Out of Eden

Essays on Modern Art

W. S. Di Piero

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2024
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520308503
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Out of Eden presents the rigorous investigations and musings of a poet-essayist on the ways in which modern artists have confronted and transfigured the realist tradition of representation. Di Piero pursues his theme with an autobiographical force and immediacy. He fixes his attention on painters and photographers as disparate as Cezanne, Boccioni, Pollock, Warhol, Edward Weston, and Robert Frank. There is indeed a satisfying sweep to this collection: Matisse, Giacometti, Morandi, Bacon, the Tuscan Macchiaioli of the late nineteenth century, the Futurists of the early modern period, and the American pop painters. Di Piero's analysis of modern images also probes the relation between new kinds of image making and transcendence. The author argues that Matisse and Giacometti, for example, continued to exercise the religious imagination even in a desacralized age. And because Di Piero believes that the visual arts and poetry live intimate, coordinate lives, his essays speak of the relation of poetry to forms in art.

This title was originally published in 1991.

Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Modern Instances: The Macchiaioli
• Morandi of Bologna
• Killing Moonlight: The Futurists
• Miscellany I
• Out of Eden: On Alberto Giacometti
• Notes on Photography
• Matisse’s Broken Circle
• The Americans
• Miscellany II
• Not a Beautiful Picture: On Robert Frank
• Other Americans
• Francis Bacon and the Fortunes of Poetry
• Selected Bibliography
• Index