Modernism (Art History)

In this essay I seek to explore the icon of the Fighting Cock movement (Khorus Jangi) and of its Manifesto, " The Slaughterer of the Nightingale, " in order to consider its implications and imagistic allusions. In outlining the background of the Khorus Jangi and associated movements, I discuss the imagery of the khorus both in ancient Iran and globally, and in the context of the ideology of the Khorus Jangi. The Manifesto is discussed and analyzed and it is seen that the khorus prefigured the Manifesto, and heralded the appearance of a new movement in painting, as distinct from what had already happened in surrealist and modernist circles in writing. The manifestation of surrealist and modernist ideology in imagery seems to have been a response to this wake-up call of the Khorus Jangi.

Aida Foroutan, “Why the Fighting Cock? The Significance of the Imagery of the Khorus Jangi and its Manifesto ‘The Slaughterer of the Nightingale,’” Iran Namag, Volume 1, Number 1 (Spring 2016), XXVIII-XLIX.

https://www.irannamag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/1.1-English-Foroutan-Iran-Namag.pdf

Amidst the expected, punning advertisements for data companies lining the drive into San Francisco, one passes a lone cultural billboard depicting Klimt’s The Virgin (1913). The image advertises Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter at the Legion of Honor. Below the image of entwined pale, female flesh against a tapestry of vibrant color are the words: “Gives off seriously sexual vibes,” excerpted from a review in San Francisco Magazine. Klimt & Rodin showcases the two male artists’ interest in depicting the white female subject, an art historical mainstay since the splash of Praxiteles’s naked Aphrodite of Knidos. Vibrant colors and gilt dominates the non-figural spaces of Klimt’s canvases, but not the subjects’ bodies, which are rendered in light flesh tones, highlighted with pale yellows and pinks. Rodin’s sculptures, in contrast, are hewn from monochrome materials—marble, bronze, clay—with no surface treatments. If the “seriously sexual vibes” advertised on the billboard come from the expected space of white female (and feminized) subjectivity, the “artistic encounter” on display is one of medium—of painting’s uncontested polychrome in contrast to the insistent monochrome of modern sculpture.

This study focuses on the artworks of artist-academic İlker Yardımcı. The perspective put forward in the study is built on the aesthetic status of the scientific and technological aspects of İlker Yardımcı's artwork. Based on this context, a research has been done on the relationships between art and science. Various examples have been given from the times when art and science were seen as a whole and did not dissociate, and the development and separation process of these two separate phenomena were approached from various angles. In this way, in the light of the information obtained from the research, an aesthetic understanding that is open to the effects of science and technology, combining technological possibilities with traditional structures has been tried to be determined. Through this way, the possibility of an aesthetic narration was opened on the situation in the sculptures of İlker Yardımcı. Thus, the traces of the aesthetics in these sculptures, including science, were deciphered.

Toward a New Architecture is a manifesto written by Le Corbusier. The manifesto has seven essays under the title of argument. These essays can be listed as the engineer's aesthetic and architecture, three reminders to architecture, regulating lines, eyes which do not see, architecture, mass-production houses and architecture or revolution. Each of them, under an influence from Adolf Loos's ideas; are rejecting eclectism as common idea and heading to functualism.

Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for 1992, Society of Architectural Historians.
Most Outstanding Book in Architecture and Urban Planning, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers, Inc., 1991.
International Architecture Book Award, American Institute of Architects, 1992: "This is magisterial history with a grand sweep, an eye for detail and a determination not to simplify.  If Modern architecture in Italy over five generations was complex, paradoxical and full of counter-tendencies in any one architect, then these are lovingly pulled apart and exposed.""

In 1935 the Venice Biennale organized an atypical exhibition commemorating its 40th anniversary. The “Mostra dei Quarant’anni” was mostly devoted to art from the Triveneto. Yet four rooms showed works by European artists who had exhibited in the Biennale, and were part of the collections of the Gallerie d’Arte Moderna in Rome and Venice. The show reflected on the evolution of modern art and of the Biennale between 1895 and 1935, exemplifying the aesthetic criteria of Italian public collections at the time. It included many artists that are still considered part of the modernist canon but most of them are now all but forgotten. It thus represents an optimal case study to analyze renegotiations of the artistic canon. Furthermore, the “Mostra” played a key role in re-defining the international role of Venice within fascist artistic organization. As the “Mostra” took place in the gap year between two Biennales and received little support from governmental institutions, it is generally overlooked in the literature on the period. Yet, on the basis of unpublished archival documentation and of the digital reconstruction of these rooms, this paper argues that the “Mostra dei Quarant’anni” is crucial for our understanding of the history of the Biennale and of the cultural policies of the fascist state.

