The book "Rethinking Postwar Europe" offers an in-depth insight into the largely unexplored topic of artistic practices in the 1940s and 1950s in Europe which until recently had been obscured by ideologies of the Cold War. Thanks to the authors' diverse methodological backgrounds, the volume presents - for the first time - a comprehensive multilayered narrative, focusing on the complexities and entanglements in the artistic field. Instead of assessing the postwar period in the traditional way as divided by the Iron Curtain, the contributions investigate processes of contact, interaction, dissemination, overlapping, and networking. Consequently, the analysis of a diversified European modernism in both its aesthetic and its socio-political dimension resonates with all the different case studies. In particular, the volume looks at how artists developed, designed and (re)negotiated identities and discourses, and sheds new light on the power of art - and creative powers in general - in a postwar setting of mutilations, losses, and devastations.
Author(s): Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt, Agata Pietrasik
Publisher: Bohlau Verlag
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 268
City: Vienna
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Europe, a Challenge | Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik
Narratives
Shaping the Narrative of a New Europe in Art | Éva Forgács
Bodies, Factories, and Islands | Simon Vagts
Practices
Community and Communism | Barbara Lange
The Politics of Asger Jorn’s Modification | Dirk Hildebrandt
Imagining the Future of Postwar Europe | Agata Pietrasik
Identities
Europe as Transit | Hildegard Frübis
Overcoming Ideological Barriers? | Regina Wenninger
Primitivism and Naïveté as Categories of Political Aesthetics | Tanja Zimmermann
Particularities
Joaquim Rodrigo’s Painting | Pedro Lapa
‘Emancipated from Provincial Myth’ | Elisabeth Ansel
Display, Discuss, and Build | Regine Heß
Contributors
Index
Body
