Konst: teman och motiv

Konstnärens trädgård tar dig till ett 20-tal trädgårdar som inte bara inspirerat konstnärer utan också ofta utgjort förstahandsvalet när de letat efter motiv. Och vad passar då bättre än att man har en egen trädgård? Under deras livstid skänkte trädgården inspiration till skapande arbete i dag vittnar den om drivkrafterna bakom deras verk och privatliv, alltifrån Paul Cézannes hus i södra Frankrike till Skagenmålarna, Frida Kahlo i Mexico och impressionisterna i New England. Claude Monets trädgård i Giverny visar till exempel hur en trädgård kan vara den utlösande katalysatorn bakom hundratals storslagna målningar. Ibland blir en hel by till brännpunkt för en konstnärskoloni, som i Murnau bland de bayerska bergen i södra Tyskland och Skagen på Danmarks nordspets. Bland de konstnärer och platser som behandlas finns: Paul Cézanne, Frida Kahlo, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Emil Nolde, Skagenmålarna Anna Ancher och P. S. Krøyer, Vasilij Kandinskij och Gabriele Münter i Münter-Haus i Murnau, William och May Morris på Kelmscott Manor i Oxfordshire, Duncan Grant och Vanessa Bell på Charleston i Sussex samt Claude Monet och andra i Giverny och Argenteuil.

A chunky sticker book with thousands of individual letters that can be turned into uniquely idiosyncratic messages or decorations of all kinds.Everyone loves the cool graphic look of the classic ransom note, and letters cut from newspapers make any message a little edgy yet playful.Now The Ransom Note Sticker Book makes it easy to spell out anything you like and capture that unique look. Thousands of stickers – A to Z, plus accents, numerals, and punctuation – in a host of fonts and typefaces are ready for your messages.You can use them to add colour to your journals, you can name your stuff, or you can give a valentine's card a mysterious anonymous touch... Stationery, wrapping paper, and collages will all benefit from these alphabets, and they make the perfect gift for the crafter, journal-keeper or scrap-booker.With a grungy, vintage letterpress vibe, the letters irresistibly recall the age of print newspapers - and the collection includes type ornaments, woodblock illustrations and a range of accents for elegant, multilingual ransom notes.

Beloved by millions, praised by film critic Roger Ebert as “the best animation filmmaker in history,” and referred to as the “Japanese Walt Disney,” Hayao Miyazaki is known for his sense of whimsical adventure, deep reverence for nature, and strong female characters. As a prolific creator, his influence and admirers include Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, and Akira Kurosawa.Curated by Spoke Art Gallery, My Neighbor Hayao features work from more than 250 artists in celebration of the acclaimed Japanese filmmaker and animator. Showcasing a diverse array of original painting, embroidery, sculpture, and limited edition prints that were first exhibited at Spoke during three highly popular group exhibitions attracting more than 10,000 attendees, this beautiful book grants fans of Miyazaki another creative avenue to explore his inspired worlds through interpretations of characters and themes found in iconic films including My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke.

Enter a mysterious realm of witchcraft and wonder with an incredible array of easy-to-follow watercolour projects from artist Lizzy Gass. Beginning with small and simple art tutorials, readers will learn how to draw and paint a variety of mystical items and assemble them in their own, unique way on a witch’s shelf. Known for her whimsical creations of various types of fantasy worlds, Lizzy has created the opportunity to look behind the veil of all types of witches and bring the magical items they possess to life.Learn how to draw a Mysterious Cauldron, Magic Potion Bottles, or a Mortar and Pestle with Spelled Herbs to create the gorgeous world of the Kitchen Witch. Create a Pumpkin from the Witch’s Garden or the Floral Teacup with Matching Saucer for the dreamlike Cottage Witch. Draw a Stargazing Telescope or Beautiful Seashells for the mysterious Sea Witch. Add to the page with an Essence of Starlight or Moonlight Infused Amethyst Crystal for the otherworldly Celestial Witch.Sprinkle the page with some sparkling magic as you create these stunning and original pieces of art that, together, illustrate an imaginative look into a witch’s mystical world.This book will include 75 projects with step-by-step illustrations.

