scholarly journals The Vitality of Viennese Art Nouveau

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-67
Author(s):  
I.N. Proklov ◽  

The article develops the problem of vitality in art on the basis of the so-called Viennese Art Nouveau, in particular on the basis of the works of Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and critical works of Hermann Bahr. The concept of vitality is seen as the foundation of that artistic anthropology, which united all types of art within the framework of Viennese Art Nouveau, giving them a single intention. The heightened interest in Man as a psychophysiological phenomenon, in the instinctive nature of man and the chaos of his inner — mental — life, in the borderline states of human existence in the space of the eternal antinomy of Eros and Thanatos — all this led to the unprecedented originality of the art of Vienna at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.

Author(s):  
Beate Murr

AbstractIn 1905, Gustav Klimt, one of the best-known Austrian Art Nouveau artists was commissioned to decorate the walls of the dining room of the Stoclet House in Brussels, which was being designed by Josef Hoffmann. Nine full-scale cartoons on paper - designed in 1910 / 1911 - are the result of Klimt’s years of work on this project. He provided instructions for their transposition as a mosaic directly onto the paper. For the production of the frieze at the Wiener Werkstatte and at Leopold Forstner’s Wiener Mosaikwerkstatte, Klimt gave numerous instructions regarding the materials to be used and the shades of color in the mosaic. He wrote these by hand directly onto the cartoons. The cartoons for the Stoclet Frieze, 1:1 in scale, have been the subject of extensive scholarly research and have been restored in the 1970ies. During the last eight years the cartoons were subjected to another invasive treatment. This second part deals with the “de-restoration” of earlier interventions, the consolidation of media and paper carrier and the mounting on acid free honeycomb cardboard panels so that the individual cartoons can be displayed side by side without interruption of frames to form a frieze. Now they are exhibited in an eleven-meter long, climate-stabilized glass display case.


Author(s):  
David Kim

Born in Vienna on 9 March 1859, the Jewish-Austrian poet Peter Altenberg (birth name: Richard Engländer) became a literary sensation with his characteristically telegraphic writing style. The purpose of this narrative form, he explained, was to capture Kleinigkeit (the smallness) of modern life—fleeting, ordinary, and unembellished. His so-called prose poems went on to garner the admiration of contemporary artists, architects and writers who belonged to the Young Vienna. They included, among others, Hermann Bahr, Gustav Klimt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus and Arthur Schnitzler. Suffering from pneumonia, Altenberg died in Vienna on 8 January 1919. Opposed to the assignment and expectation of specific social roles in a conservative Austro-Hungarian Empire, Altenberg took on a nom de plume to redefine his cultural identity in the image of the oppressed, including children, women and non-Europeans. This act of political resistance in writing became a lifelong commitment to exposing the divided and hypocritical world around him, although some of his works portrayed those in suffering with a certain degree of eroticization and prejudice. By focusing on moments of ambiguity, contradiction, monotony and triviality in social interaction, he exposed the clash of cultures between old provincialism and new cosmopolitanism in contemporary Vienna while pushing new limits of mimetic representation.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 320-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serge Nicolas ◽  
Zachary Levine

Though Alfred Binet was a prolific writer, many of his 1893–1903 works are not well known. This is partly due to a lack of English translations of the many important papers and books that he and his collaborators created during this period. Binet’s insights into intelligence testing are widely celebrated, but the centennial of his death provides an occasion to reexamine his other psychological examinations. His studies included many diverse aspects of mental life, including memory research and the science of testimony. Indeed, Binet was a pioneer of psychology and produced important research on cognitive and experimental psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and applied psychology. This paper seeks to elucidate these aspects of his work.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-361
Author(s):  
Yueh-Ting Lee ◽  
Matt Jamnik ◽  
Kortney Maedge ◽  
Wenting Chen

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-223
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Goodstein

In 1922 Sigmund Freud wrote to fellow Viennese author and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler: ‘I believe I have avoided you out of a sort of fear of my double’. Through a series of reflections on this imagined doubling and its reception, this paper demonstrates that the ambivalent desire for his literary other attested by Freud's confession goes to the heart of both theoretical and historical questions regarding the nature of psychoanalysis. Bringing Schnitzler's resistance to Freud into conversation with attempts by psychoanalytically oriented literary scholars to affirm the Doppengängertum of the two men, it argues that not only psychoanalytic theories and modernist literature but also the tendency to identify the two must be treated as historical phenomena. Furthermore, the paper contends, Schnitzler's work stands in a more critical relationship to its Viennese milieu than Freud's: his examination of the vicissitudes of feminine desire in ‘Fräulein Else’ underlines the importance of what lies outside the oedipal narrative through which the case study of ‘Dora’ comes to be centered on the uncanny nexus of identification with and anxious flight from the other.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-98
Author(s):  
Temba T. Rugwiji

