“Girst elegantly unravels the skeins of Duchamp’s thinking. . . . An essential compendium for puzzling out an essential artist.” —Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation Among the most influential artists of the last hundred years, Marcel Duchamp holds great allure for many contemporary artists worldwide and is largely considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern art. Despite this popularity, books on Duchamp are often hyper-theoretical, rarely presenting the artist in an accessible way. This new book explores the artist’s life and work through short, alphabetical dictionary entries that introduce his legacy in a clear and engaging way. From alchemy and anatomy to Warhol and windows, The Duchamp Dictionary offers a pithy and readable text that draws on in-depth scholarship and the very latest research. Thomas Girst includes close to 200 entries on the most interesting and important artworks, relationships, people, and ideas in Duchamp’s life—from The Bicycle Wheel and Fountain to Walter and Louise Arensberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Katherine Dreier, and Arturo Schwarz. Delightful, newly commissioned illustrations introduce each letter of the alphabet and accompany select entries, capturing the irreverent spirit of the artist himself.

“Girst elegantly unravels the skeins of Duchamp’s thinking. . . . An essential compendium for puzzling out an essential artist.” —Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation Among the most influential artists of the last hundred years, Marcel Duchamp holds great allure for many contemporary artists worldwide and is largely considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern art. Despite this popularity, books on Duchamp are often hyper-theoretical, rarely presenting the artist in an accessible way. This new book explores the artist’s life and work through short, alphabetical dictionary entries that introduce his legacy in a clear and engaging way. From alchemy and anatomy to Warhol and windows, The Duchamp Dictionary offers a pithy and readable text that draws on in-depth scholarship and the very latest research. Thomas Girst includes close to 200 entries on the most interesting and important artworks, relationships, people, and ideas in Duchamp’s life—from The Bicycle Wheel and Fountain to Walter and Louise Arensberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Katherine Dreier, and Arturo Schwarz. Delightful, newly commissioned illustrations introduce each letter of the alphabet and accompany select entries, capturing the irreverent spirit of the artist himself.

An imaginative, thought-provoking gift book to awaken your senses and attune them to the things that matter in your life. Welcome to the era of white noise. Our lives are in constant tether to phones, to email, and to social media. In this age of distraction, the ability to experience and be present is often lost: to think and to see and to listen. Enter Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing. This gorgeously illustrated volume will spark your creativity--and most importantly, help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises--131 of them--Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague and finally, to rediscover your sense of passion and to notice what really matters to you.

This unique and authoritative reference work contains more than 2,000 clear and concise entries on all aspects of modern and contemporary art. Its impressive range of terms includes movements, styles, techniques, artists, critics, dealers, schools, and galleries. There are biographical entries for artists worldwide from the beginning of the 20th century through to the beginning of the 21st, from the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto to the French sculptor Jacques Zwobada. With international coverage, indications of public collections and publicly sited works, and in-depth entries for key topics (for example, Cubism and abstract art), this dictionary is a fascinating and thorough guide for anyone with an interest in modern and contemporary culture, amateur or professional. Formerly the Dictionary of 20th Century Art, the text has been completely revised and updated for this major new edition. 300 entries have been added and it now contains entries on photography in modern art. With emphasis on recent art and artists, for example Damien Hirst, it has an exceptionally strong coverage of art from the 1960s, which makes it particularly ideal for contemporary art enthusiasts. Further reading is provided at entry level to assist those wishing to know more about a particular subject. In addition, this edition features recommended web links for many entries, which are accessed and kept up to date via the Dictionary of Modern Art companion website. The perfect companion for the desk, bedside table, or gallery visits, A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art is an essential A-Z reference work for art students, artists, and art lovers.

Robert Lebel, French art critic and collector, was instrumental in rendering Marcel Duchamp’s often hermetic life, art, and ideas accessible to a wider public across Europe and the United States, principally with his 1959 publication Sur Marcel Duchamp, the first monograph and catalogue raisonné devoted to the artist. Duchamp was a willing partner in the book’s creation. In fact, his active participation in both its conception and layout was so substantial that the book is considered part of the artist’s oeuvre. But the project took six years to complete. The trials, tribulations, quarrels, and machinations that plagued the production, publication, and publicity of Sur Marcel Duchamp are the focus of this correspondence between two lifelong friends. Translated and printed in full together for the first time, and including the original French texts, these letters, postcards, and telegrams from the collection of the Getty Research Institute offer uncensored access to the evolution of the relationship between Lebel and Duchamp from December 1946 to April 1967. They provide valuable information about their daily activities as well as those of friends and colleagues, vital details concerning their various collective projects, and illuminating insights into their thinking about art and life. These documents, witty and sincere, bear witness to the art of friendship and a friendship in art.

With an introduction by Robert Motherwell and an appreciation by Jasper Johns "Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneer artists, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art. . . "In the 1920s Duchamp gave up, quit painting. He allowed, perhaps encouraged, the attendant mythology. One thought of his decision, his willing this stopping. Yet on one occasion, he said it was not like that. He spoke of breaking a leg. 'You don't mean to do it,' he said. "The Large Glass. A greenhouse for his intuition. Erotic machinery, the Bride, held in a see-through cage-'a Hilarious Picture.' Its cross references of sight and thought, the changing focus of the eyes and mind, give fresh sense to the time and space we occupy, negate any concern with art as transportation. No end is in view in this fragment of a new perspective. 'In the end you lose interest, so I didn't feel the necessity to finish it.' "He declared that he wanted to kill art ('for myself') but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, 'a new thought for that object.' "The art community feels Duchamp's presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being here."--Jasper Johns, from Marcel Duchamp: An Appreciation

What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.