Hopkins David - After Modern Art 1945 - 2017

Oxford History of Art

David Hopkins is Professor of Art History at the University of Glasgow, where his broad areas of specialism are Dada and Surrealism, the history and theory of post-1945 art, and twentieth-century photography. He has published extensively on Dada and Surrealism and related topics in post-war art. His publications include Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared (Oxford University Press, Clarendon Studies in the History of Art, 1998); Marcel Duchamp (London, 1999), co-authored with Dawn Ades and Neil Cox; Dada and Surrealism: A Very ShortIntroduction (Oxford University Press, 2004); Neo-Avant-Garde (Rodopi, 2006); Dadas Boys: Masculinity After Duchamp (Yale University Press, 2007); Virgin Microbe: Essays onDada (Northwestern University Press, 2014), co-edited with Michael White; and A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Wiley Blackwell, 2016). In 2000 he curated an exhibition of Weegees photographs for the Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, and, in 2006 and 2010, two further exhibitions on contemporary art at the Fruitmarket Gallery, EdinburghDadas Boys: Play and Identity in Contemporary Art and Childish Things. He also writes and performs poetry, often in collaboration with other performers and visual artists.

Titles in the Oxford History of Art series are up-to-date, fully illustrated introductions to a wide variety of subjects written by leading experts in their field. They will appear regularly, building into an interlocking and comprehensive series. In the list below, published titles appear in bold.

WESTERN ART

Archaic and Classical Greek Art

Robin Osborne

Classical Art From Greece to Rome

Mary Beard & John Henderson

The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100450

Ja Elsner

Early Medieval Art

Lawrence Nees

Medieval Art

Veronica Sekules

Art in Renaissance Italy

Evelyn Welch

Northern European Art

Susie Nash

Modern Art 18511929

Richard Brettell

After Modern Art 19452017

David Hopkins

WESTERN ARCHITECTURE

Early Medieval Architecture

Roger Stalley

Medieval Architecture

Nicola Coldstream

Renaissance Architecture

Christy Anderson

European Architecture 17501890

Barry Bergdoll

Modern Architecture

Alan Colquhoun

Architecture in the United States

Dell Upton

WORLD ART

Aegean Art and Architecture

Donald Preziosi & Louise Hitchcock

Early Art and Architecture of Africa

Peter Garlake

African-American Art

Sharon F. Patton

Twentieth-Century American Art

Erika Doss

Byzantine Art

Robin Cormack

Art in China

Craig Clunas

Indian Art

Partha Mitter

Mesoamerican Art

Cecelia Klein

Native North American Art

Janet C. Berlo & Ruth B. Phillips

Polynesian and Micronesian Art

Adrienne L. Kaeppler

WESTERN DESIGN

Twentieth-Century Design

Jonathan M. Woodham

Design in the USA

Jeffrey L. Meikle

Fashion

Christopher Breward

PHOTOGRAPHY

The Photograph

Graham Clarke

WESTERN SCULPTURE

Sculpture Since 1945

Andrew Causey

THEMES AND GENRES

Landscape and Western Art

Malcolm Andrews

Portraiture

Shearer West

Beauty and Art

Elizabeth Prettejohn

REFERENCE BOOKS

The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology

Donald Preziosi (ed.)

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David Hopkins 2018

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First published 2000 by Oxford University Press

Second edition published 2018

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932147

ISBN 9780199218455

ebook ISBN 9780191084492

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On 9 August 1945 an atom bomb fell on Nagasaki in Japan, bringing the Second World War to a close. During the six years of the conflict an incalculable number of people had lost their lives. Soon the West would become aware of the horrors of the Holocaust visited on Germanys Jewish population. Stalins atrocities in Russia would also become apparent. Before long a new ideological Cold War between Eastern Europe and America would structure international relations in the West. These are the stark realities from which this history of post-war Western art stems. The German marxist Theodor Adorno once asserted that it would be barbaric to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz. How, he implied, could art measure up to the immensities of technological warfare and the extermination of whole populations? Art in the age of the mass media would, in his view, have to take on a resistant character if it were not to become ineffectual and compromised. Much of this book examines the continuation of an avant-garde artistic project after 1945, although not necessarily in Adornos terms. The art it discusses is therefore frequently challenging, provocative, and difficult. One of my main aims has been to retain a sense of its inner dynamic by emphasizing the critical and theoretical debates that nourished it, informed its contexts, and continue to make it meaningful.

This books framework is broadly chronological, with much of the established artistic canon in place, although a number of non-standard names and lesser-known works have been included. One of the aspirations of recent art history has been the abandonment of an artist-led conception of the subject in favour of examining how representations of various kinds are culturally produced. Whilst this book deals extensively with issues of cultural politics, gender identity, and the institutional support structures for art (the market, critics, education, and galleries), I have felt it necessary to preserve a strong sense of the historical agency of individual artists. In many ways this is appropriate to the period. Despite an ideologically motivated call for the death of the author, the fact remains that in real terms the prestige of individual artists has continued to be paramount. An archaeology of arts societal position is also more difficult to achieve for an era that is so close to us. The most pressing task still seems to be one of structuring the period as a historical entity, and making it coherent. As yet, few books have attempted to encompass the whole period from 1945 to the early 2000s. Those that have done so have often ended up looking self-defeatingly encyclopaedic or self-protectively partisan.