Writings on Art and Anti-Art
Art historian and curator Dawn Ades is a leading voice on Dada, Surrealism, abstraction and art from Latin America. This volume collects her important essays for the first time, addressing themes fundamental to the history of modern art and the avant-garde.
Arranged thematically, this collection of essays represents the breadth of Ades’s critical and curatorial interests, ranging from avant-garde poster design, to photomontage, to the representation of the female in Mexico, but with an overarching foundation in abstraction, identity and the influence of new mediums.
As well as working as a professor and curator – which earned her an OBE for her services to art history – Ades has written on a wide range of artists since 1980. Spanning the likes of Francis Bacon, Richard Deacon, Salvador Dalí and Hannah Höch, this body of essays is ingrained with Ades’s consistently clear and intellectually stimulating observations.
To introduce the book, Ades is interviewed by Doro Globus, who explores the writer’s relationship to curating, teaching and art history.
Dawn Ades is a Fellow of the British Academy, a former trustee of Tate, Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy and was awarded a CBE in 2013 for her services to art history. She is currently Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex. She has been responsible for some of the most important exhibitions in London and overseas over the past 30 years, including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed and Art in Latin America at the Hayward Gallery and Francis Bacon at the Tate. Most recently she organised the highly successful exhibition to celebrate the centenary of Salvador Dalí at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (2004), The Colour of my Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2011), and was Associate Curator for Manifesta 9 (2012). She has published standard works on photomontage, Dada, Surrealism, women artists and Mexican muralists.