Download or read book Situating El Lissitzky written by Nancy Perloff and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2003 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book El Lissitzky on Paper written by Samuel Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-06-12 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the importance of paper in the work of Soviet artist, designer, and architect El Lissitzky. Russian artist El Lissitzky’s work spans painting, photography, theatrical and exhibition design, architecture, graphic design, typography, and literature. He was active in the Jewish cultural renaissance, formed an artists’ collective with Kazimir Malevich, was a key figure in the dissemination of early Soviet art in Western Europe, and designed propaganda for the Stalin regime. With such a varied history and body of work, scholars have often struggled to identify the core principles that tied his diverse oeuvre together. In El Lissitzky on Paper, Samuel Johnson argues that Lissitzky’s commitment to creating works on paper is a constant that unites his endeavors. Paper played a key role in the utopian projects that informed Lissitzky’s work, and the artist held a commitment to print as the premier medium of immediate public exchange. Johnson analyzes and contextualizes this idea against the USSR’s strict management of this essential resource and the growth of new media communications, including the telephone, telegraph, and film. With this book, Johnson presents a significant contribution to scholarship on this major artist, revealing new connections between Lissitzky’s work in architecture and visual art and bringing to light sources from largely unstudied Russian archives.
Download or read book Explodity written by Nancy Perloff and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2017-01-21 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Big Archive written by Sven Spieker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism written by Michael Tymkiw and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Beholding written by Ken Wilder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Constructivism in Central Europe written by Esther Levinger and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Children and Yiddish Literature From Early Modernity to Post Modernity written by Gennady Estraikh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Architects Drawings written by Kendra Schank Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-08-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: · 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
Download or read book The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture 1917 1937 written by Jörg Schulte and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish emigration from Russia after the Revolution of 1917 changed the face of Jewish culture in Western Europe. Russian Jews brought with them the visions of a national Jewish literature in Hebrew, Yiddish or Russian, and new concepts of secular Jewish music and art. Often they acted as intermediaries between Jewish centres in Europe, which resulted in the creation of a single sphere of Jewish culture common to all parts of the European diaspora. Although some stayed in Western Europe for only a few years before moving on to Palestine, the budding Hebrew culture in Palestine would not have been the same without this relatively short period of intense contact between Russian Jewish and Western European cultures.
Download or read book Malevich and Interwar Modernism written by Éva Forgács and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understood as a symbol of a new internationalism and modernity and while Forgács uses it as part of her overall narrative, she focuses on it and its journey across borders to follow its significance, how it was used by the above key artists and how its meaning became modified in Western Europe. It is unusual to discuss interwar modernism and its postwar survival, but this book's chapters work together to argue that the interwar developments signified a turning point in twentieth-century art that led to much creativity and innovation. Forgács supports her theory with newly found and newly interpreted documents that prove how this exciting legacy was shaped by three major agents: Malevich, Lissitzsky and van Doesburg. She offers a wider interpretation of modernism that examines its postwar significance, reception and history up until the emergence of the New Left in 1956 and the seismic events of 1968.
Download or read book Harmony and Dissent written by R. Bruce Elder and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2010-04-22 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: R. Bruce Elder argues that the authors of many of the manifestoes that announced in such lively ways the appearance of yet another artistic movement shared a common aspiration: they proposed to reformulate the visual, literary, and performing arts so that they might take on attributes of the cinema. The cinema, Elder argues, became, in the early decades of the twentieth century, a pivotal artistic force around which a remarkable variety and number of aesthetic forms took shape. To demonstrate this, Elder begins with a wide-ranging discussion that opens up some broad topics concerning modernity’s cognitive (and perceptual) regime, with a view to establishing that a crisis within that regime engendered some peculiar, and highly questionable, epistemological beliefs and enthusiasms. Through this discussion, Elder advances the startling claim that a crisis of cognition precipitated by modernity engendered, by way of response, a peculiar sort of “pneumatic (spiritual) epistemology.” Elder then shows that early ideas of the cinema were strongly influenced by this pneumatic epistemology and uses this conception of the cinema to explain its pivotal role in shaping two key moments in early-twentieth-century art: the quest to bring forth a pure, “objectless” (non-representational) art and Russian Suprematism, Constructivism, and Productivism.
Download or read book Realisms of the Avant Garde written by Moritz Baßler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical avant-gardes defined themselves largely in terms of their relationship to various versions of realism. At first glance modernism primarily seems to take a counter-position against realism, yet a closer investigation reveals that these relations are more complex. This book is dedicated to the links between realism, modernism and the avant-garde in their international context from the late 19th century up to the present day.
