Cold War Modernists

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231538626
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Cold War Modernists by : Greg Barnhisel

Download or read book Cold War Modernists written by Greg Barnhisel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European intellectuals of the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. In response, American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. Through literary magazines, traveling art exhibits, touring musical shows, radio programs, book translations, and conferences, they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant. Yet by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. They remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War. Drawing on interviews, previously unknown archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and Voice of America, Barnhisel reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, with profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity.

Late Modernism

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812200071
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Late Modernism by : Robert Genter

Download or read book Late Modernism written by Robert Genter and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism—Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born. In Late Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950s were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners—abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others—debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960s.

The Naked Communist:Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture

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Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 082324556X
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

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Book Synopsis The Naked Communist:Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture by : Roland Vegso

Download or read book The Naked Communist:Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture written by Roland Vegso and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the "world" names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti-Communist "aesthetic ideology." The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.

The Nation's Region

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Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820334189
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis The Nation's Region by : Leigh Anne Duck

Download or read book The Nation's Region written by Leigh Anne Duck and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South served as a repository of the country's romantic notions: the region was represented as a close-knit, custom-bound place through which the nation could temper its ambivalence about the upheavals of progress. The Great Depression changed this. Amid economic anxiety and the international rise of fascism, writes Duck, "the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become." As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time. She situates their narratives amid broad concern regarding national modernization and governance, as manifest in cultural and political debates, sociological studies, and popular film. Although southern modernists' modes and methods varied along this trajectory, their purpose remained focused: to explore the mutually constitutive relationships between social forms considered "southern" and "national."

Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War

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Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609386310
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War by : Steven Belletto

Download or read book Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War written by Steven Belletto and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together noted scholars in the fields of literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, this edited volume challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, revealing it to be a global phenomenon rather than just a binary conflict between U.S. and Soviet forces. Shining a spotlight on writers from the war’s numerous fronts and applying lenses of race, gender, and decolonization, the essayists present several new angles from which to view the tense global showdown that lasted roughly a half-century. Ultimately, they reframe the Cold War not merely as a divide between the Soviet Union and the United States, but between nations rich and poor, and mostly white and mostly not. By emphasizing the global dimensions of the Cold War, this innovative collection reveals emergent forms of post-WWII empire that continue to shape our world today, thereby raising the question of whether the Cold War has ever fully ended.

Martha Graham's Cold War

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190610360
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

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Book Synopsis Martha Graham's Cold War by : Victoria Phillips

Download or read book Martha Graham's Cold War written by Victoria Phillips and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--Columbia University, 2013, titled Strange commodity of cultural exchange: Martha Graham and the State Department on tour, 1955-1987.

City of Beginnings

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691182183
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis City of Beginnings by : Robyn Creswell

Download or read book City of Beginnings written by Robyn Creswell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How poetic modernism shaped Arabic intellectual debates in the twentieth century and beyond City of Beginnings is an exploration of modernism in Arabic poetry, a movement that emerged in Beirut during the 1950s and became the most influential and controversial Arabic literary development of the twentieth century. Robyn Creswell introduces English-language readers to a poetic movement that will be uncannily familiar—and unsettlingly strange. He also provides an intellectual history of Lebanon during the early Cold War, when Beirut became both a battleground for rival ideologies and the most vital artistic site in the Middle East. Arabic modernism was centered on the legendary magazine Shi‘r (“Poetry”), which sought to put Arabic verse on “the map of world literature.” The Beiruti poets—Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, and Unsi al-Hajj chief among them—translated modernism into Arabic, redefining the very idea of poetry in that literary tradition. City of Beginnings includes analyses of the Arab modernists’ creative encounters with Ezra Pound, Saint-John Perse, and Antonin Artaud, as well as their adaptations of classical literary forms. The book also reveals how the modernists translated concepts of liberal individualism, autonomy, and political freedom into a radical poetics that has shaped Arabic literary and intellectual debate to this day.

Cold Modernism

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Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271053763
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Cold Modernism by : Jessica Burstein

Download or read book Cold Modernism written by Jessica Burstein and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores a significant but overlooked aspect of early twentieth-century modernism, one that focuses on surface appearance rather than interiority or psychological depth. Looks at the writers Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy, the artists Balthus and Hans Bellmer, and the fashion designer Coco Chanel"--Provided by publisher.

