Description
Book Synopsis"What if we ascribe significance to aesthetic and social divergences rather than waving them aside as anomalous? This book places queer demands on art history, tracing the relational networks connecting cosmopolitan eccentrics who cultivated discrepant strains of modernism in America during the 1930s and 1940s.
Trade Review“
Eccentric Modernisms is an inspiring act of queer archive building. In this elegant interdisciplinary study, Tirza True Latimer brings to light three unheralded modernist “documents” collaboratively produced by queer artists who, in Latimer’s view, advance “manifestos” of “eccentric modernism”.” * Art Bulletin *
"Works like Latimer’s will undoubtedly become important records of the changing vocabulary of modernism, in which the structures that guided modernism’s conception in the United States (MoMA, Greenberg’s criticism, the ideal of abstraction, the words “original,” “style,” “kitsch,” and “pure”) are proven unstable. . . . Indeed, scholars of queer history and of artistic movements will find a wealth of primary sources to use in beginning or continuing deeper research into marginalized perspectives on American artistic movements.” * caa.reviews *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: "Eccentric Propositions" 1. Dix Portraits 2. Four Saints in Three Acts 3. View: American Issues Conclusion: "How to Look at Modern Art in America" Notes Selected Bibliography Illustration Credits
