Allan Antliff
Anarchy and Art. From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Arsenal Pulp Press : Vancouver, 2007)
224 pp.
ISBN: 1551522187 / ISBN13: 9781551522180
Publishers Page.
In numerous essays, Allan Antliff interrogates moments of engagement when artists, poets, philosophers, and critics have confronted pivotal events over the past 140 years. The survey begins with artist Gustave Courbet and writer Emile Zola's activism during the 1871 Paris Commune (which established the modern-day French republic), and ends with an examination of anarchist art during the fall of the Soviet empire. Other subjects include the Neo-Impressionists and their depictions of the homeless in the 1890s; the Dada movement in New York City during World War I; the decline of the Russian Avant-Garde during the 1920s and 30s; the West Coast Beats of the 1940s and 50s; the Modernists of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; and anarchistic responses to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by visual artists.
Reviewed by Irene Gammel for bookforum.
Also by Allan Antliff:
* Avant-garde Fascism. The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909-1939 (Durham DC 2007)
* Anarchist Modernism. Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Vancouver 2004)
* The Culture of Revolt. Art and Anarchism in America, 1908-1920, dissertation, accepted by the University of Delaware (1998)
* Making Mischief. Dada Invades New York / by Francis M. Naumann, Beth Venn, Allan Antliff (New York 1996)
