Modernism And Revolution

Now that the political rhetoric can end, Erlich (Russian literature, Yale U.) examines the impact of the 1917 revolution on Russian poetry, criticism, and artistic prose. He looks at the flirtations with modernism of the early 20th century and compares the futurists, formalists, novelists, and short-story writers of the first decade of the new social and political order. Assumes no knowledge of Russian. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Explores the impact of the Russian Revolution and League of Nations on British modernist culture.

A comprehensive look at four transformative decades that put Mexico's modern art on the map In the wake of the 1910-20 Revolution, Mexico emerged as a center of modern art, closely watched around the world. Highlighted are the achievements of the tres grandes (three greats)--José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros--and other renowned figures such as Rufino Tamayo and Frida Kahlo, but the book goes beyond these well-known names to present a fuller picture of the period from 1910 to 1950. Fourteen essays by authors from both the United States and Mexico offer a thorough reassessment of Mexican modernism from multiple perspectives. Some of the texts delve into thematic topics--developments in mural painting, the role of the government in the arts, intersections between modern art and cinema, and the impact of Mexican art in the United States--while others explore specific modernist genres--such as printmaking, photography, and architecture. This beautifully illustrated book offers a comprehensive look at the period that brought Mexico onto the world stage during a period of political upheaval and dramatic social change. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City Exhibition Schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art (10/25/16-01/08/17) Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (02/03/17-04/30/17) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June-September 2017)

Robin Walz’s updated Modernism, now part of the Seminar Studies series, has been updated to include significant primary source material and features to make it more accessible for students returning to, or studying the topic for the first time. The twentieth century was a period of seismic change on a global scale, witnessing two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the establishment of a global economy, the beginnings of global warming and a complete reversal in the status of women in large parts of the world. The modernist movements of the early twentieth century launched a cultural revolution without which the multi-media-driven world in which we live today would not have been possible. Today modernism is enshrined in art galleries and university courses. Its techniques of abstraction and montage, and its creative impulse to innovate and shock, are the stock-in-trade of commercial advertising, feature films, television and computer-generated graphics. In this concise cultural history, Robin Walz vividly recaptures what was revolutionary about modernism. He shows how an aesthetic concept, arising from a diversity of cultural movements, from Cubism and Bauhaus to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and operating in different ways across the fields of art, literature, music, design and architecture, came to turn intellectual and cultural life and assumptions upside down, first in Europe and then around the world. From the nineteenth century origins of modernism to its postmodern legacies, this book will give the reader access to the big picture of modernism as a dynamic historical process and an unfinished project which still speaks to our times.

This book examines reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines of the teens and twenties (The Liberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and The Dial) in order to analyze some of the ways modernist writers negotiate the competing demands of aesthetics, political commitment and race. Re-examining interconnections among such superficially disparate phenomena as the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, modernism and Leftist politics, this book rightly emphasizes the vitality of little magazines and argues for their necessary place in the study of modernism.

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.

Modernism and Masculinity argues that a crisis of masculinity among European writers and artists played a key role in the modernist revolution. Gerald Izenberg revises the notion that the feminine provided a premodern refuge for artists critical of individualism and materialism. Industrialization and the growing power of the market inspired novelist Thomas Mann, playwright Frank Wedelind, and painter Wassily Kandinsky to feel the problematic character of their own masculinity. As a result, these artists each came to identify creativity, transcendence, and freedom with the feminine. But their critique of masculinity created enormous challenges: How could they appropriate a feminine aesthetic while retaining their own masculine idenitites? How did appropiating the feminine affect their personal relationships or their political views? Modernism and Masculinity seeks to answer these questions. In this absorbing combination of biography and formal critique, Izenberg reconsiders the works of Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky and semonstrates how the cirses of masculinity they endure are found not just within the images and forms of their art, but in the distinct and very personal impulses that inspired it.