The past 100 years has been the century of change,
one of the most exuberantly creative periods of human history. During that time modern art
has aspired to nothing less than the remaking of society. In The Shock of the New
Robert Hughes offers a brilliant survey of that art and a masterly analysis of the
accelerated cultural change which it bred.
The relationship of major artists to the world from which
they sprung and which they sought to change has been complex and stormy. Robert Hughes
explains and illuminates this relationship in eight themes. The Mechanical Paradise describes
how nineteenth-century notions of industrial perfectibility bore fruit in the art of
Braque, Delau nay, Léger and Picasso, and in the mechano-sexual metaphors of Duchamp. In The
Faces of Power the violent legacy of World War I is traced through Dada, Weimar
Germany and post-revolutionary Russia to Picasso's Guernica and Fascist art. By
contrast art as a celebration of the senses is seen in The Landscape of Pleasure to
link Seurat, Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, among others, in a line that reaches to more
recent artists like Kenneth Noland and Richard Diebenkorn. Trouble in Utopia explores
the considerable gap between the glorious aspirations and the often disappointing
achievements of modern architecture, beginning with the Chicago School, Corbusier and Mies
van der Rohe and ending with Buckminster Fuller and Brasilia. The Threshold of liberty is
a history and a celebration of the Irrational, from nineteenth century fantastic art
through Magritte, de Chirico, Dali, Miró and the primitives to Pollock and Gorky. The
View from the Edge deals in extremes, from van Gogh's ecstatic view of nature to
Munch's despair and the urban neurosis of German Expressionism; while other responses to
the modern urban condition are seen in Culture as Nature: art in the grip of the
media, mass-cult imagery, Pop Art, replication and satiety.
The abruptly-changing face of modern art has variously
puzzled, threatened or exhilarated the world at large. Robert Hughes reveals the pattern
that lies behind this ceaseless change - why art had to take the forms it did, and why it
had to keep moving on. But even modernism cannot last for ever.
The last chapter shows how the idea of the avant-garde,
once so potent, is losing force, and considers the question where, if
anywhere art
goes from here.
Based on the BBC2 eight-part series of the same title, The Shock of the New
combines style, wit, pertinent anecdote, critical poise and scholarship to provide a
stimulating history of the art that was modern.
- Time art critic Robert Hughes explores the interaction between the art of the 20th
century and significant events of recent world history, beginning with turn-of-the-century
Europe when the term “modernism” first came into use. Here he shows how artistic
movements such as cubism and futurism mirrored a rapidly changing, technologically -
oriented world.
- Robert Hughes examines the relationship between art and politics as exemplified by
Dadaism, expressionism and constructivism, movements seen as reactions to World War
I’s mechanized warfare; and Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s anguished response to the
1937 bombing of that Basque village.
- From the impressionist paintings of Monet and the structured coherence of Cezanne’s
still lifes and landscapes, to the rapturous use of color in the works of Derain and
Matisse, Robert Hughes offers a glimpse of the diverse visions of harmony and delight
which found expression in French art for several decades.
- In this overview of modern architecture from the Bauhaus to the Buckminster Fuller dome,
Robert Hughes comments on the rise and spread of the international style, and the myth of
the architect as social legislator, epitomized by the work of le Corbusier and the planned
city of Brasilia.
- Robert Hughes explores surrealism, as an intuitive expression in the paintings of Henri
Rousseau and the palais ideal of Ferdinand Cheval, and as the last revolutionary art
movement of the 20th century, exemplified by the work of di Chirico, Ernst, Miro, Dali and
Magritte.
- The evolution of expressionism in modern art is traced by Robert Hughes, from the work
of van Gogh and Munch, to the non-figurative paintings of Pollack and Rothko, viewed as a
reaction to the realities so graphically captured by photography in World War II, and the
increasing secularization of 20th century life.
- Robert Hughes examines the influences of mass media and mass culture on art as seen in
the jazz-inspired collages of Stuart Davis, the found-object creations of Jasper Johns and
Robert Rauschenberg, and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
- In the series conclusion, Robert Hughes considers the decline and fragmentation of
modernism, the institutionalization of art; art as a marketable commodity, opposed by the
mute, unsalable presence of conceptual art, earthworks and body art; and the death of the
idea of the art movement as such.
Above summaries from www.sfsu.edu/~avitv/AV.mediacatalog.html
Web Owner.
© Robert Hughes 1980.
Revised: 09 September, 2005.
