Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Lives of the Imaginary Artists in Cold War California

Lives of the Imaginary Artists in Cold War California

Steinberg, Monica

Hardcover

Art Criticism & TheoryArt HistoryAmerican Art - General

ISBN10: 022683963X
ISBN13: 9780226839639
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Dec 29 2025
Pages: 460
Weight: 3.79
Height: 1.42 Width: 7.80 Depth: 10.18
Language: English
How artists created fictionalized identities to realize works that resisted political overreach and art historical conventions.

This book explores how a group of real California artists created imaginary artists, engaging with the political climate of the Cold War era and frustrating the discipline of art history. They employed pseudonymity, obfuscation, anonymity, (auto)biografiction, imaginary portraiture, heteronymity, role-playing, doubling, and alter ego. Often laced with humor, these exploits facilitated stylistic experimentation, provoking reactions from art viewers and governing authorities alike, and disrupting reliance on documentation and attribution within art history.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Ed Kienholz, Walter Hopps, Robert Alexander, Wally Hedrick, George Herms, and Wallace Berman activated imagined and secret identities, provoking reactions within a conservative environment gripped by communist paranoia. As political concerns shifted in the 1960s and 1970s to movements for peace and equality, artists including Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Lynda Benglis, Larry Bell, Judy Chicago,

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