Signifying Art
Essays on Art after 1960

This book, first published in 1999, studies the work of a generation of 'respondents' to the New York School.

Marjorie Welish (Author)

9780521633017, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 September 1999

336 pages, 45 b/w illus.
23.4 x 15.1 x 2.2 cm, 0.66 kg

'Welish not only educates her readers about art, she also informs them about art writing … takes on complex questions surrounding the distinctions between description, interpretation, and evaluation--and provides us with sage advice about how to adjust to changes in the way social and cultural matters are ordered and how regimes of knowledge and belief can be appraised.' Craig Adcock, College Art Association Reviews

This book, first published in 1999, studies the work of a generation of 'respondents' to the New York School, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, who reintroduced pictorialism and verbal content in their paintings and assemblages. Their work, Marjorie Welish argues, often alludes to the history of art and culture. Also examined are the work of Minimal and Conceptual artists, particularly Donald Judd and Sol Le Witt, who sought to make objective and theoretical artefacts in response to the subjectivity that Abstract Expressionism had promoted. By interpreting the work of these artists in the light of contemporary issues, Welish offers a fresh re-evaluation of some of the major trends and production of post-war American painting.

Part I. Narrating the Hand: 1. Pail for Ganymede: Rauschenberg's sculpture
2. Texas, Japan, etc.: Rauschenberg's sense of place
3. The art of Cy Twombly
4. The art of being sparse, porous, scattered
5. Narrating the hand: Cy Twombly and Mary Kelly
6. When is a door not a door?
7. Frame of mind: interpreting Jasper Johns
8. Jasper's patterns
9. The specter of art hype and the ghost of Yves Klein
Part II. Expressionism and Other Expressivites: 10. Harold Rosenberg: transforming the earth
11. The art of Philip Guston
12. Gestural aftermath
13. Contesting leisure: Alex Katz and Eric Fischl
Part III. Ideas of Order: 14. Indeterminacy meets encyclopedia: the art of Kestutis Zapkus
15. A Greenberg retrospective
16. Abstractions: Barnett Newman and James Turrell
17. Literature of silence (Nancy Haynes)
18. Boulders from Flatland: the drawings of Jene Highstein
19. Box, aspects of (Donald Judd)
20. Quality through quantity
21. Maquettes and models: Siah Armajani and Hannes Bruner
22. Ideas of order (Sol Le Witt)
23. Contextualizing 'The Open Work'.

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