Showing papers on "Modernism published in 1981"

Rebels and precursors: The revolutionary years of Australian art

Abstract: Introductionindissolubly linked with the character of their art. As artists they werenThe claim is often made that Australians have a unique capacity fornturning their backs upon that which is richest in their heritage. A morenaccurate assessment is that they have an even greater capacity for distortingnthat heritage to make for themselves a more comforting mirror.nNowhere is this more apparent than in the period spanned by thisnbook, the two decades between the Great Depression and the beginningsnof the Cold War. These were years of unparalleled intellectualnand artistic ferment; they were also years that afforded scant comfortnto most Australians, least of all the artists and writers who are the subjectnof this study. This book is about the development of a core of Australiannartists: Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, JohnnPerceval, Yosl Bergner, Noel Counihan, Russell Drysdale andnothers - artists central to contemporary Australian art. It is also aboutntheir friends, patrons, allies and enemies - a portrait of a period, a generationnand its art. What characterized that art above all else was a deepnand pervasive concern for realism, the reality of human social andnpsychological experience at a time of unremitting crisis and intensenintellectual struggle. This preoccupation, filtered and given formnthrough surrealist, expressionist or social realist modes of art producednimages that are amongst the most uncompromising and authoritativenrecords of the Australian experience.Such records were not a product of either social or intellectual isolation.nThe artists and the circumstances in which their works werenproduced are as remarkable as the images themselves. Artists andnwriters lived together, talked, argued, and exchanged ideas on levelsnand in ways that have few parallels. In part this communalism wasnnecessitated by the actively hostile or uncomprehendingly indifferentnworld in which radicals found themselves in the 1930s and 1940s. Itnwas also, however, a part of the new social values that seemednindissolubly linked with the character of their art. As artists they werenalso highly articulate. It was this degree of political and intellectualnself-awareness and ability to communicate with force and insight innboth words and paint that ultimately produced a revolution innAustralia's cultural life.This book about painting and the politics of painting aims to tracenthe course of a distinctly liberal and liberalizing cultural tradition, onenof the least recognized of seminal traditions in this country. Such a traditionnwas forged at a time of almost unbroken political crisis. Then1930s and 1940s, as the era of Hitler and Stalin, were intensely politicalnyears marked by ideological crusades and cynical opportunism, thenconflicting claims of nationalism and internationalism, and thenexperience of economic depression and total war. The impact of thisnclimate on Australian artists was profound; these events made it possiblento anticipate imminent revolution - nothing less than a violentnand total overthrow of established order - and Australian radical artnreflected in full measure the intensity of that climate. The transitionnfrom the radical left-wing certainties of the 1930s to a more complexnand shifting set of values and moral imperatives in the 1940s helpedncondition the emergence of a radical and innovative modernism. Onnone level the consequence was a revivification of Australian art, onnanother a rediscovery of Australia and a sense of being Australian.nThough they did not know it at the time, the artists of the 1940s hadnestablished an informed and many-levelled heritage to which Australiansncould return in the continuing quest for identity and sense ofnplace. n n

Autonomy of Art: Looking Back at Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie

Abstract: Theodor Adorno's major contribution to the philosophy of art, his Asthetische Theorie, appeared in 1970.2 The work was almost completed when the author died in 1969. Adorno meant to rewrite the introduction, but otherwise the text needed only formal revisions, which were carried out by Rolf Tiedemann, Adorno's faithful disciple and editor. Tiedemann rightly felt that Asthetische Theorie deserved immediate publication since it was the legacy of Critical Theory. Yet it was precisely this aspect which marred the reception of the book. Except for a few voices in the liberal and conservative camp, the response was surprisingly negative. One might have expected that the East German critics would denounce Adorno's theory as a typical example of Western ideologywhich they did; more alarming was the unfriendly or at least cool reception among the West German Left. If the members of the Frankfurt Institute considered Asthetische Theorie as Adorno's legacy, it turned out to be an Erbe which was clearly unwelcome. The charges varied, but there was almost a consensus among the critics of the left camp that Adorno's last book did not offer the materialist theory of art that everybody was looking for. It was particularly Adorno's insistence on the autonomy of the art work and his well known indictment of Tendenz and political art which angered the Left. Adorno evidently had not changed his position. In his last work he reiterated his critique of unmediated Engagement and once more presented modernism and the avant-garde as the only viable responses to the increasing brutality of advanced capitalism. His renewed claim that, in the final analysis, only the authentic work of art overcomes the stultifying atmosphere of the cultural industry met with disbelief and outspoken disapproval. The hostility was so strong that the German Left dismissed the book out of hand and left the appropriation to the conservatives who at this point were inclined to use some of Adorno's arguments for the defense of their aesthetic and moral beliefs.

