DOCSLIB.ORG

Modernism As Institution Hans Hayden

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Modernism As Institution Hans Hayden Modernism as Institution On the Establishment of an Aesthetic and Historiographic Paradigm Hans Hayden Modernism as Institution On the Establishment of an Aesthetic and Historiographic Paradigm Hans Hayden Translated by Frank Perry Published by Stockholm University Press Stockholm University SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden www.stockholmuniversitypress.se Text © Hans Hayden 2018 License CC-BY ORCID: Hans Hayden ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0487-0666 Affiliation: Stockholm University Supporting Agency (funding): Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) and STINT (Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher education) First published 2018 Cover Illustration: Armory Show, International Exhibition of Modern Art, Chicago, 1913. The Cubist room Cover License: By Anonymous photographer. Shot 100 years ago. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Cover Design: Karl Edqvist, SUP Translator: Frank Perry (from Swedish to English) Original version in Swedish: Hayden, Hans, Modernismen som institution. Om etableringen av ett estetiskt och historiografiskt paradigm, Östlings bokförlag Symposion, Eslöv 2006. Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics ISSN: 2002-3227 ISBN (Paperback): 978-91-7635-071-3 ISBN (PDF): 978-91-7635-068-3 ISBN (EPUB): 978-91-7635-069-0 ISBN (MOBI): 978-91-7635-070-6 DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bar This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This licence allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Suggested citation: Hayden, Hans. 2018. Modernism as Institution: On the Establishment of an Aesthetic and Historiographic Paradigm. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bar To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit https://doi.org/10.16993/bar or scan this QR code with your mobile device. Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics (SiCA) (ISSN 2002- 3227) is a peer-reviewed series of monographs and edited volumes published by Stockholm University Press. SiCA strives to provide a broad forum for research on culture and aesthetics, including the disciplines of Art History, Heritage Studies, Curating Art, History of Ideas, Literary Studies, Musicology, and Performance and Dance Studies. In terms of subjects and methods, the orientation is wide: crit- ical theory, cultural studies and historiography, modernism and modernity, materiality and mediality, performativity and visual culture, children’s literature and children’s theatre, queer and gen- der studies. It is the ambition of SiCA to place equally high demands on the academic quality of the manuscripts it accepts as those applied by refereed international journals and academic publishers of a similar orientation. SiCA accepts manuscripts in English, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. Editorial Board Jørgen Bruhn, Professor of Comparative Literature at the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University in Växjö Karin Dirke, Associate Professor of History of Ideas at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Elina Druker, Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Johanna Ethnersson Pontara, Associate Professor of Musicology at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Kristina Fjelkestam, Professor of Gender Studies at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender stud- ies at Stockholm University iv Modernism as Institution Christer Johansson (coordination and communication), PhD Literature, Research officer at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Jacob Lund, Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Culture in the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University Catharina Nolin, Professor of art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Ulf Olsson (chairperson), Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Sonya Petersson, Postdoctor of Art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Meike Wagner, Professor of Theatre Studies at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Titles in the series 1. Rosenberg, T. 2016. Don’t Be Quiet, Start a Riot! Essays on Feminism and Performance. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/baf. License: CC-BY 4.0 2. Lennon, J. & Nilsson, M. (eds.) 2017. Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16993/bam. License: CC-BY 4.0 3. Tessing Schneider, M. & Tatlow, R. (eds.) 2018. Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito: A Reappraisal. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/ban. License: CC-BY 4.0 4. Callahan, S., Holdar, M., Johansson, C. & Petersson, S. (eds.) 2018. The Power of the In-between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/ baq. License: CC-BY 4.0 5. Hayden, H. 2018. Modernism as Institution: On the Establishment of an Aesthetic and Historiographic Paradigm. