scholarly journals Adverts in ‘Little Reviews’ (1890–1930): Networks, Poetry and Design

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Hélène Védrine
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Visual Displays ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Literature Reviews ◽  
Mainstream Press ◽  
Page Design

Between the 1880s and the 1920s, advertising proved fundamental to art and literature reviews since it fostered a new link between visual and consumerist culture. This article is based on fin de siècle and avant-garde magazines read in dialogue. It samples French and Belgian magazines illustrating innovations to 1880s periodicals and 1920s modernist magazines. The paper highlights the use of visual techniques in advertisements (page design, typography, etc.) that strengthen aesthetic and political stances. Advertising rhetoric masks aesthetic manifestos but also social and political agenda, revealed by visual displays of text. Publicity is also an important medium for poetic experimentation, embedded in ordinary advertising design already in the 1890s. Its subversive use informs new means of artistic expression, considered avant-garde innovations (collage, cadavre exquis, or typographic combinations). Advertising later represents new modernist stances within avant-garde magazines. Surrealism and Dada exploited publicity to promote their revolutionary aesthetic. In the 1920s, advertising being increasingly professionalized, specific designers used new visual means, strengthened artistic exchanges, and gradually erased the division between art and commercial culture in magazines. Thus modernism became part of a visual culture resonant with consumer commodities. Advertising ultimately exemplifies an interesting change in periodicals’ patterns, across literature and art reviews to the mainstream press, through posters, and decorative or architectural designs.

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2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magda Szcześniak ◽  
Łukasz Zaremba
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Polish Culture

A chapter from the book Kultura wizualna w Polsce. Spojrzenia [Visual Culture in Poland. Looks], ed. Iwona Kurz, Paulina Kwiatkowska, Magda Szcześniak, Łukasz Zaremba (Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Instytut Kultury Polskiej UW: Warsaw, 2017). The essay is devoted to protest imagery in Polish culture - from avant-garde painting to contemporary, vernacular visual representations used during protests.

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
William C. Brumfield
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
The Soviet Union

This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.

scholarly journals Whose Landscape Is It? Remapping Memory and History in Interwar Central Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Nóra Veszprémi
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Mental Maps ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Place Memory ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the sanctioning of new national borders in 1920, the successor states faced the controversial task of reconceptualizing the idea of national territory. Images of historically significant landscapes played a crucial role in this process. Employing the concept of mental maps, this article explores how such images shaped the connections between place, memory, and landscape in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Hungarian revisionist publications demonstrate how Hungarian nationalists visualized the organic integrity of “Greater Hungary,” while also implicitly adapting historical memory to the new geopolitical situation. As a counterpoint, images of the Váh region produced in interwar Czechoslovakia reveal how an opposing political agenda gave rise to a different imagery, while drawing on shared cultural traditions from the imperial past. Finally, the case study of Dévény/Devín/Theben shows how the idea of being positioned “between East and West” lived on in overlapping but politically opposed mental maps in the interwar period. By examining the cracks and continuities in the picturesque landscape tradition after 1918, the article offers new insight into the similarities and differences of nation-building processes from the perspective of visual culture.

Ästhetisch konstruierte Traditionen?

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-470
Author(s):  
Torsten Voß
Keyword(s):  
Discursive Practice ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Concept Of Beauty

Abstract Throughout various literary and artistic periods, artists have referred to or even converted to Catholicism as a means of conjuring a certain perception of a European tradition. In doing this, they seek to create an aesthetic of romanticism and/or an idea and concept of beauty, the artist, artwork etc. After giving a brief overview of this discursive practice in modern avant-garde movements, this article focuses on early forms of literary Catholic movements, such as the French Renouveau catholique and François-René de Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity), as well as Novalis’ ‘invention’ of German romanticism in his essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe). It shows that there are a variety of parallels to be identified across these periods and places, namely, in programs, performances, rhetoric-building and group-building processes, and in cultivating an anti-bourgeois distinction, both in the texts themselves and in the positioning of the artists within the literary field. Despite accusations of being reactionary, writers and artists who elaborate a Catholic concept of art and literature aim to develop a traditionalist and anti-modern stance within (aesthetical and social) modernity.

