Brains (Benn)

Forms of Life ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 261-296
Author(s):  
Andreas Gailus
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Medical Doctor ◽  
Pathology Report ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sensory Data ◽  
Gottfried Benn

This chapter explores modernist figurations of life in Gottfried Benn who developed his poetics through an engagement with and rejection of earlier models of vitalism. Benn's avant-garde Ronne novellas, written during World War I, deconstruct the Kantian belief in the mind's capacity to unify sensory data, replacing the latter's emphasis on formal unity with an emphasis on linguistic and bodily disarticulation. Himself a medical doctor, Benn writes literature in part as a pathology report, finding in the focus on disintegrating bodies and subjectivities an opening toward a new prose and therefore a new way of conceptualizing the human bios.

scholarly journals Symbolism at war: Charles Ricketts and the politics of the stage

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 318-336
Author(s):  
Ana Parejo Vadillo
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Landscape

This article considers the effect of World War I on Charles Ricketts’ work for the stage as an avant-garde set and costume designer. It looks at his cosmopolitan designs in the context of European symbolism. The first part of the essay focuses on Ricketts’ symbolist manifesto ‘The art of stage decoration’ (1913). The essay then examines his designs for three Shakespeare plays that toured Le Havre in 1918 to entertain the troops. I argue that, in the aftermath of the war, Rickett’s symbolism became the lens through which he assessed the complex political landscape of the 1920s, and suggest that his stance against realism politicized his practice and explains his interest in Mussolini’s fascism.

Grosz, George (1893–1959)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
New Objectivity ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Grosz

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art. Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.

scholarly journals Zenitism and orientalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Iva Glišić ◽  
Tijana Vujošević
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Striking Similarity ◽  
World War ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Global Demand ◽  
The Aesthetic

Reflecting on the centenary of the birth of Zenitism, this essay examines how the movement engaged with stereotypes about the Slavic Orient, and in particular the discourse on Balkanism. The European orientalist reading of the Balkans became especially profound in years surrounding the World War I. Seeking to invert derogatory characterisations of the Balkan Peninsula, Zenitists would embark on a mission to "Balkanise Europe" by presenting the artist from the East as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force emerging from a cultural tabula rasa. Zenitism sought to destabilise the dominant Orient-Occident discourse by establishing parallels between existing negative stereotypes of the Balkans and the aesthetic tropes of the European avantgarde. Specifically, Zenitists established the Balkan "Barbarogenius" as the archetypal modernist primitive - precisely the figure conjured by the European intelligentsia as the saviour for its listless modern condition. In addition, the Zenitist movement established an analogy between the hallmark fragmentation of the Balkans and the cultural cacophony of the avant-garde. The political and aesthetic strategies of the movement, the authors assert, bear a striking similarity with those of the Black Atlantic, and its 'in-betweenness'-its ambition to straddle two opposing worlds. Organised around its eponymous journal Zenit, which was conceptualised as "the first Balkan journal in Europe and the first European journal in the Balkans," Zenitism employed European avant-garde aesthetic strategies while simultaneously rejecting European claims to cultural supremacy. For Yugoslav, Soviet, and Western European audiences, the journal had two parallel goals: the creative "Balkanisation" of Europe, and a commitment to dismantling Yugoslav "nesting orientalisms" by fighting against the reproduction of negative stereotypes among the region's own inhabitants. Against a backdrop of European crisis and a global demand for a renewed emancipatory struggle, the ambition of Zenitism holds strong appeal today.

L’Herbier, Marcel (1888–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Silent Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moral Atmosphere ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Post War

Marcel L’Herbier was a French pioneer avant-garde (impressionist) filmmaker and theorist who made more than forty films between the 1920s and the 1950s. During World War I he learned the basics of filmmaking in the Army Cinematographic Service. He wrote a seminal text, Hermès et le silence (1918), in which he stated that cinema is not an art but a new language which calls into question the traditional notion of art. One of his best attempts to put into practice his theories was the poetic Rose-France (1919). In 1921 he filmed one of his masterworks, El Dorado, mainly in Granada (Andalusia, Spain), which anticipated the German Kammerspiel. He used a range of cinematographic means—including color tinting of the image—to determine character psychology and the moral atmosphere of the space, defining a kind of "cinematic melodrama" and creating a visual music. Other similar films from his silent period include L’Inhumaine [The Inhuman Woman] (1924), a science fiction drama, and L’Argent (1928), adapted from Émile Zola’s novel. In the silent L’Argent, L’Herbier used sound in an original way, recording real sound effects, which were played back in some theaters. When talkies arrived, he renounced the avant-garde, but still made noteworthy films including Le Mystère de la chambrejaune [The Mystery of the Yellow Room] (1930) based on Gaston Leroux’s novel, and La Nuitfantastique [The Fantastic Night] (1942). L’Herbier was also the founder, in 1944, of the Institut des HautesÉtudesCinématographiques. During the post-war period he poured his energy into television productions.

Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future of Modernism

2020 ◽  
pp. 40-80
Author(s):  
Ashley Maher
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Physical Structure ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Architectural Modernism

World War I has long been considered literary modernism’s defining historical event, a catastrophe that changed avant-garde optimism into postwar pessimism and fragmentation; however, the utopian rhetoric of post-World War I architecture, along with writers’ enthusiastic elaboration of that rhetoric through architectural criticism, undermines any neat division. Instead, this chapter establishes a late 1920s and 1930s tendency to identify in hindsight a wartime rupture between the national future and the modernist future, as literary and architectural cooperation began to dissolve. Amid the rise of architectural modernism in Britain, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Wyndham Lewis scrutinized the cultural integration of modernist forms. While Waugh and Betjeman increasingly emphasized modernist architecture’s inability to provide a lasting social or physical structure for the nation, Lewis rued the perceived cooption of modernism by leftist, materialist movements and instead promoted the values of “extreme modernism.”

The New Aesthetic of the Late Nineteen Twenties Reconsidering the Periodization of the Interwar Avant-Gardes

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-216
Author(s):  
Éva Forgács
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Nineteen Twenties ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Short Time

AbstractThe avant-gardes of the nineteen twenties are discussed in the art historical literature as the art products of a rarely upbeat decade, which featured great utopian aspirations and progressive art between the wake of World War I and the Nazi takeover in Germany, as well as the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. This essay depicts the decade as being far from a homogenous period, demonstrating that the early internationalism and sense of unlimited possibilities gave way, in or around 1923, to less idealistic, more pragmatic views and practices in even the avant-garde. If examined in this framework, the reception of avant-garde artists and works in the late 1920s that had been enthusiastically embraced in the first years of the decade, was understandably cooler. Professional eminence was overwriting great ideas. The lack of the earlier fervor had disappeared, not because the art was worse, but on account of the new Zeitgeist that brought about the new moral idea of utilitarianism, requiring that the artists be, first of all, of use to the community. Several artists and art writers suddenly turned against those ideas and art that they had only a short time earlier held in the highest esteem.

From Berlin to Ben Shemen: The Lehmann Brothers between Expressionism and Zionism

AJS Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-65
Author(s):  
Roni Hirsh-Ratzkovsky
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
World War ◽  
German Expressionism ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
German Jewish

The following article deals with the story of two German Jewish brothers, Alfred Lemm and Siegfried Lehmann. The first—a forgotten journalist and writer, the second—a doctor and educator, the founder of the Ben Shemen Youth Village in Mandate Palestine. Through the specific story of the two brothers, the article traces the path of messianic antiurban ideas prevalent in expressionist avant-garde circles in pre–World War I Europe, to the circles of German Jewish Zionism and from them to Palestine-Israel. Though German expressionism was itself an urban intellectual phenomenon, expressionist prose often exemplified antiurban and antimodern sentiments, as in the case of Lemm's prose. According to Lemm, redemption from the ills of modern society shall be found in withdrawal from the modern city and return to physical and metaphysical “roots.” Lemm's antiurban attitude influenced his brother Siegfried and found its full manifestation in the founding of the Ben Shemen Youth Village in 1927.

Holst – Astrology and Modernism in ‘The Planets’

Tempo ◽  
1993 ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Head
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
British Music ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Modern Movement

The subject of modernism in early 20th-century British music is rarely examined: partly because it is often thought that British composers were not interested in the Modern Movement before World War I, and partly because in discussing Modernism (a convenient umbrella term for the whole cultural avant-garde whose components included Expressionism, Futurism, Primitivism and Surrealism) one must be prepared to engage subjects which, in this country, are normally considered Verboten. There is no doubt, for instance, that the development of the Modern Movement on the Continent was partly inspired by a widespread awareness of Theosophy, and the interest, which it encouraged, in such esoteric areas as Indian philosophy and astrology. In this article I want to look at this aspect of Modernism in relation to Gustav Hoist, and especially in The Planets (1914–16): his, and British music's, first striking testament to the Modernist outlook. The very bases of this work are Hoist's understanding of astrology, his friendships of the time, and his Theosophical upbringing.

The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde

Experiment ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 214-230
Author(s):  
Linda Nochlin
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Ballets Russes

Abstract “The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde” deals with the complex relationship between Diaghalev and the members of the Parisian avant-garde he commissioned to design sets and costumes for his productions after World War I. Despite their previous aesthetic radicalism, such artists as Gris and Derain were obliged to rein in their vanguard originality and produce work of surprising conservatism, at the urging of the impresario. Matisse attempted greater originality, but in an unsuccessful ballet. The only really avant-garde production sponsored by Diaghalev after the war was Parade, in which such luminaries as Picasso, Satie and Cocteau played a leading role. Yet ultimately, it was not Diaghalev but Rolf de Mare’s Ballet Suedois that created the most experimental productions involving dance: Relache and Entr’acte. Yet, in experimenting with new forms, de Mare, in effect, abandoned ballet for different forms of expression relying on cinematic techniques rather than classical dance.

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