This book explores how Modernist movements all across the Mediterranean basin differed from those of other regions. The chapters show how the political and economic turmoil of a period marked by world war, revolution, decolonization, nationalism, and the rapid advance of new technologies compelled artists, writers, and other intellectuals to create a new hybrid Mediterranean Modernist aesthetic which sought to balance the tensions between local and foreign, tradition and innovation, and colonial and postcolonial.
Situated in a Mediterranean landscape, the Maeght Foundation is a unique Modernist museum, product of an extraordinary collaboration between the architect, Jos?uis Sert, and the artists whose work was to be displayed there. The architecture, garden design and art offer a rare opportunity to see work in settings conceived in active collaboration with the artists themselves. By focusing on the relationship between this art foundation and its Arcadian setting, including Joan Mir?labyrinth, George Braque's pool, Tal-Coat's mosaic wall and Giacometti's terrace, Jan K. Birksted demonstrates how the building articulates many of the ideas that preoccupied this group of artists during the culminating years of their lives. The study pays special attention to the ways in which architecture can shape the experience of time, and addresses the Modernist desire for wilderness and its problematic roots in the classical Mediterranean ideal. In showing how the design of the Maeght Foundation is a Modernist representation of Mediterranean culture, the author has developed an interpretation of architecture that accommodates not only the architect's handling of material or function, but shows as well how it can be the embodiment of a particular vision of space and time.
The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.
Considering the influence of the forms and tectonics of the Mediterranean vernacular on modern architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Endless sun, sparkling sea, crystalline sky these are the elements of the Mediterranean that offer its inhabitants a lifestyle that is the envy of the world and have delighted architects since antiquity. A fusion of interior style and architecture, of glorious natural landscapes and bold man-made forms, "Mediterranean Modern" presents twenty-five of the region's most covetable houses in a format that speaks directly to today's increasingly design-savvy house-dwellers. It includes work by internationally established architects, such as Alberto Campo de Baeza and Alvaro Siza, and also houses by a number of the regions rising stars revealing a wealth of cool ideas for hot climates.
Engaging with the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis within the framework of international modernism, Marinos Pourgouris places the poet's work in the context of other modernist and surrealist writers in Europe. At the same time, Pourgouris puts forward a redefinition of European Modernism that makes the Mediterranean, and Greece in particular, the discursive contact zone and incorporates neglected elements such as national identity and geography. Beginning with an examination of Greek Modernism, Pourgouris's study places Elytis in conversation with Albert Camus; analyzes the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard, and Sigmund Freud on Elytis's theory of analogies; traces the symbol of the sun in Elytis's poetry by way of the philosophies of Heraclitus and Plotinus; examines the influence of Le Corbusier on Elytis's theory of architectural poetics; and takes up the subject of Elytis's application of his theory of Solar Metaphysics to poetic form in the context of works by Freud, C. G. Jung, and Michel Foucault. Informed by extensive research in the United States and Europe, Pourgouris's study makes a compelling contribution to the comparative study of Greek modernism, the Mediterranean, and the work of Odysseus Elytis.
The Mediterranean is an invented cultural space, on the frontier between North and South, West and East. Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean examines the representation of this region in the visual arts since the late eighteenth century, placing the 'idea of the Mediterranean' - a cultural construct rather than a physical reality - at the centre of our understanding of modern visual culture. This collection of essays features an international group of scholars who examine competing visions of the Mediterranean in terms of modernity and cultural identity, questioning and illuminating both European and non-European representations. An introductory essay frames the analysis in terms of a new spatial paradigm of the Mediterranean as a geographic, historical, and cultural region that emerged in the late eighteenth century, as France and Britain colonized the surrounding territories. Essays are grouped around three vital themes: visualization of the space of the new Mediterranean; varied uses of the classical paradigm; and issues of identity and resistance in an age of modernity and colonialism. Drawing on recent geographical, historical, cultural and anthropological studies, contributors address the visual representation of identity in both the European and the 'Oriental, ' the colonial and post-colonial Mediterranean.
Foreword by Adrian Forty. The Algarve is not only Portugal’s foremost tourism region. Uniquely Mediterranean in an Atlantic country, its building customs have long been markers of historical and cultural specificity, attracting both picturesque driven conservatives and modernists seeking their lineage. Modernism, regionalism and the ‘vernacular’ – three essential tropes of twentieth-century architecture culture – converged in the region’s building identity construct and, often the subject of strictly metropolitan elaborations, they are examined here from a peripheral standpoint instead. Drawing on work that won the Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in 2013, Algarve Building challenges the conventional inclusion of Portuguese modern architecture in ‘Critical Regionalism’ narratives. A fine-grain reconstruction of the debates and cultures at play locally exposes the extra-architectural and widely participated antecedents of the much-celebrated mid-century shift towards the regional. Uncelebrated architects and a cast of other players (clients, officials, engineers and builders) contributed to maturing a regional strand of modern architecture that, more than being the heroic outcome of a hard-fought ‘battle’ by engaged designers against a conservative establishment, became truly popular in the Algarve. Algarve Building shows, more broadly, what the processes that have been appropriated by the canon of architectural history and theory – such as the presence of folk traditions and regional variation in learned architecture – stand to gain when observed in local everyday practices. The grand narratives and petites histoires of architecture can be enriched, questioned, revised and confirmed by an unprejudiced return to its facts and sources – the buildings, the documents, the discourses, the agents and the archives.
When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had a deep connection with the port city of Trieste. Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Modernism in Trieste seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature.
Using the Braudelian concept of the Mediterranean this volume focuses on the condition of “coastal exchanges” involving the Dalmatian littoral and its Adriatic and more distant maritime network. Spalato and Ragusa intersect with Constantinople, Cairo and Spanish Naples just as Sinan, Palladio and Robert Adam cross paths in this liquid expanse. Concentrating on materiality and on the arts, architecture in particular, the authors identify portability and hybridity as characteristic of these exchanges, and tease out expected and unexpected serendipitous moments when they occurred. Focusing on translation and its instruments these essays expand the traditional concept of influence by thrusting mobility and the "hardware" of cultural transmission, its mechanisms, rather than its effects, into the foreground. Contributors include: Doris Behrens-Abouseif, SOAS, University of London; Joško Belamarić, Institute of Art History, Split; Marzia Faietti, Uffizi, Florence; Jasenka Gudelj, University of Zagreb; Cemal Kafadar, Harvard University; Ioli Kalavrezou, Harvard University; Suzanne Marchand, State University of Louisiana; Erika Naginski, Harvard University; Gülru Necipoğlu, Harvard University; Goran Nikšić, City of Split, Split; Alina Payne, Harvard University; Avinoam Shalem, Columbia University and David Young Kim, University of Pennsylvania
