Nouveau R Isme 1960s France And The Neo Avant Garde

Jill Carrick's Nouveau R?isme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avant-garde provides the first in-depth historical analysis of the "New Realism" movement and the critical and theoretical debates it engaged. This text makes available a new corpus of material - the rich historical and theoretical analysis as well as the fascinating photographic documentation of artists and works - from one of the most significant French art movements of the post-World War II period, whose literature has up to now been dominated by the terms of its founder, Pierre Restany. The illustrations and surprising contextual material - many of which have been unearthed by the author's archival research - document artwork, artists' collaborations, and ephemeral events.

Pop art was essential to the Americanization of global art in the 1960s, yet it engendered resistance and adaptation abroad in equal measure, especially in Paris. From the end of the Algerian War of Independence and the opening of Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery for American Pop art in Paris in 1962, to the silkscreen poster workshops of May ’68, this book examines critical adaptations of Pop motifs and pictorial devices across French painting, graphic design, cinema and protest aesthetics. Liam Considine argues that the transatlantic dispersion of Pop art gave rise to a new politics of the image that challenged Americanization and prefigured the critiques and contradictions of May ’68.

Combining a broad overview of Jean-Jacques Lebel's coming-of-age among Surrealists and his rupture with the movement, Laurel Jean Fredrickson focuses on two landmark happenings in this book: the first, “Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely” (1960), and the most scandalous, “120 Minutes dedicated to the Divine Marquis” (1966). This study illustrates the development and significance of French happenings in relation to cultural and political changes of the 1960s. Research in Lebel's archives, and others like the Archives nationale d'outre-mer are indispensable in the telling of this extraordinary historical and theoretical narrative. It illuminates sensitive, often veiled dimensions of postwar French society, from torture during the Algerian War, to government censorship, to the sexual politics of nudity in art. This volume shows how Lebel synthesized the lessons of Dada and surrealism and 1960s experimentalism, electrified by political radicalism, to participate in shaping the erotics and forms of revolution in May 1968.

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition Face to Face: Neo-Impressionist Portraits, 1886-1904. ING Cultural Centre, Brussels, February 19-May 18, 2014, Indianapolis Museum of Art, June 13-September 7, 2014."

Georges Seurat (1859-91) has long been admired as one of the greatest artists of the late nineteenth century. Between the exhibiting of "La Grande-Jatte" in 1886 and his early death, he dominated avant-garde art in Paris and forged a new visual language. To Seurat the vital subject for contemporary painting was the modern metropolis, and this book breaks new ground in examining the critical way in which he depicted and interpreted Paris, its suburbs and its popular entertainment. In the virtual absence of direct biographical information, Richard Thomson draws on a wide range of previously unexploited contemporary sources to document Seurat's bourgeois background, his early academic training, and the artistic, literary and political milieu in which he lived. Using such indirect but revealing evidence he throws fresh light on the meaning of the paintings, and on the complex and sophisticated social awareness that underlies their haunting beauty. -- From publisher's description.

Featuring 165 expertly reproduced visionary architectural drawings from The Museum of Modern Art's Howard Gilman Archive, this collection brings together a selection of idealized, fantastic and utopian architectural drawings.