Roger Fry (1866–1934) and his role as critic, curator and member of the Bloomsbury Group are explored in this rich and vibrant biography. From his curation of one of the most important collections in New York and groundbreaking exhibitions in London to his launch of the Omega Workshops with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Fry introduced Post-Impressionism, radicalised interiors and changed the landscape of twentieth-century art. His introduction of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse to a British audience played a significant role in a legacy that still inspires today.Often overlooked, Fry was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century art in Britain, giving a generation of modern artists their first exhibitions, while also creating art himself. Roger Fry: Bloomsbury and the Invention of Modern Art offers a compelling portrait of his extraordinary career and his pivotal role in redefining British art.

Typography, the art of designing printed words, was once the domain of an elite few artists but has become an area with which millions of people engage daily. The widespread usage of digital devices from laptops to tablets and smart phones which are used for written communications means that we are regularly asked to make decisions about the fonts, sizes, and layouts we use in our writing. This broadening engagement with the field of typography has led to a perceptible shift from debates about legibility and technicalities to conversations about which fonts best reflect the writer's personality or style .In this Very Short Introduction, Paul Luna offers a broad definition of typography as design for reading, whether in print or on screens, where a set of visual choices are taken to make a written message more accessible, more easily transmitted, more significant, or more attractive. Considering the development of letterforms and the shapes of letter we use, Luna discusses the history behind our modern day letters and fonts, before considering the issues behind key typographic decisions, and the differences between printed and on-screen typography. Presenting any piece of typography as a fundamental design choice, Luna introduces the options available today, and explores the reasons why key typographic decisions are made.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

A stunning portfolio of Discworld illustrations from the brush of Paul Kidby, Sir Terry Pratchett's artist of choice.Paul Kidby, Sir Terry Pratchett's artist of choice, provided the illustrations for The Last Hero, designed the covers for the Discworld novels since 2002, and is the author of the bestselling The Art Of Discworld.Now, Paul Kidby has collected the very best of his Discworld illustrations in this definitive volume, including 40 pieces never before seen, 30 pieces that have only appeared in foreign editions, limited editions and BCA editions, and 17 book cover illustrations since 2004 that have never been seen without cover text.If Terry Pratchett's pen gave his characters life, Paul Kidby's brush allowed them to live it, and nowhere is that better illustrated than in this magnificent book. For fans old and new, this beautiful collectors item is the perfect gift for Christmas.'The closest anyone's got to how I see the characters' - Sir Terry Pratchett

Straddling two World Wars and the Great Depression, ushering in the Jazz Age and the era of the automobile and skyscraper, fomenting in the great cities of Europe and America and shaping everything from the Golden Gate Bridge to the humble desk lamp, the story of Art Deco is the story of our modern world. In this book, the most comprehensive account of the decorative arts of the Art Deco period ever assembled, Alastair Duncan celebrates the style’s rich variety of form and its diverse international roots as the very factors that make it a perennial favourite of modern collectors and designers. Sumptuously illustrated and written by one of the world’s leading experts, Art Deco Complete will be the definitive work on the subject for many years to come.

This exquisitely produced volume with a silk cover, colored edges, Swiss and Japanese tube binding, and ribbon ties explores Japan’s most haunting monsters through the eyes of its greatest printmakers. Japanese folklore teems with strange and spectral beings— yōkai that slither from wells, creep through forests, or inhabit forgotten household objects. These creatures have long reflected deep cultural anxieties and obsessions. Their influence endures today, pulsing through manga, anime, and horror cinema like walking nightmares haunting our daily lives. In follow up to his bestselling Yōkai Ghosts, Charlier examines these beings through their myths, habitats, and behaviors, uncovering the human fears and desires they embody.With the voice of a storyteller and the insight of a scholar, he traces how these spirits emerged from a world lit only by lanterns, when shadow and silence gave rise to the imagination’s most haunting macabre inventions. Organized thematically, the book’s chapters focus on particular types of yōkai—animal spirits, haunted objects, female demons, and more placing them in their cultural and historical context while revealing their continued relevance. More than a hundred woodblock prints by artists such as Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi, Kunisada, and Yoshimori bring these monsters vividly to life.Their dramatic and often humorous depictions helped shape how yōkai were seen and understood in the nineteenth century—and laid the foundation for visual traditions that continue today. Beautifully produced, this volume will appeal to readers fascinated by Japanese folklore, printmaking, horror, and the art of the uncanny.

