1920-1945: The Artistic Culture between the Wars

The second offering in Skira's five-volume series Art of the Twentieth Century surveys a period that gave birth to a bewildering array of new forms of expression. The text, written by a group of young scholars and edited by University of Turin art historian Terraroli, encompasses styles from Dadaism to Abstract Expressionism, relating them to the cultural environments and artistic centers that produced them. Chapters are devoted to the tension between the avant-garde and tradition; to Italy, where artists were eager to reconcile the avant-garde with classical tradition; and to a lengthy discussion of surrealism in Spain, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States that gives a lucid account of the movement's literary and political components. Terraroli has also included six short essays by noted scholars who address related topics, including dance, photography, decorative arts and the art of propaganda; one piece offers an illuminating survey of the contemporaneous controversy about whether art should be relevant to or independent of social and political concerns. The color illustrations, often highlighting works of lesser-known artists, are superb, and the text is supplemented by boxes featuring specific subjects or personalities. This beautifully produced volume is an excellent introduction to a complex subject. --series-- This series offers a complete, up-to-date survey of the phenomena of the 1900s and the first years of the new millennium through an original, transversal and interdisciplinary analysis of artistic culture in the twentieth century. The second volume analyses and presents the hugely diverse world of artistic production between the two world wars, taking into consideration not only the environment that took shape in the immediate wake of the First World War, from the so-called "return to order" to the re-emergence of a figurative approach (The New Objectivity, Novecento Italiano, Magic Realism) that was profoundly anti-avant-garde yet imbued with strong plastic and semantic values, but also the evolution of an avant-garde that was now historicised, with its second-generation artists (Aerial Painting, the second generation of Futurism). Also considered are the codification of certain phenomena, such as Surrealism, changes in taste (from Art Deco to Novecentismo), as well as art as the expression of the totalitarian regimes, and the outbreak of the Second World War, with the embracing of environments outside Europe, particularly the USA. The chronological boundaries are marked by the birth of the Dadaist experience in Germany and the establishment of Metaphysics in Italy (1917- 1920) on one side and by the birth of the great season of U.S. Abstract Expressionism (1943-1945) on the other.