Alex Danchev's Books

Cezanne

A Life

By: Alex Danchev

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With 32-pages of full-color inserts, and black-and-white illustrations throughout. Alex Danchev gives us the first comprehensive assessment of the revolutionary work and restless life of Paul Cézanne to be published in decades. One of the most influential painters of his time and beyond, Cézanne was the exemplary artist-creator of the modern age who changed the way we see the world. With brisk intellect, rich documentation, and eighty-eight color and fifty-two black-and-white illustrations, Danchev tells the story of an artist who was originally considered a madman, a barbarian, and a sociopath. Beginning with the unsettled teenager in Aix, Danchev takes us through the trials of a painter who believed that art must be an expression of temperament but was tormented by self-doubt, who was rejected by the Salon for forty years, who sold nothing outside his immediate circle until his thirties, who had a family that he kept secret from his father until his forties, who had his first exhibition at the age of fifty-six—but who fiercely maintained his revolutionary beliefs. Danchev shows us how the beliefs Cézanne held and the life he led became the obsession and inspiration of artists, writers, poets, and philosophers from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Samuel Beckett and Allen Ginsberg. A special feature of the book is a remarkable series of Cézanne’s self-portraits, reproduced in full color. Cézanne is not only the fascinating life of a visionary artist and extraordinary human being but also a searching assessment of his ongoing influence in the artistic imagination of our time. A stunning portrait of a monumentally important artist, this is a biography not to be missed.

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Page Count

512

Publisher

Pantheon

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307907791

ISBN 13

9780307907790

On Art and War and Terror

By: Alex Danchev

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On Art and War and Terror

By: Alex Danchev

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.

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Page Count

256

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0748641386

ISBN 13

9780748641383

On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone

By: Danchev Alex Danchev

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On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone

By: Danchev 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.

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Page Count

288

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1474410332

ISBN 13

9781474410335

Magritte

A Life

By: Alex Danchev

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Magritte

A Life

By: Alex Danchev

The first major biography of the pathbreaking, perpetually influential surrealist artist and iconoclast whose inspiration can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé—by the celebrated biographer of Cézanne and Braque In this thought-provoking life of René Magritte (1898-1967), Alex Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte’s surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape, through such legendary works as The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) and his celebrated iterations of Man in a Bowler Hat. Danchev explores the path of this highly unconventional artist from his middle-class Belgian beginnings to the years during which he led a small, brilliant band of surrealists (and famously clashed with André Breton) to his first major retrospective, which traveled to the United States in 1965 and gave rise to his international reputation. Using 50 color images and more than 160 black-and-white illustrations, Danchev delves deeply into Magritte’s artistic development and the profound questions he raised in his work about the very nature of authenticity. This is a vital biography for our time that plumbs the mystery of an iconoclast whose influence can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé.

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513

Publisher

Pantheon

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307908194

ISBN 13

9780307908193

On Art and War and Terror

By: Alex Danchev

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On Art and War and Terror

By: Alex Danchev

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256

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Edinburgh University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0748641386

ISBN 13

9780748641383

Georges Braque

A Life

By: Alex Danchev

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Georges Braque

A Life

By: Alex Danchev

Together with Picasso and Matisse, Georges Braque is unquestionably one of the three great pillars of twentieth-century art. Here is the first full-length biography of this remarkable figure. A pioneer of modern art and founder of Cubism, Georges Braque was a creative genius and tireless innovator, constantly pushing back the boundaries of the possible. In this magisterial work, Alex Danchev taps a wide range of new sources to reveal the heart and mind of one who helped usher in the greatest revolution in the ways of seeing since the Renaissance and changed the face of modern art.

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Page Count

443

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1628723653

ISBN 13

9781628723656

Magritte

A Life

By: Alex Danchev

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Magritte

A Life

By: Alex Danchev

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513

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Pantheon

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ISBN 10

0307908194

ISBN 13

9780307908193

Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London

By: Alex Ferrone

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Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London

By: Alex Ferrone

This book examines contemporary English drama and its relation to the neoliberal consensus that has dominated British policy since 1979. The London stage has emerged as a key site in Britain’s reckoning with neoliberalism. On one hand, many playwrights have denounced the acquisitive values of unfettered global capitalism; on the other, plays have more readily revealed themselves as products of the very market economy they critique, their production histories and formal innovations uncomfortably reproducing the strategies and practices of neoliberal labour markets. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London thus arrives at a usefully ambivalent political position, one that praises the political power of the theatre – its potential as a form of resistance to the neoliberal rationality that rides roughshod over democratic values – while simultaneously attending to the institutional bondage that constrains it. For, of course, the theatre itself everywhere straddles the line of capitulating to the marketization of our cultural life.

