Enough Already!: It's Deborah Kass's Turn to Take the Stage

Constance Zaytoun

doi:10.1162/dram_a_00101

Enough Already!: It's Deborah Kass's Turn to Take the Stage

TDR/The Drama Review ◽

10.1162/dram_a_00101 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 55 (3) ◽

pp. 110-123

Author(s):

Constance Zaytoun

Keyword(s):

Andy Warhol ◽

Jackson Pollock ◽

Broadway Musicals ◽

Post War

Contemporary painter Deborah Kass appropriates the forms of post-war masters such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Frank Stella in her work, but her subject choices are often conscious manifestations of her nostalgic identifications with middlebrow Jewish artists and Broadway musicals. Her radical take on nostalgia draws from lyrics, idiomatic sayings, and iconic Jewish figures to promote a progressive rather than conservative agenda. Kass's performative interventions insert her feminist-Jewish-lesbian self squarely at the center of visual culture's frame and on the stage of art's history.

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The American Invasion

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199988747.013.8 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Dominic Symonds

Keyword(s):

Sharp Contrast ◽

Typical Material ◽

Broadway Musicals ◽

Post War ◽

The Impact

This chapter considers the impact of ‘the American invasion’: a slew of Broadway musicals led by Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun that captivated and shocked audiences when they opened in 1947 in London. Arriving in a country mired in post-war rationing and rehabilitation, they offered a sharp contrast to the typical material on the British musical stage. To understand the transatlantic dynamics that are its context, it is useful to consider how contemporary America projected itself, and how the British perceived Americans. With Hollywood images of virile action heroes, and with American GIs stationed on British soil, Brits encountered a new and forceful sexuality that the energy of the post-war Broadway imports evoked. As the staid morals of the pre-war era gave way to the excitement of the new, the British musical responded with the punchy riposte of a new Novello show: Gay’s the Word.

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Motherwell, Robert (1915–1991)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem189-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Gregory Gilbert

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

The United States ◽

University Education ◽

Art Teacher ◽

Jackson Pollock ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Synonymous Term ◽

Mark Rothko ◽

Post War ◽

Symbolic Content

Robert Motherwell was one of the central founding members of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s and served as its major theoretical spokesman throughout his career. The youngest figure in the New York School (a synonymous term he coined for Abstract Expressionism), Motherwell was one of the few who received a formal university education, which is reflected in his extensive series of published critical writings and his prolific activities as a book editor, lecturer and art teacher. Trained in philosophy and art history, Motherwell’s diverse intellectual interests also included modernist literature, psychoanalytic theory and radical politics, which deeply informed the symbolic content of his art. Motherwell is notable for aligning the artistic traditions of School of Paris modernism with the progressive formal and thematic concerns associated with the post-war American avant-garde. In contrast to other Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, who forged signature painting styles, Motherwell actively experimented with a variety of abstract modes and media, but is most renowned for his innovative production of collages and celebrated series of paintings the ‘‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic’’.

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