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Curating consciousness : mysticism and the modern museum / Marcia Brennan.

By: Brennan, Marcia.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2012Description: xi, 285 pages : illustrations, 23 cm.Content type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeISBN: 9780262518093.Subject(s): Sweeney, James Johnson, 1900-1986 | Mysticism and art | Modernism (Aesthetics) | Art museums -- ExhibitionsDDC classification: 701.17
Contents:
Modernism's mystical subjects: an introduction -- The nude descending a flowchart: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Marcel Duchamp -- Seeing the one Less Seen: James Johnson Sweeney, in Light of Marcel Duchamp -- Blood miracles and fire magic: the transmutationan arts of Alberto Burri -- Illuminating the void, displaying the vision: Pierre Soulages -- Studies in self-creation and creative destruction; Jean Tinguely -- A spark of light darting through empty space: Eduardo Chillida
Summary: Artists have often taken rational, material existence as a starting point for engagement with metaphysics and mysticism, but no book until now has traced a similar strategy on the part of curators. In Curating Consciousness, Marcia Brennan focuses on one of the transformational figures of twentieth-century curatorial culture, and the main protagonist of this (until now) unacknowledged curatorial practice. James Johnson Sweeney (1900--1986) was hired by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to be the Director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935. He went on to become the Director of the Guggenheim Museum in the 1950s and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the 1960s. Throughout his career, Sweeney provocatively engaged motifs of mysticism in order to cast the modern museum as a secular temple of art. Brennan describes how these motifs informed Sweeney's curatorial and textual engagements with specific artists and projects, including works by Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Burri, Pierre Soulages, Jean Tinguely, and Eduardo Chillida.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Barcode
General lending MTU Cork Centre Architectural Education Lending 701.17 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 00133961
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How prominent curator and author James Johnson Sweeney cast the modern museum as a secular temple of art.

Artists have often taken rational, material existence as a starting point for engagement with metaphysics and mysticism, but no book until now has traced a similar strategy on the part of curators. In Curating Consciousness, Marcia Brennan focuses on one of the transformational figures of twentieth-century curatorial culture, and the main protagonist of this (until now) unacknowledged curatorial practice. James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986) was hired by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to be the Director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935. He went on to become the Director of the Guggenheim Museum in the 1950s and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the 1960s. Throughout his career, Sweeney provocatively engaged motifs of mysticism in order to cast the modern museum as a secular temple of art.

Brennan describes how these motifs informed Sweeney's curatorial and textual engagements with specific artists and projects, including works by Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Burri, Pierre Soulages, Jean Tinguely, and Eduardo Chillida.

Bibliography: p. 260-277. - Includes index.

Modernism's mystical subjects: an introduction -- The nude descending a flowchart: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Marcel Duchamp -- Seeing the one Less Seen: James Johnson Sweeney, in Light of Marcel Duchamp -- Blood miracles and fire magic: the transmutationan arts of Alberto Burri -- Illuminating the void, displaying the vision: Pierre Soulages -- Studies in self-creation and creative destruction; Jean Tinguely -- A spark of light darting through empty space: Eduardo Chillida

Artists have often taken rational, material existence as a starting point for engagement with metaphysics and mysticism, but no book until now has traced a similar strategy on the part of curators. In Curating Consciousness, Marcia Brennan focuses on one of the transformational figures of twentieth-century curatorial culture, and the main protagonist of this (until now) unacknowledged curatorial practice. James Johnson Sweeney (1900--1986) was hired by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to be the Director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935. He went on to become the Director of the Guggenheim Museum in the 1950s and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the 1960s. Throughout his career, Sweeney provocatively engaged motifs of mysticism in order to cast the modern museum as a secular temple of art. Brennan describes how these motifs informed Sweeney's curatorial and textual engagements with specific artists and projects, including works by Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Burri, Pierre Soulages, Jean Tinguely, and Eduardo Chillida.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Marcia Brennan is Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University. She is the author of Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (2002) and Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (2006), both published by the MIT Press.