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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > General
This selection of essays by a prominent art historian, critic and curator of modern art examines the art and artists of the twentieth century who have operated outside the established art world. In a lucid and accessible style, Peter Selz explores modern art as it is reflected, and has had an impact on, the tremendous transformations of politics and culture, both in the United States and in Europe. An authoritative overview of a neglected phenomenon, his essays explore the complex relationship between art at the periphery and art at the putative center, and how marginal art has affected that of the mainstream.
Simple Pleasures presents the first major critical assessment of
works by the artist Doris Lee (1904-1983). Lee was one of the most
recognized artists in America during the 1930s and 40s, and was a
leading figure in the Woodstock Artist's Colony. Her oeuvre reveals
a remarkable ability to merge the reduction of abstraction with the
appeal of the everyday. In so doing, she offers one of the very
rare examples of a coherent visual identity that successfully
bridged the various artistic "camps" that formed with the shift in
the art world in the post-World War II era.Doris Lee exploded onto
the national scene in 1935 when her painting Thanksgiving was
awarded the Art Institute of Chicago's Logan Prize and instigated
the Sanity in Art movement in protest. Two years later, her
painting Catastrophe was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. Simple Pleasures explores this initial national recognition in
the 1930s within the context of American Scene painting, and traces
the artist's thematic interest in the simple objects and scenes of
the everyday through her career. It also examines the influence of
the rise in abstraction during the late 1940s and 1950s, and the
particular way in which this abstraction found resonance with Lee's
long-held interest in, and collections of, folk and non-western
art. During this post-war period, Lee, like many of her American
Scene colleagues, found lucrative work in the heyday of commercial
advertising. Lee's commercial commissions for patrons such as
American Tobacco Company, Life magazine, Abbott Laboratories, and
Associated American Artists are especially compelling in both their
populist accessibility and in their deceptively sophisticated
abstraction. Sixty-five works by the artist span the 1930s through
the 1960s and are comprised of paintings, drawings, prints, and
commissioned commercial designs in fabric and pottery. Included are
advertisements by companies that commissioned images from Lee, and
photographs that contextualize the artist's work within the
Woodstock artist's community.
In this collection of critical essays, Barry Schwabsky re-examines
the art produced since the 1960s, demonstrating how the
achievements of 'high modernism' remain consequential to it,
through tensions between representation, abstraction, and pictorial
language. Offering close readings of works produced by several
generations of European and American artists, he begins with an
analysis of the late period of two Abstract Expressionists, Philip
Guston and Mark Rothko, who saw their own success as a failure of
reception and who came to question radically their own work. With
the core of the book focused on Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mel
Bochner, major figures of arte povera and conceptual art whose
works in a variety of media demonstrate a continuing critical
engagement with modernism, Schwabsky also studies the work of
artists, such as L. C. Armstrong and Rainer Ganahl, who also
continued to examine modernism's legacies.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent out a 'telegram' in the guise of a
urinal signed R. Mutt. When it arrived at its destination a good
forty years later it was both celebrated and vilified as
proclaiming that anything could be art; from that point on, the
whole Western art world reconfigured itself as 'post-Duchamp'. This
book offers a reading of Duchamp's telegram that sheds new light
onto its first reception, corrects some historical mistakes and
reveals that Duchamp's urinal in fact heralds the demise of the
fine arts system and the advent of what Thierry de Duve calls the
'Art-in-General' system. Further, the author shows that this new
system does not date from the 1960s but rather from the 1880s.
Duchamp was neither its author nor its agent, but rather its
brilliant messenger.
The work of Robert Rauschenberg has had a profound impact on
avant-garde art from the 1950s onwards. A pioneer of multimedia
are, this book explores his experimentations from his Combines
(works melding painting and sculpture), prints, silkscreen
paintings to his use of technology and his collaborations with
choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. This book
explores his work.
In Art and Politics, Segal explores the collision of politics and
art in seven enticing essays. The book explores the position of art
and artists under a number of different political regimes of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, traveling around the world to
consider how art and politics have interacted and influenced each
other in different conditions. Joes Segal takes you on a journey to
the Third Reich, where Emil Nolde supported the regime while being
called degenerate; shows us Diego Rivera creating Marxist murals in
Mexico and the United States for anti-Marxist governments and
clients; ties Jackson Pollock's drip paintings in their Cold War
context to both the FBI and the CIA; and considers the countless
images of Mao Zedong in China as unlikely witnesses of radical
political change.
