An illuminating study of Amedeo Modigliani's early drawings and how they reflect the artist's conception of identity One of the great artists of the 20th century, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is celebrated for revolutionizing modern portraiture, particularly in his later paintings and sculpture. Modigliani Unmasked examines the artist's rarely seen early works on paper, offering revelatory insights into his artistic sensibilities and concerns as he developed his signature style of graceful, elongated figures. An Italian Sephardic Jew working in turn-of-the-century Paris, Modigliani embraced his status as an outsider, and his early drawings show a marked awareness of the role of ethnicity and race within society. Placing these drawings within the context of the artist's larger oeuvre, Mason Klein reveals how Modigliani's preoccupation with identity spurred the artist to reconceive the modern portrait, arguing that Modigliani ultimately came to think of identity as beyond national or cultural boundaries. Lavishly illustrated with the artist's paintings and over one hundred drawings collected by Dr. Paul Alexandre, Modigliani's close friend and first patron, this book provides an engaging and long overdue analysis of Modigliani's early body of work on paper.

A strikingly original exploration of the profound impact of World War II on how we understand the art that survived it By the end of World War II an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books had been seized from their owners by Nazi forces; many were destroyed. The artworks and cultural artifacts that survived have traumatic, layered histories. This book traces the biographies of these objects--including paintings, sculpture, and Judaica--their rescue in the aftermath of the war, and their afterlives in museums and private collections and in our cultural understanding. In examining how this history affects the way we view these works, scholars discuss the moral and aesthetic implications of maintaining the association between the works and their place within the brutality of the Holocaust--or, conversely, the implications of ignoring this history. Afterlives offers a thought-provoking investigation of the unique ability of art and artifacts to bear witness to historical events. With rarely seen archival photographs and with contributions by the contemporary artists Maria Eichhorn, Hadar Gad, Dor Guez, and Lisa Oppenheim, this catalogue illuminates the study of a difficult and still-urgent subject, with many parallels to today's crises of art in war.

New York Dadaist, Parisien surrealist, international portraitist & fashion photographer, this work considers how the career of Man Ray was shaped by his turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant experience & his lifelong evasion of his past.

A new look at the art of one of the most charming and idiosyncratic personalities of early 20th-century New York Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was a New York original: a society lady who hosted an avant-garde salon in her Manhattan home, a bohemian and a flapper, a poet, a theater designer, and above all an influential painter with a sharp satirical wit. Stettheimer collaborated with Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, befriended (and took French lessons from) Marcel Duchamp, and was a member of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe's artistic and intellectual circle. Beautifully illustrated with 150 color images, including the majority of the artist's extant paintings, as well as drawings, theater designs, and ephemera, this volume also highlights Stettheimer's poetry and gives her a long overdue critical reassessment. The essays published here--as well as a roundtable discussion by seven leading contemporary female artists--overturn the traditional perception of Stettheimer as an artist of mere novelties. Her work is linked not only to American modernism and the New York bohemian scene before World War II but also to a range of art practices active today. Flamboyant and epicurean, she was an astute documenter of New York and parodist of her social milieu; her highly decorative scenes borrowed from Surrealism and contributed to the beginnings of a feminist aesthetic.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, March 17-August 6, 2017.

"Many years ago this artist placed a singles ad in Denver's alternative weekly newspaper. The headline read "Work Hard, Play Hard" and now this book celebrates 25 years of happy marriage thanks to a fun advertising experiment. In a bit of whimsy, image and text play off of each other to create irreverent pairings of singles pick-up lines with intimate portraits of abandoned furniture that can be found cast aside like a bad romance on city streets everywhere. Twenty Polaroid-style photographs are paired with text highlighting the becoming features of the lonely furniture"--Artist's statement

The former owner/proprietor of the beloved appetizing store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side tells the delightful, mouthwatering story of an immigrant family’s journey from a pushcart in 1907 to “New York’s most hallowed shrine to the miracle of caviar, smoked salmon, ethereal herring, and silken chopped liver” (The New York Times Magazine). When Joel Russ started peddling herring from a barrel shortly after his arrival in America from Poland, he could not have imagined that he was giving birth to a gastronomic legend. Here is the story of this “Louvre of lox” (The Sunday Times, London): its humble beginnings, the struggle to keep it going during the Great Depression, the food rationing of World War II, the passing of the torch to the next generation as the flight from the Lower East Side was beginning, the heartbreaking years of neighborhood blight, and the almost miraculous renaissance of an area from which hundreds of other family-owned stores had fled. Filled with delightful anecdotes about how a ferociously hardworking family turned a passion for selling perfectly smoked and pickled fish into an institution with a devoted national clientele, Mark Russ Federman’s reminiscences combine a heartwarming and triumphant immigrant saga with a panoramic history of twentieth-century New York, a meditation on the creation and selling of gourmet food by a family that has mastered this art, and an enchanting behind-the-scenes look at four generations of people who are just a little bit crazy on the subject of fish. Color photographs © Matthew Hranek