scholarly journals FROM ŁÓDŹ TO LEIDEN – ON INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS OF THE POLISH INTERWAR AVANT-GARDE

Muzealnictwo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 203-210
Author(s):  
Michał Wenderski

This article is dedicated to international connections between selected representatives of Polish and Western avant-gardes in art and literature of the interwar period. Both the nature and the scale of such relations have been exemplified by a number of artists from the “a.r.” group – Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński, Henryk Stażewski and Jan Brzękowski, as well as their relationships with the representatives of Dutch and Belgian formations, inter alia “De Stijl” group. The origin of those connections has been briefly presented, along with their nature, dynamics and an impact they made on artworks and theories of chosen artists. Their description is based on archival documents and publications, from which a picture of direct relationships between the leading artists of the European avant-garde emerges – some of them personal, some correspondence-based; they have also been presented in form of a diagram that illustrates the text.

Author(s):  
Torsten Voß

Abstract Throughout various literary and artistic periods, artists have referred to or even converted to Catholicism as a means of conjuring a certain perception of a European tradition. In doing this, they seek to create an aesthetic of romanticism and/or an idea and concept of beauty, the artist, artwork etc. After giving a brief overview of this discursive practice in modern avant-garde movements, this article focuses on early forms of literary Catholic movements, such as the French Renouveau catholique and François-René de Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity), as well as Novalis’ ‘invention’ of German romanticism in his essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe). It shows that there are a variety of parallels to be identified across these periods and places, namely, in programs, performances, rhetoric-building and group-building processes, and in cultivating an anti-bourgeois distinction, both in the texts themselves and in the positioning of the artists within the literary field. Despite accusations of being reactionary, writers and artists who elaborate a Catholic concept of art and literature aim to develop a traditionalist and anti-modern stance within (aesthetical and social) modernity.


Author(s):  
Željko Bralić ◽  
Ljubinka Katić

The work contents a presentation of the main outcomes of an extensive historical-andragogical research, mainly based on the archival documents kept in Archives of Yugoslavia. An overview of adult education practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina is shaped from the documents data concerning the most signifcant institutions and activities organized as an attempt to contribute to general educational goals in Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – Yugoslavia between two wars, through andragogical educational activities: raising the general level of literacy and education of wide sections of the population. Institutional basis of adult education praxis at the time mostly rested upon literacy courses, people’s universities, cultural-educational societies, etc. This paper especially distinguishes andragogical activity of momentous and respectable Sarajevo-based cultural-educational establishments (People’s university, Gajret, Prosveta, Napredak), that were amongst the most signifcant and successful in Yugoslavia, and represented example of model work in adult education of the interwar period.


Author(s):  
Phyllis Taoua

Léopold Sédar Senghor is one of the most influential African poets of the modern era. He also left his mark as a controversial cultural theorist and president of his native Senegal from 1960 until 1981. The poet and statesman participated with Aimé Césaire and Léon Gontran Damas in founding the négritude movement during the interwar period in Paris. Négritude was a cultural revolution that affirmed black African culture across geographical borders, combining a political vision of social justice for all peoples of African origin with an innovative poetic idiom. Senghor’s distinctive contribution to this avant-garde effort was a set of inter-related concepts with which he developed his theory of black African culture. The first was a notion of cross-cultural creativity entailing an interpenetration of African and European cultures. The second was a selective assimilation of certain aspects of French culture into an African conceptual framework. The third was an African version of socialism that integrated a community-centred ethics with a traditional African spirituality. Senghor believed that African culture had unique contributions to make to European thought, and worked to define a theory of culture based on dialogue, reciprocity and an inclusive humanism, which would pave the way for Africa’s integration into a civilization of the universal. His philosophy of culture is unsystematic; it appears as a collection of insights derived from various sources on the central theme of négritude.


Author(s):  
Richard Haese

The group of avant-garde Australian artists and their supporters, now identified as the Heide Circle, evolved over three decades, from the pioneering modernism of the early 1930s through the post-war era of the mid-1960s. These Melbourne-based artists constituted the essential core of radical Australian modernism; the early phase including, most notably, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, and the Russian-born émigré Danila Vassilieff. The work of these pioneering artists demonstrated a highly original antipodean response to European expressionist, cubist, and surrealist movements, together with a new fascination with untutored and naïve art. The group shared personal and institutional support from the art collectors and patrons John and Sunday Reed, whose semi-rural home called ‘‘Heide‘‘ on the outskirts of Melbourne became the focus of the movement. In 1938, the Reeds spearheaded the establishment of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) in order to promote the modernist movement in Australian art. Along with the young poet Max Harris, the Reeds also began publishing the key cultural journal Angry Penguins, which was dedicated to championing radical art and literature. These initiatives eventually collapsed in 1947. However, the revival of the CAS in 1953 initiated a second phase of the Heide circle, together with a new generation of artists.


