Modern Art and the Grotesque

Examines how the grotesque has shaped the history, practice, and theory of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Frances S. Connelly (Edited by)

9780521115766, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 16 July 2009

336 pages, 92 b/w illus.
24.4 x 17 x 1.8 cm, 0.54 kg

This volume examines how the grotesque has shaped the history, practice, and theory of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The grotesque entered into the mainstream of modern expression during the romantic era. It has been adopted by a succession of artists as a way to push beyond established boundaries, to explore alternate modes of experience and expression, and to challenge the status quo. Examining specific images by a range of artists, such as Ingres, Gauguin, Höch, de Kooning, Polke, and Mona Hatoum, the essays also encompass a variety of media, including medical illustration, paintings, prints, photography, multimedia installations, and film. This study brings into focus a range of subjects, styles and theoretical viewpoints that have traditionally been marginalized in the standard narratives on modernism. It demonstrates how the grotesque in modern art directly ties into current debates regarding the representation of race and gender, abjection and the other, globalization, and appropriation.

List of figures
Contributors
Preface
1. Introduction Frances S. Connelly
2. The archaeology of the modern grotesque David Summers
3. Van Gogh's ear: toward a theory of disgust Michel Chaouli
4. Conceiving Barbara Maria Stafford
5. Blemished physiologies: Delacroix, Paganini and the cholera epidemic of 1832 Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer
6. Ingres and the poetics of the grotesque Heather McPherson
7. The Stones of Venice: John Ruskin's grotesque history of art Frances S. Connelly
8. Eden's other: Gauguin and the ethnographic grotesque Elizabeth C. Childs
9. Grotesque bodies: Weimar-era medicine and the photomontages of Hannah Höch Maria Makela
10. Convulsive bodies: the grotesque anatomies of surrealist photography Kirsten A. Hoving
11. Willem de Kooning's Women: the body of the grotesque Leesa Fanning
12. Double-take: Sigmar Polke and the tradition of the grotesque-comic Pamela Kort
13. Redefinitions of abjection in contemporary performances of the female body Christine Ross
14. The grotesque today: preliminary notes towards a taxonomy Noël Carroll
Index.

Subject Areas: History of art & design styles: from c 1900 - [ACX]