Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In this original book Brandon Taylor reveals how, in the period between the two world wars, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mir , Dal made extraordinary formal discoveries in a time of rapid political, social, philosophical and scientific change. He also shows how artists such as Hans Arp contested perception theory, how Mondrian turned to geometry and the next physics, and how Ernst exploited effects of change and material flow.
The story of how such ideas were taken up in America then follows. There, young artists such as Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes responded to fresh possibilities for abstract art. Meanwhile, in post-Second World War Europe, an explosion of 'informal' methods in art marked a further flowering of one of the great periods in modern western art.
Synopsis
What is form in modern art? How could a work of art achieve its organic life in a world increasingly dominated by mechanism, by new technology? In this new book, Brandon Taylor proposes that biology and the life sciences themselves supplied many of the analogies and metaphors by which modern artists were guided. For the creative giants of the period - Picasso, Mir , Kandinsky, Strzeminski, Dal , Arp, Motherwell and Pollock, as well as less-known figures such as Taeuber, Erni and Kobro - questions of 'living' form loomed large in studio conversation, in the press, and in the writings of the artists themselves.
In a book rich in new research and fresh thinking, a well-known art historian proposes six modalities of organic and vital life that pervade the radical experiments of modern art: the organic, the biomorphic, the ambiguous, the monstrous, the dialectical, and the liquid.