"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adri Kácsor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Interwar Europe

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

scholarly journals What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Ecological Citizenship ◽  
Contemporary Media

Questions of cultural citizenship and risk have become central to contemporary sociological debates. This paper seeks to relate these concerns to a discussion of ecological citizenship and questions of visual and commercial culture. In the first section, I argue that ecological citizenship needs to avoid a moralistic rejection of the pleasures of contemporary visual and consumer culture. Such a possibility I argue has become evident in recent debates on the risk society. However, I argue despite Beck's realisation that questions of risk become defined through contemporary media his analysis remains overly distant from more everyday understandings. In order to address this question, I seek to demonstrate how an interpretative understanding of visual culture (in this case the 1995 film Safe) might help us develop more complex understandings of the competing cultures of risk and citizenship.

scholarly journals FROM ŁÓDŹ TO LEIDEN – ON INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS OF THE POLISH INTERWAR AVANT-GARDE

Muzealnictwo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 203-210
Author(s):  
Michał Wenderski
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
De Stijl

This article is dedicated to international connections between selected representatives of Polish and Western avant-gardes in art and literature of the interwar period. Both the nature and the scale of such relations have been exemplified by a number of artists from the “a.r.” group – Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński, Henryk Stażewski and Jan Brzękowski, as well as their relationships with the representatives of Dutch and Belgian formations, inter alia “De Stijl” group. The origin of those connections has been briefly presented, along with their nature, dynamics and an impact they made on artworks and theories of chosen artists. Their description is based on archival documents and publications, from which a picture of direct relationships between the leading artists of the European avant-garde emerges – some of them personal, some correspondence-based; they have also been presented in form of a diagram that illustrates the text.

scholarly journals Dadaism (Re)activated. Artzins and Dada

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Lachman
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
Definition Of

The article analyses in what way artzins (independent art and literary journals published in Poland in the 1980s and 1990s) drew inspiration from the Dada tradition, and how they made its philosophy live again. Artzins are seen here both as a medium of literature and art and as specific forms of artistic expression (press art). The article attempts to show why artzins and their authors were interested in reviving the avant-garde and Dada ideas. It also investigates how Dadaism functions today in the form of contemporary works and styles which are influenced by this avant-garde movement. What is more, the article tries to answer the question about the nature and definition of Dadaism shaped and reflected by today's artistic projects.

Conscripting Imagination: The National “Duty” of William Blake’s Art

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Saklofske
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Visual Displays ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Revolutionary Nationalism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Exhibition Culture ◽  
Reproductive Processes

Abstract This paper explores William Blake’s creative and commercial positioning relative to late-eighteenth-century galleries, exhibition culture and artistic spectacle. Demonstrating a desire to reintroduce originality into reproductive processes while also embracing the exaggerated and politicised rhetoric often associated with the spectacular visual displays of exhibition societies and new media diversions, Blake confronts modern spectacle with corrective spectacles of his own, bringing clarity, detail and focus to bear on otherwise unmanageable sights. By combining the vocabulary of modern visual spectacles with a dutiful commitment to the maintenance of national strength and progress in the advertisements for and descriptions of his 1809 exhibition, Blake optimistically reconfigures his public as a homogeneously capable body of intellectual and consumer ability. Viewing his own artistic assertion as dramatic performance on national and political scales, he appeals to spectatorial intellect in an era of increasingly sensationalist visual displays, individually attempting to reconfigure the taste of his beloved “public” through a seductive hybridization of spectacular novelty and gallery traditions. However, his “failed” exhibition allows us to see the overall incompatibility between his intended functions for art on national and political fronts (the conceptual), the rhetoric of spectacle (the visual), the individualism at the heart of Blake’s revolutionary nationalism and the persistent economical/commercial foundations of this project. Blake’s vision of a direct link between the strength of artistic expression, the potential of the urban audience and the strength of a nation is complicated by the economic demands faced by the artist and the inherently commercial nature of spectacle.

Cut and paste

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-65
Author(s):  
Anna Dahlgren
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Illustrated Press

Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.

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