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Loading... Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Artby Emma Acker
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"A fresh look at a bold and dynamic 20th-century American art style Characterized by highly structured, geometric compositions with smooth surfaces, linear qualities, and lucid forms, Precisionism fully emerged after World War I and flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. This insightful publication, featuring more than 100 masterworks by artists such as Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Demuth, sheds new light on the Precisionistaesthetic and the intellectual concerns, excitement, tensions, and ambivalences about industrialization that helped develop this important strand of early American modernism. Essays explore the origins of the style--which reconciled realism with abstraction and adapted European art movements like Purism, Cubism, and Futurism to American subject matter--as well as its relationship to photography, and the ways in which it reflected the economic and social changes brought about by industrialization and technology in the post-World War I world. In addition to making a meaningful contribution to the resurging interest in Modernism and its revisionist narratives, this book offers copious connections between the past and our present day, poised on the verge of a fourth industrial revolution"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)701.03The arts Modified subdivisions of the arts Philosophy and theory of fine and decorative artsLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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There is also something of an irony in this book, in as the assorted essayists want to link Precisionism, with its fascination with the high technology of the time, with contemporary obsessions relating to digital technology, these people are now caught like insects in amber, as the COVID epidemic, and the Russo-Ukrainian war, basically broke the globalist economy, putting a severe dent in those enthusiasms.
Also, granted that the contributors are mostly concerned about the relationship between art and technology, it does seem that there was an opportunity to write about Precisionism in relation to other American schools of epic landscape painting.
Finally, as a last word, I particularly like the observation taken from Georgia O'Keefe on the New York cultural scene of the the 1920s, and how while the denizens of the salons talked about creating the "Great American Novel," or the "Great American Play," no one was talking about creating the "Great American Painting." If that isn't a declaration of "challenge accepted," I don't know what is. ( )