Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction

This volume is part of a four-volume series about art and its interpretation in the 19th and 20th centuries. The books provide an introduction to modern European and American art and criticism that should be valuable both to students and to the general reader. The book presents a survey of art from the first two decades of the 20th century. The authors begin by exploring how aspects of the primitive were invoked by rural artists' colonies formed in France and Germany at the end of the 19th century and by the work of the Fauves and the German Expressionists a few years later. The book then develops an analysis of Cubist works based on semiotic theory, considering the social and cultural values encoded in such signifying systems, and investigating the relationship between representation and ideology. The final chapter considers some problems of interpretation and evolution posed by specific examples of abstract art ranging from Malevich to Mondrian.