Publisher's Synopsis
Renowned art historian/critic of modern art, Joseph Masheck was so encouraged to be a generalist by his mentor, the great architectural historian Rudolf Wittkower, that he answers to a specialty of "mostly modern." This book, a compilation of essays by colleagues near and far, has grown out of a symposium organised at Hofstra for his seventieth birthday. Appealing to "mostly modern" taste, they range over five categories: critical thought (Kant, Ruskin, Cézanne); architecture in cultural space (earliest Renaissance in Britain, Le Corbusier, the architectural imagination of Robbe-Grillet); Central and East European modernism (Latvian art, Kirchner, El Lissitzky); postwar modernism (indeterminacy in music and painting, drawing on a Mies van der Rohe wall, later critical legacy of Malevich's Black Square); and style and habitus (male 'bohemianism' in 16th-century Holland, feminist art-student 'hijinks' in turn of the century Edinburgh, and a piece by Masheck on the 1950s modernist topos of 'bad' barbarian copies of classical coins having "abstract" formal conviction). Each essay is prefaced by Masheck, so that the "mostly modern" symposium may continue to invite ongoing debate. Contents of the book and contributors: Preface: Joseph Masheck Reintroducing Joseph Masheck: Different Forms of Formalism and the Geometry of Humanism David L. Craven Critical Thought: 1. The "Space... in Which I Find Myself": Kant on the Origin of Spatial Form Terry F. Godlove; 2. Ruskin's Critical Pathos Andrew Ballantyne; 3. Cézanne's Oedipal Complex: His Father's Throne and His Lover's Son Brian Winkenweder; 4. Two Bodies Steven Henry Madoff; Architecture in Cultural Space: 5. The "Solomonic Window" in Scotland and At Large Ian Campbell; 6. Le Corbusier's Middleground Deborah Gans; 7. Adhering to the Text: Notes on the Observation and Description of a House in a Frantisek Lesák 1957. Central and East-European Modernism: 8. Nationality and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Baltic Art S. A. Mansbach; 9. Framing Movement: Kirchner in Berlin Charles W. Haxthausen; 10. Utopian Violence: El Lissitzky's Constructivist Victory Over the Sun Christine Poggi Postwar Modernism: 11. Revisiting Indeterminacy: On Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and the New York Painters David Ryan; 12. Drawing on Mies's Wall in Houston Alan Johnston; 13. Afterlife of the Black Quadrilateral Marjorie Welish; Style and Habitus: 14. Men of Saturn: Styling "Bohemian" Melancholy in the Seventeenth Century Martha Hollander; 15. Modernist Art-School High Jinks in 1908 Margaret Stewart; 16. Non-Mimetic "Imitations": The Modernist Topos of Barbarian Numismatic Copies Joseph Masheck
