Download or read book Debating American Modernism written by Debra Bricker Balken and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Debating American Modernism written by Debra Bricker Balken and published by Distributed Art Publishers (DAP). This book was released on 2003 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Duchamp moved from Paris to New York in 1915, he was disappointed by the predominantly nature-based abstraction he observed, publicly proclaiming that American artists were too dependent on outmoded European traditions and had overlooked their greatest subjects--the skyscraper and the machine. Meanwhile, the artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz and his "291" gallery remained loyal to their belief in nature as a source of ongoing renewal for visual culture, and emphasized the crucial role that intuition and spirituality played in their creation of art. The crossfire between Duchamp and Stieglitz and their respective circles defined a critical moment in early twentieth-century American art. Debating Modernism includes reproductions of work by artists from both camps, from Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand to Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marsden Hartley. An essay by curator Debra Bricker Balken traces the threads of the debate through the 1910s and 20s, and also addresses the appearance of sexualized imagery in nearly all of these artists' works, a phenomenon that ironically unifies the two seemingly opposed camps. Jay Bochner's essay focuses on the artists' respective violations of American expectations about art.
Download or read book Marsden Hartley and the West written by Heather Hole and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory look at Hartley's New Mexico landscapes and the darker side of postwar American modernism Considered to be among the greatest early American modernists, the painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) traveled the United States and Europe in his search for a distinctive American aesthetic. His stay in New Mexico resulted in an extraordinary series of landscape paintings--created in New Mexico, New York, and Europe between 1918 and 1924--that show an evolution in style and thinking that is important for understanding both Hartley's oeuvre and American modernism in the postwar years. Marsden Hartley and the West examines this pivotal stage of the painter's career, drawing upon his writings and providing illustrations of rarely seen and previously unpublished works. The author considers Hartley's involvement with the Stieglitz circle and its "soil-and-spirit" philosophy, the Taos art colony, New York Dada, and the impact of historical events such as World War I. Within this setting she analyzes the pastels and oil paintings that suggest Hartley's increasingly ambivalent response to the land. Beginning with optimistic, naturalistic views, the New Mexico works grew progressively darker and more tumultuous, increasingly reflecting a sense of loss brought on by war. The paintings become a site where the landscapes of memory, self, and nation merge, while reflecting broader modernist debates about "American-ness" and a usable past.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism written by Walter Kalaidjian and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-28 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original essays by twelve distinguished international scholars offer critical overviews of the major genres, literary culture, and social contexts that define the current state of scholarship. This Companion also features a chronology of key events and publication dates covering the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. The introductory reference guide concludes with a current bibliography of further reading organized by chapter topics.
Download or read book Late Modernism written by Robert Genter and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism—Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born. In Late Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950s were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners—abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others—debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960s.
Download or read book Modernist America written by Richard Pells and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's global cultural impact is largely seen as one-sided, with critics claiming that it has undermined other countries' languages and traditions. But contrary to popular belief, the cultural relationship between the United States and the world has been reciprocal, says Richard Pells. The United States not only plays a large role in shaping international entertainment and tastes, it is also a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences.Pells reveals how the American artists, novelists, composers, jazz musicians, and filmmakers who were part of the Modernist movement were greatly influenced by outside ideas and techniques. People across the globe found familiarities in American entertainment, resulting in a universal culture that has dominated the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and fulfilled the aim of the Modernist movement--to make the modern world seem more intelligible."Modernist America" brilliantly explains why George Gershwin's music, Cole Porter's lyrics, Jackson Pollock's paintings, Bob Fosse's choreography, Marlon Brando's acting, and Orson Welles's storytelling were so influential, and why these and other artists and entertainers simultaneously represent both an American and a modern global culture.
Download or read book Modernism from Right to Left written by Alan Filreis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-07-29 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of relations between American radicalism and modernism in the 1930s, focusing on Wallace Stevens.
Download or read book Unnatural Selections written by Daylanne K. English and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding. English's interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimke as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes the Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race. English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.
Download or read book Fractured Modernity written by Thomas Welskopp and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten essays in this volume deal with the debates and conflicts about modernity in a period of American history when the tensions and strains caused by seemingly unrestrained change and the reactions to it were particularly severe and tangible. Partly concentrating on the margins or dark underworlds of modernity, such as racism and violence, partly focusing on the allegedly unlimited space to negotiate and create social order from scratch, the contributions to this volume show that, and discuss why, modernity was an issue in contemporary United States which seemed to have been even more hotly contested than in Europe at the same time, albeit sometimes in terms of “Americanism” rather than “modernism”. In this book, European scholars of the United States apply variations on the transnational discourse on modernity to unexpected dimensions of U.S. history, making this volume a fascinating example of the present-day enterprise of internationalizing American studies.
