This thesis traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalised context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives and Art & Language, this thesis offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel.

The aim of this study was to investigate the connection between an artists mental illness and his or her art and this was made with the artist Mathilde Wigert-Österlund (1873-1943) as an example. Wigert-Österlund was an artist who suffered from mental illness and was a patient at a mental institution during two periods throughout her life. After she became ill, she made textile artworks that have been considered to be products of her illness. To investigate if this is true or not and to understand Wigert-Österlunds means of expression, the study was based on the purpose that with Wigert-Österlund as example investigate the connection between mental illness and creative production and study the artist and the artists role as a social and cultural construction. This was done with the following questions: How did Mathilde Wigert-Österlunds artistic expression change when she became ill? What role did Wigert-Österlund take och recieve in the artistic field? And; what resemblances and differences were there between Wigert-Österlunds artworks and her contemporary textile art? The questions were answered with studies of literature and objects as material, together with a method of material culture. Theory of practice and a theory of the artist role were applied on the material and the results. The analysis shows that Wigert-Österlunds artistic expression primarily changed with her use of other techniques and materials than before and secondarily that she had a slight change in the choice of motif and especially symbols in her work. The works shows that Wigert-Österlund is to be considered as having the role of a melancholic artist due to the theory of the artists role. Her work had no distinct recemblances with the contemporary textile art but shows that she is considered to share habitus and expression with the artist group that were defined as painters. Wigert-Österlund and her textile artcan be considered as unique in the time they were made. The study also reveals that the groups within the field were changeable and that Wigert-Österlund and her variated expression made her belong to separate groups but that she might have identified herself with the one with highest social and cultural status. The study showed that there is a slight connection between mental illness and an artists expression and that an artist can correlate to an artistic role and at the same time be a production of and a construction of the society and its expectations connected to that construction.

The doctoral thesis is concerned diachronically with the term "visual poetry". The focus is on its progress during the period after the Second World War in the context of the extensively advanced movement, as substantially defined in international expert discussion. The use of the term, which is supported by the arguments of many theoreticians and artists of the period, is studied in the thesis from the viewpoint of the inspirational sources and specific contacts between art and literature. The focus is on the specific positions and strategies of visual perception. Visual poetry is studied - considering the different contexts of the European avant-garde movements and through the analysis of contemporaneous theories which defined three main lines of thought - as an incoherent art stream manifesting itself in the eclectic use of artistic media. In conclusion, the thesis looks at the project of Czech author poetics typology which grew from purely Czech examples based on formal language of the visual poetry works. The thesis seeks to point out the original aspects of the internal discussion of visual poetry, and to place it in the international context.

The dissertation explores the work of two African artists: Lamidi O. Fakeye a Yoruba wood carver, and Ahmed M. Shibrain a Sudanese painter, as an exemplary development within African art during the second half of the 20th century. It examines their works through the sense of "tradition" as it is seen within the context of their cultures and their histories. It considers their works to be a reflection of their time, a hybrid art and a new tradition emerging within their respective cultures as a result of change in their societies. It argues against the notion that separates their art from their traditions and their histories based on the artificial barriers of "authenticity" in the literature on African art and the various categories that are related to it. It ponders on the contradictions and complexity that this situation has created and demonstrated that these categories negate historical realities. The dissertation is in two parts. The first part describes and analyses some of Lamidi's Christian and secular carvings. His work is placed in its appropriate historical perspective by revealing its close relationship to the carvings of his predecessors in terms of themes, design, content and clients. Innovation and change in his work through time and space is revealed. In the second part, the dissertation defines the connectivity of Shibrain's work to his tradition and its history, and that of his fellow artists who contributed to the development of a new trend in Sudanese art. It discusses their work on the basis of the 'idea' of art in Islam, their training and their heritage of decorative art and Arabic calligraphy. It argues that innovation, influence, borrowing and adaptation, are part of progress in art through the ages.

One medium has dominated accounts of American art in the years following the Second World War. The period witnessed, in the words of one critic, a 'Triumph of American Painting', with advances in the easel picture far surpassing those in other media. Whilst more recent accounts have nuanced this view, drawing attention to developments in music and sculpture, literary contributions to the new American modernism have gone almost without assessment. Were there advances in literature comparable to those of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, David Smith and John Cage? Drawing extensively on his unpublished writings, After the New Failure of Nerve reveals the poet Charles Olson to have been the keenest literary advocate of the new American avant-garde and one of the most astute observers of its conditions and possibilities. Paying special attention to unpublished notes, lectures, and correspondence, the thesis utilises Olson's early writings in order to examine the momentum given early postwar modernism by a potent contemporary reaction against abstract rationality, a reaction identified at the time as a 'New Failure of Nerve'. Born of recent disillusionment with 'scientific' Marxism and New Deal progressivism, the thesis demonstrates the several ways in which this 'New Failure of Nerve' fuelled vanguard American art from the middle of the Second World War to the end of the decade. It argues that the new critique of abstract rationality - which was also reflected in the contemporary American work of the Frankfurt School - defined the way American artists understood the function of postwar modernism, the posture of the postwar modernist artist, and the status of the postwar modernist artwork. This pivotal moment in the history of modernism was shaped, I contend, by a philosophical critique explored most ambitiously by an American poet.

