Contemporary art is incresingly concerned with swaying the opinions of its viewier. To do so, the art employs various strategies to convey a political message. This book provides readers with the tools to decode and appreciate political art, a crucial and understudied direction in post-war art.
At the height of the Cold War, art produced in divided Germany contested the cultural demarcation of East and West. Here Claudia Mesch shows how a wide group of artists struggled to take visual art beyond the crude separations of the ""Iron Curtain,"" and to transcend the first global cultural divide of the twentieth century. Artists in Berlin produced artworks--including painting, performance and film--that engaged critically with imposed national and global identities, and with issues of memory and trauma. Modern Art at the Berlin Wall presents a new picture of the Cold War border between East and West as a dynamic and international cultural space, and is essential for all those interested in art history, modernism, the Cold War and the cultural history of the twentieth century.
Joseph Beuys is one of the most legendary figures of 20th century art and his work and ideas continue to impact on artists today. This reader brings together the crucial texts on Beuys to look at the most contentious reception ever accorded a postwar artist