Download or read book New Deal Modernism written by Michael Szalay and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-29 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVArgues that the writers of the 30s and 40s--Hemingway, Ayn Rand, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Wallace Stevens et al. -- identified and understood the formal problems of literary modernism through an idea of the social and an idiom of s/div
Download or read book Meyer Schapiro s Critical Debates written by C. Oliver O’Donnell and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Described in the New York Times as the greatest art historian America ever produced, Meyer Schapiro was both a close friend to many of the famous artists of his generation and a scholar who engaged in public debate with some of the major intellectuals of his time. This volume synthesizes his prolific career for the first time, demonstrating how Schapiro worked from the nexus of artistic and intellectual practice to confront some of the twentieth century’s most abiding questions. Schapiro was renowned for pioneering interdisciplinary approaches to interpreting visual art. His lengthy formal analyses in the 1920s, Marxist interpretations in the 1930s, psychoanalytic critiques in the 1950s and 1960s, and semiotic explorations in the 1970s all helped open new avenues for inquiry. Based on archival research, C. Oliver O’Donnell’s study is structured chronologically around eight defining debates in which Schapiro participated, including his dispute with Isaiah Berlin over the life and writing of Bernard Berenson, Schapiro’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s ekphrastic commentary on Van Gogh, and his confrontation with Claude Lévi-Strauss over the applicability of mathematics to the interpretation of visual art. O’Donnell’s thoughtful analysis of these intellectual exchanges not only traces Schapiro’s philosophical evolution but also relates them to the development of art history as a discipline, to central tensions of artistic modernism, and to modern intellectual history as a whole. Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this study of Schapiro’s career pieces together the separate strands of his work into one cohesive picture. In doing so, it reveals Schapiro’s substantial impact on the field of art history and on twentieth-century modernism.
Download or read book Our America written by Walter Benn Michaels and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America's cultural and collective identity--ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity--linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos--something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels's sustained rereading of the texts of the period--the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar--exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.
Download or read book The Politics of Irony in American Modernism written by Matthew Stratton and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Irony in American Modernism traces how "irony" emerged as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices in American literature of the twentieth century's first half. It is the first study to derive definitions of irony inductively from its widespread use within modernist culture.
Download or read book Dove O Keeffe written by Debra Bricker Balken and published by Clark Art Institute. This book was released on 2009 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the outset of her career, Georgia O'Keeffe credited her introduction to modernism as deriving in part from a reproduction of a pastel by Arthur Dove she saw around 1913. By this time Dove was well established as the foremost modernist artist in America, yet O'Keeffe herself would later become a source of renewal for his work. Renowned scholar Debra Bricker Balken here offers the first investigation into the interrelationship between these two great artists. She shows that while Dove's sensual evocations of landscape--his abstractions of nature's undulating rhythms and forms--offered inspiration for O'Keeffe, the influence of O'Keeffe's work on Dove was equally significant. After 1930, Dove turned to O'Keeffe's early works for renewed aesthetic inspiration, mining, as he put it, her "burning watercolors." Beyond examining the impact of these mutual influences, this beautifully illustrated publication situates Dove and O'Keeffe within the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, and brings them into a fuller context within the modernist scene of the 1920s and 1930s. What emerges is a fascinating look at the first pivotal moment of modernism in America. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Exhibition Schedule: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (June 7 - September 7, 2009)
Download or read book Modernism in Dispute written by John Harris and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is part of a four-volume series about art and its interpretation in the 19th and 20th centuries. The books provide an introduction to modern European and American art and criticism that should be valuable both to students and to the general reader.
Download or read book Enchantments written by Marci Kwon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book uncovers a largely overlooked strand of American modernism in Cornell's work that engaged with current issues through the metaphysical aspects of vernacular objects and experiences"--
Download or read book Fractured Modernity written by Thomas Welskopp and published by Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten essays in this volume deal with the debates and conflicts about modernity in a period of American history when the tensions and strains caused by seemingly unrestrained change and the reactions to it were particularly severe and tangible. Partly concentrating on the margins or dark underworlds of modernity, such as racism and violence, partly focusing on the allegedly unlimited space to negotiate and create social order from scratch, the contributions to this volume show that, and discuss why, modernity was an issue in contemporary United States which seemed to have been even more hotly contested than in Europe at the same time, albeit sometimes in terms of "Americanism" rather than "modernism". In this book, European scholars of the United States apply variations on the transnational discourse on modernity to unexpected dimensions of U.S. history, making this volume a fascinating example of the present-day enterprise of internationalizing American studies.
