Material Imagination

Natalie Adamson is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews, and was Deputy Editor of Art History from 2012 to 2017. She is the author of Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-Garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960 (2009) and Painting, Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944-1964 (2009). She currently holds a two-year Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust for a book project provisionally entitled Pierre Soulages: Radical Abstraction. Steven Harris is Associate Professor in History of Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta. He is the author of articles on surrealism, postwar abstraction, and Fluxus, and the book Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930's: Art, Politics and the Psyche (2004). His current research project, The Poetics of Disenchantment, investigates both the surrealist movement in the postwar period, and how surrealist ideas and values were taken up or challenged by postwar European collectives like Cobra, the College of 'Pataphysics, and the Situationist International.

• Notes on Contributors 6Chapter 1 Material Imagination: Art in Europe, 1946–72 8Natalie Adamson and Steven HarrisChapter 2 Black Flowers Blossom: Bachelard, Soulages and the Material Imaginary of Abstract Painting 22Natalie AdamsonChapter 3 Materialism and Intersubjectivity in Cobra 44Karen KurczynskiChapter 4 Makeshift Wholes: Interiority and Texture in Postwar British Design 66Alex KitnickChapter 5 Materializing Modernism in Postwar Italy: Fausto Melotti, Gio Ponti, and the 1961 88Esposizione Internazionale del Lavoro Marin R. SullivanChapter 6 L’Optique Moderne: Daniel Spoerri’s ‘Optical Readymades’ 112Jill CarrickChapter 7 Terrain vague: Ben Vautier and the Ecole de Nice 140Anna DezeuzeChapter 8 ‘Not Yet’ Materialized: Carlfriedrich Claus’s ‘Talking Papers’ 164Sarah E. JamesChapter 9 The Longevity of Roman Opałka 188Alistair RiderIndex 209