Dawn Ades

Genius. Anti-artist. Charlatan. Impostor! Since 1914 Marcel Duchamp has been called all of these. No artist of the 20th century has aroused more passion and controversy, nor exerted a greater influence on art, the very nature of which Duchamp challenged and redefined as concept rather than product by questioning its traditionally privileged optical nature. At the same time, he never ceased to be engaged, openly or secretly, in provocative activities and works that transformed traditional artmaking procedures. Written with the enthusiastic support of Duchamp’s widow, this is one of the most original and important books ever written on this enigmatic artist, and challenges received ideas, misunderstanding and misinformation.With 172 illustrations in colour

In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille--poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism--used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dali, Miro, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille's still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso's Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille's radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.Copublished by Hayward Gallery Publishing, London

On the occasion of a major Tate Modern exhibition, distinguished art historian Dawn Adès unpacks the work of Frida Kahlo.

The third edition of this classic study, a thorough introduction to one of the most popular and recognizable artists of the 20th century. Salvador Dalí was, and remains, among the most universally recognizable artists of the twentieth century. What accounts for this popularity? His excellence as an artist? Or his genius as a self-publicist? In this searching text, partly based on interviews with the artist and fully revised, extended and updated for this edition, Dawn Ades considers the Dalí phenomenon. From his early years, his artistic friendships and the development of his technique and style, to his relationship with the Surrealists and exploitation of Freudian ideas, and on to his post-war paintings, this essential study places Dalí in social, historical and artistic context, and casts new light on the full range of his creativity.

This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, became an embodiment of their age as they struggled towards artistic maturity and their own 'liberation of the spirit' in the context of the Surrealist revolution. Their stories and their achievements are presented here against the background of the turbulent decades of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and the war that forced Surrealism into exile in New York and Mexico.With 145 illustrations in colour

Manipulation of the photograph is as old as photography itself. It has embodied and enlivened political propaganda, satire, publicity and commercial art, and created evocations of the ‘brave new world’ of the future through surreal and fantastic visions. Photomontages were made by, among others, the Dadaists, John Heartfield, El Lissitzky, Hannah Hoch and Alexander Rodchenko, and many of their works were reproduced for the first time in print when this groundbreaking study was originally published. Revered by academics, critics and readers alike, this new edition with updates is still the only definitive guide to the subject.With 225 illustrations in colour

The year before he died, in what was one of the most difficult yet prolific periods of his life, Paul Klee created his most surprising and innovative works.In 1939, the year before his death from a long illness and against a backdrop of sociopolitical turmoil and the outbreak of World War II, Klee worked with a vigor and inventiveness that rivaled even the most productive periods of his youth. This book illuminates the artist’s response to his personal difficulties and the era’s broader realities through imagery that is tirelessly inventive—by turns political, solemn, playful, humorous, and poetic.The works featured testify to Klee’s restless drive to experiment with form and material. His use of adhesive, grease, oil, chalk, and watercolor, among other media, resulted in surfaces that are not only visually striking, but also highly tactile and original. Not unlike a diary, the drawings are often meditative reflections on the pains and pleasures of life—their titles, among them Monsters in readiness and Struggles with himself, signal Klee’s frame of mind.Renowned art historian Dawn Ades looks at this group of drawings in the context of their time and as indicative of a pivotal moment in art history. Moved by this late period of Klee’s oeuvre, American artist Richard Tuttle responds to specific works in the form of a dialogical poem. This stunning publication highlights the novelty and ingenuity of Klee’s late works, which deeply affected the generation of artists—including Anni Albers, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Tobey, and Zao Wou-Ki—that emerged after World War II and continues to captivate artists and viewers alike today.

This book brings together over 160 of the finest surrealist artworks by legendary artists including Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro and Man Ray. The works hail from the four renowned and extraordinary private collections of Edward James, Roland Penrose, Gabrielle Keiller and Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, and together offer a superb overview of surrealist art. Ten essays explore the different origins, historical contexts and creative urges behind these collections. Artworks, perhaps more than anything else that one can acquire, are objects of desire and surrealist artworks even more so. The sheer quality of the works acquired (and, in the case of the Pietzsches, still being acquired) is astonishing and, while passionate about their private visions, all the collectors have been mindful of contributing something to the public good. The collections complement each other to an extraordinary degree and allow us to follow some of the artists' careers from beginning to end. By uniting them, exciting new juxtapositions emerge along with a fuller and richer picture of the surrealist movement as a whole. AUTHOR: Dawn Ades has curated numerous international exhibitions on Surrealism and Dada. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a former trustee of Tate and was awarded a CBE in 2013 for her services to art history. Elizabeth Cowling is Honorary Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She was the principal author of 'Surrealism and After: The Gabrielle Keiller Collection' (1997). Prof Dr Hubertus Gabner is Director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Annabelle Gorgen-Lammers is Exhibition Curator at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Keith Hartley is Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Saskia van Kampen-Prein is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. SELLING POINTS: . This book brings together some of the world's finest surrealist artworks from four renowned and extraordinary private collections . Many of the works featured have rarely been seen in public . By bringing together works from these collections, the oeuvres of the artists are presented in a new light and some of their careers seen from beginning to end 200 colour images

Art historian and curator Dawn Ades is a leading voice on Dada, Surrealism, abstraction and art from Latin America. This volume collects her important essays for the first time, addressing themes fundamental to the history of modern art and the avant-garde. Arranged thematically, this collection of essays represents the breadth of Ades’s critical and curatorial interests, ranging from avant-garde poster design, to photomontage, to the representation of the female in Mexico, but with an overarching foundation in abstraction, identity and the influence of new mediums. As well as working as a professor and curator – which earned her an OBE for her services to art history – Ades has written on a wide range of artists since 1980. Spanning the likes of Francis Bacon, Richard Deacon, Salvador Dalí and Hannah Höch, this body of essays is ingrained with Ades’s consistently clear and intellectually stimulating observations. To introduce the book, Ades is interviewed by Doro Globus, who explores the writer’s relationship to curating, teaching and art history.

Linder’s photomontages violate, liberate and celebrate the human body to question the mechanics of gender and its ties to consumer culture and media. Linder is best known for her pioneering photomontages that replace the sexualised imagery of soft-focus pornographic centrefolds with commodities of domestic middle-class life. Surprising, humorous, and at times shocking, these precise compositions bring to light the powerful fantasies and repressions that underlie our social expectations of identity. Spanning almost four decades, this monograph interweaves numerous photomontage series from throughout Linder’s career, demonstrating the artist’s manipulation of disparate source material – from brightly saturated male pornographic imagery to softly lit portraits of ballerinas. Accompanying over 250 illustrations is a conversation between the artist and renowned art historian Dawn Adès that reconciles her provocative work with the longer history of photomontage.

Are women's orgasms more intense than men's? What did André 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 of bitter political disputes, echoed in the intensity of these meetings and in the range of participants, including André Breton, Paul Eluard, Yves Tanguy, Benjamin Péret and Pierre Naville.Well before the so-called sexual revolution, their erotic exchanges broke sexual taboos and encouraged surrealists to openly share the libidinal themes they explored in their writing and art. In doing so, JoAnn Wypijewski writes in the new introduction, they are revealed as "lovers and prigs, fantasists and humanists, adventurers in mind if not always in flesh-flawed, foolish, brilliant, clangingly sexual human beings."

This study of Salvador Dali's work asks what accounts for his popularity as an artist. Is it the accessibility of his imagery or his talent as a self-publicist?