Description
Book Synopsis Gavin Parkinson is Professor of European Modernism, The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK.
Trade ReviewParkinson’s expansive study opens up poetic, allusive, and sometimes political layers in Rauschenberg ’s works, unearthing important responses from Parisian critics and writers. This approach unexpectedly establishes Rauschenberg’s Surrealist inflected roots, whilst contributing to the recent wave of expanded consideration of post-war, later Surrealism. * Lewis Kachur, author of Displaying the Marvellous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (2001), and Professor of Art History, Kean University, USA *
With remarkable precision, thoroughness, and generative energy, Parkinson’s book offers an authoritative account of the French surrealist reception of Rauschenberg’s work in the 1960s. Analysing little-known and untranslated texts, Parkinson shows just how enmeshed the aesthetic and political registers were for these writers and artists. * Edward Krcma, Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art History and World Art Studies, University of East Anglia, UK *
This impressive book is more than a study on Rauschenberg and Surrealism, more specifically on the largely unnoticed or forgotten link between them. It is also a reflection on the way we write art history today, as a strange mix of theory, thoroughly documented archival research and, above all, an obsession with linear periodization. -- Jan Baetens * Leonardo Reviews *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Poet: Allegory and Metaphor in US Art History and Criticism 2. In the Surrealist Domain:
Bed and
Target with Plaster Casts 3. Opposer: The Poetics and Politics of
Canyon in Paris and New York, 1961 4. Surrealist of the Re-Found Object:
Monogram in
Front unique 5. Resistance Artist:
Bed at
Anti-Procès 6. The Constantin Guys of the Atomic Era: Alain Jouffroy,
Talisman and
Barge 7.
Choisiste: ‘Things’ in French and US Art Criticism in the 1960s 8. Surrealist in Irony: José Pierre and
Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely) Concluding Remarks: On Robert Rauschenberg, Surrealism and Art History
