was simply called "die neue Frau". Similarly, the namegarçonne was borrowed from French to describe the androgynous youngcity-dweller who made no secret of her bi- or homosexuality. The garçonne and the "neue Frau",while not strictly new in the sense of never havingexisted before, did attain a new level of visibility in public life and themass media in the 1920s and 1930s. More often than not, they existed incombination with, rather than opposition to, traditional roles such as themother, the Hausfrau and the prostitute. In Marsha Meskimmon's book WeWeren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and The Limits of German Modernism,she explores the ways in which women perpetuated, refigured and foughtagainst roles both old and new. Women artists occupied a unique position inthe Weimar era. The nature of their work - painting or drawing in a studio,not employed as a sales assistant in a shop or a labourer in a factory -placed them at the borders between public and private, bourgeois andproletarian. While this ambiguity gave them more freedom to occupy numerousidentities (wife, artist, mother) simultaneously, it also made their statusmore tenuous. Those married to male artists were sometimes able tonegotiate an egalitarian partnership, but more often than not wives wereovershadowed by their husbands and, in the case of Marta Hegemann and AntonRäderscheidt, sometimes even abandoned by them. As many of the womenartists Meskimmon discusses were politically active - they were generallycommitted Socialists or Communists - their work featured realistic scenesof unemployment lines and hungry children gazing into gleaming shopwindows, as well as satirical family portraits which mocked the bourgeoisideal of domesticity. Realism was not considered avant-garde in the 1920sand 1930s, however, and their work was classified as "women's art": hencepainter Gerta Overbeck's lament that lends the book its title, "We weren'tmodern enough". During their lifetimes, many women artists supportedthemselves by drawing illustrations for children's books (this at leastseemed "natural"). After their deaths, their work remained in the hands oftheir families or a handful of private collectors, mostly in Germany. Withthe exception of Käthe Kollwitz, who is not profiled in this book, mostwomen artists of the era never found commercial success, and their namesare forgotten today: Grethe Jürgens, Jeanne Mammon, Lou Albert-Lasard,Lotte Laserstein. By documenting this part of history generally omitted infavour of folklore about the Weimar Republic's leading male figures,Meskimmon contributes a great deal to our understanding of the period aswell as women's ongoing struggle for equality and recognition. However, itis unfortunate that her book takes such a fascinating subject and rendersit stiff and awkward in academic jargon. All too often, Meskimmon useswords such as "alterity", "polyvocality", and "located subject", when aless scholarly turn of phrase would convey the same idea in a moreimmediate way. In her attempt to resurrect the histories of artists whowere written out of the canon because they were women, Meskimmon'sgender-studies idiom runs the risk of condemning them to yet anotherspecial-interest ghetto. Nevertheless, by detailing the many identitieswhich women chose and rejected in the Weimar era, Meskimmon reveals theseartists as women who made their lives on their own terms. ... Read more

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In this fundamental rethinking of the rise of modernism from its beginnings in the Impressionist movement, Robert Jensen reveals that market discourses were pervasive in the ideological defense of modernism from its very inception and that the avant-garde actually thrived on the commercial appeal of anti-commercialism at the turn of the century. The commercial success of modernism, he argues, depended greatly on possession of historical legitimacy. The very development of modern art was inseparable from the commercialism many of its proponents sought to transcend. Here Jensen explores the economic, aesthetic, institutional, and ideological factors that led to its dominance in the international art world by the early 1900s. He emphasizes the role of the emerging dealer/gallery market and of modernist art historiographies in evaluating modern art and legitimizing it through the formation of a canon of modernist masters. In describing the canon-building of modern dealerships, Jensen considers the new "ideological dealer" and explores the commercial construction of artistic identity through such rhetorical concepts as temperament and "independent art" and through such institutional structures as the retrospective. His inquiries into the fate of the juste milieu, a group of dissidents who saw themselves as "true heirs" of Impressionism, and his look at a new form of art history emerging in Germany further expose a linear, dealer- oriented history of modernist art constructed by or through the modernists themselves. ... Read more

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The Grove Dictionary of Art, the award-winning set that was launched to critical acclaim in 1996, represents the knowledge of more than 6,800 of the world's leading scholars. It is now the preeminent reference resource for the visual arts. The new GroveART series makes this comprehensive and authoritative art scholarship accessible and affordable to all audiences for the first time. Complete with a multipage color plate section as well as extensive black and white images throughout, each volume in the series will focus on one particularly popular area or period of art history. Broad enough to appeal to the general reader, but thorough enough for the art historian. ... Read more

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Italian and English text side-by-side."With extraordinary and stark beauty, glass, steel and concrete openly state the material used for the daring and welcoming, solid yet airy structure of the new Milan Exhibition Pole. The detailed descriptions and numerous pictures contained in this exquisite and elegant book illustrate the project throughout its various stages, from the geography of the area before reclamation work was completed, to design, construction, infrastructures and utilities. The numerous contributions include an in-depth discussion with Fuksas, in which the famous designer talks about his creation and about what has been described as 'the biggest sculpture in the world.'"Pictorial and fabric-covered boards.Editoriale Domus 2005 Testo italiano/inglese. Rozzano (Mi), 2005; ril. in seta, pp. 228, tavv. e ill. col., cm 33x25. ... Read more

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Great book, nicely illustrated, featuring Modern and Contemporary architecture of the 20th century. 862 color and black and white illustrations / photographs of buildings, architectural details, floorplans, architectural drawings. Includes works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Venturi, le Corbusier, Piano and Rogers, Gropius, Frank Gehry and other architects. Modernism, de Stijl, Art Deco, Post Modern, International Style. Includes notes / bibliography.Softcover. 736 pages. Measures 8 1/2 by 9 3/4 inches. Interesting book, nicely illustrated. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (21)

Expensive to be used.
It is in very good conditions but it was only ten dollars under it's original(new) price. Expensive to be a used book!

Hate to love it
I had to purchase this book as my required textbook for a Modernism class.Needless to say, when the quarter is over, this book is not getting resold!It's well bound, fabulous pictures, and very captivating reading.Yes, it's a textbook, but it's by Taschen and it's something to keep on your bookshelf as a handy reference, and idea generator in the future.I could go on and on...

Good source of information
this is a really good reference book becuase it provides many precedents of architecture that are really good to look at for ideas and cocepts.

Complicated language.
I gave up in trying to read this book.The language is too advanced for someone simply studying 20th cenury architecture class, unless this is your field of studies or you are going to write a thesis.

Modern Architecture Since 1900
Nothing to review as you were unable to provide me with a copy of the product selected.Apparently it was out of stock.But you did provide the name of another book that I might like.Unfortunately it was for a text and that suggestion ws useless. ... Read more