scholarly journals “The Turn of the Century. From Modernism to the Avant-garde in European Literature and the Arts Le Tournant du siècle. Du modernisme à l’avant-garde dans la littérature et les arts européens”

Author(s):  
Nell Andrew

This book reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions—the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema—which together changed the artistic landscape of early twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. Rather than seeking dancing pictures or pictures of dancing, however, this study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction. Recovering the performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence of avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period, this book challenges modernism’s medium-specific frameworks by demonstrating the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde’s development of abstraction: from the turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller, who awakened in symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged vision; to cubo-futurist and neosymbolist artists who reached pure abstraction in tandem with the radical dance theory of Valentine de Saint-Point; to Sophie Taeuber’s hybrid Dadaism between art and dance; to Akarova, a prolific choreographer whose dancing Belgian constructivist pioneers called “music architecture”; and finally to the dancing images of early cinematic abstraction from the Lumière brothers to Germaine Dulac. Each chapter reveals the emergence of abstractionas an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception deployed across artistic media toward shared modernist goals. The author argues that abstraction can be worked like a muscle, a medium through which habits of reception and perception are broken and art’s viewers are engaged by the kinesthetic sensation to move and be moved.


CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Eric Thil

The choice of Italy to reveal the homosexuality of the characters seems to be a recurring stereotype in the decadent European literature at the turn of the century. The present study examines the origins of such a literary mythology by confronting various linguistic sources in order to identify an intertextual and geocritical network. The choice of a country still untouched by an industrial culture allows for epiphanic encounters whose outcome is the rediscovery of oneself by each of the characters. Confronted with monsters and other secondary mythological deities, the protagonists will experience becoming one themselves.


1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 387-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evan Bonds

The growing aesthetic prestige of instrumental music in the last decades of the eighteenth century was driven not so much by changes in the musical repertory as by the resurgence of idealism as an aesthetic principle applicable to all the arts. This new outlook, as articulated by such writers as Winckelmann, Moritz, Kant, Schiller, Herder, Fichte, and Schelling, posited the work of art as a reflection of an abstract ideal, rather than as a means by which a beholder could be moved. Through idealism, the work of art became a vehicle by which to sense the realm of the spiritual and the infinite, and the inherently abstract nature of instrumental music allowed this art to offer a particularly powerful glimpse of that realm. Idealism thus provided the essential framework for the revaluation of instrumental music in the writings of Wackenroder, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and others around the turn of the century. While this new approach to instrumental music has certain points of similarity with the later concept of "absolute" music, it is significant that Eduard Hanslick expunged several key passages advocating idealist thought when he revised both the first and second editions of his treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. The concept of "absolute" music, although real enough in the mid-nineteenth century, is fundamentally anachronistic when applied to the musical thought and works of the decades around 1800.


Author(s):  
Sharon Jordan

From the 1880s until the mid-1910s, Art Nouveau was the dominant style in art, architecture, and design in Europe, with innovative and thoroughly modern production in graphics, furniture, and applied arts. Though it incorporated elements from a range of diverse sources, the most characteristic forms of Art Nouveau were those inspired by nature, but nature that had been adapted, stylized, and aestheticized to reflect the cultural climate of the turn of the century. The origins of Art Nouveau developed out of the ideas of several leading figures during the mid-nineteenth century in their efforts to reconcile art with the increasingly industrialized methods of production dominating in the applied arts. In Britain, William Morris advocated for a unity among art, design, and applied arts that valued handcraftsmanship in well-made objects made available to the middle classes. The Arts & Crafts movement sought to counter the array of poorly designed consumer goods seen at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, in which individual objects were frequently overwhelmed by ornamentation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 275-294
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald

Artist/scientist Erin Espelie was trained at Cornell University as a biologist, but turned down opportunities to study biology at the graduate level at Harvard and MIT in order to explore the New York City theater scene, before finding her way into independent, “avant-garde” filmmaking, first exploring her interests in biology and the history of science in a series of short films, then producing the remarkable essay-film The Lanthanide Series (2014), which explores the importance of the “rare earths” (the elements with atomic numbers 57–71) for modern communication and informational technologies. The imagery for The Lanthanide Series was recorded, almost entirely, off the reflective surface of an iPad. In her work as a moving-image artist, Espelie combines poetry, science, environmental politics, and modern digital technologies within videos that defy traditional knowledge categories. She is currently editor in chief for Natural History magazine and a director of the NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado-Boulder.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIGID COHEN

AbstractThis article explores mid-century New York intellectual scenes mediated by the avant-garde émigré composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), with special emphasis on Wolpe's interactions with jazz composer George Russell (1923–2009) and political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75). Cross-disciplinary communities set the stage for these encounters: Wolpe and Russell met in the post-bop circles that clustered in Gil Evans's basement apartment, while Wolpe encountered Arendt at the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, the hotbed of Abstract Expressionism. Wolpe's exchanges with Arendt and Russell, long unacknowledged, may initially seem unrelated. Yet each figure shared a series of “cosmopolitan” commitments. They valued artistic communities as spaces for salutary acts of cultural boundary crossing, and they tended to see forms of self-representation in the arts as a way to respond to the dehumanizing political disasters of the century. Wolpe and Arendt focused on questions of human plurality in the wake of their forced displacements as German-Jewish émigrés, whereas Russell confronted dilemmas of difference as an African American migrant from southern Ohio in New York. Bringing together interpretive readings of music with interview- and archive-based research, this article works toward a historiography of aesthetic modernism that recognizes migration as formative rather than incidental to its community bonds, ethical aspirations, and creative projects.


2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
CARLA VIVARELLI

The presence of two famous exponents of the French and Italian ars nova in Naples in 1318––respectively Petrus de Sancto Dionysio and Marchetto da Padova––substantiates Nino Pirrotta's hypothesis that the Angevin capital was an important center of musical culture in the early Trecento and a setting for avant-garde debates. It also aids in reconstructing the elusive biography of the Paduan musician and clarifies the much debated dating of his Pomerium. Pirrotta ultimately abandoned his Neapolitan hypothesis for lack of evidence, a difficulty caused and aggravated by the thorough destruction of Angevin chancery documents during the Second World War. Evidence has been found, however, in indirect sources, such as literary texts, works of local history, and documentary transcriptions and summaries that predate the archival losses. In addition to placing the two prominent musicians at the Angevin court in Naples, these sources confirm the presence there of minstrels (evidence for secular music within the court's recreational sphere), vouch for the continuity of the institution of the royal chapel (evidence for sacred music at court, clearly connected to the liturgy), and testify to Robert of Anjou's catalytic patronage of the arts and his passion for music in general. Thus Naples regains its status as a capital on the map of 14th-century music.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Kolb

The central role that avant-garde music and dance theatre played in the interplay and synthesis of the arts and media in the 1920s, particularly in Paris, is well known. However, the creative potential of ballet has hardly been recognized in its manifold relationships with film and cinematic-inspired expression. The extent to which especially ballet music interacted with the latest cinematographic principles and techniques and referred to cinematic aesthetics in a variety of ways can instructively be seen regarding the productions of the Ballets Suédois. This is discussed in this article with an exemplary look at Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921), Within the Quota (1923), Skating Rink (1922) and Relâche (1924). By that it becomes clear that the transmedia inclusion of cinematographic ideas not only inspired the vocabulary of avant-garde dance and modern choreography, but was also distinctively reflected in the conception and composition of film-affected music.


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