American painter and sculptor Salvatore Scarpitta (1919-2007) spent his childhood in Hollywood, where he fostered a love of dirt track racing. He moved to Italy in 1936 to study painting, and later fostered friendships with artists such as Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni. Scarpitta's mature work was to emerge from a unique mid-terrain between the unlikely twin influences of drag racing and Arte Povera; it led to his well-known wrapped or bandaged paintings, shaped canvases and even to replica racing cars, which frequently saw service before being exhibited. In the 1970s he made a series of sleds, the first of which was bought by Willem de Kooning. Despite Scarpitta's associations with both Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists, his work remained on the fringes of the postwar period's defining movements. As his influence emerges on a younger generation, this volume assesses his oeuvre.

Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi's Self-portrait ruptures the linear tradition of art-historical writing. Lonzi first abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising. This is the voice of feminist experimentalism in Italian art and literature, and here Lonzi speaks for herself in English. Self-portrait montages her verbatim conversations with fourteen prominent artists working at the time, all men except one. Lonzi's vital feeling that it was impossible to respond professionally to the political and existential problems embedded in the production and distribution of artworks drives the book's contingent structure. Artmaking struck Lonzi as the invitation to be together in a humanly satisfying way. This first English translation brings Lonzi's final work of criticism before her break with 'art' to an international audience. Her uncompromising enactment and pragmatic drop-out discontinues the narration of postwar modern art in Italy and beyond.

This volume explores how Italian institutions, dealers, critics, and artists constructed a modern national identity for Italy by exporting – literally and figuratively – contemporary art to the United States in key moments between 1929 and 1969. From artist Fortunato Depero opening his Futurist House in New York City to critic Germano Celant launching Arte Povera in the United States, Raffaele Bedarida examines the thick web of individuals and cultural environments beyond the two more canonical movements that shaped this project. By interrogating standard narratives of Italian Fascist propaganda on the one hand and American Cold War imperialism on the other, this book establishes a more nuanced transnational approach. The central thesis is that, beyond the immediate aims of political propaganda and conquering a new market for Italian art, these art exhibitions, publications, and the critical discourse aimed at American audiences all reflected back on their makers: they forced and helped Italians define their own modernity in relation to the world’s new dominant cultural and economic power. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, social history, exhibition history, and Italian studies.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

"This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Shirin Neshat: Facing History, organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian institution, Wahington DC May18- September 20, 2015"--Title page verso.

A riveting, scandle-filled biography of the most famous nude model in America, Audrey Munson (1891-1996) whose beauty brought her extraordinary success and great tragedy. Many readers will recognize Audrey Munson, even without knowing her name. She was America's first supermodel. Munson's beauty, though, was also her curse, exactly as a fortune teller predicted in her youth. Her looks won her entry to high society, but at a devastating cost. In 1919 she became a recluse, eventually being admitted to an asylum whre she remained until her death. This is her story.

A renowned art critic of the 1960s, Carla Lonzi abandoned the art world in 1970 to found Rivolta Femminile, a pioneering feminist collective in Italy. Rather than separating the art world luminary from the activist, however, this book looks at the two together. It demonstrates that even as Lonzi refused art, she articulated how feminist spaces and communities drew strength from creativity. The eleven essays in this book document the artistic and feminist circles of postwar Italy, a time characterised both by radical protest and avant-garde aesthetics, using primary and archival sources never before translated into English. They map Lonzi's deep connections to the influential Italian Arte Povera movement, and explore her complicated relationship with female artists of the time, such as Carla Accardi and Suzanne Santoro. Carla Lonzi's written work and activism represents a crucial, but previously overlooked, feminist intervention in traditional art history from beyond the Anglo-American canon. This book is a timely and urgent addition to our understanding of radical politics, separatist feminism and art criticism in the postwar period.

Collecting the Now offers a new, in-depth look at the economic forces and institutional actors that have shaped the outlines of postwar art history, with a particular focus on American art, 1960–1990. Working through four case studies, Michael Maizels illuminates how a set of dealers and patrons conditioned the iconic developments of this period: the profusions of pop art, the quixotic impossibility of land art, the dissemination of new media, and the speculation-fueled neo-expressionist painting of the 1980s. This book addresses a question of pivotal importance to a swath of art history that has already received substantial scholarly investigation. We now have a clear, nuanced understanding of why certain evolutions took place: why pop artists exploded the delimited parameters of aesthetic modernism, why land artists further strove against the object form itself, and why artists returned to (neo-)traditional painting in the 1980s. But remarkably elided by extant scholarship has been the question of how. How did conditions coalesce around pop so that its artists entered into museum collections, and scholarly analyses, at pace unprecedented in the prior history of art? How, when seeking to transcend the delimited gallery object, were land artists able to create monumental (and by extension, monumentally expensive), interventions in the extreme wilds of the Western deserts? And how did the esoteric objects of media art come eventually to scholarly attention in the sustained absence of academic interest or a private market? The answers to these questions lie in an exploration of the financial conditions and funding mechanisms through which these works were created, advertised, distributed, and preserved.