Are women's orgasms more intense than men's? What did Andr� Breton think of homosexuality? Can love be separated from physical desire?In 1928 a group of surrealist writers and artists held twelve round table discussions to address these questions. Calling them "researches into sexuality," their bizarre and humorous conversations are now made available in this new edition in all their surreal and salacious detail. Their research spanned the most critical period for surrealism, a time...

First published in 1967, Guy Debord's stinging revolutionary critique ofcontemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired acult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideasgenerated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord's pitiless attackon commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everydaylife continues to burn brightly in today's age of satellite televisionand the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spec...

Nicholas Fox Weber, for thirty-three years head of the Albers Foundation, spent many years with Anni and Josef Albers, the only husband-and-wife artistic pair at the Bauhaus (she was a textile artist; he a professor and an artist, in glass, metal, wood, and photography).The Alberses told him their own stories and described life at the Bauhaus with their fellow artists and teachers, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well these figures’ lesser-known w...

Ornans, Courbet’s birthplace, is near the beautiful valley of the Doubs River, and it was here as a boy, and later as a man, that he absorbed the love of landscape. He was by nature a revolutionary, a man born to oppose existing order and to assert his independence; he had that quality of bluster and brutality which makes the revolutionary count in art as well as in politics. In both directions his spirit of revolt manifested itself. He went to Paris to study art, yet he did not attach him...

The French painter Édouard Manet, often associated with the Impressionists, broke new ground by defying traditional techniques of representation and by choosing contemporary subjects of Parisian life. His ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ and ‘Olympia’ sparked public outcries, while inspiring a new generation of artists to embark on a new focus on modern, urban subjects, winning for Manet a pivotal place in the history of modern art. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first d...

Manet is one of the most famous artists from the second half of the nineteenth century linked to the impressionists, although he was not really one of them. He had great influence on French painting partly because of the choice he made for his subjects from everyday life, the use of pure colours, and his fast and free technique. He made, in his own work, the transition between Courbet’s Realism and the work of the impressionists. Born a high bourgeois, he chose to become a painter after fa...

Nineteenth century France was a period of rapid modernisation and expansion. Édouard Manet, the quintessential painter of modern life, was a man of his times and his paintings were powerful, often shocking, representations of modern society. In particular, Manet scandalised French society with his iconoclastic depictions of women as objects of pleasure and commerce, as products of a burgeoning capitalism and a commodity of the bourgeois male. An understanding of the historical and social c...

In this dazzling exploration of one of the most contradictory periods of literary and artistic achievement in modern history, journalist Andy McSmith evokes the lives of more than a dozen of the most brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. Taking us deep into Stalin's Russia, Fear and the Muse Kept Watch asks the question: can great art be produced in a police state? For although Josif Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in world history, under him Russia...

The smoothly metallic portraits, nudes and still lifes of Tamara de Lempicka encapsulate the spirit of Art Deco and the Jazz Age, and reflect the elegant and hedonistic life-style of a wealthy, glamorous and privileged elite in Paris between the two World Wars. Combining a formidable classical technique with elements borrowed from Cubism, Lempicka’s art represented the ultimate in fashionable modernity while looking back for inspiration to such master portraitists as Ingres and Bronzino. T...

Raised in Tzarist pre-revolutionary Russia Boris Anrep became an important British artist in the first half of the twentieth century, yet until now has never had a full overview of his considerable artistic output. A member of the Bloomsbury and Garsington sets of Edwardian England, he counted the writer Virginia Woolf, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the painter Augustus John among his many friends. Discover Anrep's fascinating story and learn about the many mosaics he created, som...

This book traces the emergence of modernism in art in South Asia by exploring the work of the iconic artist George Keyt. Closely interwoven with his life, Keyt’s art reflects the struggle and triumph of an artist with very little support or infrastructure. He painted as he lived: full of colour, turmoil and intensity. In this compelling account, the author examines the eventful course of Keyt’s journey, bringing to light unknown and startling facts: the personal ferment that Keyt went thro...

Sharon Poggenpohl has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is also the editor and publisher of the interdisciplinary journal Visual Language. Keiichi Sato teaches design theory and methodology, human-centered system integration, and interactive systems design in addition to coordinating the PhD program at the Institute of Design at IIT.