The Art of the Everyday: The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814731082 ISBN 13: 9780814731086

Publisher: NYU Press, 1997

Synopsis

Perhaps more than anything else, it is the concept of the everyday that has most marked the arts and culture of the twentieth century. Nowhere has this been so clearly articulated as in France after World War II. Indeed, the 1950s and 1960s in France were awash in a sociological fascination with the transformed rhythms and accoutrements of daily lived experience.
The Art of the Everyday features essays by prominent writers on the topic of the quotidian in philosophy, cinema, theater, photography, and other visual arts of postwar France. In particular, a number of younger artists practicing today—such as Joël Bartoloméo, Rebecca Bournigault, Claude Closky, Frédéric Coupet, Valerie Jouve, Philippe Mairesse, Jean-Luc Moulène, and Rainer Oldendorf—find inspiration in the stuff of everyday life, rejecting an outmoded reverence for le grand goût. For them, the sophisticated urbanity of the nineteenth-century flâneur has mutated into a city dweller well-acquainted with the often unpleasant requirements of city life.
A panorama of an important aspect of postwar French culture, The Art of the Everyday brings to light the work of a new generation of contemporary French artists viewed through the lens of daily experience.

About this title

About the Author

An authority on contemporary European art, Lynn Gumpert is director of the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center at New York University. She has held curatorial positions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Jewish Museum in New York and has consulted for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814731082
• ISBN 13: 9780814731086
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 146
• Editor: Gumpert Lynn