Roger Fry, Clive Bell and American Modernism

Regular price €69.99
Regular price €70.99 Sale Sale price €69.99
A01=David Maddock
Aesthetic Formalism
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_David Maddock
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=ACXD2
Category=AGA
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch

Product details

  • ISBN 9781788749275
  • Weight: 433g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 29 May 2020
  • Publisher: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

When the Bloomsbury critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell introduced an aesthetically conservative English public to recent Parisian avant-garde painting, they explained its disconcerting imagery by way of a late nineteenth-century metaphysical tradition which had long intrigued musicians and Symbolist writers on the European continent. The Post-Impressionist aesthetic they devised advocated a direct response to the formal ingenuity of the work of art without recourse to prior knowledge and emphasized the significance of visionary genius, albeit to the detriment of narrative acuity and technical accomplishment, values hitherto upheld by the Edwardian art establishment. The provocation was calculated, the author suggests, and its domestic ramifications were predictable: the reaction of an Anglo-conformist public in New York, on the other hand, was anything but.

Recreating an Anglo-American dialogue inspired by Fry and Bell, and framed within a period encompassing Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition in 1910 and Alfred Barr Jr’s Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition in 1936, the author demonstrates how key components of Bloomsbury’s aesthetic bypassed a pre-existent modernist practice in New York and were instead taken up by an urban intelligentsia which adapted them to the requirements of an increasingly professionalized institutional practice during the 1920s.

Having studied Fine Art at Bristol and then Goldsmith’s College, David Maddock taught art while continuing to practice as a painter. In 1989, he enrolled on the Art History master’s course at the University of Leeds, where he catalogued the works of George Clausen in the Sam Wilson Bequest at the City Art Gallery, before submitting a thesis on English modernist theory between 1910 and 1914. He returned to the topic, expanding upon it, some years later when he undertook his PhD at Leicester University. He is currently Head of Art and Art History at Leicester Grammar School where, in addition to normal teaching duties, he co-ordinates a programme of exhibitions and visits to cities of cultural interest, finding time, when he can, to paint.