Joseph Masheck – författare

Best known for cheeky conceptual works,like his signed urinals ("R. Mutt") and his graffitioed Mona Lisa,Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was also an extraordinary painter and sculptor ( Nude Descending a Staircase ) who changed the language of twentieth-century art and reigns with Picasso and Matisse as one of its greatest influences. Joseph Masheck has compiled a sampler of the best writing on Duchamp, with pieces that include Duchamp's obituary from Artforum , written by Jasper Johns Octavio Paz on the ready-mades a Duchamp post-mortem by Hans Richter Donald Judd's investigation of Rrose Sélavy a "Counter-Avant-Garde" by Clement Greenberg a consideration by Guillaume Apollinaire and John Cage's "26 Statements on Marcel Duchamp." Illustrated with photographs of Duchamp's seminal pieces, and updated with a substantial preface that offers new scholarship as well as a fascinating consideration of why Duchamp's popularity has exponentially increased since this book first appeared, this is an essential volume for the Duchamp devotee.

Building-Art is an anthology of essays by noted critic Joseph Masheck. Considering topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, its theory and practice, as well as selected achievements by such great modernists as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn, Masheck also analyses important monuments and architectural ideas of such artists as Giorgio di Chirico and Tony Smith. Contextualising and culturally speculative, these studies address such issues as the distinction between architecture and 'mere' building, and architecture and engineering, frequently drawing the reader into architectural problems that have persisted for at least two centuries. Demonstrating a concern with on-going modernism, Masheck's essays guide the reader through the anti-modernist polemics of the 1970s and 1980s, which are particularly relevant in the light of postmodernism's demise.

Metaphysical thought has been excluded from much of the discourse on modern art, especially abstract painting. By connecting ideas about faith with the initiators of abstract painting, Joseph Masheck reveals how an underlying religiosity informed some of our most important abstract painters.Covering Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and El Lissitzky, Masheck shows how ‘revealed religion’ has been an underlying but fundamental determinant of the thinking and practice of abstract painting from its very originators. He contextualizes their art within some of the historical moments of the early 20th century, including the Russian revolution and the Stalinist period, and explores the appeal of certain themes, such as the Passion of Christ.A radical new theorization of the influence of religion over visual art, Faith in Art asks why metaphysics has been eliminated from the discussion where it might have something to say. This is a new way of thinking about a hundred years of abstract painting.

Metaphysical thought has been excluded from much of the discourse on modern art, especially abstract painting. By connecting ideas about faith with the initiators of abstract painting, Joseph Masheck reveals how an underlying religiosity informed some of our most important abstract painters.Covering Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and El Lissitzky, Masheck shows how ‘revealed religion’ has been an underlying but fundamental determinant of the thinking and practice of abstract painting from its very originators. He contextualizes their art within some of the historical moments of the early 20th century, including the Russian revolution and the Stalinist period, and explores the appeal of certain themes, such as the Passion of Christ.A radical new theorization of the influence of religion over visual art, Faith in Art asks why metaphysics has been eliminated from the discussion where it might have something to say. This is a new way of thinking about a hundred years of abstract painting.

Widely regarded as one of the most significant prophets of modern architecture, Adolf Loos was a star in his own time. His work was emblematic of the turn-of-the-century generation that was torn between the traditional culture of the nineteenth century and the innovative modernism of the twentieth. His essay 'Ornament and Crime' equated superfluous ornament and 'decorative arts' with underclass tattooing in an attempt to tell modern Europeans that they should know better. But the negation of ornament was supposed to reveal, not negate, good style; and an incorrigible ironist has been taken too literally in denying architecture as a fine art. Without normalizing his edgy radicality, Masheck argues that Loos's masterful "astylistic architecture" was an appreciation of tradition and utility and not, as most architectural historians have argued, a mere repudiation of the florid style of the Vienna Secession. Masheck has reads Loos as a witty, ironic rhetorician who has all too often been taken at face value. Far from being the anti-architect of the modern era, Masheck's Loos is 'an unruly yet integrally canonical artist-architect'.He believed in culture, comfort, intimacy and privacy and advocated the evolution of artful architecture. This is a brilliantly written revisionist reading of a perennially popular architect.