Material Imagination

Notes on Contributors 6
 
Chapter 1 Material Imagination: Art in Europe, 1946-72 8
Natalie Adamson and Steven Harris
 
Chapter 2 Black Flowers Blossom: Bachelard, Soulages and the Material Imaginary of Abstract Painting 22
Natalie Adamson
 
Chapter 3 Materialism and Intersubjectivity in Cobra 44
Karen Kurczynski
 
Chapter 4 Makeshift Wholes: Interiority and Texture in Postwar British Design 66
Alex Kitnick
 
Chapter 5 Materializing Modernism in Postwar Italy: Fausto Melotti, Gio Ponti, and the 1961 Esposizione Internazionale del Lavoro 88
Marin R. Sullivan
 
Chapter 6 L'Optique Moderne: Daniel Spoerri's 'Optical Readymades' 112
Jill Carrick
 
Chapter 7 Terrain vague: Ben Vautier and the Ecole de Nice 140
Anna Dezeuze
 
Chapter 8 'Not Yet' Materialized: Carlfriedrich Claus's 'Talking Papers' 164
Sarah E. James
 
Chapter 9 The Longevity of Roman Opa³ka 188
Alistair Rider
 
Index 209

Natalie Adamson is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and Deputy Editor of Art History. Her research focuses on the interpretation of abstract painting; surrealism; problems in French painting and political ideology in the post-1945 period; and modernist photography. She is the author of Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-Garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960 (2009) and Painting, Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944-1964 (2009).
 
Steven Harris is Associate Professor in History of Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta, Canada. He works on twentieth-century art in Europe and North America, and is the author of articles on surrealism, postwar abstraction, and Fluxus. He is the author of Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930's: Art, Politics and the Psyche (2004). His current research project, The Poetics of Disenchantment, investigates both the surrealist movement in the postwar period, and how surrealist ideas and values were taken up or challenged by postwar European collectives like Cobra, the College of Pataphysics, and the Situationist International.