Elia Kazan

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Stephen C. Foster

Few artists spanned the movements of early twentieth-century art as completely as did Hans Richter. Richter was a major force in the developments of expressionism, Dada, De Stijl, constructivism, and surrealism, and the creator, with Viking Eggeling, of the abstract cinema. The contributors to this book rewrite Richter's history to include his pivotal role in the development of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and his political activism. When Richter's work, particularly that of his earlier, European career, is viewed in its historical and political context, he emerges as an artist committed to the power of art to change the fabric of social, political, and cultural affairs.

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Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener

Holbein was a hugely ambitious artist, and even during his formative years in Lucerne and Basle undertook to make designs for jewelry, stained glass and woodcuts as well as to paint major altarpieces and portraits. He also carried out several monumental decorative schemes for private houses and civic buildings. This book offers both a remarkable range of extant visual evidence and a rewarding and scholarly account of Holbein's oeuvre in its full historical and artistic contexts. In addition, the authors include a reappraisal of the high reputation in which Holbein was held during the centuries following his death, as illustrated by the opinion expressed by the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard and the searches undertaken by the French collector Charles Patin, and by the remarks and exertions of the wealthy eighteenth-century dilettante Horace Walpole.

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Tzvetan Todorov

Le discours soviétique officiel décrit progressivement la réalité du pays en termes qui ne correspondent pas à l'expérience commune, comme si les mots pouvaient créer les choses. L'importance de cette doctrine dépasse de loin le domaine esthétique, elle représente à l'état pur l'un des traits dominants de la société soviétique sous Staline car elle consacre le règne universel du mensonge". A la fois connaisseur de l'Union soviétique et grand penseur des oeuvres d'art, Tzvetan Todorov a souhaité éclairer les rapports idéologiques entre ceux qu'il nomme les "artistes créateurs" et le pouvoir politique à partir de la révolution d'Octobre.0Comment les artistes ont-ils annoncé la révolution ? Comment ont-ils ensuite obéi ou échappé au réalisme socialiste désireux d'annihiler toute création ? Todorov explore le destin d'artistes phares, Maïakovski, Pasternak, Boulgakov ou Mandelstam, et s'attarde sur le parcours singulier du peintre Kasimir Malevitch, dont la pluralité des voies artistiques fait écho à l'intensité de son engagement. Le Triomphe de l'artiste, c'est finalement le pouvoir de l'art sur celui qui veut sa mort.

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Kathleen Nicholson

Now famous for their immediate impact of color, light, and atmostpheric effect, the landscapes of Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) were at first the object of opposing critical claims: from one side the British artist was charged with painting "pictures of nothing and very like," from the other, with allowing too much "content" to eclipse his presentation of nature. Taking this paradox as its starting point, Kathleen Nicholson's richly illustrated book proposes a thorough revision of how we understand the enigmatic artist who revolutionized landscape painting. Advancing the growing interest in Turner's handling of content, without ignoring questions of style, Nicholson shows how Turner used the themes of antiquity to explore the ways natural imagery can embody meaning, and how he came to view interpretation itself as a primary subject. Nicholson maintains that by seeking themes in ancient myth, culture, and history, Turner was able to reinvest nature with new values and concepts, thereby accomplishing a genuinely modern revision of classical landscape in an early nineteenth-century idiom. His inquiry into the nature of meaning, she argues, led him to articulate a narrative that engaged the viewer in "reading" or interpreting both symbolic and purely visual imagery - a narrative that finds its most striking enactment in his 1806 work The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides. Among the first to analyze systematically the themes treated in Turner's early sketchbooks, Nicholson traces the artist's understanding of a given legend, ancient author, or formal source as it developed over time, providing rare insight into the extent and character of his manipulation of subject matter. -- from dust jacket.