Richard King (ed.): Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, 1970s, art, art history, ballet, china, cultural revolution, opera, painting, politics, sculpture
The Cultural Revolution was a massive social and political upheaval resulting from a battle for supremacy within the ruling Chinese Communist Party, set in motion by the party’s chairman Mao Zedong. It was also a time of both brutal iconoclasm and radical experimentation in the arts, the effects of which still resonate today.
Forty years after the Cultural Revolution, Art in Turmoil revisits the visual and performing arts of the period — the paintings, propaganda posters, political cartoons, sculpture, folk arts, private sketchbooks, opera, and ballet. Probing deeply, it examines what these vibrant, militant, often gaudy images meant to artists, their patrons, and their audiences at the time, and what they mean now, both in their original forms and as revolutionary icons reworked for a new market-oriented age.
Chapters by scholars of Chinese history and art and by artists whose careers were shaped by the Cultural Revolution decode the rhetoric of China’s turbulent decade. The many illustrations in the book, some familiar and some never seen before, also offer new insights into works that have transcended their times.
Edited with Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng, and Scott Watson
Publisher UBC Press, Vancouver/Toronto, 2010
Contemporary Chinese Studies series
ISBN 0774815426, 9780774815420
282 pages
review (Stefan R. Landsberger, The China Beat)
Comment (0)Nahui Olin: una mujer de los tiempos modernos, 2nd ed (1993) [Spanish]
Filed under book, catalogue | Tags: · activism, art, art history, literature, mexico, painting, poetry
Extensive catalogue of an exhibition of Mexican artist’s model, painter and poet Carmen Mondragón, also known as Nahui Olin (1893-1978). She is considered one of the talented and revolutionary women who formed the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico by activism and creativity, like Guadalupe Marín, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, Lupe Vélez and María Izquierdo.
Publisher Museo Estudio Diego Rivera, Mexico, 1993
ISBN 9682946697
173 pages
Michel Foucault: This Is Not a Pipe (1973–) [ES, EN, PT, SK, RU]
Filed under book | Tags: · art, art history, art theory, painting
“What does it mean to write ‘This is not a pipe’ across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte’s famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte’s visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.”
Originally published in French as Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Fata Morgana, Montpellier, 1973
English edition
Translated and Edited by James Harkness
With Illustrations and Letters by Rene Magritte
Publisher University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1983
ISBN 0520042328, 9780520042322
66 pages
Review (Marcel Chabot)
Publisher (EN)
Esto no es una pipa (Spanish, trans. Francisco Monge, 4th ed., 1981/1997, updated on 2014-6-6)
This Is Not a Pipe (English, trans. James Harkness, 1983, updated on 2014-7-4)
Isto não é um cachimbo (Portuguese, trans. Jorge Coli, 5th ed., 1988/2008, added on 2014-2-24)
Toto nie je fajka (Slovak, trans. Miroslav Marcelli, 1994, no OCR)
Eto ne trubka (Russian, trans. Irina Kulik, 1999, added on 2014-6-6)