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Golan argues that reactionary issues such as anti-urbanism, the return to the soil, regionalism, corporatism, xenophobia, and doubts about the new technology became central to cultural and art-historical discourse. Focusing on the overlap of avant-garde and middle-of-the-road production, she investigates the import of these issues not only in, painting, sculpture, and architecture (concentrating on the work of Leger, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, Derain, the Surrealists, and the so-called naifs), but also in the decorative arts, in the spectacle of world and colonial fairs, and in literature. Throughout she finds evidence that artists turned from the aesthetics of the machine age toward a more organic, naturalistic art. This leads her to ask whether the famous and momentous shift of the avant-garde from Paris to New York in 1939 did not, in fact, begin two decades earlier, in 1918.
In this fascinating and generously illustrated book, Romy Golan explores mural and mural-like works in Europe from the 1920s to the 1950s, beginning with Monet's installation of the Nymphéas at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, and ending dramatically with Le Corbusier's huge tapestries in Chandigarh, India. Many artists and critics looked to the mural as a corrective to the ills of painterly Modernism: the disruption of the pictorial field at the hands of Cubism and other avant-garde practices; the commodification of painting through the market for easel paintings; and more generally the alienation of man and the anomie of art in the modern condition. At the same time it was clear that a...
An intellectual biography of the cultural critic Reyner Banham. Reyner Banham (1922-88) was one of the most influential writers on architecture, design, and popular culture from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. Trained in mechanical engineering and art history, he was convinced that technology was making society not only more exciting but more democratic. His combination of academic rigor and pop culture sensibility put him in opposition to both traditionalists and orthodox Modernists, but placed him in a unique position to understand the cultural, social, and political implications of the visual arts in the postwar period. His first book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (still in print with The MIT Press after forty years), was central to the overhaul of Modernism, and it gave Futurism and Expressionism credibility amid the dynamism and change of the 1960s. This intellectual biography is the first comprehensive critical examination of Banham's theories and ideas, not only on architecture but also on the wide variety of subjects that interested him. It covers the full range of his oeuvre and discusses the values, enthusiasms, and influences that formed his thinking.
Born near Minsk in White Russia, the painter Chaim Soutine (1894-1943) created his major works in France between the two World Wars. He is identified with the School of Paris, the group of artists, many of them foreign-born and Jewish, who lived and worked in the French capital between the wars. Known as a "painter's painter", Soutine worked with unreserved gesture and emotion, using exuberant color, thickly applied paint, and sweeping brushwork. Chaim Soutine is a comprehensive, ground-breaking book that rediscovers this important artist, providing an overview of his life, work, and aesthetic influence, as well as his critical reception. Essays by leading scholars and curators assess Soutin...
What is this 'new world' imagined by architect and designer Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999)? How did she reconceive our relationship with the natural world and the role of art in everyday life? The answers provided by this pioneer of modernity seem astonishingly relevant to us today. Published on the occassion of the Fondation Louis Vuitton's major retrospective dedicated to Charlotte Perriand and her links with the artists and architects of her era, this book offers a fresh interpretation of her work, which was characterized by commitment and freedom. Edited by Sébastien Cherruet and Jacques Barsac, with contributions from international authors, it presents an approach that is both chronological and thematic, inviting us on a journey of creativity through the twentieth century.
"The first biography of sculptor Chana Orloff, and the first to include stories from her unpublished "memoir," which focus on the artist's early life in Ukraine, her family's move to Palestine and Orloff's life there (1905-1910), and her subsequent years between Paris and Tel Aviv"--
A fascinating look at key aspects of visual culture in modern Jewish history
Examines the vast array of art produced by African Americans in response to the continuing impact of anti-Black violence and how it is used to protest, process, mourn and memorialize those events.
A groundbreaking account of the meaning of abstract painting From Mondrian's bold geometric forms to Kandinsky's use of symbols to Pollock's "dripped paintings," the richly diverse movement of abstract painting challenges anyone trying to make sense of either individual works or the phenomenon as a whole. Applying his insights as an art historian and a painter, John Golding offers a unique approach to understanding the evolution of abstractionism by looking at the personal artistic development of seven of its greatest practitioners. He re-creates the journey undertaken by each painter in his move from representational art to the abstract—a journey that in most cases began with cubism but l...