Fresh Widow


Book Description

Leon Battista Alberti's 1435 treatise De pictura influenced generations of painters by suggesting that a painting should be approached as an open window. By the twentieth century, the window had transformed into a motif that would test the limits of painting. With his 1920 "Fresh Widow"--a replica of a French window with panes covered in black leather--Marcel Duchamp postulated a farewell to illusionist painting. This publication presents the development of window painting by artists such as Robert Delaunay, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Ren Magritte, Ellsworth Kelly, Eva Hesse, Gerhard Richter and many others.




Reading Relationally


Book Description

How reading literature through the lens of visual art sheds new light on the accomplishments of modernist and postmodernist writers




Alchemist of the Avant-Garde


Book Description

Acknowledged as the "Artist of the Century," Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) left a legacy that dominates the art world to this day. Inventing the ironically dégagé attitude of "ready-made" art-making, Duchamp heralded the postmodern era and replaced Pablo Picasso as the role model for avant-garde artists. John F. Moffitt challenges commonly accepted interpretations of Duchamp's art and persona by showing that his mature art, after 1910, is largely drawn from the influence of the occult traditions. Moffitt demonstrates that the key to understanding the cryptic meaning of Duchamp's diverse artworks and writings is alchemy, the most pictorial of all the occult philosophies and sciences.




Drawing on Art


Book Description

This volume explores the central importance of appropriation, collaboration, influence, and play in French artist Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) work -- and in Dada and Surrealism in general -- to show how the concept of art itself became the critical fueland springboard for questioning art's fundamental premises. Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. The author maintains that rather than simply negating art, Duchamp's readymades (Duchamp's "readymades" are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art") and later works, including films and conceptual pieces, demonstrating the impossibility of defining art in the first place. Through his readymades, Duchamp explicitly critiqued the commodification of art and inaugurated a profound shift from valuing art for its visual appearance to understanding the significance of its mode of public presentation.




Infrathin


Book Description

"The "infrathin" was Marcel Duchamp's name for the thinnest shade of difference: that between, say, the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole on its target, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. In this book, the esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff shows how such differences occur at the level of words and argues that it is this infrathin space, this micropoetics of language, that separates poetry from prose. Perloff treats the relationship between Duchamp and Gertrude Stein; ranges over Concrete, Objectivist, and Black Mountain poetry; and gives stunning readings of poets from Eliot, Yeats, and Pound to Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery, and Rae Armantrout. Poetry, Perloff shows us, exists in the play of the infrathin, and it is the poet's role to create unexpected relationships-verbal, visual, and sonic-from the finest nuances of language"--




Collected Reprints


Book Description




The French Widow


Book Description

A young American woman is attacked at an historic Paris chateau and four paintings are stolen the same night, drawing Hugo Marston into a case where everyone seems like a suspect. To solve this mystery Hugo must crack the secrets of the icy and arrogant Lambourd family, who seem more interested in protecting their good name than future victims. Just as Hugo thinks he’s close, some of the paintings mysteriously reappear, at the very same time that one of his suspects goes missing. While under pressure to catch a killer, Hugo also has to face the consequences of an act some see as heroic, but others believe might have been staged for self-serving reasons. This puts Hugo under a media and police spotlight he doesn’t want, and helps the killer he’s hunting mark him as the next target….




An Ambush of Widows


Book Description

From New York Times bestselling author Jeff Abbott’s, an uneasy alliance forms as two widows delve into their husbands’ deadly and dangerous secrets... Henry North is a down-on-his-luck cybersecurity expert from New Orleans. Adam Zhang is the cofounder of one of Austin’s most successful venture capitalist firms. These two men didn’t know each other. They had never met. Yet they died together, violently, in a place neither had any business being. When Henry doesn’t return from a business trip, his wife, Kirsten, panics – and then gets an anonymous phone call: 'Your husband is dead in Austin.' Flora knew Adam was keeping secrets from her. She suspected an affair, but had decided she could forgive him for his weakness – until her husband ended up dead. And with no explanation for her husband’s murder, the police begin to suspect her. Together, these two widows will face a powerful foe determined to write a false narrative about the murders. In doing so, neither Flora nor Kirsten will remain the women the world thought they were. An exceptional thriller from the million copy bestseller, showing the ends people will go to protect their own, perfect for fans of Linwood Barclay, Harlan Coben and Lisa Gardner.




Looking at Dada


Book Description

"Published in conjunction with 'Dada,' an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (from February 19 to May 14, 2006) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (from October 5 to January 9, 2006), in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New York (from June 18 to September 11, 2006)"--P. [75




Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde


Book Description

This interdisciplinary collection of essays brings together scholars in the fields of art history, theatre, visual culture, and literature to explore intersections between the European avant-garde (c. 1880–1945) and themes of health and hygiene, such as illness, contagion, cleanliness, and contamination. Examining the artistic oeuvres of some of the canonical names of modern art – including Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, George Orwell, Marcel Duchamp, and Antonin Artaud – this book investigates instances where the heightened political, social, and cultural currencies embedded within issues of hygiene and contagion have been mobilised, and subversively exploited, to fuel the critical strategy at play. This edited volume promotes an interdisciplinary and socio-historically contextualised understanding of the criticality of the avant-garde gesture and cultivates scholarship that moves beyond the limits of traditional academic subjects to produce innovative and thought-provoking connections and interrelations across various fields. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, theatre, cultural studies, modern history, medical humanities, and visual culture.