The History Of Modern Painting

Over 200 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and conceptual pieces trace the story of modern art's innovation and adventure. With explanatory texts for each work, and essays introducing each of the major modern movements, this is an authoritative overview of the ideas and the artworks that shook up standards, assaulted the establishment, and...

This book traces the development of scientific conservation and technical art history. It takes as its starting point the final years of the nineteenth century, which saw the establishment of the first museum laboratory in Berlin, and ground-breaking international conferences on art history and conservation held in pre-World War I Germany. It follows the history of conservation and art history until the 1940s when, from the ruins of World War II, new institutions such as the Istituto Centrale del Restauro emerged, which would shape the post-war art and conservation world. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, conservation history, historiography, and history of science and humanities.

Since it first appeared in 1968, History of Modern Art has emphasized the unique formal properties of artworks, and the book has long been recognized for the acuity of its visual analysis.

With the recent advent of technologies that make detecting art forgeries easier, the art world has become increasingly obsessed with verifying and ensuring artistic authenticity. In this unique history, Thierry Lenain examines the genealogy of faking and interrogates the anxious, often neurotic, reactions triggered in the modern art world by these clever frauds. Lenain begins his history in the Middle Ages, when the issue of false relics and miracles often arose. But during this time, if a relic gave rise to a cult, it would be considered as genuine even if it obviously had been forged. In the Renaissance, forgery was initially hailed as a true artistic feat. Even Michelangelo, the most revered artist of the time, copied drawings by other masters, many of which were lent to him by unsuspecting collectors. Michelangelo would keep the originals himself and return the copies in their place. As Lenain shows, authenticity, as we think of it, is a purely modern concept. And the recent innovations in scientific attribution, archaeology, graphology, medical science, and criminology have all contributed to making forgery more detectable—and thus more compelling and essential to detect. He also analyzes the work of master forgers like Eric Hebborn, Thomas Keating, and Han van Meegeren in order to describe how pieces baffled the art world. Ultimately, Lenain argues that the science of accurately deciphering an individual artist’s unique characteristics has reached a level of forensic sophistication matched only by the forger’s skill and the art world’s paranoia.

Styles : Cubism - Futurism - Dada - Surrealism. Painters : Picasso - Kandinsky - Klee.

Painting has often been declared dead since the 1960s and yet it refuses to die. Even the status and continued legitimacy of the medium has been repeatedly placed in question. As such, painting has had to continually redefine its own parameters and re-negotiate for itself a critical position within a broader, more discursive set of discourses. Taking the American Clement Greenberg's 'Modernist Painting' as a point of departure, After Modernist Painting will be both a historical survey and a critical re-evaluation of the contested and contingent nature of the medium of painting over the last 50 years. Presenting the first critical account of painting, rather than art generally, this book provides a timely exploration of what has remained a persistent and protean medium. Craig Staff focuses on certain developments including the relationship of painting to Conceptual Art and Minimalism, the pronouncement of paintings alleged death, its response to Installation Art's foregrounding of site, how it was able to interpret ideas around appropriation, simulation and hybridity and how today painting can be understood as both imaging and imagining the digital. After Modernist Painting is an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand the themes and issues that have pertained to painting within the context of postmodernism and contemporary artistic practice.

This handsomely illustrated volume traces the intersections of art history and paintings restoration in nineteenth-century Europe. Repairing works of art and writing about them—the practices that became art conservation and art history—share a common ancestry. By the nineteenth century the two fields had become inseparably linked. While the art historical scholarship of this period has been widely studied, its restoration practices have received less scrutiny—until now. This book charts the intersections between art history and conservation in the treatment of Italian Renaissance paintings in nineteenth-century Europe. Initial chapters discuss the restoration of works by Giotto and Titian framed by the contemporary scholarship of art historians such as Jacob Burckhardt, G. B. Cavalcaselle, and Joseph Crowe that was redefining the earlier age. Subsequent chapters recount how paintings conservation was integrated into museum settings. The narrative uses period texts, unpublished archival materials, and historical photographs in probing how paintings looked at a time when scholars were writing the foundational texts of art history, and how contemporary restorers were negotiating the appearances of these works. The book proposes a model for a new conservation history, object-focused yet enriched by consideration of a wider cultural horizon.