See in list of books below the book-jackets—

THE CARPET PARADIGM from 1976 to 2014: Versions, Translations, Influence

This is the revised English version:

The Carpet Paradigm: Integral Flatness from Decorative to Fine Art

Decades ago, Joseph Masheck published a long, wide-ranging, history-of-ideas inquiry into carpet, textile and related figures for the integral flatness of modern painting insofar as it paralleled early modern design theory. Concern with a planarity uncompromised by pictorial illusion had a long prehistory in surface design, underpinning the most sublimated “fine art” of painting (as if raised to a higher power). By the 1970s, however, a new generation had become frustrated by having the notion of flatness in painting become trademarked, like a patent medicine, with the name of one highly influential critic. Masheck, interested since youth in abstract or non-representational art and ever appreciative of its ideal formal flatness, had no qualms about tracing such high-art, as it were sublimated flatness, back to the material flatness of real-world craft work in the “applied” arts. Examining that situation historically, through a sequence of developing stylistic modalities, may have produced something of a minor classic in the literature of modernist flatness.

New York and Turin: Edgewise Press, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1-893207-23-9
ISBN-10: 1-893207-23-4