Modernism And Still Life

Explores the 'still life spirit' in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetryChallenges the conventional positioning of still life a 'minor' genre in art historyProposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual cultureProvides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and danceUncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace StevensThe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the 'age of speed' but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Czanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Claudia Tobin reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement: the still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm; an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.

This work takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary.

An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one. At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations. Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats—Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.

A compact introduction to modernism--why it began, what it is, and how it hasshaped virtually all aspects of 20th and 21st century life

Focusing on cultural practices, and gender issues during a period of the early 20th-century that witnessed radical transformations in sex roles, this anthology of original (and one classic) essays will generate a greater understanding of women's contributions to modernist culture, and explore how that culture was affected by gender issues. The essays provide a wealth of insights into literature, painting, architecture, design, anthropology, sociology, religion, science, popular culture, music, issues of race and ethnicity, and the influence of 20th-century women and sexual politics.

Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history's traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world. Contributors. Bill Anthes, Peter Brunt, Karen Duffek, Erin Haney, Elizabeth Harney, Heather Igloliorte, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, W. Jackson Rushing III, Damian Skinner, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano

This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.

The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.