postsocialist postmodernism extraordinary expressionism

books:

2 reviews
Stephanie Barron

Harry N. Abrams, 1991

It's not just the pictures
If the Barron/Guenther book were only about the pictures, it would still rate five stars. It has to catalog "degenerate art" (a weak translation of "entartete Kunst", but the one that has become standard) better than most of its competitors. But Barron and Guenther were not content to stop with a catalog. Even without the pictures, this book would rate five stars. Guenther for one writes about ...

Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (California Studies in the History of Art Discovery Series)

5 reviews
Therese Lichtenstein

University of California Press, 2001

A beautifully crafted book, cautious interpretations
Therese Lichtenstein's "Behind Closed Doors" will immediately grab you visually, as any book about art or an artist should. It rivals Sue Taylor's "Anatomy of Anxiety" as far as visual appeal with the book itself and the plates therein. However, Lichtenstein's discussion of the exceedingly complex Hans Bellmer is a little too cautious, a little too much of a large brushstroke. This is a great ...

Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Library of Holocaust Testimonies,)

1 review
Paul A. Baran, Paul M. Sweezy

Monthly Review Press, 1968

Brilliant Period Piece
"Monopoly Capital" is a classic of radical literature. Written in the 1960s, it argued that oligopolies had taken over the U.S. economy and that oligopolistic industries inevitably generated more "surplus" than the economy could absorb under peacetime conditions. As a result, although huge military spending during World War II and the Cold War had staved off depression, the U.S. economy would ...

Socialist Realist Painting

2 reviews
Matthew Cullerne Bown

Yale University Press, 1998

Encyclopaedic, demanding from the reader's point of view
This book is a throughly history of the art of painting in Russia and the USSR from the point of view of the Realist school of painting that began to exist in the 2nd. half of the XIXth. century and, after the October 1917 Revolution, vied for supremacy with the Futurist school about the right to represent the socialist political project in form and content. The book examines the supramacy of ...

Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (Music of the African Diaspora)

1 review
Robin D. Moore

University of California Press, 2006

Poor scholarship, apolegetics for Castro and his crew
The first problem with this book is that it skims over major developments in Cuban music and treats the topic practically in passing rather than in depth. A serious scholarly work would have focused more on how Cuban music shifted in terms of its harmonic vocabulary, the innovations in terms of different rhythms and how they came about, with interviews from the creators, such as Jose Luis ...

Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s

13 reviews
Sheila Fitzpatrick

Oxford University Press, USA, 1999

Must read
If you have an interest in Stalin and the 1930's, which include the purges, this book is a must for you. For the most part I study the Military and Political history of the early Soviet Union and I had this book on my shelf for years before I finally decided to read it. But once I began I was amazed at myself that I had waited so long to finally dive into this book! The author has really done ...

Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956

2 reviews
Andrew Hemingway

Yale University Press, 2002

A must have for scholars of American art and culture!!
Hemingway has produced a well written, well researched, and richly illustrated book which draws much needed attention to the 1920s-1950s and the Left. Now, thanks to Hemingway, instead of cursory summaries or straight out errors, we have a much more complete story of key issues in our culture.

Capital Dilemma:: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy

1 review

Princeton Architectural Press, 1998

Interesting reading
Capital Dilemma is one of those books that talk about architecture with a slight hue of fiction, which makes interesting reading. The subject matter itself is very intriguing in that it deals with the plots that Germany was subjected to through its rather tumultuous history. Architecture assumes importance as a manouvreable political tool. The classical buildings standing over time accrue ...

German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism ...

1 review
Rose-Carol Washton Long

University of California Press, 1995

German Expressionism:Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism
Edited and annotated by Rose-Carol Washton Long Assistance by Ida Katherine Rigby University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California © 1993 Rose-Carol Washton Long constructed this anthology around a volume of essays in order to reveal a variety of voices associated with this artistic movement. Her work is meant to augment the scope of interpretations formed around the ...

