By the middle of the 20th century, abstraction was the accepted language of art as practiced by painters and articulated by critics, who began to investigate its historical and theoretical dimensions. Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century includes seminal essays on abstract painting by eleven of its most incisive critics and written over four decades, between 1960 and 2000. Tracing the post-Greenbergian development of such critical issues as hard-edge painting, deductive and serial structure, monochrome abstraction, the psychological analogy, regionalism, and the 'death of painting' in post-modernism, they examine works by Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Brice Marden, Sherrie Levine, and Gerhard Richter, among others. The introduction and commentary by Frances Colpitt situates the essays historically and examines their philosophical sources and influences, from formalism and phenomenology, to structuralism and poststructuralism. What emerges is a coherent and optimistic picture of
In Art versus Nonart, Tsion Avital poses the question: 'Is modern art art at all?' He argues that much, if not all, of the nonrepresentational art produced in the twentieth century was not art, but rather the debris of the visual tradition it replaced. Modern art has thrived on the total confusion between art and pseudo-art and the inability of many to distinguish between them. As Avital demonstrates, modern art has served as a critical intermediate stage between art of the past and the future. This book, first published in 2003, proposes a distinct way to define art, anchoring the nature of art in the nature of the mind, solving a major problem of art and aesthetics for which no solution has yet been provided. The definition of art proposed in this book paves the way for a fresh and promising paradigm for future art.
This book, first published in 1999, studies the work of a generation of 'respondents' to the New York School, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, who reintroduced pictorialism and verbal content in their paintings and assemblages. Their work, Marjorie Welish argues, often alludes to the history of art and culture. Also examined are the work of Minimal and Conceptual artists, particularly Donald Judd and Sol Le Witt, who sought to make objective and theoretical artefacts in response to the subjectivity that Abstract Expressionism had promoted. By interpreting the work of these artists in the light of contemporary issues, Welish offers a fresh re-evaluation of some of the major trends and production of post-war American painting.
Examines the spiritual and transcendental dimension of painting. Using psychoanalytical ideas, the author demonstrates the developmental processes that are the inner core of the creative process. Newt
Building-Art is an anthology of essays by noted critic Joseph Masheck. Considering topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, its theory and practice, as well as selected achievements by such great modernists as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn, Masheck also analyses important monuments and architectural ideas of such artists as Giorgio di Chirico and Tony Smith. Contextualising and culturally speculative, these studies address such issues as the distinction between architecture and 'mere' building, and architecture and engineering, frequently drawing the reader into architectural problems that have persisted for at least two centuries. Demonstrating a concern with on-going modernism, Masheck's essays guide the reader through the anti-modernist polemics of the 1970s and 1980s, which are particularly relevant in the light of postmodernism's demise.
This book, first published in 1999, studies the work of a generation of 'respondents' to the New York School, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, who reintroduced pictorialism and verbal content in their paintings and assemblages. Their work, Marjorie Welish argues, often alludes to the history of art and culture. Also examined are the work of Minimal and Conceptual artists, particularly Donald Judd and Sol Le Witt, who sought to make objective and theoretical artefacts in response to the subjectivity that Abstract Expressionism had promoted. By interpreting the work of these artists in the light of contemporary issues, Welish offers a fresh re-evaluation of some of the major trends and production of post-war American painting.
Surrealist Art and Writing offers a fresh analysis of Surrealism, the avant-garde movement that, in its search for contemporary lyricism and imagery, united literature and art to politics and psychology. Examining Surrealism's main phases from a variety of perspectives, Jack Spector emphasises the rebellion of the protagonists against their middle-class education. In Manifestos and Manifestations the Surrealists promoted Marxist over liberal politics; Freudian psychoanalysis over French psychiatry; Hegelian dialectics over Cartesian logic; and the outmoded, psychotic, or childish over modernist art. This study offers a coherent overview of the exciting and important interwar period in Europe. In particular it places avant-garde ideas and imagery within the historical and political contexts of the 1920s and 30s, integrating them into contemporary artistic and ideological currents.
This selection of essays, first published in 1998 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 lucid and accessible prose, Peter Selz explores modern art as it reflects, and has had an impact on, the tremendous transformation of politics and culture, both in the United States and Europe. An authoritative overview of a neglected phenomenon, his essays explore the complex relationship between art at the periphery and art at the putative centre, and how marginal art has affected that of the mainstream.
