The Family of Man in Poland: An Exhibition as a Democratic Space?

Ikonotheka ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 213-238
Author(s):  
Kamila Leśniak
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Spatial Arrangement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Exhibition Space ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Family ◽  
Utopian Thinking ◽  
Relational Aspect

The exhibition entitled The Family of Man, which was designed by Edward Steichen and presented for the fi rst time in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, belongs to the most famous and most controversial photographic expositions of the 20th century. Usually perceived in the light of the anachronistic, West-centric vision of humanism, i.e. as an embodiment of Modernist views on photography, it constitutes a good example of the museum’s infl uence as a Modernist “social instrument”. However, contemporary theories in exhibition studies offer a more complex interpretation. The present work provides insight into this process by referring to the views of Mieke Bal (on the “cinematic effect” of photographic exhibitions, the narrative and relational aspect of expositions), Fred Turner (on the space of an avant-garde exhibition as the realisation of the political and social idea of a “democratic personality”) and Ariella Azoulay (on exhibition space as a “visual declaration of human rights” and the fi eld for a “photographic social contract”). The primary aim of the present article is to set The Family of Man within the framework of Polish exhibition practices. The complex origins of the American project can be traced back to avant-garde experiments with exhibition space conducted in the Bauhaus movement and in Soviet Constructivism (the psychology of perception, “photo-murals”); the analysis focuses on the political and propagandistic aspects. An analysis of the above issues provides the starting point for considering the signifi cance and probable reception of the exhibition’s spatial arrangement in the milieu of Polish architects and designers as well as its Polish variant as prepared by Stanisław Zamecznik and Wojciech Fangor. It was therefore useful to refer to Oskar Hansen and his theory of Open Form, as he cooperated with Zamecznik and Fangor at the time. Models of avant-garde and Modernist “utopian thinking” are juxtaposed, thus making it possible to perceive the process of reception in the light of its effectiveness. The article also discusses The Family of Man as a model for projects with propaganda undertones, i.e. the so-called “problem-oriented exhibitions”. It mentions attempts at adapting Steichen’s design of exhibition space to the needs of the offi cial narrative in the People’s Republic of Poland. Finally, it uncovers the ambivalent nature of the infl uence of The Family of Man and the dual status of the exhibition as both a propagandistic project and as an anti-systemic space supporting the ideal of a creative, free individual.

The Cuban Avant-Garde and the International Art Community

2019 ◽  
pp. 82-97
Author(s):  
Ramón Cernuda
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art Market ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cuban Art ◽  
The Core ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Art Community ◽  
Modern Artists

Art collector Ramón Cernuda discusses how Cuban art was consolidated during the first half of the twentieth century, especially after the emergence of two generations of modern artists that are now considered the core of the vanguardia (also known as the Havana School). Cernuda notes that the international art market increasingly valued the work of Cuban artists such as Amelia Peláez, Víctor Manuel García, René Portocarrero, and Wifredo Lam. These artists appeared in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in major museums and private galleries, as well as in specialized art magazines and books. As Cernuda underlines, Cuban vanguardia painters reached a broad audience with Alfred Barr Jr.’s 1944 exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Ironically, the wide success of Cuban artists abroad led Cuban collectors to pay attention to them.

Lassaw, Ibram (1913–2003)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther T. Thyssen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
New York School ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
The Family ◽  
Galactic Cluster ◽  
Brooklyn Museum

A sculptor of the New York School, Ibram Lassaw was born to Russian parents in Alexandria, Egypt. The family immigrated to Brooklyn, NY, in 1921, where Lassaw learned modeling, casting, and carving. He discovered avant-garde art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, and continued to study sculpture at the Clay Club from 1927 to 1932. An active participant in New York modernist circles, Lassaw was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group (1935), and The Club (1949). Lassaw’s interest in cosmic and religious themes culminated in abstract sculptures for Jewish synagogues, such as Pillar of Fire (1953) at Temple Beth El, Springfield, MA. Known for his web-like structures, Lassaw dripped, fused, and spattered metal, embracing the resulting accidental contours that accrued on his gridded designs, as in Galactic Cluster #1 (1958, Newark Museum). He wielded the oxyacetylene torch like a paintbrush and the intricately structured wires twist, turn, and redouble like skeins of paint by Jackson Pollock. His work was included in the 1959 Kassel Documenta, which showcased American Abstract Expressionism.

scholarly journals The Cage Case. Arts and Social Neuroscience

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amendola Alfonso ◽  
Jessica Camargo Molano
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Reference Model ◽  
Social Research ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Figurative Art ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Relationship

A great story told by a musician is the basis of the best stage experimentation of the second half of the 20th century. The musician is John Cage, whose work synthesizes the entire system of arts within the extraordinary world of the avant-garde. This great story begins with the experimental artistic activities which were developed in the 1920s, consolidated in the thirties and continued through the post-war period up to the dawn of the fifties. Apart from the socio-historical cross-section Cage’s experimentation provides, it is also a pretext for reflecting on the artist’s work as well as the relationship between neuroscience and art. Important contributions to this topic come from the neuro-scientific-social research on new expressions “of creativity, imagination, genius” (Pecchinenda, 2018). This study is based on the assumption that Cage was the forerunner of neuronal experimentation that would be central to the experiments and research of many other artists. The theoretical reference model can be found in the research of the neuroscientist Kandel et al, whose work was the starting point for this investigation. Kandel grasps the definitive break between scientific logic and humanistic sensitivity in the methodological reductionism practiced by neuroscience and in the experiments of contemporary creativity. According to Kandel, both neuroscience and artistic experimentation have similar objectives and problems, and in some respects seem to develop similar methodological practices. Kandel identifies the use of memory, synthesis and knowledge of the world in authors such as Mondrian, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Louis, Warhol as well as the New York school of which Cage was an important member. The relationship between art and neuroscience is synthetized in the avant-garde action of Cage and in all the artists who launched continuous attacks against traditional forms. The transition from figurative art to abstraction is “comparable” to the reductionist process that is used in the scientific field to explain complexity and phenomenology. The prolegomena of this discourse are anticipated by a previous work written by Kandel in 2012 and can also be found in other studies on the relationship between neuroscience and art, in particular in the reflections of the neurobiologist and father of neuroaesthetics, Semir Zeki. Zeki analyzed artists work as a practice perfectly comparable to the research carried out by neuroscientists. Cage, the focus of this investigation, carried out a sound-stage-vision experimentation affecting theatre, media and art which can be examined from at least two different perspectives. The first concerns the definitive subversion of “innate rules of perception” (Kandel) and the second deals with the relationship between art and neuroscience.

