People of the 20th century

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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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Patricia West

"Focusing on George Washington's Mount Vernon, Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and the Booker T. Washington National Monument, Patricia West shows how historic houses reflect less the lives and times of their famous inhabitants than the political pressures of the eras during which they were transformed into museums. In the late 1850s, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association evoked a mythologized George Washington to campaign for the "rescue" of his home, glossing over his role as a slaveholder to appeal to patrons on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. In 1912, the establishment of Orchard House as a museum paid homage to Alcott's novel Little Women and unified the Woman's Club of Concord, Massachusetts, which was bitterly divided over women's suffrage. In the 1920s and 1930s, Monticello became a touchstone for professional house restoration and an idealized Thomas Jefferson a focal point for a rift-weary Democratic Party. During the 1950s, the birthplace of Booker T. Washington became a monument created largely by politicians besieged by conflicts over civil rights." "In Domesticating History, West contends that house museum founders, while claiming to create sites strictly devoted to individual lives, were in fact establishing monuments steeped in the issues of their times."--BOOK JACKET.

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essays by Kendall H. Brown, Sharon A. Minichiello

"Catalogue entries on popular songbooks, kimono, and decorative arts further investigate the potent relations between styles and ideologies imported from the West and those newly established as Japanese tradition. The nihonga paintings, woodblock prints, textiles, and domestic artifacts discussed and illustrated here come primarily from the Honolulu Academy of Arts, which organized the exhibition documented by this book. Many of these works have never been published and several major paintings, exhibited in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s then lost after the war, are brought to light here for the first time in decades. This catalogue not only presents newly discovered works but also, in bringing together a broad range of objects representative of mainstream Taisho visual culture, reconstructs the styles popular from 1915 to 1935 in a celebration of Taisho Chic."--BOOK JACKET.

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Edward R. Ford

v.1, covering 1890-1932, focuses on various recognized architects, explaining the detailing and construction techniques that distort, camouflage, or enhance a building. v.2 continues the study of the relationships of the ideals of design and the realities of construction in modern architecture from the late 1920s to the present.