Essays explore the influence of art in twentieth-century American culture, including jazz, basketball, professional wrestling, magic, gambling, entrepreneurship, series television and automotive design.

Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited. Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.

Reprinted just in time for the anniversary of the series that stole our hearts, this handsome hardcover contains hundreds of art pieces created during the development of the show's first season. Featuring creator commentary from DiMartino and Konietzko, this is an intimate look inside the creative process that brought the mystical world of bending and a new generation of heroes to life! Go behind the scenes of the animated series Legend of Korra Book One - Air - created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko - the smash-hit sequel to their blockbuster show Avatar: The Last Airbender!

In The Work of Art, Anthea Callen analyzes the self-portraits, portraits of fellow artists, photographs, prints, and studio images of prominent nineteenth-century French Impressionist painters, exploring the emergence of modern artistic identity and its relation to the idea of creative work. Landscape painting in general, she argues, and the “plein air” oil sketch in particular were the key drivers of change in artistic practice in the nineteenth century—leading to the Impressionist revolution. Putting the work of artists from Courbet and Cézanne to Pissaro under a microscope, Callen examines modes of self-representation and painting methods, paying particular attention to the painters’ touch and mark-making. Using innovative methods of analysis, she provides new and intriguing ways of understanding material practice within its historical moment and the cultural meanings it generates. Richly illustrated with 180 color and black-and-white images, The Work of Art offers fresh insights into the development of avant-garde French painting and the concept of the modern artist.

In the New York Times Michael Kimmelman called them "sleek, whimsical contraptions in a modernist mode"; the Basler Zeitung termed them "net-like structures . . . like hedgehogs or serpents." The kinetic sculptures of Tim Prentice create a novel geometry of air and light. Concentrating on movement rather than object, Prentice harnesses natural elements into his art machines-delicate structures that walk the tightrope between order and chaos, control and serendipity, understated technique and extravagant wonder. Prentice purposely circumscribes the artist's prerogatives, distilling the power of wind and sun into an ever-changing dance of light and shadow. These understated, subtle inventions provide endless distraction, delighting the child in all of us. Drawing on Air offers a many-sided vision of the kinetic sculptor and his works. An essay by Nicholas Fox Weber introduces the artist and his work, while a chapter on "Mechanics" explains some of the physical principles underlying Prentice's whimsical sculptures. Photographs of works-in-progress, principal public commissions as well as occasional pieces created for casual amusement are punctuated by the artist's mordant, sometimes mischievous comments. "Prentice's sculptures . . .are about fluid movement and change, reminding us that everything is in flux. . . . Wonders of engineering, they create evanescent drawings in thin air." -Michael Amy, Art in America "What is grand in these sculptures is the sense of immensity created by their movements, a sense resonant with our most pleasurable apprehensions of land, sea, and sky." -Elaine Bleakney, Sculpture "These refined sculptures are never ponderous, plump or boring but constantly and slowly transforming themselves as though imbued by perpetuum mobile." -Karen Gerig, Basler Zeitung Experiencing Tim Prentice's work is like taking a ride on a roller coaster" -Catalog of the Connecticut Biennial