[ePub] Wide Awake in Slumberland (Great Comics Artists Series) by Katherine Roeder at Arts-Photography

Description

Lawrence Alloway (1926-1990) was one of the most influential and widely respected (as well as prolific) art writers of the post-war years. His many books; catalogue essays and reviews manifest the changing paradigms of art away from the formal values of modernism towards the inclusiveness of the visual culture model in the 1950s; through the diversity and excesses of the 1960s; to the politicisation in the wake of 1968 and the Vietnam war; on to postmodern concerns in the 1970s.Alloway was in the right places at the right times. From his central involvement with the Independent Group and the ICA in London in the 1950s; he moved to New York; the new world centre of art; at the beginning of the 1960s. In the early 1970s he became deeply involved with the realist revival and the early feminist movement in art -- Sylvia Sleigh; the painter; was his wife -- and went on to write extensively about the gallery and art market as a system; examining the critics role within this system. Positioning himself against the formalism and exclusivism associated with Clement Greenberg; Alloway was wholeheartedly committed to pluralism and diversity in both art and society. For him; art and criticism were always to be understood within a wider set of cultural; social and political concerns; with the emphasis on democracy; social inclusiveness; and freedom of expression. Art and Pluralism provides a close critical reading of Alloways writings; and sets his work and thought within the cultural contexts of the London and New York art worlds from the 1950s through to the early 1980s. It is a fascinating study of one of the most significant art critics of the twentieth century.