Anglo American Exchange In Postwar Sculpture 1945 1975

Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945-1975 redresses an important art historical oversight. Histories of American and British sculpture are usually told separately, with artists and their work divided by nationality; yet such boundaries obscure a vibrant exchange of ideas, individuals, and aesthetic influences. In reality, the postwar art world saw dynamic interactions between British and American sculptors, critics, curators, teachers, and institutions. Using works of art as points of departure, this book explores the international movement of people, objects, and ideas, demonstrating the importance of Anglo-American exchange to the history of postwar sculpture.

This book challenges existing notions of what is "American" and/or "Asian" art, moving beyond the identity issues that have dominated art-world conversations of the 1980s and the 1990s and aligning with new trends and issues in contemporary art today, e.g. the Global South, labor, environment, and gender identity. Contributors examine both historical and contemporary instances in art practices and exhibition-making under the rubric of "American art in Asia." The book complicates existing notions of what constitutes American art, Asian American (and American Asian) art. As today’s production and display of contemporary art takes place across diffused borders, under the fluid conditions of a globalized art world since transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, new contexts and art historical narratives are forming that upend traditional Euro-American mappings of center-margins, migratory patterns and community engagement. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, American studies, Asian studies and visual culture.

Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) was a key figure in the development of modern art in Europe and America from the 1950s to the 1980s. He is credited with coining the term pop art and with championing conceptual art and feminist artists in America. His interests as a critic and as a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York were wide-ranging, however, and included architecture, design, earthworks, film, neorealism, science fiction, and public sculpture. Early in his career he was associated with the Independent Group in London and although he was largely self-taught, he was a noted educator and lecturer. A prolific writer, Alloway sought to escape the conventions of art-historical discourse. This volume illuminates how he often shaped the field and anticipated approaches such as social art history and visual and cultural studies. Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator provides the first critical analysis of the multiple facets of Alloway’s life and career, exploring his formative influence on the disciplines of art history, art criticism, and museum studies. The nine essays in this volume depend on primary archival research, much of it conducted in the Lawrence Alloway Papers held by the Getty Research Institute. Each author addresses a distinct aspect of Alloway’s eclectic professional interests and endeavors.

Since the 1970s, romance novels have surpassed all other genres in terms of popularity in the United States, accounting for half of all mass market paperbacks sold and driving the digital publishing revolution. Romance Fiction and American Culture brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and publishing to explore American romance fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Essays on interracial, inspirational, and LGBTQ romance attend to the diversity of the genre, while new areas of inquiry are suggested in contextual and interdisciplinary examinations of romance authorship, readership, and publishing history, of pleasure and respectability in African American romance fiction, and of the dynamic tension between the genre and second wave feminism. As it situates romance fiction among other instances of American love culture, from Civil War diaries to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Romance Fiction and American Culture confirms the complexity and enduring importance of this most contested of genres.

This is a book about contemporary literary and artistic entanglements: word and image, media and materiality, inscription and illustration. It proposes a vulnerable, fugitive mode of reading poetry, which defies disciplinary categorisations, embracing the open-endedness and provisionality of forms. This manifests itself interactively in the six case studies, which have been chosen for their distinctness and diversity across the long twentieth century: the book begins with the early twentieth-century work of writer and artist Djuna Barnes, exploring her re-animation of sculptural and dramatic sources. It then turns to the late modernist artist and poet David Jones considering his use of the graphic and plastic arts in The Anathemata, and next, to the underappreciated mid-century poet F.T. Prince, whose work uncannily re-activates Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture. The second half of the book explores the collaborations of the canonical poet Ted Hughes with the publisher and artist Leonard Baskin during the 1970s; the innovative late twentieth-century poetry of Denise Riley who uses page space and embodied sound as a form of address; and, finally, the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon who has collaborated with photographers and artists, as well as ventriloquising nonhuman phenomena. The resulting unique study offers contemporary writers and readers a new understanding of literary, artistic, and nonhuman practices and shows the cultural importance of engaging with their messy co-dependencies. The book challenges critical methodologies that make a sharp division between the textual work and the extra-literary, and raises urgent questions about the status and autonomy of art and its social role.

This is a multidisciplinary study of the rhythms depicted in abstract art, the body's rhythms, and neural oscillations.

This book introduces the reader to the art of sculpture across five millennia up to the present, and from the Near East to the west. In each of the eleven chapters, a number of selected works are discussed to exemplify the circumstances and conditions for making pieces of sculpture – objects peculiar to place, time and context. Within each cultural framework, characteristics are observable that suggest various reasons for the use of colour in sculpture. These encompass local preferences, customs or cultural requirements; and others point to an impulse to enhance the expression of the phenomenal. Whether colour is really necessary or even essential to sculpted works of art is a question especially pertinent since the Renaissance. Surface finishes of sculptural representations may allude to the sensory world of colour without even having pigment applied to them. What makes polychromy so special is that it functions as an overlay of another dimension that sometimes carries further encoded meaning. In nature, the colour is integral to the given object. What the present survey suggests is that the relationship between colour and sculpture is a matter of intentional expression, even where the colour is intrinsic – as in the sculptor’s materials.

Slant Steps explores the vital role of the semi-periphery—artistic communities working between the provinces and the metropole. Premised on the collective fascination with the found object Slant Step, the book details a history of encounters among artists, filmmakers, critics, and others operating in and out of the Bay Area during the long 1960s. They revised the terms of the counterculture, the appeal of consumer goods, and the surfaces and materials of industrial design and contemporary sculpture. Whether extending to international exchanges or shrinking to local coteries, these circles helped develop process, funk, and conceptual art as they forged new directions for the art world and its members. Yet when these groups degraded their own works alongside those of their rivals, they made their political and aesthetic commitments difficult to decipher, reorganizing the ties between the visual arts and the New Left. Merging sociologies of art with the tradition of social art history, Jacob Stewart-Halevy uncovers the oblique perspectives and values of the semi-periphery, revealing its enduring impact upon contemporary art, above all in the field of pedagogy.