Modernism: A Very Short Introduction

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192804413
Total Pages : 137 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernism: A Very Short Introduction by : Christopher Butler

Download or read book Modernism: A Very Short Introduction written by Christopher Butler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compact introduction to modernism--why it began, what it is, and how it hasshaped virtually all aspects of 20th and 21st century life

The Aesthetic Cold War

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691230633
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis The Aesthetic Cold War by : Peter J. Kalliney

Download or read book The Aesthetic Cold War written by Peter J. Kalliney and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka—carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work. Kalliney looks at how the United States and the Soviet Union, in an effort to court writers, funded international conferences, arts centers, book and magazine publishing, literary prizes, and radio programming. International spy networks, however, subjected these same writers to surveillance and intimidation by tracking their movements, tapping their phones, reading their mail, and censoring or banning their work. Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions, deportations, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government agents. Although conventional wisdom suggests that cold war pressures stunted the development of postcolonial literature, Kalliney's extensive archival research shows that evenly balanced superpower competition allowed savvy writers to accept patronage without pledging loyalty to specific political blocs. Likewise, writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police. A revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature, The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century.

The Triumph of Modernism

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1442223227
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (422 download)

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Book Synopsis The Triumph of Modernism by : Hilton Kramer

Download or read book The Triumph of Modernism written by Hilton Kramer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-12-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely acknowledged as the most authoritative art critic of his generation, Hilton Kramer advanced his comments and judgments largely in the form of essays and short pieces. Thus this first collection of his work to appear in twenty years is a signal event for the art world and for criticism generally. The Triumph of Modernism not only traces the vicissitudes of the art scene but diagnoses the state of modernism and its vital legacy in the postmodern world. Mr. Kramer bracingly updates his incisive critique of the artists, critics, institutions, and movements that have formed the basis for modern art. Appearing for the first time in greatly expanded form is his consideration of the foundations of modern abstract painting and the future of abstraction. The aesthetic intelligence that Mr. Kramer brings to bear on certain tired assumptions about modernism—many of them derived from methodologies and politics that have little to do with art—helps rescue the artwork itself and its appreciation from the very institutions, such as the art museum and the academy, that purport to foster it. Always clear-eyed and vastly illuminating, Hilton Kramer’s art criticism remains among the very finest written in the past hundred years. Readers of The Triumph of Modernism will be treated to an exhilarating experience.

Interventions into Modernist Cultures

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 082238986X
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Interventions into Modernist Cultures by : Amie Elizabeth Parry

Download or read book Interventions into Modernist Cultures written by Amie Elizabeth Parry and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-30 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interventions into Modernist Cultures is a comparative analysis of the cultural politics of modernist writing in the United States and Taiwan. Amie Elizabeth Parry argues that the two sites of modernism are linked by their representation or suppression of histories of U.S. imperialist expansion, Cold War neocolonial military presence, and economic influence in Asia. Focusing on poetry, a genre often overlooked in postcolonial theory, she contends that the radically fragmented form of modernist poetic texts is particularly well suited to representing U.S. imperialism and neocolonial modernities. Reading various works by U.S. expatriates Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Parry compares the cultural politics of U.S. canonical modernism with alternative representations of temporality, hybridity, erasure, and sexuality in the work of the Taiwanese writers Yü Kwang-chung and Hsia Yü and the Asian American immigrant author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Juxtaposing poems by Pound and Yü Kwang-chung, Parry shows how Yü’s fragmented, ambivalent modernist form reveals the effects of neocolonialism while Pound denies and obscures U.S. imperialism in Asia, asserting a form of nondevelopmental universalism through both form and theme. Stein appropriates discourses of American modernity and identity to represent nonnormative desire and sexuality, and Parry contrasts this tendency with representations of sexuality in the contemporary experimental poetry of Hsia Yü. Finally, Parry highlights the different uses of modernist forms by Pound in his Cantos—which incorporate a multiplicity of decontextualized and ahistorical voices—and by Cha in her 1982 novel Dictee, a historicized, multilingual work. Parry’s sophisticated readings provide a useful critical framework for apprehending how “minor modernisms” illuminate the histories erased by certain canonical modernist texts.

Ethnic Modernism

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674030916
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (39 download)

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Book Synopsis Ethnic Modernism by : Werner Sollors

Download or read book Ethnic Modernism written by Werner Sollors and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Werner Sollors's monograph looks into how African American, European immigrant and other minority writers gave the United States its increasingly multicultural self-awareness, focusing on their use of the strategies opened up by modernism.

Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1441188371
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism by : Paul Ardoin

Download or read book Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism written by Paul Ardoin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henri Bergson is frequently cited amongst the holy trinity of major influences on Modernism-literary and otherwise-alongside Sigmund Freud and William James. Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism has re-popularized Bergson for the 21st century, so much so that, perhaps, our Bergson is Deleuze's Bergson. Despite renewed interest in Bergson, his influence remains understudied and consequently undervalued. While books examining the impact of Freud and James on Modernism abound, Bergson's impact, though widely acknowledged, has been closely examined much more rarely. Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism remedies this deficiency in three ways. First, it offers close readings and critiques of six pivotal texts. Second, it reassesses Bergson's impact on Modernism while also tracing his continuing importance to literature, media, and philosophy throughout the twentieth and into the 21st century. In its final section it provides an extended glossary of Bergsonian terms, complete with extensive examples and citations of their use across his texts. The glossary also maps the influence of Bergson's work by including entries on related writers, all of whom Bergson either corresponded with or critiqued.

