Focusing on the work of Italian artists Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting in post-WWII Italy critiqued the economic violence of the Marshall Plan and American hegemony, broke with fascist-associated futurism, and anticipated Italian social unrest in the 1960 and 1970s.

Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Art History Publication Initiative)

Arts & Photography

Mansoor, Jaleh

History & Criticism

Duke University Press Books

Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors of traumatic memories of World War II. Rather, she locates the motivation for this violence in the history of the medium of painting and in the economic history of postwar Italy. Reconfiguring the relationship between politics and aesthetics, Mansoor illuminates how the monochrome's reemergence reflected Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni's aesthetic and political critique of the Marshall Plan's economic warfare and growing American hegemony. It also anticipated the struggles in Italy's factories, classrooms, and streets that gave rise to Autonomia in the 1960s. Marshall Plan Modernism refigures our understanding of modernist painting as a project about labor and the geopolitics of postwar reconstruction during the Italian Miracle.

Published in conjunction with Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx's first American museum exhibitions at The Renaissance Society and New York's Drawing Center, this brilliant book, conceived and designed by the artist, is an artwork in its own right, a project of equal standing with the exhibitions themselves. For Chicago Studies: Les etants donnes at The Renaissance Society, Tuerlinckx combined video and slide projections, classroom furniture, sculptural elements, and moveable walls into a constantly changing installation whose conceptual identity incorporated the educational, administrative, and exhibition functions of the Society and the University building in which it is housed. For Drawing Inventory at The Drawing Center, the artist created a constellation of marks, which she measured and arranged in an infinitely additive process that mirrored the institution?s methods of broadening the definition of drawing. In this book Tuerlinckx applies institutional critique to the various forms of exhibition documentation, from installation photographs to registrar's condition photos, using it as yet another reconfiguration of the materials, forms, and concepts she arranges and rearranges, breaks down and rebuilds, examining the relations between objects, spaces, and people. In addition to exhibition documentation that redefines the term "exhaustive," the book includes an introduction by curators of the Drawing Center exhibition Catherine de Zegher and Katherine Carl, and essays by Jaleh Mansoor and Michael Newman. Co-published with The Drawing Center, New York.

Joelle Tuerlinckx: Study Book

De Zegher, Catherine

Carl, Katherine

Newman, Michael

Renaissance Society

Known for her expansive multidisciplinary approach to art making Vancouver-based Dana Claxton, who is Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux), has investigated notions of Indigenous identity, beauty, gender and the body, as well as broader social and political issues through a practice which encompasses photography, film, video and performance. Rooted in contemporary art strategies, her practice critiques the representations of Indigenous people that circulate in art, literature and popular culture in general. In doing so, Claxton regularly combines Lakota traditions with “Western” influences, using a powerful and emotive “mix, meld and mash” approach to address the oppressive legacies of colonialism and to articulate Indigenous world views, histories and spirituality. This timely catalogue will be the first monograph to examine the full breadth and scope of Claxton’s practice. It will be extensively illustrated and will include essays by Claxton’s colleague Jaleh Mansoor, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art &amp; Theory at the University of British Columbia; Monika Kin Gagnon, Professor in the Communications Department at Concordia University, who has followed Claxton’s work for 25 years; Olivia Michiko Gagnon, a New York–based scholar and doctoral student in Performance Studies; and Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Dana Claxton: Fringing the Cube

Arnold, Grant

Gagnon, Monika Kin

Gagnon, Olivia Michiko

Figure 1 Publishing

The 2014 exhibition explored how modernist legacies are being revisited by contemporary, largely female, Canadian artists' the formalist aesthetics of the modernist movement of the 1960s (which included many Saskatchewan artists via the Emma Lake workshops) are now being recognized by female Canadian artists at various stages of their careers' an interesting phenomenon given that women artists were historically largely excluded from the intellectual discourse at the birth of the movement. Fully illustrated with exhibition installation images, the book follows suit in presenting artists from across Canada who utilize formalist aesthetics in ways that take new conceptual, narrative and aesthetic turns. In addition, three critical essays—two commissioned and one from the exhibition curator— contextualize the movement.

Who's Afraid of Purple, Orange, and Green?

Cheetham, Mark

Matotek, Jennifer

Black Dog Press

Florian Pumhösl’s latest work focuses on abstract films and paintings and their interaction with the surrounding space. 678 comprises three new pieces: a drawing cycle titled Dimunition; the film installation “Expressive Rhythm,” which refers to Alexander Rodchenko’s 1943 painting of the same name; and a second film project that uses dance notation.

Florian Pumhösl: 6 7 8

de Bruyn, Eric

Michalka, Matthias

Individual Artists

Walther König, Köln

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mansoor, Jaleh. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mansoor, Jaleh