Christian Weikop - Böcker

The first book to consider Kiefer’s photography and use of photographs in his wider artistic practice. Known for his monumental painting and installations, the internationally celebrated artist Anselm Kiefer's works are marked by a constant questioning of history and collective memory. Born in Germany two months before the Nazi capitulation in 1945, Kiefer's reflections on post-war identity, loss, and shared experience, nourished by myths and literature, create an unparalleled breadth of imagery. The use of photography as both practice and source material is a little-known aspect of Kiefer’s art that has played a central role throughout his career. This book presents over 130 works charting the artist's relationship with photography, and his investigations into what images reveal.

New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History brings together highly-renowned international art historians in a scholarly work that offers the first full-length reassessment in English of the importance of the Brücke group to German modernism specifically and to international modernism more generally. It challenges, interrogates and updates existing orthodoxies in the field of Brücke studies by deploying new research combined with innovative interpretative approaches. This is an exciting volume of essays with an interlinking tripartite structure that charts the significance of this pioneering German avant-garde group in relation to various critical themes, namely, 'cultural and material identity', 'collectivity and selfhood', as well as 'defamation and rehabilitation'. The book is unique in the field in that it seeks to excavate specific historical research relating to the activities of the Brücke as a bohemian yet nonetheless enterprising artists' community, and considers the contributions of the key members in relation to the dynamics of that group rather than simply on an individual basis. It thoroughly explores the historiography of the Brücke artists' reception throughout the turbulent history of the twentieth century up until the present day.

New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History brings together highly-renowned international art historians in a scholarly work that offers the first full-length reassessment in English of the importance of the Brücke group to German modernism specifically and to international modernism more generally. It challenges, interrogates and updates existing orthodoxies in the field of Brücke studies by deploying new research combined with innovative interpretative approaches. This is an exciting volume of essays with an interlinking tripartite structure that charts the significance of this pioneering German avant-garde group in relation to various critical themes, namely, 'cultural and material identity', 'collectivity and selfhood', as well as 'defamation and rehabilitation'. The book is unique in the field in that it seeks to excavate specific historical research relating to the activities of the Brücke as a bohemian yet nonetheless enterprising artists' community, and considers the contributions of the key members in relation to the dynamics of that group rather than simply on an individual basis. It thoroughly explores the historiography of the Brücke artists' reception throughout the turbulent history of the twentieth century up until the present day.

«With astuteness and feeling, Stina Barchan captures the wonderful friendship between Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters and their artistic affinities. She deftly traces how each threaded together archival treasures and different forms of three-dimensional montage in their homes and workspaces to create living art in difficult times.»(Maud Lavin, Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and author of Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch)«Focusing on Hannah Höch’s archive (rather than her artworks) and her post-Second World War activities (rather than the Dada period), Stina Barchan bypasses conventional approaches to the artist and compellingly argues that Höch’s holistic approach to art and life in this period was among the most fundamentally subversive and radical of her career.»(Adrian Sudhalter, author of Dadaglobe Reconstructed)The archive of the German artist Hannah Höch (1889–1978) has long been an important source of material for historians researching the interwar avant-garde and artists associated with Berlin Dada. This book explores Höch’s practices of organisation when assembling the documents in her house outside Berlin from 1939 until her death. Through extensive research, the author argues that Höch’s archive should be considered not just a collection of documents but a work in its own right, intimately connected with the artist’s daily life. Noting the importance of understanding the mechanisms of this work, the book suggests that Höch took charge of both preserving and exploring the possibilities of Dada long after the group had been officially dissolved.The file that Höch assembled on her friend, the artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), plays an important part in the book, its content revealing how domestic habits infused both artists’ practices. Juxtaposing Höch’s archive and Schwitters’s Merzbau, the author argues for an interactive movement between the two that has fundamental implications for how we understand both artists’ oeuvres.

The formation and impact of the landmark exhibition Strategy: Get Arts, staged at Edinburgh College of Art as part of the Edinburgh Festival in 1970Watch Brian Cox and Sir Nicholas Serota discuss Strategy: Get Arts and Richard Demarco in an excerpt from RICO (The Richard Demarco Story) (2021), directed by Dr Marco J. FedericiAuthored and guest edited by Dr Christian Weikop, a renowned specialist on modern and contemporary German art.Includes work from Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo, Klaus Rinke, Stefan Wewerka, Günther Uecker and many more.Based on archival research at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA).Featuring guest contributions by academics and curators, including individuals directly involved with Strategy: Get Arts in 1970.Incorporating numerous arresting ‘event photographs’ of the exhibition, taken by George Oliver, Monika Baumgartl, and Richard Demarco, many never seen before and published here for the first time.Based on close archival research, Christian Weikop uncovers unknown and exciting narratives, as well as artist networks, concerning this provocative 1970 exhibition, held at ECA. The author has previously considered the British press reception of SGA in an article for Tate Papers, but this Studies in Photography-EUP book publication goes far beyond that article and any other scholarship on the exhibition by taking into account the contributions of all 35 artists based in Düsseldorf, and incorporating testimony of individuals who were involved in this landmark exhibition, or who were later engaged in archive exhibitions or recreation projects. Weikop explores the formation of the exhibition in the context of a late 1960s culture of protests and occupations, and demonstrates that SGA was a pivotal ‘Shock of the New’ moment that would leave its mark on art education.You can find out more about Strategy Get Arts at the ECA here

Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was one of the greatest colourists of the twentieth century. An artist passionate about his north German home near the Danish border, with its immense skies, flat, windswept landscapes and storm-tossed seas, he was equally fascinated by the demi-monde of Berlin's cafés and cabarets, the busy to and fro of tugboats in the port of Hamburg and the myriad of peoples and places he saw on his trip to the South Seas in 1914. Nolde felt strongly about what he painted, identifying with his subjects in every brushstroke he made, heightening his colours and simplifying his shapes, so that we, the viewers, can also experience his emotional response to the world about him. This is what makes Nolde one of Germany's greatest expressionist artists. This book, comprising five essays, has over 100 illustrations drawn from the incomparable collection of the Emil Nolde Foundation in Seebüll (the artist's former home in north Germany). It covers Nolde's complete career, from his early atmospheric paintings of his homeland right through to the intensely coloured, so-called 'unpainted paintings', works done on small pieces of paper during the Third Reich when Nolde was branded a 'degenerate'.

Otto Dix fought in the First World War for the better part of four years before becoming one of the most important artists of the Weimar era. Marked by the experience, he made monumental, difficult and powerful works about it. Whereas Dix has often been presented as a lone voice of reason and opposition in Germany between the wars, this book locates his work squarely in the mainstream of Weimar society. Informed by recent studies of collective remembrance, of camaraderie, and of the popular, working-class socialist groups that commemorated the war, this book takes Dix’s very public, monumental works out of the isolation of the artist’s studio and returns them to a context of public memorials, mass media depictions, and the communal search for meaning in the war. The author argues that Dix sought to establish a community of veterans through depictions of the war experience that used the soldier’s humorous, grotesque language of the trenches and that deliberately excluded women and other non-combatants. His depictions were preoccupied with heteronormativity in the context of intimate touch and tenderness between soldiers at the front and with sexual potency in the face of debilitating wounds suffered by others in the war.