Gleizes was also one of the few French painters of the 1920s to recognise nonrepresentational painting as the logical development of Cubism." "His work as a painter is accompanied by an immense body of theoretical work, addressing the question posed so starkly by Duchamp and Picabia: why should we paint? What is the justification for the work of art? Over his life he touches on many spheres of human activity - religious, political and cultural history, physics and the philosophy of work.".
The scholarly essays in this book focus on the theme of art and social change in Western art from the Renaissance to about 1950. The edited volume includes contributions by scholars with a range of professional backgrounds and affiliations. Their essays address some aspect of the theme and engage with one or more artworks in the collection of La Salle University Art Museum. Topics include religious iconography, portraiture, landscape, journal illustrations, and Modernist abstraction. These essays on the collection add to the body of scholarship which situates works of art in contexts that help reveal and explain changes in social, political or cultural values. The book is lavishly illustrated, with 104 color illustrations.
In what ways do the artistic avant-garde's representations of the human body reflect the catastrophe of World War I? The European modernists were inspired by developments in the nineteenth-century, yielding new forms of knowledge about the nature of reality and repositioning the human body as the new 'object' of knowledge. New 'visions' of the human subject were created within this transformation. However, modernity's reactionary political climate - for which World War I provided a catalyst - transformed a once liberal ideal between humanity, environment, and technology, into a tool of disciplinary rationalisation. Visions of the Human considers the consequences of this historical moment for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It explores the ways in which the 'technologies of the self' that inspired the avant-garde were increasingly instrumentalised by conservative politics, urbanism, consumer capitalism and the society of 'the spectacle'. This is an engaging and powerful study which challenges prior ideas and explores new ways of thinking about modern visual culture.
Central to the development of abstract art, in the early decades of the 20th century was the conception (most famously articulated by Walter Pater) that the most appropriate paradigm for non-figurative art was music. The assumption has always been that this model was most effectively understood as Western art music (classical music). However, the musical form that was abstract art's true twin is jazz, a music that originated with African Americans, but which had a profound impact on European artistic sensibilities. Both art forms share creative techniques of rhythm, groove, gesture and improvisation. This book sets out to theorize affinities and connections between, and across, two seemingly diverse cultural phenomena.
Cubism was the most influential artistic movement of the 20th century, yet just what cubism was, or stood for, is still in dispute. This book offers a way beyond this confusion through a narrative of cubism's beginnings, consolidation and dissemination.
Reveals that during the World War I era modernists participated in a wide-ranging anarchist movement that encompassed lifestyles, literature, and art, as well as politics.
Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.
Examines the ideological differences between the education policies of the two main political parties in the UK and discusses the emergence of these differences within the context of the 1988 Education Reform Act. It also looks at the world-wide influence of the "New Right" politics on education.
Tradition and innovation in the building of the skyscraper - Alfred Stieglitz - Alvin Langdon Coburn - American modernists, Marin, Weber and Walkowitz - Skyscraper mania, 1917-1931 - Art Deco skyscraper and its impact on the arts, 1916-1931 - Urban development, 1917-1931.
This groundbreaking book provides a major reassessment of the history and significance of cubism. David Cottington examines the cubist movement and sets it within the complex political, economic, and cultural forces of pre-World War I France. Cubism, as a part of the Parisian artistic avant-garde, played an integral role in the turbulent Belle Epoque. The author focuses on cubisms relation to the particular discourses?of nationalism, aestheticism, gender, the social purpose of art?that gave meaning to the experience of modernity in Paris in the decade before the war. In Part I of the book, the author discusses the "cubist conjuncture," the years that followed the collapse of the Bloc des Gauches. The Bloc, more than a parliamentary alliance, represented an effort of collaboration between the liberal middle class and sectors of the working class led by Parisian intellectuals and artists (future cubists among them). In the wake of the Blocs failure, workers withdrew into trade unionism and artists into aesthetic avant-gardism. Cottington analyzes this consolidation of the artistic avant-garde, its relation to the expanding dealer-centered art market, and the dominant and counter discourses of the day. In Part II, he considers specific aspects of cubist art and the cubist movement?from the conservative modernism of the paintings of Le Fauconnier and Gleizes to the aestheticism of Picassos papiers-collés to the collective architectural and interior design project of the "cubist house." These examples and others, Cottington concludes, reveal cubism as a contradictory and unstable constellation of interests and practices, sometimes complicit with dominant social and political forces, sometimes opposed to them, but in every case shaped by them.