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16993/bar. License: CC-BY 4.0 Peer Review Policies Stockholm University Press ensures that all book publications are peer-reviewed in two stages. Each book proposal submitted to the Press will be sent to a dedicated Editorial Board of experts in the subject area as well as two independent experts. The full manuscript will be peer reviewed by chapter or as a whole by two independent experts. A full description of Stockholm University Press’ peer-review policies can be found on the website: http://www.stockholm universitypress.se/site/peer-review-policies/ Recognition for reviewers The Editorial Board of Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics applies single-blind review during proposal and manu- script assessment. We would like to thank all reviewers involved in this process. Special thanks to the reviewers who have been doing the peer review of the manuscript of this book. Contents Illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction xiii PART I. THE REGIME OF AUTHENTICITY 1 The Modernity of Modernism 3 The Tradition of the New 3 True and False Modernity 16 Metaphoric Displacements 20 Conflicting Truths 36 The Antithesis of Modernism 36 A Space of Transformations 48 The Mirror and the Lamp 61 Critical Margins 88 Endnotes for Part I 101 PART II. THE NORMALISATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 133 The Struggle for Interpretive Privilege 135 Complex Settings 135 The Criteria of Normalisation 149 The Issue of the Function of Modern Art 156 The Aesthetic and Ideological Criteria of Normalisation 164 The Dictates of the Antitheses: The Cold War Cultural System 164 The Production of Identity as Realpolitik 173 The Model of Indirect and Symbolic Interpretation 181 viii Modernism as Institution The Modernist Metanarrative 188 Between History and the Present 188 Institution and Narration 190 Alfred Barr’s Diagram 200 Endnotes for Part II 213 PART III: TRANSFORMATION/TRANSMEDIA/ TRANSFUSION 243 Realities Around and Underneath the Sign 245 Approaches in Post-war Visual Cultures 245 The Reactivation of an Old Relationship 255 Trespassing on Common Culture 265 Open Aesthetics 272 Paradigmatic Reinterpretations 272 The Play of Opposites 283 Endgame 301 Endnotes for Part III 307 lllustrations 1 Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass, 1912, collage and charcoal on board, 47,9 x 36,5 cm, Collection of the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay, 1950.11. Copyright: Succession Picasso, License CC BY-NC-ND 22 2 Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Artist’s Despair Before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruin, 1778/80, red chalk and brown wash on paper, 42 x 35,2 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Wikimedia Commons, License CC-0 (Public Domain) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Johann_Heinrich_F%C3%BCssli_013.jpg 32 3 Henri Meyer, Le Triennal. Le Grand Salon Carré avec les portraits des peintres et des sculpteurs principaux, illustration i Le Journal Illustré, sept. 30, Paris 1883, Photo and copyright: Uppsala University Library, License CC-0 CC BY-NC-ND 37 4 Jules Lefebvre, La vérité, 1870, oil on canvas, 110 x 226 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Photo and copyright: Reunion des musées nationaux/ IBL, Wikimedia Commons, License CC-0 (Public Domain) https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_V%C3%A9rit%C3%A9,_ par_Jules_Joseph_Lefebvre.jpg 62 5 José Maria Mora, Vanderbilt Ball, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt as the electric light, March 26 1883, fotografi, The New York Historical Society, New York (Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architecture Collections: Costume Ball Photographs Collection, PR-223, Series V, Box 3, Folder 34), Photo: The New York Historical Society, Wikimedia Commons, Licence CC-0 (Public Domain) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mrs_ Vanderbilt_ElectricLight.jpg 76 6 Anonymous, Trademark of Allgemeine Elekrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), Germany, 1894, Photo and copyright: The Archives of the National Museum of Science and Technology, Stockholm, License: CC BY-NC-ND 78 7 Advertising poster for Philips TV, 1958, Photo and copyright: The National
Load more

Recommended publications
  • MAD Visionaries!
    Press Release MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN TO PRESENT ANNUAL VISIONARIES! AWARDS NOVEMBER 20, 2013 The Evening Will Honor Materialise CEO and Founder Wilfried Vancraen, Artist Frank Stella, Vilcek Foundation Executive Director Rick Kinsel, and Designers David and Sybil Yurman NEW YORK, NY (November 5, 2013) – On Wednesday, November 20, PRESS CONTACT 2013, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) will host its 2013 Visionaries! Claire Laporte/Carnelia Garcia Gala, celebrating five influential creators and leaders in the art, craft, and Museum of Arts and Design design industries, whose work personifies the Museum’s mission to explore 212.299.7737 and celebrate contemporary creativity across all media: [email protected] • Wilfried Vancraen, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Materialise, an international additive manufacturing company started in Belgium. MAD PRESS RESOURCES For more than twenty years, Materialise has been working with image library designers and scientists to help expand design, manufacturing, and release as .pdf biomedical research into new frontiers, while remaining committed to artistic creativity, sustainability and the improvement of people’s lives. MAD LINKS • Frank Stella, legendary painter and printmaker, most noted for his Minimalist, Post-Painterly Abstract works has challenged ideas collections database of abstraction and of painting itself by negating the evidence of facebook brushwork and asserting the flatness of the canvas. Today, Stella youtube continues to explore new forms and aesthetic avenues in creating flickr multidimensional, hybrid sculptures that combine painting with twitter geometrical and architectural elements. • Rick Kinsel, Executive Director, The Vilcek Foundation. For more than 10 years, the Vilcek Foundation, under Kinsel's leadership, has been an important philanthropic supporter of the arts and sciences.
