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Distributed for Reaktion Books

Public Monuments

Art in Political Bondage 1870-1997

Public monuments to significant individuals or to political concepts are all too familiar. But the notions underlying them are not so obvious. Sergiusz Michalski traces the history of the public monument from the 1870s, when erecting them became an artistic, political and social pre-occupation, to today when the distinction between public monuments and public sculpture is increasingly blurred.

The author shows how, in its golden age – up until 1914 – the public monument served the purpose of both education and legitimization. The French Third Republic, for example, envisaged the monument as a symbol of bourgeois meritocracy. In more recent decades, the public monument has been charged with the task of commemorating and symbolizing one of humankind’s most terrible catastrophes - the Holocaust. Today, although the artistic failure of countless European war memorials has signaled the beginning of the demise of the public monument in the West, it continues to flourish elsewhere, commemorating despotic leaders from Kim Il Sung to Saddam Hussein.

Distribution by the University of Chicago Press only to customers in the USA and Canada. Customers elsewhere should visit the UK website of Reaktion Books.


256 pages | © 1998

Essays in Art and Culture

Art: Art--General Studies


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Table of Contents

Preface
1. Democratic ’Statuomania’ in Paris
2. Bismarck and the Lure of Teutonic Granite
3. Memorials to the Great War
4. The Nazi Monuments
5. The Communist Pantheon
6. In Quest of a New Heroic Form
7. Invisibility and Inversion
8. Public Monuments in the Third World
9. Monuments in the 1990s and Beyond
References
Select Bibliography
Photographic Acknowledgements

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