"The biography recounts Rosenberg's full story for the first time. Art critic for The New Yorker from 1962 until 1978, Rosenberg, together with Clement Greenberg, radically reshaped the interpretation of art in the post-World-War-II period by promoting and examining abstract expression. But Rosenberg was also a social and literary critic-writing about art was just one aspect of his work. Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life weaves together Rosenberg's life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. Rosenberg's mid-century linking of the New York School with the art establishment, together with his observations on the commodification of the artwork and the evisceration of the "self" in favor of celebrity (especially in his often-cited essay "The Herd of Independent Minds") make this book especially topical"--

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

This book studies C.P. Snow's eleven-volume series of novels (Strangers and Brothers) as documents detailing the social and political life of mid-twentieth-century Britain, and points out the uses for the novels in the academic study of that time period. Both Snow and his central character, Lewis S. Eliot, started from unremarkable origins in terms of their mutual background in the lower reaches of the middle class, their dreams of success in their teen years, and their early professional education in a new, struggling academic institution in the mid-1920s. Neither could really be considered typical for men of their class. Eliot's working life would include being a very minor town clerk, a barrister, an advisor to a powerful industrialist, a Cambridge don, a moderately powerful civil servant, and finally, in early retirement, a writer. Eliot would befriend members of both the traditional and Jewish upper classes, scholars and brilliant scientists, powerful behind-the-scenes civil servants, second-tier British and Nazi politicians, financiers and industrialists, Communists, and writers and artists, providing a fairly broad overview of parts of the middle class and ruling elites of the periods. Snow's sequence of novels is therefore useful to the historian of twentieth-century Britain, both in understanding the period as it recedes away from common experience and in presenting the period in the classroom. Snow was a classic twentieth-century writer who presented a more balanced account of the British «governing classes» of the middle third of the twentieth century than did the upper-class (and would-be upper-class) or working-class writers of the same period. His novels provide an insight that every student of twentieth-century Britain must have on hand.

Looking at the status and meaning of Bauhaus objects in relation to the school’s history, this book features contributions from some of the most brilliant scholars writing in the field today. It offers an entirely new treatment of the Bauhaus school and through a strong thematic structure, the questions and subsequent conclusions presented by the contributors re-examine the history of the Bauhaus and its continuing legacy.

Bringing together twenty-nine of Lawrence Alloway’s most influential essays in one volume, this fascinating collection provides valuable perspectives on the art and visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century. Lawrence Alloway ranks among the most important critics of his time, and his contributions to the spirited and contentious dialogue of his era make for fascinating reading. These twenty-nine provocative essays from 1956 to 1980 from the man who invented the term ‘pop art’ bring art, film, iconography, cybernetics and culture together for analysis and investigation, and do indeed examine the context, content and role of the critic in art and visual culture. Featuring a critical commentary by Richard Kalina, and preface by series editor Saul Ostrow, Imagining the Present will be an enthralling read for all art and visual culture students.

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.