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Page Count

269

Publisher

Springer Nature

Published Date

ISBN 10

3030635988

ISBN 13

9783030635985

Kosovo and International Society

By: Alex J. Bellamy

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Kosovo and International Society

By: Alex J. Bellamy

This book explains the international engagement with the Kosovo conflict from the dissolution of Yugoslavia to Operation Allied Force. It shows how Kosovo was deliberately excluded from the search for peace in Yugoslavia before going on to demonstrate how a shaky international consensus was forged to support air strikes in 1999. In doing so, it exposes many of the myths and conspiracy theories that have developed about the war and explains the dilemmas facing actors in this unfolding drama.

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Page Count

280

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

0230597602

ISBN 13

9780230597600

Scandalous Times

Contemporary Creativity and the Rise of State-Sanctioned Controversy

By: Alex Ling

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Scandalous Times

Contemporary Creativity and the Rise of State-Sanctioned Controversy

By: Alex Ling

We live in scandalous times. Every day some new controversy demands our attention, our emotional investment, and, ultimately, our judgment. Many of these routine transgressions will be understood in 'revelatory' terms, as peeling back the multiple layers of artifice and spin to reveal an underlying, and oftentimes disturbing, 'truth'. Otherswill be recognized as calculated marketing exercises that simply present the strategic face of contemporary capitalism. Yet these 'ordinary' scandals can themselves be seen to be largely derivative of another, altogether more fundamental-and fundamentally rare-form of disruption. Such is the real scandal that accompanies instances of authentic creation. Building on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Scandalous Times not only argues the case for such 'real scandal', but also shows how it is today being abrogated and substituted through the increasing production of novel forms of state-sanctioned controversy. From Duchamp to Donald Trump, Scandalous Times explores the ways in which areas from art and advertising to politics and social media have come to actively contribute to this 'static' fabrication of controversy, all the while arguing for the need to rethink creativity as a radical exception to the state, and not its proxy.

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Page Count

209

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1350068578

ISBN 13

9781350068575

Sacrifice and Modern War Writing

Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss

By: Alex Houen

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Sacrifice and Modern War Writing

Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss

By: Alex Houen

Sacrifice and Modern War Writing presents the most extensive study to date of twentieth- and twenty-first-century war writing. Examining works by over 110 authors, Alex Houen surveys how war writing explores sacrifice in relation to major modern and contemporary conflicts, from the First World War to the War on Terror. Various conceptions of sacrifice are examined, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and secular. The discussion ranges across literary portrayals of multiple sacrificial practices, including ancient rituals of child sacrifice, martyrdom, scapegoating, and suicide bombing. Houen builds an innovative interdisciplinary approach to how war, sacrifice, and their representations interrelate, and a wide range of Anglophone literature is discussed, including novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, manifestoes, elegies, ballads, and lyric poetry. Whereas critics and theorists have tended to emphasize that war's reality exceeds any attempt to represent it, Houen contends that political, religious, and cultural frames of sacrifice have continued to play a significant part in shaping how war's reality is shaped and experienced. Those frames are inextricably tied to modes of representation, which include symbolism and mimesis. Sacrifice and Modern War Writing explores how sacrificial killing in war is itself riddled with symbolic transfigurations and mimetic exchanges, and it builds a fresh approach by arguing that the figurative and imaginative aspects of literary writing ironically become its very means of engaging closely with the reality of war's sacrifices. That approach also develops by using the literary analyses to critique and revise various prominent theories of sacrifice and war.

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337

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198912307

ISBN 13

9780198912309

Massacres and Morality

Mass Atrocities in an Age of Civilian Immunity

By: Alex J. Bellamy

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Massacres and Morality

Mass Atrocities in an Age of Civilian Immunity

By: Alex J. Bellamy

Most cultural and legal codes agree that the intentional killing of civilians, whether in peacetime or war, is prohibited. Yet despite this fact, the deliberate killing of large numbers of civilians remains a persistent feature of global political life.