This thesis offers a new policy history of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency responsible for providing grants to artists and arts organisations in the United States. It focuses in particular on the development of conservative perspectives on federal arts funding from the 1950s to the 1980s, and hence, illuminates the broader evolution of conservative political power, especially its limits. The most familiar narrative holds that the Endowment found itself caught up in the Culture Wars of the late 1980s when Christian right groups objected to certain federal grants, particularly to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe's Self-Portrait with Whip. This thesis, however, uncovers the older origins of conservative opposition to state support for the arts, analyses conservative conceptions of art, and illuminates the limited federal role the right sought to secure in the arts in the post-war period. Numerous studies have analysed the meanings and origins of the Culture Wars, but until now, scholars had not examined conservative approaches to federal arts politics in a historical sense. Historians have generally been too interested in explaining change to the detriment of examining continuity, but this approach under-emphasises the long-term tensions that underlie seemingly sudden political eruptions. This work also offers a deep account of the conservative movement and the arts world, an area that has so far been almost completely ignored by scholars, even though a focus on marginalised players is essential to understanding the limits of conservatism. In a general sense then, this thesis evaluates the range and diversity of the conservative movement and illuminates the overall odyssey of the right in modern America. In so doing, it provides a new insight into the ways we periodise political history and also invites a broader view of how we understand politics itself.

Classical mythology has been one of the main sources of inspiration for European artists for centuries. It also remained current during the 20th century. From the 1920s, one can see increasing interest in classical myths; it becomes a source of inspiration even for artists of avant-garde art movements. The 20th century artist approach themes from classical mythology from a position of newly acquired artistic freedom. Release of iconographic conventions and academic rules, emphasis on psychology and individuality of a modern man brings specific forms of reception and reinterpretation of classical myths. In many cases, classical mythology carries allegorical meanings in a relation to contemporary political and social events, often in a very critical tone. But it also represents a tool for one's personal coping with reality. The thirties and early forties of the 20th century with dark atmosphere affected by war conflicts represent the culmination period of classical myths in visual arts. The tendency can be observed both in the art of European and Czech origin. Antiquity and classical mythology become the symbols of a return to the roots of European culture and civilization, symbols of the common European humanistic heritage. The collection of nearly 180 works of modern Czech art inspired by classical...

[pt] A tese Giorgio Morandi e o respeito pelas coisas de uso, retoma a produção artística de Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964, um dos mais importantes artistas italianos do século XX, para restabelecer dentro do período de formação do Modernismo suas relações com a produção cultural europeia coetânea. A tese busca mostrar como a obra de Morandi se apresenta como uma alternativa à interpretação artística hegemônica feita pelo Cubismo da obra de Cézanne, privilegiando aspectos dessa poética que foram relegados a segundo plano por Picasso e Braque, notadamente a percepção de um espaço em profundidade corporalmente determinado, porém conjuminando essa espacialização com a linguagem planar estabelecida pelos cubistas. Procuramos mostrar que as buscas de Morandi não tinham afinidades somente no campo das artes, mas como a produção de sua obra e as questões por ela elaboradas, particularmente como o entendimento plástico das coisas e utensílios que lhe servem como motivo para suas naturezas–mortas estão em sintonia com o conceito de coisa e coisidade tratado pxsor Heidegger em A origem da obra de arte e O que é uma coisa?, ambos os textos escritos em 1935. As indagações artísticas de Morandi, de modo mais amplo, têm profundas afinidades com o método fenomenológico de Husserl, Heidegger e Merleau-Ponty. / [en] The dissertation Morandi and the Respect for Things of Use reexamines the artistic production of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century, in order to reestablish, within the time frame of the development of Modernism, his connections with contemporaneous European cultural production. The dissertation shows the ways in which Morandi s work presents itself as an alternative to Cubism s hegemonic artistic interpretation of Cézanne s work, favoring aspects of Cèzanne s poetics that Picasso and Braque relegated to the background – notably the perception of corporally determined depth of space – while at the same time uniting this spatialization with the language of flatness established by the Cubists. The dissertation seeks to demonstrate that Morandi s investigations had affinities not only in the arts, but that the production of his body of work and the questions it raised – in particular the visual understanding of things and utensils that motivated his still-lifes – were in line with the concept of thing and thingness elaborated by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art and What is a Thing? both written in 1935. Morandi s artistic inquiries, in a broad sense, have deep affinities with the phenomenological method of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.