Modernism

About: Modernism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1395 publications have been published within this topic receiving 23369 citations. The topic is also known as: modernism (aesthetics).

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Abstract: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was one of the most influential painters of the twentieth century, and "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" is universally recognised as an essential document of modernist art theory. It lays out the tenets of painting as he saw them and makes the case for non-objective artistic forms. Brilliant as a philosophical treatise and as emphatic as an avant-grade tract, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" provides the theoretical underpinnings to the Expressionist movement in art. While Michael Sadler's masterful translation has been available since its original publication in 1914, under the title "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", unknown until now is the significant correspondence between the translator and the artist, who closely followed the progress of his book's transformation into English, and who offered numerous insights and explanations into its meaning. Housed in the archives of Tate, these and other unpublished documents are appended to Kandinsky's text to provide the first comprehensively annotated edition of this seminal work. Included in this volume, essential for any student of modernism, and certain to supersede any previous edition, are the letters between Kandinsky and Sadler, and prose poems by Kandinsky relating to the period in which the book was written. More than a revised edition, this publication constitutes a major event, as the first full account of a remarkable literary collaboration and a crucial intellectual adventure.

The originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths

Abstract: Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

Madness and modernism: Insanity in the light of modern art, literature, and thought.

Abstract: The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of authority, nihilism, extreme relativism, distortions of time, strange transformations of self, and much more. In this book, Louis Sass, a clinical psychologist, offers a new vision of schizophrenia, comparing it with the works of such artists and writers as Kafka, Beckett, and Duchamp and philosophers including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. It provides a portrait of the world of the madman, along with a commentary on modernist and postmodernist culture.

The Politics of Modernism Against the New Conformists

Abstract: This is an exploration of the ambivalent relationship between revolutionary politics and modernist or avant-garde art. Williams clarifies many of the issues that have dogged recent critical discussion: the term "modernism" itself; the distinction between modernism and avant garde; and the possibility of a cultural theory "beyond the modern" which avoids the pitfalls of postmodernism. Raymond Williams is the author of "Politics and Letters," "Problems in Materialsm and Culture," "Resources of Hope" and "Writing in Society."