info@woodslane.com.au
Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

WOODSLANE

Popular Subjects

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9780271082387 Add to Cart Academic Inspection Copy

Art and Form:

From Roger Fry to Global Modernism
Description
Table of
Contents
Reviews
Google
Preview
In this examination of the rise of formalism in the visual arts, Sam Rose uses a close contextual study of Roger Fry and British art writing from 1900 to 1939 to rethink how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement's significance to art history today.
 
In the context of modernism, formalist critics are often thought to be interested in art rather than life, a stance exemplified in their support for abstract works that exclude the world outside. But through careful attention to early twentieth-century connoisseurship, aesthetics, art education, design, and art in colonial Nigeria and India, Rose builds an expanded account of form based on its engagement with the social world. Art and Form thus opens discussions on a range of urgent topics in art writing, from its history, to constructions of high and low culture, to the idea of global modernism. Rose demonstrates the true breadth of formalism and how it lends a new richness to thought about art and visual culture in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Accessibly written and analytically sophisticated, Art and Form opens exciting new paths of inquiry into the meaning and lasting importance of formalism and its ties to modernism. It will be invaluable for scholars and enthusiasts of art history and visual culture.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Art Writing

1. Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

2. The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

Part Two: Art and Life

3. Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

4. Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing: For and Against Mass Culture

5. Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

Notes

Bibliography

Index



“A brilliant and timely account of aesthetic form and formalism. Debates about form are fundamental to modernism, and indeed to the story of the arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, yet until now we have been lacking a sustained investigation of how this came to be. Art and Form is a great work of art history, and it will also prove indispensable to literary scholars, philosophers, and cultural critics.”

—Rebecca Beasley, author of Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism

Google Preview content