In the years leading up to the recent centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, perhaps the most significant revelation to emerge about the paragon of twentieth-century literature is that he had a strong interest in drawing. Over one hundred pages of drawings by Kafka, most of them previously unknown, were made public in 2021 by the National Library of Israel in an online repository, and they have opened the door to new consideration of the place of visual production in Kafka’s life and work. An...

Despite its speaker’s early resolution to “go slowly,” Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (1919), an exuberantly frenetic work, rarely lets up. [2] There is one moment, however, just after Mirrlees evokes the Russian Revolution in the dreamt specter of “giant sinister mujik,” when this noisy poem draws to a temporary calm and reflects, or so it seems, on the limits of art (Mirrlees, Paris, 15):

Herr [Gustav] Klimt indoctrinates Frau [Serena] Lederer into the art of Secessionist painting. This rapprochement between modern art and nouveau-riche Jews, this progress in the art of design, capable of transforming ghettos into affluent quarters, warrants the loveliest of hopes. [1] —Karl Kraus, Die Fackel (November 1900) In his dryly sardonic “praise” of Jewish patronage in relation to the then-dominant Secessionist aesthetic, the polemical critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936)—who, not...

There is no gentle way into the later twentieth-century work of the painter Prunella Clough. It is, as this paper will argue, a difficult kind of realism, embedded in an obdurate poetry of form. But for the viewer of Clough’s visual work or the reader of her extensive notes and diaries, it is also a brutal appraisal of the world at mid-century through an uncompromising reassessment of the process of paintings. “Considerations. Pickaxe etc. Multiple object forms repetitive, why? Cf human forms in...

© 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press In 1961, the Venezuelan artist Elsa Gramcko (1925–94) completed Sin título (Untitled; fig. 1). In the work, cratered sheets of corroded metal are caught in a permanent stasis of decomposition. Ochre and burnt sienna spread from the tarnished and oxidized surfaces of the irregularly shaped pieces of metal, creating a chromatic palette both earthen and industrial. Facture engenders form, as each metal piece assumes its character from the haptic quality...

In 1969, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote to her ex-husband, Ben Nicholson, “so much depends, in sculpture, on what one wants to see through a hole!" What emerges in a sustained encounter with Hepworth’s work is her philosophy that sculpture is not simply a form carved or constructed out of specific material, but an intervention in a physical space, comprising the sculpture itself, the viewer, and the space surrounding it.

In October 2019, The Getty Center in Los Angeles opened its “Manet and Modern Beauty” exhibit, a major reappraisal of Manet’s late work. The directors believed these canvases would reveal how “Manet’s growing fascination with contemporary fashion and femininity coincided with a steep decline in his health and mobility, a confrontation with his own human frailty.” [1] If the emphasis of the exhibition fell on his less familiar works, the narrative of the modern artist as a suffering genius sounds...

Modernity seems very much to be with us still. Yet that explosive moment on either side of 1900 is long over, and what has come after is either a pale shadow of its former self or actively contests it. It is precisely that gap that Johanna Drucker explores in Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist, in terms of the book artist Iliazd (1894-1975) and of Drucker herself, who began her project as a graduate student in 1985 and returned to it in 2019 as the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor of Information Studies at UCLA.

The condition of Paris as the main artistic capital from the end of the 19 th to the mid-20 th century caused it to attract an expressive contingent of foreign artists, and among those, dozens of Brazilian artists who were attracted by what was seen as the world capital of arts [1]. They encountered, however, an extremely competitive universe, in which national origins were important components to recognition. As mentioned by Michele Greet, the participation of Latin-Americans in the Salons de...

© 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press Sam Rose’s compelling new book Art and Form begins with the observation that modernist formalism has suffered severe blows to its reputation since its heyday in Clement Greenberg’s aesthetics, but argues that many of its critics have been attacking straw men. The supposed doxa of formalist aesthetics—that there is an autonomous realm of aesthetic experience, that this realm is radically separated from the world and available only to the sophisticated, and...