    [Show full text]
  • Mommie Dearest
    lopsided shape of the picture. It's so bulky Film and ravenous that it may have elbowed charcters out of the script and shouldered a dozen scenes out of the final cut. It's the kind of performance to which an actress's Mommie ego is obviously committed, where she puts everything she has on the line and dares the critics to hate her. The least you can say of Dearest Dunaway is that she totally inhabits the character. Her eyes appear unfocused and psychotic even in the rare moments when the character is in repose. As for "doing" Crawford, I found her expressions and mannerisms more arresting than the "un- canny" physical resemblance I was led to expect. Both actresses were endowed with Hal Crowther great cheekbones, but that's the extent of it. Drawing hr Gregory Vigrass Miss Dunaway is a beautiful woman and Beaten black and blue by her mother for dropping, no glamorous walk-ons, no Miss Crawford was a beautiful woman, but storing an expensive dress on a wire hanger, gratuitous Filmland lore. With the necessary when you put Crawford's makeup on the nine-year-old blond moppet surveys the exception of Louis B. Mayer—done to a Dunaway you've combined two beauties to wreckage of her beautiful room left in turn by Howard Da Silva—there's no create one hag. Dunaway has seldom looked Mommie's wake and voices the only possible attempt to cash in on any film legend besides less attractive. reaction: "Jesus Christ!" Miss Crawford's. For all the acting, the energy, and the The line was a calculated (and success- What he gives us is such a tight, narrow internal integrity of Dunaway's big scenes— ful) audience-pleaser, but it just about sums focus on Crawford and her daughter that the and "big" has an extended, Gotter- up my critical response to Mommie Dearest.
    [Show full text]
  • Discovering the Contemporary
    of formalist distance upon which modernists had relied for understanding the world. Critics increasingly pointed to a correspondence between the formal properties of 1960s art and the nature of the radically changing world that sur- rounded them. In fact formalism, the commitment to prior- itizing formal qualities of a work of art over its content, was being transformed in these years into a means of discovering content. Leo Steinberg described Rauschenberg’s work as “flat- bed painting,” one of the lasting critical metaphors invented 1 in response to the art of the immediate post-World War II Discovering the Contemporary period.5 The collisions across the surface of Rosenquist’s painting and the collection of materials on Rauschenberg’s surfaces were being viewed as models for a new form of realism, one that captured the relationships between people and things in the world outside the studio. The lesson that formal analysis could lead back into, rather than away from, content, often with very specific social significance, would be central to the creation and reception of late-twentieth- century art. 1.2 Roy Lichtenstein, Golf Ball, 1962. Oil on canvas, 32 32" (81.3 1.1 James Rosenquist, F-111, 1964–65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 10 86' (3.04 26.21 m). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 81.3 cm). Courtesy The Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. New Movements and New Metaphors Purchase Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). Acc. n.: 473.1996.a-w. Artists all over the world shared U.S.
    [Show full text]
  • How Should the United States Confront Soviet Communist Expansionism? DWIGHT D
    Advise the President: DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER How Should the United States Confront Soviet Communist Expansionism? DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER Advise the President: DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER Place: The Oval Office, the White House Time: May 1953 The President is in the early months of his first term and he recognizes Soviet military aggression and the How Should the subsequent spread of Communism as the greatest threat to the security of the nation. However, the current costs United States of fighting Communism are skyrocketing, presenting a Confront Soviet significant threat to the nation’s economic well-being. President Eisenhower is concerned that the costs are not Communist sustainable over the long term but he believes that the spread of Communism must be stopped. Expansionism? On May 8, 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower has called a meeting in the Solarium of the White House with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Treasury Secretary George M. Humphrey. The President believes that the best way to craft a national policy in a democracy is to bring people together to assess the options. In this meeting the President makes a proposal based on his personal decision-making process—one that is grounded in exhaustive fact gathering, an open airing of the full range of viewpoints, and his faith in the clarifying qualities of energetic debate. Why not, he suggests, bring together teams of “bright young fellows,” charged with the mission to fully vet all viable policy alternatives? He envisions a culminating presentation in which each team will vigorously advocate for a particular option before the National Security Council.