Both in literature and art, exponents of modernism sought new forms of expression that took into account changes in the social, economic, technical and political conditions of the time. A similar trend towards questioning outmoded forms of representation and establishing new ways of seeing has become apparent in European comics since the 1980s, a development that was initiated primarily in Italy and France. In Murmure (1989), Lorenzo Mat- totti invokes expressionism and centres his mystical tale on the individual’s inner being. In rejecting the representational norms traditionally applied to comics, Nicolas de Crécy also shows his allegiance to modernism yet reflects in his absurdly hyperrealist work, Foligatto (1991), the grotesque images of Otto Dix. The following article demonstrates how the two artists, despite the deliberate reversion to early twentieth-century art common to both, have, each in his own way, established a new approach to seeing in comics.

Keywords: expressionism, Foligatto, Italy, modernism, Murmure, new objectivity

The first female architecture student to study under Walter Gropius at the Harvard School of Design in the Post World War II era, Daphne Bugbee Jones was an accomplished architect who brought the principles of the Bauhaus and Modernist architecture to the state of Montana in America's Inland Northwest. Along with her husband, noted environmental philosopher Henry Bugbee, Bugbee Jones merged her commitment to Modernist design, social activism, and the preservation of wilderness in the urban interphase zone around the city of Missoula.

When Hemingway went to Paris, Hart Crane went to Mexico, along with hundreds of others in search of modernism, political action, and a distinctly New World culture.  In Mexico's American Bohemia those who would have otherwise been outsiders could thrive -- homosexuals and lesbians, African Americans, women in general.  Rene D'Harnancourt caught the Rockefeller's eye as a window dresser in Mexico City who collected folk art -- and Mexican modernism was championed by the new MoMA when D'Harnancourt joined the staff. Photography iin Mexico was strong -- Edward Weston and TIna Modotti its best known practitioners today; they were part of a rich community of writers (Katharine Anne Porter) movie makers (Sergei Eisenstein) and adventurers. After WW2, African American artists used the GI Bill to study in Mexico, where school and work opportunities were greater than in the US. The fine Craft movement flourished here. Black Mountain teachers vacationed here.

The image of female in art has remained a subject of interest since prehistoric age. Representation of female has left strong mark on the aesthetic sensibility of artists globally. Looking at the history of Pakistani Art, it is observed that the exquisiteness of female as an icon has influenced the creative practice of the local artists. Female as an image is represented by many artists with diversity of subject matter, medium and technique. This subject of artistic expression has left unique impact in the development of art which can easily be analyzed looking at the present account of Pakistani art.

Članak govori o Bijelom gradu, četvrti Tel Aviva s brojnim reprezentativnim primjerima građevina podignutih u stilu internacionalne moderne arhitekture u razdoblju između dva svjetska rata, a u povodu izložbe održane u Architekturzentrumu u Beču u prvoj polovini 2008.

The origins of modern photojournalism in Germany, during the yeas 1925-1933, is the central object of this dissertation. Checking popular illustrated magazines, such as Berlliner Illustrirte Zeitung, and their contemporary critics, one seeks to know if could understand them with a notion of “aesthetic of transparency”. In order to arrive at the empirical research, some notions about the modern and modernity were delineated, hoping to understand the cultural processes and regimes of visuality of the beginning of 1920s as its unfolding, as well as starting from some reflections of Charles Baudelaire to think the aesthetic experience of modernity and its relation with photography. In addition, it was tried to understand if a dialogue between realism and modernisms could be possible, within the German context. The Weimar Republic was thought of as a democratic space for political, economic and social rearticulation, in which photography would have been articulated by the artistic field such as Neues Sehen (New Vision), by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, and Neue Sachlichkeit Objectivity), by Albert Renger-Patzsch, exerting on the photographic production in journalism some of its conditions for its modernization. Finally, it was reflected on the modernization of the photojournalism in the Weimar Republic from the illustrated magazines study, based on the use of the photographic series potentially narrating journalistic facts, mainly from some photographs of Erich Salomon and Felix H. Man. This study allowed us to verify that the ripening of photojournalism met a demand of the German reading public for facts, reinforcing a certain professional ideology of objectivity. Having been possible by the coincidence of relations, as photographers willing to produce many images of various aesthetic forms under a diversity of conditions, allied to the freedom of editorial power and its experimentation, besides the rising of photographic agencies that began to order photographic work with the written report.

