Hal Foster teaches art history at Princeton. He has written widely on postmodernism, the avant-garde and aesthetic theory, both in the LRB and in his books, which include Recodings, The Return of the Real and The First Pop Age. He edited the influential essay collection The Anti-Aesthetic. Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics was published in February 2025.
Which modern artists identified with anarchism? The Dadaists would be a good guess, but the truly political ones, such as John Heartfield and George Grosz, were communists, and since the early days of Proudhon and Marx anarchists and communists have been more rivals than comrades. The ultra-composed Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille...
The avant-garde of the early 20th century had more than its fair share of clever rogues, and no one played the role with more self-conscious élan than Walter Serner, who compiled an aphoristic guide to succeeding as a con artist in a Europe roiled by social upheaval, economic chaos and political intrigue after the First World War. Born in 1889 to an affluent Jewish family in the...
‘Anew type has emerged,’ a critic wrote after the raucous premiere of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi in Paris in December 1896, ‘a popular legend of base instincts, rapacious and violent.’ ‘What more is possible?’ W.B. Yeats, who was in attendance, recalled in his autobiography. ‘After us the Savage God.’ Was the uproarious Ubu an early intimation...
All the change is good, but not if we lose the plot altogether; there is no need for MoMA to mix and match to the extent that Tate Modern does. So, too, all the collaboration is good, but not if the voices of the various curators drown each other out. A protean display in frequent circulation might also be a prophylactic against criticism – Proteus shape-shifted in order not to answer questions, after all. There may be another, unintended consequence: if iconic works like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are almost always on view, the flux elsewhere might render them more monumental, not less.
Biographies of artists often read like legends of heroes. Vasari preferred his Renaissance masters to be precocious in talent, humble in origin and, if possible, anointed by a predecessor – so he gives us Cimabue discovering the shepherd boy Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was...
Hal Foster reads his review of the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at Tate Modern.
When Hal Foster uses the word ‘first’ in the title of his confidently focused study, he means to start us thinking about Pop now and then. It is a reference to Reyner Banham’s
Helen Gardner’s benevolently dictatorial Art through the Ages was published in 1926, and remained the pre-eminent survey for American undergraduates until 1962, when H.W. Janson’s
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