Looking back to the future

Sample

David McCarthy

"Mass culture, popular taste and kitsch, previously considered outside the limits of fine art, were the inspiration and provocative themes of Pop art, a movement that enjoyed great prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s. Rejecting the idea that art and life could be separated, artists in both Britain and the United States - among them Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol - used mass-produced objects and photographic images to make a blatant connection between art and the post-war world of consumerism." "This study follows the development of Pop, from its roots in the irreverence of Dada and Surrealism, to its rise in popularity as an art form that celebrated the glamour and hedonism of the newly commercialised Western world, whilst acknowledging its superficiality and transience."--Jacket.

Sample

Marco Livingstone

This book offers readers a clear perspective on the movement, unravelling the sequence of events associated with the evolution of Pop in Britain, Europe and the United States. Drawn in part from extensive interviews with the contemporary artists, and illustrating the work of more than 130 artists, it is the most authoritative study available on this intriguing movement.

Sample

Elizabeth Legge

In this illustrated study, Elizabeth Legge describes Wavelength as a film of virtuosically managed tensions, sensuous beauty, subtle light and color, and recession into perspectival depth. At the same time, she points out, it is also austere: the loft space where the action unfolds could be the last clerical outpost of a defunct business. The zoom is punctuated by what Snow laconically called "4 human events": a woman directs two men who carry in a bookcase and place it against the left wall of the room; two women come in and listen to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields" on the radio; a man briefly appears after protracted crashing and glass-breaking noises, wheels around, and drops dead; a young woman comes into the room and makes a frightened telephone call reporting the dead man ("And he doesn't look drunk, he looks dead.").

Sample

Bruce Altshuler

The avant-garde is a twentieth-century phenomenon. By the turn of the nineteenth century, artists were beginning to address a far larger audience than ever before, and it was one on whose understanding they could no longer depend. Aesthetic concerns, too, had shifted from representing visual phenomena to reconfiguring the visible world in new and complicated ways. The public was rarely amused. Indeed, as these newer forms of art were presented in now famous exhibitions, derision and anger were the customary responses of the public and the critics. Artists formed more or less cohesive groups of like-thinking individuals who styled themselves the "avant-garde," really a military term for those pathfinders who first venture into unknown or enemy territory. Through photographs of personalities, installations, and works of art, and in a lively text that recounts the artistic thinking and the gossip that surrounded each new movement, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century traces this phenomenon from its beginnings in the Fauvist Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 through such notorious events as the exhibitions of the Section d'Or (Paris) and the Blue Rider (Munich), the Armory Show (New York), the Futurist 0-10 exhibition (Petrograd), the Dada Fair (Berlin), the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition (Munich), the First Papers of Surrealism (New York), Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century (New York), the Ninth Street Show (New York), the Gutai Art Association (Japan), Le Vide (Paris), Full-Up (Paris), the New Realists (New York), Primary Structures (New York), and When Attitudes Become Form (Bern).