Situating El Lissitzky

Situating El Lissitzky

Author: Nancy Perloff

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780892366774

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Reassessing the complex career of one of the most influential yet controversial experimental artists of the early 20th century, this volume of essays looks at the prolific painter, designer, architect and photographer, El Lissitzky (1890-1941).


El Lissitzky on Paper

El Lissitzky on Paper

Author: Samuel Johnson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 022652423X

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"The artist and architect El Lissitzky (1890-1941) is celebrated for his contributions to painting, architecture, photography, and graphic design, and for his role in disseminating Russian and Soviet avant-garde art in Europe during the 1920s. Though he worked in a diversity of media, Lissitzky nonetheless produced the majority of his work on paper in the form of innovative photomontages, architectural drawings, lithographs, typography, books, and photo magazines. This monograph--the first career-spanning archival study of Lissitzky since 1968--reveals that the artist's multiple pursuits arose from his deep commitment to print as the premier medium of public exchange in the young and turbulent twentieth century. Samuel Johnson demonstrates that paper and print media were preoccupations that shaped Lissitzky's worldview, values, politics, and production in ways that have never been fully appreciated. Probing Lissitzky's stance on the problems of distribution and reception, this book offers a compelling and nuanced portrait of Lissitzky as experimenter, visionary designer, technocrat, and propagandist-the very prototype of the twentieth-century artist, with a legacy that remains largely on paper"--


Explodity

Explodity

Author: Nancy Perloff

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2017-01-21

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1606065084

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The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval’ (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound differences between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism, and she uncovers a wide-ranging legacy in the midcentury global movement of sound and concrete poetry (the Brazilian Noigandres group, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin), contemporary Western conceptual art, and the artist’s book. Sound recordings of zaum poems featured in the book are available at www.getty.edu.


Beholding

Beholding

Author: Ken Wilder

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-05-14

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1350088412

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Beholding considers the spatially situated encounter between artwork and spectator. It argues that artworks created for specific places or conditions structure a reciprocal encounter, which is completed by the presence of a beholder. These are works which demand the 'beholder's share', but not, as Ernst Gombrich famously claimed, to sustain an illusion. Rather, Beholding reconfigures Gombrich's notion of the beholder's share as a set of 'licensed' imaginative and cognitive projections. Each chapter frames a particular work of art from the remit of a complementary theoretical text. The book establishes a transhistorical notion of the spatially situated encounter, and considers the role of the architectural host in bringing the beholder's orientation into play. The book engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art. Written within the broad remit of reception aesthetics, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding, argued through an in-depth examination of artworks and their spatial contexts, selected for their explanatory potential. These various encounters allocate different constitutive roles to the beholder, bringing not only spatial and temporal orientation into play, but also a repertoire of anticipated ideas and beliefs.


Key Modern Architects

Key Modern Architects

Author: Andrew Higgott

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1474265065

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Key Modern Architects provides an accessible and thought-provoking introduction to the work of the most significant architects of the modern era. Fifty short chapters introduce fifty key architects, from Le Corbusier to Aldo Van Eyck to Zaha Hadid, exploring their most influential buildings and developing a critique of each architect's work within a broader cultural and historical context. The selection represents the most influential architects working from 1890 to the present, those most likely to be taught on survey courses in modern architectural history, along with some lesser-known names with an equal claim to influence. Emphasis is placed on a critical and interpretative approach, allowing the student to position each architect in a cultural and intellectual context quickly and easily. Artistic, technical, social, and intellectual developments are brought to the fore – built and unbuilt projects, writings and influences. This approach brings to light the ideology behind architectural work, offering insights into each architect's working practice. - Helps students to develop a critical approach to understanding modern architectural history. - One chapter per architect – meaning chapters may be read individually as a concise resource for the study of an architect, or together as a coherent book-length history of the whole period of modern architecture. - Chapters are supported by boxed lists of each architect's most significant projects, along with suggestions for further reading as a springboard to further study and research. Combining the clarity and accessibility of a textbook with in-depth reading and a critical approach, Key Modern Architects provides an invaluable resource for both the classroom and for independent study in architectural and art history.


The Big Archive

The Big Archive

Author: Sven Spieker

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-03-03

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 026253357X

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The archive as a crucible of twentieth-century modernism and key for understanding contemporary art. The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the “living” past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's “anemic archive” of readymades and El Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism. Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process. Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies—the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.


Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism

Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism

Author: Michael Tymkiw

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2018-05-29

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1452956774

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A new and challenging perspective on Nazi exhibition design In one of the most comprehensive analyses ever written on the subject, Michael Tymkiw reassesses the relationship between Nazi exhibition design and modernism. While National Socialist exhibitions are widely understood as platforms for attacking modern art, they also served as sites of surprising formal experimentation among artists, architects, and others, who often drew upon and reconfigured the practices and principles of modernism when designing exhibition spaces and the objects within. In this book, Tymkiw reveals that a central motivation behind such experimentation was the interest in provoking what he calls "engaged spectatorship"—attempts to elicit experiences among exhibition-goers that would pique their desire to become involved in wider processes of social and political change. For historians of art, architecture, performance, and other forms of visual culture, Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism unravels long-held assumptions, particularly concerning the ideological stakes of participation.


Constructivism in Central Europe

Constructivism in Central Europe

Author: Esther Levinger

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-01-31

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9004506373

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The book tells the story of individual artists in Central Europe who believed in art's power to change the world; they imagined a collective of human beings living happily in a free society liberated of injustice and inequality.


Children and Yiddish Literature From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity

Children and Yiddish Literature From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity

Author: Gennady Estraikh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1317198794

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Children have occupied a prominent place in Yiddish literature since early modern times, but children’s literature as a genre has its beginnings in the early 20th century. Its emergence reflected the desire of Jewish intellectuals to introduce modern forms of education, and promote ideological agendas, both in Eastern Europe and in immigrant communities elsewhere. Before the Second World War, a number of publishing houses and periodicals in Europe and the Americas specialized in stories, novels and poems for various age groups. Prominent authors such as Yankev Glatshteyn, Der Nister, Joseph Opatoshu, Leyb Kvitko, made original contributions to the genre, while artists, such as Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Yisakhar Ber Rybak, also took an active part. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, children’s literature provided an opportunity to escape strong ideological pressure. Yiddish children’s literature is still being produced today, both for secular and strongly Orthodox communities. This volume is a pioneering collective study not only of children’s literature but of the role played by children in literature.


Architects' Drawings

Architects' Drawings

Author: Kendra Schank Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-08-11

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1136429581

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· Sketches from prominent architects, drawn from an international selection · A unique insight into how architects use sketches to develop and transfer complex concepts into physical form, enabling readers to improve the connection between their own ideas and designs · Reveals the secrets of the most successful sketching techniques used by architects for today's designers