Patricia Allmer

'Angels of Anarchy' reconsiders the art-historical tradition of women Surrealists. It draws on an international range of artists to investigate how their practices responded to, developed, enriched, and even subverted the conventions and traditions of art history.

Women Artists and Surrealism

Angels of Anarchy

Essays focusing on European horror cinema from 1945 to the present, features new contributions by international scholars exploring British, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Northern European and Eastern European horror cinema.

Horror Cinema in Europe Since 1945

European Nightmares

The traumatic surreal is the first major study to examine the ground-breaking role played by Germanophone women artists working in surrealist traditions in responding to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War. Analysing works in a variety of media by leading artists and writers, the book redefines the post-war trajectories of surrealism and recalibrates critical understandings of the movement’s relations to historical trauma. Chapters address artworks, writings and compositions by the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the German Unica Zürn, the Austrian Birgit Jürgenssen, the Luxembourg-Austrian Bady Minck and the Austrian Olga Neuwirth and her collaboration with fellow Austrian Nobel-prize winning novelist Elfriede Jelinek. Locating each artist in their historical context, the book traces the development of the traumatic surreal through the wartime and post-war period.

Germanophone women artists and Surrealism after the Second World War

The traumatic surreal

John Sears

Passage Works is the first book-length English language critical analysis of the transdisciplinary work of the Austrian film-maker, writer, and artist Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952, Vienna). Beckermann’s works interrogate identity and geography as formations of the intersections between the past and the contemporary. Taking as her central topics Austria and its history and politics, her own identity as a Jewish woman, and the contemporary global geopolitics of migration and displacement, Beckermann develops wider meditations in film, art, and writing on the persistence of European memory, and the meanings of Europe itself; on borders, migrations, and identities; on memories, traumas, and traditions; on the image as marker of presence and absence, repository of the traces of historical violence; and on the passage as metaphor for a range of physical, psychological, and ideological movements defining the complexities of contemporary cosmopolitan identities.

Ruth Beckermann’s art

Passage works

The traumatic surreal is the first major study to examine the leading role Germanophone women artists have played in deploying surrealism to respond to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War.

Germanophone Women Artists and Surrealism After the Second World War

The Traumatic Surreal

René Magritte

Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich, Germany)

Johan Grimonprez

Edited by Steven Bode. Text by Patricia Allmer, Jorge Luis Borges, Chris Darke, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom McCarthy, Jeff Noon, Slavoj Zizek.

Looking for Alfred

Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond offers a major new critical discussion of the work of one of the most significant twentieth-century photographers. Applying art-theoretical analyses and insights afforded by previously unseen material in archives and collections, Patricia Allmer undertakes revisionary readings of many of Miller's works, including Portrait of Space, Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy and the famous series of war photographs produced for Vogue. At the same time she sheds new light on Miller's relations with surrealist groups and American avant-gardes, on her experiences in Paris, Egypt and World War II Europe and on her critically neglected post-war activities. Above all, Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond focuses critical attention on the works themselves. As a result it will be of great interest to students and scholars of twentieth-century photography, modernism and surrealism.

Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond

Lee Miller

René Magritte offers a rethinking of Magritte's art from a position informed by contemporary developments in art theory. The book employs a wide range of literary and philosophical/cultural theoretical frameworks to analyze Magritte's art. It offers close readings of specific images, paying attention to neglected aspects of Magritte's work, discussing the significance of cabinets of curiosities and encyclopedias, trompe l'oeil, framing and forgeries. It addresses a range of intertextual relations between Magritte's work and that of other Surrealist artists and the art-historical tradition. This highly readable text explores how Magritte's art challenges conventional notions of originality, canonicity and coherence, revealing his work as being shaped by co-operations and co-options. It demonstrates that uncertainty, incoherence and negation lie at the core of Magritte's oeuvre.

Beyond Painting

Belgian artist René Magritte's biography is a key element of his art. His life is infused with bizarre moments: a surreal journey oscillating between fact and fiction that he always conducted as the straight-faced bowler-hatted man. The events of Magritte's childhood played an important part in creating the surrealist, but it was his popular culture borrowings from crime fiction, advertising and postcards that has made his work instantly recognisable. The often unreliable nature of Magritte's accounts of his own life have transformed his public image into a kind of fictional character rather than a 'real person'. He would shape his own life story to be its own surreal work of art. This Is Frank Lloyd Wright brings his projects and persona into vivid focus. Wit and visual punch have been the hallmarks of the This Is series to date; the first architectural title in the series will give readers an up-close look at Wright's progress from difficult childhood, to struggling apprenticeship, to early success, through mid-life setbacks and on to late-life comeback. Beautiful specially commissioned illustrations documenting the important events in his life sit alongside photographs of Wright's most iconic buildings (including Fallingwater and New York's Guggenheim Museum).

Patricia Allmer

Books

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