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Due to biases and lacunae in the discipline of art history, the importance of illustrating to the work of artists of color, particularly African American artists, has been understudied. Consequently, we will only change existing art-historical narratives by more fully incorporating material like illustrations into our broader histories of art. Illustrating was a crucial outlet for many artists: it provided a source of income when other means of financial support were limited, and offered a way to communicate important stories in the face of modernism's general dismissal of narrative. The continuing lack of robust attention to practices like illustration, still often framed as a mere prelude or addendum to an artist's oeuvre, deprives us of a richer sense of the contributions of artists of color to the history of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial flowers made by Vanessa Bell and others for the Omega Workshops during the war years have received little scholarly commentary compared with the firm's other products. This article analyzes the flowers as heirs to a Victorian tradition of artificial flower making, as innovative aesthetic objects in their own right, and as works that catalyzed an emancipatory vision of modern living, painterly style, and comparative aesthetics for the Bloomsbury artists. Bell reworked the material culture of her Victorian upbringing in a modernist idiom through the flowers, articulating a new vision of femininity. For Duncan Grant, they were both symbols of sexual nonconformity and vehicles of sensual immersion in private domestic space. And in Roger Fry's paintings, the flowers often invite formal and conceptual comparisons between the arts of East and West, opening up new forms of cross-cultural pollination and appreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1939 Georgia O'Keeffe traveled to the Territory of Hawai'i to fulfill a commission for the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son. Her expenses were covered in exchange for two paintings to be used in advertisements for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company), an enterprise entangled with the conquest of Hawai'i. James Dole built his pineapple empire on the dispossession and oppression of Indigenous Hawaiians by U.S. missionaries, businessmen, and politicians. While O'Keeffe's experiences in and paintings of Hawai'i were structured by coSSnderstand O'Keeffe's work as participating in the highly racialized project of colonialism is to disrupt dominant histories that, often unwittingly, contribute to the ongoing disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples. Doing so is an important step toward "decolonizing" the history of American modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the exceptional appeal to modernists of pulquerías : working-class Mexican bars often generously painted on their exteriors. Specifically, this article focuses on two essays published by Diego Rivera and illustrated with photographs by Edward Weston that appeared in the bilingual journal Mexican Folkways in 1926. Through their praise, the two artists sought to align themselves both aesthetically and politically with the popular. Set against the backgrounds of folk revivals in both the United States and Mexico, as well as the Mexican mural movement, each artist drew on a distinct aspect of the pulquerías to make their own modernist art—Rivera on the tragicomic vacilada and Weston on the tension between representation and the real. Rather than reinforce the binary relationships Rivera and Weston imagined to exist between tradition and modernity, this article argues for the hybridity of both modernist and folk art constructs. Far from requiring either modernist "salvage" or transformation, an idea that forecloses the possibility of folk art's dynamic development, the pulquerías proved to be equally responsive to the conditions of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

