Weaving Modernism

An unprecedented study that reveals tapestry’s role as a modernist medium and a model for the movement’s discourse on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades following World War II

With a revelatory analysis of how the postwar French tapestry revival provided a medium for modern art and a model for its discourse and marketing on both sides of the Atlantic, Weaving Modernism presents a fascinating reexamination of modernism’s relationship to decoration, reproducibility, and politics. Tapestry offered artists a historically grounded medium for distributing and marketing their work, helped expand the visibility and significance of abstraction at midcentury, and facilitated modernism’s entry into the dominant paradigm of the postwar period. K. L. H. Wells situates tapestry as part of a broader “marketplace modernism” in which artists participated, conjuring a lived experience of visual culture in corporate lobbies, churches, and even airplanes, as well as in galleries and private homes. This extensively researched study features previously unpublished illustrations and little-known works by such major artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, and Frank Stella.

Un studiu fara precedent care dezvaluie rolul tapiseriei ca mediu modernist si un model pentru discursul miscarii de pe ambele maluri ale Atlanticului in deceniile care au urmat celui de-al doilea razboi mondial. model pentru discursul si marketingul sau de pe ambele parti ale Atlanticului, Weaving Modernism prezinta o reexaminare fascinanta a relatiei modernismului cu decorarea, reproductibilitatea si politica.