American Architecture 1607-1976

Abstract: This panoramic survey of American architecture will serve a variety of readers interested in American architectural, cultural, and social history as a source of information and insight on the development of the man-made landscape in the United States.The book--illustrated with nearly 300 halftones and over 50 line drawings--provides a long perspective on the social and environmental factors that shaped American building and delineates both the assimilation of European influences (from Lord Baltimore's London-imported row houses to the work of Mies van der Rohe) and the growth of native innovations (from the climate-adapted houses of New England to the close-to-the-land prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright).Marcus Whiffen wrote the first eight chapters of the book, covering the period from the Jamestown settlement of 1607 to the year 1860; Frederick Koeper then carries the history from the Civil War period to the present in the final eight chapters.Some highlights: A comparison of early Southern and New England domestic architectural arrangements--The introduction of the Spanish style into the Southwest, a style that had already superseded Old-World models through its Mexican transmutation--The influence of Wren and his contemporaries on the churches and mansions along the Eastern Seaboard--The seminal work of Peter Harrison--The vogue of Palladianism--The eclectic architectural practice of Thomas Jefferson--The buildings of Bulfinch in Boston and elsewhere--The contributions of such immigrants as Charles L'Enfant, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and William Thornton to the nation's new capital and Capitol--The Greek revival and the Gothic, Romanesque, and Picturesque reactions to it--The appearance of the Second Empire in New York--High Victorian architecture as a reflection of Ruskinian high-mindedness--The emergence of H. H. Richardson and Richard Morris Hunt--The rise of the skyscraper--The Beaux-Arts period and the return to classical discipline and order--Frank Lloyd Wright and "the elimination of the box"--Art Deco and Streamline Moderne--The impact of European modernism from the 1930s--Reactions against the International Style: Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism, the Neo-Formalism (also known as Neo-neo-Classicism), Brutalism--The new emphasis on geometry in the 1970s as seen in recent Chicago skyscrapers and the work of I. M. Pei and Louis Kahn--Signposts of future possibilities.

Painters of the humble truth: Masterpieces of American still life, 1801-1939

Abstract: This reference work covers American still-life painting from the beginning of the 19th century, when it became a well-known medium of expression, to the mid-20th century. Among the artists Gerdts analyzes are those who worked with still life extensively and those who painted them only occasionally, including the Peales, Severin Roesen, Samuel Marsden Brooks, William Michael Harnett, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The effects on this form of such movements as realism, impressionism, tonalism, orphism, and modernism are discussed in detail. The study concludes with 1939, when American art began to be dominated by abstraction.

Ezra Pound, identity in crisis: A fundamental reassessment of the poet and his work

Abstract: This monograph on Ezra Pound's poetry and thought explores how Pound’s notions of language, sexuality and politics intersect in the programme for poetic modernism that Pound followed in his own work and advocated in the work of others. Contains detailed discussion of the writing of Ernest Fenollosa and Remy de Gourmont, among other figures who were major influences on Pound’s thinking, and analyses the role of metaphor and metonymy in Pound’s view of the poetic image through detailed commentary on the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

The Greekness of Modern Greek Surrealism

Abstract: Surrealism as a full-blown artistic movement, or, as many of its exponents preferred to see it, a full-blown way of life, was very much a French product. The line of descent from larry's Ubu (1896), via the self-conscious modernism of Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, to the Dadaist activities of 1916 represents the continuation of that semi-official anti-culture which had existed throughout nineteenth-century France. With the destruction of the officially sanctioned culture of Nationalism and Catholic conformism in the debacle of the First World War, there was a sudden vacuum in French intellectual circles which the anti-culture was quite ready to fill. In the words of an early member of she movement, Roger Vailland: ‘Surrealism was not a literary school. It was above all a common ground and meeting-place for young petit-bourgeois intellectuals particularly aware of the futility of every activity expected of them by their background and their era’.