This important new study reevaluates British art writing and the rise of formalism in the visual arts from 1900 to 1939. Taking Roger Fry as his starting point, Sam Rose rethinks how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement’s significance to art history today. In the context of modernism, formalist critics are often thought to be interested in art rather than life, a stance exemplified in their support for abstract works that exclude the world outside. But through careful attention to early twentieth-century connoisseurship, aesthetics, art education, design, and art in colonial Nigeria and India, Rose builds an expanded account of form based on its engagement with the social world. Art and Form thus opens discussions on a range of urgent topics in art writing, from its history and the constructions of high and low culture to the idea of global modernism. Rose demonstrates the true breadth of formalism and shows how it lends a new richness to thought about art and visual culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Accessibly written and analytically sophisticated, Art and Form opens exciting new paths of inquiry into the meaning and lasting importance of formalism and its ties to modernism. It will be invaluable for scholars and enthusiasts of art history and visual culture.

"The text is at once a meditation on theories of form and an essay on the painter Gerhard Richter as a philosophical pragmatist. Richter serves as the inspiration for a broader argument about the nature of "art" itself and for what Klinger professes to be a fresh approach to contemporary art more generally. He (1) addresses the widely conceded exhaustion of the modernist-postmodernist paradigm that has been used to negotiate the "essence of art" for decades and (2) offers what he says is a solution to the resulting gap that leaves us unclear on how to make art and talk about it. He draws on Kuhn's definition that a paradigm consists of the pre-theoretical framework of any practice: While rules and principles, where they exist, grow out of the paradigm, the paradigm can guarantee the functioning of a practice in the absence of rules. He sees Richter as relevant because the painter has never accepted the modern, neo-avant-garde, or postmodern movements as paradigms for his production. Klinger maintains that the goal of Richter's artistic program is "to replace traditional essentialist models of artistic form by a pragmatic model" of respecting the properties of actual physical substances at hand, such as paint, and making art in terms of process rather than with a prescribed end. This way, the modernist-postmodernist paradigm is neither affirmed nor perpetuated in the mode of its reversal, critique or deconstruction, but replaced by something else that forms an effective reaction to the situation without directly deriving from it"--

This work aims to show that sociology is indeed an art form, one that had strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the 19th century, the age in which sociology came into full stature.

'Living as Form' grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a 30-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of colour images.

Art and the Form of Life takes a classic theme—philosophy as the art of living—and gives it a contemporary twist. The book examines a series of watershed moments in artistic practice alongside philosophers’ most enduring questions about the way we live. Coupling Tino Sehgal with Wittgenstein, cave art with Foucault, Stanley Kubrick with Nietzsche, and the Bauhaus with Walter Benjamin, the book animates the idea that life is literally ours to make. It reflects on universal themes that connect the long histories of art and philosophy, and it does so using a contemporary approach. Drawing on great philosophical works, it argues that life practiced as an art form affords an experience of meaning, in the sense that it is engaging, creative, and participatory. It thus effects a fundamental renewal of experience.

Outstanding among textile artists -- Theo Moorman is a British weaver who has taught extensively in the United States. Illustrated with beautiful colour and black-and-white examples of her work are her thoughts on the design and aesthetic expression embodied in a woven fabric. The technique of weaving that bears her name is explained with numerous ways the Moorman technique may be varied and used with further exploration. Her experiences with commissioned works are utilised in a special chapter relating the problems and opportunities these present.