    [Show full text]
  • Else Alfelt, Lotti Van Der Gaag, and Defining Cobra
    WAS THE MATTER SETTLED? ELSE ALFELT, LOTTI VAN DER GAAG, AND DEFINING COBRA Kari Boroff A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS May 2020 Committee: Katerina Ruedi Ray, Advisor Mille Guldbeck Andrew Hershberger © 2020 Kari Boroff All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Katerina Ruedi Ray, Advisor The CoBrA art movement (1948-1951) stands prominently among the few European avant-garde groups formed in the aftermath of World War II. Emphasizing international collaboration, rejecting the past, and embracing spontaneity and intuition, CoBrA artists created artworks expressing fundamental human creativity. Although the group was dominated by men, a small number of women were associated with CoBrA, two of whom continue to be the subject of debate within CoBrA scholarship to this day: the Danish painter Else Alfelt (1910-1974) and the Dutch sculptor Lotti van der Gaag (1923-1999), known as “Lotti.” In contributing to this debate, I address the work and CoBrA membership status of Alfelt and Lotti by comparing their artworks to CoBrA’s two main manifestoes, texts that together provide the clearest definition of the group’s overall ideas and theories. Alfelt, while recognized as a full CoBrA member, created structured, geometric paintings, influenced by German Expressionism and traditional Japanese art; I thus argue that her work does not fit the group’s formal aesthetic or philosophy. Conversely Lotti, who was never asked to join CoBrA, and was rejected from exhibiting with the group, produced sculptures with rough, intuitive, and childlike forms that clearly do fit CoBrA’s ideas as presented in its two manifestoes.
    [Show full text]
  • Freedom in the World 2016 Report
    Anxious Dictators, Wavering Democracies: Global Freedom under Pressure FREEDOM IN THE WORLD 2016 Highlights from Freedom House’s annual report on political rights and civil liberties. This report was made possible by the generous support of the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Schloss Family Foundation, and Kim G. Davis. Freedom House also gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the 21st Century ILGWU Heritage Fund, the Reed Foundation, and other private contributors. Freedom House is solely responsible for the content of this report. Freedom in the World 2016 Table of Contents Anxious Dictators, Wavering Democracies: Global Freedom under Pressure 1 Methodology 2 Countries to Watch in 2016 6 Notable Developments in 2015 7 Regional Trends 10 Freedom in the World 2016 Map 12 Freedom in the World 2016 Trend Arrows 18 Freedom in the World 2016 Scores 20 The following people were instrumental in the writing of this essay: Elen Aghekyan, Jennifer Dunham, Bret Nelson, Shannon O’Toole, Sarah Repucci, and Vanessa Tucker. This booklet is a summary of findings for the 2016 edition ofFreedom on the World. The complete analysis including narrative reports on all countries and territories can be found on our website at www.freedomhouse.org. ON THE COVER Refugees and migrants arriving at the Greek island of Lesbos, October 2015. Cover image by Aris Messinis/Getty Images FREEDOM IN THE WORLD 2016 Anxious Dictators, Wavering Democracies: Global Freedom under Pressure by Arch Puddington and Tyler Roylance The world was battered in 2015 by overlapping crises that fueled xenophobic sentiment in democratic countries, undermined the economies of states dependent on the sale of natural resources, and led authoritarian regimes to crack down harder on dissent.