H. C. Westermann's sculptures The Plush (1963) and Imitation Knotty Pine (1966)—are representative of his occasionally facetious response to concurrent sculptural practices in the United States. A close look at his media, production, form, and content reveals a disaffection for the then-fashionable emphases on industrial materials and technologies, material specificity, and reductive form that were linked to David Smith and, later, the minimalists. Like Marisol and Robert Arneson, Westermann rejected modernist ideas about sculpture. This article offers an historically grounded, contextual analysis of these two works and unearths an extensive web of references and allusions. Westermann's response to modernist and minimalist practices was a refusal of aesthetic autonomy for an art that openly celebrated, even insisted upon, a democratic ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent addition of materials to the Archives of American Art's Worden Day Papers enlivens study of this fascinating artist's life. Methodologically, this case study also addresses the challenge of researching American women modernists who lack significant archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The comprehensive 1933 Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists at the Smithsonian Institution's National Gallery of Art sought to introduce a broad public to the creative expression of African Americans at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. In its use of race as its organizing principle, the exhibition was also an early contributor to the production of "African American art" as a distinct field of study. James V. Herring, Alain Locke, and James A. Porter each played a key role in interpreting and presenting African American art both in Washington, D.C., and across the nation, and laid the foundations of an art-critical and art-historical tradition that continues today. This essay explores how Herring's background as a curator, Locke's background as a philosopher, and Porter's background as an artist all colored their interpretations of African American art at this important juncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of Charles Demuth's abstract townscape, Backdrop of East Lynne (1919) was long disregarded as either a specific place name or a Dada-inspired play on words of little significance. This article proposes that it actually references the nineteenth-century novel and popular play East Lynne (1861) by Ellen Wood. East Lynne remained well known in Demuth's day through theatrical revivals and silent film adaptations. Though it still appealed to traditional taste, it became notorious for displaying a Victorian sentimentality many considered out of touch with the complexities of modern life. Understood in this context, Demuth's title draws an analogy between outmoded theatrical traditions and the American landscape conventions his modernist painting sought to revitalize. Moreover, it provides important insight into how his involvement with avant-garde theater as a founding member of the Provincetown Players shaped his practice as a visual artist and points to the deeper impact of nineteenth-century culture on the foundations of American modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With their gaudy colors and showgirl subjects, Walt Kuhn's paintings have a kitschy flavor for viewers today. The artist was admired and successful during his lifetime but is now largely discussed only for his role as the Secretary of the 1913 Armory Show. What remains unexplored by scholars is the fact that these kitschy elements were part of a career-long intentional recreation of what Kuhn called a "buckeye" aesthetic and that this aesthetic was central to his artistic aims. This study reconsiders the paradoxical elements in Kuhn's oeuvre and complicates our understanding of American modernisms. Through a study of his painting The City (1919), a full-length portrait of a showgirl and one of his first explorations of vulgarity in theme and style, I contend that concomitant views of gender, popular culture, and the metropolis were fundamental to his burgeoning buckeye aesthetic. By examining the multivalent, metaphoric links Kuhn presents in this painting—among kitsch, the city, and the popular female performer—I argue that the artist's cultivation of a lowbrow aesthetic was inextricably bound to the marking of his own vision as modern and avant-garde. In fact, Kuhn's recreation of the buckeye was part of his quest for a specifically alternative modernism. Ultimately, Kuhn's City and subsequent deliberately garish works encouraged an active observation based on thoughtful reflection and effort that affirmed individual agency and masculine control and suggested a new way of seeing by which viewers could navigate the unprecedented proliferation of mass-produced consumer products and crass visual ephemera so endemic to modern urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art dealer Samuel M. Kootz brought abstract expressionism and architectural modernism into their first sustained alliance in The Muralist and the Modern Architect , a 1950 exhibition at his New York gallery. The exhibited murals—gestural wall paintings for homes, schools, and urban plazas—attempted to resolve issues about audience, public life, and monumentality then arising in art and architecture circles. Yet Kootz's signature contribution lay in his harnessing of the exhibition venue as a robust marketing tool. Through various display strategies, Kootz presented the abstract mural not as site-specific and monumental, but as a scalable, reproducible art form, customizable to the requirements of any venue and any client. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses African American sculptor and folk artist William Edmondson. Topics include his one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, modernism and primitivism, the mobility and transnational travels of his works, and his work on gravestones and funeral monuments.

This article was originally published in Revue générale de l'architecture et des travaux publics 27 (1869): 10–71. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparisons have often been made between aesthetic shifts in the arts of late antiquity and the rise of abstraction in early twentieth-century Euro-American art. These include the use of marble in both late antique and modernist architecture to orchestrate patterned effects read as ornamental, or even figural. The analogy might be extended to some early and medieval mosques, in which the natural images seen in marble patterning authorized figural imagery within an otherwise aniconic environment. In both mosques and modernism, marble was embraced by architectural cultures that were ostensibly suspicious of ornament and imagery, if for quite different reasons. Rather than suggesting a fortuitous parallel, this essay argues for a common relation to the architecture of late antiquity: direct in the case of the mosque, indirect and highly mediated in the case of modernist monuments. This debt to earlier precedents qualifies standard antihistoricist representations of modernist architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including Modernism and the work of contemporary and Modern artists including Felrath Hines, Hideo Benjamin Noda and Mark Tobey.

The article discusses the 2015-2016 exhibition "Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic," focusing particularly on the works including the 1931 American painting "Classic Landscape" by Charles Sheeler and the 1924 Brazilian painting "São Paulo" by Tarsila do Amaral. Topics include modernism in art, international business relations in the early 20th century, and vernacular art.

