Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia

Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia PDF Author: Krzysztof Fijalkowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351547410
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days sheds much-needed light on the location of the greatest concentration of Surrealist photography and examines the culture and tradition within which it has taken root and flourished. The volume explores a rich and important artistic output, very little of which has been seen outside of its land of origin. Based on extensive research at museums in Prague and Brno and many conversations with participants in and historians of the movement, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson and Ian Walker analyse how this photographic work has developed cohesively and rigorously, from the beginnings of Czech Surrealism in 1934, to the intriguing researches of the present-day Czech and Slovak Surrealist group by way of mysterious veiled responses to the repressive contexts with which they were faced from the 1950s to the 1980s. The main chapters, ordered chronologically, are intersected with shorter texts examining specific works. The reader will find in this volume images that present challenges to our understanding of how photographic work has been used within surrealism, pinpointing individual pictures whose dynamic charge may induce instants of compelling interrogation and disruption.

Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia

Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia PDF Author: Krzysztof Fijalkowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351547429
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days sheds much-needed light on the location of the greatest concentration of Surrealist photography and examines the culture and tradition within which it has taken root and flourished. The volume explores a rich and important artistic output, very little of which has been seen outside of its land of origin. Based on extensive research at museums in Prague and Brno and many conversations with participants in and historians of the movement, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson and Ian Walker analyse how this photographic work has developed cohesively and rigorously, from the beginnings of Czech Surrealism in 1934, to the intriguing researches of the present-day Czech and Slovak Surrealist group by way of mysterious veiled responses to the repressive contexts with which they were faced from the 1950s to the 1980s. The main chapters, ordered chronologically, are intersected with shorter texts examining specific works. The reader will find in this volume images that present challenges to our understanding of how photographic work has been used within surrealism, pinpointing individual pictures whose dynamic charge may induce instants of compelling interrogation and disruption.

Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia

Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia PDF Author: Krzysztof Fijałkowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781409406280
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia sheds much-needed light on the location of the single greatest concentration of Surrealist photography - the Czech Republic - and examines the culture and tradition of Surrealist photography that has taken root and flourished there. This volume explores a rich and important artistic output, from 1934 to the present, very little of which has been seen outside of the Czech Republic.

City Gorged with Dreams

City Gorged with Dreams PDF Author: Ian Walker
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719062155
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The author analyses how the Surrealists utilised the tactics of documentary and how Surrealist ideas in turn influenced the development of documentary photography. This is a study of what Louis Aragon called 'surrealist realism': the exploration of the real-life surreality of the city.

Postcards from Absurdistan

Postcards from Absurdistan PDF Author: Derek Sayer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069118545X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 752

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Book Description
A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy—with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country’s socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. Derek Sayer shows that Prague’s twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some “end of history,” whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times. In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers—poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee—not to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way and Václav Havel’s greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Over and over, Prague exposes modernity’s dreamworlds of progress as confections of kitsch. In a time when democracy is once again under global assault, Postcards from Absurdistan is an unforgettable portrait of a city that illuminates the predicaments of the modern world.

Crisis

Crisis PDF Author: Sascha Bru
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110773635
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
Notions of crisis have long charged the study of the European avant-garde and modernism, reflecting the often turbulent nature of their development. Throughout their history, the avant-garde and modernists have both confronted and instigated crises, be they economic or political, aesthetic or philosophical, collective or individual, local or global, short or perennial. The seventh volume in the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies addresses the myriad ways in which the avant-garde and modernism have responded and related to crisis from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. How have Europe’s avant-garde and modernist movements given aesthetic shape to their crisis-laden trajectory? Given the many different watershed moments the avant-garde and modernism have faced over the centuries, what common threads link the critical points of their development? Alternatively, what kinds of crises have their experimental practices and critical modes yielded? The volume assembles case studies reflecting upon these questions and more from across all areas of avant-garde and modernist activity, including visual art, literature, music, architecture, photography, theatre, performance, curatorial practice, fashion and design.

Magnetic Woman

Magnetic Woman PDF Author: Karla Huebner
Publisher: Russian and East European Stud
ISBN: 9780822946472
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902-80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen's early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in three avant-garde groups--Devětsil, Prague surrealism, and Paris surrealism--yet, unusually for a female artist of her generation, Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work. Despite her importance and ground-breaking work, Toyen has been notoriously difficult to study. Using primary sources gathered from disparate disciplines and studies of the artist's own work, Magnetic Woman is organized both chronologically and thematically, moving through Toyen's career with attention to specific historical circumstances and intellectual developments approximately as they entered her life. Karla Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women's roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.

Reading Claude Cahun's Disavowals

Reading Claude Cahun's Disavowals PDF Author: JenniferL. Shaw
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351552252
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The first monograph on a Surrealist cult classic, Reading Claude Cahun's Disavowals offers a comprehensive account of Cahun's most important published work, Aveux non avenus (Disavowals), 1930. Jennifer L. Shaw provides an encompassing interpretation of this groundbreaking work, paying careful attention to the complex interrelationship between the photomontages and writings of Aveux non avenus. This study argues that the texts and images of Aveux non avenus not only explore Cahun's own subjectivity, they formulate a trenchant social and cultural critique. Shaw explores how Cahun's work both calls into question the dominant culture of interwar France - with its traditional gender roles, religious conservatism, and pronatalism - and takes to task the era's artistic avant-garde and in particular its models of desire. This volume cuts across the disciplinary boundaries of interwar art studies, demonstrating how one artist's personal exploration intervened in wider contemporary debates about the purpose of art, the role of women in French culture, and the status of homosexuality, in the aftermath of World War I.

The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema

The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema PDF Author: Tessel M. Bauduin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319764993
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Many modernist and avant-garde artists and authors were fascinated by the occult movements of their day. This volume explores how Occultism came to shape modernist art, literature, and film. Individual chapters examine the presence and role of Occultism in the work of such modernist luminaries as Rainer Maria Rilke, August Strindberg, W.B. Yeats, Joséphin Péladan and the artist Jan Švankmaier, as well as in avant-garde film, post-war Greek Surrealism, and Scandinavian Retrogardism. Combining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field of Esotericism Studies with those of Literary Studies, Art History, and Cinema Studies, this volume provides in-depth and nuanced perspectives upon the relationship between Occultism and Modernism in the Western arts from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century

Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Derek Sayer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691043809
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 621

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Book Description
Asserts that Prague could well be seen as the capital of the twentieth century, describing how the city has experienced and suffered more ways of being modern than perhaps any other metropolis.

Surrealism Beyond Borders

Surrealism Beyond Borders PDF Author: Stephanie D'Alessandro
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588397270
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Surrealism Beyond Borders challenges conventional narratives of a revolutionary artistic, literary, and philosophical movement. Tracing Surrealism's influence and legacy from the 1920s to the late 1970s in places as geographically diverse as Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey, this publication includes more than 300 works of art in a variety of media by well-known figures—including Dalí, Ernst, Kahlo, Magritte, and Miró—as well as numerous artists who are less widely known. Contributions from more than forty distinguished international scholars explore the network of Surrealist exchange and collaboration, artists' responses to the challenges of social and political unrest, and the experience of displacement and exile in the twentieth century. The multiple narratives addressed in this expansive book move beyond the borders of history, geography, and nationality to provocatively redraw the map of Surrealism.