The Icon and Visual Arts During the Russian Religious Renaissance

2020 ◽  
pp. 411-431
Author(s):  
Clemena Antonova
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Simple Observation ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The One ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Artistic Tradition

This chapter begins from a simple observation, namely, that what has been called ‘the Russian religious renaissance of the twentieth century’ coincided in time with two important movements in the sphere of the visual arts. On the one hand, there was a sweeping revival of interest in the medieval icon at the beginning of the twentieth century, which left almost no sphere of cultural life untouched. On the other, in artistic terms, the whole period was largely defined by the advent of the Russian avant-garde. I would like to consider the junction at which these three developments overlapped, informed, influenced, even opposed and clashed with one another. According to the interpretation proposed here, it is the mixture and the coexistence of a revived Orthodoxy, a reawakened focus on the medieval artistic tradition, and the rise of avant-garde modernism that gave a unique flavour to early twentieth-century Russian culture. The debates on the function and the meaning of the icon in the period between the 1910s and the early 1920s ultimately suggested different answers to the problem of the role of religion in modernity.

The avant-garde’s visual arts in the context of Santayana’s idea of vital liberty

Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Skowroński
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Universe

AbstractIn the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot.

Ugliness and Beauty: the Politics of Landscape in Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Claire Warden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Surrounding Area ◽  
North West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The North ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
Open Fields

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.

Untimely Reasoning about Two Monuments. Between Architecture, Sculpture and Site

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Danailov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Artistic Analysis

The report compares the form-formation principles, key to the architecture of the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts (1983/89) Columbus, Ohio – of the American Peter Eisenmann – with some of the techniques used in the spatial – compositional solution of the destroyed Sofia monument “1300 Years Bulgaria” (1980/81–2017). The text refers to the 80’s of the twentieth century and the creative approaches, distinctive for some of the lastest „large-scale monuments“ realized in Bulgaria. These approaches are considered in the light of one opened architectural theory, absolutely oppositional to the one typical to our country at this time. The comparison aims to are to expand, within this date, the scope of the spatial-artistic analysis, committed to the relationship between the architecture, sculpture and the surrounding environment.

scholarly journals The avant-garde in the architecture and visual arts of Post-Revolutionary Mexico

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando N. Winfield
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Mexican Architecture ◽  
Direct Reflection

Commenting on an exhibition of contemporary Mexican architecture in Rome in 1957, the polemic and highly influential Italian architectural critic and historian, Bruno Zevi, ridiculed Mexican modernism for combining Pre-Columbian motifs with modern architecture. He referred to it as ‘Mexican Grotesque’. Inherent in Zevi’s comments were an attitude towards modern architecture that defined it in primarily material terms; its principle role being one of “spatial and programmatic function”. Despite the weight of this Modernist tendency in the architectural circles of Post-Revolutionary Mexico, we suggest in this paper that Mexican modernism cannot be reduced to such “material” definitions. In the highly charged political context of Mexico in the first half of the 20th Century, modern architecture was perhaps above all else, a tool for propaganda. In this political atmosphere it was undesirable, indeed it was seen as impossible, to separate art, architecture and politics in a way that would be a direct reflection of Modern architecture’s European manifestations. Form was to follow function, but that function was to be communicative as well as spatial and programmatic. One consequence of this “political communicative function” in Mexico was the combination of the “mural tradition” with contemporary architectural design; what Zevi defined as “Mexican Grotesque”. In this paper, we will examine the political context of Post-Revolutionary Mexico and discuss what may be defined as its most iconic building; the Central Library at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico . In direct counterpoint to Zevi, we will suggest that it was far from grotesque, but rather was one of the most committed political statements made by the Modern Movement throughout the Twentieth Century. It was propaganda, it was political. It was utopian.

POLITICAL ATHEISM: THE SECULARIZATION AND LIBERALIZATION OF AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID SEHAT
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Overlapping Consensus ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.

Leon Petrażycki and contemporary socio-legal studies

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cotterrell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Transnational Law ◽  
The One

AbstractThe work of the Polish–Russian scholar Leon Petrażycki from the early decades of the twentieth century holds a strikingly paradoxical position in the literature of juristic and socio-legal scholarship: on the one hand, lauded as a supremely valuable contribution to knowledge about the nature of law and, on the other, widely neglected and little known. This paper asks how far Petrażycki's theories, expressed in writings by and about him available to an international readership, can provide insight for contemporary socio-legal studies – not as historical background but as living ideas. How far can his work speak to current issues and inform current debates? What obstacles stand in the way of this? Why have few international scholars engaged with his theories despite their rigour and originality? The paper starts from this last issue before addressing the others. It argues that Petrażycki's radical legal theory offers strikingly distinctive resources for rethinking issues about the role of law in multicultural societies, the nature of developing transnational law, and the significance of law as an aspect or expression of culture.