Bakhtin and the Visual Arts assesses the relevance of Mikhail
Bakhtin's ideas as they relate to painting and sculpture. First
published in the 1960s, Bakhtin's writings introduced the concepts
of carnival and dialogue or dialogism, which have had significant
impact in such diverse fields as literature and literary theory,
philosophy, theology, biology and psychology. In his four early
aesthetic essays, written between 1919 and 1926, and before he
began to focus on linguistic and literary categories, Bakhtin
worked on a larger philosophy of creativity, which was never
completed. Deborah Haynes's in-depth 1995 study of his aesthetics,
especially his theory of creativity, analyses its applicability to
contemporary art theory and criticism. The author argues that
Bakhtin, with such categories as answerability, outsideness and
unfinalizability, offers a conceptual basis for interpreting the
moral dimensions of creative activity.
A comprehensive survey of the work of the legendary Swiss artist,
this book illustrates and examines more than 100 of his sculptures,
paintings, drawings, and prints This lavishly illustrated
retrospective traces the early and midcareer development of the
preeminent Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), examining
the emergence of his distinct figural style through works including
a series of walking men, elongated standing women, and numerous
busts. Rare paintings and drawings from his formative period show
the significance of landscape in Giacometti's work, while also
revealing the influence of the postimpressionist painters that
surrounded his father, the artist Giovanni Giacometti. Other areas
of inquiry on which Alberto Giacometti casts new light are his
studio practice-amply illustrated with photographs-his obsessive
focus on depicting the human head, his collaborations with poets
and writers, and his development of the walking man sculpture,
thanks to numerous drawings, many of which have never been shown.
Original essays by modern art and Giacometti specialists shed new
light on era-defining sculptural masterpieces, including the
Walking Man, the Nose, and the Chariot, or on key aspects of his
work, such as the significance of surrealism, his drawing practice,
or the question of space. Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of
Art Exhibition Schedule: Cleveland Museum of Art (March 12-June 12,
2022) Seattle Art Museum (July 14-October 9, 2022) Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston (November 13, 2022-February 12, 2023) The
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (March 19-June 18, 2023)
In The Rhetoric of Purity, Mark Cheetham explores the historical
and theoretical relations between early abstract painting in Europe
and the notion of purity. For Gauguin, Serusier, Mondrian and
Kandinsky - the pioneering abstractionists whose written and visual
works Cheetham discusses in detail - purity is the crucial quality
that painting must possess. Purity, however, was itself only a
password for what Cheetham defines as an 'essentialist' philosophy
inaugurated by Plato's vision of a perfect, non-mimetic art form
and practised by the founders of abstraction. The essentialism of
late nineteenth-century French discussion of 'abstraction',
Cheetham argues, also infects the work of Mondrian and Kandinsky.
These visions of abstraction are central to the development of
Modernism and are closely tied to the philosophical traditions of
Plato, Hegel and Schopenhauer. As a conclusion, Cheetham provides a
postmodern reading of Klee's rejection of the rhetoric of purity
and claims that Klee's refusal speaks to contemporary concerns in
visual theory and culture. By acting as an antidote to the
seductive appeal of purity in art and society, Cheetham's final
critique of the trope of purity seeks to preserve the possibility
of visual discourse itself.
The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist examines the philosophical,
psychological and aesthetic premises for avant-garde art and its
subsequent evolution and corruption in the late twentieth century.
Arguing that modernist art is essentially therapeutic in intention,
both towards self and society, Donald Kuspit further posits that
neo-avant-garde, or post-modern art, at once mocks and denies the
possibility of therapeutic change. As such, it accommodates the
status quo of capitalist society, in which fame and fortune are
valued above anything else. Stripping avant-garde art of its
missionary, therapeutic intention, neo-avant-garde art instead
converts it into a cliche of creative novelty or ironical value for
its fashionable look. Moreover, it destroys the precarious balance
of artistic narcissism and social empathy that characterizes modern
art, tilting it cynically towards the former. Incorporating
psychoanalytic ideas, particularly those concerned with narcissism,
The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist offers a reinterpretation of
modern art history. Donald Kuspit, one of America's foremost art
critics, is a contributing editor to Artforum and the author of
many books.
