The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226471389)

The years before World War I were a time of social and political ferment in Europe, which profoundly affected the art world. A major center of this creative tumult was Paris, where many avant-garde artists sought to transform modern art through their engagement with radical politics. In this provocative study of art and anarchism in prewar France, Patricia Leighten argues that anarchist aesthetics and a related politics of form played crucial roles in the development of modern art, only to be suppressed by war fever and then forgotten.
Leighten examines the circle of artists--Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Frantisek Kupka, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees Van Dongen, and others--for whom anarchist politics drove the idea of avant-garde art, exploring how their aesthetic choices negotiated the myriad artistic languages operating in the decade before World War I. Whether they worked on large-scale salon paintings, political cartoons, or avant-garde abstractions, these artists, she shows, were preoccupied with social criticism. Each sought an appropriate subject, medium, style, and audience based on different conceptions of how art influences society--and their choices constantly shifted as they responded to the dilemmas posed by contradictory anarchist ideas. According to anarchist theorists, art should expose the follies and iniquities of the present to the masses, but it should also be the untrammeled expression of the emancipated individual and open a path to a new social order. Revealing how these ideas generated some of modernism's most telling contradictions among the prewar Parisian avant-garde, The Liberation of Painting restores revolutionary activism to the broader history of modern art.

Author: Patricia Leighten
ISBN-10: 0226471381
ISBN-13: 9780226471389
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 11/08/2013
Pages: 248
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 3.05lbs
Size: 11.20h x 8.80w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 12/06/2013 pg. 18
Choice 07/01/2014