Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art
Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art
Donald Kuspit
March 1994
Unavailable - out of print June 1995
Hardback
9780521440561
Out of Print
Hardback
Paperback
Signs of Psyche in Modern and Post-Modern Art examines the psychological dimension of visual culture in the twentieth century. Analysing the ways in which psychoanalysis can be used to understand art and culture, Donald Kuspit argues that modern art affirms subjectivity, whereas postmodern art, which is characterised as cynical and glamorous, denies it while, paradoxically, being unable to escape it. Assessing the depth-psychological implications of works by, among others, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, André Breton, Anselm Kiefer, and Gerhard Richter, this study persuasively demonstrates how the methods of psychoanalysis can be used to probe art works created at critical junctures of this century.
- Author is a star in contemporary art studies
- Psychoanalytic theory is currently a very 'hot'topic/approach in visual arts
Product details
March 1994Hardback
9780521440561
399 pages
262 × 182 × 30 mm
1.195kg
33 b/w illus.
Unavailable - out of print June 1995
Table of Contents
- Part I. Traditional Modern Art:
- 1. The Pathology and Health of Art: Gauguin's Self-Experience
- 2. The Process of Idealization of Woman in Matisse's Art
- 3. Cubist Hypochondria: On the Case of Picasso and Braque
- 4. Surrealism's Re-Vision of Psychoanalysis
- 5. Dispensable Friends, Indispensable Ideologies: André Breton's Surrealism
- 6. Choosing Psychosis: Max Ernst's Artificial Hallucinations
- 7. Back to the Future
- 8. A Freudian Note on Abstract Art
- 9. The Will to Unintelligibility in Modern Art: Abstraction Reconsidered
- 10. An Alternative Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Jackson Pollock's Psychoanalytic Drawings
- 11. Art and the Moral Imperative: Analyzing Activist Art
- 12. The Modern Fetish
- 13. The Only Immortal
- 14. Tart Wit, Wise Humor
- Part II. Contemporary European Art:
- 15. Joseph Beuys: The Body of the Artist
- 16. The Hospital of the Body: Maria Lassnig's Body Ego Portraits
- 17. Mourning and Melancholia in German Neo-Expressionism: The Representation of German Subjectivity
- 18. Anselm Kiefer's Will to Power
- 19. Gerhard Richter's Doubt and Hope
- 20. All Our Yesterdays
- 21. Christian Boltanski's Art of Gloom
- 22. By Kitsch Possessed: Jiri Georg Dokoupil's Satiric Art
- Part III. Theoretical Considerations:
- 23. Sincere Cynicism
- 24. The Problem of Art in the Age of Glamour
- 25. The Good Enough Artist: Beyond the Mainstream Avant-Garde Artist
- 26. Visual Art and Art Criticism: The Role of Psychoanalysis
- 27. The Use and Abuse of Applied Psychoanalysis
- 28. A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Aesthetic Disinterestedness
- 29. Collecting: A Narcissistic Agony
- 30. Critical Reflections.
