Malevich and Interwar Modernism

Malevich and Interwar Modernism PDF Author: Éva Forgács
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350204196
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understood as a symbol of a new internationalism and modernity and while Forgács uses it as part of her overall narrative, she focuses on it and its journey across borders to follow its significance, how it was used by the above key artists and how its meaning became modified in Western Europe. It is unusual to discuss interwar modernism and its postwar survival, but this book's chapters work together to argue that the interwar developments signified a turning point in twentieth-century art that led to much creativity and innovation. Forgács supports her theory with newly found and newly interpreted documents that prove how this exciting legacy was shaped by three major agents: Malevich, Lissitzsky and van Doesburg. She offers a wider interpretation of modernism that examines its postwar significance, reception and history up until the emergence of the New Left in 1956 and the seismic events of 1968.

Malevich and Interwar Modernism

Malevich and Interwar Modernism PDF Author: Éva Forgács
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350204196
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understood as a symbol of a new internationalism and modernity and while Forgács uses it as part of her overall narrative, she focuses on it and its journey across borders to follow its significance, how it was used by the above key artists and how its meaning became modified in Western Europe. It is unusual to discuss interwar modernism and its postwar survival, but this book's chapters work together to argue that the interwar developments signified a turning point in twentieth-century art that led to much creativity and innovation. Forgács supports her theory with newly found and newly interpreted documents that prove how this exciting legacy was shaped by three major agents: Malevich, Lissitzsky and van Doesburg. She offers a wider interpretation of modernism that examines its postwar significance, reception and history up until the emergence of the New Left in 1956 and the seismic events of 1968.

100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922

100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922 PDF Author: Isabel Wünsche
Publisher: Böhlau Köln
ISBN: 3412525650
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
The First Russian Art Exhibition (Erste Russische Kunstausstellung), which opened at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin on October 15, 1922, and later travelled to Amsterdam, introduced a broad Western audience to the most recent artistic developments in Russia. The extensive show – more than a thousand works, including paintings, graphic works, sculptures, stage designs, architectural models, and works of porcelain – was remarkably inclusive in its scope, which ranged from traditional figurative painting to the latest constructions of the Russian avant-garde. Coming on the heels of the Treaty of Rapallo, the exhibition was a first cultural step towards bilateral relations between two young and yet internationally isolated new states – the Weimar Republic and the Russian Soviet Republic. Moving away from the narrow focus on the avant-garde, the volume presents new research that examines the exhibition's broader historical scope and cultural implications. The reception of the exhibition within artistic circles in Germany, Europe, the United States, and Japan in the 1920s is addressed, as well as the disposition of many of the works exhibited. The combination of longer, thematic essays and short features, along with reproductions of newly identified works and a selection of unpublished archival materials make this book valuable to both a scholarly and a general readership.

Wolkenbügel

Wolkenbügel PDF Author: Richard Anderson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262048787
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
How a visionary, never-realized architectural project, devised by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, shaped architectural culture in Europe between the world wars. After achieving international acclaim as a painter and designer, El Lissitzky set out in 1924 to convince the world—and himself—that he was also an architect. He did this with a project for a “horizontal skyscraper,” which he gave an obscure and untranslatable name: Wolkenbügel. Eight of these buildings, perched atop slender pillars, were intended to stand at major intersections along Moscow’s Boulevard Ring, integrating the flow of tramlines, subways, and elevators. In Wolkenbügel, Richard Anderson explores Lissitzky’s translation of visual and textual media into spatial ideas and offers an in-depth study of the surviving drawings and archival artifacts related to Lissitzky's most complex architectural proposal. This book offers a new and definitive account of how Lissitzky expanded the conceptual and representational tools available to the modern architect by drawing on many sources—including photography, typography, exhibition design, and even the elementary forms of the alphabet—to create the Wolkenbügel. Anderson shows how the production and reception of a paper project served to link key ideas and relationships that animated the worlds of art and architecture, offering a new view on received histories of the interwar avant-gardes. By attending to Lissitzky’s singular architectural project, Anderson reveals the dynamics of internationality in the constitution of modern architectural culture in Europe.

Historic Avant-Garde Work on Paper

Historic Avant-Garde Work on Paper PDF Author: Sascha Bru
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003856667
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This book examines the many functions of paper in the fine art and aesthetics of the early twentieth-century modernist or historic avant-garde (Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism and many more). With its many collages and photomontages, the historic avant-garde is generally considered to have transformed paper from a mere support into an artistic medium and to have assisted in art on paper gaining a firm autonomy. Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book shows that the story of paper in the avant-garde has thereby hardly been told. The first section looks at a selection of canonized individual avant-gardists’ work on paper to demonstrate that the material and formal analysis of paper in the avant-garde’s artistic production still holds much in store. In the second section, chapters zoom in on forms and formats of collective artistic production that deployed paper to move around reproductions of fine art works, to facilitate the dialogue between avant-gardists, to better promote their work among patrons, and to make their work available to a wider audience. Chapters in the third section lay bare how certain groups within the avant-garde began to massively create monochrome works, because these could be easily reproduced when transferred to, or reproduced as, linocuts. In the last section of the book, chapters explore how the avant-garde’s attentiveness to paper almost always also implied a critique of the ways in which paper, and all that it stood for, was treated and labored in European culture and society more broadly. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, modernism, and design.

Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain

Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004711287
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
This volume, edited by Éva Forgács, with contributions from art historians from across Europe and the Americas, analyzes the artistic initiatives of the short time span between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. In this moment, a new internationalism was anticipated by retrieving pre-war modernism, as well as creating the new era's new artistic lingua franca. The chapters include in-depth case studies that analyze the complex, often interconnected, projects throughout the world—South America and Eastern and Western Europe—that were soon ended by the Cold War.

State Construction and Art in East Central Europe, 1918-2018

State Construction and Art in East Central Europe, 1918-2018 PDF Author: Agnieszka Chmielewska
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000655687
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This volume offers a comprehensive perspective on the relationship between the art scene and agencies of the state in countries of the region, throughout four consecutive yet highly diverse historical periods: from the period of state integration after World War I, through the communist era post 1945 and the time of political transformation after 1989, to the present-day globalisation (including counter-reactions to westernisation and cultural homogenisation). With twenty-three theoretically and/or empirically oriented articles by authors from sixteen countries (East Central Europe and beyond, including the United States and Australia), the book discusses interconnections between state policies and artistic institutions, trends and the art market from diverse research perspectives. The contributors explore subjects such as the impact of war on the formation of national identities, the role of artists in image-building for the new national states emerging after 1918, the impact of political systems on artists’ attitudes, the discourses of art history, museum studies, monument conservation and exhibition practices. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural politics, cultural history, and East Central European studies and history.

Rethinking Postwar Europe

Rethinking Postwar Europe PDF Author: Barbara Lange
Publisher: Böhlau Köln
ISBN: 3412514012
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The book "Rethinking Postwar Europe" offers an in-depth insight into the largely unexplored topic of artistic practices in the 1940s and 1950s in Europe which until recently had been obscured by ideologies of the Cold War. Thanks to the authors' diverse methodological backgrounds, the volume presents – for the first time – a comprehensive multilayered narrative, focusing on the complexities and entanglements in the artistic field. Instead of assessing the postwar period in the traditional way as divided by the Iron Curtain, the contributions investigate processes of contact, interaction, dissemination, overlapping, and networking. Consequently, the analysis of a diversified European modernism in both its aesthetic and its socio-political dimension resonates with all the different case studies. In particular, the volume looks at how artists developed, designed and (re)negotiated identities and discourses, and sheds new light on the power of art – and creative powers in general – in a postwar setting of mutilations, losses, and devastations.

Reclaiming and Redefining American Exhibitions of Russian Art

Reclaiming and Redefining American Exhibitions of Russian Art PDF Author: Roann Barris
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000927660
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book examines the history of American exhibitions of Russian art in the twentieth century in the context of the Cold War. Because this history reflects changes in museological theory and the role of governments in facilitating or preventing intercultural cooperation, it uncovers a story that is far more complex than a chronological listing of exhibition names and art works. Roann Barris considers questions of stylistic appropriations and influences and the role of museum exhibitions in promoting international and artistic exchanges. Barris reveals that Soviet and American exchanges in the world of art were extensive and persistent despite political disagreements before, during, and after the Cold War. It also reveals that these early exhibitions communicated contradictory and historically invalid pictures of the Russian or Soviet avant-garde. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, and Russian studies.

Universal – International – Global

Universal – International – Global PDF Author: Antje Kempe
Publisher: Böhlau Köln
ISBN: 3412520829
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
This collection of articles explores a possible alternative beginning of Global Art History and World Art Studies, two methodologies that set a worldwide focus in the study of art around the 2000s. Teaching back to earlier efforts to conceive of the international community in a less Eurocentric way, the volume proposes a tentative link between socialist internationalism as a political and cultural diplomatic principle in the Soviet Block and some new approaches to art and cultural historiography introduced there. In the "Second World", universal art history or Weltkunstgeschichte were endorsed as frameworks for the teaching and writing of art history. Authors in this book interrogate whether "world art history" as practiced by socialist scholars had aspirations and achievements comparable to today's Global Art History and World Art Studies. Or was this knowledge production in an internationalist paradigm a mere foil for communist rhetoric, behind which severed cultural relations to the Western world could also be recommenced?

Byzantium/Modernism

Byzantium/Modernism PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004300015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Byzantium/Modernism features contributions by fourteen international scholars and brings together a diverse range of interdisciplinary essays on art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, and philosophy, which examine how and why Byzantine art and image theory can contribute to our understanding of modern and contemporary visual culture. Particular attention is given to intercultural dialogues between the former dominions of the Byzantine Empire, with a special focus on Greece, Turkey, and Russia, and the artistic production of Western Europe and America. Together, these essays invite the reader to think critically and theoretically about the dialogic interchange between Byzantium and modernism and to consider this cross-temporal encounter as an ongoing and historically deep narrative, rather than an ephemeral or localized trend. Contributors are Tulay Atak, Charles Barber, Elena Boeck, Anthony Cutler, Rico Franses, Dimitra Kotoula, Marie-José Mondzain, Myroslava M. Mudrak, Robert S. Nelson, Robert Ousterhout, Stratis Papaioannou, Glenn Peers, Jane A. Sharp and Devin Singh.