FörordJag är mycket glad att du nu håller den här boken i din hand – i avsikt att uppleva den. Javisst, ”uppleva” – jag väljer att inte skriva ”läsa”, så som kanske kunde förväntas. Det är ju ändå en bok med skriven text och javisst, text måste ju faktiskt läsas för att man skall kunna ta del av den.Den innehåller förstås också bilder – målningar i aquarell. Hur tar man då del av dem? Jo, om man betraktar dem, bör man ju kunna ta del av dem, men varför inte försöka få upplevelser av såväl dikter som målningar?Vi kan kommunicera, uttrycka oss, i allt från en tyst tanke via försiktiga ord och meningar till ett crescendo, vars eko tenderar att ta stor plats i våra sinnens aula – själen.En tyst tanke, en försiktig mening eller en ensam ton, kanske från flöjt eller harpa, skärper våra sinnen till koncentrerad tystnad, en nödvändig sådan som skapar utrymme för ett gott mottagande av vad som har avsänts. Med gott mottagande vill jag mena att en upplevelse har skapats.Det välkända pedagogiska knepet att sänka rösten så att den knappt blir hörbar inför en alltför bullrig hop, föder som bekant oftast en unison önskan om tystnad –skärpning.Crescendot kan däremot vara så påtagligt att vi nästan behöver värja oss, för att inte förlora balansen eller blåsas i väg i ett inferno som kommer till oss, fyller oss – kanske svämmar över – ofta utan att vi anstränger eller engagerar oss särskilt mycket.Javisst, den tysta tanken kan också landa i vår själ men dessbudskap och verkliga uttryck behöver tydas, kanske efterspanas, innan dess symboler väcker insikt och skapar upplevelse hos våra sinnen och landar för lång tid framåt i vårt själsliga rum.Alla kreativa gestaltningar – oavsett media – skulle kunna skrivas in mellan dessa båda poler; ”Den tysta tanken” vs ”crescendot”.Jag – som avsändare – vill skapa förutsättningar för dig – som mottagare – att uppleva det jag kommunicerar, så helt och fullt som möjligt. Uppmärksam och nyfiken, som jag tror att du är, kommer du snart att inse, hur de upplevelser du får med den här boken, gärna landar nära polen ”den tysta tanken”. Endast några få når längre bort emot ”crescendots” pol.När jag arbetar gror de flesta av mina akvareller som frön till nästan osynliga tankar. De börjar då ta form på akvarellpapperet såsom väldigt tysta, försiktiga uttryck, som endast jag själv kan avläsa. Du får avläsa dem, först när jag finner målningarna värdiga – då vidtar den kommunikation som förhoppningsvis uppstår när du upplever den här boken.Mina målningars väg från frö till värdigt verk (värdigt att visas) består konkret av ett antal transparenta skikt som målas på varandra – mer eller mindre över hela det framväxande verkets yta, i ömsesidig kommunikation med mig, tills jag anser att värdighet uppstår.De flesta av mina dikter föds som tysta ord och uttryck, som oftast – helt utan förvarning – ”landar” i mina sinnen. De tycks säga: ”Här är jag, så här låter jag men jag är nyfödd – väldigt ung – och behöver din hjälp för att utvecklas, bli mogen, så att du vill presentera mig för dina läsare”. En tidig kommunikation startar, då jag svarar genom att försöka förädla en del av de tysta orden eller tidiga uttrycken. Jag får nya svar, svarar igen, tills jag känner att dikten kan landa som en eftersträvad upplevelse i min egen själ. Först då finns det förutsättningar för att också du som läsare kan få en god upplevelse.Här i ”Aquadikt” vill jag för dig presentera såväl aquareller som dikter samtidigt. Inte alls för att de på något sätt har fötts samtidigt eller som någon sorts ömsesidig förklaring – de går inte nödvändigtvis hand i hand.Den minsta gemensamma nämnaren är jag själv. Det är samma jag som med mina sinnen och estetiska värderingar har kreerat såväl målningar som poesi.Det behöver inte alls vara så, att verken talar till varandra, men väl – att de samsas på gemensam arena – i samma bok – om än i två delar av boken.Lite av en retrospektiv presentation är det dock – verken följer en kronologisk ordning – poesin från ca 1965 och måleriet från 2003 – fram till skrivande stund 2026.Jag nämnde inledningsvis ”tysta ord och tankar”. När du läser en dikt – läs då även ”mellan raderna” – där kan du finna det viktiga ”pausutrymme” som visar den riktigt verksamma tystnadens väg, den väg som kan ge dig avsedd upplevelse.När du betraktar en bild – sträva efter att leva dig in i den. Känn in hur det vore att vara bilden, eller åtminstone att vara en viss del av den – där finner du de osynliga tankarnas väg, den väg som kan ge dig såväl inlevelse som upplevelse, i och av verket.Jag skriver och målar i ganska tydliga bilder, men inte så mycket för att de skall tolkas i förhållande till konkret verklighet, utan mera för att kända element skall ge dig möjlighet att med dem ”försvinna in” i varje verk.Du kommer att finna många gemensamma beröringspunkter och värderingar så, att när du har upplevt boken i sin helhet, säkert kan känna ett samlat uttryck som gäller mitt skapande och blir till en samlad upplevelse för dig – en upplevelse som förhoppningsvis söker fristad även i din själ!Verkens rubriker och titlar tjänar som egennamn, endast för att göra det möjligt att tala om dem. För aquarellernas del talar första delen av titeln om verkets ytterformat – se förklaring i anslutning till innehållsförteckningen.Andra delen av titeln ger en fingervisning om verkets tänkta uttryck – ungefär som inom musiken – men, som sagt, för att öppna för din egen upplevelse, bör du inte försöka tolka eller jämföra titlar med verk. Använd dem endast som egennamn på respektive verk.Jag önskar dig fina upplevelser med boken.Håkan ’Lin Haogan’ Lindskog den 1 mars 2026

