From the time of its invention, photography has enabled artists not only to capture the world around them but also to create worlds of their own. Utopia/Dystopia investigates how artists from the late 19th century to the present have used photographic fragments or techniques to represent political, social, or cultural states of utopia or dystopia. Artists have employed a number of strategies to this end, such as cutting, fragmenting, and puncturing images as well as reassembling those culled from ready-made materials or giving a subject multiple exposures. The resulting photographs, photocollages, photomontages, and other creations question the validity of seamless pictorial images, and attempt to dismantle the notion of photography as an objective medium.
This publication features approximately forty-five exemplary works by artists such as Herbert Bayer, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Arata Isozaki, El Lissitzky, Carter Mull, László Moholy-Nagy, Vik Muniz, Man Ray, Okanoue Toshiko, and many others. Also included are essays that offer new ways of thinking about photography's uses and implications.

Utopia/Dystopia: Construction and Destruction in Photography and Collage

Arts & Photography

Bader, Graham

Nakamori, Yasufumi

History & Criticism

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Product Description 
A definitive resource, full of fresh insights and new revelations, on one of the most influential interwar artists \nThis richly illustrated book offers a definitive new assessment of the oeuvre of Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), a central figure of the interwar European avant-garde. Active as an artist, designer, publisher, performer, critic, poet, and playwright, Schwitters is best known for intimately scaled, materially rich collages and assemblages made from found objects—often refuse—that the artist described as having lost all contact with their role and history in the world at large. But as Graham Bader explores, such simple separation of art from life is precisely what Schwitters's "poisoned abstraction" calls into question. \nConsidering works reaching from Schwitters’s earliest collage-based pieces of 1918–19, through his 1920s advertising designs, to his seminal environmental installation the 
Merzbau, Bader carefully unpacks the meaning behind such projects and sheds new light on the tumultuous historical conditions in which they were made. In the process, he reveals a new Schwitters—aesthetically committed and politically astute—for our time. This authoritative account reframes our understanding of Schwitters’s multifaceted artistic practice and explores the complex entwinement of art, politics, and history in the modern period. 
 Review 
" 
Poisoned Abstraction is the account of Schwitters for our moment. Its comprehensiveness does justice to the complexity of his art and critically expands our understanding of Schwitters himself."—Bibiana Obler, George Washington University\n"A fascinating analysis of Kurt Schwitters's body of work. Graham Bader successfully makes sense of Schwitters's often puzzling art, its evolution, and its meaning in a context that shifted dramatically between the two world wars."—Andrés Mario Zervigón, author of 
John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage\n“Graham Bader's elegant study explores key aspects of Kurt Schwitters's practice, testing the artist’s relay between art and life. In exploring how Schwitters's works, made from the shards of a devastated modern landscape, create meaning and value, Bader is a thoughtful and probing guide.”—Leah Dickerman, Museum of Modern Art\nAbout the Author 
Graham Bader is associate professor and chair of art history at Rice University.

Poisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and Exile

Yale University Press

Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960 is the first major museum exhibition to investigate the early work of one of the best known American artists of the twentieth century. Co-organised by the Colby College Museum of Art and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the exhibition will include approximately 80 works from the artist's fruitful and formative early career drawn from both public and private collections, many never before seen by the public. The show and accompanying catalogue will include paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints, which reveal an artist, even in the earliest stages of his career, with a keen interest in visual culture, culling - with a critical eye - from a wide range of sources, including fairy tales, folk and children's art, and mythic forms of Americana (from cowboys to Disney cartoon characters). These and other inspirations were the essential but little-known precursors to the artist's later sourcing of comic books and advertisements. Likewise, his exploration of abstraction, just before the artist's abrupt turn to Pop Art in 1961, straddles the line between unabashed lyricism and wry critique of second-generation Abstract Expressionism. The catalogue - which includes several essays offering new scholarship by leading experts in the field - provides an opportunity to more fully assess the artistic and cultural dynamism of postwar America through the lens of one of the twentieth-century's great masters.

Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960

Finch, Elizabeth

Price, Marshall

Scott Manning Stevens

Rizzoli Electa

Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 is an international historical survey of the "attacks" that painting endured (and survived) in the years following World War II. For the artists discussed here, coming after Abstract Expressionism, painting had arrived at an impasse, and they devised ways to overcome its existing conventions. This phenomenon occurred all over the world, and Target Practice documents how and why artists felt compelled to shoot, rip, tear, burn, erase, nail, unzip and deconstruct painting in order to usher in new ways of thinking about their art. It shows that such ideas were of concern to well-known artists like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, and also introduces lesser-known peers who were making equally challenging work.

Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78

Darling, Michael

Yoshitake, Mika

Mangini, Elizabeth

Seattle Art Museum

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