Postwar Art Research Articles

Jim Copp's playhouse

Jim Copp wrote, performed, and produced a series of children's phonograph records during the 1950s and 1960s. These records are stunning achievements in magnetic tape-era sound art, and were released and distributed by Playhouse Records, an independent record label operated by Copp and his business partner Ed Brown. The history of Playhouse Records adds to our knowledge of postwar sound art and independent media production, and reveals the potential for children's media to serve as an outlet for artists working on the fringes of the mainstream entertainment scene. In this essay, I situate Playhouse within the context of the postwar record industry, and listen to Copp's recordings with an ear to the intersection of sound studies, queer theory, and children's media culture.

The Color of Experience: Postwar Chromatic Abstraction in Venezuela and Brazil

In the aftermath of World War II, South American artists and critics saw color as a key to liberation from the crisis of the art object and the related crisis of modernity. In so doing, they resisted an entrenched postwar suspicion of color's expressive qualities that elsewhere resulted in color either being repositioned as readymade or purged outright. The essays comprising “Color and Abstraction in Latin America” investigate what was at stake in this resurgence, in 1950s and '60s South American abstraction, of color as a central problem of perceptual experience and subject construction. First, color was conceptualized in relation to material experience, as a corporealization (whether individual or collective) that relocates us as subjects. Second, color became the basis for a complex negotiation that laid claim to chromatic abstraction as a universal project through its localized articulation within the developmentalist contexts of postwar South America. Third, all of these artists and writers contextualized their aesthetic maneuvers in relation to Europe, positioning their work as a resuscitation of the historical avant-garde's utopian aspirations in the wake of the latter's failure in the aftermath of World War II. The essays collected here reassess the role of color in postwar art, to reconsider in light of the varied experiences of developmentalist South American nations what are by now familiar concerns regarding the effects of the commercialization of human imagination and memory, the pervasiveness of culture industry spectacle, and the corrosion of subjectivity imposed by industrial capital.

Islands of Clay

Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011) was an important postwar Asian-American artist from Hawai‘i. My exploration of Takaezu’s work is closely informed by scholarship on hybridity and performative identity, which examines artists with hyphenated identities that bridge multiple personal and cultural formations. Takaezu has occupied an ambiguous and fluid space between cultures, artistic traditions, and assigned gender roles as Asian and American, as potter and sculptor, and as a woman who paid deference to traditional Japanese female culture but was also a pioneer artist who consistently identified with male forms of power. The essential paradoxes of Takaezu’s life and her struggle to find ways to create and perform her ethnicity without becoming trapped within it make her a fascinating case study. Her work reflects the implications of transnational flows and circulations; her clay works speaks to a heritage of migration, dispersal and the need to recapture a sense of lost homeland.

Shinro Ohtake and Post-war Japanese Avant-garde Art

Shinro Ohtake was born in 1955 in Japan when the country first entered its period of major economic growth. Post-war Japanese society was being heavily influenced by American consumerism and its cultural hegemony. Ohtake was no exception: American Pop Art, and Andy Warhol in particular, significantly affected his artistic development. The course of his successful debut in the early 1980s, his subsequent fluctuating career and the recent establishment of his artistic status both in Japan and abroad encapsulate the significant issues of Western-influenced, contemporary Japanese art. This article aims to identify the nature of his Pop Art–style creations by examining his key working methods and the underlying concepts relating to the whole body of his extraordinarily diverse work. In particular, the avant-gardism of Ohtake's art will be examined with reference to Gutai and Mono-ha, the recognised ‘traditional styles’ of the country's post-war avant-garde art. The significance of his anarchism will also be discussed in relation to Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s. By doing so, the article intends to contextualise his creations in the complex development of post-war Japanese avant-garde art, and at the same time explore the potential for transnational engagement of a contemporary artist who lives and practices in the age of globalisation.

