"A wide-ranging collection that allows the mask—as artifact, metaphor, theatrical costume, fetish, strategy for self-concealment, and treasured cultural object—to clarify modernity’s relationship to history."--Carrie J. Preston, author of Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance "Covering an impressive range of geographies, cultures, and time periods, these carefully researched essays explore the fascinating role of masks and masking in mediating the relationship between tradition and modernity in both art and literature."--Paul Jay, author of The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies Behind the Masks of Modernism reconsiders the meaning of "modernism" by taking an interdisciplinary approach and stretching beyond the Western modernist canon and the literary scope of the field. The essays in this diverse collection explore numerous regional, national, and transnational expressions of modernity through art, history, architecture, drama, literature, and cultural studies around the globe. Masks--both literal and metaphorical--play a role in each of these artistic ventures, from Brazilian music to Chinese film and Russian poetry to Nigerian masquerade performance. The contributors show how artists and writers produce their works in moments of emerging modernity, aesthetic sensibility, and deep societal transformations caused by modern transnational forces. Using the mask as a thematic focus, the volume explores the dialogue created through regional modernisms, emphasizes the local in describing universal tropes of masks and masking, and challenges popular assumptions about what modernism looks like and what modernity is.

"A wide-ranging collection that allows the mask-as artifact, metaphor, theatrical costume, fetish, strategy for self-concealment, and treasured cultural object-to clarify modernity's relationship to history."--Carrie J. Preston, author of Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance "Covering an impressive range of geographies, cultures, and time periods, these carefully researched essays explore the fascinating role of masks and masking in mediating the relationship between tradition and modernity in both art and literature."--Paul Jay, author of The Humanities "Crisis" and the Future of Literary Studies Behind the Masks of Modernism reconsiders the meaning of "modernism" by taking an interdisciplinary approach and stretching beyond the Western modernist canon and the literary scope of the field. The essays in this diverse collection explore numerous regional, national, and transnational expressions of modernity through art, history, architecture, drama, literature, and cultural studies around the globe. Masks--both literal and metaphorical--play a role in each of these artistic ventures, from Brazilian music to Chinese film and Russian poetry to Nigerian masquerade performance. The contributors show how artists and writers produce their works in moments of emerging modernity, aesthetic sensibility, and deep societal transformations caused by modern transnational forces. Using the mask as a thematic focus, the volume explores the dialogue created through regional modernisms, emphasizes the local in describing universal tropes of masks and masking, and challenges popular assumptions about what modernism looks like and what modernity is.

A cultural history of the face in Western art, ranging from portraiture in painting and photography to film, theater, and mass media This fascinating book presents the first cultural history and anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and media. Ranging from funerary masks and masks in drama to the figural work of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman and Nam June Paik, renowned art historian Hans Belting emphasizes that while the face plays a critical role in human communication, it defies attempts at visual representation. Belting divides his book into three parts: faces as masks of the self, portraiture as a constantly evolving mask in Western culture, and the fate of the face in the age of mass media. Referencing a vast array of sources, Belting's insights draw on art history, philosophy, theories of visual culture, and cognitive science. He demonstrates that Western efforts to portray the face have repeatedly failed, even with the developments of new media such as photography and film, which promise ever-greater degrees of verisimilitude. In spite of sitting at the heart of human expression, the face resists possession, and creative endeavors to capture it inevitably result in masks—hollow signifiers of the humanity they're meant to embody. From creations by Van Eyck and August Sander to works by Francis Bacon, Ingmar Bergman, and Chuck Close, Face and Mask takes a remarkable look at how, through the centuries, the physical visage has inspired and evaded artistic interpretation.

Published to accompany an exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 9 March-29 May 2017

As the first book-length study to bring the fields of modernism and food studies together, Modernism and Food Studies anchors the burgeoning field of modernist food studies. This volume collects theoretically and methodologically diverse essays that investigate modernist representations of food, broadly treated in phases from production to distribution and consumption. By exploring the profound relationship between modernist aesthetics and the new food cultures of modernity, Modernism and Food Studies uncovers new links between seemingly disparate spaces, cultures, and artistic media in a globalizing world.

"This work bridges a number of fields in the humanities to examine how modernist representations demonstrate the limits of facial expressivity as a marker of the true qualities of a person"--

Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.