Books by Nicholas Sawicki
Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language traces the writer Franz Kafka’s inter... more Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language traces the writer Franz Kafka’s interest in modern art and visual culture. Examining Kafka’s relationship to visuality, the book explores the diversity of images that surrounded Kafka in his home city of Prague—a heterogeneous and multilingual metropolis whose visual environment shaped his everyday experiences. It maps how Kafka engaged with local painting and sculpture, architecture, and monuments, and also with an array of popular visual media and phenomena from illustrated magazines and advertising to film, photography, dance, and cabaret. Kafka’s attention to the modern visual culture of his era was reflected in his writings and in his interest in drawing, a practice in which he received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student. The monograph is published on the occasion of the centennial of Kafka's death and in association with the exhibition Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language at the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen (5 June–28 October 2024). It is also available in a Czech edition edited by Marie Rakušanová. The book is available for purchase in North America through Distributed Art Publishers: https://www.artbook.com/9788074374265.html
A cut through the layers of America past and present, artist Shimon Attie’s 2022 project Starstru... more A cut through the layers of America past and present, artist Shimon Attie’s 2022 project Starstruck: An American Tale focuses on the historic steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, weaving together film and sculpture to explore people, place, and community, and the powerful social, political, and economic forces that shape them. From Bethlehem’s utopian founding by Moravian Christian settlers to its industrial heyday as a capital of American steel, the collapse of its defining industry, and its subsequent reinvention as a casino town, the city is a microcosm of America’s hopes, failures, and realities. Starstruck: An American Tale probes the uneasy, distinctive convergence of religious aspiration, industrial capitalism, and the dream of “making it big” that have characterized life in Bethlehem and other Rust Belt cities in the United States since their early beginnings.
The circle of Czech, German, and Jewish artists who called themselves the Eight, ‘Osma’ in Czech ... more The circle of Czech, German, and Jewish artists who called themselves the Eight, ‘Osma’ in Czech and ‘Die Acht’ in German, played a foundational role in the development of modernism in Prague before the First World War. Drawing on new archival, textual, and visual sources, this monograph presents a detailed analysis of the group’s artistic production and activities, paired with a close examination of the social and cultural context in which the Eight formed and operated. Tracing the shared practices, beliefs, and concerns that brought the Eight together, it considers aspects of the group's history that have not yet been fully documented in scholarship. In particular, the book examines the relationship that the Eight had with the public, critics, and institutions of Prague, and the reception that the group garnered from audiences and the press. It also investigates the mixed ethnic composition of the Eight, which voluntarily brought together artists of both Czech and German identity, Christian as well as Jewish, openly challenging the historically embedded national divisions that dominated artistic and cultural life in Prague before the war. The book is available for worldwide purchase through Karolinum: https://cupress.cuni.cz/ink2_ext/index.jsp?include=podrobnosti&id=232209
Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of internat... more Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of international culture that attracted artists from Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas during a period of burgeoning global immigration. Sixteen essays by a group of emerging and established international scholars - including several whose work has not been previously published in English - address the experiences of foreign exiles, immigrants, students and expatriates. They explore the formal and informal structures that permitted foreign artists to forge connections within and across national communities and in some cases fashion new, transnational identities in the City of Light. Considering Paris from an innovative global perspective, the book situates both important modern artists - such as Edvard Munch, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Marc Chagall and Gino Severini - and lesser-known American, Czech, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Catalan, and Hungarian painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, and illustrators within the larger trends of international mobility and cultural exchange. Broadly appealing to historians of modern art and history, the essays in this volume characterize Paris as a thriving transnational arts community in which the interactions between diverse cultures, peoples and traditions contributed to the development of a hybrid and multivalent modern art.
Contributors include Juliet Bellow (Associate Professor of Modern European Art History, American University), Ewa Bobrowska (Associate Program Officer of Research at the Terra Foundation for American Art, Europe), Norma Broude (Professor Emerita of Art History, American University), Emily Burns (Assistant Professor of Art History, Auburn University), Paul Fisher (Associate Professor of American Studies, Wellesley College), Sharon Hecker (independent scholar), Zoë Marie Jones (Instructor, University of Alaska, Fairbanks), Cindy Kang (doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Laura Karp Lugo (University of Tours, France), Donald McCallum (1939–2013; former Professor of Art History at UCLA), Thomas Rimer (Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Pittsburgh), Nicholas Sawicki (Assistant Professor of Art History, Lehigh University), Richard Sonn (Professor of History, University of Arkansas), and Maite van Dyck (Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
Contents:
Introduction: Strangers in paradise: foreign artists and
communities in modern Paris, 1870-1914, Susan Waller and Karen L. Carter.
