Buy this book on-line VARNEDOE,KIRK: : A FINE DISREGARD - WHAT MAKES MODERN ART MODERNLONDON.THAMES & HUDSON,1990. ISBN 0500235848.
UK, 8vo HB+dw/dj, 1st edn.FINE/FINE.No owner inscrptn, no price-clip to dw/dj.Bright,clean,
glossy laminated colour photographic wraps with negligible shelf-wear and minimal creasing to edges - no nicks or tears present.
Top edge very,very lightly aged;fore-edge bright and clean, contents bright, tight and clean also - near pristine.Publisher's original,unblemished red cloth bds with bright,stamped gilt publisher's colophon to upper bd and bright,stamped gilt letters to spine/backstrip with immaculate,plain white eps.8vo,9-319pp includes half-title+title pages,b/w photographic frntis,contents list, 5 chapters including intro; notes,list of illustrations,profuse colour+b/w photographic illustrations throughout text [280 illus,100 in colour],an index,acknowledgements and photograph credit list.
In this brilliant,radically fresh investigation of the origins and meaning of modern art,one of America's most powerful younger art historians breaks new ground.The student's room full of Van Gogh posters as well as the millionaire's mansion full of Van Gogh paintings make it apparent that modern art has become the repository of our century's widest spectrum of hopes and values,
from the crassest search for status to the most exalted and refined search for meaning.
Yet for all that modern art has become a common language and a shared experience,too often it is still explained in narrow polemics far removed from the pleasures and stimulations to be found in the works themselves.Showing how pioneering modernists chose to disregard established convention to create new roles,Kirk Varndoe disregards the maze of coded theories whose 'real' meaning lies hidden in dense ciphers that only the expert can interpret.Instead he offers an entirely new vision of modern art by examining
four crucial moments in its genesis: the sudden birth of a 'flat' pictorial space in
Degas and Van Gogh;the replacement of complete
figures by broken,insistently repeated figures
in Rodin;the attention to the primitive in Gaugin and Picasso;and the sudden proliferation,from Belle Epoque Paris to revolutionary Russia,of the overhead viewpoint,the world seen from above.In the context,but not the restrictive confines,of cultural and intellectual history,he refutes the conventional view that these innovations were the consequences of external influences -Japanes prints, for example,or photography - arguing that the raw,bold uncompromising force
of individual imagination created a revolution within the arts that continues to affect the way we see the world.Varndoe describes how the modernists recognized the potential for innovation in traditions and processes that lay near at hand:how Degas discovered a world of space in the peculiar margins of perspective,how Rodin recognized the possibility of a language of modular form in the detritus of a sculptor's studio.By pairing and comparing work from diverse periods,he enables us to see familiar works with a new eye.And by shifting emphasis from social context back to the artist as the prime
source of meaning,he reasserts the most basic notions of modern art's significance.
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