A gem of a book that stays with you long after you have finished it. Edvard Munch wrote continuously; letters, diaries, literary texts and other notes. In Like a Ghost I Leave You you will find striking statements about art versus nature, enemies, money, death and much more. - "Had I been in Possession of the as yet undiscovered little Remote telephone which one carries around in one’s Pocket You would have long ago received Communications from me"- Undated draft of a letter to Jens Willumsen.

'Stephen’s collection of glorious images is one of the most reliably edifying and entertaining things in my day' Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NighttimeStephen Ellcock's international following avidly await his carefully curated and sequenced albums of little known and public domain imagery on social media. Taking his title from the first ever encyclopedia in the English language All Good Things (Omne Bonum), Ellcock's compendium of art and photography inspired by both the natural world and human endeavour provide comfort in these solace-seeking times.All Good Things evokes the medieval tradition of exquisite, illuminated books: beginning with the universal and travelling through the realms of sky, sea, earth, science and humanity before ending amongst the angels and monsters that have so preoccupied artists over the centuries. Using found artwork from archives, libraries and little-known collections of art, illustration, photography and textiles, this is a glorious adventure; one that can be appreciated on many levels.

New York Times Bestseller"The ultimate behind-the-scenes account.” —Washington Post“The definitive history of the landmark TV show.” —USA TodayJoin the entire Dunder Mifflin gang on a journey back to Scranton: here’s the hilarious and improbable inside story behind the beloved series.Based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews, this definitive oral history with the cast and creators is illustrated with 100 behind-the-scenes photographs. Here, at last, is the untold inside story of The Office, featuring a foreword by Greg Daniels, who adapted the series for the U.S. and was its guiding creative force, and narrated by star Brian Baumgartner (aka "Kevin Malone") and executive producer Ben Silverman..In Welcome to Dunder Mifflin, the entire Office gang reunite after nearly a decade to share their favorite untold stories, spill secrets, and reveal how a little show that barely survived its first season became the most watched series in the universe. This ultimate fan guide and companion pulls back the curtain as never before on all the absurdity, genius, love, passion, and dumb luck that went into creating America’s beloved The Office.Featuring the memories of Steve Carell, John Krasinkski, Jenna Fischer, Greg Daniels, Ricky Gervais, Rainn Wilson, Angela Kinsey, Craig Robinson, Brian Baumgartner, Phyllis Smith, Kate Flannery, Ed Helms, Oscar Nunez, Amy Ryan, Ellie Kemper, Creed Bratton, Paul Lieberstein, Ben Silverman, Mike Schur, and many more.Go even deeper into the world of Scranton with this definitive history of the landmark TV show:Exclusive Cast Interviews: Hear directly from Steve Carell, John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer, Rainn Wilson, and more as they share their favorite untold stories from the set.Behind-the-Scenes Secrets: Discover how a little show that barely survived its first season became the most watched series in the universe, with details only the insiders know.Never-Before-Seen Photos: Explore a treasure trove of 100 rare and candid photographs that take you right onto the set of Dunder Mifflin.The Ultimate Fan Companion: With a foreword by creator Greg Daniels, this is the must-have book for any fan, perfect for re-watching or discovering the beloved series for the first time.

