Apollinaire on the Edge: Modern Art, Popular Culture, and the Avant-Garde

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-104
Author(s):  
P. Read
Author(s):  
Maya Bielinski

The art manifesto, a written political, social, and artistic proclamation of an artistic movement, surged in popularity among avant‐garde art groups in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the manifestos featured declarations for the synthesis of art and life as well as a call for social and political power for artists of both 'high' and 'low' art forms. Concurrently, new artistic interpretations of the humble teapot became suddenly ubiquitous. This inquiry explores how the teapot emerged as a dominant symbol for the goals of Modern Art movements, and includes an analysis of the teapot's socio‐political history, its ambiguous status between high and low art, and its role in the commercial sphere. By examining the teapots of Suprematism's Kazimir Malevich, Constructivism's Mariane Brandt,and Surrealism's Meret Oppenheim, this presentation will track ideas of functionality, the teapot as symbol, and aesthetics from 1923 to 1936. This small window in time offers an analysis of the extraordinary developments in teapots, and perhaps a glimpse of the paralleled momentum that occurred more generally in design, architecture, and the other arts in this time period.


Author(s):  
Sharon Hecker

This chapter looks at the shift in Medardo Rosso's position from an outsider in his own country to a foreigner in France. Rosso's move to Paris belongs to the wider phenomenon of increased migration by artists to the principal metropolis of modern art toward the end of the century. It also confirms his awareness of a new kind of transnational mobility. Tracing Rosso's trajectory as a form of self-exile characteristic of cultural anarchists, the chapter examines his hopeful but obstacle-ridden expatriation and his struggle to make avant-garde sculpture in the epoch and city dominated by Rodin. Paris at the end of the nineteenth-century offered Rosso new opportunities, such as a vibrant art scene, a burgeoning market for serial sculpture, and a network of sophisticated artists, collectors, and critics.


This is a brief interstitial introduction by art historian Kim A. Munson explaining the importance of and interaction between two blockbuster exhibitions featuring comics, High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture (MoMA, 1990) and Masters of American Comics (Hammer & Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2005). This chapter discusses The Comic Art Show (Whitney, 1983), Jonah Kinigstein’s satirical cartoons about the NY art world, and the critical and public dialogue surrounding both High and Low and Masters, which has shaped many of the comics exhibitions that followed. This chapter tracks the team of comics advocates that organized The Comic Art Show (John Carlin, Art Spiegelman, Brian Walker, and Ann Philbin), their reactions to High and Low and the production of Masters of American Comics in response.


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