Edgar Wind and Modern Art

This book presents the first comprehensive study of the philosopher and art historian Edgar Wind's critique of modern art. The first student of Erwin Panofsky, and a close associate of Aby Warburg, Edgar Wind was unusual among the 'Warburgians' for his sustained interest in modern art, together with his support for contemporary artists. This culminated in his respected and influential book Art and Anarchy (1963), which seemed like a departure from his usual scholarly work on the iconography of Renaissance art.
Based on extensive archival research and bringing to light previously unpublished lectures, Edgar Wind and Modern Art reveals the extent and seriousness of Wind's thinking about modern art, and how it was bound up with theories about art and knowledge that he had developed during the 1920s and 30s. Wind's ideas are placed in the context of a closely connected international cultural milieu consisting of some of the leading artists and thinkers of the twentieth century. In particular, the book discusses in detail his friendships with three significant artists: Pavel Tchelitchew, Ben Shahn and R. B. Kitaj. In the process, the existence of an alternative to the prevailing formalist approach of Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg to modern art, based on the enduring importance of the symbol, is revealed.

Ben Thomas is Reader in History of Art, University of Kent, UK.

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
1. In Defence of Marginal Anarchy
Edgar Wind (1900-1971)
2. Art and Anarchy
The Polarity of the Symbol
Holy Fear
Experiment and Metaphysics
3. The Tradition of Symbols in Modern Art
The Heritage of Baudelaire
History of the Monster
Picasso and the Atavism of the Mask
Religious and Scientific Fallacies - 'Our Present Discontents'
4. 'Cher Magus' - Pavel Tchelitchew
Cathedrals of Art
'You really are a magician...'
The Feast of the Gods
Monstrous Phenomena
Method and Microcosm in Leonardo da Vinci
Tchelitchew and Leonardo
5. 'The Muses' sterner laws' - W. H. Auden and Ben Shahn
The Irresponsibles
The Critical Nature of a Work of Art
Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century
Klee and Candide
Seven Moral Paintings
Art and Morals
The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning
The Shape of Content
6. 'Certain Forms of Association Neglected Before' - R. B. Kitaj
The Fallacy of Pure Art
The Book as Symbol
Rosa Luxemburg as Pathosformel
Warburg as Maenad - the reconciliation of opposites
If Not, Not
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Index