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The Penguin Modern Painters (1944–1959) was a groundbreaking series of British art monographs designed to promote the work of contemporary artists to a general readership. In examining the factors that influenced the wartime conception and development of the series, this Element makes a contribution to the understanding of the relationship between publishing and the visual arts during the Second World War. The study argues that the emergence of The Penguin Modern Painters was inextricably linked to the aims of British wartime cultural policy and the ideology of the pre-war adult education movement. The key personalities involved are identified and their multiple and often conflicting motives analysed to provide new insights into the shifting perspectives of Britain's elites regarding the way that art was presented to the public in the 1940s. This Element provides a foundation on which further study of twentieth-century art publishing in Britain might be developed.
Chapter 3 is focused on the short-lived Silsilat al-Nafaʾis (Precious Books Series), published in Beirut by Dar an-Nahar between 1967 and 1971 under the direction of modernist poet Youssuf al-Khal. The series engaged prominent modern Arab artists such as Chafic Abboud, Paul Guiragossian, and Dia al-Azzawi and extended the vision of al-Khal’s journal Shiʿr to the ‘preciousness’ of art books. This publishing endeavour formed a node connecting transnational modernist art and literary circuits with book publishing and was thus paradigmatic of new forms of visuality of the Arabic book. The chapter demonstrates how this new materiality was enabled by a network of changes in the visual arts, printing technologies and the political economy of transnational publishing in late 1960s Beirut. Relations between these three fields are analysed through a multifaceted lens, focusing on the book as at once a product of intellectual and artistic practice, a translocal artefact of visual and print culture and a commodity in a capitalist economy of publishing. The analysis probes the political, intellectual and aesthetic modalities of key books from this series and maps the transnational networks of social relations and circuits of modernism that are interwoven in their undertaking.
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