Modernism and Authority: Picasso and His Milieu around 1900
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Modernism and Authority: Picasso and His Milieu around 1900 Details
From the Inside Flap "Charles Palermo's Modernism and Authority pursues a wholly new approach to early Picasso (and to Apollinaire, among other fascinating figures) by exploring with exceptional brilliance, learning, and sophistication a set of theoretical and indeed theological issues that he demonstrates were at the forefront of serious thinking, writing, and art making in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's a stunning achievement, one that sets a new standard for interpretive work on the period, and not only in the history of art." —Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University "Do we need to understand Pope Pius X in order to understand Apollinaire and Picasso? This extraordinary book says yes, and brilliantly shows how the crisis of authority produced by Catholic modernism contributed to the crisis of authority that produced the very different modernism of the French poet and the Spanish painter. The readings of Apollinaire are amazing; the readings of certain crucial early Picassos alter forever one’s sense of what is at stake in those paintings." —Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy"Although focused on a select group of writers and painters and a brief moment in history, this book addresses the much larger issue of modernism’s crisis of authority (i.e., art’s ability, in the absence of a given tradition, to compel conviction). Palermo’s nuanced discussions of individual works reveal a surprising number of parallels with and references to contemporaneous debates within the Catholic Church. If I was initially skeptical of the theological dimension of his project, I have since been converted—such is the marvelous authority of Palermo’s text." —Lisa Florman, Ohio State University Read more About the Author Charles Palermo is Associate Professor of Art History at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miró in the 1920s. Read more
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