Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art explores the ways in which artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth, and religion. Endless Enigma takes as its point of departure Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s legendary 1936 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which not only introduced these movements to the American public, but also placed them in a historical and cultural context by situating them with artists from earlier centuries. Presenting works from the twelfth century to the present day, this catalogue is organized into six themes—Monsters & Demons, Dreams & Temptation, Fragmented Body, Unconscious Gesture, Super Nature, and Sense of Place. Works included range from medieval gargoyles to twentieth-century works by Louise Bourgeois, Sigmar Polke, and Pablo Picasso as well as contemporary works by Michaël Borremans, Marcel Dzama, and Raymond Pettibon. Masterworks from the likes of Piero di Cosimo, Francisco de Goya, and Titian are considered alongside those by William Blake and Odilon Redon. Time folds and temporal barriers collapse when Damiano Cappelli meets Edvard Munch, and Salvator Rosa encounters Luc Tuymans and Lisa Yuskavage. Salvador Dalí, Sherrie Levine, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Kerry James Marshall—eight centuries intersect and, as such, this wide-ranging catalogue examines affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time. Organized in collaboration with Nicholas Hall, a specialist in the field of Old Masters and nineteenth-century art, this fully illustrated catalogue is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2018. It includes new scholarship by Dawn Ades, Olivier Berggruen, and J. Patrice Marandel.

'The book is worthy for all and one should definitely read it as this is although a type of fiction, but it will give you certain lessons, a hidden strength and verses, which would freshen you up and your kids. This is book is not just a still, paper written work but it's a reality, and one should be aware of reality, whether it's happening with you or with someone else l. This is an upbeat message alone, which is a management of 100 or more words together.

"Throughout the 1970s, no style of popular music was more controversial than progressive rock, and no progressive rock band was more controversial than Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Initially attracting attention for their unusual keyboards-bass-drums configuration, ELP became hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Fans saw ELP as fulfilling the promise of post-Beatles rock, imaginatively fusing rock, jazz, and classical elements with cutting-edge technology, breathtaking virtuosity, and a monumental stage show. Critics saw ELP as a bombastic assault on rock's working-class and oppositional roots. In this, Edward Macan unravels the enigma that is Emerson, Lake and Palmer."--BOOK JACKET.

By taking Dali's "paranoiac-critical method" to the delirious extents Dali himself recommended, LaFountain demonstrates that Dali's Surrealism anticipates tactics practiced by postmodern and poststructural critics. In particular, LaFountain advances the notion that "phantom meaning" displaced Surrealism's "phantom object," thereby creating a crisis of the subject and the object far in excess of that sought by Surrealist revolutionaries. Focusing on Dali's magnificent painting, Endless Enigma, LaFountain inaugurates "New Dali Studies" by offering an original interpretation of Dali's close, yet strained, relationship with André Breton and the Surrealist canon.

As technology advances, society retains its mythical roots--a tendency evident in rock music and its enduring relationship with myth and science fiction. This study explores the mythical and fantastic themes of artists from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, including David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, Blue Oyster Cult, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Drawing on insights from Joseph Campbell, J.G. Frazer, Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade, the author examines how performers have incorporated mythic archetypes and science fiction imagery into songs that illustrate societal concerns and futuristic fantasies.

In this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms much of the era’s most enduring literature, from the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm to the great vernacular works of Dante, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and, above all, Langland’s Piers Plowman. Riddles, rhetoric, and theology—the three fields of meaning of aenigma in medieval Latin—map a way of thinking about reading and writing obscure literature that was widely shared across the Middle Ages. The poetics of enigma links inquiry about language by theologians with theologically ambitious literature. Each sense of enigma brings out an aspect of this poetics. The playfulness of riddling, both oral and literate, was joined to a Christian vision of literature by Aldhelm and the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. Defined in rhetoric as an obscure allegory, enigma was condemned by classical authorities but resurrected under the influence of Augustine as an aid to contemplation. Its theological significance follows from a favorite biblical verse among medieval theologians, “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). Along with other examples of the poetics of enigma, Piers Plowman can be seen as a culmination of centuries of reflection on the importance of obscure language for knowing and participating in endless mysteries of divinity and humanity and a bridge to the importance of the enigmatic in modern literature. This book will be especially useful for scholars and undergraduate students interested in medieval European literature, literary theory, and contemplative theology.

Among the many books written on or by Salvador Dalí, this is the first to give a complete, well-documented picture of his life and art. Carlos Rojas's approach to Dalí is somewhere between biography, Freudian analysis, and art and literary interpretation. Dalí is haunted from earliest childhood by the specter of his elder brother who died as a toddler shortly before Dalí was conceived (both brothers and the father bore the same name), as he is haunted by the devouring phantom of his mother, that praying mantis on whose portrait he would like to spit. Dalí is seen as endlessly struggling to affirm his identity and existence. A combination of genius, madman, neurotic, and spoiled brat, Dalí is illuminated by his work, while the known facts of his life, his own writings, those of his sister, and of others, are used to analyze the paintings, which are described in considerable detail. Rojas also provides sustained analyses of Dalí's relationships, including his influential amorous and intellectual affair with Federico García Lorca.