Download or read book Faith in Art written by Joseph Masheck and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphysical thought has been excluded from much of the discourse on modern art, especially abstract painting. By connecting ideas about faith with the initiators of abstract painting, Joseph Masheck reveals how an underlying religiosity informed some of our most important abstract painters. Covering Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and El Lissitzky, Masheck shows how 'revealed religion' has been an underlying but fundamental determinant of the thinking and practice of abstract painting from its very originators. He contextualizes their art within some of the historical moments of the early 20th century, including the Russian revolution and the Stalinist period, and explores the appeal of certain themes, such as the Passion of Christ. A radical new theorization of the influence of religion over visual art, Faith in Art asks why metaphysics has been eliminated from the discussion where it might have something to say. This is a new way of thinking about a hundred years of abstract painting.
Download or read book Wolkenb gel written by Richard Anderson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a visionary, never-realized architectural project, devised by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, shaped architectural culture in Europe between the world wars. After achieving international acclaim as a painter and designer, El Lissitzky set out in 1924 to convince the world—and himself—that he was also an architect. He did this with a project for a “horizontal skyscraper,” which he gave an obscure and untranslatable name: Wolkenbügel. Eight of these buildings, perched atop slender pillars, were intended to stand at major intersections along Moscow’s Boulevard Ring, integrating the flow of tramlines, subways, and elevators. In Wolkenbügel, Richard Anderson explores Lissitzky’s translation of visual and textual media into spatial ideas and offers an in-depth study of the surviving drawings and archival artifacts related to Lissitzky's most complex architectural proposal. This book offers a new and definitive account of how Lissitzky expanded the conceptual and representational tools available to the modern architect by drawing on many sources—including photography, typography, exhibition design, and even the elementary forms of the alphabet—to create the Wolkenbügel. Anderson shows how the production and reception of a paper project served to link key ideas and relationships that animated the worlds of art and architecture, offering a new view on received histories of the interwar avant-gardes. By attending to Lissitzky’s singular architectural project, Anderson reveals the dynamics of internationality in the constitution of modern architectural culture in Europe.
Download or read book 2019 written by Günter Berghaus and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Futurist art movement, founded by F.T. Marinetti in 1909, had a worldwide impact and made important contributions to avant-garde movements in many countries and artistic genres. This yearbook is designed to act as a medium of communication amongst a global community of Futurism scholars. It has an interdisciplinary orientation and presents new research on Futurism across national borders in fields such as literature, fine arts, music, theatre, design, etc. Apart from essays and country surveys it contains reports, reviews and an annual bibliography of recent Futurism studies. Vol. 1 (2011): Special Issue, Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe Vol. 2 (2012): Open Issue Vol. 3 (2013): Special Issue, Iberian Futurism Vol. 4 (2014): Open Issue Vol. 5 (2015): Special Issue, Women Futurists Vol. 6 (2016): Open Issue For Vol. 1-3 please see also: http: //www.degruyter.com/view/j/futur
Download or read book The Utopian Globalists written by Jonathan Harris and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE UTOPIAN GLOBALISTS “Crossing continents, historical periods and cultural genres, Jonathan Harris skilfully traces the evolution of utopian ideals from early modernism to the spectacularised and biennialised (or banalised as some would say) contemporary art world of today.” Michael Asbury, University of the Arts, London The Utopian Globalists is the second in a trilogy of books by Jonathan Harris examining the contours, forces, materials and meanings of the global art world, along with its contexts of emergence since the early twentieth century. The first of the three studies, Globalization and Contemporary Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), anatomized the global art system through an extensive anthology of over 30 essays contextualized through multiple thematic introductions. The final book in the series, Contemporary Art in a Globalized World (forthcoming, Wiley-Blackwell), combines the historical and contemporary perspectives of the first and second books in an account focused on the ‘mediatizations’ shaping and representing contemporary art and its circuits of global production, dissemination and consumption. This innovative and revealing history examines artists whose work embodies notions of revolution and human social transformation. The clearly structured historical narrative takes the reader on a cultural odyssey that begins with Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist model for a ‘Monument to the Third International’ (1919), a statement of utopian globalist intent, via Picasso’s 1940s commitment to Soviet communism and John and Yoko’s Montreal ‘Bedin’, to what the author calls the ‘late globalism’ of the Unilever Series at London’s Tate Modern. The book maps the ways artists and their work engaged with, and offered commentary on, modern spectacle in both capitalist and socialist modernism, throughout the eras of the Russian Revolution, the Cold War and the increasingly globalized world of the past 20 years. In doing so, Harris explores the idea that the utopian -globalist lineage in art remains torn between its yearning for freedom and a deepening identification with spectacle as a media commodity to be traded and consumed.
