In The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s, Catherine Dossin challenges the now-mythic perception of New York as the undisputed center of the art world between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a position of power that brought the city prestige, money, and historical recognition. Dossin reconstructs the concrete factors that led to the shift of international attention from Paris to New York in the 1950s, and documents how ’peripheries’ such as Italy, Belgium, and West Germany exerted a decisive influence on this displacement of power. As the US economy sank into recession in the 1970s, however, American artists and dealers became increasingly dependent on the support of Western Europeans, and cities like Cologne and Turin emerged as major commercial and artistic hubs - a development that enabled European artists to return to the forefront of the international art scene in the 1980s. Dossin analyses in detail these changing distributions of geopolitical and symbolic power in the Western art worlds - a story that spans two continents, forty years, and hundreds of actors. Her transnational and interdisciplinary study provides an original and welcome supplement to more traditional formal and national readings of the period.

This book challenges the perception of New York as the undisputed center of the art world between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a position of power that brought the city prestige, money, and historical recognition. In her transnational and interdisciplinary study, Dossin analyses changing distributions of geopolitical and symbolic power in the Western art worlds - a story that spans two continents, forty years, and hundreds of actors.

In The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s, Catherine Dossin challenges the now-mythic perception of New York as the undisputed center of the art world between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a position of power that brought the city prestige, money, and historical recognition. Dossin reconstructs the concrete factors that led to the shift of international attention from Paris to New York in the 1950s, and documents how ’peripheries’ such as Italy, Belgium, and West Germany exerted a decisive influence on this displacement of power. As the US economy sank into recession in the 1970s, however, American artists and dealers became increasingly dependent on the support of Western Europeans, and cities like Cologne and Turin emerged as major commercial and artistic hubs - a development that enabled European artists to return to the forefront of the international art scene in the 1980s. Dossin analyses in detail these changing distributions of geopolitical and symbolic power in the Western art worlds - a story that spans two continents, forty years, and hundreds of actors. Her transnational and interdisciplinary study provides an original and welcome supplement to more traditional formal and national readings of the period.

Hot Art, Cold War – Northern and Western European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 is one of two text anthologies that trace the reception of American art in Europe during the Cold War era through primary sources. With the exception of those originally published in English, the majority of these texts are translated into English for the first time from eight languages, and are introduced by scholarly essays. They offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (FRG), Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural, and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations. This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences. Whilst many are fluent in one or two foreign languages, few are able to read all twenty-five languages represented in the two volumes. These ground-breaking publications significantly enrich the fields of American art studies and European art criticism. This book, together with its companion volume Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990,, is a joint initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the editors of the journal Art in Translation at the University of Edinburgh. The journal, launched in 2009, publishes English-language translations of the most significant texts on art and visual cultures presently only available only in their source language. It is committed to widening the perspectives of art history, making it more pluralist in terms of its authors, viewpoints, and subject matter.

Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 is one of two text anthologies that trace the reception of American art in Europe during the Cold War era through primary sources. Translated into English for the first time from sixteen languages and introduced by scholarly essays, the texts in this volume offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Soviet Union (including the Baltic States), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany (GDR). There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations. This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War – Northern and Western European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences. Whilst many are fluent in one or two foreign languages, few are able to read all twenty-five languages represented in the two volumes. These ground-breaking publications significantly enrich the fields of American art studies and European art criticism.

This book is devoted to the concept of horizontal art history—a proposal of a paradigm shift formulated by the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski (1952–2015)—that aims at undermining the hegemony of the discourse of art history created in the Western world. The concept of horizontal art history is one of many ideas on how to conduct nonhierarchical art historical analysis that have been developed in different geopolitical locations since at least the 1970s, parallel to the ongoing process of decolonization. This book is a critical examination of horizontal art history which provokes a discussion on the original concept of horizontal art history and possible methods to extend it. This is an edited volume written by international scholars who acknowledge the importance of the concept, share its basic assumptions and are aware both of its advantages and limitations. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art historiography and postcolonial studies.

Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg~ISBN 0-87846-701-7 U.S. $35.00 / Clothbound, 5.5 x 8.25 in. / 336 pgs / 35 b&w. ~Item / June / Nonfiction and Criticism Ms. Marquis has done a superlative job of setting the bare facts of the man's monklike concentration and tireless industry against the glitz and screaming egos of collectors, dealers and artists. --The New York Times Book Review on Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern

Taking on the myth of France's creative exhaustion following World War II, this collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars, whose research offers English readers a rich and complex overview of the place of France and French artists in the visual arts since 1945. Addressing a wide range of artistic practices, spanning over seven decades, and using different methodologies, their contributions cover ground charted and unknown. They introduce greater depth and specificity to familiar artists and movements, such as Lettrism, Situationist International or Nouveau Réalisme, while bringing to the fore lesser known artists and groups, including GRAPUS, the Sociological Art Collective, and Nicolas Schöffer. Collectively, they stress the political dimensions and social ambitions of the art produced in France at the time, deconstruct the traditional geography of the French art world, and highlight the multiculturalism of the French art scene that resulted from its colonial past and the constant flux of artistic travels and migrations. Ultimately, the book contributes to a story of postwar art in which France can be inscribed not as a main or sub chapter, but rather as a vector in the wider constellation of modern and contemporary art.

This book brings together experts from different fields of study, including sociology, anthropology, art history and art criticism to share their research and direct experience on the topic of art and politics. How art and politics relate with each other can be studied from numerous perspectives and standpoints. The book is structured according to three main themes: Part 1, on Valuing Art, broadly concerns the question of who, how and what value is given to art, and how this may change over time and circumstance, depending on the social and political situation and motivation of different interest groups. Part 2, on Artistic Political Engagement, reflects on another dimension of art and politics, that of how artists may be intentionally engaged with politics, either via their social and political status and/or through the kind of art they produce and how they frame it in terms of meaning. Part 3, on Exhibitions and Curating, focuses on yet another aspect of the relationship between art and politics: what gets exhibited, why, how, and with what political significance or consequence. A main focus is on the politics of art in the Basque Country, complemented by case studies and reflections from other parts of the world, both in the past and today. This book is unique by gathering a rich variety of different viewpoints and experiences, with artists, curators, art historians, sociologists and anthropologists talking to each other with sometimes quite different epistemological bases and methodological approaches.

Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race. In Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment. Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and the connections among authors across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Modernist and avant-garde styles were absorbed into popular culture as writers and artists turned away from social realism to emphasize the process of artistic creation. Hutchinson explores a range of important writers, from Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. African American and Jewish novelists critiqued racism and anti-Semitism, women writers pushed back on the misogyny unleashed during the war, and authors such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams reflected a new openness in the depiction of homosexuality. The decade also witnessed an awakening of American environmental and ecological consciousness. Hutchinson argues that despite the individualized experiences depicted in these works, a common belief in art’s ability to communicate the universal in particulars united the most important works of literature and art during the 1940s. Hutchinson’s capacious view of American literary and cultural history masterfully weaves together a wide range of creative and intellectual expression into a sweeping new narrative of this pivotal decade.