Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, were the essential American abstract painters that radically defined Modern painting and established New York City as the center of the art world for the second half of the 20th century. While Motherwell is known as one of the most important artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, he is also revered for his accomplishments as a printmaker. Motherwell was always searching for new techniques to express his ideas and aesthetic. In the early 1970s, his artwork, across several media, began to incorporate material from daily life such as cigarette (or wine) label graphics. "Gauloises", his preferred brand of cigarette, became one of the central elements of his compositions during the 1970's. "Gauloises" cigarettes were notoriously strong. The brand was also linked to glamorous cultural figures, like Pablo Picasso, and the French intellectual elite (including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus). Using such cigarette labels continued a tradition, established by Picasso and Braque during the heyday of Cubism, of using the detritus of daily life in their artwork. Where the Cubists incorporated collage into the painted canvas, Motherwell similarly developed a process of collage incorporated into print while retaining the artistic gesture of Abstract Expressionist painting. Questions about this artwork? Contact us. “Gauloises Bleues (White)”, 1970. Color aquatint and line-cut with ULAE blindstamp lower left Signed and numbered “trial proof” in pencil to margin Published by Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York. 11”H 6.5”W (plate) 23”H 15.5”W (sheet) Provenance: The Morris Gallery, Toronto (label verso) Literature: Bernard Jacobson, Robert Motherwell: The Making of an American Giant, 2015; Stephanie Terenzio, The Prints of Robert Motherwell: A Catalogue Raisonné 1943-1984, [1980] 1984.

Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less.By engaging modernism à la mode--that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns--this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.

150+ must-read classics- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Introduce a sense of graceful, old world mystique into your home by adorning your bookshelves with these beautiful bookends. Depicting on each side a classical metal birdcage with a small chirping bird inside of it, the tranquility of the piece communicates quiet, happy solitude and a greater peace with the world around it, the perfect tone for any collection of beloved literature.

From the cultural icons to the book-club thrillers, these are the pages people were turning when you arrived.