Picturing History

1 total work

The Destruction of Art

by Dario Gamboni

Published 1 January 1997

In this book -- the first comprehensive examination of modern iconoclasm -- Dario Gamboni looks closely at deliberate attacks against works of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He probes for motives and reassesses the circumstances in which institutions as well as individuals have attempted to eradicate public buildings, churches, sculptures, paintings, and other works of art. His interest spurred by the destruction of public monuments in the Communist bloc after 1989, Gamboni shows that iconoclasm is not just a thing of the past, but is also an international contemporary cultural phenomenon that includes explicable and inexplicable vandalism, political protest, and censorship. He examines incidents of destruction, some comic and others disquieting, in the United States, France, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, the former Soviet Union and its satellites, and elsewhere.

To explore the relationship between the destruction of art in this century and older forms of iconoclasm, the author presents case studies of such European and American controversies as the Suffragette protests in London's National Gallery and the hotly debated removal of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in New York. The Destruction of Art considers what has changed worldwide since the French Revolution in the ways in which works of art have been willfully attacked or eliminated and what this reveals about the place of works of art and material culture in society. The history of iconoclasm, Gamboni finds, reflects the changing and conflicting definitions of art itself.