Esprit de corps: the art of the Parisian avant-garde and the First World War, 1914-1925

This essay presents the experimental subject as a figure of modernity. It addresses notions of control, sensory thresholds, automatism, and human agency through a study of experimental psychology and psychological apparatus from the late 19th century to the First World War, juxtaposing this with notions of experimentation in early 20th-century avant-garde movements. The human subject of experimental psychology, defined by its inexpression as it awaits the stimuli of testing and measurement, is treated as a prototype for the present-day user of technological interfaces.

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‘When a Dream Vanishes’: Edward Gordon Craig in Florence

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x00003031 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 5 (18) ◽

pp. 140-151 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Alessandro Sardelli

Keyword(s):

First World War ◽

World War ◽

Avant Garde ◽

The First World War ◽

Influential Journal ◽

First World

When Gordon Craig settled in Florence before the First World War, he found himself amidst a flourishing avant-garde artistic community. which he regarded with some caution. Between the staging of Rosmersholm with Duse in 1906 and the closing of his short-lived theatre school at the Goldoni Arena in 1914, he also conducted a correspondence with the eclectic cosmopolitan Carlo Placci – a previously unpublished source on which Alessandro Sardelli has drawn to illuminate Craig's Florentine years, during which his influential journal The Mask made its earliest appearance, and Craig also developed the idea of his adjustable screens, first employed during his Moscow collaboration with Stanislavski on Hamlet.

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Pandemic Avant-Garde Urban Coexistence in Mário de Andrade’s Pauliceia Desvairada (1922) after the Spanish Flu

10.46877/klengel.2020.30 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Susanne Klengel

Keyword(s):

Blind Spot ◽

First World War ◽

World War ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Artistic Production ◽

The First World War ◽

The World ◽

Famous Book ◽

Spanish Flu ◽

First World

The radical aesthetic of the historical avant-garde movements has often been explained as a reaction to the catastrophic experience of the First World War and a denouncement of the bourgeoisie’s responsibility for its horrors. This article explores a blind spot in these familiar interpretations of the international avant-garde. Not only the violence of the World War but also the experience of a worldwide deadly pandemic, the Spanish flu, have moulded the literary and artistic production of the 1920s. In this paper, I explore this hypothesis through the example of Mário de Andrade’s famous book of poetry Pauliceia desvairada (1922), which I reinterpret in the light of historical studies on the Spanish flu in São Paulo. An in-depth examination of all parts of this important early opus of the Brazilian Modernism shows that Mário de Andrade’s poetic images of urban coexistence simultaneously aim at a radical renewal of language and at a melancholic coming to terms with a traumatic pandemic past.

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Curiosities from the Front

PMLA ◽

10.1632/pmla.2019.134.3.555 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 134 (3) ◽

pp. 555-561

Author(s):

Guillaume Apollinaire ◽

Cedric Van Dijck

Keyword(s):

Musical Instrument ◽

First World War ◽

World War ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Everyday Objects ◽

Guillaume Apollinaire ◽

The First World War ◽

The Everyday ◽

Full Swing ◽

First World

In November 1916, with the first world war in full swing, the Soldiers of the 82nd Territorial Infantry Regiment of the French Forces opened the latest issue of their monthly regimental magazine, Brise d'entonnoirs (“Breeze from Bombcraters”), to find a piece by the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Entitled “Curiosités du front” (“Curiosities from the Front”), it reinvents the everyday objects that cluttered the front lines: a shovel held up above the trench, for instance, becomes a dancing musical instrument as German bullets strike the shovel plate. This sense of humor was characteristic of the trench press, which existed to distract readers from the grim realities of warfare. Probably because it was thought to be so amusing or pertinent, Apollinaire's piece attracted some notice in its day. Several of its sections—“The Shovel,” “Trellis,” “The Bulletproof Shield”—found their way into other publications, at the front as well as in Paris, and some even made it onto the popular quotation pages of the official magazine of the French army, Bulletin des Armées de la République, of which an unsuspecting Apollinaire had written a year earlier, “Les pages consacrées aux citations sont merveilleuses” (“The pages dedicated to quotations are marvelous” [Letter to André Level]).

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Applied Modernism

Theory Culture & Society ◽

10.1177/0263276411423938 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 28 (7-8) ◽

pp. 241-269 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Paul K. Saint-Amour

Keyword(s):

Traffic Control ◽

First World War ◽

Aerial Photographs ◽

World War ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Continuous Survey ◽

The First World War ◽

Aerial Reconnaissance ◽

Close Study ◽

First World

This article is about a period of technology transfer – the late 1910s and 1920s – when wartime aerial reconnaissance techniques and operations were being adapted to a range of civilian uses, including urban planning, land use analysis, traffic control, tax equalization, and even archaeology. At the center of the discussion is the ‘photomosaic’: a patchwork of overlapping aerial photographs that have been rectified and fit together so as to form a continuous survey of a territory. Initially developed during the First World War to provide coverage of fronts, photomosaic mapping was widely practiced and celebrated during the postwar years as an aid to urban development. The article traces both the refinements in photomosaic technology after the Armistice and the rhetorical means by which the form’s avant-garde wartime reputation was domesticated into an ‘applied realism’ that often effaced its site-specific perspective, its elaborately rectified optics, and the oppositionality of both its military and civilian uses. The article has a broader theoretical aim as well. Classic statements of both structuralist and post-structuralist spatial theory (Barthes and de Certeau are the primary examples here) have produced an ossified geometry wherein the vertical is the axis of paradigm, top-down strategy, and manipulative distance and the horizontal the axis of syntagm, grassroots tactics, and resistant proximities and differences. In its close study of the technology and rhetoric surrounding interwar photogrammetry, the article provides an example of how one might reverse the long-standing misrecognition of high-altitude optics as effacing time, difference, and materiality – and what it might mean to view such optics as, instead, a resource in turning from abstract toward differential conceptions of both aerial photography and our theoretical habits. This turn I call ‘applied modernism’, a term that accesses both the wartime photomosaic’s affiliation with avant-garde painting and its insistence that portraits of the total are always projections from partial, specific vantages.

