Southeastern Art Gallery News

Carl Gutherz: Poetic Vision and Academic Ideals contains a biography and a series of essays that explore the relationship between Gutherz’s work and his personal experiences, his philosophical beliefs, and his academic training. Based largely on the extensive collection of artwork, journals, and archival material in the collection of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, it offers an overview of Gutherz’s activities in Memphis, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C., and his achievements as an expatriate painter in France.

University Press of Mississippi

Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames intimately explores Expressionist Claude Monet’s London series of paintings, especially those that immortalized the Thames River. In this volume we are invited to explore the scope of the socio-cultural context of that time, through the works of Monet’s contemporaries: Derain, Coburn, Fenton, Pennell, and Whistler, to name a few. In the latter half of the 19th century, London, specifically around the Thames, had become a seductive urban landscape—a place that encouraged artists to create.

Not only does Monet’s London document an important exhibition, but it is also the first publication to thoroughly document and discuss the artistic and cultural context of Modernist London (1859-1914), with special emphasis on the visual power of the Thames River.

Snoeck-Ducaju en Zoon, N.V.

At the height of the Cold War, art produced in divided Germany contested the cultural demarcation of East and West. Here Claudia Mesch shows how a wide group of artists struggled to take visual art beyond the crude separations of the “Iron Curtain,” and to transcend the first global cultural divide of the twentieth century. Artists in Berlin produced artworks–including painting, performance and film–that engaged critically with imposed national and global identities, and with issues of memory and trauma.Modern Art at the Berlin Wall presents a new picture of the Cold War border between East and West as a dynamic and international cultural space, and is essential for all those interested in art history, modernism, the Cold War and the cultural history of the twentieth century.

Macmillan

Pop Art and the Contest Over American Culture examines the socially and aesthetically subversive character of pop art. Providing a historically contextualized reading of American pop art, Sara Doris locates the movement within the larger framework of the social, cultural, and political transformations of the 1960s. She demonstrates how pop art’s use of discredited mass-cultural imagery worked to challenge established social and cultural hierarchies. At the same time, its affinities with marginalized forms of taste - gay Camp and youth culture - allied it with the proto-political changes foreshadowing the radical politics that emerged late in the decade. Pop art’s subversive critique of consumer culture also served as a crucial precedent for postmodernist practices. By analyzing pop art within the context of the broader social upheavals of the 1960s, this study establishes that it was both a significant participant in those transformations and that it profoundly shaped today’s postmodern culture.

• First full-scale scholarly re-evaluation of American Pop Art in the last eight years, bringing our understanding of the movement up to date • Provides the first historical accounting of Pop Art’s role in the emergence of postmodernist culture • Broad cultural and historical contextualization will appeal to those interested in visual studies, cultural studies, American studies and history.

Editor’s Note: This is a scholarly title which covers the subject matter in great detail.

Cambridge University Press