Dada: The Revolt of Art / by Marc Dachy

Nothing in the art community previously could prepare people for Dada, a movement beginning in Zurich in 1916. A meld of abstract art and avant-garde, Dadaists were the edgiest of the full-fledged anti-establishment artists, breaking all the rules, keeping none of the past traditions alive, rebelling against any type of "isms" and broadening the scope of what art could be. This new generation of visionaries were certainly not aiming to please the critics. 20 years later Adolf Hitler used Dada to point out what high art was not, using an exhibition of Dada pieces in sort-of derisive motif. So what was it exactly? The movement can best be described as "direct relationship between an artist and his art--as opposed to the art that until then had been imposed by social constraints." Figures like Hugo Ball, Jean Arp, Sophie Tauber and Marcel Duchamp essentially reconfigured artwork that removed the medium. Dada wasn't purely painting; it wasn't sculpture. And while you could call many of the pieces a collage, an amalgamation, it wasn't purely dimensional, necessarily, in any respect. Even as it maintained its integrity by conceptually representing an artist's inception of ideas, it did so by remaining void of popular styles. Dachy's little book, part of a larger series of humanities publications, is filled with Dada creations as well as the story behind it. Best of all, it manages to concentrate the material inside a very manageable, easy-to-get-through volume of artistic concepts. (709.04 DACHY)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Paris during the La Belle Epoque is a place and time evoking many bawdy, even decadent connotations. Bohemian Montmartre, Moulin Rouge, Can-can dancers, legalized prostitution and widespread debauchery were all

relevant activities and themes. At the center of it all, sharing in the esprit du temps and chronicling the unique spectacle was a very talented artist with an especially acute eye for the provocative named Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Born to a moderately aristocratic family in Albi in 1864, life was not easy for the youth whose parents, first cousins whose mothers had been sisters, separated early on in his childhood. Owing to an obvious but largely undiagnosed genetic disorder (now speculated to be pycnodysostosis, or Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome), Henri suffered from numerous illnesses and painfully disabling features his entire life. When both his legs fractured around the age of 13, they never healed properly leaving the lower half of his body undeveloped and prone to Rickets. Nevertheless his talent for drawing the painting was evident early on and his caretakers, specifically his mother, did everything to aid the youth with a proper education and tutelage. By 1880, Lautrec had settled semi-permanently in the Montmartre, home to the city's Red Light district as well as many other artists, namely Gauguin, Van Gogh, Bernard and Gen Paul, painters already emerging onto the exciting Post-Impressionist scene. Accepted within this circle and well-admired for his gifts with watercolor portraits and lithographs, the young Lautrec soon rose to prominence, his skill and exposure boosted by his steady stream of dry-point posters and snapshot image postcards of the city scenes. His well-endorsed paintings soon drew worldwide fame and Lautrec was able to travel extensively and live luxuriously. Tragically, the pain he suffered due to his condition as well as a general propensity for spirits plunged the young artist into severe alcoholism by his late twenties and even though family and friends tried to help him overcome his struggles, he died in 1901 at the age of 36. Several items showcase his unforgettable work such as The Life and Works of Lautrec (759.4 HARRIS), Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre (DVD 760.092 TOULOUSE), Toulouse-Lautrec: The Complete Graphic Works: A Catalogue Raisson: The Gerstenburg Collection (769.92 ADRIANI), and Toulouse-Lautrec: His Complete Lithographs and Dry-Points (769.924 A). There's also a foundation dedicated to his life which displays an entire collection of his work.

Cubism / by David Cottington

Avant-Garde artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque may not have intended to spearhead a revolutionary style of art in Montmartre, France circa 1907, but that’s precisely what happened. Between 1907 -1914 Pablo Picasso along with George Braque were among the first to work in the new style of Cubism, one of the most influential, innovative styles of the early 20th century. It was Picasso’s paintings which first began portray hard angular forms using luscious colors like blue, strident yellow, black and white. For all who viewed these sharp-edged images on the canvas--heads and nudes mostly, in the brightest colors: yellow, red, blue and black--it represented a drastic departure from contemporary and conventional European artwork. It was something different, sure, but it was also something outside the conventional realm of the European aesthetic. This was because cubism, its non-fluid qualities and slanted brushwork, garishly attributed its methodology and ideology to more "primitive", non-archetypal artwork, in a sense merging the primitive with the abstract.

But the object of cubism wasn't merely to portray elemental forms within a geometric motif. These “new” paintings clearly characterized the representational as well as the structural, trying to reproduce the formal beauty of things. The objective of "cubism" was to represent the position of objects in space: the artist arranges images from a clearly defined background and works toward the front, envisioning an abstract, multi-dimensional piece. Other interpretations speculated that the style never meant to have anything to do with shapes or forms; nor was it a set of rigorously defined guidelines associated with geometry or rigid contours. Rather it was a style which invariably gave a fourth dimension to images. In any case, it was the beginning of a new wave of intellectual art in the twentieth century. Author and art scholar Cottington does a good job of providing the reader with a solid understanding of this unique style of artwork within the historical context it was associated with. (709.04 COTTINGT)

On Beauty / by Zadie Smith

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English-born Howard Belsey is a art history professor at a small liberal arts school in Massachusetts. Over the years he has seen his liberal academic values and leftist ideologies slowly eroded in the face of intellectual conservativism, a fact more acutely rendered through the attitudes and opinions of his long-time nemesis Prof. Monty Kipps. Despite his disappointments, Howard is a relatively satisfied man, married to his African-american wife Kiki and loved by his three college-age kids Jerome, Zora and Levi. Yet a shadow closes over Howard's world when Jerome, his oldest, interns at a college in England where he lodges at the Kipps' residence and, in the process, falls head-over-heels in love with the Kipps' daughter Victoria.

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Though the budding romance between Jerome and Victoria is soon broken off, aspects of the entanglement have re-engaged Howard with instances from a preferredly forgotten past, one which includes incidents of a particularly distasteful nature between he and Monte Kipps. Now with the Kipps planning a move to America (Monte on a visiting professorship), Howard's world seems to be closing in around him. Compounding the drama in Howard's life, though in a more subversive manner, is the fallout from a one-night stand he'd had with a colleague some months previous, the details of which are now painfully known to Kiki and the children along with a select number of intimate peers and faculty members.

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It is from this backdrop that author Zadie Smith, also the writer of White Teeth and The Autograph Man, deftly portrays the intimacies of family situations, relating how the conflicts of relationships and antagonism, race and identity, class and prejudice are all enmeshed in the strata of daily life. Reminiscent of E.M. Forster's Howard's End--Smith apparently adapted aspects of her own novel's key characters from Forster's original two female protagonists--this is a moving novel centered on the complications and comprimises arising out of a growing need for connection in modern life.