Contingent Cubism

January 01 2015 Contingent Cubism Jeffrey Weiss Jeffrey Weiss Jeffrey Weiss is Senior Curator at the Guggenheim Museum and Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. Formerly head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, he has produced numerous exhibitions and publications on topics in modern and postwar art. His most recent exhibition project is a comprehensive survey of the work of On Kawara (Guggenheim Museum, February 6–May 3, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jeffrey Weiss Jeffrey Weiss is Senior Curator at the Guggenheim Museum and Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. Formerly head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, he has produced numerous exhibitions and publications on topics in modern and postwar art. His most recent exhibition project is a comprehensive survey of the work of On Kawara (Guggenheim Museum, February 6–May 3, 2015). Online ISSN: 1536-0105 Print ISSN: 1526-3819 © 2015 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2015 Grey Room (2015) (58): 26–49. https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00161 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Jeffrey Weiss; Contingent Cubism. Grey Room 2015; (58): 26–49. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00161 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsGrey Room Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Between the black box and the white cube: expanded cinema and postwar art

Between the black box and the white cube: expanded cinema and postwar art

Interstitial Movements in the Works of Hanada Kiyoteru: A Preliminary Study

This is a study of Hanada Kiyoteru, a communist literary and art critic whose position in the world of postwar art criticism has gone relatively unexamined in Japanese studies and art history in English. One of the more aggressive critical figures during the immediate postwar era, he helped to foster a community of art critics and artists who carried into practice aspects of his dialectical and surrealist-inflected method of reading. He was in many ways responsible for signifying how postwar avant-garde art should be read, as well as how the prewar efforts could be revived to continue the leftist struggle. This article is primarily concerned with his earlier work, starting from his first collection of essays, Spirit of Renaissance (1946), to his well-known Avant-Garde Art (1954), touching upon some of his major motifs found in these texts. Beginning with Hanada's concern for the “transformative age” referred to as tenkeiki, the article examines his dynamic thinking process, which mirrored the very performative maneuvers he saw in the figures who occupied a transitional period. His investment in the historical interstice was a way to escape essentialism, humanism, and ultimately, Japan. He did so in order to conceive of plurality, nonhuman agency, and becoming. This article, rather than to place Hanada in the historical context in which he wrote, treats his work aesthetically, paying particular attention to the rhythmic and agile movement of his writing and thought.

Contemporary art and unconditionality: ‘the genus of art’ in the art criticism of Chiba Shigeo

This article examines art criticism of the 1980s that sought to address the context and continuity of postwar Japanese avant-garde art. The emphasis is placed on the notion of ‘the genus of art [rui to shite no bijutsu]’, which the art critic Chiba Shigeo discussed in his Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi (1986). Chiba argued for an autonomous current of postwar Japanese art separate from Western art history but the argument has been largely overshadowed by his ostensible nihonjinron. The term ‘the genus of art’, therefore, has not yet received an adequate critical treatment. The article rephrases this notion as a call for a more inclusive definition of art designed to challenge the conditions that regulate non-Western art. Rather than simply being a nationalist polemic against Western art history from a marginalized place, Japan, ‘the genus of art’ was intended to revitalize and redefine the aims of the avant-garde within the context of ‘contemporary art’. By fleshing out the textual details of ‘the genus of art’ and situating the notion within a larger discourse that interrogated the semiotic role of ‘Japan’ in a global exhibition context, the study repositions Chiba's writing as a potential argument for unconditional acceptance, or unconditionality, as one important ethical contribution of contemporary art.

Dead Boars, Viruses, and Zombies: Roberto Jacoby's Art History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsDaniel R. QuilesDaniel R. Quiles is an assistant professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses on the theory and history of postwar art of the Americas. He is currently writing a book manuscript titled “Ghost Messages: Oscar Masotta and Argentine Conceptualism.”

Out of time: Philip Guston and the refiguration of postwar American art

Out of time: Philip Guston and the refiguration of postwar American art

Digitizing artist periodicals: new methodologies from the Digital Humanities for Analysing Artist Networks

The research project Digital Archive of Belgian Neo-Avant-garde Periodicals (DABNAP) aims to digitize and analyse a large number of artists’ periodicals from the period 1950–1990. The artistic renewal in Belgium since the 1950s, sustained by small groups of artists (such as G58 or De Nevelvlek), led to a first generation of post-war artist periodicals. Such titles proved decisive for the formation of the Belgian neo-avant-garde in literature and the visual arts. During the sixties and the seventies, happening and socially-engaged art took over and gave a new orientation to artist periodicals. In this article, I wish to highlight the challenges and difficulties of this project, for example, in dealing with non-standard formats, types of paper, typography, and non-paper inserts. A fully searchable archive of neo-avant-garde periodicals allows researchers to analyse in much more detail than before how influences from foreign literature and arts took root in the Belgian context.

