Blossfeldt, Karl (1865–1932)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Long
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Industrial Design ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Geometrical Structures ◽  
Plant Modeling ◽  
Natural Forms ◽  
Design Students ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The 19Th Century

Karl Blossfeldt was a sculptor and a teacher of plant modeling at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseums (Institute of the Royal Arts and Crafts Museum) in Berlin, where he worked from 1898 until 1930. His reputation as a photographer rests on two books: Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature, 1928) and Wundergarten der Natur (Magic Garden of Nature, 1932). Both consist of extreme close-ups of plants, and seek to identify in natural forms the blueprints of industrial design. The images are characterized by extraordinary detail, revealing to the eye the geometrical structures and formal complexities of common flora. Blossfeldt had been using photographs since the early 1900s as tools of instruction for his design students, but the resonance of his books goes beyond instrumental applied photography. His artistic lineage has been traced to Jugendstil, while his use of the plants’ Latin names and their serial presentation link his work to the tradition of the herbarium and to the scientific photography of the 19th century. Urformen der Kunst was enthusiastically received by critics (Walter Benjamin and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy among them), and Blossfeldt’s work has also often been seen as part of the inter-war German Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement.

scholarly journals Back in time for utopia: Neo-Victorian utopianism and the return to William Morris

2020 ◽  
pp. 136754942098000
Author(s):  
Joe PL Davidson
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 19Th Century

When we think of the Victorian era, images of shrouded piano legs, dismal factories and smoggy streets often come to mind. However, the 19th century has been rediscovered in recent years as the home of something quite different: bold utopian visions of the future. William Morris’ great literary utopia News from Nowhere, first published in 1890, is an interesting case study in this context. Morris’ text is the point of departure for a number of recent returns to Victorian utopianism, including Sarah Woods’ updated radio adaptation of News from Nowhere (2016) and the BBC’s historical reality television series The Victorian House of Arts and Crafts (2019). In this article, I analyse these Morris-inspired texts with the aim of exploring the place of old visions of the future in the contemporary cultural imaginary. Building on previous work in neo-Victorian studies and utopian studies, the claim is made that the return to 19th-century dreams is a plural phenomenon that has a number of divergent effects. More specifically, neo-Victorian utopianism can function to demonstrate the obsolescence of old visions of utopia, prompt a longing for the clarity and radicality of the utopias of the Victorian moment, or encourage a process of rejuvenating the utopian impulse in the present via a detour through the past.

The Flaneur in the Parlor: Poe's “Philosophy of Furniture”

Prospects ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin J. Hayes
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City

In one of the brief reflections Walter Benjamin composed as part of his Arcades Project, he personified the mid-19th-century domestic interior and made it and the flaneur onfidantes: “The space winks at the flaneur: What do you think may have gone on here?” (418–19). Benjamin typically filtered much of his thought through the figure of the flaneur, a recognizable urban type that emerged during the middle third of the 19th century, one who deliberately strolled the city streets and arcades and attempted to discern the meanings of what he observed. In the fullest scholarly treatment of the subject, Anke Gleber argued that the act of walking formed an essential part of the flaneur's observational process. Discussing such works as E. T. A. Hoffman's “The Cousin's Corner-Window,” however, Gleber did acknowledge a “paradoxical variant,” the stationary flaneur (13).

scholarly journals Drohobycz stolicą XX wieku

Schulz/Forum ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Stanisław Rosiek
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Salt Mines ◽  
The World ◽  
The 19Th Century

Nowadays it is impossible to think about Schulz outside Drogobych. Wherever else he showed up, be it Vienna, Marienbad, Kudowa, Zakopane, Warsaw or Paris, he was a refugee, a patient, a visitor or a tourist – always a stranger. And he considered himself one, while others did the same. To an extent, it was his own fault. It could perhaps be otherwise if he did not so often write in his letters (and most likely said in conversations) that he was unable to live and work outside his hometown. But the words of the writer could only encourage others to contribute to a stereotype of a “modest schoolteacher from a small town.” The provincial status of Schulz, however, is not so obvious. At the end of the 19th century, thanks to oil Drogobych reached the end of centuries long stasis from which even the salt mines opened in the Middle Ages could not save it. Oil changed the life of many people in Galicia. Without leaving Drogobych, Schulz could actually watch and personally experience in doses which let him keep his independence and inner stability the rise of a metropolitan mentality described by Georg Simmel. Yet Paris was too much for him – after three weeks he escaped from the French capital with not a single word of commentary. To live in the capital of the 19th century, as Walter Benjamin called it, would have been a torture for him. Thus Schulz did not cancel the opposition of center and periphery, the capital and the provinces, but turned such distinctions upside down. Thanks to writing, the center of the world moved to his hometown so that perhaps Drogobych became the capital of the 20th century.

The Dangers of Tolerance

1971 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-218
Author(s):  
Ernest Gellner
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Vision ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The 19Th Century

COMPARED WITH THE 19TH CENTURY, OURS IS AN AGE OF intellectual dishonesty. The 19th century did not invent the modern vision of the world, nor did it work out its implications. All that was already done in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it was in the 19th century that the awareness of these implications became widespread, partly through the sheer lapse of time, and more significantly, through the emergence of a large literate middle class which possessed the means, in various senses, for contemplating the new vision. The consequences of this are well known. The 19th century satisfied the demand and produced the secular prophets who wrestled, heroically, with the problem of finding a new meaning for life, honestly acceptable in the light of new critical standards and of the new knowledge.

Grammatical Descriptions in Manchu Grammar Books from the Qing Dynasty

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-55
Author(s):  
Takashi Takekoshi
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Scholars ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The 19Th Century

In this paper, we analyse features of the grammatical descriptions in Manchu grammar books from the Qing Dynasty. Manchu grammar books exemplify how Chinese scholars gave Chinese names to grammatical concepts in Manchu such as case, conjugation, and derivation which exist in agglutinating languages but not in isolating languages. A thorough examination reveals that Chinese scholarly understanding of Manchu grammar at the time had attained a high degree of sophistication. We conclude that the reason they did not apply modern grammatical concepts until the end of the 19th century was not a lack of ability but because the object of their grammatical descriptions was Chinese, a typical isolating language.

Immigrant Arab Women in Chile during the Renaissance (Nahda), 1910s-1920s

1970 ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Sarah Limorté
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
New World ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
Arab Woman ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century

Levantine immigration to Chile started during the last quarter of the 19th century. This immigration, almost exclusively male at the outset, changed at the beginning of the 20th century when women started following their fathers, brothers, and husbands to the New World. Defining the role and status of the Arab woman within her community in Chile has never before been tackled in a detailed study. This article attempts to broach the subject by looking at Arabic newspapers published in Chile between 1912 and the end of the 1920s. A thematic analysis of articles dealing with the question of women or written by women, appearing in publications such as Al-Murshid, Asch-Schabibat, Al-Watan, and Oriente, will be discussed.

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