In this day and age of environmental disasters and consciousness of environmental degradation, as stated in the introduction, "...the editors think it imperative that we gain a better
understanding of the ways in which attitudes towards `nature' and the `life" shaped our culture and in which ways they helped form modernity and engender Modernism." Oliver A.I. Botar (art
history, U. of Manitoba, Canada) and Isabel W羹nsche (art and art history, Jacobs U., Germany) have brought together 11 contributed essays encompassing a wide range of cultural studies
disciplines. Initial articles define biocentrism and discuss bioromanticism and the naming of biomorphism. Subsequent contributions discuss gardening and urban planning theories in early
20th-century Germany, organic visions and biological models in Russian avant-garde art, Herbert Read's Modernism, cubist Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Klee and neo-Romanticism, Kandinsky and science,
and Pollock's dream of a biocentric art. Annotation 穢2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
