Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art

Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art

Author: Dee Reynolds

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-03-30

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780521421027

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism studies works by Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kandinsky, and Mondrian.


The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890-1937

The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890-1937

Author: Shearer West

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780719052798

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This work provides an introduction to the visual arts in Germany from the early years of German unification to World War II. The study is an analysis of painting, sculpture, graphic art, design, film and photography in relation to a wider set of cultural and social issues that were specific to German modernism. It concentrates on the ways in which the production and reception of art interacted with and was affected by responses to unification, conflict between left and right political factions, gender concerns, contemporary philosophical and religious ideas, the growth of cities, and the increasing important of mass culture.


The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art

The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art

Author: Michelle Facos

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1351540106

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With the words ?A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,? Jean Mor? announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist artists broke with the past and paved the way for the heterogeneity and penchant for risk-taking that characterizes modern art. The essays collected here, which consider artists from France to Russia and Finland to Greece, argue persuasively that Symbolist approaches to content, form, and subject helped to shape twentieth-century Modernism. Well-known figures such as Kandinsky, Khnopff, Matisse, and Munch are considered alongside lesser-known artists such as Fini, Gyzis, Koen, and Vrubel in order to demonstrate that Symbolist art did not constitute an isolated moment of wild experimentation, but rather an inspirational point of departure for twentieth-century developments.


Symbolist Art in Context

Symbolist Art in Context

Author: Michelle Facos

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009-03-31

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0520255828

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Symbolist art movement of the late 19th century forms an important bridge between Impressionism and Modernism. But because Symbolism emphasizes ideas over objects and events, it has suffered from conflicting definitions. In this book, Michelle Facos offers a comprehensive description of this challenging subject.


Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Author: Allison Morehead

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 027107938X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of “nature’s experiments”—the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body—extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists’ solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange. Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental tactics of symbolism, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a foundational period for the development of European modernism.


Aesthetic Afterlives

Aesthetic Afterlives

Author: Andrew Eastham

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-10-06

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1441130012

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the development of British Aestheticism in the 1870s, the concept of irony has focused a series of anxieties which are integral to modern literary practice. Examining some of the most important debates in post-Romantic aesthetics through highly focused textual readings of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and Alan Hollinghurst, this study investigates the dialectical position of irony in Aestheticism and its twentieth-century afterlives. Aesthetic Afterlives constructs a far-reaching theoretical narrative by positioning Victorian Aestheticism as the basis of Literary Modernity. Aestheticism's cultivation of irony and reflexive detachment was central to this legacy, but it was also the focus of its own self-critique. Anxieties about the concept and practice of irony persisted through Modernism, and have recently been positioned in Hollinghurst's work as a symptom of the political stasis within post-modern culture. Referring to the recent debates about the 'new aestheticism' and the politics of aesthetics, Eastham asks how a utopian Aestheticism can be reconstructed from the problematics of irony and aesthetic autonomy that haunted writers from Pater to Adorno.


Strategic Ambiguity: The Obscure, Nebulous, and Vague in Symbolist Prints

Strategic Ambiguity: The Obscure, Nebulous, and Vague in Symbolist Prints

Author: La Salle University Art Museum

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2013-03-12

Total Pages: 73

ISBN-13: 0988999900

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Exhibition catalogue for Strategic Ambiguity: The Obscure, Nebulous, and Vague in Symbolist Prints, December 6, 2012 to March 1, 2013 at the La Salle University Art Museum. The prints in this exhibition demonstrate how the Symbolist fascination with ambiguity seen in their choices of subject matter (i.e. half-human, half-animal hybrids such as harpies and sphinxes, gender ambiguity and androgyny) extended to formal strategies of representation that obscure form as well as content. This exhibition places Symbolist art in the context of Modernism by focusing on the ways in which artists experimented with print media and explored technical means of suggesting formal ambiguity (i.e. flattening, abstracting, obscuring) both to better match form and content and to push the boundaries of figurative art. The exhibition features work by artists Odilon Redon, Jan Toorop, Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Henri Ibels, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Buhot, Pierre Roche, Henri Martin, Armand Point, Maurice Dumont, Jeanne Jacquemin, Georges de Feure,François-Marius Valère Bernard, Carlos Schwabe and others. Print techniques represented in this survey range from lithography and etching to gypsography. The exhibition catalogue features essays by the curator and La Salle faculty from the disciplines of art history and philosophy.


Intimate Collaborations

Intimate Collaborations

Author: Bibiana Obler

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-05-06

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0300195796

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Beautifully illustrated, this insightful book looks at two influential artist couples and the roles of gender and the applied arts in the emergence of abstraction.


The Idea of Cultural Heritage

The Idea of Cultural Heritage

Author: Derek Gillman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-04-12

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0521192552

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book reviews the competing claims that works of art belong either to a particular people and place, or to humankind.


The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde

The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde

Author: Irina Sirotkina

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-04-20

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1350014338

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The touch and movement senses have a large place in the modern arts. This is widely discussed and celebrated, often enough as if it represents a breakthrough in a primarily visual age. This book turns to history to show just how significant movement and the sense of movement were to pioneers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. It makes this history vivid through a picture of movement in the lives of an extraordinary generation of Russian artists, writers, theatre people and dancers bridging the last years of the tsars and the Revolution. Readers will gain a new perspective on the relation between art and life in the period 1890-1920 in great innovators like the poets Mayakovsky and Andrei Bely, the theatre director Meyerhold, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the young men and women in Russia inspired by her lead, and esoteric figures like Gurdjieff. Movement, and the turn to the body as a source of natural knowledge, was at the centre of idealistic creativity and hopes for a new age, for a 'new man', and this was true both for those who looked forward to the technology of the future and those who looked back to the harmony of Ancient Greece. The book weaves history and analysis into a colourful, thoughtful affirmation of movement in the expressive life.