Details

Subject(s)

• Modernism (Art) [Browse]
• Painting, Modern—20th century [Browse]

Summary note

This incisive account of modernism's postwar development examines how painters, such as Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman, and Rose Piper, invoked tradition in order to respond to, participate in, and disrupt the histories of the movement being written at midcentury. Saul Nelson argues that artists' turn to the past, often dismissed as regressive, offers an important counternarrative to the notion of modernism as always pushing forward. To be a modernist, Nelson contends, was to live in doubt--about which aspects of the past were still needed and how they might be put to new use. The story ranges across continents and historical boundaries, from India to Europe and the United States. It encompasses Grace Hartigan's and Mitchell's feminist reworkings of Matisse, the links between the work of Newman and nationalistic nineteenth-century painting, the attempts of Piper to salvage a heritage from the Harlem Renaissance, and F. N. Souza's interrogations of the legacies of colonialism. Never Ending presents a new history of postwar painting in which modernism is reimagined as a practice of retrieval and reinvention, a ceaseless confrontation between tradition and the demands of the present.

Notes

This incisive account of modernism’s postwar development examines how painters, such as Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman, and Rose Piper, invoked tradition in order to respond to, participate in, and disrupt the histories of the movement being written at midcentury. Saul Nelson argues that artists’ turn to the past, often dismissed as regressive, offers an important counternarrative to the notion of modernism as always pushing forward. To be a modernist, Nelson contends, was to live in doubt—about which aspects of the past were still needed and how they might be put to new use. The story ranges across continents and historical boundaries, from India to Europe and the United States. It encompasses Grace Hartigan’s and Mitchell’s feminist reworkings of Matisse, the links between the work of Newman and nationalistic nineteenth-century painting, the attempts of Piper to salvage a heritage from the Harlem Renaissance, and F. N. Souza’s interrogations of the legacies of colonialism. Never Ending presents a new history of postwar painting in which modernism is reimagined as a practice of retrieval and reinvention, a ceaseless confrontation between tradition and the demands of the present.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• Introduction: five Demoiselles
• Barnett Newman and buried history
• Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell: framing Matisse
• Rose Piper's Harlem renaissance
• F.N. Souza, Barnett Newman, and the end of modernism
• Conclusion: fashion, not painting?

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ISBN

• 9780300272307 (hardcover)
• 0300272308 (hardcover)

LCCN

2023946076

OCLC

1405842298

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