Vladimir Markov And Russian Primitivism

Hailed as a brilliant theoretician, Voldemārs Matvejs (best known by his pen name Vladimir Markov) was a Latvian artist who spearheaded the Union of Youth, a dynamic group championing artistic change in Russia, 1910-14. His work had a formative impact on Malevich, Tatlin, and the Constructivists before it was censored during the era of Soviet realism. This volume introduces Markov as an innovative and pioneering art photographer and assembles, for the first time, five of his most important essays. The translations of these hard-to-find texts are fresh, unabridged, and authentically poetic. Critical essays by Jeremy Howard and Irena Buzinska situate his work in the larger phenomenon of Russian ’primitivism’, i.e. the search for the primal. This book challenges hardening narratives of primitivism by reexamining the enthusiasm for world art in the early modern period from the perspective of Russia rather than Western Europe. Markov composed what may be the first book on African art and Z.S. Strother analyzes both the text and its photographs for their unique interpretation of West African sculpture as a Kantian ’play of masses and weights’. The book will appeal to students of modernism, orientalism, ’primitivism’, historiography, African art, and the history of the photography of sculpture.

This book offers a versatile approach to the enigmatic phenomenon of Russian irrationalism of the last two hundred years and beyond. The 23 chapters look at diverse artistic and cultural forms, including Russian philosophy, theology, literature, music and visual arts.

The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century. Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production. Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements.

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

"This book collects fourteen essays by the woefully understudied Carl Einstein, translated here from the German. Einstein was a major critic in the early twentieth century. He was a large presence in Paris when it was the crucible of the modernist avant-garde. He was one of the earliest thinkers to take Cubism seriously. He was an architect of formalism and perhaps the first critic to produce a substantial text on African art and its relationship to modernism that rejected Sub-Saharan African cultures as "primitive." And, his views on repetition and mechanical reproduction are in direct opposition to those of Walter Benjamin. Charles Haxthausen identified and translated these fourteen essential texts and has provided critical introductions to each one as well as a longer introduction to Einstein's life, work, and contribution to the intellectual culture of the 20th century"--

A history of the evolving field of African art. Peter Probst offers the first book to explore the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. He starts his exploration with a simple question: What do we actually talk about when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Probst identifies the notion of African art as a conceptual vessel whose changing content manifests wider societal transformations. The perspective is a pragmatic and relational one. Rather than providing an affirmative answer to what African art is and what local meanings it has, Probst shows how the works labeled as "African art" figure in the historical processes and social interactions that constitute the Africanist art world. What Is African Art? covers three key stages in the field's history. Starting with the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, Probst focuses on the role of museums, collectors, and photography in disseminating visual culture and considers how early anthropologists, artists, and art historians imbued objects with values that reflected ideas of the time. He then explores the remaking of the field at the dawn of African independence with the shift towards contemporary art and the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, he examines the postcolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of heritage, reparation, and representation. Probst looks to the future, arguing that, if the study of African art is to move in productive new directions, we must look to how the field is evolving within Africa.

What is modernism in Southeast Asia? What is modern art, as embodied in the paintings of Southeast Asia? These questions and more are answered in Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name. Featuring 217 works, in full colour, by 51 Southeast Asian and European artists, from the Centre Pompidou and National Gallery Singapore, as well as other Southeast Asian collections in the region and beyond, this catalogue tells the compelling story of modernism as it developed across continents, and reveals artists' powerful, and sometimes surprising, responses to modernity.