Bøker av Alison McDonald

Tracing the surge in creativity and transformations in culture and the arts during one of history’s most tumultuous decades  Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s looks at the complex shifts in technology and the arts, including music, film, and fashion, that surged in a tumultuous decade. Despite restrictions and hardships, the visual arts flourished, with some artists addressing political concerns in their work and others moving into abstraction. War disrupted the fashion industry in Paris, allowing New York to become a competitive center. Furniture design made creative use of technological advances. The movement of artists during the war years and afterward catalyzed the exchange of ideas and created more diverse artistic communities.   Essays by leading figures in their respective fields show how wartime restrictions impacted world economies and the innovative solutions found by creative communities, examine Hollywood of the 1940s and its ability to unite international audiences, explore the ways clothing and textiles were shaped by the rapid changes of the era, and discuss how musicians played a vital role at this moment in history and helped shape the sounds of today. Interviews with contemporary figures, such as jazz artist Christian McBride and filmmaker Ken Burns, reflect on the impact of the 1940s on their respective fields. Including paintings by Lee Krasner, Horace Pippin, and Jackson Pollock, photographs by Margaret Bourke-White and Weegee, furniture by George Nakashima, jewelry by Alexander Calder, poetry by Anna Akhmatova, and apparel by Elsa Schiaparelli, the book covers the transformational responses to a volatile time across the spectrum of artistic practice.   Distributed for the Philadelphia Museum of Art  Exhibition Schedule:  Philadelphia Museum of Art (April 12–September 1, 2025)

This volume, on a delightful area within sight of the towers and spires of central Oxford, is the result of 25 years work by the author. It began as a desk study which generated sufficient interest for the author to work on a base-line botanical survey of Port Meadow with Wolvercote Common, ancient pasture, and to contrast it with a similar survey of Picksey Mead, ancient hay-meadow. The historical research was extended to look at the history of the management of both these flood-plain areas in order to understand something of the differences in their species-composition and to enable the author to relate them to their past management. The pioneering environmental archaeology undertaken in the area is now an authoritative discipline and the ground-breaking use of a multi-disciplinary approach to grassland studies is at last being recognised by Natural England and others as an essential element in management plans for Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Since the early 1980s grants have been available for increasingly in-depth studies of a single topic. The publication of this volume represents a change of view in which multi-disciplinary studies, especially those relating to the history of man and the landscape he has influenced are recognized for the breadth of vision which is their strength. The description of the vegetation has proved invaluable when working with English Nature (now Natural England) over the intervening years as it provided a base-line from which natural and man-made changes in the vegetation could be measured. In particular, the description of Port Meadow Marsh was vital in connection with the study of Apium repens carried out by the Rare Plants Group of the Ashmolean Natural History Society of Oxfordshire for English Nature from 1996-2006. The author has brought the descriptions of the various communities into line with the relevant volumes of John Rodwell's British Plant Communities. The historical sections of the work have also stood the test of time and have been brought up to date where necessary and incorporated into this new volume. With the current interest in flood-alleviation plans for West Oxford, which include the possibility of constructing new channels associated with overflow areas within the river Thames flood-plain above Oxford, which could affect the hydrology and therefore the vegetation of these ancient pastures and meads, publication of this work is timely.