Part I Institutions and Networks: The Italian expatriates: De Nittis and Zandomeneghi, Norma Broude
International artists at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris: the case of Edvard Munch (1896 and 1897), Maite van Dijk
‘Earning a living’ in the International Graphic Arts: the Académie
Julian and the teaching of poster design and illustration, 1890-1914, Karen L. Carter
Between Montparnasse and Prague: circulating cubism
in Left Bank Paris, Nicholas Sawicki
Part II Expatriate Communities:
Polish artists in Paris, 1890-1914: between international modernity and national identity, Ewa Bobrowska
Revising Bohemia: the American artist
colony in Paris, 1890-1914, Emily C. Burns
Catalan artists in Paris at the turn of the century, Laura Karp Lugo
Jewish Modernism: immigrant artists of Montparnasse, 1905-1914, Richard D. Sonn
Part III Incomers and Outsiders:
Everywhere and nowhere: Medardo Rosso and the
cultural cosmopolitan in fin-de-siècle Paris, Sharon Hecker
The Sacre ‘au printemps’: Parisian audiences and the Ballets Russes, Juliet Bellow
Gwen John: posing and painting in Paris, 1905-1914, Susan Waller
A path beyond Paris: the evolving art of Sakamoto Hanjirō, J. Thomas Rimer
Part IV Cosmopolitans and Hybridities:
The lost ambassador: Henrietta Reubell and transnational queer spaces in the Paris arts world, 1876-1903, Paul
Fisher
József Rippl-Rónai’s embroideries: crafting Hungarian Modernism in Paris, Cindy Kang
Japanese painters in Paris, 1880-1912, Donald F.
McCallum
Gino Severini’s Bohemian Paris: integrating the Italian artist,
1906-1914, Zoë Marie Jones
Selected bibliography; Index. 288 pages. 978-1-4724-4354-0
Articles by Nicholas Sawicki
Reviews of Published Works by Nicholas Sawicki
Reviews of Friedrich Feigl, 1884-1965, and the exhibition Friedrich Feigl: The Eye Sees the World, Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu and Alšova jihočeská galerie, 2016-17. In: Ars Judaica, East European Jewish Affairs, Judaica Bohemiae, Roš Chodeš, Artalk, Art and Antiques, E*forum, Umění.
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Books by Nicholas Sawicki
Contributors include Juliet Bellow (Associate Professor of Modern European Art History, American University), Ewa Bobrowska (Associate Program Officer of Research at the Terra Foundation for American Art, Europe), Norma Broude (Professor Emerita of Art History, American University), Emily Burns (Assistant Professor of Art History, Auburn University), Paul Fisher (Associate Professor of American Studies, Wellesley College), Sharon Hecker (independent scholar), Zoë Marie Jones (Instructor, University of Alaska, Fairbanks), Cindy Kang (doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Laura Karp Lugo (University of Tours, France), Donald McCallum (1939–2013; former Professor of Art History at UCLA), Thomas Rimer (Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Pittsburgh), Nicholas Sawicki (Assistant Professor of Art History, Lehigh University), Richard Sonn (Professor of History, University of Arkansas), and Maite van Dyck (Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
Contents:
Introduction: Strangers in paradise: foreign artists and
communities in modern Paris, 1870-1914, Susan Waller and Karen L. Carter.
Part I Institutions and Networks: The Italian expatriates: De Nittis and Zandomeneghi, Norma Broude
International artists at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris: the case of Edvard Munch (1896 and 1897), Maite van Dijk
‘Earning a living’ in the International Graphic Arts: the Académie
Julian and the teaching of poster design and illustration, 1890-1914, Karen L. Carter
Between Montparnasse and Prague: circulating cubism
in Left Bank Paris, Nicholas Sawicki
Part II Expatriate Communities:
Polish artists in Paris, 1890-1914: between international modernity and national identity, Ewa Bobrowska
Revising Bohemia: the American artist
colony in Paris, 1890-1914, Emily C. Burns
Catalan artists in Paris at the turn of the century, Laura Karp Lugo
Jewish Modernism: immigrant artists of Montparnasse, 1905-1914, Richard D. Sonn
Part III Incomers and Outsiders:
Everywhere and nowhere: Medardo Rosso and the
cultural cosmopolitan in fin-de-siècle Paris, Sharon Hecker
The Sacre ‘au printemps’: Parisian audiences and the Ballets Russes, Juliet Bellow
Gwen John: posing and painting in Paris, 1905-1914, Susan Waller
A path beyond Paris: the evolving art of Sakamoto Hanjirō, J. Thomas Rimer
Part IV Cosmopolitans and Hybridities:
The lost ambassador: Henrietta Reubell and transnational queer spaces in the Paris arts world, 1876-1903, Paul
Fisher
József Rippl-Rónai’s embroideries: crafting Hungarian Modernism in Paris, Cindy Kang
Japanese painters in Paris, 1880-1912, Donald F.
McCallum
Gino Severini’s Bohemian Paris: integrating the Italian artist,
1906-1914, Zoë Marie Jones
Selected bibliography; Index. 288 pages. 978-1-4724-4354-0
Articles by Nicholas Sawicki
Reviews of Published Works by Nicholas Sawicki