PhD dissertation: This dissertation examines how mass magazines framed American abstraction for a broad public during the years following the Second World War.  While art historians have devoted much attention to Abstract Expressionism’s place within the New York art establishment and its international promotion, the presentation of this and other art to the American public has been largely overlooked.  Most Americans who did not frequent museums and galleries or read art journals would have experienced art primarily in mass magazines such as Life, Time, Look, Newsweek, and The Saturday Evening Post.  This dissertation investigates how such magazines defined modern art and its role in postwar American culture for millions of readers.

During the late 1940s mass magazines portrayed modern art as a culturally divisive issue in articles that ridiculed abstraction, describing it as a mediocre European derivation that required no skill and questioning whether it was art at all or actually a highbrow hoax on middle America.  As American abstraction gained support from art institutions and markets in the 1950s, magazines depicted modern art as a commonplace consumer object, a stylistic choice that demonstrated both the consumer’s personality and capitalist freedom.  By the end of the decade, mass magazines characterized Abstract Expressionism as the embodiment of American freedom and individualism, the leading international style, and an asset in the cultural Cold War.  Yet letters to the editors reveal that readers were still not convinced of the value of abstract art.  These mass magazine representations of abstract painting and readers’ responses to it constructed both a vision of postwar American culture and a middle American public for it.

Pour la philosophie des sciences, un paradigme
est la matrice disciplinaire adoptée
par une communauté scientifique. Il constitue
et délimite le champ, la logique et la pratique
à suivre de l’étude même : il identifie
l’objet d’étude de la recherche scientifique, les
problèmes auxquels on ne peut déroger et la
meilleure technique pour les affronter. Dans
son application, un paradigme est la conjonction
d’expériences, étayées par des maquettes,
qui peuvent être étudiées ou répétées. Le paradigme
prédominant est souvent une façon particulière
de voir la réalité : davantage et autre
chose qu’une méthode scientifique générale.....

Folding screens, known as byôbu in Japanese, are treasures within any museum’s collection and are beloved by the general public. This beautiful publication brings together the very finest screens from the world-renowned collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Saint Louis Art Museum. The featured works range from an extraordinary pair of landscapes by Sesson Shukei, a Zen-Buddhist monk-painter of the late 16th century, to daring contemporary works from the late 20th century.

The first half of the Edo period (1615–1868) is especially well represented, with a dozen screens from the 17th century by such masters as Kano Koi and Tosa Mitsuoki. The contemporary scene is also well covered, with ten examples from the 20th century—proving the longevity of this art form and its currency among modern-day artists. Enlightening essays by important scholars in the field cover topics like the emergence of screens as an art form and a novel discussion of the relationship of Japanese screens to those made in other countries.

This is the introduction ("Bearings") to my 1998 book The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, together with the closing two sections of Ch. 5 "Modernisms and Modernities" discussing the arts in interwar Prague.  The book was published by Princeton University Press.  These "deep cuts" are taken from New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central & East European Politics and International Relations (Vol. 26,No. 2(S)/2018) that was devoted to my work.

Insofar as semiology examines language synchronically, there is question about its application within a specifically art-historical discourse. A productive test case for analysing the potential conjunctions and disjunctions between art historiography and semiology is the re-examination of Cubism by October critics Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. At the 1989 Picasso and Braque symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art, both Bois and Krauss presented important papers that utilized semiology as an interpretative method for elucidating the collages and papier collés of Synthetic Cubism. In both of their presentations, historiographic questions and the inaugural character of collage are repeatedly highlighted. Bois' essay exhibits an effort to think through the process that led to the epistemological break of the paper collés, and for Krauss the issue of art-historical method is raised, particular the antimony between formalist versus socio-historical paradigms. This paper explores the semiological approaches taken by Bois and Krauss and considers their fecundity for the art-historical study of Synthetic Cubism. However, in doing so, it seeks to resist the notion that Cubism is viewed through the lens of semiology as if such a theoretical approach merely constitutes an interpretative model that can used or not. On the contrary, this paper aims to suggest that Cubist collage functions as a model: firstly, as a model for understanding semiology rather than vice versa, and secondly as a model for our art-historical accounts of Cubism. By examining how Cubist collage establishes the condition of possibility for its interpretation, I hope additionally to shed light on October's overall turn from art criticism engaged with theorizing contemporary art to a more genealogical writing that will define the journal's output from the late 1990s onwards. That is to say, collage becomes a potential model for art history tout court.

