Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde PDF Download

Author: Natalie Adamson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527554732
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960 is a collection of eight essays and a scholarly introduction by established and emerging scholars that challenges the continuing modernist slant of twentieth-century art history. The intention is not to perpetuate the vulgar opposition between avant-garde and reactionary art that characterized early-twentieth-century discourse and has marked much subsequent historical writing, but rather to investigate the complex relationship that both innovative and conservative artists had to the concept of tradition. How did artists and art critics conceive of tradition in relation to modernity? What was the role of an artist’s institutional positioning in determining expectations for his or her art? What light is thrown on the structure of the French art world by considering artists from abroad who worked in Paris? How did the war alter modernist and avant-garde paradigms and force crucial changes upon art production in the postwar period to 1960? Particular attention is paid to the terms academic, pompier, official, and arrière-garde, originally used to situate the more conservative artists and works as second-rate or as the negative foil to the assumed radicalism of the avant-garde. By re-evaluating the work of artists pushed to the historical margins by such polemical descriptors, and by proposing alternative understandings of the aesthetic, economic, institutional and political factors that drive our ideas of avant-gardism and the modernist narrative in France, this collection of essays offers new routes to explore the terrain of twentieth-century art in France.

Author: Marc Gotlieb
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629885X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This is the first book in English on Henri Regnault (1843–71), a forgotten star of the European fin-de-siècle. A brilliant maverick who once seemed to hold the future of French painting in his hands, Regnault enjoyed a meteoric rise that was cut short when he died at the age of twenty-seven in the Franco-Prussian War. The story of his glamorous career and patriotic death colored French commemorative culture for nearly forty years—until his memory was swept away by the vast losses of World War I. In The Deaths of Henri Regnault, Marc Gotlieb reintroduces this important artist while offering a new perspective on the ultimate decline of nineteenth-century salon painting. Gotlieb traces Regnault’s trajectory after he won the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome, a fellowship that provided four years of study in Italy. Arriving in Rome, however, Regnault suffered a profound crisis of originality that led him to flee the city in favor of Spain and Morocco. But the crisis also proved productive: from Rome, Madrid, Tangier, and Paris, Regnault enthralled audiences with a bold suite of strange, seductive, and violent Orientalist paintings inspired by his exotic journey—images that, Gotlieb argues, arose precisely from the crisis that had overtaken Regnault and that in key respects was shared by his more avant-garde counterparts. Both an in-depth look at Regnault’s violent art and a vibrant essay on historical memory, The Deaths of Henri Regnault lays bare a creative legend who helped shape the collective experience of a generation.

Author: Patricia Leighten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022600242X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The years before World War I were a time of social and political ferment in Europe, which profoundly affected the art world. A major center of this creative tumult was Paris, where many avant-garde artists sought to transform modern art through their engagement with radical politics. In this provocative study of art and anarchism in prewar France, Patricia Leighten argues that anarchist aesthetics and a related politics of form played crucial roles in the development of modern art, only to be suppressed by war fever and then forgotten. Leighten examines the circle of artists—Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, František Kupka, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees Van Dongen, and others—for whom anarchist politics drove the idea of avant-garde art, exploring how their aesthetic choices negotiated the myriad artistic languages operating in the decade before World War I. Whether they worked on large-scale salon paintings, political cartoons, or avant-garde abstractions, these artists, she shows, were preoccupied with social criticism. Each sought an appropriate subject, medium, style, and audience based on different conceptions of how art influences society—and their choices constantly shifted as they responded to the dilemmas posed by contradictory anarchist ideas. According to anarchist theorists, art should expose the follies and iniquities of the present to the masses, but it should also be the untrammeled expression of the emancipated individual and open a path to a new social order. Revealing how these ideas generated some of modernism’s most telling contradictions among the prewar Parisian avant-garde, The Liberation of Painting restores revolutionary activism to the broader history of modern art.

Author: Natalie Adamson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119328578
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Material Imagination examines the interrelated concepts of matter, materialism, and materiality in postwar European art, from 1946-1972. Provides a unique perspective on European art by prioritizing material dimensions over concept or context, while also paying attention to theoretical and historical concerns Explores artists’ methods and materials in order to better understand the social and cultural environments in which their works of art were made Demonstrates how materials can be harnessed to affect the critical interpretation of artwork Brings together exceptional illustrations and new research in eight essays by art historians and scholars

Author: Jonathan Freedman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022658111X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into Western European and Anglo-American cultural centers, they encountered a society obsessed with decadence. An avant-garde movement characterized by self-consciously artificial art and literature, philosophic pessimism, and an interest in nonnormative sexualities, decadence was also a smear, whereby Jews were viewed as the source of social and cultural decline. In The Jewish Decadence, Jonathan Freedman argues that Jewish engagement with decadence played a major role in the emergence of modernism and the making of Jewish culture from the 1870s to the present. The first to tell this sweeping story, Freedman demonstrates the centrality of decadence to the aesthetics of modernity and its inextricability from Jewishness. Freedman recounts a series of diverse and surprising episodes that he insists do not belong solely to the past, but instead reveal that the identification of Jewishness with decadence persists today.