This encyclopedic guide explores the rich and varied meanings of more than 2,000 symbols?from amethyst to Zodiac.

What is "the artist type"? How is an artist's mind structured? What are the links between creativity and mental health? Are there particular personality traits and psychological experiences that great artists have in common? Are most artists really mad? What defines the artist's personality?This book answers these questions by way of a deep, multi-angled, psychological analysis of the personality-based roots of creativity and the creative process. It draws on decades of scientific research focused on the central, mysterious trait of Openness, the true unifying glue behind everything creative. Featuring dozens of notable creators such as John Coltrane, Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, David Bowie, Frida Kahlo, Jack Kerouac, John Lennon, and others, this book showcases the nuances of an artist's mind beyond oversimplified formulas that falsely connect art to mental illness, painting a more authentic picture of the structure of the artist's psychology. Ultimately, this book reveals that the "torture" in an artist's perceived image has more to do with personality, creative processes, states of mind, and a need to express trauma symbolically, repeating it in the form of art.As an eminent psychobiographer with an award-winning career as a personality and creativity psychologist, Dr. William Todd Schultz yet again offers his unique perspective on a fascinating topic that is both engaging and insightful. In exploring the precise nature of inner chaos in a wide range of renowned artists, this book takes an enchanting dive into the artistic abyss for all those interested in creativity, personality, and psychology, including both general and academic readers.

Black Milk is the first in-depth analysis of the visual archives that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its latter stages the book also explores the ways in which the museum cultures of North America and Brazil have constructed slavery over the last hundred years. These institutional legacies emerge as startlingly different from each other at almost every level. Working through comparative close readings of a myriad art objects - including prints, photographs, oil paintings, watercolours, sculptures, ceramics, and a host of ephemera - Black Milk celebrates just how radically alternative Brazilian artistic responses to Atlantic slavery were. Despite its longevity and vastness, Brazilian slavery as a cultural phenomenon has remained hugely neglected, in both academic and popular studies, particularly when compared to North American slavery. Consequently much of Black Milk is devoted to uncovering, celebrating, and explaining the hidden treasury of visual material generated by artists working in Brazil when they came to record and imaginatively reconstruct their slave inheritance. There are painters of genius (most significantly Jean Baptiste Debret), printmakers (discussion is focussed on Angelo Agostini the 'Brazilian Daumier') and some of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century, lead by Augusto Stahl. The radical alterity of the Brazilian materials is revealed by comparing them at every stage with a series of related but fascinatingly and often shockingly dissimilar North American works of art. Black Milk is a mould-breaking study, a bold comparative analysis of the visual arts and archives generated by slavery within the two biggest and most important slave holding nations of the Atlantic Diaspora.

Since the end of the 1980s in India, self-styled representatives of a variety of ascriptive groups (religious, caste, regional, and linguistic among others) have come to routinely damage artwork, disrupt their exhibition, and threaten and assault artists and their supporters. Often, these acts are said to be a protest against the allegedly 'hurtful' or 'offensive' artworks. They are even claimed to be a prescient call to save the identity of the community, in a manner that makes the communal identities hinge entirely on that artistic (mis)representation. Yet, at the time of these attacks, many who indulge in this kind of violence have seldom heard of the artist before or even seen, read, watched, let alone engaged with the artwork. Such is the wrench on the right to freedom of speech and expression in general, and on the physical safety and security of artists in particular, that has inspired fear, anger, and discomfort within the art world, marked by ominous declarations of a 'cultural emergency' owing to the loss of lives and property, and without the due processes of law-a consequence that was hardly synonymous with art practice in India, at least until a few decades ago.This book tells the story of violence against artists in India, marked by the intensifying sense of insecurity, fear, frustration and anger within the art world. But to bring out its complexities-to build an analytical account for understanding what such destructive and, even competitive, attacks on artists convey about India's liberal democracy, given that violence in its many avatars has not so much been an aberration to the form of India's liberal democracy as much as its very condition-the book attempts to map the concrete political transformations that have informed its dynamic unfolding. In other words, as opposed to simply adding to the prevalent commentaries on violent regulation of free speech in India, this work focuses on the dynamics of violence in that regulation. Based on extensive interactions with assailants and artists, I argue that these attacks are not simply 'anti-democratic.' But are dependent in perverse ways on the very logics of democracy's functioning, as much they are contained by it, along with the wider material conditions that have prevented both free speech in India, and India at large, from being immutably locked in a downward spiral.

