Synopses & Reviews
In this collection of critical essays the well-known critic Barry Schwabsky reexamines the art produced since the 1960s, demonstrating how the achievements of "high modernism" remain consequential to it, through tensions among representation, abstraction, and pictorial language. With the core of the book focused on Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mel Bochner, Schwabsky also studies the work of emerging artists who also continue to examine modernism's legacies.
Review
'An admirably clear writer, a good editor of his own texts, Schwabsky provides an engaging perspective on our era which, as he presents it, is in itself not uninteresting.' Burlington Magazine
Synopsis
A collection of essays about modernism and art since the 1960s.
Synopsis
A collection of essays about modernism and art since the 1960s.
Synopsis
Reexamining the art produced since the 1960s, this collection demonstrates how the achievements of "high modernism" remain consequential to it, through tensions between representation, abstraction, and pictorial language.
Table of Contents
Part I. Abstraction, Representation ...: 1. The widening circle: abstraction and representation in contemporary art and criticism; 2. 'The real situation': Philip Guston and Mark Rothko at the end of the 1960s; 3. Norman Bluhm and the eternal feminine; 4. Color field and Caro: mannerist modernism; 5. Larry Poons: formalism in ruins; 6. Gesture revisited: Mel Bochner, Howard Buchwald, Brice Marden; 7. Mary Heilmann's ceramics and paintings: color as substance; 8. Porfirio DiDonna: vision fulfilled; 9. Moira Dryer: answering machines; 10. The rustle of painting: Jacques Lacan, David Row, Brenda Zlamany; Part II. Italian Interlude: 11. W. de Pisis; 12. Rotellascope; 13. Michelangelo Pistoletto: mirrors to monuments; 14. The abstraction epidemic: a conversation with Demetrio Paparoni; Part III ... and Inscription: 15. Thomas Chimes: concerning the surface; 16. Cy Twombly: Et in Arcadia Ego?; 17. Bruce Conner's inkblot drawings: documents for a secret tradition; 18. Reverse continuity: the prints of Mel Bochner; 19. Rubble: representing Mel Bochner's early work; 20. Ross Bleckner: memories of light; 21. L. C. Armstrong: written on the skin; 22. Rainer Ganahl: windows on the word.