The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 030014265X
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War by : Campbell Craig

Download or read book The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War written by Campbell Craig and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-28 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of nuclear warfare’s key role in triggering the post-World War II confrontation between the US and the USSR After a devastating world war, culminating in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was clear that the United States and the Soviet Union had to establish a cooperative order if the planet was to escape an atomic World War III. In this provocative study, Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko show how the atomic bomb pushed the United States and the Soviet Union not toward cooperation but toward deep bipolar confrontation. Joseph Stalin, sure that the Americans meant to deploy their new weapon against Russia and defeat socialism, would stop at nothing to build his own bomb. Harry Truman, initially willing to consider cooperation, discovered that its pursuit would mean political suicide, especially when news of Soviet atomic spies reached the public. Both superpowers, moreover, discerned a new reality of the atomic age: now, cooperation must be total. The dangers posed by the bomb meant that intermediate measures of international cooperation would protect no one. Yet no two nations in history were less prepared to pursue total cooperation than were the United States and the Soviet Union. The logic of the bomb pointed them toward immediate Cold War. “Sprightly and well-argued…. The complicated history of how the bomb influenced the start of the war has never been explored so well."—Lloyd Gardner, Rutgers University “An outstanding new interpretation of the origins of the Cold War that gives equal weight to American and Soviet perspectives on the conflict that shaped the contemporary world.”—Geoffrey Roberts, author of Stalin’s Wars

A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations

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Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119459699
Total Pages : 1518 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (194 download)

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Book Synopsis A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations by : Christopher R. W. Dietrich

Download or read book A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations written by Christopher R. W. Dietrich and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-03-04 with total page 1518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the entire range of the history of U.S. foreign relations from the colonial period to the beginning of the 21st century. A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations is an authoritative guide to past and present scholarship on the history of American diplomacy and foreign relations from its seventeenth century origins to the modern day. This two-volume reference work presents a collection of historiographical essays by prominent scholars. The essays explore three centuries of America’s global interactions and the ways U.S. foreign policies have been analyzed and interpreted over time. Scholars offer fresh perspectives on the history of U.S. foreign relations; analyze the causes, influences, and consequences of major foreign policy decisions; and address contemporary debates surrounding the practice of American power. The Companion covers a wide variety of methodologies, integrating political, military, economic, social and cultural history to explore the ideas and events that shaped U.S. diplomacy and foreign relations and continue to influence national identity. The essays discuss topics such as the links between U.S. foreign relations and the study of ideology, race, gender, and religion; Native American history, expansion, and imperialism; industrialization and modernization; domestic and international politics; and the United States’ role in decolonization, globalization, and the Cold War. A comprehensive approach to understanding the history, influences, and drivers of U.S. foreign relation, this indispensable resource: Examines significant foreign policy events and their subsequent interpretations Places key figures and policies in their historical, national, and international contexts Provides background on recent and current debates in U.S. foreign policy Explores the historiography and primary sources for each topic Covers the development of diverse themes and methodologies in histories of U.S. foreign policy Offering scholars, teachers, and students unmatched chronological breadth and analytical depth, A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present is an important contribution to scholarship on the history of America’s interactions with the world.

Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters

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Author :
Publisher : Thames & Hudson
ISBN 13 : 0500774242
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters by : Martin Gayford

Download or read book Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters written by Martin Gayford and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Gayford’s masterful account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s, illustrated by documentary photographs and the works themselves The development of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s has never before been told before as a single narrative. R. B. Kitaj’s proposal, made in 1976, that there was a “substantial School of London” was essentially correct but it caused confusion because it implied that there was a movement or stylistic group at work, when in reality no one style could cover the likes of Francis Bacon and also Bridget Riley. Modernists and Mavericks explores this period based on an exceptionally deep well of firsthand interviews, often unpublished, with such artists as Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield. But Martin Gayford also teases out the thread weaving these individual lives together and demonstrates how and why, long after it was officially declared dead, painting lived and thrived in London. Simultaneously aware of the influences of Jackson Pollock, Giacometti, and (through the teaching passed down at the major art school) the traditions of Western art from Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the postwar painters were bound by their confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvelous things, and explored in their diverse ways, the possibilities of paint.