The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

Krauss, Rosalind E

Camabridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Hardcover. Black paper boards with pink gilt lettering along the spine, dustjacket is pink and white with black lettering and photo, 307 pp., bw illustrations throughout. VG/G (book has minimal age toning along textblock, but otherwise in excellent condition / dustjacket has a few tears - at spine and front right corner, and significant fading on the spine). Item #180760
ISBN: 9780262110938

"In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism."--MIT Press.