Easels of Utopia: Art's Fact Returned (Avebury Series in Philosophy)

This text presents a discussion of duration and anomaly within the aesthetic parameters of the Italian and British avant-garde, which throughout this century, have constructed, influenced and informed our definitions of modernity. In this context the author reads Umberto Boccioni's "Futurism" as reminiscent of Thomist realism. He proposes Caravaggism's historical relevance to the election of individuality in post-war realism and draws the readers attention to the aesthetic implications in Carlo Carra's metaphysical art and its reappraisal of the early Renaissance. In presenting parallel discussions of Italian and British questions, this book presents the works of Marino Marini, Renato Guttuso, Francis Bacon and Stanley Spencer as decisive anomalies within art's aesthetic construct. Baldacchino argues that this "anomaly" initiates a return to "lost" beginnings where form seeks knowledge, content regains an ability to archaicize and art becomes contingent.