Joseph Masheck

Literary Nonfiction. Art Criticism. TEXTS ON (TEXTS ON) ART collects art historian Joseph Masheck's essays on the interplay of texts and art, texts and texts, and art and art into an imaginative volume that speaks to the range and depth of textual and visual intersections in the history of art. Demonstrating an enormous scope of knowledge and research, Masheck delves into Alois Riegl's art historical grammar, the unlikely connection between Henri Matisse and American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, Duchamp's playful riff on the face of Mona Lisa and (maybe?) George Santayana, Le Corbusier's influence on Breton's novella Nadja, spirituality and caricature in Ad Reinhardt's work, Florenskian icons in Lacanian theory, Mike Bidlo's Warholian Brillo Boxes, and more. Together the essays comprise a wide-ranging and penetrating inquiry into the influence of history upon art, and art upon its history.

Texts on (texts On) Art

Arthur W. Dow

A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers

Composition

Widely regarded as one of the most significant prophets of modern architecture, Adolf Loos was a celebrity in his own day. His work was emblematic of the turn-of-the-century generation that was torn between the traditional culture of the nineteenth century and the innovative modernism of the twentieth. His essay 'Ornament and Crime' equated superfluous ornament and 'decorative arts' with tattooing in an attempt to tell modern Europeans that they should know better. But the negation of ornament was supposed to reveal, not negate, good style; and an incorrigible ironist has been taken too literally in denying architecture as a fine art. Without normalizing his edgy radicality, Masheck argues that Loos' masterful "astylistic architecture" was an appreciation of tradition and utility and not, as most architectural historians have argued, a mere repudiation of the florid style of the Vienna Secession. Masheck reads Loos as a witty, ironic rhetorician who has all too often been taken at face value. Far from being the anti-architect of the modern era, Masheck's Loos is 'an unruly yet integrally canonical artist-architect'. He believed in culture, comfort, intimacy and privacy and advocated the evolution of artful architecture. This is a brilliantly written revisionist reading of a perennially popular architect.

The Art of Architecture

Adolf Loos

This new publication is authored by noted critic Joseph Masheck and explores the development of modernism and aesthetics through the work of postimpressionist Paul Cezanne. Masheck's innovative experiment in art criticism has been undertaken in the analytical tradition of twentieth-century philosophical thought. Published with the Center for Visual Culture, Bryn Mawr College. "In that abstract painting was made possible by a cubism whose patron saint was the postimpressionist Cezanne, what follows is a search for the implicit philosophical aesthetics of the single most crucial artist for the development of modernism. [...] But I also write as a teacher who sees a generation afoot that has learned to deal with postmodernism before understanding modernism (if at all)--which might be something like the American way of starting the dinner with the salad, if one ever got some meat. So I am perhaps also doing something constructively remedial about that, attempting to think, on its own terms but perhaps ?forward? again, through the work of a mythic ?founder? whose work opened so much future." --From the preface to C's ?sthetics by Joseph Masheck

Philosophy in the Painting

C's Aesthetics

Best known for cheeky conceptual works -- like his signed urinals ("R. Mutt") and his graffitioed Mona Lisa -- Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) was also an extraordinary painter and sculptor ("Nude Descending a Staircase") who changed the language of twentieth-century art and reigns with Picasso and Matisse as one of its greatest influences. Joseph Masheck has compiled a sampler of the best writing on Duchamp, with pieces that include Duchamp's obituary from Artforum, written by Jasper Johns; Octavio Paz on the ready-mades; a Duchamp post-mortem by Hans Richter; Donald Judd's investigation of Rrose Sélavy; a "Counter-Avant-Garde" by Clement Greenberg; a consideration by Guillaume Apollinaire; and John Cage's "26 Statements on Marcel Duchamp." Illustrated with photographs of Duchamp's seminal pieces, and updated with a substantial preface that offers new scholarship as well as a fascinating consideration of why Duchamp's popularity has exponentially increased since this book first appeared, this is an essential volume for the Duchamp devotee. -- From product description.

Marcel Duchamp in Perspective

Joseph Masheck wants to take art, historical and modern, as a field of lively interrelations (as if in "random-access memory" retrieval), rather than just second the motion that art history should be nonlinear; and he takes the task of art criticism to be theory in practice. Thus significant new art is represented in the thirty essays in Modernities, besides already "classic" modern architecture, sculpture, and photography, and contemporary painting by artists. Alternating between a comprehensive sense of art history and engagement with the new and unplumbed contemporary arts, he considers himself a kind of aesthetic double agent. Because Masheck is concerned with the concrete standing of artworks, he speculates on how works of art, including Marcel Duchamp's "ready-mades," relate to other things. More general themes range from the origin of the modern sense of form in prehistoric art to the historical underpinnings of expressionism and on to latter-day "graffiti" culture.

Joseph Masheck

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