Our 2023 publication Ends of Painting: Art in the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Paris Lettau and David Homewood, has been awarded a prize for best anthology.
Ends of Painting has been awarded the important Best Anthology prize in the 2023 Arts Writing and Publishing Awards (AWAPAs). Administered by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, the AWAPAs the only prizes in the Australasia region to celebrate the publishing achievements writers make to the field.
The Best Anthology prize is sponsored by the Australian Institute of Art History, and is awarded annually to the best collected edition of relevant writing on art, art theory and historical research.
"The premise of this book is that artists from the 1960s and ‘70s, far from simply/simplistically rejecting painting as an exhausted or bourgeois medium, reappraised it within an expanded network of media in order to explore ‘novelties through and in relation to painting’. The introduction by David Homewood and Paris Lettau is persuasively argued and clearly written. Whether comprising specific case studies or reconfiguring familiar art historiographies of the period, the essays are generally rigorously argued with many fresh insights to inform and delight the reader. The 12 contributors give a good global coverage, though mostly oriented to Australia, Europe and the USA.
The book is pitched at art historians interested in the radical reappraisals of art by artists given the geo-political upheavals of the time, challenges to the prevailing Euro-American hegemony of the art scene, the embrace of new media, trans-national opportunities and, within Australia, the emergence of cross-cultural currents that witnessed the supercharging of painting by performance and conceptual art. The strongest essays are thoughtful, erudite, original and inspiring. Most art historians will delight in finding something new in the anthology, but there is also much to engage readers with an interest in a broader fields of societal and visual studies.
The design and production values are excellent which contributes to the appeal of the book. Inserts of a generous number of colour illustrations are welcome." Judges: Associate Professor Catherine De Lorenzo & Professor Helen Ennis
Huge congratulations are due to the book's editors, Paris Lettau and David Homewood, and the designer Elle Williams.
More about the book
Contemporary art begins where painting ends, or so goes one of recent art history's most dominant narratives. This book is a post-mortem of the supposed death of painting in the period following World War II. In eleven essays by a global array of leading scholars, Ends of Painting offers a counter-history, showing how the practice and discourse of painting remained integral to art throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Written by art historians from Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, each chapter captures a renewed critical approach to topics as diverse as conceptualism and anachronism, photography and autobiography, theatre and politics, nationalism and consumerism, race and modernism.
The book reveals a vast constellation in which painting’s ends are also beginnings—from Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York to Naoyoshi Hikosaka’s act of pouring latex over tatami mats on his bedroom floor in Tokyo; from the first canvas boards by Aboriginal artists at Papunya in Australia’s Western Desert to the Collective Actions Group’s documentation of people holding up arrangements of coloured envelopes in snowfields outside Moscow.
These unlikely correspondences between times and places sustain this book’s return to the medium, revealing how history is brushed by painting, and painting by history.