    [Show full text]
  • Click to Download
    v8n4 covers.qxd 5/13/03 1:58 PM Page c1 Volume 8, Number 4 Original Music Soundtracks for Movies & Television Action Back In Bond!? pg. 18 MeetTHE Folks GUFFMAN Arrives! WIND Howls! SPINAL’s Tapped! Names Dropped! PLUS The Blue Planet GEORGE FENTON Babes & Brits ED SHEARMUR Celebrity Studded Interviews! The Way It Was Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, MARVIN HAMLISCH Annette O’Toole, Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, David L. Lander, Bob Balaban, Rob Reiner, JaneJane Lynch,Lynch, JohnJohn MichaelMichael Higgins,Higgins, 04> Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Barbra Streisand, Diane Keaton, Anthony Newley, Woody Allen, Robert Redford, Jamie Lee Curtis, 7225274 93704 Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Wolfman Jack, $4.95 U.S. • $5.95 Canada JoeJoe DiMaggio,DiMaggio, OliverOliver North,North, Fawn Hall, Nick Nolte, Nastassja Kinski all mentioned inside! v8n4 covers.qxd 5/13/03 1:58 PM Page c2 On August 19th, all of Hollywood will be reading music. spotting editing composing orchestration contracting dubbing sync licensing music marketing publishing re-scoring prepping clearance music supervising musicians recording studios Summer Film & TV Music Special Issue. August 19, 2003 Music adds emotional resonance to moving pictures. And music creation is a vital part of Hollywood’s economy. Our Summer Film & TV Music Issue is the definitive guide to the music of movies and TV. It’s part 3 of our 4 part series, featuring “Who Scores Primetime,” “Calling Emmy,” upcoming fall films by distributor, director, music credits and much more. It’s the place to advertise your talent, product or service to the people who create the moving pictures.
    [Show full text]
  • Murder-Suicide Ruled in Shooting a Homicide-Suicide Label Has Been Pinned on the Deaths Monday Morning of an Estranged St
    -* •* J 112th Year, No: 17 ST. JOHNS, MICHIGAN - THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 1967 2 SECTIONS - 32 PAGES 15 Cents Murder-suicide ruled in shooting A homicide-suicide label has been pinned on the deaths Monday morning of an estranged St. Johns couple whose divorce Victims had become, final less than an hour before the fatal shooting. The victims of the marital tragedy were: *Mrs Alice Shivley, 25, who was shot through the heart with a 45-caliber pistol bullet. •Russell L. Shivley, 32, who shot himself with the same gun minutes after shooting his wife. He died at Clinton Memorial Hospital about 1 1/2 hqurs after the shooting incident. The scene of the tragedy was Mrsy Shivley's home at 211 E. en name, Alice Hackett. Lincoln Street, at the corner Police reconstructed the of Oakland Street and across events this way. Lincoln from the Federal-Mo­ gul plant. It happened about AFTER LEAVING court in the 11:05 a.m. Monday. divorce hearing Monday morn­ ing, Mrs Shivley —now Alice POLICE OFFICER Lyle Hackett again—was driven home French said Mr Shivley appar­ by her mother, Mrs Ruth Pat­ ently shot himself just as he terson of 1013 1/2 S. Church (French) arrived at the home Street, Police said Mrs Shlv1 in answer to a call about a ley wanted to pick up some shooting phoned in fromtheFed- papers at her Lincoln Street eral-Mogul plant. He found Mr home. Shivley seriously wounded and She got out of the car and lying on the floor of a garage went in the front door* Mrs MRS ALICE SHIVLEY adjacent to -• the i house on the Patterson got out of-'the car east side.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Ambrosio – Cubism and the Fourth Dimension To appear in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol. 41, no. 2-3 Please cite from the published version Cubism and the Fourth Dimension Chiara Ambrosio Department of Science and Technology Studies UCL [email protected] Abstract: This article revisits the historiography of Cubism and mathematics, with a particular focus on Pablo Picasso’s uses of geometry at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. In particular, I consider the artistic appropriation of the concept of the fourth dimension, and its pictorial uses as a conduit for a conceptual reformulation of pictorial space. I investigate Picasso’s distinctive adoption of this geometric framework in relation to one of his 1909 experiments across painting and photography, and advocate the possibility of drawing novel historiographical lessons from Picasso’s work - lessons that bring the historiography of Cubism in a closer dialogue with recent debates in the historiography of science. I conclude with an appeal to consider the continued relevance of this past experiment in art and science when assessing the contemporary drive toward art-science collaborations, and use the case of Cubism and the fourth dimension as a springboard for a critical reflection on the future directions of art-science collaborations. Keywords: Cubism, Fourth Dimension, Art and Science, Interdisciplinarity Introduction “The new painters do not claim to be geometricians any more than painters of the past did. But it is true that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Nowadays scientists have gone beyond the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry.