Visual Music after Cage: Robert Breer, expanded cinema and Stockhausen's Originals (1964)

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-169
Author(s):  
Andrew V. Uroskie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The Aesthetic

Within William Seitz's 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage for the New York Museum of Modern Art, the question of framing – of art's exhibitionary situation within and against a given environment – had emerged as perhaps the major issue of postwar avant-garde practice. Beyond the familiar paintings of Johns and Rauschenberg, a strategy of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer's film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen's Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer's three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen's aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.

Kupka, František (1871–1957)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milan Pech
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Guillaume Apollinaire ◽  
Natural Forms ◽  
Founding Director ◽  
Spiritual Reality

František Kupka, a Czech-born painter and graphic artist active in France, was a pioneer of abstract painting. His Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours, shown at the Salon d’Autumne in 1912, was the first manifestation of abstract art in Paris. Vertical Schemes I (1912), exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913, was later celebrated by Alfred H. Barr, founding director of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, as the first pure geometrical abstraction. While Guillaume Apollinaire appreciated Kupka’s work and included him in Orphism, Kupka was not fully accepted into avant-garde circles, and despite his contact with the Puteaux Cubists, he refused to be identified with them. Kupka views motion and light as the only forces that can penetrate and melt matter. From his viewpoint, spiritual reality or cosmic order can be found in nature and is present in all natural forms. While in the 1890s Kupka incorporated elements of symbolism, naturalism, and decorative stylization into his works, in 1910 he gradually began to liberate color as a result of his belief in the deep spiritual and cosmological meaning of art. This conceptual approach led him to develop a scientific and theoretical basis for his work: he studied optics and the color theories of various scientists, including Isaac Newton and Michel-Eugène Chevreul, who were also engaged in biology, physiology, anthropology, and other fields, and applied these interests to his own artistic concerns.

scholarly journals Definición jurídica de la familia en el derecho romano : legal definition of the family in roman law

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mª Eva Fernández Baquero
Keyword(s):  
Family Law ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Institution ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Family ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Definition Of

A diferencia de las declaraciones genéricas de la actual legislación internacional que evita definir a la familia, en las fuentes jurídicas romanas contamos con definiciones de familia en los textos jurídicos. Ello otorgó a la sociedad romana dar la suficiente seguridad para consolidar los pilares fundamentales del Derecho de Familia en el Derecho Romano. Y es que, en Roma como en la actualidad, la familia –como institución jurídica– no fue inmutable, sufrió cambios importantes a lo largo de los siglos en función de las transformaciones políticas, sociales y culturales. Sin embargo, y a diferencia del Derecho actual, dichos cambios tuvieron siempre presente el contenido sustancial y jurídico de lo que implica la idea primordial de la familia pues, dichas definiciones jurídicas, sirvieron como punto de partida para encontrar nuevas soluciones.Unlike generic statements of current international legislation that avoid defining family, in Roman legal sources there are definitions of family in legal texts. This granted Roman society sufficient certainty to consolidate the fundamental pillars of family law in Roman law. And in Rome, as at the present, the family – as a legal institution – was not immutable, it suffered major changes over the centuries on the basis of the political, social and cultural transformations. However, and contrary to current law, changes always had present substantial and legal content of what the primary idea of family was because such legal definitions served as a starting point to finding new solutions.

Common Goods: American Folk Crafts as Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1932—33

Prospects ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 447-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Marshall
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New England ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Everyday Object ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Common ◽  
Intellectual Leader

During New York City's newly opened Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA's) fourth exhibition season of 1932–33, while director and intellectual leader Alfred H. Barr, Jr. was on sabbatical leave in Europe, interim director Holger Cahill mounted a show of 18th- and 19th-century American arts and crafts. Offered for sale in New England as antiques at the time of the show, the items on display in Cahill's American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750–1900 obscured the divisions between the avant-garde and the traditional, between high art and the everyday object. In an exhibit of items not easily categorized as modern nor properly considered art, MoMA admitted such local antiques and curiosities as weather vanes and amateur paintings into spaces otherwise reserved for the likes of Cézanne and Picasso.

Filled with Spirit and Power: Protestant Clergy in Politics. By Laura R. Olson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 174p. $57.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (4) ◽  
pp. 1005-1006
Author(s):  
Paul J. Weber
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Family Values ◽  
State University ◽  
Protestant Clergy ◽  
African American Pastors ◽  
The Family ◽  
Limited Scope

Laura Olson is one of a small but energetic and influential group of Christian political scientists determined to bring the debate politically legitimate called it either racist or sexist. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, African American pastors held the most consistently conservative views on family values, although they also saw the connections among crime, violence, and the deterioration of the family. Within the authorÕs intentionally limited scope, this is an excellent study, but one should be cautious about generalizing.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

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