Conservation of Modern Oil Paintings
Conservation of Modern Oil Paintings

Author: Klaas Jan van den Berg

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-02-17

Total Pages: 611

ISBN-13: 3030192547

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Artists’ oil paints have become increasingly complex and diverse in the 20th Century, applied by artists in a variety of ways. This has led to a number of issues that pose increasing difficulties to conservators and collection keepers. A deeper knowledge of the artists’ intent as well as processes associated with material changes in paintings is important to conservation, which is almost always a compromise between material preservation and aesthetics. This volume represents 46 peer-reviewed papers presented at the Conference of Modern Oil Paints held in Amsterdam in 2018. The book contains a compilation of articles on oil paints and paintings in the 20th Century, partly presenting the outcome of the European JPI project ‘Cleaning of Modern Oil Paints’. It is also a follow-up on ‘Issues in Contemporary Oil Paint’ (Springer, 2014). The chapters cover a range of themes and topics such as: patents and paint manufacturing in the 20th Century; characterization of modern-contemporary oil paints and paint surfaces; artists’ materials and techniques; the artists’ voice and influence on perception of curators, conservators and scientists; model studies on paint degradation and long term stability; approaches to conservation of oil paintings; practical surface treatment and display. The book will help conservators and curators recognise problems and interpret visual changes on paintings, which in turn give a more solid basis for decisions on the treatment of these paintings.

Art Books
Art Books

Author: Wolfgang M. Freitag

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9780824033262

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Expanded to twice as many entries as the 1985 edition, and updated with new publications, new editions of previous entries, titles missed the first time around, more of the artists' own writings, and monographs that deal with significant aspects or portions of an artist's work though not all of it. The listing is alphabetical by artist, and the index by author. The works cited include analytical and critical, biographical, and enumerative; their formats range from books and catalogues raisonnes to exhibition and auction sale catalogues. A selection of biographical dictionaries containing information on artists is arranged by country. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe
The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe

Author: Karen Kurczynski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-12

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1351034480

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This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948–1951). Although the name stood for the organizers’ home cities, the Cobra artists hailed from countries in Europe, Africa, and the United States. This book investigates how a group of struggling young artists attempted to reinvent the international avant-garde after the devastation of the Second World War, to create artistic experiments capable of facing the challenges of postwar society. It explores how Cobra’s experimental, often collective art works and publications relate to broader debates in Europe about the use of images to commemorate violent events, the possibility of free expression in an art world constrained by Cold War politics, the breakdown of primitivism in an era of colonial independence movements, and the importance of spontaneity in a society increasingly dominated by the mass media. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, 20th-century modern art, avant-garde arts, and European history.

Rethinking Postwar Europe
Rethinking Postwar Europe

Author: Barbara Lange

Publisher: Böhlau Köln

Published: 2019-12-09

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 3412514012

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The book "Rethinking Postwar Europe" offers an in-depth insight into the largely unexplored topic of artistic practices in the 1940s and 1950s in Europe which until recently had been obscured by ideologies of the Cold War. Thanks to the authors' diverse methodological backgrounds, the volume presents – for the first time – a comprehensive multilayered narrative, focusing on the complexities and entanglements in the artistic field. Instead of assessing the postwar period in the traditional way as divided by the Iron Curtain, the contributions investigate processes of contact, interaction, dissemination, overlapping, and networking. Consequently, the analysis of a diversified European modernism in both its aesthetic and its socio-political dimension resonates with all the different case studies. In particular, the volume looks at how artists developed, designed and (re)negotiated identities and discourses, and sheds new light on the power of art – and creative powers in general – in a postwar setting of mutilations, losses, and devastations.

Comparative Vandalism
Comparative Vandalism

Author: Peter Shield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-26

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0429828373

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First published in 1998, this volume is a study of Asger Jorn’s attempt to formulate the ‘first complete revision of the existing philosophical system’ from the standpoint of the artist in the period 1961-67. The Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-73), painter, draughtsman, potter and sculptor, was one of the most prominent figures of his generation in Europe. His characteristic paintings were spontaneous, using energetic brushstrokes, splashing and spotting with a wide-ranging palette. Jorn’s eclectic intellect absorbed an astonishing range of influences and involved him in many causes, including an ambitious programme to re-publish, with commentary, material vital to Scandinavian cultural history. He was also a founder member of Cobra (1948-51) and subsequently several other international groupings, which coalesced in 1957 in the setting-up of the Situationist International with French and Italian writers and artists. Fascinated by the philosophical debate on the position of the artist in contemporary life and the artist’s relationship to the past, Jorn broke with the Situationist International in 1961 over the issue of whether an artist is an instigator of cultural change or only an instrument of political change. For the next four years, he committed himself to ‘a first complete revision of the existing philosophical system’ with the intention of placing the artist at the centre. Many of his ideas were first tried out in French in various Situationist publications and have since stirred considerable debate. His much more comprehensive texts in Danish of 1961-67 have never been made available in English. In Comparative Vandalism, Peter Shield offers the first detailed study of Jorn’s revision of modern philosophy, exploring the origins and formulation of his ideas. The book includes colour and black and white reproductions chosen from his mature work to illustrate the connection between his writing and painting.

Downcast Eyes
Downcast Eyes

Author: Martin Jay

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 652

ISBN-13: 9780520088856

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Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.

Action Art
Action Art

Author: John Gray

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1993-05-30

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0313387575

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This comprehensive international bibliography is the first to attempt documentation of this diverse field, covering the history of Artist's Performance. It focuses on its early twentieth-century antecedents in such movements as Futurism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, and the Bauhaus as well as its peak period in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with such developments as Gutai, Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, Situationism, and Guerrilla Art Action. Major emphasis is also given to sources on 115 individual performance artists and groups. More than 3700 entries document print and media materials dating from 1914 to 1992. Organized for maximum accessibility, the sources are also extensively cross-referenced and are indexed by artist, subject, title, and author. Three appendices identify reference works, libraries, and archives, and addenda material not found in the book text, and two others list artists by country and by group or collective.

Raiding the Icebox
Raiding the Icebox

Author: Peter Wollen

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1789604117

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Raiding the Icebox is a kaleidoscopic review of the avant-garde and radical subcultures of the twentieth century, and explains how the most powerful artistic statements of the era redrew the line between high and low art. Beginning with an analysis of the role of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet, Wollen argues that modernism has always had a hidden, suppressed side which cannot easily be absorbed into the master-narrative of modernity. Wollen reviews the hopes, fears and expectations of artists and critics such as the Bauhaus movement, as fascinated by Henry Ford's assembly line as they were by the Hollywood dream factory, concluding with Guy Debord's caustic dystopian vision of an all-consuming "Society of the Spectacle." Finally, Wollen chronicles the emergence of a subversive sensibility as he explores some of the unexpected new cultural forms which non-Western artists are taking as modernism enters into crisis at the beginning of a new century: reversing the rules of the game and raiding the icebox of the West.