The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

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Rosalind Krauss

The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1985, English

Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History; Nonfiction, Photography

ISBN: 9780262610469

From the Publisher. Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of 15 essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of 20th-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, “Modernist Myths” and “Toward Postmodernism,” her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti’s sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

On 2 book lists

Victoria Meyers

On Victoria Meyers’s Book List

Rosalind Krauss wrote many of the best essays on contemporary art in the 20th century. I love her writing, and I especially appreciate that she’s a woman.

Abbott Miller

On Abbott Miller’s Book List

Essays on the history of modernism and photography that shaped much of my thinking about art, design, and theory. Krauss was an incredible teacher but an even better writer—incredibly sophisticated, cerebral, stylish, and original. This book was foundational for me.

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