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Page Count

459

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199288429

ISBN 13

9780199288427

Flying Boats

My Father's War in the Mediterranean

By: Alex Frame

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Flying Boats

My Father's War in the Mediterranean

By: Alex Frame

Flying Boats : My Father's War in the Mediterranean is an exciting and original blend of personal memoir and war history. Alex Frame's father was a flying boat pilot in war and afterwards in peace, and the roots of this book are the logbooks he kept over his 30 year career, the first covering early flights in 1938 and the war years, the second from 1950 to 1960 flying in Sydney and then Tahiti on the legendary Coral route around the Pacific Islands, and the third the final years flying in the Pacific from 1960 to 1969. This book concentrates on the years of World War II , and the star of the story is the Sunderland flying boat T9046, while under the command of Alex's father from November 1940 to June 1941. During this concentrated period of setbacks and disasters for the Commonwealth and British forces, the crews of the large, graceful flying boats were both saviours and victims in the struggle against Hitler's war machine." --Back cover.

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Page Count

212

Publisher

Victoria University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0864735626

ISBN 13

9780864735621

Lessons from History

Hidden heroes and villains of the past, and what we can learn from them

By: Alex Deane

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Lessons from History

Hidden heroes and villains of the past, and what we can learn from them

By: Alex Deane

History is full to the brim with untold tales of heroics and villainy, gruesome battles, hilarious happenings and downright bizarre coincidences. Meet the war veteran who lost an eye and amputated his own fingers. Discover the original Die Hards, whose bravery would put even Bruce Willis to shame. Just who stole the still-missing Irish crown jewels and how did Adeline, Countess of Cardigan, scandalise society so completely? In Lessons from History, Alex Deane takes us on an uproarious romp through the tales you didn't hear at school. With stories ranging from the little-known characters who played their vital parts in the world's most famous wars to the remarkable adventures of figures across the centuries, to events so extraordinary as to be almost – almost – unbelievable, this book proves that fact is almost always wilder than fiction. Bringing these stories joyfully and often poignantly back to life, Deane finally shines a light on the tales lost to history, and on what we might learn from them today.

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Page Count

284

Publisher

Biteback Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1785907115

ISBN 13

9781785907111

Georges Braque

A Life

By: Alex Danchev

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Georges Braque

A Life

By: Alex Danchev

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Page Count

443

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1628723653

ISBN 13

9781628723656

100 Artists' Manifestos

From the Futurists to the Stuckists

By: Alex Danchev

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100 Artists' Manifestos

From the Futurists to the Stuckists

By: Alex Danchev

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, Dalí, 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

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Page Count

429

Publisher

Penguin UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0141932155

ISBN 13

9780141932156

The Letters of Paul Cézanne

By: Alex Danchev

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The Letters of Paul Cézanne

By: Alex Danchev

The long-awaited, fresh and accurate new translation of the correspondence of Paul Cézanne. For this richly-illustrated edition, Alex Danchev has gone back to the original manuscripts, clearing up decades of questionable scholarship. Cézanne was a singular thinker and an uncompromising seeker after artistic truth qualities that shine through in the letters which reveal the mans very human hopes and fears as he strove to harness his artistic passion. The result is a collection of over 250 letters, written to family, friends, fellow artists and dealers, and many major cultural figures of the late nineteenth century.

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Page Count

360

Publisher

Thames & Hudson

Published Date

ISBN 10

0500772150

ISBN 13

9780500772157

Alchemist of War

The Life of Basil Liddell Hart

By: Alex Danchev

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Alchemist of War

The Life of Basil Liddell Hart

By: Alex Danchev

Basil Liddell Hart was a rare bird: military writer, creative artist, journalist, propagandist, controversialist, archivist, adviser, exemplar, thrower of stones and a leading authority on fashion. This is his biography.

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Page Count

369

Publisher

Phoenix

Published Date

ISBN 10

0753808730

ISBN 13

9780753808733

International Perspectives on the Yugoslav Conflict

By: Alex Danchev,Thomas Halverson

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International Perspectives on the Yugoslav Conflict

By: Alex Danchev,Thomas Halverson

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.

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Page Count

232

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

1349245410

ISBN 13

9781349245413

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