Lynn Gumpert – författare

Memoir of a provocative Parisian art dealer at the heart of the 20th-century art world, available in English for the first time. Berthe Weill, a formidable Parisian dealer, was born into a Jewish family of very modest means. One of the first female gallerists in the business, she first opened the Galerie B. Weill in the heart of Paris's art gallery district in 1901, holding innumerable exhibitions over nearly forty years. Written out of art history for decades, Weill has only recently regained the recognition she deserves. Under five feet tall and bespectacled, Weill was beloved by the artists she supported, and she rejected the exploitative business practices common among art dealers. Despite being a self-proclaimed "terrible businesswoman," Weill kept her gallery open for four decades, defying the rising tide of antisemitism before Germany's occupation of France. By the time of her death in 1951, Weill had promoted more than three hundred artists-including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, and Suzanne Valadon-many of whom were women and nearly all young and unknown when she first exhibited them. Pow! Right in the Eye! makes Weill's provocative 1933 memoir finally available to English readers, offering rare insights into the Parisian avant-garde and a lively inside account of the development of the modern art market.

The New York Times devotes the cover of its magazine to America's declining interest in politics and its obsession with money, finance, and the markets. Bill Gates builds a $50 million mansion while food pantries and homeless shelters overflow with the desperate. The explosive expansion of media and cyber conglomerates creates dreamworlds while the ecology of our actual world is jeopardized. Public space and public democracy withers, as is evidenced by the fact that the closest facsimile of a town square is the local Barnes and Noble.New geographies of power are defined by sex scandals, plant closings, cyberporn, sweatshop labor, information webs, and stock market schizophrenia. Global capitalism and its cyberrelations use this chaos to construct modern forms of sexual and racial exploitation.Into this world steps Zillah Eisenstein, with a book of profound despair and yet also great hope, informed by her trademark sharp analysis and her unrelenting passion for a more humane world. Exposing the purported democratic effect of new media for the global mirage it is, Eisenstein shows how transnational capital and its patriarchal obsessions threaten us all, while at the same time creating possibilities for a new democratic society.

Perhaps more than anything else, it is the concept of the everyday that has most marked the arts and culture of the twentieth century. Nowhere has this been so clearly articulated as in France after World War II. Indeed, the 1950s and 1960s in France were awash in a sociological fascination with the transformed rhythms and accoutrements of daily lived experience. The Art of the Everyday features essays by prominent writers on the topic of the quotidian in philosophy, cinema, theater, photography, and other visual arts of postwar France. In particular, a number of younger artists practicing today—such as Joël Bartoloméo, Rebecca Bournigault, Claude Closky, Frédéric Coupet, Valerie Jouve, Philippe Mairesse, Jean-Luc Moulène, and Rainer Oldendorf—find inspiration in the stuff of everyday life, rejecting an outmoded reverence for le grand goût. For them, the sophisticated urbanity of the nineteenth-century flâneur has mutated into a city dweller well-acquainted with the often unpleasant requirements of city life.A panorama of an important aspect of postwar French culture, The Art of the Everyday brings to light the work of a new generation of contemporary French artists viewed through the lens of daily experience.

When asserting the history of 20th-century cultural forms, non-Western art can no longer remain relegated to the margins, viewed as derivative and imitative of canonical Western artistic modes. This assessment of modern Iranian visual culture from the 1960s and 1970s suggests that modernity in Iran was a creative, complex and contested process. The book examines the expression of Iranian modernity in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography, posters and graphic arts. It highlights new modes of artistic production within an expanding institutional context: developments in Iranian art criticism, exhibition apparatus, education and patronage. The contributors also address changes in the iconography of Iranian art and in the increasingly social role of the artist. Ultimately, these patterns of artistic production influenced the art that accompanied the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This work demonstrates that the visual arts serve as an important archival record of a critical period in Iranian history.

Modernisms explores art from the 1960s and early ’70s from Iran, Turkey, and India via selections from an unparalleled collection at New York University. Featuring new scholarship and seminal essays, this book also illustrates paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from these three countries alongside biographical narratives of each artist. Modernisms will be the first book to provide a cross-cultural study of works from Iran, Turkey, and India. In so doing, it will illuminate our understanding of modern art created outside the long-dominant North American–Western European axis. With nearly 700 works, the Abby Weed Grey Collection comprises the largest institutional holdings of modern art from Iran and Turkey outside those countries, and the most important trove of modern Indian art in an American university museum. Proposing non- Western art as a critical component of modernity, this publication challenges the long held belief that other modernisms are second-rate.