Influencing the Modern in Brisbane

Dr Gertrude Langer arrived quite by chance in Brisbane in 1939 as a refugee from Hitler's Europe. She was a young, elegant Austrian refugee with a PhD in art history from the University of Vienna. After arriving in Australia, Gertrude and her husband, Dr Karl Langer, had hoped to settle in Sydney, but Karl's work as an architect moved them on to Brisbane. Gertrude Langer would become an important figure in Brisbane's post-war art scene through her salon-style lectures, art criticism and work with the Australia Council. She strongly believed that the arts were an important part of a community, and for this reason became a champion for the cause of contemporary art in Brisbane.

Making sense: affective research in postwar Lebanese art

Based on long-term research with contemporary artists in Lebanon, who utilise documentary practices to advance experimental forms of evidence, this article explores the generative possibilities enabled by crossing disciplinary borders between anthropological and artistic modes of social inquiry. In the wake of an unresolved civil war in the country (1975–1990), a vibrant art movement emerged with a set of critical aesthetics aimed at identifying and working through a postwar crisis of representation. Although typically consigned to artistic engagements with the archive, the work of Jayce Salloum, Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari elucidates a motif of research curiously under-examined. Because they each have systematically grappled with the epistemological and methodological aspects of researching the war, their oeuvres provide a germane triptych for assessing alternative forms of evidence. By closely examining the way their work rethinks the taken-for-granted modes of knowledge production, this article argues that their experimental visual practices poignantly critique the politics of representation, redefine the codes of documentary evidence, and ‘make sense’ of the war on an affective level. Although these artists express antagonism toward traditional anthropology, the article contends that their minority perspectives, research methodologies and practice-based accounts work as alternative ethnographies of Lebanon. Drawing upon recent anthropology, film and art theory, this article demonstrates how disciplinary differences serve as ‘productive irritants’ (Schneider and Wright 2006b) and provides glimpses of different forms of knowledge.

Eccentric objects: rethinking sculpture in 1960s America

Jo Applin, Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America New Haven and London, Yale Universit y Press, 2012, 176 pp., 40 colour and 38 b & w illustrations, £35. ISBN 978-0-300-18198-2When you next see a copy of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - the one with the sleeve by Peter Blake - look carefully at the figure partly obscured by the lime-green feathered plume in George Harrison's bicorne. That's H. C. Westermann, the American sculptor, and one of the five artists who form the focus of Jo Applin's Eccentric Objects. Applin takes some pleasure in the fact that one of her artists is in the crowd, rubbing shoulders with Mahatma Ghandi, Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe and all those other famous faces that form the backdrop for the Fab Four. It proves he was part of the 1967 zeitgeist. But only partly, inasmuch as only his left eyebrow, forehead and hair are properly detectible. For Applin, his semi-visibility in this famous image is apt, for it provides her with a nice allegory for describing his equivalently 'oblique' standing within the contemporary art scene (p. 115).Applin's recourse to Blake's album sleeve also serves as helpful way of summarizing her art-historical approach to sculpture during 1960s. She selects sculptors - Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Westermann and Bruce Nauman - who were all well represented by museums and galleries during the period, yet arguably never quite seem central to histories of that moment. The reason for this is that their art now fails to fit with the critical categories that art historians are inclined to use when discussing this period, such as 'abstraction', 'assemblage', 'minimalism' or 'pop'. Nonetheless, she is clear that these artists do not amount to an alternative tradition: instead she is more interested in charting the ways in which their various trajectories intersect with the more established narratives that have come to define this era. Her rationale is that by approaching sculpture from the perspective of these figures, who otherwise might appear as 'misfits' (p. 141), the tidy, familiar histories of 1960s sculpture begin to unravel, and the entire field starts to look a lot more idiosyncratic, and generally more open.If Blake's Beatles album sleeve is one of the most iconic images from 1960s popular culture, then Donald Judd's essay 'Specific Objects' must surely hold a commensurate status for students of 1960s art. Judd's 1965 review of the work of his contemporaries is one of those essays that is included on reading lists for practically every post-war art history survey course for undergraduates.1 But students are largely encouraged to read it as a manifesto for the newly emerging minimalist tendencies, with which Judd's name would increasingly be associated. The problem, though, is that almost all the art he references in 'Specific Objects' hardly looks 'minimal' by today's standards; in fact it is often a challenge for students to come to terms with the disarming stylistic diversity of his examples. For Applin, however, the heterogeneity of Judd's choices is a source of great interest, and this serves as the starting point for her account. Eccentric Objects is essentially a study of those artists whom Judd enlisted in order to clarify his artistic programme, and by exploring this diverse body of material, she tacitly undermines the coherency of minimalism as a critical category.Judd, however, is not the only critical reference point to which Applin refers. She points out that sculptors such as Oldenburg, Bontecou and Nauman also enjoyed the endorsement of the critic Lucy Lippard, in spite of the fact that her outlook is often seen as extremely different to Judd's. In other words both writers were turning to the same artists to promote their respective positions. In 1966 Lippard curated the group exhibition 'Eccentric Abstraction', with a view to promoting a biomorphic alternative to the hard-edged forms of the increasingly dominant minimalist trend. …