The article presents a critical analysis of the work of artist Roy Lichtenstein, focusing on examination of his style as"retromodern" through its combination of both future and past-oriented aesthetics. Topics include Lichtenstein's relationship to the 20th-century Modernist art movement and his incorporation and undermining of the style, the influence of the debate between high and low culture on his works, and the Art-Deco inspired aesthetic of Lichtenstein's Modernist works. Earlier critical responses to the paintings are discusses.

This essay analyzes the sexuality of the form, surface and style of the works of 20th century Italian painter and sculptor Ardengo Soffici. It highlights the move by Futurist artists to stake their ventures on a language of emphatic sexual difference. The engagement of artists in Italian modernism and the Nietzschean philosophy is also discussed.

The article discusses melancholy as the condition of all music. Topics discussed are the twentieth-century historical definition of melancholy, the nineteenth-century history of melancholy music and the distinction between melancholy and sentimentality. Also mentioned are the function of dreams as wish fulfillments, modernism and the anxiety of articulation.

In this article, the author recounts the would-be collaboration between the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania art collector Albert C. Barnes and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Barnes, a collector of modernist art and founder of the Barnes Foundation, first approached the PAFA after it staged the exhibition "Paintings and Drawings by American Artists Showing the Later Tendencies in Art" in 1921. This exhibition led to the display of Barnes' art collection at PAFA in a 1923 exhibition organized by the American artist Arthur B. Carles. In subsequent years, however, Barnes' relationship with both PAFA and Carles, soured. The article discusses the legacy of the 1923 exhibition on the complex history of modernist art in Philadelphia.

This article is the last of a three-part study that identifies Belgian art nouveau as "imperial modernism" and its interlocking history with the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Part III opens by discovering the sixth and final element of a distinctively Congo lexicon of modern design in the "steamer style" of Henry van de Velde, who began and ended his career in Tervuren. The body of the article provides a critical account of the Royal Museum's history, the tepid revisionism of its 2005 Memory of the Congo exhibition, and the challenges of the museum's on-going renovation. This analysis is framed by new research that brings back to the interpretive field a surprisingly unexamined history of the foundational role of violence in Belgian national identity and collective self-definition after 1830, suggesting how the creation of a cultural system as a nation of victims and avengers may have interacted with patterns of violence in the Congo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the second part of a three-part study of Belgian art nouveau as "imperial modernism," created from Congo raw materials and inspired by Congo motifs. While Part I explored the lash, the vine, and the elephantine, Part II examines Henry van de Velde's theory and design of modern ornament, finding as one of his sources the African body arts of scarification known as tatouage. In the 1890s, when Henry van de Velde was preoccupied with defining a new language of ornament, a discourse of tatouage circulated in Belgium, which emphasized body scarification as a complex and living art form with a coherent set of styles and functions. The Congolese practice of repeated cuts in the flesh to create raised, abstract patterns corresponded closely to Van de Velde's emerging conception of structural ornament. Scarification provided a central resource in his design repertoire for modernism; emulating the native artists he explicitly admired, Van de Velde fused material and surface in his ceramics, furniture, and women's clothing. The final part of this study, to be published in the next issue of this magazine, will focus on the history, visual culture, and ongoing renovation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa and highlight new research on expressive forms of violence, past and present, within Belgium and outside it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Germans' perceived enthusiasm for American pop art in the 1960s and 1970s, with emphasis given to the work of such artists as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. The author relies on the theories of cultural history and culture transfers. The author beings by charting the development of German modernism and abstract expressionism, which influenced this love of U.S. pop art. The influence of U.S. economic conditions on the rise of pop art is then explained. Other topics discussed include the opening of German art galleries, German art collectors, and German economic conditions.

The article provides an analysis of U.S. artist Ernest L. Blumenschein's painting "The Gift," which depicts a group of Native Americans. The author assesses the painting's iconography, composition, and style, as well as Blumenschein's protests of U.S. federal policy regarding the assimilation of Native Americans. The artist's association with modernism is also examined. The painting's similarities to earlier depictions of Pueblo women are explained.

The article provides an analysis of U.S. artist Ernest L. Blumenschein's painting "The Gift," which depicts a group of Native Americans. The author assesses the painting's iconography, composition, and style, as well as Blumenschein's protests of U.S. federal policy regarding the assimilation of Native Americans. The artist's association with modernism is also examined. The painting's similarities to earlier depictions of Pueblo women are explained.

