Modern Art at the Berlin Wall Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys

by Mesch, Claudia

• ISBN13: 9781845118082
• ISBN10: 1845118081
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-15
• Publisher: Tauris Academic Studies

Summary

At the height of the Cold War, art produced in divided Germany contested the cultural demarcation of East and West. Here Claudia Mesch shows how a wide group of artists struggled to take visual art beyond the crude separations of the "Iron Curtain," and to transcend the first global cultural divide of the twentieth century. Artists in Berlin produced artworks--including painting, performance and film--that engaged critically with imposed national and global identities, and with issues of memory and trauma. Modern Art at the Berlin Wallpresents a new picture of the Cold War border between East and West as a dynamic and international cultural space, and is essential for all those interested in art history, modernism, the Cold War and the cultural history of the twentieth century.

Author Biography

Claudia Mesch teaches in the School of Art at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. She is the author, with Viola Michely, of Joseph Beuys: The Reader (I.B. Tauris, 2007) and is founding editor of the e-journal Surrealism and the Americas. She writes on diverse topics in twentieth-century and contemporary art, especially postwar modernism, its ties to surrealism, and European intellectual history, and is working on a study of European intellectuals’ and surrealism’s preoccupation with Native American culture. She is a frequent contributor of art and film criticism to Sculpture, caa.reviews and The Art Book.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

New preface by the author

North to the Sporades

Skiathos

Skopleos: Vangeli's Island

Kosta and Paraskevoula

Panormos: Saints and Treasure

Skyos: A Poet's Grave

Granddaughters of Lycurgos: A Berth for Astarte

Landowner at Last

Earth Tremors and Island Rivalry

Goat-Hunt to Iura

Tourist Salad Days

Eremonisia

A Balcony over the Sea

Elections for Mayor: Vangeli Stands

Harbour of Silence

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