In Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Si?e France, Robyn Roslak examines for the first time the close relationship between neo-impressionist landscapes and cityscapes and the anarchist sympathies of the movement's artists. She focuses in particular on paintings produced between 1886 and 1905 by Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce, the neo-impressionists whose fidelity to anarchism, to the art of landscape and to a belief in the social potential of art was strongest. Although the neo-impressionists are best known for their rational and scientific technique, they also heeded the era's call for art surpassing the mundane realities of everyday life. By tempering their modern subjects with a decorative style, they hoped to lead their viewers toward moral and social improvement. Roslak's ground-breaking analysis shows how the anarchist theories of Elis?Reclus, Pierre Kropotkin and Jean Grave both inspired and coincided with these ideals. Anarchism attracted the neo-impressionists because its standards for social justice were grounded, like neo-impressionism itself, in scientific exactitude and aesthetic idealism. Anarchists claimed humanity would reach its highest level of social and moral development only in the presence of a decorative variety of nature, and called upon progressive thinkers to help create and maintain such environments. The neo-impressionists, who primarily painted decorative landscapes, therefore discovered in anarchism a political theory consistent with their belief that decorative harmony should be the basis for socially responsible art.

Examines the theoretical bases and the social fabric that spawned French neo-impressionism, best represented by Seurat, Signac, Pissarro, Angrand, and Luce. Shows how they rejected the spontaneity of the impressionists to embrace scientific theories promulgated by anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Jean Grave, and how the movement broke up when their concern for social justice was supplanted by demands for more militant, didactic art. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

One of the powers of art is its ability to convey the human aspects of political events. In this fascinating survey on art, artists, and anarchism, Allan Antliff interrogates critical moments when anarchist artists have confronted pivotal events over the past 140 years. The survey begins with Gustave Courbet’s activism during the 1871 Paris Commune (which established the French republic) and ends with anarchist art during the fall of the Soviet empire. Other subjects include the French neoimpressionists, the Dada movement in New York, anarchist art during the Russian Revolution, political art of the 1960s, and gay art and politics post-World War II. Throughout, Antliff vividly explores art’s potential as a vehicle for social change and how it can also shape the course of political events, both historic and present-day; it is a book for the politically engaged and art aficionados alike. Allan Antliff is the author of Anarchist Modernism.

Providing a fresh perspective on an important but underappreciated group of late nineteenth-century French painters, this is the first book to provide an in-depth account of the Nabis' practice of the decorative, and its significance for twentieth-century modernism. Over the course of the ten years that define the Nabi movement (1890-1900), its principal artists included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul S?sier, and Paul Ranson. The author reconstructs the Nabis' relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition in order to show how their painterly practice emerges out of the pressing questions defining modernism around 1900. She shows that the Nabis were engaged, nonetheless, with issues that are always at stake in accounts of nineteenth-century modernist painting, issues such as the relationship of high and low art, of individual sensibility and collective identity, of the public and private spheres. The Nabis and Intimate Modernism is a rigorous study of the intellectual and artistic endeavors that inform the Nabis' decorative domestic paintings in the 1890s, and argues for their centrality to painterly modernism. The book ends up not only re-positioning the Nabis to occupy a crucial place in modernism's development from 1860 to 1914, but also challenges that narrative to place more emphasis on notions of decoration, totality and interiority.

This biography charts the life and fascinating long militant career of the French anarchist journalist, editor, theorist, writer, campaigner and educator Jean Grave (1854-1939), from the run up to the 1871 Paris Commune to the eve of the Second World War. Through Grave, it explores the history of the French and international anarchist communist movement over seven decades: its “heroic period” (1880-1890s), shaken by terrorist violence and intense repression, the emergence of syndicalism, national and international solidarity campaigns, the divisions over the First World War, and post-war division and relegation. Through Grave, a “sedentary transnationalist,” the study investigates the networked and transnational organisation of the anarchist movement, addressing the paradox of Grave’s international influence alongside his deep rootedness in Paris by emphasizing the movement’s global print culture and staggering circulations.

