Segal, Arthur (1875–1944)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem196-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Erwin Kessler

Keyword(s):

Modern Art ◽

Political Engagement ◽

Color Theory ◽

Van Gogh ◽

Traditional Art ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Vincent Van Gogh ◽

Tristan Tzara ◽

Art Scene ◽

Art Colony

Arthur Segal was a Romanian artist born as Aron Sigalu to Jewish parents. He shifted his attention away from post-impressionist modernism around 1900 to focus on the radical avant-garde in the early 1920s, and then back to classicizing modernism in the 1940s. His work moved from traditional art-craft (painting, engraving) to modern and avant-garde practices (political engagement, teaching, curatorship, manifestos, theoretical writings, art-therapy). From 1892 to 1900 he studied in Berlin, Paris, and Munich. Segal was a student of Adolf Hölzel (founder of the art colony Neues Dachau), and much of his work was shaped by Hölzel’s color theory, where landscapes were formally structured as decorative grids rather than as phenomenal transcripts of ocular perception. In 1902–1903 he visited Italy and France, where he was influenced by the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Giovanni Segantini, whose naturalism and light-seeking divisionism he sought to appropriate in his own work. He exhibited with the Berliner Secession from 1909 onward, and co-founded the Neue Secession in 1910. Segal remained connected to the Romanian art scene, exhibiting with the TinerimeaArtistica group in 1910–1913. His 1910 Bucharest exhibition was heralded as ‘‘the first exhibition of modern art’’ in Romania (Segal 1974: 133). In 1914 Segal moved to Ascona, Switzerland, where he met Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, and Alexei Jawlensky, who were linked with the Monte Verita community. In 1916 Segal exhibited at Cabaret Voltaire alongside fellow Romanian Dadaists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco. In 1919 he joined the Novembergruppe, becoming one of its leaders.

Download Full-text

The Artist’s Experience of Migration

Moment's Monument ◽

10.1525/california/9780520294486.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Sharon Hecker

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Modern Art ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Transnational Mobility ◽

Art Scene

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.

Download Full-text

Gauguin, Paul (1848-1903)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem956-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Will Atkin

Keyword(s):

French Polynesia ◽

Second Phase ◽

Professional Relationship ◽

Van Gogh ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Paul Gauguin ◽

Vincent Van Gogh ◽

Technical Practice

Paul Gauguin was a Parisian-born French artist who was for a time associated with the Neo-Impressionist and Symbolist movements in painting. Having turned to a career as an artist relatively late, after working as a stockbroker, he became a remarkable presence within the French avant-garde. His activities as an artist fall, broadly, into two professional phases. The first phase of Gauguin’s career is characterized by his work in France up until 1891. During this early part of his career, he became closely linked to the Neo-Impressionist circle and learned his technical practice from painters such as Camille Pissaro (1830–1903). Later on in this period, he famously became acquainted with Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) in a tumultuous and short-lived professional relationship. Towards the end of this phase of activity in France, he became involved with the Symbolist movement through his friendship with the poet Charles Morice (1860–1919). The second phase of Gauguin’s career is characterized by his activities in French Polynesia, where, from 1891 until his death in 1903, he sought to develop a primitivist approach to art based on Polynesian traditions. During this later period, he also produced a significant body of writing on art and his travels.

Download Full-text

Between Zurich and Romania: A Dada Exchange

Narratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction ◽

10.16993/bbj.f ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 123-144

Author(s):

Amelia Miholca

Keyword(s):

Abstract Art ◽

Folk Culture ◽

Traditional Art ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Tristan Tzara ◽

