Bøger af Alyce Mahon

Born in the small town of Galesburg, Illinois, the life, and art of Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) perfectly exemplifies the transnational spirit and nomadic practice of Surrealism, though it was all the harder an achievement for a woman. In Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World we travel with her across lived places and imagined spaces in Chicago, Arizona, Paris, Seillans, through to her final years in New York. Expertly drawn from extensive archival and curatorial research to map the artist’s life story across a seventy-year career, Alyce Mahon situates Tanning at the very heart of avant-garde discussions on art and philosophical ideas. She explores how this circle of relationships informed Tanning’s work at critical moments of her career and how she navigated the difficulty of being the wife of a male artist already established on the international stage. Mahon demonstrates how Tanning’s work expanded post-war global Surrealism in offering a world of kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting perspectives.

International Journal of Surrealism (IJS) creates a welcome space for critical ideas and debate centered on Surrealism, its international history, and its ongoing worldwide influence on contemporary culture. The journal seeks to document, celebrate, and interrogate the intellectual and aesthetic repercussions of the Surrealist movement across a wide array of fields: literature and literary theory; painting, sculpture, and photography; performance, film, and music; and philosophy, political thought, and new media. Encompassing both scholarly and creative perspectives on Surrealism and its global manifestations, IJS is committed to exploring the practice and reception of Surrealism around the world, throughout the Global South as well as in Europe and the Global North, within and by Indigenous cultures and international movements. IJS is attentive to individualism and collective identity; global and transcultural modernity and modernism; and science, ecology, and natural history.

From the surreal eroticism of Salvador Dali to the kitsch eroticism of Jeff Koons, erotic art has always inflamed opinion and, even today, such images are considered provocative, dangerous, and unwelcome in the public sphere. Now Alyce Mahon, the feisty Irish art historian, takes us on an imaginative and engaging tour of erotic art in all its forms, including painting, sculpture, video art, installation, performance art, and photography. Mahon explores eroticism from its most romantic to its most explicit: from Impressionist Paris where the naked body signaled the rise of a new, modern world, to the contemporary scene where artists use eroticism to address the politics of race, gender, and sexual orientation. The book examines some of the key movements and moments in modern art history: from the birth of Realism with Courbet in Paris, to the Surrealist subversion of taboo, to Nazi propaganda's use of the heroic nude, to the soft-porn of Pop art, to the vogue for carnality in contemporary art in Los Angeles, Paris, and London. Indeed, Mahon provides a concise history of art in the twentieth century through the lens of eroticism, offering original insights into works of art that do not sit easily within popular notions of taste and that have provoked controversy and calls for censorship. Her discussion includes the work of such European and American artists as Egon Schiele, Hans Bellmer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nancy Goldin, Orlan, Franco B, and Annie Sprinkle. With over a hundred illustrations, including sixty-five in full color, here is a strikingly written and stimulating history of eroticism in modern Western art.