A century after the Modernism art movement arrived in Europe and America, many artists and architects found new inspiration in an unlikely place. Hand-crafted folk-industrialization expanded. Other folkloric traditions such as oral tales, customs, and proverbs also started to influence the pioneers of Modernism as the movement began to develop its artistic language. As private collectors, museums and artists began to collect and exhibit these treasured artifacts, the artistic community has started to focus their attention on how popular and folk traditions influenced modern artistic practice. ​ Folklore & Avantgarde examines the influence of folkloric traditions within the Modernism movement in great detail. The work of avant-garde artists such as Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay, and Johannes Itten is contrasted with craft objects and folk art through 350 illustrations, including African, folk and peasant art and textile handicrafts.

A beautiful presentation of outstanding works of craft being created in Japan today.

This book does not aim to document comprehensively the extraordinarily rich activity in New York City in the early 1960's. Instead, the author focuses on one year, 1963. This was the most productive year of the period 1958-64, the transition between the Fifties and Sixties. The author also focuses on one other place---Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan. For it was primarily here, in a place already historically and culturally mythologized as avant-garde terrain, that the emerging generation of vanguard artists lived, worked, socialized, and remade the history of the avant-garde. - from the Introduction.

Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essentialism associated with notions of "critical practice." We can see this manifesting in the renewed relevance of what were previously considered "outsider" art practices, the emphasis on first-person accounts of identity over critical theory, and the proliferation of exhibitions that refuse to distinguish between art and the productions of culture more generally. How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics underscores how the cultural traditions, belief systems and performed exchanges that were once integral to the folklore discipline are now central to contemporary art’s "post-critical turn." This shift is considered here as less a direct confrontation of critical procedures than a symptom of art’s inclusive ideals, overturning the historical separation of fine art from those "uncritical" forms located in material and commercial culture. In a global context, aesthetics is now just one of numerous traditions informing our encounters with visual culture today, symptomatic of the pull towards an impossibly pluralistic image of art that reflects the irreducible conditions of identity.

Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

"Captured in three Tokyo parks in the early seventies, Kohei Yoshiyuki's The Park series features some intriguing photographic works of art. Shot at night using flash and infrared film, the photographs show hetero- and homosexuals gathering for furtive sexual encounters in the Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks. These amorous scenes, however, are unpleasantly crowded; even before Yoshiyuki approached them with his camera, the couples had become objects of desire for voyeurs. The sixty-two photographs are presented here in duotone quality with an interview with the artist."--BOOK JACKET.

Contributed articles with reference to India.