Pop art

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David McCarthy

"Mass culture, popular taste and kitsch, previously considered outside the limits of fine art, were the inspiration and provocative themes of Pop art, a movement that enjoyed great prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s. Rejecting the idea that art and life could be separated, artists in both Britain and the United States - among them Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol - used mass-produced objects and photographic images to make a blatant connection between art and the post-war world of consumerism." "This study follows the development of Pop, from its roots in the irreverence of Dada and Surrealism, to its rise in popularity as an art form that celebrated the glamour and hedonism of the newly commercialised Western world, whilst acknowledging its superficiality and transience."--Jacket.

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essays Griselda Pollock

"Griselda Pollock, in seeking to understand her own paradoxical role as critic and historian, has established not only a social and historical framework for her practice, but also a self-critical one. Internationally, Pollock is recognized as a significant writer on art and arguably the most important voice in feminist art history in Britain. She has also become a significant force in the area of Cultural Studies and is widely read by those outside the discipline of Art History. In this selection of recent essays, she insightfully engages all major areas of contemporary theory, especially focusing on sexed subjectives, post-colonialism and Marxist-informed history." "Penny Florence, in her commentary, places Pollock's critique of Modernism, art history and criticism within the context of the social, political and ideological developments that have taken place since the 1970s."--BOOK JACKET.

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G.D. Sheffield

This collection of essays, written by members of the British Commission for Military History, examines key aspects of the experience of the US and British armies, ranging from the American Civil War to the most recent example of high intensity manoeuvre war, the Gulf Conflict of 1991. The exercise of command in particular is an under-researched area and the essays make a major contribution to our understanding of this vital topic.

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Bruce Altshuler

The avant-garde is a twentieth-century phenomenon. By the turn of the nineteenth century, artists were beginning to address a far larger audience than ever before, and it was one on whose understanding they could no longer depend. Aesthetic concerns, too, had shifted from representing visual phenomena to reconfiguring the visible world in new and complicated ways. The public was rarely amused. Indeed, as these newer forms of art were presented in now famous exhibitions, derision and anger were the customary responses of the public and the critics. Artists formed more or less cohesive groups of like-thinking individuals who styled themselves the "avant-garde," really a military term for those pathfinders who first venture into unknown or enemy territory. Through photographs of personalities, installations, and works of art, and in a lively text that recounts the artistic thinking and the gossip that surrounded each new movement, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century traces this phenomenon from its beginnings in the Fauvist Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 through such notorious events as the exhibitions of the Section d'Or (Paris) and the Blue Rider (Munich), the Armory Show (New York), the Futurist 0-10 exhibition (Petrograd), the Dada Fair (Berlin), the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition (Munich), the First Papers of Surrealism (New York), Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century (New York), the Ninth Street Show (New York), the Gutai Art Association (Japan), Le Vide (Paris), Full-Up (Paris), the New Realists (New York), Primary Structures (New York), and When Attitudes Become Form (Bern).