Amazon.com: The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (9780262181396): David Robbins, Jacquelynn Baas, Lawrence Alloway: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 1990

The Independent Group, or the IG, as it was called, is best known for having launched Pop Art. But the young artists, architects, and critics who met informally at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in the early 1950s were actually embarked on a far more subversive and constructive mission than the founding of an art movement. Street-smart, anti-academic, and iconoclastic, they embraced Hollywood and Madison Avenue and rejected the traditional dichotomies between high and low culture, British and American values. They used their meetings and exhibitions to challenge the official modernist assumptions of British aesthetics and to advocate instead a media-based, consumer-based aesthetics of change and inclusiveness - an aesthetics of plenty. In doing so they drew upon Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist strategies to invigorate their alternative version of modernism - a version that today can be said to have insinuated the terms of postmodernism.

This book provides the first comprehensive view of the IG's aims and significance. The texts and illustrations fully represent the achievements of its leaders, including artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham. The historic exhibitions that publicized the ideas of IG members are also documented - "Parallel of Life and Art," "Man, Machine and Motions," "This Is Tomorrow," and "An Exhibit." Above all, the book emphasizes the interaction between the exhibitions, discussions, art and writings of IG members, showing the ways in which they established a new aesthetic horizon.

David Robbins is a freelance writer and editor in Berkeley, California. Distributed for the University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley.

Essays by: Lawrence Alloway, Theo Crosby, Barry Curtis, Diane Kirkpatrick, David Mellor, David Robbins, Denise Scott Brown, Alison and Peter Smithson, David Thistlewood

Retrospective Statements by: Lawrence Alloway, Mary Banham, Richard Hamilton, Geoffrey Holroyd, Magda Cordell McHale, Dorothy Morland, Eduardo Paolozzi, Toni del Renzio, Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, William Turnbull, Colin St. John Wilson

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } The Independent Group, or the IG, as it was called, is best known for having launched Pop Art. But the young artists, architects, and critics who met informally at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in the early 1950s were actually embarked on a far more subversive and constructive mission than the founding of an art movement. Street-smart, anti-academic, and iconoclastic, they embraced Hollywood and Madison Avenue and rejected the traditional dichotomies between high and low culture, British and American values. They used their meetings and exhibitions to challenge the official modernist assumptions of British aesthetics and to advocate instead a media-based, consumer-based aesthetics of change and inclusiveness - an aesthetics of plenty. In doing so they drew upon Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist strategies to invigorate their alternative version of modernism - a version that today can be said to have insinuated the terms of postmodernism.

This book provides the first comprehensive view of the IG's aims and significance. The texts and illustrations fully represent the achievements of its leaders, including artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham. The historic exhibitions that publicized the ideas of IG members are also documented - "Parallel of Life and Art," "Man, Machine and Motions," "This Is Tomorrow," and "An Exhibit." Above all, the book emphasizes the interaction between the exhibitions, discussions, art and writings of IG members, showing the ways in which they established a new aesthetic horizon.

David Robbins is a freelance writer and editor in Berkeley, California. Distributed for the University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley.

Essays by: Lawrence Alloway, Theo Crosby, Barry Curtis, Diane Kirkpatrick, David Mellor, David Robbins, Denise Scott Brown, Alison and Peter Smithson, David Thistlewood

Retrospective Statements by: Lawrence Alloway, Mary Banham, Richard Hamilton, Geoffrey Holroyd, Magda Cordell McHale, Dorothy Morland, Eduardo Paolozzi, Toni del Renzio, Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, William Turnbull, Colin St. John Wilson

More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Jacquelynn Baas Page

Jacquelynn Baas was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and attended Michigan State University (BA Art History 1971) and the University of Michigan (MA Art History 1973, PhD 1982). Her museum career was spent at university art museums: the University of Michigan Museum of Art (Registrar, Assistant to the Director, Editor, Bulletin of the Museums of Art and Archaeology, 1974-82), the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College (Chief Curator, Director, 1982-88), and the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Director, 1989-99, Emeritus Director 1999- ). She left the museum field in 1999 to devote herself to writing, although she still consults and serves as guest curator for museum exhibitions. Baas was co-founder and director of the arts consortium Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness (1999-2004), and is curator of the exhibition "Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life," currently traveling from The Hood Museum, Dartmouth College (through August 8, 2011), to the Grey Art Gallery, NYU (Fall 2011), to the University of Michigan Museum of Art (February - May, 2012). She continues to research, write, and lecture about the many ways artists working in the U.S. and Europe use Asian philosophy as a resource, as well as other topics including the Mexican muralists, Fluxus, and contemporary art and artists. She lives and works at The Sea Ranch, California.