Misia (French language)

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Tom Sandqvist

"In Dada East Tom Sandqvist shows that Dada did not spring full-grown from a Zurich literary salon but grew out of an already vibrant artistic tradition in Eastern Europe - particularly Romania - that was transposed to Switzerland when a group of Romanian modernists settled in Zurich. Bucharest and other cities in Romania had been the scene of Dada-like poetry, prose, and spectacle in the years before World War I. One of the leading lights was Tristan Tzara, who begn his career in avant-garde literature at fifteen when he cofounded the magazine Simbolul. Tzara - who himself coined the term "Dada," inspired by an obscure connection of his birthday to an Orthodox saint - was at the Cabaret Voltaire that night, along with fellow Romanians Marcel, Jules, and Georges Janco and Arthur Segal. It's not a coincidence, Sandqvist argues, that so many of the first dadaist group was Romanians. Sandqvist traces the artistic and personal transformations that took place in the "little Paris of the Balkans" before they took center stage elsewhere, finding sources as varied as symbolism, futurism, and folklore. He points to a connection between Romanian modernists and the Eastern European Yiddish tradition; Tzara, the Janco brothers, and Segal all grew up within Jewish culture and traditions." "For years, the communist authorities in Romania disowned and disavowed Romania's avant-garde movements. Now, as archives and libraries are opening to Western scholars, Tom Sandqvist tells the secret history of Dada's Romanian roots."--Jacket.

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Annie Cohen-Solal

"Mark Rothko was not only one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century; he was a scholar, an educator, and a deeply spiritual human being. Born Marcus Yakovlevich Rotkovitch, he emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States at age ten, already well educated in the Talmud and carrying with him bitter memories of the pogroms and persecutions visited upon the Jews of Latvia. Few artists have achieved success as quickly, and by the mid-twentieth century, Rothko's artwork was being displayed in major museums throughout the world. In May 2012 his painting Orange, Red, Yellow was auctioned for nearly $87 million, setting a new Christie's record. Author Annie Cohen-Solal gained access to archival materials no previous biographer had seen. As a result, her book is an extraordinarily detailed portrait of Rothko the man and the artist, an uncommonly successful painter who was never comfortable with the idea of his art as a commodity"--

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Patricia Mainardi

The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic examines the cultural forces that contributed to the demise of the most important series of art exhibitions in nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing the history of the Salon from the French Revolution, when it was taken away from the Academy and opened to all artists, to its abandonment by the state in the 1880s, Patricia Mainardi shows that its contradictory purposes, as both didactic exhibition venue and art marketplace, resulted in its collapse. She situates the Salon within the shifting currents of art movements, from modern to traditional, and the evolving politics of the Third Republic, when France chose a republican over a monarchic form of government. This book provides a rich overview of art production during the final decades of the nineteenth century, government attitudes toward the arts in the early Third Republic, and the institution of exhibitions as they were redefined by free-market economics. The End of the Salon demonstrates how all artists were forced to function within the framework of the major social, economic, and cultural changes taking place in France during the nineteenth century and, as a result, how art history and social history are inextricably intertwined.

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[text, Mikhaïl Guerman

Upon his return to Germany in 1921, Kandinsky developed his theory of the Science of Art in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art in Weimar. The Bauhaus Period is the time of Kandinsky's most intense production when his genius would become better known to the world. This book allows us to discern the richness of Kandinsky's work through numerous canvases that have contributed to his international prestige as a painter.