The article discusses the operations of the the Penguin club, a group of modernist U.S. artists, and the role of painter Walt Kuhn in its formation. Kuhn's efforts in organizing the Armory Show, an early showcase for European modern art in the U.S., are explained by the author, as is Kuhn's divergence from the artistically conservative standpoint of the National Academy of Design (NAD). The author then goes on to describe various events sponsored by the Penguin, such as art exhibitions, auctions, and an annual costume ball.

The article discusses the papers related to painter Albert Bloch donated by the Albert Bloch Foundation which served as a link between American and European Modernism . Topics include an understanding of European modernism provided by Bloch's papers including perspectives on World War I, and family letters found among the Bloch's papers which highlighted Bloch's personal life.

The article discusses the effect of scientific understandings of an era on its portraiture. It traces the history of portraiture in the 18th and 19th centuries, when depictions of human attributes were mediated by theories purporting to trace intelligence and character in physiognomy. It notes that early 20th-century portraits were governed by abstraction and reflected developments of physics, mathematics and psychology that informed modernism. It cites digitization, which in the 21st century allows conveying of information through minute bits of data, noting that this affects the idea of identity. It cites digital manipulation of photographs by artist Nancy Burson and works by artists Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Marc Quinn, whose portraits consist of genetic code rather than image.

The article focuses on the absconding of artifacts. It states that in many archaic societies, the properties and things attached to the memory of dead persons were destroyed or buried with them. It notes that absconding an object, along with the person's remains, suggests that any notion of the subsistence of the people beyond death also applies to their belongings, not for self protection on the part of the living, but as a way of ensuring them with metaphysical permanence or immortality. It also mentions that in the modern world, visibility has become the dominant parameter of art, unlike in the past wherein artifacts were meant to be buried with the dead, forever absconded and concealed from the living.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Procter & Gamble popularized the art of soap carving through a series of annual competitions, which explicitly promoted handicraft as a therapeutic alternative to the machine age. However, soap sculpture in fact offered a way to accommodate the changes associated with commercial modernization. A do-it-yourself hobby that relied on mass production, turned the household chore of shaving soap into an art form, and produced compact works of art that reflected the demands of factory production, soap sculpture is an example "antimodern modernism"-assimilating and aestheticizing the very processes of modernization it otherwise appeared to oppose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the plans of art galleries and global art markets to expand the concepts of modern expressions in art history and museum studies that would provide the cultivation, articulation and preservation of elitist tastes in Western countries. He illustrates the complexity of the subjects of modernity, mythology and museography from a different elevation of art museums. He points out the need for art museums to collaborate with anthropological museums.

New York Dadaist John Covert's (1882–1960) collage construction Time (1919) is a staple of American modernist art history. Recently discovered materials prompt our reconsideration of the work in terms of the connotations that time, broadly considered, came to embody in Covert's life and post-World War I America. Time addresses a reverence for the number four that we see in other works by the artist and that constituted part of a philosophy espoused by the pioneering psychiatrist Elmer Ernest Southard. Time represents a game or toy that, soon after its production, Covert would no longer have time to play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with Aleksandr Sokurov, considered as a great modernist film maker in Russia. When asked about the failure of his latest film, "The Sun" in the Berlin Film Festival, he merely replied as it was a painful event for him and he do not want to give further details. He expresses his admiration to Dreyer as a great and indispensable figure in cinema. He relates his art sensation as it is always best produced by painting and symphonic music.

The article presents the author's point of view on the artistic practice of conceptual art, its movement and legacy. It is said that the practice of art has encountered several crisis in terms of modernism in which it is supposed to have emerged. According to the author that the account of such crisis was driven by an over developed sense of the necessity of the succession and the relations in questions that have been widely conventionalized.

The article profiles Aleksandr Sokurov, considered as a famous film maker in Russia. He was born in 1951 and started out as one of the not so lost generation of the Russian film makers whose production was blocked during the Brezhnev period. He became successful through his idea of modernist art cinema such as the long take, slow motion narrative, a web allusion and the morbid of subject matter.

The article describes the contemporary art of today. Works such as the Cremaster, a five feature-length 35 mm films, provides answers to the nature of art in this times and illustrating contemporary art, as a movement, emerged as a new modern. Another through the works of Shirin Neshat and Ayanah Moore which provide the second wide-scale answer of what comprises contemporary art which exists from the states of contemporaneity.

