scholarly journals Je Cherche Fortune: Identity, Counterculture, and Profit in Fin-de-siècle Montmartre

2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-32
Author(s):  
Nicolas Kenny
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Rural District ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The North ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The City

This paper examines the Parisian neighbourhood of Montmartre during the 1880s and 1890s. Isolating themselves on a hilltop to the north of the city, a defiant community of painters and poets left the busy macadam below to position themselves physically and symbolically at the apex of anti-bourgeois, countercultural sentiment. Known for its subversive character, Montmartre's legacy appealed to these passionate and creative youths, and their appropriation of a semi-rural district on the fringes of the metropolitan centre of modernity symbolized their desire to escape stifling cultural traditions. Particularly revealing are the ways in which their art and literature represented at once a deeply interior questioning of identity as well as a loosely unified movement of cultural protest. By the turn of the 20th century, many of these artists and writers had been tamed by the commercialization of their nonconformity, but Montmartre remains a powerful site for the memory of its influential social and cultural transgressions.

Curious Intricacies: Some Versions of City Writing at the Fin de Siècle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The City

This Chapter surveys the range of writing about the city, and particularly about London at the time. It explains why the metropolis became such an important subject for writers, as well as showing how it consistently eluded and challenged perception, except in partial or fragmentary ways. Attention is given to the variety of writing about the city, there being, it is argued, no single or dominant urban vision.

The Strangely Mingled Monster

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-62
Author(s):  
Sam Wiseman
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The City

This chapter explores the ways in which London is established as the central site of Gothic modernity in literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines this literature in terms of broad movements or dynamics: the invasion of the metropolitan centre (as in Stoker’s Dracula); the conceptualization of the city as divided between dangerous and secure spaces (as in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde); the pollution of those spaces by the Gothic threat (as in Machen’s The Great God Pan); and a centrifugal movement towards the suburbs (as in Machen’s The Hill of Dreams). Fin de siècle London, this chapter argues, should not be seen as an end but a beginning: it is a cultural moment in which the evolving relations between the Gothic and modernity manifest themselves in new ways of representing place.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Michael Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Scottish Parliament ◽  
Celtic Revival ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Set Up

The introduction to this book begins by illustrating that many writers and critics in the 1890s identified an artistic and literary revival in fin-de-siècle Scotland, one that hoped to defend Scottish cultural traditions and revive Scotland’s status as an international cultural centre. Despite these statements, the period has come to be associated with insularity, anti-nationalism and sentimentality, especially in Scottish literary criticism. The introduction establishes the book’s aim: to uncover the concerns with cultural revivalism in fin-de-siècle Scotland, before going on to set up the key contexts and parameters for the book. Building on John Hutchinson’s theory of cultural nationalism, I define my terms and then introduce key political contexts, highlighting that cultural revival efforts ran alongside (and intersected with) a prominent late-Victorian political campaign to establish a Scottish Parliament. I then introduce the key artistic movements that helped support fin-de-siècle cultural revivalism – decadence and symbolism – and I discuss the ways in which they complemented the Celtic Revival.

“What Is to Come After This?”

2021 ◽  
pp. 188-222
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
To Come ◽  
Socialist Art ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

This chapter engages with Britain’s fin-de-siècle socialist revival by investigating its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a socialist culture characterized by its fusion of artistic and emancipatory commitments. From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords, however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like an unprecedented development than a change in modalities. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that the aesthetic was constitutive of an important strand of the British socialist tradition; sublimated aesthetic energies underpinned and invigorated a succession of anti-political schemes of communal regeneration. Morris corrected this excessively instrumentalizing tendency by promulgating a highly self-conscious aesthetic of sensuous surfaces. By desublimating socialism’s aesthetic impulse, he fostered an environment in which successful socialist art and literature was finally possible. But despite Morris’s own intentions, this chapter contends, his intercession also conspired to drain socialism of its anti-political vitality. This argument is staged through a thickly contextualized reading of News from Nowhere. In his utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style and plot to entice readers to embrace his own vision of Britain’s socialist future. However, this approach sanctions the emergence of a privatized aesthetic ideal that is fundamentally at odds with the nongovernmental utopia of the craft arts that News from Nowhere officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, Morris inadvertently contributed to the dispersal of the vitality and resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent Britain’s socialist anti-political tradition.

scholarly journals Nature and image: a city in the art of Chernivtsi of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st century

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-153
Author(s):  
Iryna Mishchenko
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Subjective Perception ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Iconic Images ◽  
The City

The purpose of this article is to consider the peculiarities of the reflection of the city – its architecture and inhabitants – in the works of Chernivtsi artists of the 20th and early 21st century, to analyze the differences between their views on the reproduction of urban motifs. The methodology consists in the application of the historical-chronological method, art analysis, and generalization, comparative and systematic approach. The scientific novelty lies in the introduction into scientific circulation of works by artists of the specified time, in understanding the evolution in the reflection of the city in the works of authors with various artistic orientations. Conclusions. In the paintings and graphics of the 20th – 21st centuries, several options for solving urban landscapes can be defined, among which the most common is a careful reflection of existing architectural monuments. In the 19th century in European art, in particular in Impressionist painting, the desire to convey not only the appearance but above all the spirit of the city became noticeable, depicting the townspeople, emphasizing the bustle or poetry of squares and streets. At the turn of the 20th-21st centuries the artists are no longer limited to the usual fixation of what is seen, but try to create a conceptual image of the city, to tell a story through iconic images and symbols, reveal their own position in particular and to preserve the authenticity of an object or the city in general. Such a variety of approaches for creating an urban landscape is partly due to differences in preferences formed during studies in art institutions and is also characteristic for the art of Chernivtsi – a city where people of many nationalities with different cultural traditions have lived side by side for centuries. Ultimately, the artists who worked here in the 20th century were often graduates not only of Ukrainian schools or universities, but also of well-known European institutions, including Vienna, Munich, Florentine, Berlin, Kraków, or Bucharest academies. While in the second half of the 19th – early 20th century the city often appears as the sum of certain architectural structures in the works of artists of Bukovina and visiting masters (F. Emery, R. Bernt, J. Shubirs), in the second half of the 19th – first third of the 20th century the artists mostly try to recreate the dynamics of urban life instead, sometimes depicted with a touch of irony, using the grotesque in the image of the inhabitants (lithography and watercolors by F.-K. Knapp, O. Laske and G. Löwendal). Subsequently, we meet emphasized mood images, in which the author's subjective perception of a particular motive, which he seeks to reproduce in a work full of emotions, is important (L. Kopelman, G. Gorbaty). A peculiar historical retrospection is present in the exquisite graphics of O. Kryvoruchko and in the distilled-finished sheets of O. Lyubkivsky, and the lyrical watercolors and sketches of N. Yarmolchuk represent the non-festive side of the city center. In O. Litvinov's paintings Chernivtsi surprises with desolation and restraint, and in M. Rybachuk's paintings it is distinguished by an unexpected riot of colors. Therefore, each of the artists creates his own image of Chernivtsi, which landscapes often become only a stimulus for the author's imagination, allowing him to depict a completely individual sense of space and life of the city.

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