Brutal Aesthetics

In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian and critic Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the mass devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by "positive barbarism," the enigmatic idea that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the variety of ways key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a "brutal aesthetics" adequate to the destruction all around them. With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates this manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again.