The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (Cultural Memory in the Present)

1 review
Eric Michaud

Stanford University Press, 2004

Remarkably erudite and exceptionally well argued
Eric Michaud's book is an erudite marvel of cultural and intellectual history. Not only does it complement and improve on existing accounts of the role of art in Nazism (particularly the tradition stemming from George L. Mosse's work), it intelligently argues for a rethinking of art's importance in the Nazi project of a new Europe-wide order. Michaud connects art to the Christian and voelkish ...

Russia Gets the Blues: Music, Culture, and Community in Unsettled Times (Culture and Society After Socialism)
Michael E. Urban, Andrei Evdokimov

Cornell University Press, 2004

Michael Urban chronicles the advent of blues music in Russia and explores the significance of the genre in the turbulent, postcommunist society. Russians, he explains, have taken a music originating in the "low" culture of the American South and transformed it into an object of "high" culture, fashioning a social identity that distinguishes blues adherents from both the discredited Soviet past and the vulgar consumerism associated with the ...

Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945
Karen Painter

Harvard University Press, 2008

Can music be political? Germans have long claimed the symphony as a pillar of their modern national culture. By 1900, the critical discourse on music, particularly symphonies, rose to such prominence as to command front-page news. With the embrace of the Great War, the humiliation of defeat, and the ensuing economic turmoil, music evolved from the most abstract to the most political of the arts. Even Goebbels saw the symphony as a tool of ...

Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (Marxism and Culture)

Pluto Press, 2006

This unique book is the first comprehensive introduction to Marxist approaches to art history. Although the aesthetic was a crucial part of Marx and Engels's thought, they left no programmatic statements on the arts. In meeting this gap, succeeding Marxists have inevitably devised a wide variety of approaches to both aesthetics and the writing of art's history. Although there is an abundant scholarship on Marxist approaches to literature, the ...

An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933-1938

1 review
Peter Paret

Cambridge University Press, 2003

an artist against the third reich:ernst barlach, 1933-1938
A perfect addition to the information I'm gathering on Ernst Barlach.

Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, Fourth Edition

10 reviews
Isaiah Berlin

Oxford University Press, USA, 1996

IT'S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS
Isaiah Berlin's biography of Karl Marx is as erudite as it is compelling. Taking one of the more controversial and laborious men of the twentieth century as his subject matter, Berlin weaves the intricate and sometimes confounding thoughts of his subject into a patterned and complex whole. Karl Marx is treated fairly in this book--neither with sycophantic adulation nor with profound cynicism ...

Reinventing Anarchy, Again

1 review

AK Press, 2001

BUY THIS OR DIE
This Awesome volume has no peers.If anarchy interests you even SLIGHTLY, you already have it. Nothing more need be said.

Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe

Berg Publishers, 2000

This book explores the material and visual world of the socialist Bloc from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. The essays, by authors from a range of disciplines, examine the forms and uses of material objects that made up the environment of life behind the 'Iron Curtain', and investigates the particular ways in which these objects came to represent the often divergent aspirations of regimes and peoples in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.The ...

A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Brian Currid

Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2006

A sound track of Germany in the early twentieth century might conjure military music and the voice of Adolf Hitler rising above a cheering crowd. In A National Acoustics , Brian Currid challenges this reductive characterization by investigating the transformations of music in mass culture from the Weimar Republic to the end of the Nazi regime. Offering a nuanced analysis of how publicity was constructed through radio programming, print media, ...

John Heartfield : AIZ/ VI 1930-38

1 review
John Heartfield

Kent Gallery, 1992

AIZ is A-ma-Zing!
This is a very thurough book, with detailed information about each photomontage appearing in AIZ by John Heartfield. The book seems to be the first to provide translations of the German text on each AIZ, and offers some, but not always, enough information about each work by putting it in the historical context it originally appeared. If you're studying Heartfield, this book is well worth your ...

Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism (Ahmanson-Murphy Fine ...

1 review

University of California Press, 2003

Excellent text
Both introductary as well as detailed enough for experts, this is a well-researched and astute text, covering a range of issues that resonate in today's world.

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