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Una creadora olvidada: Irène Hillel-Erlanger, entre el simbolismo y las vanguardias

Çédille ◽

10.25145/j.cedille.2021.20.16 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 313-332

Author(s):

Isabel González Gil ◽

Keyword(s):

Science Fiction ◽

First World War ◽

The Novel ◽

World War ◽

Avant Garde ◽

The Gaze ◽

Main Work ◽

The First World War ◽

First World

"This article is about an unknown author of the French avant-garde, Irène Hillel-Erlanger, and her main work, Voyages en kaléidoscope, an unusual poetic novel, published in 1919, belonging to the genre of the “Scientific-marvellous”, the proto-science-fiction developed in France between 1900 and 1930. As a result of the hybridisation of the languages of symbolism and avant-garde experimentalism, the novel shows the tensions between these two movements, which will be studied through the analysis of thematic and formal aspects, such as allegory, hermeticism, fragmentarism, or visuality, as well as textual and discursive plurality. Finally, we will address the poetics of the gaze underlying the utopian invention of the kaleidoscope, in the context of the end of the First World War. "

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Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri (1891–1915)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1752-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Grace Brockington

Keyword(s):

Catalytic Effect ◽

First World War ◽

Art World ◽

Museum Collections ◽

World War ◽

French Army ◽

Avant Garde ◽

The First World War ◽

First World

Born in St Jean-de-Braye, France, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska had a catalytic effect on the development of modernist sculpture in Britain. In 1911 he moved to London, where he produced his most significant works. At the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted in the French army and was killed in action on 5 June 1915 at the age of 23. His career was brief but prolific, and has become emblematic of the growth of Modernism in Britain shortly before the War. As an artist he was self-taught, taking his inspiration from a number of sources including museum collections in Paris and London, Rodin and other European Modernists and non-European artefacts. Among avant-garde groups, he associated most closely with the Vorticists, signing their manifesto in 1914 and contributing articles to their magazine, Blast (1914 and 1915). He also worked across the factions of the London art world and his practice was eclectic; he used whatever materials came to hand, combining the virile negrophilia of Red Stone Dancer with the naturalistic figuration of Maternity (both 1913).

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BLAST (1914–1915)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1543-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Nathan Waddell

Keyword(s):

San Francisco ◽

First World War ◽

Ford Madox Ford ◽

Wyndham Lewis ◽

World War ◽

Rebecca West ◽

Avant Garde ◽

The First World War ◽

First World

BLAST was an early modernist ‘little magazine’ edited by Wyndham Lewis in London. Not to be confused with Alexander Berkman’s San Francisco-based anarchist newspaper The Blast (1916–17), BLAST proclaimed the arrival of the English avant-garde movement Vorticism. BLAST ran for two volumes, appearing in July 1914 and July 1915, before the First World War forced it to end. The magazine’s two instalments represent a key example of pre-war avant-garde periodical culture, and are recognised as exemplifying, through the differing commitments of their various contributors, some of the overlapping alliances and antagonisms of London’s early modernist socio-cultural scene. Key contributions include Lewis’s play Enemy of the Stars (1914) and stories by Ford Madox Ford (‘The Saddest Story’, 1914) and Rebecca West (‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, 1914). In promoting Vorticism, BLAST championed an intellectual aesthetic based on contemplative detachment and foregrounded inter-subjective relations. Both volumes of BLAST were heavily illustrated, featuring visual contributions from Jessie Dismorr, Jacob Epstein, Frederick Etchells, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Spencer Gore, Cuthbert Hamilton, Jacob Kramer, Lewis himself, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Dorothy Shakespear, and Edward Wadsworth.

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The War in the East of 1914–1915 and the Experience of the German Military

The Forgotten Front ◽

10.5810/kentucky/9780813175416.003.0014 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 206-244

Author(s):

Hans-Erich Volkmann

Keyword(s):

First World War ◽

World War ◽

Avant Garde ◽

The First World War ◽

The World ◽

First World

Following Modris Eksteins, Birgit Menzel examines the First World War as an expression of modernism, particularly with regard to introspection, primitivism, abstraction, and myth creation. After a thematic overview of reactions to the war by contemporary Russian intellectuals and artists, focusing on symbolists, post-symbolists, and the avant-garde, the chapter closely analyzes two works: Vladimir Mayakovski’s 1915–1916 poem “Voina i mir” (War and the World) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel August 1914 (1971/1983).

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Beatrice Hastings in Paris

Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454438.003.0014 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 181-192

Author(s):

Chris Mourant

Keyword(s):

New Age ◽

First World War ◽

World War ◽

Love Affair ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Guillaume Apollinaire ◽

The First World War ◽

Art Scene ◽

First World

This article examines the life and work of the elusive modernist writer Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield’s sometime friend, mentor and rival. Frequently, Hastings has been misrepresented or marginalised in accounts of the period. When we turn to the writings she produced when in Paris from 1914, however, Hastings emerges as a central, noteworthy figure in the avant-garde art scene during and immediately after the ‘crisis’ years of the First World War. This article considers the autobiographical ‘Impressions of Paris’ that Hastings published from 1914 in the British periodical The New Age, the surrealist novella that she recited in 1916 at a literary and musical matinee organised by Guillaume Apollinaire, and the hospital diary composed in 1920 in which she recounts details of her turbulent love affair with Amedeo Modigliani.

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