scholarly journals Dialogue East/West in the Russian Avant-garde and Poetics of Primitive

2021 ◽  
pp. 201-227
Author(s):  
Nataliya Zlydneva ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Third ◽  
Official Ideology ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
East West

The essay examines interrelation between the motif and the poetics in the visual arts, specifically,as it concerns the East / West motif and the style of primitivism in the Russian art of the twentieth century. It discussesvarious forms and meanings of this theme as presented in the works of M. Larionov, N. Goncharova, and P. Filonov. Two models are shown: the early historical avant-garde and the avant-garde of the late 1920s. If at the beginning of the century, the style is contingent on the plot and focuses mainly on the theme of the East, the primitivism of the next decade develops in the context of the Western Europeanturn towards documentary in art and therefore addresses the theme of the West. The third model describes the painting of the early 1930s when the appeal to the East, required by the order of the official ideology, gave rise to a form of primitivism as a way to escape from the pressure of socialist realism (Vasnetsov, Volkov). Conclusion: in relation to the topic East / West, primitivism acted as geopoetics of a kind, generating new meanings. Inherent dualism of the Russian culturefound a correspondence in primitivism as a borderline type of poetics.

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.

The Old Rhetoric

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-68
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Persuasive Communication ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Persuasive Speech

This chapter discusses the Old Rhetoric, sketching the long persistence in the West—from Aristotle to the early twentieth century—of a ‘single meaning model’ of language, one that takes ambiguity for granted as an obstacle to persuasive speech and clear philosophical analysis. In Aristotle's works are the seeds of three closely related traditions of Western thought on ambiguity: the logicosemantic, the rhetorical, and the hermeneutic. The first seeks to eliminate ambiguity from philosophy because it hinders a clear analysis of the world. The second seeks to eliminate ambiguity from speech because it hinders the clear and persuasive communication of argument. The third, an extension of the second, seeks to resolve textual ambiguity because it hinders the reader's ability to grasp the writer's intention. The chapter then considers Aristotle's two types of verbal ambiguity: homonym and amphiboly. The solution to both—whether their presence in a discussion is accidental or deliberate—is what Aristotle calls diairesis or distinction, that is, the explicit clarification of the different meanings involved.

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.

scholarly journals Coupled Model Simulations of the West African Monsoon System: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Simulations

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (15) ◽  
pp. 3681-3703 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry H. Cook ◽  
Edward K. Vizy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West African Monsoon ◽  
West African ◽  
First Century ◽  
Gulf Of Guinea ◽  
Physical Processes ◽  
The West ◽  
African Monsoon ◽  
The Third ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract The ability of coupled GCMs to correctly simulate the climatology and a prominent mode of variability of the West African monsoon is evaluated, and the results are used to make informed decisions about which models may be producing more reliable projections of future climate in this region. The integrations were made available by the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The evaluation emphasizes the circulation characteristics that support the precipitation climatology, and the physical processes of a “rainfall dipole” variability mode that is often associated with dry conditions in the Sahel when SSTs in the Gulf of Guinea are anomalously warm. Based on the quality of their twentieth-century simulations over West Africa in summer, three GCMs are chosen for analysis of the twenty-first century integrations under various assumptions about future greenhouse gas increases. Each of these models behaves differently in the twenty-first-century simulations. One model simulates severe drying across the Sahel in the later part of the twenty-first century, while another projects quite wet conditions throughout the twenty-first century. In the third model, warming in the Gulf of Guinea leads to more modest drying in the Sahel due to a doubling of the number of anomalously dry years by the end of the century. An evaluation of the physical processes that cause these climate changes, in the context of the understanding about how the system works in the twentieth century, suggests that the third model provides the most reasonable projection of the twenty-first-century climate.

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.

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.

Utzon

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-186
Author(s):  
Richard Weston
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Third Generation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Third ◽  
Theoretical Position ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Acoustic Separation ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe

It has taken a long time to be able to assess Jørn Utzon's importance. Until the end of the twentieth century, the architect described by Sigfried Giedion as the most important of the ‘third generation’ hardly appeared in its literature. By contrast we had no such problem with Le Corbusier: there were the Oeuvres Complètes. It was easy to consult any building, indeed sketch, and along the way to be thoroughly coerced into his theoretical position. His massive and megalomaniac contribution to the last century could be studied first through L'Esprit Nouveau, the avant-garde magazine which promulgated him – ‘17.23, 2me février, 1926, Grande Pensée de L-C …’ and so forth – and later through the archives and sketchbooks. Wright suffered from too many publications. After the Wasmuth Portfolio of 1910 there was no single, accessible reference to his huge output: his theory tended to the verbose, and he was devious in concealing his own sources, most especially his debt to Japan. Mies van der Rohe wrote little and was famously gnomic; his buildings supplied his ‘text’. The so-called second generation, Aalto and Kahn, were well served in terms of publication of their work. The former's theoretical position took much posthumous teasing-out by critics to become widely understood. He could overcome people's ignorance of Finnish – for example, by his 1961 definition ‘acoustic separation is kilograms’ and by his stupefied reaction to the question of what module he used: ‘a millimetre, more or less!’ – but he wrote little.

scholarly journals After zero hour: States as “custodians of universal human culture,” or “guardians of advanced art”

Muzikologija ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Melita Milin
Keyword(s):  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Post War

The emergence of radically new, avant-garde movements in German music and throughout Western Europe after WW2 has often been seen as expressing a strivings to create on a tabula rasa, in order to create distance from the horrors of the recent past. In the countries of the communist bloc, the imposed ideology of socialist realism also created a sharp break, similar to that in the West, except that Zero Hour was conceived in quite a different fashion, as a move in the opposite direction from Western modernism. The case of post-war music in Yugoslavia is examined under the light of the fact that the country did not belong to either bloc.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1876–1944)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elena Versari
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Stage Performances ◽  
Verbal Relations ◽  
Free Word

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was founder and leader of Futurism, the first intellectual and artistic movement that explicitly defined the codes of avant-garde practice in the twentieth century. His work extended across a multiplicity of fields: journalism, poetry, literature, theater, visual arts, politics, but it’s probably his all-encompassing activity as a cultural leader and fosterer of innovation that made him one of the preeminent intellectuals of his time. He implemented and systematized the practice of diffusing avant-garde ideas through manifestos, performances, and happenings, capitalizing on a deliberately magnified antagonistic relation with the tastes of the public at large. His experimentations in visual/verbal relations and stage performances, which led to the creation of free-word poetry and synthetic theater, were pivotal for the development of new modernist codes in poetry and the performing arts.

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, c.1909-39

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Vere
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
German Expressionism ◽  
Italian Futurism ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Celebrity Status ◽  
The Press

This book highlights sport as a key inspiration for an international range of modernist artists. With sport attracting large crowds, being written about in the press, filmed and broadcast, and with its top stars enjoying celebrity status, sport has claims to be the most pervasive cultural form of the early twentieth century. Modernist artists recognised sport’s importance in their writings and production. This book examines a diverse set of paintings, photographic works, films, buildings, and writings from artists in France, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union to establish the international appeal of the theme while acknowledging local and stylistic differences in its interpretation. From the fascination with the racing cyclist in paintings by Umberto Boccioni, Lyonel Feininger and Jean Metzinger, to the designs for stadiums in fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, the works examined are compelling both in visual and ideological terms. Encompassing studies of many avant-garde movements, including Italian futurism, cubism, German expressionism, Le Corbusier’s architecture, Soviet constructivism, Italian rationalism and the Bauhaus, this book interrogates the ways in which sport and modernism interconnect.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document