Enrico Baj's works look playful, colourful and humorous, but simultaneously show his sharp socio-critical, even anarchist, attitude. Baj himself stated that "only fun can validly oppose the system". Baj used play as a form of engagement and creation as a form of protest. His work was a protest against fascism, totalitarian systems, the power of the ruling class and the potential annihilation of the environment (the then new nuclear threat). The exhibition shows how Baj playfully used the strategies of satire and deliberate disrespect as means of protest against a society that seems to be on the constant verge of self-destruction. Exhibition: Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen, The Netherlands (04.02.-14.05.2017).

Science and art are increasingly interconnected in the activities of the study and conservation of works of art. Science plays a key role in cultural heritage, from developing new analytical techniques for studying the art, to investigating new ways of preserving the materials for the future. Following on from the 2014 title Science and Art: The Painted Surface, this book consists of a series of chapters written together by scientists, art historians, conservators, curators and artists dedicated to conservation, execution techniques, languages and conceptual topics. Science and Art: The Contemporary Painted Surface largely covers execution techniques, material’s conservation and languages of artists, representative of twelve different countries, all protagonists of the development of innovative significant techniques and methodologies. The book opens with a focus on widely historicized artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana, Enrico Baj, Piero Manzoni and Joseph Albers. Its core is dedicated to the work of major worldwide renowned living artists, in a perspective that, while considering the Sixties as the historical starting point of contemporaneity, does not neglect to offer a view on the work done in the immediately preceding years. Several interviews with artists are included. Final chapters are dedicated to contemporary design, net art, and painted surfaces in contemporary architecture. Presented in an easily readable form for a large audience, the book guides readers into new areas uncovered by the link between science and art, and will be of interest to artists, art historians and curators, as well as those who appreciate art. Reviews of Science and Art: The Painted Surface 'Science and Art provides an excellent read for art historians, who will instantly recognise the famous pieces that have been studied, while giving them insight into how a painting was constructed, what it is made from, or how the colours would have looked when they were freshly painted.' Chemistry World, 6 November 2014 'Science and Art is recommended for students, teachers, and the general public who are interested in chemistry or other sciences and art, as well as applications of the former to the latter.' J. Chem. Educ., 2016, 93(5), 810–810

From Cahiers d’Art, a monograph on one of the most ambitious collections of 20th-century art, and its complex, charismatic creator, Theodor Ahrenberg. Living with Matisse, Picasso, and Christo explores one of the most ambitious, and yet largely unknown, private collections of twentieth-century Western art, and its charismatic creator Theodor “Teto” Ahrenberg (1912–1989). Containing over 6,000 artworks acquired between the 1940s and late 1980s, Ahrenberg’s collection features key works by artists as distinguished and diverse as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Olle Bartling, Sam Francis, Öyvind Fahlström, Tadeusz Kantor, Lucio Fontana, Christo, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de Saint Phalle. Ahrenberg’s ever-evolving collection was shaped by his commitment to the changing notion of contemporary art, his dedication to young and marginalized artists, and a self- declared conviction that he was not merely a collector but one who facilitated exhibitions, collaborations, and commissions, and who employed art as an instrument against conservatism and complacency. Ahrenberg passionately believed in personally meeting those artists whose works he acquired, and he accordingly established rich, long-term friendships that transcended the conventional artist-collector dynamic.

"This is the first book to examine the cultural history of Marquis de Sade's (1740-1814) philosophical ideas and their lasting influence on political and artistic debates. An icon of free expression, Sade lived through France's Reign of Terror, and his writings offer both a pitiless mirror on humanity and a series of subversive metaphors that allow for the exploration of political, sexual, and psychological terror. Generations of avant-garde writers and artists have responded to Sade's philosophy as a means of liberation and as a radical engagement with social politics and sexual desire, writing fiction modelled on Sade's novels, illustrating luxury editions of his works, and translating his ideas into film, photography, and painting. In The Sadean Imagination, Alyce Mahon examines how Sade used images and texts as forms that could explore and dramatize the concept of terror on political, physical, and psychic levels, and how avant-garde artists have continued to engage in a complex dialogue with his works. Studying Sade's influence on art from the French Revolution through the twentieth century, Mahon examines works ranging from Anne Desclos's The Story of O, to images, texts, and films by Man Ray, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Peter Brook. She also discusses writings and responses to Sade by feminist theorists including Angela Carter and Judith Butler. Throughout, she shows how Sade's work challenged traditional artistic expectations and pushed the boundaries of the body and the body politic, inspiring future artists, writers, and filmmakers to imagine and portray the unthinkable"--

Published to accompany an exhibition held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 21-Sept. 6, 2011, the Reunion des Musees Nationaux-Grand Palais, Paris, Oct. 3, 2011-Jan. 16, 2012, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Feb. 21-June 3, 2012.

1900-1914: European center - 1914-1929: Widening circle - 1929-1945: Enduring arts - 1945-1960: Expressive gesture - 1960-1973: Dynamic arts - 1973-1989: Vanished boundary - Art and modernism - Art and religion - Surrealism - Art and politics - Art and realism - Art and nature - Art and abstraction - Art galleries and exhibitions - Pop art - Conceptual art - Art and money - Fauvism - Fauves - Art and European Nationalism - The Arts in the New World - Asia and Europe - Africa and black consciousness - The Pacific Basin: a new focus - Global crosscurrents.

Murray Bookchin has been a dynamic revolutionary propagandist since the 1930s when, as a teenager, he orated before socialist crowds in New York City and engaged in support work for those fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Now, for the first time in book form, this volume presents a series of exciting and engaged interviews with, and essays from, the founder of social ecology. This expansive collection ranges over, amongst others, Bookchin's account of his teenage years as a young Communist during the Great Depression, his experiences of the 1960s and reflections on that decade's lessons, his vision of a libertarian communist society, libertarian politics, the future of anarchism, and the unity of theory and practice. He goes on to assess the crisis of radicalism today and defends the need for a revolutionary Left. Finally, he states what is to be valued in both anarchism and Marxism in building such a Left and offers guidelines for forming a new revolutionary social movement.

"In addition to a text by the curator, the volume contains essays by scholars, theorists and artists that take a historical, critical, philosophical and sociological look at the theme of multiplication in art through a variety of languages and media: magazines, books, radio, film, design, fashion, performance and editions of artists' originals and multiples, over a period that stretches from the historical Avant-Garde to the 1970s"--Page [11].

The radical post-war Cobra group of artists and poets (1948-51) included some of the most important European artists of the second half of the twentieth century, who collaborated in a search for a universal artistic language. Cobra provides a fascinating picture of this vibrant group of artists.