Whanganuilibrary.com
Syndetics cover image
Image from Syndetics

The shock of the new / Robert Hughes.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: New York, N.Y. : McGraw-Hill, c1991.Edition: Second editionDescription: 444 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 28 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0070311277 (pbk.)
  • 9780070311275 (pbk.)
Uniform titles:
  • Shock of the new (Television program)
Subject(s):
Contents:
The mechanical paradise -- The faces of power -- The landscape of pleasure -- Trouble in Utopia -- The threshold of liberty -- The view from the edge -- Culture as nature -- The future that was.
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Non-Fiction Alexander Library | Te Rerenga Mai o Te Kauru Stack Room Stack Room 709.04 HUG 1 Available T00442121
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This authoritative, lively book, based on the BBC Time-Life television series, provides a comprehensive survey of the birth and development of modern art and an updated discussion of the European and American art movements in the 70s and 80s including minimalist and public art, 70s American painting, German Neo-Expressionism, art by women, and environmental art. "The Future that Was," the final chapter, is completely rewritten and updated. 75% of the 275 illustrations in the revised edition are in 4-color.

Outgrowth of the eight-part BBC/Time-Life television series written and narrated by the author.

Includes index.

Subtitle on cover : The hundred-year history of modern art, its rise, its dazzling achievement, its fall.

The mechanical paradise -- The faces of power -- The landscape of pleasure -- Trouble in Utopia -- The threshold of liberty -- The view from the edge -- Culture as nature -- The future that was.

11 37

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • 1 The Mechanical Paradise
  • 2 The Abiding Violence
  • 3 The Landscape of Pleasure
  • 4 Trouble in Utopia
  • 5 The Threshold of Liberty
  • 6 The View from the Edge
  • 7 Culture as Nature
  • 8 The Future That Was

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

The author of The Fatal Shore and Time magazine's art critic here presents a greatly expanded version of a PBS television series on modern art, and includes some 270 color illustrations. Although he frequently deals in generalities, ``choice anecdotes, telling characterizations, witty observations flow from his pen,'' lauded PW . The ``chapters bristle with apt insights.'' (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

Like Hilton Kramer, a critic he approvingly quotes, Hughes is reactionary: he reacts continually, and with a certain pugnacious glee, when things do not quite turn out as originally advertised. One of those things is modernist art--out of whose spluttering history Hughes has made a Kenneth Clark-like series for the BBC, the origin of these illustrated essays. Owing to the visual jumpiness a TV series demands, Hughes is all over the place--literally (Van Gogh's Provence, Monet's Giverny, Cezanne's Mont Ste. Victoire) and metaphorically: backpedaling from DeKooning to Kandinsky; terming Picasso--whom he has real antipathy for--a ""walking scrotum"" and his early interest in African sculpture ""a dainty parody of the imperial model""; minutely explaining Duchamp's Large Glass as a masturbation allegory; skewering (along the lines of Peter Blake) the majority of modernist architecture as authoritarian. In general, then, Hughes' is a cultural politics of complaint, pointing to but never describing some vague state of social satisfaction and moral/artistic integrity that the art of this century ostensibly plays no part in: ""There is no intensity without rules, limits, and artifice."" So it becomes more than just a matter of curiosity to see what Hughes actually does approve of. Length of attention is indicative, a corollary of his sympathies: he speaks volubly of Dada, of Rauschenberg and Johns, of Robert Motherwell--punning, anthologizing, highly processed work all; Robert Rosenblum's far-fetched but glossy thesis linking Caspar David Friedrich to Mark Rothko along the same sublime/transcendental arc is bought whole. There's a certain polish to these eclectic nods, true, but finally little depth. A scattershot book, in sum, intermittently entertaining, but without a base or core. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Powered by Koha