Fashion and the art of pochoir

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Ian Donaldson & Tamsin Donaldson

First sight / Ian Donaldson & Tamsin Donaldson -- The first European depictions / Bernard Smith -- Reactions on Cook's voyage / Glyndwr Williams -- Savage sportsmen / James Urry -- The Darwinian perspective / D.J. Mulvaney -- Hearing the first Australians / Tamsin Donaldson -- Projections of melancholy / Margaret Maynard -- Tom Roberts' aboriginal portraits / Helen Topliss -- Thomas Dick's photographic vision / Isabel McBryde -- The popular image / Nicolas Peterson -- Ordering the landscape / Rhys Jones.

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Marvin Böhm

In 2017, Marvin Böhm?s mother was diagnosed with cancer. From then on, he began to capture his private life with a camera ? led by his intuition. He had little interest in chronicling her suffering and illness: Böhm?s main goal was to ?carry on? and continue into the future. His incessant interaction with the resulting images soon turned into a sort of therapy. Even though his mother appears in the pictures again and again, his attention was drawn especially to familiar settings and objects, friends and commonplace occurrences. Above all, he considered these ordinary situations worthy of being recorded. His reflection on death revealed the small everyday moments that make life worth living. Joined together, these pictures provide a photographic diary: at times, it is difficult to decipher and almost abstract, then again it seems full of emotion and optimism. Owing to their stylized black-and-white contrasts, the photos convey an atmosphere that is deeply moving and oscillates somewhere between drama and gloom. And although they depict very intimate moments, the images express an almost universal experience.

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Victor Margolin

Following World War I, a new artistic-social avant-garde emerged with the ambition to engage the artist in the building of social life. Nowhere is this project more evident than in the lives of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy whose careers covered a broad range of artistic practices and political situations. The remarkable continuity between the various forms of their work stems from their belief that art had to be extended beyond the aesthetic sphere. But given that the social situations they confronted changed radically in their lifetimes, their operative strategies were severely tested and underwent significant revisions. Through close readings of their work as it relates to the situations in which they were active, Victor Margolin examines the way these three artists negotiated the changing relations between their social ideals and the political realities they confronted. He follows them and their affiliations through the 1920s and 1930s in Moscow, Berlin, and Chicago, documenting their contributions to utopian architecture, Constructivist ideology, industrial design, photography, visual communication, and design education. Each essay features one or two of the artist-designers and shifts from one medium to another through a chronological narrative that begins with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and ends in Chicago just after World War II. Focusing on the difficult relationship between art and social change, Margolin brings important new insights to our understanding of the avant-garde's role in a period of great political complexity.

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Deborah Pike

"Known as an icon of the Jazz Age, a flamboyant socialite, and the mad wife of F. Scott, Zelda Fitzgerald has inspired studies of her life and work which focus on her earlier years, and on the myth of the glorious-but-doomed woman. As an unprecedented study of the totality Zelda Fitzgerald's creative work, this book makes an important contribution to the history of women's art with new perspectives on women and modernity, plagiarism, creative partnership, and the nature of mental illness. Zelda Fitzgerald's creative output was astonishing, considering the conditions under which she lived, and the brevity of her life: she wrote dozens of short stories, several journalistic pieces, a play, two novels, hundreds of letters, kept diaries and produced hundreds of artworks. Employing a new mode of literary analysis that draws upon critics, theorists, and historians to situate her work in its context, The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald rehabilitates the literary and artistic status of Zelda Fitzgerald by reassessing her life and writings in the light of archival sources. Such materials include medical and psychiatric documents; her unpublished novel; an artistic and spiritual diary; and over one hundred letters written from asylums.While much of her writing can be read as a tactical response to her husband's injunctions against her creativity, it can also be read as brilliant work in its own right. Far from imitating Scott's style, Zelda Fitzgerald's artistic output is vibrantly alive and utterly her own" -- Dust jacket.