Nauka wobec wyzwań współczesnej rzeczywistości społeczno-politycznej

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Andrzej Chodubski
Keyword(s):  
Science Studies ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Productive Force ◽  
Political Sciences ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Structured Knowledge ◽  
The One

It is indicated in the lecture that science, as human activity that aims at the objective recognition of a person and his universe, is nowadays perceived as a fundamental power that generates the cultural and civilizational nature of mankind and the world around it. The widening horizon of cultural life has been changing and still changes the scientific and research challenges, including the way, in which science is defined. At present, scientific and technological progress, legal solutions, educational requirements, constantly generate new challenges for science and make it a productive force. The role of social and political sciences that until recently strived to make their ways to achieve the title of science that is a methodologically structured knowledge about human, society and the world, has been changing.At present, the place of social and political reality in the sphere of scientific cognition is perceived as dichotomous – on the one hand, due to the methodology of researches, including attempts to compare them with exact sciences, their scientific separateness is assessed critically; however, on the other hand, taking into account the worked out methods and ways of defining cultural and civilizational reality, explantation of occurrences, processes, humanistic and social values, they are set in the classical science studies, as a whole.

Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation: Ecumenical Initiatives Amidst Human Brokenness and Community Division

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-111
Author(s):  
Jerald D. Gort
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
World Council Of Churches ◽  
The World ◽  
World Council ◽  
Human Capacity ◽  
The One ◽  
Role Of Religion

AbstractAfter reflecting on the ambiguous role of religion in terms of violence, Jerald D. Gort in this article outlines, first, the conditions for true reconciliation among peoples (acknowledgement of Christian complicity; no cheap reconciliation; no utopian enthusiasm; no fatalistic view of human capacity); then, second, he outlines the initiatives ofthe World Council of Churches (WCC) toward justice and reconciliation in the world. Such initiatives involve the struggle against injustice on the one hand and a practice of the "wider ecumenism" (dialogue of histories, theologies, spiritualities, and life) on the other.

Short Reviews

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-130
Author(s):  
Susan Teneriello
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
English Language ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Symbolic System ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Body Imagery ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
Critical Dance Studies

Gabriele Brandstetter's Poetics of Dance has remained unavailable to English-language readers until now. Widely considered a landmark book of dance scholarship when it first appeared in Germany in 1995, this provocative analysis of the early twentieth-century avant-garde in Europe is sure to continue to influence a new audience. The book's initial publication advanced the application of critical theory and interdisciplinary approaches to dance that now constitute the field of critical dance studies. Caringly translated by Elena Polzer with Oxford Studies in Dance Theory series editor Mark Franko, this work remains a unique analysis of modernity that illuminates dance as an “act of transmission,” a bridge through theatre, literature, and visual arts altering relationships to how movement is reproduced and how space is conceptualized. Brandstetter's central premise expands through reading body imagery as a historically specific context from which the iconography of pictorial patterns open up perceptual concepts. The interdependency between new models and vocabularies of modern dance and literature appearing at the turn-of-the-twentieth century brace the argument that avant-garde aesthetic debates and concerns moved through body imagery and figurations in space. The poetics of free dance (and later forms of Expressionist dance appearing in Germany) as it took shape in Europe foregrounds the dancer's movement as a transformative language and symbolic system of cultural deconstruction and renewal.

Introduction

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 819-827 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Hitzer ◽  
Joachim Schlör
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
East European ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
The One ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Religious Landscape

This article introduces a special issue that investigates the place of religion in the spatial and cultural organization of west and east European cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Discussing different frameworks for a conceptualization of the role of religion within the urban context during the past two hundred years, it argues for adopting a broader perspective that takes into account the multiple and often conflicting processes and practices of religious modernization. Thus, it places particular emphasis on scrutinizing a space in between, that is to say, the area of contact between the outward influence on the spatial development of religious communities on the one hand and the inner workings of such communities on the other hand. Based on an 1880s debate over the way Jewish immigrants changed the religious landscape of New York Jewry as well as on the results of the following contributions, it supports a fresh look at the turn of the century as a period of intensified religious life and visibility within metropolises that contributed to the development of more “modern,” individualized forms of religious sociability and, in the same vein, fostered the emergence of modern urbanity.

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