The article discusses the legacy of photographic modernism in the U.S. Charles Sheeler has made photography an integral part of his artistic practice since 1915. The inclusion of his 1939 work entitled Wheels in the 14th edition of the "Encyclopedia Britannica" published in 1941 is an evidence of his importance to the aesthetic development of the medium. His work accompanied Edward Weston's revised entry on the subject of Photographic Art for the publication. According to the article, photographic modernism in its purist sense started in the U.S. about 1915 to 1916 with the developing work of artists Sheeler, Strand and Morton Schamberg.

This article presents the life history of African American artist Thelma Johnson Streat. The studies of African American art frequently examine European modernism and African art as the two major sources of stylistic and ideological influence on Afro-American artists working in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. The artist, who grew up in the Northwest, made it her objective to promote the idea of "one people in one world." Although Streat worked and exhibited in a number of cities, including New York and Chicago, her multicultural message was formulated largely from a base in California. The extent to which San Francisco's social landscape shaped Streat's ideas is difficult to measure. According to scholar Judith Wilson, the situation for African American artists in the Bay Area was unique for the time.

Presents an interview with American artist William T. Wiley. Personal and professional background of Wiley; Role of Wiley as a teacher at the University of California; Views of Wiley on abstract expressionism; Comment of Wiley on his association with the funk art movement on the West Coast; Influence of cartoonists on the life of Wiley,

Focuses on the inquiry on what makes writing the indispensable art of transmission in the era of technologically mediated information. Generic feature of informational writing, the memorandum, the humblest yet perhaps the most ubiquitous genre of writing in the modern world; Recognition of memorandum as the quintessential genre, a means of transmitting information within the large bureaucratic structures organizing virtually all work in modernity; Emergence of memorandum as a new genre of writing in the context of the development of systematic management techniques in the large corporations of the later nineteenth century.

This article focuses on the painting titled "Placa," where former graffiti writer Charles" Chaz" Bojorquez lists the names of people who have been significant in his life. He has described this work, made with fine art materials and donated to a museum, as his mantra painting, one that he created to acknowledge in a different realm the strength he had been given through the support of those he names. Through medium, format, technique, and placement, these acrylic letters also participate in the art-historical debates about the legacy of modernism in late-twentieth-century painting and about the influence of movements ranging from pop and abstract expressionism in the United States to informalism in Spain.

The article examines the artistic dimension of anthropology as a discipline. It relates the nature of the study of art within anthropology. It discusses the reliance of anthropology on comparison and multidisciplinarity which prevents the classification of anthropology as a science. It offers an overview of the role of psychoanalysis in anthropology. It emphasizes that any study of human beings must rely on distancing themselves from themselves. It explores the aspects of alienation and Modernism in the anthropologies of art.

The article discusses the impact of Islamic art on Western art in the past and present. According to the article, many artists today are extending the Islamic vocabulary beyond its original framework, developing new narratives that reconfigure and subvert the original idioms and defy the assumptions of modernism. It also features the life and works of several artists including Ghada Amer, Shahzia Sikander and Shirazeh Houshiary, among others. These three artists share their refusal to inhabit a gheto either Western or Islamic, insteadm inventing new orders that are akien to both.

The article discusses the history of Maya of the highlands of Chiapas in Southern Mexico and the integral part of the inner dialectic of the Western World that includes the pre-Columbia. The author describes the integration of dualism implied by the notion of otherness and the West and the Nonwest contending with the historico-geographical fact that Columbus seek with the ultimate Western land. It also looks into the contribution of modernism which is a renewed concern for universals and a sort of psycho-anthropological one with historical search.

The article looks briefly at a few writings about the Cubist painting "Still Life," by Juan Gris before turning attention back to an essay by art critic Clement Greenberg that is devoted to an analysis of Cubist collage. The article aims to see "Still Life" itself as part of this larger context, as crucial, that is, to a thinking-through of modernist art and its history. For the critic, modernism was fueled from the start by a deep anxiety over the fate and identity-of art. In later writings, he expresses simply a fear that art might degenerate into a form of a relatively trivial interior decoration.

Comments on trends in 20th century American art which gave rise to the modernism movement. Spirit of the modernist movement illustrated in the 1946 parody published by painter Ad Reinhardt; Role of forming early collections of modern art to validate and shape the historical perspective through which American modernism has been assessed.