As a woman wielding public authority, Elizabeth I embodied a paradox at the very center of sixteenth-century patriarchal English society. Louis Montrose's long-awaited book, "The Subject of Elizabeth", illuminates the ways in which the Queen and her subjects variously exploited or obfuscated this contradiction. Montrose offers a masterful account of the texts, pictures, and performances in which the Queen was represented to her people, to her court, to foreign powers, and to Elizabeth herself. Retrieving this "Elizabethan imaginary" in all its richness and fascination, Montrose presents a sweeping new account of Elizabethan political culture. Along the way, he explores the representation of Elizabeth within the traditions of Tudor dynastic portraiture; explains the symbolic manipulation of Elizabeth's body by both supporters and enemies of her regime; and considers how Elizabeth's advancing age provided new occasions for misogynistic subversions of her royal charisma. This book, the remarkable product of two decades of study by one of our most respected Renaissance scholars, will be welcomed by all historians, literary scholars, and art historians of the period.

With Artist as Author, Christa Noel Robbins provides the first extended study of authorship in mid-20th century abstract painting in the US. Taking a close look at this influential period of art history, Robbins describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting to advance their own claims about the role that they believed authorship should play in dictating the value, significance, and social impact of the art object. Robbins tracks the subject across two definitive periods: the “New York School” as it was consolidated in the 1950s and “Post Painterly Abstraction” in the 1960s. Through many deep dives into key artist archives, Robbins brings to the page the minds and voices of painters Arshile Gorky, Jack Tworkov, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin along with those of critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Rosalind Krauss. While these are all important characters in the polemical histories of American modernism, this is the first time they are placed together in a single study and treated with equal measure, as peers participating in the shared late modernist moment.

Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited.Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.

Barbara Maria Stafford is a pioneering art historian whose research has long helped to bridge the divide between the humanities and cognitive sciences. In "A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field", she marshals a distinguished group of thinkers to forge a groundbreaking dialogue among the emerging brain sciences, the liberal arts, and social sciences. Stafford's book examines meaning and mental function from this dual experimental perspective. The wide-ranging essays included here - from Frank Echenhofer's foray into shamanist hallucinogenic visions to David Bashwiner's analysis of emotion and danceability - develop a common language for implementing programmatic and institutional change. Demonstrating how formerly divided fields are converging around shared issues, "A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field" maps a high-level, cross-disciplinary adventure from one of our leading figures in visual studies.

The story of artist R. H. Quaytman’s discovery of an engraving hidden behind a famous artwork by Paul Klee.  This book begins with artist R. H. Quaytman uncovering something startling about a picture by Paul Klee. Pasted beneath Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus—famous for its role in the writings of its first owner, Walter Benjamin—Quaytman found that Klee had interleaved a nineteenth-century engraving of Martin Luther, leaving just enough visible to provoke questions.  Behind the Angel of History reveals why this hidden face matters, delving into the intertwined artistic, political, and theological issues consuming Germany in the wake of the Great War. With the Angelus Novus, Klee responded to a growing call for a new religious art. For Benjamin, Klee’s Angelus became bound up with the prospect of meaningful dialogue among religions in Germany.  Reflecting on Klee’s, Benjamin’s, and Quaytman’s strategies of superimposing conflicting images, Annie Bourneuf reveals new dimensions of complexity in this iconic work and the writing it inspired.

A history of 1960s activist art group Black Mask.  With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.”  Up Against the Real examines how and why the group ultimately rejected art in favor of what its members deemed “real” political action. Exploring this notorious example of cultural activism that rose from the ruins of the avant-garde, Millner-Larsen makes a critical intervention in our understanding of political art.