In 1961, a solo exhibition by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana met with a scathing critical response from New York art critics. Fontana (1899--1968), well known in Europe for his series of slashed monochrome paintings, offered New York ten canvases slashed and punctured, thickly painted in luridly brilliant hues and embellished with chunks of colored glass. One critic described the work as "halfway between constructivism and costume jewelry," unwittingly putting his finger on the contradiction at the heart of these paintings and much of Fontana's work: the cut canvases suggest avant-garde iconoclasm, but the glittery ornamentation evokes outmoded forms of kitsch. In Lucio Fontana, Anthony White examines a selection of the artist's work from the 1930s to the 1960s, arguing that Fontana attacked the idealism of twentieth-century art by marrying modernist aesthetics to industrialized mass culture, and attacked modernism's purity in a way that anticipated both pop art and postmodernism. Fontana painted expressionist and abstract sculptures in the pinks and golds of mass-produced knick-knacks, saturated architectural installations with fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light, and encrusted candy-colored monochrome canvases with glitter. In doing so, White argues, he challenged Clement Greenberg's dictum that avant-garde and kitsch are diametrically opposed. Relating Fontana's art to the political and social context in which he worked, White shows how Fontana used the materials and techniques of mass culture to comment on the fate of the avant-garde under Italian fascism and the postwar "economic miracle." At a time when Fontana's work is commanding record prices, this new interpretation of the work assures that it has unprecedented critical relevance.
Blue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster, The Century (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 154. 8. Time-Life Editors, This Fabulous Century, Vol. IV, 23. 9.
Offers a selection of eighty-seven full-color reproductions of Timberlake's paintings, with an introduction by the painter
THE FERRELL BROTHERS, WILBUR AND WARREN , in their own words "were not known as singular artists but a duo." Wilbur began his career as a motion picture ...
Adelson, Warren, “John Singer Sargent and the 'New Painting,'” in Stanley Olson, Warren Adelson, and Richard Ormond, Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist ...
This is a rich undiscovered history—a history replete with competing art departments, dynastic scenic families, and origins stretching back to the films of Méliès, Edison, Sennett, Chaplin, and Fairbanks.
Through careful research, Carol Gibson-Wood exposes the mythology surrounding the Morellian method, especially the mythology of the coherence and primacy of his method of attribution. She argues that it “could also be said that Berenson ...
Gibson translates from the Phoenician: “Beware! Behold, there is disaster for you ... !” (SSI 3, no. 5=KAI nr. 2). Examples from Cyprus include SSI 3, no. 12=KAI nr. 30. Gibson's translation of the Phoenician reads (SSI 3, ...
Examines the emergence of abstract organic forms and their assimilation into the popular arts and culture of American life from 1940-1960, covering advertising, decorative arts, commercial design, and the fine arts.
... S. Newman ACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes ADAM SMITH Christopher J. Berry ADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith ADVERTISING ... ALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Eric Avila AMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer AMERICAN IMMIGRATION ...