Expressionist Utopias

Expressionist Utopias

Author: Timothy O. Benson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 9780520230033

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Conveys the dreams and disappointments of German artists, architects, and intellectuals from World War I through the social and economic chaos of the Weimar Republic.


Utopia

Utopia

Author: David Ayers

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-12-14

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 3110433001

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Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century. The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as: · how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity? · how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present? · how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?


Utopia(s) - Worlds and Frontiers of the Imaginary

Utopia(s) - Worlds and Frontiers of the Imaginary

Author: Maria do Rosário Monteiro

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2016-11-03

Total Pages: 735

ISBN-13: 1351966820

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The idea of Utopia springs from a natural desire of transformation, of evolution pertaining to humankind and, therefore, one can find expressions of “utopian” desire in every civilization. Having to do explicitly with human condition, Utopia accompanies closely cultural evolution, almost as a symbiotic organism. Maintaining its roots deeply attached to ancient myths, utopian expression followed, and sometimes preceded cultural transformation. Through the next almost five hundred pages (virtually one for each year since Utopia was published) researchers in the fields of Architecture and Urbanism, Arts and Humanities present the results of their studies within the different areas of expertise under the umbrella of Utopia. Past, present, and future come together in one book. They do not offer their readers any golden key. Many questions will remain unanswered, as they should. The texts presented in Proportion Harmonies and Identities - UTOPIA(S) WORLDS AND FRONTIERS OF THE IMAGINARY were compiled with the intent to establish a platform for the presentation, interaction and dissemination of researches. It aims also to foster the awareness and discussion on the topics of Harmony and Proportion with a focus on different utopian visions and readings relevant to the arts, sciences and humanities and their importance and benefits for the community at large.


The Spirit of Utopia

The Spirit of Utopia

Author:

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2000-08

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780804778855

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I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation. The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation--which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto--concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." I am. We are. That's hardly anything. But enough to start.


Visualizing Utopia

Visualizing Utopia

Author: M. G. Kemperink

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9789042918771

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This volume contains the essays presented at the workshop 'Visualizing Utopia' held in May 2005, organized by Mary Kemperink and Willemien Roenhorst. The essays presented here discuss utopian thinking from 1890 until 1930. From the end of the eighteenth century, this utopian thinking developed from what can be called 'classic' utopianism into 'modern' utopianism. Utopianism unmarked by temporality made way for a tale situated in time - future time. Thus what was first regarded as merely a thought experiment gradually assumed the character of a real political programme. In their view of the new world and new people, writers, artists, architects, social reformers, cultural critics, politicians, etc., would often draw on representations already present in the culture. These could be biblical representations, such as those of the Apocalypse, Christ the Saviour and earthly paradise, or ancient myths, such as those of the Age of Gold, Arcadia, the sun-drenched world of Gnosticism and the Wagnerian mythological universe. The workshop concentrated on the following two aspects: the way in which the future Utopia and the path that would lead to its realization was given shape in the artistic field as well as in the non-artistic field, and the question to which culturally rooted concepts these representations were related. This double line of approach created the opportunity for specialized researchers from different disciplines - history, cultural history, art history, history of architecture, literary history - to discuss utopianism as it manifested itself in Europe and the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.


German Expressionism and the Messianism of a Generation

German Expressionism and the Messianism of a Generation

Author: Lisa Marie Anderson

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9401200513

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This book reads messianic expectation as the defining characteristic of German culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. It has long been accepted that the Expressionist movement in Germany was infused with a thoroughly messianic strain. Here, with unprecedented detail and focus, that strain is traced through the work of four important Expressionist playwrights: Ernst Barlach, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller and Franz Werfel. Moreover, these dramatists are brought into new and sustained dialogues with the theorists and philosophers of messianism who were their contemporaries: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem. In arguing, for example, that concepts like Bloch’s utopian self-encounter (Selbstbegegnung) and Benjamin’s messianic now-time (Jetztzeit) reappear as the framework for Expressionism’s staging of collective redemption in a new age, Anderson forges a previously underappreciated link in the study of Central European thought in the early twentieth century.


New Perspectives on Br?cke Expressionism

New Perspectives on Br?cke Expressionism

Author: Christian Weikop

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1351556444

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New Perspectives on Br?cke Expressionism: Bridging History brings together highly-renowned international art historians in a scholarly work that offers the first full-length reassessment in English of the importance of the Br?cke group to German modernism specifically and to international modernism more generally. It challenges, interrogates and updates existing orthodoxies in the field of Br?cke studies by deploying new research combined with innovative interpretative approaches. This is an exciting volume of essays with an interlinking tripartite structure that charts the significance of this pioneering German avant-garde group in relation to various critical themes, namely, 'cultural and material identity', 'collectivity and selfhood', as well as 'defamation and rehabilitation'. The book is unique in the field in that it seeks to excavate specific historical research relating to the activities of the Br?cke as a bohemian yet nonetheless enterprising artists' community, and considers the contributions of the key members in relation to the dynamics of that group rather than simply on an individual basis. It thoroughly explores the historiography of the Br?cke artists' reception throughout the turbulent history of the twentieth century up until the present day.


Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

Author: Tim Satterthwaite

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1501341618

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The new photo-illustrated magazines of the 1920s traded in images of an ideal modernity, promising motorised leisure, scientific progress, and social and sexual emancipation. Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal is a pioneering history of these periodicals, focusing on two of the leading European titles: the German monthly UHU, and the French news weekly VU, taken as representative of the broad class of popular titles launched in the 1920s. The book is the first major study of UHU, and the first scholarly work on VU in English. Modernist Magazines explores, in particular, the striking use of regularity and repetition in photographs of modernity, reading these repetitious images as symbolic of modernist ideals of social order in the aftermath of the First World War. Introducing a novel methodology, pattern theory, the book argues for a critical return to the Gestalt tradition in visual studies. Alongside the UHU and VU case studies, Modernist Magazines offers an essential primer to interwar magazine culture in Europe. Accounts of rival titles are woven into the book's thematic chapters, which trace the evolution of the two magazines' photography and graphic design in the tumultuous years up to 1933.