Author: Kerry Greaves
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000370984
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This transnational volume examines innovative women artists who were from, or worked in, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sápmi, and Sweden from the emergence of modernism until the feminist movement took shape in the 1960s. The book addresses the culturally specific conditions that shaped Nordic artists’ contributions, brings the latest methodological and feminist approaches to bear on Nordic art history, and engages a wide international audience through the contributors’ subject matter and analysis. Rather than introducing a new history of "rediscovered" women artists, the book is more concerned with understanding the mechanisms and structures that affected women artists and their work, while suggesting alternative ways of constructing women’s art histories. Artists covered include Else Alfelt, Pia Arke, Franciska Clausen, Jessie Kleemann, Hilma af Klint, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Greta Knutson, Aase Texmon Rygh, Hannah Ryggen, Júlíana Sveinsdóttir, Ellen Thesleff, and Astri Aasen. The target audience includes scholars working in art history, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, curatorial studies, Nordic studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.

Author: Suzanne Preston Blier
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002042
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
In Picasso's Demoiselles, eminent art historian Suzanne Preston Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the twentieth century's most important, celebrated, and studied paintings. Drawing on her expertise in African art and newly discovered sources, Blier reads the painting not as a simple bordello scene but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of representations of women from around the world that he encountered in photographs and sculptures. These representations are central to understanding the painting's creation and help identify the demoiselles as global figures, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, and sisters, as well as part of the colonial world Picasso inhabited. Simply put, Blier fundamentally transforms what we know about this revolutionary and iconic work.

Author: Fae Brauer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144386370X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Once the State-run Salon in Paris closed, an array of independent Salons mushroomed starting with the French Artists Salon and Women’s Salon in 1881 followed by the Independent Artists’ Salon, National Salon of Fine Arts and Autumn Salon. Offering an unparalleled choice of art identities and alliances, together with undreamed-of opportunities for sales, commissions, prizes and art criticism, these great Salons guaranteed the centripetal and centrifugal power of Paris as the “modern art centre”. Lured by the prospect of being exhibited annually in Salons the size of Biennales today, a huge number and national diversity of artists, from the Australian Rupert Bunny to the Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, flocked to Paris. Yet by no means were these Salons equal in power, nor did they work consensually to forge this “modern art centre”. Formed on the basis of their different cultural politics, constantly they rivalled one another for State acquisitions and commissions, exhibition places and spaces, awards, and every other means of enhancing their legitimacy. By no means were the avant-garde salons those that most succeeded. Instead, as this culturo-political history demonstrates, the French Artists’ and National Fine Art Salons were the most successful, with the genderist French Artists' Salon being the most powerful and “official”. Despite the renown today of Neo-Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Fauvism, Cubism and Orphism, the most powerful artists in this “modern art centre” were not Sonia Delaunay, Émile Gallé, Paul Signac, Henri Matisse or even Picasso but such Academicians as Léon Bonnat, William Bouguereau, Fernand Cormon, Edouard Detaille, Gabriel Ferrier, Jean-Paul Laurens, Luc-Oliver Merson and Aimé Morot, who exhibited at the “official” Salon supported by the machinery of the State. In its exposure of the rivalry, conflict and struggle between the Salons and their artists, this is an unprecedented history of dissension. It also exposes how, just below the welcoming internationalist veneer of this “modern art centre”, intense persecutionist paranoia lay festering. Whenever France’s “civilizing mission” seemed culturally, commercially or colonially threatened, it erupted in waves of nationalist xenophobia turning artistic rivalry into bitter enmity. In exposing how rivals became transmuted into conspirators, ultimately this book reveals a paradox resonant in histories that celebrate the international triumph of French modern art: that this magnetic “centre”, which began by welcoming international modernists, ended by attacking them for undermining its cultural supremacy, contaminating its “civilizing mission” and politically persecuting the very modernist culture for which it has received historical renown.

Author: Sara Crangle
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1399524313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
Mina Loy has long been recognised as a writer who insists on the primacy of the corporeal. Over two volumes, Sara Crangle excavates how Loy's relationship to the human body was inextricable from her esoteric understanding of the human soul. Nethered Regions - An Anatomy of Mina Loy develops new thinking on Loy's representations of the foundations of existence, exploring topics that include sentience, primitivism, evolution, vitalism and sensibility. Dubbing Loy an atavistic vanguardist, this book aligns sacrifice and satire, demonstrating how Loy devises an original feminist satirical mode by which sardonic aggression is aimed at generating intimacy and proximity, rather than ironised distance. Loy's articulations of 'low' body parts - feet, legs, genitals, bellies and wombs - are explored in chapters that theorise her deployment of 'dissident' sexualities (queerness, prostitution, women's pleasure) and censorship; pictorial-poetic cartographies of desire; and the accursed muse that is unsung counterpart to the poete maudit.

Author: Sara Crangle
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1399524348
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Mina Loy has long been recognised as a writer who insists on the primacy of the corporeal. Over two volumes, Sara Crangle excavates how Loy's relationship to the human body was inextricable from her esoteric understanding of the human soul. Elevated Realms is the first study book-length study devoted to Loy's affinities with alternative spiritualities ancient and modern. Aligning Loy's heterodoxies with her vanguardism, this volume considers Loy's engagements with mesmerism, spiritualism and telepathy; enchantment and visionariness; psychoanalysis, philosophy and physics; Christian Science and Theosophy. Attending to Loy's presentations of the upper half of the body - heartscapes, spines, eyes and nerve centres - Elevated Realms unearths the coordinates of Loy's esoteric Eros, a transcendent, orgasmic love that is cosmic, intimate, aesthetic and a corrective to women's disregarded satiation. The requisite counterpart to her acerbic feminist satires, Loy's Eros re-envisions abjectified, feminised posturing as a dorsality with the potential to access the beyond.