Two exhibitions concurrently held at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Quilty and Margaret Olley: A Generous Life, encouraged a dialogue, highlighting the mythologised lineage connecting the two artists. Though the intuitive pairing encouraged a thoughtful retrospective of Olley’s oeuvre, the disparate curatorial agendas produced an unfavourable comparison. As this review elucidates, the thematic anchor of A Generous Life (Olley’s generosity) made Quilty’s focus on the individual—of Quilty himself, as a celebrity artist, and of his subjects whom he disentangles from the broader context and politics of war—all the more pronounced.

The topic of pederasty in "The Sisters" has attracted extensive commentary. In this discussion, the boy's confusion, growing up at the crux of two views of masculinity, has not been explored. Moreover, Father Flynn's nostalgic view of boyhood, and his dependency on the company of the boy, also warrants exploration. Furthermore, little has been made of the boy's antagonistic relationship with Father Flynn's sisters, as there is evidence in the story that the boy is considered corruptive. It is my contention that pederasty is not the larger issue, as in another context, this could be contested. Rather, the boundary between the boy and adults is constructed across two opposing ideals of masculinity, obliterating any possibility of contestation. Subsequently, sentient and reflexive aspects of the boy's characterization deviate from how children are viewed by adult characters in Dubliners.

The Authors, while making references to the literature on Symbolism in visual arts and literature, reinterpret Polish painting of the turn of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, placing it both within the context of the native artistic tradition and European early modernism. By juxtaposing the notions of ‘Symbolism’ and ‘Young Poland’, they bring forth Symbolism as the tendency dominating in the process of modernist transformations embedded in the cultural formation of Young Poland which encompassed several disciplines of thought and art, and a variety of artistic attitudes not bound by a single goal and one exclusive program. The book’s discourse refers to Young Poland as a broad current that spans the Romantic legacy of the passing century with the ambitions of the young generation of artists sensitive to the innovative aura of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. A culmination in the development of national culture, Young Poland summed up the intellectual accomplishments of the nineteenth century, at the same time opening up a perspective of artistic experimentation to be yielded in the decades to come.

The book presents Polish Symbolism as a perfect synthesis of idiosyncratic national components and aesthetic formulae adopted from European modernism. The Authors disclose a specific syncretism of the trend consisting in transposition and amalgamation of iconographic motifs, morphological elements and expressive qualities frequently regarded as antithetic factors. They modify the well-established chronological caesurae marking the beginning and the end of Polish Symbolism, and analyze the process in which this multilayered trend of diversified genealogy, rich subject matter, and heterogeneous morphology was shaped. While enhancing the main tendencies inherent to Symbolism (historicism, mysticism, pantheism, proto-expressionism, intimism, Japonism), they also explore artistic phenomena (folklorist, decorative) that diverged from the Symbolist presumptions, yet coexisted with Symbolism as an integral component of the Young Poland movement.

The narrative pinpoints topics peculiar to Polish Symbolism, while emphasizing the artists’ search for new visual language, and showing both convergent and opposing artistic approaches. Based on purposefully constructed sequences of images, it leads to the cultural centre of Young Poland, i.e. Krakow, it speaks of syncretistic interpretations of ancient myths and folk legends, evokes the decadent poetics of death, eroticism and Satanism, provides a glimpse at Parisian nooks haunted by demons and artificial paradises of bourgeois drawing-rooms, shows nocturnal and sunlit Italian sights, severe Breton, Scandinavian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian landscapes, explores the mythicized enclave of Polish countryside.

The Authors also describe the internal evolution of Polish Symbolism and a gradual fading away of catastrophic comprehension of history manifest in the trend. Initiated by metaphors of the nation’s tragic fate and eschatological visions rendered in monumental formats it concluded with intimate images of home Arcadia. In the 1910s everyday reality was returning to art, though no longer in a mimetic formula, as in the paintings of nineteenth century naturalists, but in a stylized and decorative manner, being engaged in a dialogue with the artistic tradition of Europe and the aesthetic predilections of the Parisian Post-Impressionists and the Nabis.

The abundant illustrative material incorporated in the book encompasses the canon of Polish turn-of-the-nineteenth-century painting, as well as little-known and previously unpublished works coming from public and private collections.