Introduction: Collectivism in Twentieth-Century Japanese Art with a Focus on Operational Aspects of Dantai

Collectivism is a lively phenomenon in a rapidly globalizing world of contemporary art today. Artists' groups proliferate in many regions of the world, calling into question the modern myth of originality and individualism. These collectives actively explore new possibilities of expression and operation, while aspiring to break down the conventional boundaries that have long conditioned the production of art and its distribution in society. The global scope of artists' collectives makes the study of collectivism an integral part of “world art history,” providing a critical perspective in understanding the distinctive local developments of modernity and postmodernity worldwide. This issue focuses on twentieth-century Japan to examine some critical issues concerning collectivism and art, including the impetuses and origins of collectivism, the evolution of modern and contemporary collectivism, and the ways collectivism shapes artists' practices of making and showing art in an environment they operate. In particular, this introduction proposes a periodization of kindai (modern), gendai (contemporary), and kontemporarī (“contemporary” in a global sense) based on three different operational modes of collectivism and explores how modern collectivism that centered on bijutsu dantai (art associations) helped create the art establishment and disseminate the idea of modernism among the general public, while fostering vanguard experimentalism that foresaw the collectivism of postwar art.

D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form and the Concept of Dynamic Form in Postwar Avant-Garde Art Theory

The impact is considered of D’Arcy Thompson’s notion of biological form as set out in On Growth and Form on postwar avant-garde experimental art practices associated with the Independent Group, Nigel Henderson’s photography, and László Moholy-Nagy’s post-Bauhaus art theory. How Thompson’s insistence on the importance of physical forces in shaping biological form, and of distortion as a component of symmetrical systems, influenced the writings and practices of these artists, is explored, linking abstraction to legacies concerned with materiality and technique encountered earlier in Constructivism. Henderson’s photograms and ‘stressed photography’ are shown to be directly inspired by Thompson’s conception of form as a diagram of forces, and attest to a novel understanding of rules of symmetry in abstract form that may be seen in the dynamic processes at play in complex natural phenomena. How Moholy-Nagy explored these notions theoretically is examined, for example in his definition of drawing in Vision in Motion, which cites Thompson directly as a source of inspiration.

