Pictorial Narrative In The Nazi Period

This book investigates creative responses to the Nazi period in the work of three artists, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, focusing on their use of pictorial narrative. It analyses their contrasting aesthetic strategies and their innovative forms of artistic production. In contrast with the autonomous, modernist art object, their works were explicitly linked with the historical conditions under which they were produced – the pressures of persecution and exile. Conditions in the slave labour camps and ghettos in the Ukraine, which shaped the paintings and drawings of Daghani, are contrasted with the experiences of exile in Belgium and France, which inspired Nussbaum and Salomon. In defiance of conventional artistic practice, they produced word-image combinations that can be read as narrative sequences, incorporating specific references to political events. While there has been a wealth of literary, philosophical and historical studies relating to the Holocaust, aesthetic debate has developed less extensively. This is the first comparative study of three artists who are only belatedly achieving recognition and the recent reception of their work is evaluated. By identifying the aesthetic principles and narrative strategies underlying their work, the book reassesses their achievement in creating new forms of modernism with an unmistakable political momentum. This book was published as a special issue of Word & Image.

This book investigates creative responses to the Nazi period in the work of three artists, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, focusing on their use of pictorial narrative. It analyses their contrasting aesthetic strategies and their innovative forms of artistic production. In contrast with the autonomous, modernist art object, their works were explicitly linked with the historical conditions under which they were produced – the pressures of persecution and exile. Conditions in the slave labour camps and ghettos in the Ukraine, which shaped the paintings and drawings of Daghani, are contrasted with the experiences of exile in Belgium and France, which inspired Nussbaum and Salomon. In defiance of conventional artistic practice, they produced word-image combinations that can be read as narrative sequences, incorporating specific references to political events. While there has been a wealth of literary, philosophical and historical studies relating to the Holocaust, aesthetic debate has developed less extensively. This is the first comparative study of three artists who are only belatedly achieving recognition and the recent reception of their work is evaluated. By identifying the aesthetic principles and narrative strategies underlying their work, the book reassesses their achievement in creating new forms of modernism with an unmistakable political momentum. This book was published as a special issue of Word & Image.

Featuring contributions from prominent art historians, literary and cultural critics, and historians, Reading Charlotte Salomon celebrates the genius and courage of a remarkable figure in twentieth-century art.

Introduces English and American readers to an important and evolving field of historical and cultural studies through intellectual autobiography. This title documents the formative experiences of a scholar who was to become a pioneering teacher and researcher in the field of German culture and politics.

The social history of the genocide, its representation in postwar culture, and new theoretical approaches stand at the forefront of current research in a range of disciplines. Analyses at the most intimate scale—of the individual or of a particular locale— are juxtaposed with those that turn to broader studies of the war or postwar order. Complementing these different scales are theoretical investigations that address individual agency, moral judgment, and the construction of meaning and memory in the study of the victims of the Holocaust and in our understanding of society as a whole. Together they mark the contemporary scholarly landscape of Holocaust studies, which includes history as well as film and literary studies, philosophy, and religious studies (among other disciplines). Each of the volume's three sections contributes to understanding the Holocaust and postwar ramifications of the genocide by focusing on: 1) the history of specific communities of both victims and perpetrators; 2) postwar cultural representations; and 3) new theoretical understandings of each. The essays in this volume thus represent new interests in the field that contribute to building integrated histories of the Holocaust.

In recent years an increasing number of scholars have incorporated a focus on emotions in their theories of material culture, transnationalism and globalization, and this book aims to contribute to this field of inquiry. It examines how 'emotions' can be theorized, and serves as a useful analytical tool for understanding the interrelated mobility of humans, objects and images. Ethnographically rich, and theoretically grounded case studies offer new perspectives on the relations between migration, material culture and emotions. While some chapters address the many different ways in which migrants and migrant artists express their emotions through objects and images in transnational contexts, other chapters focus on how particular works of art, everyday objects and artefacts can evoke feelings specific to particular migrant groups and communities. Case studies also analyse how artists, academics and policy makers can stimulate positive interaction between migrants and non-migrant communities.

A book that looks at both the traditional and the unconventional ways in which the holocaust has been visually represented. The purpose of this volume is to enhance our understanding of the visual representation of the Holocaust - in films, television, photographs, art and museum installations and cultural artifacts - and to examine the ways in which these have shaped our consciousness. The areas covered include the Eichman Trial as covered on American television, the impact of Schindler's List, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Isreali Heritage Museums, Women and Holocaust Photography, Internet Holocaust sites and tattoos and shrunken heads, the bodies of the dead and of the survivors.>

Investigating the complex history of visual art?s engagement with literature, this collection demonstrates that the art of the book is a fully interdisciplinary and distinctly modern form. The essays in the collection develop new critical approaches to the analysis of twentieth-century bookworks and explore ways in which European writers and painters challenged the boundary between visual and linguistic expression in the content, production, and physical form of books. The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe offers a detailed examination of word-image relations in forms ranging from the livre d?artiste to personal diaries and almanacs. It analyzes innovative attempts to challenge familiar hierarchies between texts and images, to fuse different expressive media, and to reconceptualize traditional notions of ekphrasis. Giving consideration to the material qualities of books, the works discussed in this collection also test and celebrate the act of reading, while locating it in the context of other sensory experiences. Essays examine works by Dufy, Matisse, Beckett, Kandinsky, Braque, and Ponge, among other European artists and writers active during the twentieth century.