Livre - High & low

Since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, modern art has had an extraordinary openness to popular culture – to styles and imagery derived, for example, from newspapers, advertisements, cartoons, and graffiti. This striking and richly illustrated volume is the first encompassing history of that century-long dialogue between “high” and “low.” In it, Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik trace the key exchanges through which artists have expanded the languages of art by taking up styles and forms found outside the usual precincts of the museum; they show how those exchanges have constantly redefined for us the relationship between the private imagination and the shared energies of public communication. High and Low begins with the Cubists and their contemporaries, who first directly incorporated into art elements from advertising and the popular press, and then takes the story of this dialogue up through the past decade, in which the imagery of consumer society has been of central importance to younger artists. The book establishes the lineage that flows, for example, from Picasso’s collages through the poetry of paper remnants in Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell – and beyond them to such recent work with public words as the electronic signboards of Jenny Holzer. At the same time, each chapter emphasizes the irreducible singularity in the counterpoint individual artists have created between a found style and an original vision. By pursuing the internal histories of the popular culture that modern artists encountered, we can see, with a new clarity, the ways in which those artists have been inspired by the innovations of masters of “low” art; we can also discover the surprising, imaginative inventions that modern artists have made from anonymous vernaculars. From subtle rearrangements, like those Roy Lichtenstein worked upon his comic-book sources, through stranger transformations, like Joan Miro’s creation of Surrealist fantasies from printed advertisements, the more than 600 illustrations in this book capture our century’s culture in all its unpredictable vitality. The authors examine not only the self-evident instances of the dialogue between high and low, such as the works of British and American Pop artists; they also explore more covert relationships between, for example, Fernand Leger’s aesthetic and the design of shop windows, or the paintings of Cy Twombly and the graffiti-marked walls of Pompeii, to see what such similarities tell us about the dreams and ambitions of modern culture. Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, High and Low constructs a new framework for the history of modern art, yet remains rooted in a specific chronicle of the lives and works of individual artists. Through a mosaic of particular incidents, tracing a history of astonishing imaginative leaps and discoveries, High and Low offers us a fresh account of the evolution of the language of modern art, and of the connections between that language and the world around it. Kirk Varnedoe is Director of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art. He has also been Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His previous publications for The Museum of Modern Art were Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design, in 1986, and three essays in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, in 1984. Adam Gopnik is an editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the magazine’s art critic and a regular contributor to “Notes and Comments” and “The Talk of the Town.”