IN AVANT-GARDE art, as in polar exploration, it’s getting there first that counts. The history of modernism is often viewed as a series of discoveries with the glory going to whomever made the next conceptual breakthrough. As that story is usually told, for the first half of the 20th century the innovative centre was Europe, before the old world was overtaken in the aftermath of the second world war by America.
In recent years that comfortable narrative has been disrupted. In the 1950s and 1960s some of the most daring work began to come not from cities like Paris or New York but from near Osaka, a second-tier city in a nation already considered marginal to the modernist project. The source of this innovation was a movement known as Gutai (meaning something like concreteness). It was founded in 1954 by Jiro Yoshihara, a Japanese painter who encouraged his followers to challenge the conformity that had contributed to the authoritarianism of the preceding decades. In place of the wartime slogan, “one hundred million hearts beating as one”, Yoshihara championed an art of radical individualism summed up by...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1JDMsm1
No comments:
Post a Comment