Edouard Léon Théodore Mesens (1903-1971) was a main figure in twentieth-century European art. He was known as the "talisman of surrealism". Like a collage, his artistic vocation comprised various fragments: he was a composer, poet, publisher, photographer, exhibition maker and above all a passionate promoter of art. In the early 1920s E.L.T. Mesens played an active role in the European art scene, becoming friends with Tristan Tzara, Theo van Doesburg, Erik Satie and other artists. He appointed himself one of the driving forces of the surrealist movement. It was Mesens to whom René Magritte owed his international reputation and it was Mesens who introduced surrealism to the U.K. He surrounded himself with artists, including Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, André Breton, Yves Tanguy and Man Ray. His life was entirely devoted to imagination and poetry. Discover l'amour fou in 'The Star Alphabet by E.L.T. Mesens.' Exhibition: MuZEE, Oostende, Belgium (06.07.-17.11.2013).

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 brings the series of cultural histories of the avant-garde in the Nordic countries up to the present. It discusses revisions and continuations of historical practices since 1975.

The first major biography of the pathbreaking, perpetually influential surrealist artist and iconoclast whose inspiration can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé—by the celebrated biographer of Cézanne and Braque In this thought-provoking life of René Magritte (1898-1967), Alex Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte’s surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape, through such legendary works as The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) and his celebrated iterations of Man in a Bowler Hat. Danchev explores the path of this highly unconventional artist from his middle-class Belgian beginnings to the years during which he led a small, brilliant band of surrealists (and famously clashed with André Breton) to his first major retrospective, which traveled to the United States in 1965 and gave rise to his international reputation. Using 50 color images and more than 160 black-and-white illustrations, Danchev delves deeply into Magritte’s artistic development and the profound questions he raised in his work about the very nature of authenticity. This is a vital biography for our time that plumbs the mystery of an iconoclast whose influence can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé.

As an artist, an impresario, a biographer and a collector, Roland Penrose (1900-1984) is a key figure in the study of art in England from 1920 to 1984. In the first biography of Penrose, acclaimed biographer James King explores the intricacies of Penrose's life and work tracing the profound effects of his upbringing in a Quaker household on his values, the early influence of Roger Fry, his friendships with Max Ernst, Andre Breton and other surrealists, especially Paul Eluard, his organization of the landmark International Surrealist Exhibition in the summer of 1936, his conflicted relationship with Pablo Picasso, and his tireless promotion of surrealism as well as the production of his own surrealist art. With a deftness of touch, King traces Penrose's complex professional and personal lives, including his pacifism, his work as a biographer - including his outstanding life of Picasso as well as those of Miro, Man Ray, and Tapies - and as an art historian, as well as his unconventionality, especially in his two marriages - including that to Lee Miller -and his numerous love affairs.