Rethinking Postwar Europe

Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the late 1940s and 1950s. Edited by Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik.

The book offers an in-depth insight into the largely unexplored topic of artistic practices in the 1940s and 1950s in Europe which until recently had been obscured by ideologies of the Cold War. Thanks to the authors’ diverse methodological backgrounds, the volume presents a comprehensive multilayered narrative, focusing on the complexities and entanglements in the artistic field. Instead of assessing the postwar period in the traditional way as divided by the Iron Curtain, the contributions investigate processes of contact, interaction, dissemination, overlapping, and networking. Consequently, the analysis of a diversified European modernism in both its aesthetic and its socio-political dimension resonates with all the different case studies. In particular, the volume looks at how artists developed, designed and (re)negotiated identities and discourses, and sheds new light on the power of art - and creative powers in general - in a postwar setting of mutilations, losses, and devastations. 268 Seiten mit zahlreichen Abb., gebunden (Böhlau Verlag 2020) leichte Lagerspuren/minor shelfwear