Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting
Christa Noel Robbins
Abstract
The first extended study of authorship in twentieth-century abstract painting in the US, this book describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting to advance their own claims about the role authorship should play in dictating the value, significance, and social impact of the art object. Beginning with an overview of the history of the “death of the author” thesis, the book shows that, while Roland Barthes didn’t publish his essay of the same name until 1967, there was already a lively discussion at work concerning the stakes of authorship in and around American Modernist painting ... More
The first extended study of authorship in twentieth-century abstract painting in the US, this book describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting to advance their own claims about the role authorship should play in dictating the value, significance, and social impact of the art object. Beginning with an overview of the history of the “death of the author” thesis, the book shows that, while Roland Barthes didn’t publish his essay of the same name until 1967, there was already a lively discussion at work concerning the stakes of authorship in and around American Modernist painting as early as the 1940s. The book tracks the question of authorship across two definitive periods: the “New York School” as it was consolidated in the 1950s and “Post Painterly Abstraction” in the 1960s. Chapters address key figures who helped define the Modernist field in the US, analyzing the paintings of Arshile Gorky, Jack Tworkov, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin, and the art criticism of Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss. By historicizing authorship this book shows that today’s debates over the author’s function—debates that only continue to proliferate in discussions of art theory today—are themselves outgrowths of a mode of questioning initiated in Modernist theory and practice.
Keywords:
abstract painting,
art criticism,
authorship,
Death of the Author,
modernist art,
New York School,
painting,
Post Painterly Abstraction,
Twentieth Century
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226752952 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226753003.001.0001 |