Jikken Kobo and Takiguchi Shuzo: The New Deal Collectivism of 1950s Japan

In post-1945 Japan, the government, guided by the occupation authority, reeducated the people with a democratic ideology. Belligerent nationalism was replaced by a national mission of enrichment of arts and culture. Takiguchi Shūzō (1903–79), a poet-critic and supporter of vanguard art since the prewar period, continued to cultivate the spirit of defiance against the establishment in the postwar art world. However, as a respected man of culture, he was also involved in a project of building the first national museum of modern art for the purpose of public enlightenment. This article explores how Takiguchi fostered independent art movements despite his conflicting engagement with the establishment. In Takiguchi’s mind, artistic collectivism had to be rooted in the public domain so that art and society would inform each other. His utopian vision paralleled many objectives of the historical avant-gardes of the West, and it was transmitted to the postwar generation of artists, most notably, to the artists’ collective Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop; active 1951–57). This group exemplified the postwar Japanese reception of the Bauhausian philosophy of unified art, and Takiguchi played an important role in fostering Jikken Kōbō’s interest in the Bauhaus. By placing the transmission of utopianism from Takiguchi to Jikken Kōbō in a larger politicocultural context, this article analyzes the effect of the legacy of the US-led occupation on the idea of artistic collectivism in 1950s Japan. The United States was already under the influence of the Bauhaus in the 1930s as evidenced in the establishments of Black Mountain College and the Chicago Bauhaus. The concept of progressive art education promoted by these schools eventually reached Japan through the postwar occupation, whose initial directive was fueled by New Deal liberalism. This article examines a work that revisited Bauhausian philosophy, Jikken Kōbō’s 1955 The Future Eve ( Mirai no ivu ), an experimental ballet theater based on a science fiction novel written in 1886 by the French novelist Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The Future Eve revealed Jikken Kōbō’s affinity with the Bauhaus in its collective engagement with production of theater, its strong interest in merging art and technology, and ultimately, its belief in art’s relevance to social and public issues of the time.

Tokyo, 1955-1970: a new avant-garde

Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde explores the extraordinary convergence of artists, intellectuals, and creators in Japans capital city during the radically transformative postwar period. Examining works from a range of media paintings, sculpture, photographs, drawings, prints, videos and films, as well as graphics, architecture, musical compositions and dance this is the first publication in English to focus in depth on the full scope of postwar art in Japan. The city during this period was a vibrant hub that attracted such critical artistic figures as Taro Okamoto, Hiroshi Nakamura, Ay-O, Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi and Tetsumi Kudo; photographers Daido Moriyama, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu; illustrators and graphic designers Tadanori Yokoo, Kohei Sugiura and Kiyoshi Awazu; and architects Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurokawa; as well as many important artists collectives. Curator Doryun Chongs introductory essay investigates Tokyos sociopolitical context and the massive urban changes that redefined the city as a vital node in the international avant-garde network. Essays by scholars Hayashi Michio and Miryam Sas and curator Mika Yoshitake discuss central notions of postwar Japanese art, including design and graphics; the development of new sculptural languages; and the intermedia trend that engendered experimental performance works and cross-pollination among artistic modes.

Art and/or Revolution: The Matter of Painting in Postwar Japan

Japanese art critics of the 1950s perceived the locus of a new materialist aesthetics in the new trends of informal abstraction emanating from the United States and France. This revealed a stark contrast with the idea of individual freedom that informed North-American discourse on Abstract Expressionism. Focusing on the writings of Miyakawa Atsushi, Haryū Ichirō, and Segi Shinichi, this article explores the political significance of the question of matter in Japanese postwar art criticism and indicates its importance for the subsequent development of avant-garde art in 1960s Japan.

Art in an Age of Civil Struggle 1848-1871. A Social History of Modern Art. Volume Four

Published barely four months before the author’s death in November 2008, one of a projected six-volume social history of western art from the Ancien Régime to the First World War stands, at least provisionally, as an epitaph to one of the most influential and productive careers in post-war art history. A seminal figure in opening up the discipline to other areas of historical enquiry, Albert Boime was central to the vigorous debate initiated during the 1970s by scholars such as Robert Herbert, Linda Nochlin, and T. J. Clark out of which art history emerged re-invigorated as a more theoretically aware and politically engaged field of enquiry. The importance of nineteenth-century French studies within this radical re-evaluation is reflected in the overall balance of Boime’s gargantuan survey (currently totalling some 3000 pages). Begun in 1987, and seemingly growing in scope and ambition with each successive volume, this final offering has reached what might be regarded as the symbolic departure point of the intellectual revolution to which it attests: Nochlin’s work on Courbet, Herbert’s research on Millet, and Clark’s publications on Courbet, Manet, and the art of the Second Republic all stand as particularly authoritative antecedents in the study of Realism and Impressionism that dominates Boime’s current instalment. Beyond this, over the course of an unusually prolific career, Boime himself published widely on mid-century culture, not only in France, but also in nations traditionally less often considered in the art-historical literature, notably Italy, Germany and the United States. If whole chapters of Art in an Age of Civil Struggle have a familiar ring, this is because Boime draws upon his prodigious back-catalogue of books and articles covering a myriad of artists and themes from the Second Republic to the Commune.