    [Show full text]
  • CUBISM and ABSTRACTION Background
    015_Cubism_Abstraction.doc READINGS: CUBISM AND ABSTRACTION Background: Apollinaire, On Painting Apollinaire, Various Poems Background: Magdalena Dabrowski, "Kandinsky: Compositions" Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art Background: Serial Music Background: Eugen Weber, CUBISM, Movements, Currents, Trends, p. 254. As part of the great campaign to break through to reality and express essentials, Paul Cezanne had developed a technique of painting in almost geometrical terms and concluded that the painter "must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone:" At the same time, the influence of African sculpture on a group of young painters and poets living in Montmartre - Picasso, Braque, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Derain, and Andre Salmon - suggested the possibilities of simplification or schematization as a means of pointing out essential features at the expense of insignificant ones. Both Cezanne and the Africans indicated the possibility of abstracting certain qualities of the subject, using lines and planes for the purpose of emphasis. But if a subject could be analyzed into a series of significant features, it became possible (and this was the great discovery of Cubist painters) to leave the laws of perspective behind and rearrange these features in order to gain a fuller, more thorough, view of the subject. The painter could view the subject from all sides and attempt to present its various aspects all at the same time, just as they existed-simultaneously. We have here an attempt to capture yet another aspect of reality by fusing time and space in their representation as they are fused in life, but since the medium is still flat the Cubists introduced what they called a new dimension-movement.
    [Show full text]
  • How Language Looks: on Asger Jorn and Noël Arnaud's La Langue Verte*
    How Language Looks: On Asger Jorn and No ël Arnaud’s La Langue verte* STEVEN HARRIS In November 1968, the Paris publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert brought out Asger Jorn and Noël Arnaud’s La Langue verte et la cuite , an event accompanied by a banquet for 2,000 at a Danish restaurant in Paris, and a considerable response from the press, though the book has largely dropped from view since. 1 Initially titled La Langue crue et la cuite , the book was written in French by artist Asger Jorn, founding member of Cobra and of the Situationist International, and revised by Arnaud, member of the Surrealist “Main à plume” group in occupied Paris, founding member of the Revolutionary Surrealist group in postwar Paris (with which Jorn was also involved), and later regent in the Collège de ’Pataphysique. 2 Jorn, in addition to writing the text, also chose the illustrations, while Arnaud added sections of his own and reordered the material in collaboration with Jorn. It is thus the collective labor of two individuals who had first met in Paris in 1946, and who were both involved in the Revolutionary Surrealist group, a splinter group of Communist persuasion that had seceded from the main body of the Surrealist group shortly before the opening of its exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 , at the Galerie Maeght. If Cobra was very much ori - ented against Arnaud when it was first formed in 1948, the paths of the two men crossed numerous times in subsequent years. Jorn turned to Arnaud as a trusted friend who was in in sympathy with his aims, who corrected Jorn’s rather casual French, and who in general was willing to lend a hand to the enterprise.
    [Show full text]
  • HUMAN ANIMALS the ART of COBRA COBRA CONTEMPORARY LEGACY
    HUMAN ANIMALS THe ART OF COBRA COBRA CONTEMPORARY LEGACY September 15-November 20, 2016 University Museum of Contemporary Art The Cobra Belgium, included twice as many works as the first and displayed a more mature and sophisticated side of Cobra. The show included Movement several well-known artists like Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró and Wifredo Lam, and thus demonstrated Cobra’s acceptance into the wider artistic community. Despite this, the show’s unfavorable reviews and the onset of tuberculosis in Jorn and Dotremont forced the group Cobra was formed in Paris in 1948 as an international avant-garde to split up and cease to exist as a coherent, international network. movement that united artists and poets of three cities —Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam—by Christian Dotremont (Belgian, 1922– In the 1950s, artists all around Europe searched for ways to confront 1979), Joseph Noiret (Belgian, 1927–2012), Asger Jorn (Danish, 1914– the traumatic history and legacy of the Second World War. Artists 1973), Karel Appel (Dutch, 1921–2006), Constant (Dutch, 1920–2005), focused internationally on new forms of expressive abstraction in and Corneille (Dutch, 1922–2010). The Cobra artists were inspired paint as well as other materials. Interest was revived in movements by the idea of the “human animal,” a playful or perhaps satirical like German Expressionism, formerly considered “degenerate” under representation of people’s animalistic instincts and desires, while Fascism. Historical Expressionism and Surrealism were the major evoking the symbolic relationship between humans, animals, and the inspirations for Cobra. Abstract Expressionism in the United States natural environment. The group chose the snake as a totem because was a parallel contemporary movement, but Cobra artists differed of the animal’s universal presence as a mythic and religious symbol.
    [Show full text]