The Family of Man Revisited
The Family of Man Revisited

Author: Gerd Hurm

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-09

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 100021169X

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The Family of Man is the most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography. The book of the exhibition, still in print, is also the most commercially successful photobook ever published. First shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, the exhibition travelled throughout the United States and to forty-six countries, and was seen by over nine million people. Edward Steichen conceived, curated and designed the exhibition. He explained its subject as `the everydayness of life' and `the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world'. The exhibition was a statement against war and the conflicts and divisions that threatened a common future for humanity after 1945. The popular international response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Many critics, however, have dismissed the exhibition as a form of sentimental humanism unable to address the challenges of history, politics and cultural difference.This book revises the critical debate about The Family of Man, challenging in particular the legacy of Roland Barthes's influential account of the exhibition. The expert contributors explore new contexts for understanding Steichen's work and they undertake radically new analyses of the formal dynamics of the exhibition. Also presented are documents about the exhibition never before available in English. Commentaries by critical theorist Max Horkheimer and novelist Wolfgang Koeppen, letters from photographer August Sander, and a poetic sequence on the images by Polish poet Witold Wirpsza enable and encourage new critical reflections. A detailed survey of audience responses in Munich from 1955 allows a rare glimpse of what visitors thought about the exhibition. Today, when armed conflict, environmental catastrophe and economic inequality continue to threaten our future, it seems timely to revisit The Family of Man.

100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922
100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922

Author: Isabel Wünsche

Publisher: Böhlau Köln

Published: 2022-12-12

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 3412525650

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The First Russian Art Exhibition (Erste Russische Kunstausstellung), which opened at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin on October 15, 1922, and later travelled to Amsterdam, introduced a broad Western audience to the most recent artistic developments in Russia. The extensive show – more than a thousand works, including paintings, graphic works, sculptures, stage designs, architectural models, and works of porcelain – was remarkably inclusive in its scope, which ranged from traditional figurative painting to the latest constructions of the Russian avant-garde. Coming on the heels of the Treaty of Rapallo, the exhibition was a first cultural step towards bilateral relations between two young and yet internationally isolated new states – the Weimar Republic and the Russian Soviet Republic. Moving away from the narrow focus on the avant-garde, the volume presents new research that examines the exhibition's broader historical scope and cultural implications. The reception of the exhibition within artistic circles in Germany, Europe, the United States, and Japan in the 1920s is addressed, as well as the disposition of many of the works exhibited. The combination of longer, thematic essays and short features, along with reproductions of newly identified works and a selection of unpublished archival materials make this book valuable to both a scholarly and a general readership.

9 Evenings Reconsidered
9 Evenings Reconsidered

Author: Clarisse Bardiot

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13:

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In 1966, a Bell Laboratories physicist brought a group of avant-garde artists together with 10 open-minded members of the science and technology fields for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of investigatory Happenings which took place at the 69th Regiment Armory and were duly noted by critics Lucy Lippard and Brian O'Doherty. The resulting seminal performances included John Cage's Variations VII, in which 30 photocells were mounted around the performance space, activating a variety of sound sources -- including a blender, 20 radio channels and two Geiger counters -- as the performers moved around. An 88-page exhibition catalogue includes original essays, reprinted reviews of the original performances "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" by Lucy Lippard and Brian O'Doherty, and an interview with Herb Schneider (engineer)

Seeing the Invisible
Seeing the Invisible

Author: Michel Henry

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2009-04-15

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1441105999

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Michel Henry was one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. His numerous works of philosophy are all organized around the theme of life. In contrast to the scientific understanding of life as a biological process, Henry's philosophy develops a conception of life as an immediate feeling of one's own living. Seeing the Invisible marks Henry's most sustained engagement in the field of aesthetics. Through an analysis of the life and works of Wassily Kandinsky, Henry uncovers the philosophical significance of Kandinsky's revolution in painting: that abstract art reveals the invisible essence of life. Henry shows that Kandinsky separates color and line from the constraints of visible form and, in so doing, conveys the invisible intensity of life. More than just a study of art history, this book presents Kandinsky as an artist who is engaged in the project of painting the invisible and thus offers invaluable methodological clues for Henry's own phenomenology of the invisible.

Revisiting Italy
Revisiting Italy

Author: Rebecca Butler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-05

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1000381625

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With the rise of mass tourism, Italy became increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers not only as a locus of artistic culture but also as a site of political enquiry. Despite being outwardly denied a political voice in Britain, many female tourists were conspicuous in their commitment to the Italian campaign for national independence, or Risorgimento (1815–61). Revisiting Italy brings several previously unexamined travel accounts by women to light during a decisive period in this political campaign. Revealing the wider currency of the Risorgimento in British literature, Butler situates once-popular but now-marginalized writers: Clotilda Stisted, Janet Robertson, Mary Pasqualino, Selina Bunbury, Margaret Dunbar and Frances Minto Elliot alongside more prominent figures: the Shelley-Byron circle, the Brownings, Florence Nightingale and the Kemble sisters. Going beyond the travel book, she analyses a variety of forms of travel writing including unpublished letters, privately printed accounts and periodical serials. Revisiting Italy focuses on the convergence of political advocacy, gender ideologies, national identity and literary authority in women’s travel writing. Whether promoting nationalism through a maternal lens, politicizing the pilgrimage motif or reviving gothic representations of a revolutionary Italy, it identifies shared touristic discourses as temporally contingent, shaped by commercial pressures and the volatile political climate at home and abroad.