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Overview
This book helps us understand the "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 in depth 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, 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. East Village scene-makers of the 1980s, recent artists of appropriation, and the return to the body in the art of the 1990s.Editorials
Library Journal
Fineberg (art history, Univ. of Illinois) asserts that the "implicit underlying subject matter of modern art is always the personality of the artist in its encounter with the world." Such explicit, forceful expressions seldom find their way into major survey texts, which more often try to balance points of view and hedge bets. Yet Fineberg has not let any theory of contemporary art constrain the organization of his book. In a system that at first seems chaotic, he lets what is most important filter up, whether it be an individual artist, a movement, a critic's theory, a style, or a medium. The result is a rich mixture of essentially separate essays that allows the reader to choose how to use the book. Unfortunately, for all his innovations, Fineberg repeats some of the common mistakes of this type of book: Barely ten percent of the artists on the contents pages are women; photography is given scant attention; and architecture, that bastion of the the individual artist, is divorced from the "fine arts." Still, Fineberg should be lauded for his provocative and inspiring assessments (whether or not one agrees with his thesis), and his eminently readable and engaging text should become a new standard of the form. For all art collections.-- Eric Bryant
Library Journal
Fineberg (art history, Univ. of Illinois) asserts that the "implicit underlying subject matter of modern art is always the personality of the artist in its encounter with the world." Such explicit, forceful expressions seldom find their way into major survey texts, which more often try to balance points of view and hedge bets. Yet Fineberg has not let any theory of contemporary art constrain the organization of his book. In a system that at first seems chaotic, he lets what is most important filter up, whether it be an individual artist, a movement, a critic's theory, a style, or a medium. The result is a rich mixture of essentially separate essays that allows the reader to choose how to use the book. Unfortunately, for all his innovations, Fineberg repeats some of the common mistakes of this type of book: Barely ten percent of the artists on the contents pages are women; photography is given scant attention; and architecture, that bastion of the the individual artist, is divorced from the "fine arts." Still, Fineberg should be lauded for his provocative and inspiring assessments (whether or not one agrees with his thesis), and his eminently readable and engaging text should become a new standard of the form. For all art collections.-- Eric Bryant
Book Details
Published
April 1, 1995
Publisher
New York : H.N. Abrams, 1995.
Pages
496
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780810919518