Constructed abstract art in England after the Second World War: a neglected avant-garde

2005 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 43-1355-43-1355
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Second World

scholarly journals The Crisis of Artistic Forms after 1945; Abstractionism and the Theatre of the Absurd versus Abstract Theatre Dilemma

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-68
Author(s):  
Cristian Rusu
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
World War ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Theatre Of The Absurd ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Second World ◽  
War Art

Abstract The present study aims to revive the discussion on Martin Esslin’s 1961 labeling of the post-war theater as “absurd” and proposes the consideration of a new paradigm: “abstract theater”. In the great existential and artistic crisis triggered by the end of the Second World War, post-war art oriented itself towards an abstract expression that would dominate the 5th and 6th decades of the 20th century. A panoramic study of the second wave of the avant-garde represented by abstract art could also include these dramatic texts in the great abstract movement of the period. This approach could reopen, in the spirit of the analysis of that Zeitgeist, a fruitful discussion, integrating the art of theater in the great post-war abstractionist spirit.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
English Language ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Planner ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Archives ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Second World

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (b. Neuruppin, 1781–d. Berlin, 1841) was a celebrated Prussian architect, theatre set designer, artist, furniture and object designer, urban planner, and civil servant. Born into modest yet respectable circumstances as the son of a deacon, Schinkel, by virtue of his talent and work ethic, rose in his own lifetime to become one of Prussia’s most celebrated cultural figures and its chief royal architect. He worked mostly in Berlin and its surrounding territories, including in some areas that are now part of Poland. His built works suffered heavy destruction during the Second World War, but important examples still survive or have been reconstructed, including the Altes Museum, the Friedrich-Werder Church, the Theatre (Schauspielhaus), and the New Guardhouse in Berlin, as well as the Charlottenhof and Glienicke Palaces in nearby Potsdam. His paintings, drawings, and personal archives can be found mostly in collections in and around Berlin, including at various departments of the Berlin State Museums. Recent debates have surrounded the potential reconstruction of Schinkel’s celebrated masterpiece, the Berlin Bauakademie (which was demolished in 1962), bringing a consciousness of Schinkel’s legacy to the fore in German public life once again. Despite his fame in Germany and his noted status as a reference-point for German avant-garde modernism, Schinkel’s work has remained under-explored in the English language (with some notable exceptions) due to difficulties accessing both his buildings and his archives in the years between the Second World War and German reunification. Since the 1990s, however, Schinkel’s international reputation has been steadily restored due to the efforts of a number of scholars and curators who have sought to disseminate his work more widely than ever before. Schinkel’s oeuvre is as eclectic as the tools and media he employed to realize it are versatile. They reveal traces of neoclassicism and the neogothic, French Enlightenment formalism, German Romanticism and Idealism, and 19th-century historicism. But at the same time, his work resists absolute categorization, by virtue of the fact that he lived and worked suspended between two epochs: he was born too late to be immersed in the worldview of the 18th-century Enlightenment and French Revolution, but nor did he live to see Germany’s development as a fully industrialized and unified nation. Occupying this ambiguous historical moment has given Schinkel’s work a versatility, a freedom, and an inquiring rigor that has assured its originality and enduring value.

Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–89)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan (Amy) Tang
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Dramatic Works ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Waiting For Godot ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

Samuel Barclay Beckett is widely considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Born in Ireland and living in France for half of his life, he wrote prose, dramatic works, poems, and criticism in both English and French. He started to write fiction after he met James Joyce and other intellectuals in Paris in the 1920s. His research on languages, literature and philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris provided a solid basis for his works. His popularity grew rapidly after the Second World War, particularly after the publication of his groundbreaking play, En attendant Godot (1953, Waiting for Godot), and his trilogy, Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951, Malone Dies), and L’innommable (1953, The Unnamable). He was not only a prolific modernist who innovated avant-garde prose, theatre, radio, television, and cinema; he also joined the French Resistance during the Second World War and the post-war reconstruction. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

Australian Poetry, 1940s–1960s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Kirkpatrick
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Bona Fide ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Poetic Culture ◽  
Second World

When situating 20th-century Australian poetry within world literary space, critical histories often map it against the Anglo-American tradition and find it wanting. In particular, and despite the strong reputations that poets such as Judith Wright and A. D. Hope continue to enjoy, there is a tendency to regard Australian poetry from the Second World War until the mid-1960s as variously complacent, insular, or retrograde: representative of what John Tranter in his introduction to The New Australian Poetry in 1979 called “a moribund poetic culture.” Certainly, there was a turning away from avant-garde experimentalism in the immediate postwar period (as there was in Britain and the United States), but in Australia, this has been linked to a discrediting of modernism as a result of the Ern Malley hoax. In the Malley “affair,” as Michael Heyward dubbed it, two conservative poets hoodwinked the editor of the avant-garde journal Angry Penguins with a suite of poems written by a wholly invented working-class surrealist. As a result, according to Wright (among others), Australian poets became less adventurous in favor of more traditional forms. On top of this, recent revisionist accounts of the hoax have virtually canonized “Malley” himself as a bona fide modernist and so exacerbated a sense of lost opportunity after the mid-1940s. Yet modernizing impulses may take many forms, and it is an overstatement to suggest that innovation had ceased, or that the poetry of this period was somehow disengaged from the rest of the world or from international literary-political debates. A reassessment shows that Australian poets were keenly engaged with the questions of their time but also dealt with the persistent, unresolved problem of how to become “unprovincial,” overcoming a cultural cringe that now gravitated away from Britain and toward America. In fact, for Australian literature prior to the emergence of Patrick White, poetry, rather than beating a retreat, actually led the way forward. It is time, then, to reconsider the poetry of the postwar era within its own cultural ecologies, acknowledging that Australian poetic modernism, while it remains contested, may also be distinctive.

