Art & Architecture

Avant-garde writers and artists of the twentieth century radically reconceived poetic language, appropriating scientific theories and techniques as they turned their attention to the physical process of spoken language. This modernist "sound writing" focused on the bodily production of speech, which it rendered in poetic, legible, graphic form.

Modernist sound writing aims to capture the acoustic phenomenon of vocal articulation by graphic means. Tobias Wilke considers sound writing from its inception in nineteenth-century disciplines like physiology and experimental phonetics, following its role in the aesthetic practices of the interwar avant-garde and through to its reemergence in the postwar period. These projects work with the possibility of crossing over from the audible to the visible, from speech to notation, from body to trace. Employing various techniques and concepts, this search for new possibilities played a central role in the transformation of poetry into a site of radical linguistic experimentation. Considering the works of writers and artists--including Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Viktor Shklovsky, Hugo Ball, Charles Olson, and Marshall McLuhan--Wilke offers a fresh look at the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian pioneer of abstract painting whose work has influenced generations of artists. His Sounds (Klänge) of 1912 is one of the earliest, most beautiful examples of a 20th-century artist's book. Its "sound poems" are alternately narrative and expressive, witty and simple in form. They treat questions of space, color, physical design, and the act of seeing in a world that offers multiple and often contradictory possibilities. The woodcut illustrations that accompany the poems range from representational designs to abstract vignettes. In its fusion of image and word, Sounds epitomizes the artist's move toward abstraction and his aspiration to a synthesis of the arts. This updated edition of Sounds includes all of the book's poems in English and German and its woodcuts, twelve of which appear in color for greater fidelity to the original. The translator's introduction offers close formal examination of the poems and situates Sounds in the context of Kandinsky's oeuvre. Although it was prized by prominent 20th-century artists, Sounds is one of the least known of Kandinsky's major writings, and this remains the most authoritative English version.

How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway?

Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States and the artist who really invented the "readymade." Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned and your eyes opened to many artforms often ignored or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it's never been told before.

In 1968, Suzuki Seijun--a low-budget genre filmmaker known for movies including Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter, and Youth of the Beast--was unceremoniously fired by Nikkatsu Studios. Soon to be known as the "Suzuki Seijun Incident," his dismissal became a cause for leftist student protestors and a burgeoning group of cinephiles to rally around. His films rapidly emerged as central to debates over politics and aesthetics in Japanese cinema.

William Carroll offers a new account of Suzuki's career that highlights the intersections of film theory, film production, cinephile culture, and politics in 1960s Japan. Carroll places Suzuki's work between two factions that claimed him as one of their own after 1968: the New Left and its politicized theoretical practice on one hand, and the apparently apolitical cinephiles and their formalist criticism on the other. He considers how both of these strands of film theory shed light on the distinctive qualities of Suzuki's films, and he explores how both Suzuki's works and unheralded Japanese film theorists offer new ways of understanding world cinema.

This book presents both a major reinterpretation of Suzuki's work--which influenced directors such as John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino--and a new lens on postwar Japanese film culture and industry. Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema also includes a complete production history of Suzuki's filmography along with never-before-discussed information about his unfinished film projects.

Used for self-exploration or divination, tarot has, for more than 500 years, been the most popular and accessible of all esoteric tools, looming large in today's mainstream culture. Why? Because the cards are inexpensive and easy to carry--a perfect traveling companion and, therefore, an invitation to a journey inward and out.

Humans are drawn to playing games and feel driven to find meaning in the chaos of paradoxical signs. The vivid iconography of the "Arcanas" speak to us like no other language, moving us to the core, weaving through each card a universal story, a metaphorical pathway of transformation.

This 400-page book presents--for the first time--a close look at 500 years of figurative card decks created or used for fortune telling, divinations, and oracle purposes, and explores, one card at the time, their iconographic roots at the crossroads of the medieval imaginarium, Western esoteric wisdom, folklore, and also contemporary art and pop culture. With hundreds of images drawn from more than 100 decks, rarely published and often forgotten in library archives, this book offers the first visual history of tarot.

One section of the book looks closely at time as a dominant concern in 20th-century art. From Einsteinian spacetime, Bergsonian subjective duration, and Freudian non-linear dreamtime, with their respective impacts upon art of the early century, to late-century involvements with critical theory and time-based art (performance, video, and electronic intermedia), this century's reinvention of time and altered notions of history are considered.

A second section explores the meanings of time embodied in works of art from 12 world cultures. Assyrian eternal time, Medieval European apocalyptic time, Indian cosmic, cyclical time, African ancestral time, Native American episodic temporality, and the complex calendrics of the Maya are among the subjects explored.

The final section addresses time from the perspective of those charged with rescuing and protecting works of art from the ravages of time: art conservators. Both the creative time of the artist and the patina of time acquired by the art object are documented.

Painter Aleksandra Waliszewska creates densely narrative, art historically saturated oil and gouache paintings. Waliszewska's pictorial universe is populated by supernatural characters and dark themes: devils, vampires, satanic creatures, possessed girls, apocalyptic scenes, bloodthirsty zombies, and other incarnations of the living dead. These characters are situated in dystopian urban landscapes, lost highways, deserted suburbs, gloomy housing estates, swamps, and other sites associated with the Eastern European landscape. Drawing from the specifically Slavic histories of the Upiór (the living dead), Waliszewska claims her artistic and conceptual descendance from premodern art and Symbolist works of the late 19th and early 20th century from Nordic, Baltic, and Eastern European regions.

The Dark Arts presents a dense visual narrative, reproducing over a hundred images of Waliszewska's in juxtaposition with dozens of historical paintings and sculptures. Shifting away from the dominant figures of French and Austrian artists, this revisionist look at Symbolism through an Eastern and Baltic lens will introduce a wider audience to a rich and relatively understudied field of visual culture.

In this book the authors rewrite the history of Chinese art wherever it is found--in caves, temples, or museum collections. They begin by grounding the Western reader in Chinese traditions and practices, showing in essence how to look at a Chinese painting. They then shed light on such topics as the development of classical and narrative painting, the origins of the literati tradition, the flowering of landscape painting, and the ways the traditions of Chinese painting have been carried into the present day. The book, which concludes with a glossary of techniques and terms and a list of artists by dynasty, is an essential resource for all lovers of, or newcomers to, Chinese painting.

Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting is the inaugural volume in a new series, The Culture & Civilization of China, a joint publishing venture of Yale University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies with the China International Publishing Group in Beijing. The undertaking will ultimately result in the publication of more than seventy-five volumes on the visual arts, classical literature, language, and philosophy, as well as several comprehensive reference volumes.

Published in association with Foreign Languages Press, Beijing

Now, at last, here is a coherent theory which describes in modern terms an architecture as ancient as human society itself.

Tree houses are no longer just for children. With the growing excitement surrounding tree house architecture, adults around the world are building their own treetop hideaways -- savoring the childhood memories, feelings of nostalgia, and images of fantasy that are evoked by these almost dreamlike constructions. TreeHouses: Living a Dream brings together the most innovative ideas of today's architects and designers, providing readers with a comprehensive exploration of the unique construction methods that allow these amazing structures to adapt to their changing environments.

From Nebraska and Georgia to France and Germany, this book features a variety of projects that include playrooms, weekend retreats, home offices, dining rooms, and more. Each case study includes interior and exterior photography, as well as detailed site and floor plans accompanied by concise, informative text. With more than 350 full-color illustrations, TreeHouses: Living a Dream is sure to help every reader make a reality out of their tree house fantasy.