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Once regarded as a brilliant eccentric whose works skirted the outer fringes of English art and literature, William Blake (1757–1827) is today recognized as a major poet, a profound thinker, and one of the most original and exciting English artists. Nowhere is his glorious poetic and pictorial legacy more evident than in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which many consider his most inspired and original work. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is both a humorous satire on religion and morality and a work that concisely expresses Blake's essential wisdom and philosophy, much of it revealed in the 70 aphorisms of his "Proverbs of Hell." This beautiful edition, reproduced from a rare facsimile, invites readers to enjoy the rich character of Blake's own hand-printed text along with his deeply stirring illustrations, reproduced on 27 full-color plates. A typeset transcription of the text is included.

’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen FryAlex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics―an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways,Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivalled Shakespeare in universal reach is implicated in an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

“A masterpiece, a major work of modern art history.” ―Wall Street Journal“Absorbing and lavishly illustrated.” ―New Yorker“If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it. You soon will be.” ―Financial TimesNow available in an attractive paperback, Modernists and Mavericks is Martin Gayford’s impressively researched and well-reviewed chronicle of postwar London painting.Modernists and Mavericks explores the development of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s based on an exceptionally deep well of firsthand interviews, with artists such as Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield. Gayford also teases out the thread weaving these individual lives together and demonstrates how and why, long after it was officially declared dead, painting lived and thrived in London. Simultaneously aware of the influences of Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti, and the traditions of Western art, from Piero della Francesca to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the postwar painters were bound together by their confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvelous things, and their urge to explore, in their diverse ways, the possibilities of paint. 100+ illustrations

An intriguing visual history of the veneration in European churches and monasteries of bejeweled and decorated skeletons Death has never looked so beautiful. The fully articulated skeleton of a female saint, dressed in an intricate costume of silk brocade and gold lace, withered fingers glittering with colorful rubies, emeralds, and pearls―this is only one of the specially photographed relics featured in Heavenly Bodies.In 1578 news came of the discovery in Rome of a labyrinth of underground tombs, which were thought to hold the remains of thousands of early Christian martyrs. Skeletons of these supposed saints were subsequently sent to Catholic churches and religious houses in German-speaking Europe to replace holy relics that had been destroyed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. The skeletons, known as “the catacomb saints,” were carefully reassembled, richly dressed in fantastic costumes, wigs, crowns, jewels, and armor, and posed in elaborate displays inside churches and shrines as reminders to the faithful of the heavenly treasures that awaited them after death. Paul Koudounaris gained unprecedented access to religious institutions to reveal these fascinating historical artifacts. Hidden for over a century as Western attitudes toward both the worship of holy relics and death itself changed, some of these ornamented skeletons appear in publication here for the first time.105 illustrations, 90 in color

Traces the evolution of the Romantic approach to literary criticism and compares it to the other methods which prevailed in the early nineteenth century.

The classic, in-depth history of psychoanalysis, presenting over a hundred years of thought and theoriesSigmund Freud's concepts have become a part of our psychological vocabulary: unconscious thoughts and feelings, conflict, the meaning of dreams, the sensuality of childhood. But psychoanalytic thinking has undergone an enormous expansion and transformation since Freud's death in 1939. With Freud and Beyond, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black make the full scope of twentieth century psychoanalytic thinking—from Harry Stack Sullivan to Jacques Lacan; D.W. Winnicott to Melanie Klein—available for the first time.Richly illustrated with case examples, this lively, jargon-free introduction makes modern psychoanalytic thought accessible at last.

Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition.The Architectural Uncanny presents an engaging and original series of meditations on issues and figures that are at the heart of the most pressing debates surrounding architecture today. Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition. The essays are at once historical—serving to situate contemporary discourse in its own intellectual tradition and theoretical—opening up the complex and difficult relationships between politics, social thought, and architectural design in an era when the reality of homelessness and the idealism of the neo-avant-garde have never seemed so far apart.Vidler, one of the deftest and surest critics of the contemporary scene, explores aspects of architecture through notions of the uncanny as they have been developed in literature, philosophy, and psychology from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. He interprets the unsettling qualities of today's architecture—its fragmented neo-constructivist forms reminiscent of dismembered bodies, its "seeing walls" replicating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions - in the light of modern reflection on questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness.Focusing on the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau, John Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, and Ricardo Scofidio, as well as theorists of the urban condition, Vidler delineates the problems and paradoxes associated with the subject of domesticity.

Containing accounts of the author's field work among Sioux and Yurok Indians, and an examination of the American, German and Russian characters, this is an interpretation of human life on psychological lines. Using case histories as springboards for theoretical discussion of the formative years of childhood, Professor Erikson identifies human life as a delicate balance between bodily, mental and social influences. The main chapters are devoted to anxiety in young children, apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, and arrogance in young Nazis.

Hard to Imagine is the first work to chronicle in detail the evolution of gay male erotic image culture, from the canonical works of "art" cinema and photography to the private and often highly explicit productions of amateurs. In this visual history of homoerotic image-making in its first century, Thomas Waugh brings together nearly four hundred photographs and film stills, from archives and personal collections in Europe and North America. Waugh identifies four primary aspects of homoerotic photography and film - the artistic, the commercial, the illicit, and the politico-scientific - tracing their development against a background of advances in visual technology. This comprehensive work explores a vast, eclectic tradition in its totality, analyzing the visual imagery in addition to its production, circulation, and consumption. A pathbreaking examination of the interplay between gay film and photography, gay life, and the larger social and political world, Hard to Imagine is a model for social and cultural historians. Interweaving an analysis of these images in their gay cultural context with the broader social and legal implications, Thomas Waugh offers a pioneering chapter in both gay and visual history.

The Armenian-born mystic, philosopher, and spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949) is an enigmatic figure, the subject of a great deal of interest and speculation, but not easily fitting into any of the common categories of "esoteric," "occult," or "New Age." Scholars have for the most part passed over in silence the contemplative exercises presented in Gurdjieff's writings. Although Gurdjieff had intended them to be confidential, some of the most important exercises were published posthumously in 1950 and in 1975. Arguing that an understanding of these exercises is necessary to fully appreciate Gurdjieff's contribution to modern esotericism, Joseph Azize offers the first complete study of the exercises and their theoretical foundation. It shows the continuity in Gurdjieff's teaching, but also the development and change. His original contribution to Western Esotericism lay in his use of tasks, disciplines, and contemplation-like exercises to bring his pupils to a sense of their own presence which could to some extent be maintained in daily life in the social domain, and not only in the secluded conditions typical of meditation. Azize contends that Gurdjieff had initially intended not to use contemplation-like exercises, as he perceived dangers to be associated with these monastic methods, and the religious tradition to be in tension with the secular and supra-denominational guise in which he first couched his teaching. As Gurdjieff adapted the teaching he had found in Eastern monasteries to Western urban and post-religious culture, however, he found it necessary to introduce contemplation.