scholarly journals Viðtökur á verkum Þórarins B. Þorlákssonar

Ritið ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 187-215
Author(s):  
Hlynur Helgason
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Time Function ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
20Th Century Art ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

Þórarinn B. Þorláksson (1867–1924) has been credited with being the first Icelandic professional painter. His reception, both during his lifetime and posthumously, is therefore an interesting indication of the changes in the outlook and ideology surrounding the reception of Scandinavian fin­de­siécle art up to the present. He was honourably mentioned by his contemporaries and then was forgotten in the upheavals surrounding the adoption of modern styles, such as abstract art, in Ice­land around the Second World War. He re­gained attention in the sixties and has since then been revered as an important, though problematic, pioneer of Icelandic painting. This has in recent years been especially evident in the way he has been mentioned in the context of the revival of Nordic and Scandinavian late 19th and early 20th century art in Northern­Europe and America. The paper reviews and analyses the historical reception Þorláksson has received and the way his work has been inscribed into the narrative of Icelandic and Scandinavian Art History. This process is an attempt to understand and contextualise Þorláksson’s work in aesthetic terms, while at the same time function as a critical mirror of the trends and ideolo­gies surrounding the Nordic revival in recent years.

Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Andre Gide ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Diary Writing ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

This is the first study of the diary in French writing across the twentieth century, as a genre including both fictional and non-fictional works. From the 1880s it became apparent to writers in France that their diaries (or journaux intimes) – a supposedly private form of writing – would probably come to be published, strongly affecting the way their readers viewed their other published works, and their very persona as an author. More than any other, André Gide embraced the literary potential of the diary: the first part of this book follows his experimentation with the diary in the fictional works Les Cahiers d’André Walter (1891) and Paludes (1895), in his diary of the composition of his great novel, Le Journal des faux-monnayeurs (1926), and in his monumental Journal 1889–1939 (1939). The second part follows developments in diary-writing after the Second World War, inflected by radical changes in attitudes towards the writing subject. Raymond Queneau’s works published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara (1947–1962) used the diary playfully at a time when the writing subject was condemned by the literary avant-garde. Roland Barthes’s experiments with the diary (1977–1979) took it to the extremes of its formal possibilities, at the point of a return of the writing subject. Annie Ernaux’s published diaries (1993–2011) demonstrate the role of the diary in the modern field of life-writing, especially in comparison with autobiography. Throughout the century, the diary has repeatedly been used to construct an œuvre and author, but also to call these fundamental literary concepts into question.

‘Control and Communication’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Roach
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
Analytical Control ◽  
World War ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Community ◽  
Second World

This chapter traces the fortunes of the interview in the years after the Second World War. At mid-century the interview was becoming increasingly associated with the surveillance of citizens and cybernetics. In turn, interviews were no longer considered a product of co-production but rather as an interrogative profiling device—as publicized by Senator McCarthy among others. Innovative broadcasters such as Mike Wallace began to adopt their own interrogative style of interviewing toward the profilers in an attempt to foster a critically engaged citizenry. But it was in the infamous Treason case of Ezra Pound that questions around the subject’s analytical control in the era of New Criticism came to a head for the literary community. Meanwhile, for some avant-garde authors including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the interrogative possibilities of interviewing established it as a useful means for creating a countercultural project able to counter New Criticism.

La biennale di Venezia: a bibliographical note

1980 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-11
Author(s):  
Stephen Bury
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Unique Sequence ◽  
World War ◽  
Bibliographical Note ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Italian Art ◽  
Second World

The Biennale comprises a unique sequence of 20th century exhibitions of international (if uneven) coverage from 1895 onwards with only two breaks – between 1914-20 and 1942-48. It documents for the pre-Second World War period the non avant-garde in whom there is now increasing interest and since 1948 the activities of the avant-garde. It is a particularly useful source for Italian art and illustrates the metamorphosis of futurist art into fascist art. The Biennale has become part of art history: what has been shown has influenced what has subsequently been produced: the 1958 and 1960 Biennali, for example, were influential in the propagation of abstract-expressionism in Europe.

The Night of the Human Body: Statues and Fantasy in Postwar American Cinema

2017 ◽  
pp. 101-117
Author(s):  
Susan Feleman
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Second World

Although it is conventional, and perhaps logical, to regard the avant-garde and the commercial cinemas separately, major new developments in each arose concurrently in the USA during the Second World War and, to some extent, in response to it. The dark Hollywood trend that was retrospectively dubbed film noir could be seen, as Paul Arthur and David James have observed, as an industrial form of an equally dark trend in the new genre of art cinema that came to be known as the trance film: “both modes feature a somnambulist protagonist who enters a menacing, often incomprehensible environment in a search for sexual, social, or legal identity, and both states are characterized by the same deadened affect, increased capacity for absorbing or inflicting violence, iconographies of entrapment, and the dissolution of geographic boundaries.”

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