The Writing of Art

This collection of essays offers different ways of seeing twentieth-century art via the medium of aesthetics. In Mercure (1924), Picasso collapses the tradition of classical ballet into the visual arts; Paul Klee, in his work from the Thirties, searches for a purity of language reminiscent of German Romanticism; with his concept of the Void, Yves Klein emphasizes that, within the context of art, ritualized performance can lead to a radical loss of ego; Ed Ruscha’s gunpowder drawings from the Sixties offer visual paradoxes and question the boundaries between art and language; and in Twombly’s Bacchus paintings, movement becomes a metaphor for the Dionysian forcesthat shape history.