Sven-Olov Wallenstein: Nihilism, Art, and Technology (2010)

Beginning in an analysis of three paradigmatic instances of the encounter between art and technology in modernism—the invention of photography, the step beyond art in Futurism and Constructivism, and the interpretation of technology in debates on architectural theory in the 1920s and ’30s—this book analyzes three philosophical responses to the question of nihilism—those of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger—all of which are characterized by an avant-garde sensibility that looks to art as a way to counter the crisis of modernity.

These responses are then brought to bear on the work of the architect Mies van der Rohe, whose “silence”—understood as a withdrawal of language, sense, and aesthetic perception—is analyzed as a key problem in the interpretation of the legacy of modernism. From this, a different understanding of nihilism, art, and technology emerges. These concepts form a field of constant modulation, which implies that the foundations of critical theory must be subjected to a historical analysis that acknowledges them as ongoing processes of construction, and that also accounts for the capacity of technologies and artistic practices to intervene in the formation of philosophical concepts.


Originally presented as a compilation thesis in theoretical philosophy, the work was published as a book by Axl Books in 2011.

Doctoral Thesis
Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, 2010
ISBN 9789174470734
92 pages

Publisher (Thesis)
Publisher (Book)

PDF (Thesis; without images)

László Moholy-Nagy: Von Material zu Architektur (1929–) [DE, EN]

László Moholy-Nagy coined the term “the New Vision” for his belief that photography could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. His theory of art and teaching is summed up in this book.

Publisher Albert Langen, Munich, 1929
Bauhausbücher series, 14
241 pages

Facsimile reprint
Edited by Hans M. Wingler
Publisher Florian Kupferberg, Mainz and Berlin, 1968
Neue Bauhausbücher series
ISBN 3786114668, 9783786114666
251 pages
via Di Tutiya

English edition
Translated by Daphne M. Hoffman
First published as The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, Breuer Warren and Putnam, New York, 1930
Expanded and revised edition as The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist
Publisher George Wittenborn, New York, 1947
92 pages

Von Material zu Architektur (German, 1929, PDF, JPG, in Heidelberg U Library, added on 2019-7-7)
Von Material zu Architektur (German, facs.repr., 1929/1968, 21 MB, no OCR)
The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist (English, 1930/1947, 10 MB, no OCR, added on 2015-2-5)

See also other titles in Bauhaus Books series and other works by Moholy-Nagy on Monoskop wiki.

Josef Albers: Glass, Color, and Light (1994)

Josef Albers (1888-1976), famous as a master at Germany’s Bauhaus until 1933, and then a professor in American schools such as Yale University, influenced many young artists. His Homage to the Square series of paintings remains an important example of 20th-century art. Yet Albers’s first great works – the glass pictures that he made in Germany beginning in 1921 – remain little known. Starting with found fragments of colored glass, and later employing a sophisticated sandblasting process, Albers created a new art form.

Glass, Color and Light is the first monograph devoted to Albers’s work in this medium. Reproductions, 62 in color, of every extant glass picture are accompanied by full documentation by Brenda Danilowitz of the Josef Albers Foundation. Also illustrated and discussed are Albers’s architectural commissions in glass and those works that were lost or destroyed after the artist fled Nazi Germany. Essays by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef Albers Foundation, and Fred Licht, curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, illuminate the many themes suggested by this extraordinary group of works, while a chronology of Albers’s life and professional career places the glass works in the context of his entire oeuvre.

Publisher Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York, 1994
ISBN 0810968649
152 pages
via Archive.org

PDF