During Rolph Scarlett's remarkable seventy-five year career he was an avant-garde abstract painter, an innovative set designer, an industrial designer, and the creator of unique sculptural jewellery in the American modernist tradition. In this beautifully illustrated book Judith Nasby presents a retrospective of his life and work. Scarlett was born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1889. By the time he moved to the United States in 1918 he had already had some experience with the techniques of painting, jewellery, and designing for the stage which he put to good use in his career in New York. During the 1930s and 1940s Scarlett was a leading practitioner of geometric abstraction, with sixty of his paintings in the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). A geometric sensibility also inspired the innovative, constructionist stage designs that he created for plays such as George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman" (1929). As an industrial designer during the 1930s, Scarlett produced a remarkable body of design drawings for everything from household objects to New York World's Fair amusement rides and guided missiles. His streamlined modern designs emphasized efficiency, science, and progress. Throughout his life he had made unique sculptural jewellery and after his retirement in the 1960s jewellery increasingly became his focus. He actively made jewellery until a few years before his death at age ninety-five.

Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century is a survey of the richest, most controversial and perhaps most thoroughly confusing centuries in the whole history of the visual arts in Canada - the period from 1900 to the present. Murray shows how, beginning with Tonalism at the start of the century, new directions in art emerged - starting with our early Modernists, among them Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Today, Modernism has lost its dominance. Artists, critics, and the public alike are confronted by a scene of unprecedented variety and complexity. Murray discusses the social and political events of the century in combination with the cultural context; movements, ideas, attitudes, and styles; the important groups in Canadian art, and major and minor artists and their works. Fully documented, well researched and written with clarity and over four hundred illustrations in both black-and-white and colour, Murray’s book is essential for understanding Canadian art of this century. As an introduction, it is excellent in both its scope and intelligence.

The cool designs, sleek lines and fashion-forward forms of the open and optimistic feel of the modernism furniture and design is as reflective of attitude as it is ingenuity. The enthusiasm and boundless hope of post-War 1950s America, not unlike our country’s current eagerness for a shot of optimism, is represented in the pages of this beautifully illustrated, inspiring, and informative book. Warman’s Modernism Furniture & Accessories features the furniture and designs that emerged during the prime of the movement, between 1945 and 1985. The collection of 1,000 rich and robust color photos, real-world auction prices and extensive descriptions make this a fundamental reference for anyone with an interest in modernism furniture.

Galley proofs with manuscript notes in the hands of the author and the proofreader, Florence Keene. With a letter to N. Van Patten. Illustrated by Rolph Scarlett, et al. With photographs.

The changing relationships between science and industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, illustrated by the career of the “father of plastics.” The Belgian-born American chemist, inventor, and entrepreneur Leo Baekeland (1863–1944) is best known for his invention of the first synthetic plastic—his near-namesake Bakelite—which had applications ranging from electrical insulators to Art Deco jewelry. Toward the end of his career, Baekeland was called the “father of plastics”—given credit for the establishment of a sector to which many other researchers, inventors, and firms inside and outside the United States had also made significant contributions. In Beyond Bakelite, Joris Mercelis examines Baekeland's career, using it as a lens through which to view the changing relationships between science and industry on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He gives special attention to the intellectual property strategies and scientific entrepreneurship of the period, making clear their relevance to contemporary concerns. Mercelis describes the growth of what he terms the “science-industry nexus” and the developing interdependence of science and industry. After examining Baekeland's emergence as a pragmatic innovator and leader in scientific circles, Mercelis analyzes Baekeland's international and domestic IP strategies and his efforts to reform the US patent system; his dual roles as scientist and industrialist; the importance of theoretical knowledge to the science-industry nexus; and the American Bakelite companies' research and development practices, technically oriented sales approach, and remuneration schemes. Mercelis argues that the expansion and transformation of the science-industry nexus shaped the careers and legacies of Baekeland and many of his contemporaries.

Judith Nasby, founding director and curator of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, animates the story of the gallery from its humble beginnings in the hallways of a university campus in 1916 to its latest incarnation as the internationally recognized Art Gallery of Guelph. The book is beautifully illustrated with eighty images of artworks in the permanent collection, beginning with the gallery's first acquisition, Tom Thomson's 1917 masterpiece The Drive, the last large canvas he painted before his tragic death. As curator, Nasby oversaw the creation of one of the most comprehensive sculpture parks in Canada and the amassing of a permanent collection of some nine thousand artworks. In The Making of a Museum Nasby reveals how the museum developed its internationally recognized collection of contemporary Inuit drawings and wall hangings that toured four continents. She discusses the development of the collection's specializations in contemporary works by Canadian silversmiths; historical European etchings; Woodland and Northeastern Indigenous beadwork; and others that arose from curatorial collaborations, such as molas by Kuna women artists from Panama and contemporary paintings and indigenous woodcuts from Chongqing, China. Nasby recounts her long career as founding director and curator, peppering the hundred-year history of cultural development on the University of Guelph campus and in the city with humorous anecdotes and personal insights to reveal how arts institutions can be created through dedication, serendipity, and perseverance.

A rich compendium of Western art by women, this book also contains essays which examine the many economic, social, and political forces that have shaped the art over years of pivotal change. The women profiled played an important role in gaining the acceptance of women as men's peers in artistic communities. Their independent spirit resonates in studios and galleries throughout the country today. Photos.

This book uses an examination of the annual Turner Prize to defend the view that the evaluation of artworks is a reason-based activity, notwithstanding the lack of any agreed criteria for judging excellence in art. It undertakes an empirical investigation of actual critical practice as evident within published commentaries on the Prize in order to examine and test theories of critical evaluation, including the ideas of Noel Carroll, Frank Sibley, Kendall Walton and Suzanne Langer. Case studies of work by Turner Prize winners such as Steve McQueen, Martin Creed, Tomma Abts are used to explore definitions of art and concepts of artistic value and meaning. The book will be of interest to academics in the fields of aesthetics, contemporary art and cultural studies, but also to practitioners working in the arts, media and education.

By the late twentieth century, idyllic depictions of eighteenth-century manorial landscapes had become artistic expressions of dislocation. Western agricultural paradigms had shifted, as had the relationship between art and agriculture. The Cultivated Landscape uses over seventy illustrations to look at the development of Western agriculture from feudal times to the present.