In Anxious Celebration: Lewis Hine's Men at Work

Prospects ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 319-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Factory Worker ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Proletarian Art

In a letter to the radical periodical, the New Masses, in October of 1930, one reader requested more satire from the artists who published in its pages, art with “greater revolutionary purpose.” The drawings of an artist like Louis Lozowick, Vern Jessup complained, were suspiciously ambiguous: “In the New Masses they're proletarian art. What do you call them when they appear in the bourgeois business magazines, as they do?” Louis Lozowick, a Russian-American avant-garde painter and a contributing editor of the New Masses, rose immediately to the challenge. In a letter of response in the December, 1930 issue, entitled, “What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Now?” he noted that leftist artists and writers go to capitalist publications and galleries with the same regularity (and uncertainty) as workers go to shops and factories — and for the same reasons. One might ask a revolutionary artist to refuse all collaboration with capitalist institutions and starve to death with his revolutionary conscience immaculate. Or one might ask him to contribute to the revolutionary movement with whatever means at his command while conceding the inevitability (as we do in the case of the factory worker) of his working in capitalist institutions.

Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah

2001 ◽  
pp. 184-220
Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Alive Today ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter studies the long historiographic tradition in search of a definition of the Haskalah. It suggests reducing the historical parameters of the Jewish Enlightenment so that it can be recognized as a trend in which modernizing intellectuals aspired to transform Jewish society. Despite the obvious diversity and dispersion of the Haskalah, and the difficulty in defining it precisely, the chapter enumerates a number of essential criteria, elaborating on the self-consciousness of the maskilim and paying special attention to their militant rhetoric and awareness of belonging to an avant-garde, redemptive, and revolutionary movement. It also sketches a portrait of the typical maskil, surveys the history of the movement and its various centres, and elucidates the dualistic nature of its ideology, explaining its links to the processes of Jewish modernization and secularization. Ultimately, the Haskalah was the intellectual option for modernization that triggered the Jewish Kulturkampf which, still alive today — especially in Israel — separates modernists and anti-modernists, Orthodox and secular Jews.

Ludic Love

2021 ◽  
pp. 367-384
Author(s):  
Catriona Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Factory Worker ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Hall Effects ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
Philosophical Meditation

This chapter discusses the single movie made at Lenfilm by one of the USSR’s most important avant-garde directors, Kira Muratova. As she worked on the script, Muratova transformed a mild and sweet story about a pretty young factory worker, Lyuba, who was in love with two men at once, into a philosophical meditation on love. Yet any aspirations to deep thinking were constantly called into question by the playful nature of the representation. Music-hall effects, comedy repetition, and parodic echoes of Stalin-era official films jostle film noir and citations from new wave. Reactions at Lenfilm were wary, and the collaboration with Muratova ended at one film. But Getting to Know the Wide World remained Muratova’s favorite film even at the end of her life; though she resented the criticism that she got at Lenfilm, the frustration that it generated turned out to be creative.

From the Avant-Garde to “Proletarian Art”

Art Journal ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-45
Author(s):  
Oliver A. I. Botar
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Proletarian Art

Between art and politics: the avant-garde art to the social-political changes in the Weimar Republic/ Między sztuką i polityką: awangarda artystyczna wobec zmian społeczno-politycznych w Republice Weimarskiej

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Cześniak-Zielińska
Keyword(s):  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
German Expressionism ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
First World

AbstractArticle discusses the relationships between art and politics on the example of the German avantgarde, whose origins must be sought in the period before the First World War had broken out. Ideas of the German expressionism evolved under the influence of the Great War and the news from the Bolshevik Russia. Many left-wing artists in post-war Germany were involved in the revolutionary movement, especially the so-called November Revolution; after the Versailles Treaty, some of them joined the management of culture institutions and artistic schools with the famous Bauhaus School of Design at the forefront. Hitler’s rise to power brought an end to both the Weimar Republic and the avant-garde art in Germany

Freedom and Fusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 401-446
Author(s):  
Ted Gioia
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
World Music ◽  
Free Jazz ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Miles Davis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bitches Brew

The avant-garde (or “free jazz”) musicians who came to the forefront of jazz during the late 1950s and early 1960s mounted a revolutionary movement that challenged all the conventions of the idiom, aligning their innovations with the progressive social and political changes of the era. This chapter looks at the leading exponents of the music, including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler. But just when jazz seemed ready to sever completely its relationship with a mainstream audience, a new movement known as fusion (or jazz-rock fusion) attempted to broaden the music’s appeal by drawing on the new sounds of electrified commercial styles. Miles Davis, previously seen as an advocate of bebop, cool jazz, and other jazz movements, emerged as the leader of this new approach, signaled by the release of his hit album Bitches Brew. In the 1970s, a different kind of fusion style emerged, associated with the ECM record label in Germany, which combined jazz with ingredients drawn from classical music, world music, and other sources. This chapter traces the history of these contrasting styles and their major exponents, including Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and the band Weather Report

Murayama, Tomoyoshi (1901–1977)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Wei Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
Active Member ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Theatre Production ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
Film Series ◽  
Preservation Law ◽  
Proletarian Art

Tomoyoshi Murayama was a multi-disciplinary Japanese artist associated with the interwar avant-garde and leftwing theater movements. After briefly attending Tokyo Imperial University, Murayama moved to Berlin in 1922, where he met Herwarth Walden and participated in The Great Futurist Exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm. Upon returning to Japan, Murayama held his first solo exhibition in Tokyo in 1923, where he developed a theory of ‘conscious constructivism’ that called for the incorporation of everyday life into aesthetic practice. As the founding member and spokesman of the art collective Mavo, Murayama challenged prevailing notions of pure art—his mixed media assemblages included references to popular culture and industrial materials. In addition to his mixed media pieces, Murayama produced work across a range of media including children’s illustration, commercial design, theater, and film. Murayama’s theater affiliations included the Kokoro-za Theatre and the New Cooperative Theatre, and he designed the constructivist-style set for the Tsukiji Little Theatre production of From Morning Till Midnight (1924). An active member of proletarian art associations, Murayama was detained multiple times under the Peace Preservation Law, and was forced to renounce his political affiliations in 1933. In 1940, the New Cooperative Theatre and New Tsukiji Little Theatre were disbanded, and Murayama imprisoned. Following his sentence, Murayama spent the remainder of the war in Korea and Manchuria, returning to Japan after the war in 1945. His late novel Shinobi no mono (1960–1962) was adapted as a film series, play, and television program. Prior to his death, he completed a four-volume autobiography.

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