Dale Chihuly (b. 1941), one of the most inno vative and iconic
figures in contemporary art, is also an avid collector of
everything from ceramic dogs to inkwells, vintage Christmas orna
ments, dollhouse furniture, plastic radios you name it, Chihuly
collects it. These everyday objects reflect the same playful,
colorful aesthetic that can be seen in Dale Chihuly's sculptures
and installations. Fully illustrated, Chihuly: An Artist Collects
includes an essay by Chihuly's longtime friend, artist Bruce
Helander, who considers why people collect and explores the
collections of artists such as Damien Hirst, Peter Blake, Andy
Warhol, Pablo Picasso and of course, Dale Chihuly. Also Available:
Chihuly 2018 Wall Calendar (ISBN: 978-1-4197-2599-9), Chihuly 2018
Weekly Planner (ISBN: 978-1-4197-2598-2), Chihuly 2019 Wall
Calendar (ISBN: 978-1-4197-3093-1), Chihuly 2019 Weekly Planner
(Engagement Calendar) (ISBN: 978-1-4197-3094-8)
This comprehensive survey of the career of Edward Bawden (1903-89)
accompanied a major exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery and
brings together his most significant work in watercolour,
printmaking, design and illustration. Bawden began his career in
the 1920s as a precociously talented designer and illustrator, and
he successfully reinvented himself time and again as the decades
passed while always retaining a distinctive freshness, humour and
humanity in his work. The book explores in depth the most
significant creative periods of Bawden's life and is fully
illustrated throughout.
Abstract Expressionism was the dominant movement in experimental American painting from the 1940s through the early 1960s. This book is a collection of articles, reviews, and essays that chronicle the critical history of the movement from its inception to the present. Drawing on a range of sources, including newspapers, magazines, and exhibition catalogues, the original debates about the validity of "action painting" are dramatically illustrated. The articles selected for the volume include classic statements from the most influential and prolific critics, including Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Hilton Kramer. The editors have also included contributions of iconoclasts from the 1950s and 1960s such as Leon Golub and John Canaday to suggest the full range of critical discussion. Six representative artists are the subject of extended sections that include biographical chronologies, reviews, and the artists' own comments: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Should Christians even bother with the modern wing at the art
museum? After all, modern art and artists are often caricatured as
rabidly opposed to God, the church-indeed, to faith of any kind.
But is that all there is to the story? In this Studies in Theology
and the Arts volume, coeditors Cameron J. Anderson and G. Walter
Hansen gather the reflections of artists, art historians, and
theologians who collectively offer a more complicated narrative of
the history of modern art and its place in the Christian life.
Here, readers will find insights on the work and faith of artists
including Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol,
and more. For those willing to look with eyes of faith, they may
just find that God is present in the modern wing too. The Studies
in Theology and the Arts series encourages Christians to
thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and
artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and
artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music,
poetry, literature, film, and more.
On the Very Edge brings together fourteen empirical and
comparative essays about the production, perception, and reception
of modernity and modernism in the visual arts, architecture, and
literature of interwar Serbia (1918 1941). The contributions
highlight some idiosyncratic features of modernist processes in
this complex period in Serbian arts and society, which emerged "on
the very edge" between territorial and cultural, new and old,
modern and traditional identities.
With an open methodological framework this book reveals a
vibrant and intertwined artistic scene, which, albeit prematurely,
announced interests in pluralism and globalism. On the Very Edge
addresses issues of artistic identities and cultural geographies
and aims to enrich contextualized studies of modernism and its
variants in the Balkans and Europe, while simultaneously remapping
and adjusting the prevailing historical canon.
