John Paul Stonard Livres

Examining the role of artists in the years following the Second World War, Fault Lines reveals the reconstruction of German artistic culture during a period of great upheaval.This volume offers an important and insightful account of art and artists in Germany in the wake of the Second World War, and of the reconstruction of German artistic culture in the early stages of the Cold War. Drawing on a broad range of archival and visual sources, Fault Lines examines the circumstances of destruction, defeat and division in the postwar decade, and the role played by artists during the first moments of reconstruction and occupation.Author John-Paul Stonard How did artists respond to the destruction of Germany by Allied bombardment? What was the impact of Russian, American, French and British cultural policies during the military occupation? What were the connections between East and West?

Published to accompany a significant exhibition at the British Museum, Germany Divided: Baselitz and his generation showcases a selection of key works from six artists who re-defined art in Germany in the second half of the twentieth century; Georg Baselitz, Marcus Lüpertz, Blinky Palermo, A.R. Penck, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. The majority of the works are published here for the first time. In-depth biographical essays on each artist show how the division of Germany into separate states affected their work; and the importance of the experience of migration from East to West. The new consumer culture in the West contrasted starkly with the planned economy of the East. Artists on both side of the wall were faced with the difficult emotional task of negotiating with the past; not only the recent history of the Third Reich, but the 'lost' traditions of German painting, particularly Expressionism, from which they had been cut adrift. Germany Divided explores the work of these artists in the broader historical context of Germany and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and shows how these debates placed crucial emphasis on the creation and display of art. Graphic traditions, reaching back through Expressionism to older traditions of print-making in Germany, were an essential part of the reconstruction of artistic life, and a basis for the phenomenal success of German art on an international stage in the decades to follow.

For Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902–1968), painting was an entrance to a world beyond the visible, a world more real and more vital that lay beneath the surface of appearances.Beginning his career as the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic became the dark years of the Third Reich, it was natural that he should look to art for an alternative reality. One of Germany's most important abstract painters, this fully illustrated publication offers a fresh approach to the Nay's work.This first-ever English monograph is accompanied by an overview of his life and work by John-Paul Stonard and in-depth history of Nay's reception in Britain and the United States by Dr Pamela Kort, and a foreword by Sir Norman Rosenthal.

From distinguished critic and curator John-Paul Stonard, a dazzling, panoramic world history of art from ancient times to the present for the twenty-first century reader.