Weaving Modernism

An unprecedented study that reveals tapestrys role as a modernist medium and a model for the movements discourse on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades following World War II With a revelatory analysis of how the postwar French tapestry revival provided a medium for modern art and a model for its discourse and marketing on both sides of the Atlantic, Weaving Modernism presents a fascinating reexamination of modernisms relationship to decoration, reproducibility, and politics. Tapestry offered artists a historically grounded medium for distributing and marketing their work, helped expand the visibility and significance of abstraction at midcentury, and facilitated modernisms entry into the dominant paradigm of the postwar period. K. L. H. Wells situates tapestry as part of a broader marketplace modernism in which artists participated, conjuring a lived experience of visual culture in corporate lobbies, churches, and even airplanes, as well as in galleries and private homes. This extensively researched study features previously unpublished illustrations and little-known works by such major artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, and Frank Stella.