Contributors: Jelena Bogdanovi (Iowa State University), Lilien
Filipovitch Robinson (George Washington University), Igor Marjanovi
(Washington University in St. Louis), Milo R. Perovi (University of
Belgrade), Jasna Jovanov (The Pavle Beljanski Memorial Collection
and University EDUCONS, Novi Sad), Svetlana Tomi (Alfa University,
Belgrade), Ljubomir Milanovi (Serbian Academy of Sciences and
Arts), Bojana Popovi (Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade), Anna
Novakov (Saint Mary's College of California), Aleksandar Kadijevi
(University of Belgrade), Tadija Stefanovi (University of
Belgrade), Dragana orovi (University of Belgrade), Viktorija Kamili
(independent scholar), Marina Djurdjevi (Museum of Science and
Technology, Belgrade), Neboj a Stankovi (Princeton University),
Dejan Zec (Institute for Recent History of Serbia)"
Taking citizenship as a political position, cultural process, and
intertwining of both, this edited volume examines the role of
visual art and visual culture as sites for the construction and
contestation of both state-sanctioned and cultural citizenships
from the late 1970s to today. Contributors to this book examine an
assortment of visual media-painting, sculpture, photography,
performance, the built environment, new media, and social
practice-within diverse and international communities, such as the
United States, South Africa, Turkey, and New Zealand. Topics
addressed include, but are not limited to, citizenship in terms of:
nation building, civic practices, border zones, transnationalism,
statelessness, and affects of belonging as well as alternate forms
of, or resistance to, citizenship.
Published to accompany the first Francis Bacon retrospective in
Paris for twenty years, this catalogue analyses Bacon's works from
1971 onwards in light of his relationship to literature. Bacon
always vigorously opposed over-analysis of his paintings,
preferring to interpret them in purely illustrative or symbolic
terms; he admitted, however, that literature was a powerful
stimulus to his imagination. The artist was inspired by the images
conjured up by certain texts: Aeschylus' phrase 'the reek of human
blood smiles out at me' in particular haunted Bacon, while his 1978
work Painting refers to T. S. Eliot's seminal poem The Waste Land.
The inventory of Bacon's personal library has identified more than
1,300 books, ranging from Bataille and Conrad to Nietzsche and
Leiris. Including twelve of Bacon's renowned triptychs, this lavish
publication features eleven gatefolds and some sixty paintings
created by Bacon between 1971 and his death in 1992. Reproduced
here with analyses of Bacon's paintings in the light of some of his
most admired authors, these specially commissioned texts reveal new
ways of understanding some of the most powerful works in the modern
canon.
Numerous American women artists built successful professional
careers in the mid-twentieth century while confronting challenging
cultural transitions: shifts in stylistic avant-gardism, harsh
political transformations, and changing gender expectations for
both women and men. These social and political upheavals provoked
complex intellectual and aesthetic tensions. Critical discourses
about style and expressive value were also renegotiated, while
still privileging masculinist concepts of aesthetic authenticity.
In these contexts, women artists developed their careers by
adopting innovative approaches to contemporary subjects,
techniques, and media. However, while a few women working during
these decades have gained significant recognition, many others are
still consigned to historical obscurity. The essays in this volume
take varied approaches to revising this historical silence. Two
focus on evidence of gender biases in several exhibitions and
contemporary critical writings; the rest discuss individual
artists' complex relationships to mainstream developments, with
attention to gender and political biases, cultural innovations, and
the influence of racial/ethnic diversity. Several also explore new
interpretative directions to open alternative possibilities for
evaluating women's aesthetic and formal choices. Through its
complex, nuanced approach to issues of gender and female agency,
this volume offers valuable and exciting new scholarship in
twentieth-century American art history and feminist studies.
First published in 1996, this irreplaceable resource has now been
updated, revised, and expanded by Kristine Stiles to represent
thirty countries and more than one hundred new artists. Stiles has
added forty images and a diverse roster of artists, including many
who have emerged since the 1980s, such as Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae
Weems, Damien Hirst, Shirin Neshat, Cai Guo-Qian, Olafur Eliasson,
Matthew Barney, and Takashi Murakami. The writings, which as before
take the form of artists' statements, interviews, and essays, make
vivid each artist's aesthetic approach and capture the flavor and
intent of his or her work. The internationalism evident in this
revised edition reflects the growing interest in the vitality of
contemporary art throughout the world from the U.S. and Europe to
the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australia.
Modern art, filled with complex themes and subtle characteristics,
is a wonder to view, but can be intimidating and baffling to the
casual observer. In this accessible, practical guide, Jon Thompson
analyses more than 200 works of modern art, describing each
artist's use of media and symbolism to help the reader unlock the
painting's meaning. The book also offers biographical information
on all the featured artists.
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