Folk Traditions ◽

Jewish Heritage ◽

Literary Forms ◽

International Climate ◽

Bourgeois Culture

In 1916, a group of ambitious artists set out to dismantle traditional art and its accompanied bourgeois culture. Living in Zurich, these artists—among them the Romanians Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, and the Germans Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball—formulated the new Dada movement that would awaken new artistic and literary forms through a fusion of sound, theater, and abstract art. With absurd performances at Cabaret Voltaire, they mocked rationality, morality, and beauty. Within the Dada movement in Zurich, I would like to focus on the artists whose Romanian and Jewish heritage played a central role in Cabaret Voltaire and other Dada related events. Art historical scholarship on Dada minimized this heritage in order to situate Dada within the Western avant-garde canon. However, I argue that the five young Romanians who were present on the first night of Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916 brought with them from their home country certain Jewish and Romanian folk traditions, which helped form Dada’s acclaimed reputation. The five Romanians—Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and his brothers Georges Janco and Jules Janco, and Arthur Segal—moved to Zurich either to escape military conscription or to continue their college studies. By the start of the twentieth-century, Romania’s intellectual scene was already a transcultural venture, with writers and artists studying and exhibiting in countries like France and Germany. Yet, Zurich’s international climate of émigrés from all over Europe allowed the young Romanians to fully expand beyond nationalistic confines and collaborate together with other exiled intellectuals. Tom Sandqvist’s book Dada East from 2007 is the most recent and most comprehensive study of the Romanian aspect of Dada. Sandqvist traces Janco’s and Tzara’s prolific, pre-Dada time in Bucharest, along with the folk and Jewish sources that Sandqvist claims influenced their Dada performances. For instance, Tzara’s simultaneous poems, which he performed at Cabaret Voltaire, may derive from nineteenth century Jewish theater in Romania and from Hasidic song rituals. Moreover, the Dada performances with grotesque masks created by Janco relate to the colinde festival in Romania’s peasant folk culture. In my paper, I aim to analyze Sandqvist’s claim and answer the following questions: to what extent did Janco and Tzara incorporate the colinde festival and Jewish theater and ritual? Was their Jewish identity more important to them than their Romanian identity? And, lastly, how did they carry Dada back to Romania after the war ended and the Dadaists in Zurich moved on to other cities?

Download Full-text

Emjaroen, Pratuang (1935--)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem803-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Thanom Chapakdee

Keyword(s):

Visual Art ◽

Social Problems ◽

Van Gogh ◽

Traditional Art ◽

Vincent Van Gogh ◽

Visual Artist ◽

Silver Medal

Pratuang Emjaroen is a member of a wave of self-taught artists in Thailand who gained renown in the 1970s. His works are driven by his concerns about the vicissitudes of life, social problems, nature and Buddhism. A prolific artist, he created a large variety of works throughout his career. Pratuang began his career working as a painter of cinema billboards and movie posters. Inspired by the biographic film Lust for Life (1956), about Vincent Van Gogh, Pratuang developed an interest in becoming a visual artist and began studying painting independently. Being a self-taught artist could have been an obstacle to his career in challenging Thailand’s traditional art institutions. Fortunately, Pratuang was able to overcome this in developing his own inimitable style in painting, drawing and poetry. Having struggled to become a renowned artist, Pratuang established the Dhamma Group in 1971, and was able to convince many artists to join, thereby increasing his own reputation. In 1967, he won the Silver Medal from the National Exhibition of Arts, and in 1968, 1974 and 1995 won Bronze Medals. Pratuang received the National Artist of Thailand Award in Visual Art in 2005.

Download Full-text

Kazimir Malevich in Avant-Garde Discussions in 1928–1930

Kyiv Historical Studies ◽

10.28925/2524-0757.2021.25 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 36-41

Author(s):

Oksana Salata

Keyword(s):

Modern Art ◽

Scientific Research ◽

Scientific Controversy ◽

Traditional Art ◽

Avant Garde ◽

New Approaches ◽

Art Form ◽

History Of Art ◽

History Of ◽

Traditional Approaches

The article is devoted to the figure of Kazimir Malevich as an artist and art critic, who introduced new tendencies and approaches to the depiction of objects into traditional art; representation of the artist in avant-garde discussions in the period of his teaching at the Kyiv Art Institute in 1928–1930; searches and experiments of the artist, which were closely connected with the feeling of modernity and new impulses in culture. Malevich’s activity on creation of a unique history of art of Modernism is revealed. It is shown that the scientific controversy between artists over traditional approaches and pictorial methods acted as a catalyst for the development of a new direction in modern art. Discussions between Kazimir Malevich and Mykhailo Boichuk became fundamental for an artistic discussion which continues among contemporary artists and art critics. The artist based his work on objectlessness, which became a method of interpreting art. In this way, he shifted the emphasis from defining the content to defining the form, the very essence of art. Being a theorist, Kazimir Malevich discovered the patterns of development of art form, explaining the importance and sequence of emergence of each new direction: Suprematism, Cubism, Cubofuturism. Artistic discussions with contemporaries were of great importance. Malevich’s ideas continued to spread thanks to students and like-minded people who developed them and developed new approaches to painting techniques. The experience embodied by the artist at the Kyiv Art Institute showed the peculiarity of the artistic space that was formed in Kyiv in the late 1920s. Kazimir Malevich’s ideas are a promising scientific research for both historians and art historians as they show new facets of the avant-garde style.

Download Full-text