Bøger af Alex Danchev

Today we view Cezanne as a monumental figure, but during his lifetime (1839-1906), many did not understand him or his work. This title covers the days and years of this visionary who would 'astonish Paris with an apple'. It is also a complete assessment of Cezanne's influence through artistic imaginations in our own time.

"The first major biography for our time of Renâe Magritte, from the celebrated biographer of Braque and Câezanne. In this stimulating life of Renâe Magritte (1898-1967), Alex Danchev makes a case for the artist as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. His surreal sensibility, his deadpan melodrama, and his fine-tuned outrageousness have all become inescapably part of our times through legendary works such as The Treachery of Images (we know it as Ceci n'est pas une pipe), and through his iterations of the man in a bowler hat, raining down in multiples from the sky, or with an apple where his face should be. These pathbreaking subversions all came from a middle-class Belgian gent, who kept a modest house in a Brussels suburb; who led a small, brilliant band of Belgian surrealists, and famously clashed with Andrâe Breton; whose first one-man show, in the style he famously dubbed "Vache" ("Cow"), sold absolutely nothing. In 1965 a major retrospective traveling throughout the United States gave birth to his international reputation. Using thirty-two pages of color inserts and black-and-white illustrations throughout the text, Danchev explores the path of this highly unconventional artist who posed profound questions about the relationship between image and reality and the very nature of authenticity. Danchev delves into a deep examination of Magritte's artistic development, surveys his intimate friendships, and plumbs the mystery of an iconoclast whose influence can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncâe"--

This book, a collection of Alex Danchev's essays on the theme of art, war and terror, offers a sustained demonstration of the way in which works of art can help us to explore the most difficult ethical and political issues of our time: war, terror, extermination, torture and abuse. It takes seriously the idea of the artist as moral witness to this realm, considering war photography, for example, as a form of humanitarian intervention. War poetry, war films and war diaries are also considered in a broad view of art, and of war. Kafka is drawn upon to address torture and abuse in the war on terror; Homer is utilised to analyse current talk of 'barbarisation'. The paintings of Gerhard Richter are used to investigate the terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group, while the photographs of Don McCullin and the writings of Vassily Grossman and Primo Levi allow the author to propose an ethics of small acts of altruism. This book examines the nature of war over the last century, from the Great War to a particular focus on the current 'Global War on Terror'. It investigates what it means to be human in war, the cost it exacts and the ways of coping. Several of the essays therefore have a biographical focus.

In this remarkable collection of 100 manifestos from the last 100 years, Alex Danchev presents the cacophony of voices of such diverse movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Communism, Destructivism, Vorticism, Stridentism, Cannibalism and Stuckism, taking in along the way film, architecture, fashion, and cookery.Artists' manifestos are nothing if not revolutionary. They are outlandish, outrageous, and frequently offensive. They combine wit, wisdom, and world-shaking demands. This collection gathers together an international array of artists of every stripe, including Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Le Corbusier, Picabia, Dal , Oldenburg, Vertov, Baselitz, Kitaj, Murakami, Gilbert and George, together with their allies and collaborators - such figures as Marinetti, Apollinaire, Breton, Trotsky, Guy Debord and Rem Koolhaas. Edited with an Introduction by Alex Danchev

How can works of the imagination help us to understand good and evil in the modern world? In this new collection of essays, Alex Danchev treats the artist as a crucial moral witness of our troubled times, and puts art to work in the service of political and ethical inquiry. He takes inspiration from Seamus Heaney's dictum: 'the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it'. This is a book of blasphemers, world menders, troublemakers, torturers and turbulent priests of every persuasion.

International Perspectives on the Yugoslav Conflict is a collection of important new work by the leading authorities in the field. Unusually, this is an international investigation of an international conflict. The result is both profound and provocative - the most stimulating and the most far-reaching exploration of the subject yet to appear.