A01=Saul Nelson
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Saul Nelson
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=ACXD2
Category=AFC
Category=AGA
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780300272307
- Dimensions: 203 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 23 Apr 2024
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A new history of postwar painting that explores how the desire to look backward shaped some of the period’s most radical artmaking
This incisive account of modernism’s postwar development examines how painters, such as Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman, and Rose Piper, invoked tradition in order to respond to, participate in, and disrupt the histories of the movement being written at midcentury. Saul Nelson argues that artists’ turn to the past, often dismissed as regressive, offers an important counternarrative to the notion of modernism as always pushing forward. To be a modernist, Nelson contends, was to live in doubt—about which aspects of the past were still needed and how they might be put to new use.
The story ranges across continents and historical boundaries, from India to Europe and the United States. It encompasses Grace Hartigan’s and Mitchell’s feminist reworkings of Matisse, the links between the work of Newman and nationalistic nineteenth-century painting, the attempts of Piper to salvage a heritage from the Harlem Renaissance, and F. N. Souza’s interrogations of the legacies of colonialism. Never Ending presents a new history of postwar painting in which modernism is reimagined as a practice of retrieval and reinvention, a ceaseless confrontation between tradition and the demands of the present.
This incisive account of modernism’s postwar development examines how painters, such as Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman, and Rose Piper, invoked tradition in order to respond to, participate in, and disrupt the histories of the movement being written at midcentury. Saul Nelson argues that artists’ turn to the past, often dismissed as regressive, offers an important counternarrative to the notion of modernism as always pushing forward. To be a modernist, Nelson contends, was to live in doubt—about which aspects of the past were still needed and how they might be put to new use.
The story ranges across continents and historical boundaries, from India to Europe and the United States. It encompasses Grace Hartigan’s and Mitchell’s feminist reworkings of Matisse, the links between the work of Newman and nationalistic nineteenth-century painting, the attempts of Piper to salvage a heritage from the Harlem Renaissance, and F. N. Souza’s interrogations of the legacies of colonialism. Never Ending presents a new history of postwar painting in which modernism is reimagined as a practice of retrieval and reinvention, a ceaseless confrontation between tradition and the demands of the present.
Saul Nelson is Junior Research Fellow in the History of Art at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge.
