After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse, Volume 2 (Essays on European Avant-Garde Art, XX-XXI)

The ten essays in After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse offer original critical discussions of some of the major European artists and movements in the twentieth century, beginning with important reassessments of Italian Futurism and the unique and disruptively consequential compounding of words and images in Dada and Surrealism. Welchman writes with verve and insight about the production, and circumvention, of affect in the work of Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger; the delirious splits and metaphorical ricochets fired up by Salvador Dalí; and the social and philosophical ideas mobilized by René Magritte. The second half of the volume examines mid- and later-twentieth century artists, offering a revisionist assessment of Hans Hartung; a new analysis of major themes and issues in the work of Antoni Tàpies; a meditation on “whiteness” in the practice and thinking of Günter Brus; and an exploration of exchanges between the US and the UK about sculpture between 1945 and the 1970s. The book concludes with an essay on the relations between writing and seeing in the work of Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg. The volume is the second in Welchman's series XX–XXI on European art from this and the last century.