Art of the Twentieth Century

by Walther, Ingo F.; Ruhrberg, Karl; Schneckenburger, Manfred; Fricke, Christiane; Honnef, Klaus

• ISBN13: 9783822885765
• ISBN10: 3822885762
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-09-01
• Publisher: Taschen America Llc

Summary

An undertaking as immensely ambitious as this one deserves our attention before we even open one of its stunningly illustrated and argued twin volumes. For what Ingo Walther and his international team have done is to make sense of this most explosive of artistic centuries. Who could possibly have forecast on New Year's Eve 1899 that, one hundred years later, painting and sculpture would be only options, not prerequisite disciplines for modern artists, constantly questioning both the technical and thematic definitions of their work? The infinite laboratory of experiment that the visual arts have become over the last decades highlights not only the inherent potential for human creativity and representation, but also shows the way individuals and groups have responded to the huge social, political and technological changes of this most turbulent of times. Ranging across the full spectrum of disciplines available, including photography and new media, and thematically chaptered to highlight relationships between works and movements, this readable and encyclopaedic masterwork does just what it says on the cover. Whether you want Surrealism or Land Art, Fluxus or Bauhaus, your art book purchases can stop once you buy this. Warning: it will not fit on your coffee table!

Table of Contents

Sculpture
Manfred Schneckenburger
Metamorphoses of Modern Sculpture	407	(2)
1 Between Tradition and Modernity	409	(10)
Rodin: Perfection and Experiment
Maillol and the Vitality of Classicism
Barlach: Expressive Robed Figures
Lehmbruck: Structure and Spirituality
Image-Makers from Hildebrand to Marini
2 Abstraction and Cubism's Sound Shift	419	(26)
Spatial Dimension
Primitivism: a New Ideal
Brancusi: Being and Form
Matisse: Modelled Space
Picasso the Groundbreaker
Archipenko: Emancipation of Empty Form
Boccioni and the Futurist Vision
Duchamp-Villon and the Mechanisation of Man
A New Human Image for the Machine Age
From Cubism to the Myth of Nature: Lipchitz, Laurens, Zadkine
3 Constructing the World	445	(12)
Russia: Monuments and the Culture of Materials
Tatlin: Counter-Relief, Monument and Flying Machine
Rodchenko and the Inkhuk Constructivists
"Transit Stations between Painting and Architecture"
The Constructivist International
Gabo and Pevsner: Crystalline Development
Bauhaus and De Stijl: New Media and Experimentation
Abstraction-Creation and Concrete Art
4 From Readymade to Surrealist Object	457	(12)
Duchamp: Creation through Negation
The Shock of Dada: Man Ray and Schwitters
The Surrealist Object
Giacometti: Staging of Psychological Terror
The Spectre of Surrealism
5 New Materials: Iron and Steel	469	(8)
Picasso's Discovery of the Metal Montage
Gonzalez: Founding Father of Iron Sculpture
Calder: Poetry of the Mobile
With Hammer and Cutter
6 Biomorphic Sculptures-A Vitalistic Counterposition	477	(10)
"Like Nature"
Picasso's Work at Boisgeloup
Arp: Dada Heads and Organic Concretions
Moore: the Landscape of the Body
Growth and Construction
7 Post-War Positions: The Existential and the Abstract	487	(12)
Aftershock or New Freedom?
Giacometti and the Threat of Humanity
Informel: Process and Structure
Abstract Expressionism: Construction of the Gesture
David Smith and Gestural Abstraction
8 Kinetic Expansion	499	(10)
Composition and Psychology Renounced
Nature, Light, Movement, Technology
The Impetus of the Group: GRAV, ZERO, EAT, CAVS
Kinetic Art: Crisis and Complexity
Tinguely: the Machine as Theatre
9 The Direct Language of Reality	509	(15)
The Ubiquitous Readymade
Rauschenberg and the Gap between Life and Art
Kienholz and the American Way of Life
Oldenburg's Double Irony
British Pop Art and Paolozzi's Machine World Collages
Nouveau Realisme: the Sociology of the Object
Intermedia, Fluxus: Object and Concept
Happening: Object and Action
Strategies of Object Art
10 American and European Minimalists	524	(9)
Minimal Art: Pure Perception
Europe: System, Composition and Caro's Strategy of
Discontinuity
11 Post-Minimal: Sensual Intensity and the Expansion of Art	533	(27)
The Sixties Revised
Minimal Processes and Physicality
Serra: from Materialism to Urban Sculpture
Land Art: Painting with Mountains
Nauman and the Body as a Medium
Beuys: Aura and Sculpture
Arte Povera: an Alphabet for Materials
12 The Delta of the Contemporary	560
The End of the Avant-Garde
Architecture, Sculpture and Forms of Action
Furniture and Models
Traces of Memory
Recycling and Readymade
Young British Sculptors
Intimacy and the Public Sphere