Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being - Hardcover

Fineberg, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1856691985 ISBN 13: 9781856691987

Publisher: Laurence King Pub

Synopsis

In Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, Jonathan Fineberg presents the art of the last six decades of our century as a series of responses, made by exceptional men and women, to the conditions of life in baffling and chaotic times. This Second Edition includes a whole new chapter on the 1990s and augmented sections earlier in the book.
The year 1940 marks a defining moment in 20th-century art, when many artists of the European avant-garde moved en masse to New York. The city was instantly transformed into the art capital of the world, triggering radical changes of direction as artists, both immigrant and American-born, struggled with the reshuffled facts of their existence. For these artists, says Fineberg, making art was - as it continues to be for artists today - a strategy of coming to terms with their moment in history.
This book helps us understand these "strategies of being" of the greatest postwar artists, and by extension other artists both well-known and little celebrated. Professor Fineberg focuses on artists' lives and how they intersected with broader cultural issues. Individual artists looked at indepth include Calder, Hofmann, Gorky, Motherwell, de Kooning, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, David Smith, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Bacon, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Johns, Beuys, Klein, Warhol, Rosenquist, Westermann, Arneson, Hesse, Nauman, Christo, Polke, Richter, Guston, Bearden, Aycock, Kiefer, Clemente, Borofsky, Basquiat, and Wojnarowicz.
Professor Fineberg's thematic discussion treats ideas and events that are critical to understanding how social and cultural climates have affected creative people from the 1940s to the present. The accent is on individual artists and their experience. Interspersed are fascinating considerations of scores of major tendencies - from the Cobra, art informed, British Pop Art, Bay Area figurative painters in the 1950s, and the artists and writers of the Beat Generation, to the Minimalists, the impact of feminism, minority artists, conceptual art, European neo-expressionism, the East Village of the 1980s, recent artists of appropriation, installation, and the return to the body in the art of the 1990s.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Exceptionally comprehensive and authoritative, this extensively illustrated survey of art since 1940 stresses the individuality of the artists in relation to their political, social, and cultural contexts, and focuses on the meaning of the major works and innovations.

From the Back Cover:

This comprehensive and authoritative book illustrates art from the 1940's and stresses the individuality of the artists in relation to their political, social, and cultural contexts. The book focuses on the meaning of the major works and innovations. It features nearly 600 illustrations (approximately half in color) representing art since 1940, both in Europe and America. It explores the full range of periods, artists, and movements: New York in the Forties; Calder, Hofmann, Gorky, Motherwell, De Kooning; Existentialism (Pollock, Newman, Rothko, David Smith); The New European Masters of the Late Forties (Dubuffet, Giacometti, Bacon), plus so much more. For anyone interested in Postwar Art.

About this edition

• Publisher: Laurence King Pub
• ISBN 10: 1856691985
• ISBN 13: 9781856691987
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2