This strikingly designed volume presents French Modern commercial graphic design in all its glory. Every aspect of French life in the lively and turbulent decades of the '20s and '30s is displayed in this rich compendium of highly stylized design concepts, including magazines, posters, brochures, and retail packages. From exhibition affiches proclaiming the dawn of a new cultural era and symbolic advertisements celebrating the marriage of man and machine to seductive perfume packages and exquisitely chic cocktail paraphernalia, this stunning survey offers a wealth of original artifacts - some never before seen in the United States - making it an essential reference for industrial designers, graphic artists, and anyone with an interest in the history of fine design and advertising.

Explores how the novels of Henry James reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society, and how essential the language and imagery of the arts, as well as friendships with artists, were to James's writing.

From T.J. Clark comes this provocative study of the origins of modern art in the painting of Parisian life by Edouard Manet and his followers. The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was a brand-new city, recently adorned with boulevards, cafés, parks, Great Exhibitions, and suburban pleasure grounds—the birthplace of the habits of commerce and leisure that we ourselves know as "modern life." A new kind of culture quickly developed in this remade metropolis, sights and spectacles avidly appropriated by a new kind of "consumer": clerks and shopgirls, neither working class nor bourgeois, inventing their own social position in a system profoundly altered by their very existence. Emancipated and rootless, these men and women flocked to the bars and nightclubs of Paris, went boating on the Seine at Argenteuil, strolled the island of La Grande-Jatte—enacting a charade of community that was to be captured and scrutinized by Manet, Degas, and Seurat. It is Clark's cogently argued (and profusely illustrated) thesis that modern art emerged from these painters' attempts to represent this new city and its inhabitants. Concentrating on three of Manet's greatest works and Seurat's masterpiece, Clark traces the appearance and development of the artists' favorite themes and subjects, and the technical innovations that they employed to depict a way of life which, under its liberated, pleasure-seeking surface, was often awkward and anxious. Through their paintings, Manet and the Impressionists ask us, and force us to ask ourselves: Is the freedom offered by modernity a myth? Is modern life heroic or monotonous, glittering or tawdry, spectacular or dull? The Painting of Modern Life illuminates for us the ways, both forceful and subtle, in which Manet and his followers raised these questions and doubts, which are as valid for our time as for the age they portrayed.

L'artiste native de Cuba Carmen Herrera (née en 1915) peint depuis plus de sept décennies, mais ce n'est que ces dernières années que la reconnaissance pour son travail a projeté l'artiste vers la notoriété internationale. Ce beau volume offre le premier examen soutenu d'elle, depuis le début de sa carrière en 1948 jusqu'en 1978, et s'étend sur les mondes de l'art de La Havane, de Paris et de New York. Les essais considèrent les premières études de l'artiste à Cuba, son implication dans le Salon des Réalités Nouvelles dans le Paris d'après-guerre et sa sortie révolutionnaire de New York. Puis l'ouvrage situe son travail dans le contexte d'un art d'avant-garde latino-américain plus large. Un essai de Dana Miller considère le travail de New York d'Herrera depuis les années 1950 jusque dans les années 1970, lorsque Herrera arrivait et perfectionnait son style de signature. Des photographies familiales personnelles des archives de Herrera enrichissent le récit, et une chronologie traitant de l'intégralité de sa vie et de sa carrière présente des images documentaires supplémentaires. Plus de quatre-vingts œuvres sont illustrées sous forme de plaques de couleur. Ce livre est la représentation la plus étendue des travaux de Herrera à ce jour. (d'après l'éditeur).

An exploration of the innovative, quintessentially Brazilian painter who merged modernism with the brilliant energy and culture of her homeland Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) was a central figure at the genesis of modern art in her native Brazil, and her influence reverberates throughout 20th- and 21st-century art. Although relatively little-known outside Latin America, her work deserves to be understood and admired by a wide contemporary audience. This publication establishes her rich background in European modernism, which included associations in Paris with artists Fernand Léger and Constantin Brancusi, dealer Ambroise Vollard, and poet Blaise Cendrars. Tarsila (as she is known affectionately in Brazil) synthesized avant-garde aesthetics with Brazilian subjects, creating stylized, exaggerated figures and landscapes inspired by her native country that were powerful emblems of the Brazilian modernist project known as Antropofagía. Featuring a selection of Tarsila's major paintings, this important volume conveys her vital role in the emerging modern-art scene of Brazil, the community of artists and writers (including poets Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade) with whom she explored and developed a Brazilian modernism, and how she was subsequently embraced as a national cultural icon. At the same time, an analysis of Tarsila's legacy questions traditional perceptions of the 20th-century art world and asserts the significant role that Tarsila and others in Latin America had in shaping the global trajectory of modernism.