The Hebrew Bible depicts that music and dance formed part of worship and reverence of Yahweh in which various musical instruments were played during ancient biblical times. In the modern post-biblical world, music and dance characterise every context of human existence either in moments of love, joy, celebration, victory, sorrow or reverence. In Zimbabwe, music — which is usually accompanied by dance — serves various purposes such as solidarity towards or remonstration against the land reform, despondency against corruption, celebration, giving hope to the sick, worship as in the church or appeasing the dead by those who are culturally-entrenched. Two fundamental questions need to be answered in this article: 1) What was the significance of music and dance in ancient Israel? 2) What is the significance of music and dance in Zimbabwe? In response to the above questions, this essay engages into dialogue the following three contestations. First, texts of music, musical instruments and dance in the Hebrew Bible are discussed in view of their spiritual significance in ancient Israel. Second, this study analyses music and dance from a faith perspective because it appears for the majority of Gospel musicians the biblical text plays a critical role in composing their songs. Third, this article examines music and dance in view of the spirituality which derives from various genres by Zimbabwean musicians in general. In its entirety, this article attempts to show that the Zimbabwean society draws some spirituality from music and dance when devastated by political, cultural or socio-economic crises.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
M L Mojapelo

Storytelling consists of an interaction between a narrator and a listener, both of whom assign meaning to the story as a whole and its component parts. The meaning assigned to the narrative changes over time under the influence of the recipient‟s changing precepts and perceptions which seem to be simplistic in infancy and more nuanced with age. It becomes more philosophical in that themes touching on the more profound questions of human existence tend to become more prominently discernible as the subject moves into the more reflective or summative phases of his or her existence. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the metaphorical character of a story, as reflected in changing patterns of meaning assigned to the narrative in the course of the subjective receiver‟s passage through the various stages of life. This was done by analysing meaning, from a particular storytelling session, at different stages of a listener‟s personal development. Meaning starts as literal and evolves through re-interpretation to abstract and deeper levels towards application in real life.


2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-60
Author(s):  
Davide Sparti

Obwohl jede menschliche Handlung mit einem gewissen Grad an Improvisation erfolgt, gibt es kulturelle Praktiken, bei denen Improvisation eine überwiegende Rolle spielt. Um das Risiko zu vermeiden, einen zu breiten Begriff von Improvisation zu übernehmen, konzentriere ich mich im vorliegenden Beitrag auf den Jazz. Meine zentrale Frage lautet, wie Improvisation verstanden werden muss. Mein Vorgehen ist folgendes: Ich beginne mit einem Vergleich von Improvisation und Komposition, damit die Spezifizität der Improvisation erklärt werden kann. Danach wende ich mich dem Thema der Originalität als Merkmal der Improvisation zu. Zum Schluss führe ich den Begriff affordance ein, um die kollektive und zirkuläre Logik eines Solos zu analysieren. Paradigmatisch wird der Jazzmusiker mit dem Engel der Geschichte verglichen, der nur auf das Vergangene blickt, während er der Zukunft den Rücken zugekehrt hat, und lediglich ihr zugetrieben wird. Weder kann der Improvisierende das Material der Vergangenheit vernachlässigen noch seine genuine Tätigkeit, das Improvisieren in der Gegenwart und für die Zukunft, aufgeben: Er visiert die Zukunft trotz ihrer Unvorhersehbarkeit über die Vermittlung der Vergangenheit an.<br><br>While improvised behavior is so much a part of human existence as to be one of its fundamental realities, in order to avoid the risk of defining the act of improvising too broadly, my focus here will be upon one of the activities most explicitly centered around improvisation – that is, upon jazz. My contribution, as Wittgenstein would say, has a »grammatical« design to it: it proposes to clarify the significance of the term »improvisation.« The task of clarifying the cases in which one may legitimately speak of improvisation consists first of all in reflecting upon the conditions that make the practice possible. This does not consist of calling forth mysterious, esoteric processes that take place in the unconscious, or in the minds of musicians, but rather in paying attention to the criteria that are satisfied when one ascribes to an act the concept of improvisation. In the second part of my contribution, I reflect upon the logic that governs the construction of an improvised performance. As I argue, in playing upon that which has already emerged in the music, in discovering the future as they go on (as a consequence of what they do), jazz players call to mind the angel in the famous painting by Klee that Walter Benjamin analyzed in his Theses on the History of Philosophy: while pulled towards the future, its eyes are turned back towards the past.


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