The Historical Context of Abstract Expressionism The historical context of Abstract Expressionism can perhaps best be mapped out according to the theories of Pierre Bourdieu who coined the phrase “the field of cultural production.” What was the “field” which...
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF The Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 1939 by Clement Greenberg What is life? If one paraphrases the painter, Ad Reinhardt, “Life is everything that is not art or art is everything that is not life…” which means that much has been excluded from...
How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art: Abstract Expressionism and Meaning The American artists had early training from Modernist masters in New York City that prepared the ground with the abstract Cubism of Piet Mondrian and with Surrealist ideas and...
THE ART SCENE SHIFTS FROM EUROPE TO AMERICA In 1983, art historian, Serge Guilbaut, wrote a provocatively titled book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. How, indeed? While the first chapter of this book discusses the politics of the New York intelligentsia...
Trauerspielbuch (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), 1925 by Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschenTrauerspiels utilized a thought floated by Marx, that all art would become “allegorical” as a result of commodification and of its transformation into...
Re-reading “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin Part Two “What is aura actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. Decades after the...
