Primitivism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priyanka Basu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Artistic Styles ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Cultural Features ◽  
Hybrid Forms

Primitivism in modern art designates a range of practices and accompanying modes of thought that span the period from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and cut across manifold artistic styles and groups. This entry presents instances of Primitivism from this period that are representative of its features. Modern artistic Primitivism refers, above all, to the ways in which Western artists valorized and drew upon aspects of so-called ‘primitive’ art and cultures in their works, ideas and lifestyles. They employed selective formal and thematic elements that they believed were characteristic of the arts and cultures of not only small-scale, native, non-Western peoples, but also of larger-scale, more highly organized non-Western societies, Western pre-Renaissance and non-classical styles and European vernacular means of expression. Even more frequently, these artists freely intermixed such elements and invented others that suited their conceptions of the ‘primitive’, generating hybrid forms and cultural features.

Carmelo Bene e la decostruzione delle arti del secondo Novecento

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cosetta Saba
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Interdisciplinary Practice ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
First Results ◽  
Extended Field ◽  
The Subject

This essay collects the first results of a reflection launched in the context of the Conference "The Arts of the 1900s and Carmelo Bene" curated by Edoardo Fadini and based in Turin, at the Gallery of Modern Art, between 24 and 26 October 2002. The intent is to focus on how in the first phase of the interdisciplinary practice of Carmelo Bene, between the Sixties and the Seventies, an aesthetic reflection and a deconstructive attitude emerge that involve questions (such as the subject, subjectivity and singular / plural dimension of art) that were being defined in the philosophical field and in the extended field of art during the second half of the twentieth century.

Moving Modernism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nell Andrew
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Lumiere Brothers ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe

This book reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions—the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema—which together changed the artistic landscape of early twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. Rather than seeking dancing pictures or pictures of dancing, however, this study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction. Recovering the performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence of avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period, this book challenges modernism’s medium-specific frameworks by demonstrating the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde’s development of abstraction: from the turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller, who awakened in symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged vision; to cubo-futurist and neosymbolist artists who reached pure abstraction in tandem with the radical dance theory of Valentine de Saint-Point; to Sophie Taeuber’s hybrid Dadaism between art and dance; to Akarova, a prolific choreographer whose dancing Belgian constructivist pioneers called “music architecture”; and finally to the dancing images of early cinematic abstraction from the Lumière brothers to Germaine Dulac. Each chapter reveals the emergence of abstractionas an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception deployed across artistic media toward shared modernist goals. The author argues that abstraction can be worked like a muscle, a medium through which habits of reception and perception are broken and art’s viewers are engaged by the kinesthetic sensation to move and be moved.

scholarly journals The Future of Winckelmann’s Classical Form

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Prettejohn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Classical Form ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Historical Importance

Winckelmann’s thought and writing are routinely acknowledged to have had a profound influence on the artistic practices of the half-century after his death, known under the label ‘Neoclassicism’. Standard accounts of modernism in the arts, however, assume that this influence came to an abrupt end around 1815. According to such accounts, the anti-classical reaction that followed the Battle of Waterloo and the demise of Neoclassicism was itself a motive force in the generation of modern art and modernism. This paper argues, on the contrary, that Winckelmann’s ideas not only remained relevant, but gained in power through the generations after the fall of Napoleon. Mediated by critics and artists among whom Walter Pater and Frederic Leighton serve as the principal examples, Winckelmann’s thought made a decisive contribution to twentieth-century modernism. In particular, the articulation in both criticism and artistic practice of ideas about classical form, indebted to Winckelmann, had a subtler and more complex impact on the modernist doctrine of ‘formalism’ than literary or art historians have acknowledged. A renewed attention to classical form will help future scholars to write a more nuanced account of modernism in the visual arts. More importantly, it will call attention to artistic projects that have been excluded from histories of modern art due to reductive assumptions that classicism and modernism are inherently contradictory. The paper concentrates on Frederic Leighton as a case study of an artist whose historical importance and aesthetic merit have been occluded by reductive thinking of this kind.

Painting

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the wake of the Romantic movement, Christian theologians gave renewed attention to the arts, including painting, which entered one of its most turbulent phases in the nineteenth century. The chapter examines the revalorization of the Middle Ages as the epitome of a Christian culture; symbolism, especially as represented in the English painter G. F. Watts; and the emergence of French modernism as a secularizing tendency. Constructively, the chapter demonstrates that the nineteenth century can still provide a significant resource for reflection on theology and painting. Critically, it finds nineteenth-century theology was unprepared for the dramatic convulsions of the early twentieth century that would transform the landscape of modern art.

Pavel Chistiakov and Jan Ciągliński: New Approaches to Art Pedagogy in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-319
Author(s):  
Isabel Wünsche
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Education ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Academic System ◽  
Imperial Academy ◽  
Art Pedagogy

Abstract This essay looks at art education in Russia in the nineteenth century, specifically at artist-training practices at institutions such as the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and the Imperial Society for the Encouragements of the Arts in St. Petersburg. Particular emphasis is on the role and significance of Pavel Chistiakov and Jan Ciągliński, charismatic teachers who developed their distinct art-pedagogical systems as an alternative to the existing academic system and paved the way for the emergence of modern art and the avant-garde in Russia.

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.

Hopscotch Modernism: On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Health Centre ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Point Of Departure

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.

How Art Works

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Winner
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Truth Value

This book is an examination of what psychologists have discovered about how art works—what it does to us, how we experience art, how we react to it emotionally, how we judge it, and what we learn from it. The questions investigate include the following: What makes us call something art? Do we experience “real” emotions from the arts? Do aesthetic judgments have any objective truth value? Does learning to play music raise a child’s IQ? Is modern art something my kid could do? Is achieving greatness in an art form just a matter of hard work? Philosophers have grappled with these questions for centuries, and laypeople have often puzzled about them too and offered their own views. But now psychologists have begun to explore these questions empirically, and have made many fascinating discoveries using the methods of social science (interviews, experimentation, data collection, statistical analysis).

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

Italian-Jewish Patrons of Modern Art in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Italy

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29
Author(s):  
Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Museums

With a focus on art donations, this article explores several case studies of Jewish Italian patrons such as Sforni, Uzielli, Sarfatti, Castelfranco, Vitali, and others who supported artists of movements that were considered modern at their time: the Macchiaioli (1850-1870), the Futurists (1910s), the Metaphysical painters (1920s), the Novecento group (1920-1930s), and several post WWII cases. It reflects on differences in art donations by Jews in Italy and other European countries, modes of reception, taste, meanings and strategy of donations, thus contributing to the social history of Italian and European Jewry and the history of collections and donations to public museums.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document