Engaging with contemporary debates about the political role of art in an era of total market subsumption, this book shows how artists respond to the challenges of political authoritarianism, police violence, right-wing populism, 'post-truth' discourse, economic inequality, pandemics, and the environmental crisis, transforming the public sphere in new and unexpected ways. Going beyond sterile debates about identity politics, diversity and representation that beset the mainstream media, university campuses and other cultural domains, the volume illustrates the ways in which artists are opening up alternative sites of contestation, occupation, and autonomous political thought and action. Newman and Topuzovski examine here the artistic practices of multiple collectives and individuals deeply engaged with social and political activities such as Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) and Voina, arguing that the best way to understand these new critical discourses and practices is through an updated political theory of anarchism - or what we call postanarchism - where the insurrection against power and the politics of singularity are central. Featuring, for instance, an examination of significant movements such as Black Lives Matter, as well as its use of artistic tactics such as graffiti, graphic design and movement art, the book launches itself into a vibrant discussion of the extent to which art can produce a multiplicity of practices through the deconstruction of existing legal, political, and cultural identities. By developing an alternative way of exploring the nexus between art and politics through the idea of postanarchism, this book bridges the gap between the two, promoting an understanding of the political role that art can play today and introduces a theory of postanarchism to a non-specialist audience of artists, activists and those generally interested in new sites and directions for radical politics.

The essays in this wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated volume capture the theoretical range and scholarly rigor of recent criticism that has fundamentally transformed the study of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Readers are invited to consider the profound issues and penetrating questions that lie beneath this perennially popular body of work as the contributors examine the art world of late nineteenth-century France—including detailed looks at Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne, Morisot, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. The authors offer fascinating new perspectives, placing the artworks from this period in wider social and historical contexts. They explore these painters' pictorial and market strategies, the critical reception and modern criteria the paintings engendered, and the movement's historic role in the formation of an avant-garde tradition. Their research reflects the wealth of new documents, critical approaches, and scholarly exhibitions that have fundamentally altered our understanding of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. These essays, several of which have previously been familiar only to scholars, provide instructive models of in-depth critical analysis and of the competing art historical methods that have crucially reshaped the field. Contributors: Carol Armstrong, T. J. Clark, Stephen F. Eisenman, Tamar Garb, Nicholas Green, Robert L. Herbert, John House, Mary Tompkins Lewis, Michel Melot, Linda Nochlin, Richard Shiff, Debora Silverman, Paul Tucker, Martha Ward

The first English collection of writings by Henry van de Velde, one of the most influential designers and theorists of the twentieth century. Belgian artist, architect, designer, and theorist Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) was a highly original and influential figure in Europe beginning in the 1890s. A founding member of the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements, he also directed the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, Germany, which eventually became the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius. This selection of twenty-six essays, translated from French and German, includes van de Velde’s writings on William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement, Neo-Impressionist painting, and relationships between ornament, line, and abstraction in German aesthetics. The texts trace the evolution of van de Velde’s thoughts during his most productive period as a theorist in the artistic debates in France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Katherine M. Kuenzli expertly guides readers to see how van de Velde’s writings reconcile themes of aesthetics and function, and expression and reason, throughout the artistic periods and regions represented by these texts. With introductory discussions of each essay and full annotations, this is an essential volume for a broad range of scholars and students of the history of fine and applied arts and ideas.

An authoritative re-definition of the social, cultural and visual history of the emergence of the “avant-garde” in Paris and London Over the past fifty years, the term "avant-garde" has come to shape discussions of European culture and modernity, ubiquitously taken for granted but rarely defined. This ground-breaking book develops an original and searching methodology that fundamentally reconfigures the social, cultural, and visual context of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Paris and London before 1915, bringing the material history of its formation into clearer and more detailed focus than ever before. Drawing on a wealth of disciplinary evidence, from socio-economics to histories of sexuality, bohemia, consumerism, politics, and popular culture, David Cottington explores the different models of cultural collectivity in, and presumed hierarchies between, these two focal cities, while identifying points of ideological influence and difference between them. He reveals the avant-garde to be at once complicit with, resistant to, and a product of the modernizing forces of professionalization, challenging the conventional wisdom on this moment of cultural formation and offering the means to reset the terms of avant-garde studies.

Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada sheds new light on Paris Dada's role in developing the anarchist and individualist philosophies that helped shape the cultural dialogue in France following the First World War. Drawing on such surviving documentation as correspondence, criticism, periodicals, pamphlets, and manifestoes, this book argues that, contrary to received wisdom, Dada was driven by a vision of social change through radical cultural upheaval. The first book-length study to interrogate the Paris Dadaists' complex and often contested position in the postwar groundswell of anarcho-individualism, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada offers an unprecedented analysis of Paris Dada literature and art in relation to anarchism, and also revives a variety of little known anarcho-individualist texts and periodicals. In doing so, it reveals the general ideological diversity of the postwar French avant-garde and identifies its anarchist concerns; in addition, it challenges the accepted paradigm that postwar cultural politics were monolithically nationalist. By positioning Paris Dada in its anarchist context, this volume addresses a long-ignored lacuna in Dada scholarship and, more broadly, takes its place alongside the numerous studies that over the past two decades have problematized the politics of modern art, literature, and culture.