Feb. 7 Book Talk by Jenny Anger, Prof of Art History

Professor of Art History, Jenny Anger's "Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme" follows artists who participated in both the German (Der Sturm [storm]) and American (Société Anonyme [anonymous society]) organizations and who found inspiration in metaphor.

Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm—the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin (1910-32)—has never been the subject of a book-length study in English.

Then Anger follows artists across the Atlantic to Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme in New York (1920-50), which based its practices on those of Der Sturm.

Jenny Anger is a professor of art history at Grinnell College, where she has taught since earning her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture at Brown University in 1997. Anger’s specialty is twentieth-century European art history and theory. Her first book, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge University Press, 2004) situates Klee’s art within the problematic of the decorative as it was articulated and contested especially in the early years of the twentieth century. Anger’s second book, Four Metaphors of Modernism: Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme, appeared with the University of Minnesota Press in 2018. The book argues for the unacknowledged centrality of metaphor in modern art through an exploration four recurrent metaphors—piano, water, glass, and home—that shape the realm of possibility of art in the two titular organizations: Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm in Berlin (1910-32) and Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme in New York (1920-50).

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and the Grinnell College Libraries, please join us on February 7 at 4:15 pm in the Burling 1st Floor Lounge.  Light refreshments will be served.