Historical Present: Essays of the 1970s

Historical Present: Essays of the 1970s

Contents

Foreword
Preface
Introduction

Traditions in Letters

After Ruskin: Hopkins as Draftsman
Santayana: A Sentimental Education
Magritte in an Imagist Light
Beats and Art: The Surrealist Connection

High Modernity

Kirchner as a Soldier and the Crisis of World War I
Corbu in 2-D
(Un)learning (Not) to (Dis)like Ernst
Mondrian the New Yorker

New Classics

Two Sorts of Monk: Reinhardt and Merton
The Englishness of Caro
Mangold’s Humanist Geometry
Coming to Terms with Later Johns

Smithson’s Earth

The Panama Canal and Other Works of Work
Smithson’s Earth: Spontaneous Retrievals
The Spiral Jetty Movie

“Iconicity”: Experiments in Revision

Cruciformality
Hard-Core Painting
Pictures of Art
Nothing / Not Nothing / Something
Iconicity

Historical Present

Neo-Neo
Thornton Willis and Abstract Identity
Scully’s Stripes and Strokes
Nozkowski: Pressing On

Afterword

Plastic Art and General Culture

Ann Arbor, Michigan: U.M.I. Research Press, 1984