Author(s):  
Michael Johnson

De Stijl (The Style) was an avant-garde artistic group founded in the Netherlands in 1917. The name was also applied to a journal used to propagate the group’s theories and published between 1917 and 1932. Led by the painters Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, the group developed an abstract, elemental style based upon primary colors, geometric planes and right angles. Pursuing spiritual harmony based upon mathematical order, De Stijl formulated a universal language of pure form and color. This became paradigmatic of modernist visual art and design. In 1915 the painter and theorist Theo van Doesburg encountered the work of Piet Mondrian, who had developed a visual style consisting of primary colors and asymmetrical, orthogonal grids. Mondrian was inspired by the mystical ideas of the Theosophists, particularly the eccentric mathematician M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, who devised a Neo-Platonic philosophy based upon pure geometric form. Influenced by Schoenmaekers’ publications The New Image of the World (1915) and Principles of Plastic Mathematics (1916), Mondrian developed an artistic philosophy known as Neo-Plasticism (Nieuwe Beelding): This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour … [This art allows] only primary colors and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical line.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-82
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan

Political theater is a trend that, during the avant-garde 1920s, emerged at the intersection of efforts to liberate artistic forms and oppressed groups in society. It was an influence on Slovenian theatrical artists at the Workers’ Stage (Delavski oder) already in the interwar period. A trend towards ‘political theater’, one of the tendencies of politicized performing arts in the period, flourished in Slovenia and other republics of the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s. Against the background of an identity crisis of the Yugoslav state and its ideology, political theater addressed great stories of History and the Revolution in a post-avant-garde manner. During the transition, political theater initially lost its edge but was reborn in the 21st century. As a post-dramatic practice associated with performance, it now parses its own politics. It is a forum for critiquing small, local stories that nonetheless evince the contradictions of a peripheral nation-state in the era of transnational late capitalism.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-402
Author(s):  
NORBERT BANDIER

The time has come for researchers into innovative movements in art and literature in the first half of the twentieth century to break free from traditional investigative frameworks. The works reviewed here belong to different disciplines – art history, literary history, literary criticism, history – but all show a shift of perspectives in the history of culture. They point to a reassessment of the theoretical models we use to understand modern art and literature. Those models are – in this case as they relate to the avant-garde – nuanced, refined, developed and sometimes even invalidated. Though some of these works are not wholly devoted to the European avant-gardes, they do deal with the international circulation of modern art in, to or from Europe, studied here in its lesser-known aspects. Moreover, they all to some extent examine the artist’s responsibility to the community, or the state’s responsibility to art. This theme of responsibility runs through all these works, either in its ethical dimension or as an aspect of the social function of art, especially when art has to confront an entertainment culture or is roped in as part of cultural policy.


Author(s):  
Gérard Raulet

It is somewhat surprising that Walter Benjamin, who has been very much involved with French literature, has shown so little interest in the most prestigious social novelists and in the great social romance cycles. Unlike Lukács, Benjamin evaluates the form of the novel negatively: the novel is not, or no longer, the modern epic. The contemporary novelist differs from the epic narrator in that he has lost the collective dimension. Instead of complaining about this loss, Benjamin accepts it and looks critically for authors and works that experiment new narrative means and at the same time explore new social worlds. But most novels to which Benjamin attributes experimental, or even avant-garde, value have met this challenge the least. They betray their breakthrough either by a purely private social criticism (Julien Green), by a kind of “infantile disease” of commitment (Malraux), or by a mere “cry of indignation” (Céline), which at least has the merit of reintroducing the voice of the Lumpenproletariat into the realm of the novel without mobilizing the “mimicry” of belonging to the proletariat. This essay is part of a larger project on Benjamin and the French intelligentsia of the interwar period.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (49) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Bożena Tokarz

Translation in the Perspective of Avant-garde Avant-garde is a kind of precursor that precedes some fundamental change. Translation can provoke such a change in the host literature, presenting works that have the potential to make a turn in it, or it can become revolutionary in the art of translation. The avant-garde function of Polish literature in Slovenia is fuzzy. It is present in the minds of some authors although they do not exhibit it in an explicit way. Therefore, it is not possible to assign its translations an avant-garde role in the interwar period, which abounded with stormy transformations of European art and not only. The Polish historical avantgarde was unknown to the reader, and the poetry of one of the central poetic groups, the Krakow Avant-Garde, has remained so. The translations of avant-garde prose and drama of that time are late to fulfill such a function because they only appeared after the 1970s.


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