Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art - Hardcover

Tirza True Latimer is Associate Professor and Chair of the Visual and Critical Studies Graduate Program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

“Tirza True Latimer’s analysis of under-studied episodes in the queer history of modernism challenges so many common art historical assumptions that this book could be said to queer art history itself. Eccentric Modernisms makes a compelling case for the importance of queer subcultures and multimedia collaborations.”—Christopher Reed, Professor of English and Visual Culture, The Pennsylvania State University

“Latimer gives us both intimate and expansive readings of three ambitious interdisciplinary projects of the 1930s and 1940s, emphasizing their collaborative nature as one way artists such as Virgil Thomson, Pavel Tchelitchew, Christian Bérard, and Charles Henri Ford performed their modernism. Her study promotes a more inclusive history of modern art, one that embraces the productive partnerships within the cosmopolitan and international queer community during the first half of the twentieth century.” —Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University

“This book reveals how a creative community was formed and sustained, and how it eventually, although belatedly, came to influence our culture. Combining historical, contextual, theoretical, and visual analyses of under-studied artworks, publications, and ephemera, Latimer tells a hidden history that does not rely on authoritarian truth claims, offering instead a methodological model for understanding suppressed, yet highly significant, historical phenomena. Interdisciplinary in nature, this study is bound to be significant across a multitude of fields.”—Dr. Nizan Shaked, author of The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art

“Tirza True Latimer’s analysis of under-studied episodes in the queer history of modernism challenges so many common art historical assumptions that this book could be said to queer art history itself. Eccentric Modernisms makes a compelling case for the importance of queer subcultures and multimedia collaborations.”—Christopher Reed, Professor of English and Visual Culture, The Pennsylvania State University

“Latimer gives us both intimate and expansive readings of three ambitious interdisciplinary projects of the 1930s and 1940s, emphasizing their collaborative nature as one way artists such as Virgil Thomson, Pavel Tchelitchew, Christian Bérard, and Charles Henri Ford performed their modernism. Her study promotes a more inclusive history of modern art, one that embraces the productive partnerships within the cosmopolitan and international queer community during the first half of the twentieth century.” —Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University

“This book reveals how a creative community was formed and sustained, and how it eventually, although belatedly, came to influence our culture. Combining historical, contextual, theoretical, and visual analyses of under-studied artworks, publications, and ephemera, Latimer tells a hidden history that does not rely on authoritarian truth claims, offering instead a methodological model for understanding suppressed, yet highly significant, historical phenomena. Interdisciplinary in nature, this study is bound to be significant across a multitude of fields.”—Dr. Nizan Shaked, author of The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art