20th Century Art Research Articles

Demystifying Adolphe Appia: Understanding the Influences on Modern Stage Design

The 19th Century stage had many influences, not the least of which was Richard Wagner. Adolphe Appia sought to correct Wagner's staging mistakes; but Appia's understanding of stage technology was weak. He was not on the same level as those who worked, designed and produced in the theatre as a profession. Those individuals had to solve the problems and limitations of the 19th Century stage with the emerging technologies of lighting and stage construction. Appia is best known for his essays and accompanying stage renderings which sought only to revolutionize the Wagnerian stage. He only executed a few of his designs and only one was in a legitimate theatre. Theatre had become a middle class activity in the 19th Century, but it's aesthetic style drew from painters and artists. The artists who collaborated with theatre had more to do with changing the 19th Century stage than one individual. Edvard Munch set the emotional tone in his paintings for the early part of the 20th Century. He was friends with August Strindberg and was admired by Ibsen. Max Reinhardt used Munch's set design for his production of Ibsen's Ghosts at the Kammerspiele Theatre in 1906. What was the relationship between art and theatre in the early 20th Century and to what effect?

Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)

Michelle Facos is professor of art history at Indiana University. She is an expert in 19th-century European art, especially Scandinavian. I have been following Facos’ studies since 2005, when I started my Ph.D. research in Finnish art. Her book Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Painting in the 1890s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) led me through Swedish art and National Romanticism in Northern countries. In her new book, Facos explores Symbolist art within several contexts, with a modern approach to the study of this influential movement.

Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and beyond: post-Impressionist masterpieces from the Musee d'Orsay

This book explores the explosive arrival of modern art in Europe. Featuring 114 of some of the best-known works of modern art which draw millions of tourists to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, one of the great museums of 19th-century art. Famous works include van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles 1889, Gauguin's Tahitian women 1891, Cezanne's beloved Mount Saint-Victoire c 1890, as well as many other great examples of Post-Impressionist art.

V pasteh interpretacijskih optik: Beležka o napredku

Prispevek opozarja ne neenovita pota umetnosti 20. stoletja, brez enoznačne usmeritve, ki bi jo lahko imeli za pregledno zgodovinsko postopnost, ki bi ji »pristajal« pojem napredovanja. Predlaga raziskave umetniške prakse in historiografskega gradiva, ki bi ugotovile pogojnost in omejeno uporabnost pojma napredek ter hkrati pokazale njegovo ideološko učinkovanje na obeh področjih. Opozarja na spremembe temeljnih podmen umetnosti 20. st. ter modelov opazovanja in opisovanja umetniških dosežkov.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Centuryby Ross Alex . New York, Farrar , Straus and Giroux , 2008 , 704 pp., $30.00 .

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Centuryby Ross Alex . New York, Farrar , Straus and Giroux , 2008 , 704 pp., $30.00 .

Art for all: British posters for transport

In 1908 London Underground began a comprehensive publicity program that became one of the most successful, adventurous, and best-sustained promotional operations ever attempted. The posters commissioned not only encouraged travel on the capital's burgeoning public transport system; they also helped to foster a civic identity for metropolitan London. The four national rail lines created in 1923, inspired by this example, created their own campaigns. This richly illustrated volume celebrates the designs, highlighting works that are among the triumphs of 20th-century poster art. Designed to accompany an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, Art for All features more than one hundred works executed for the Underground and the railways. The exhibition and catalogue will explore the evolution of transport posters in 20th-century Britain. It will feature the career of E. McKnight Kauffer, perhaps the greatest of these poster artists; the role of women designers; the printing techniques that brought the designs to life; and the strategies of display developed by the transport systems. Both a visual delight and a work of scholarship, Art for All pays tribute to these extraordinary exploits in public design.

Dress behind bars: prison clothing as criminality

Research for this sole-authored book was undertaken during AHRC-funded Research Leave (2007). It represents Ash’s expertise as a dress historian and interest in the history and current organisation of prisons, which evolved from her teaching experience in Holloway women’s prison and Wakefield top security men’s prison in the 1970s. Crossing the disciplines of dress history, social history and film studies, this is the first book to examine the history of prisoners' clothing. Focusing on UK, American and European prison clothing, this history analyses waves of reform, sandwiched between regimes of punishing clothing restraints. Prison clothing, as Ash demonstrates, raises issues of regional, colonial, post-colonial, gender, fashion and class variations, contested by collective, political and individual tactics devised by inmates to survive and subvert cultures of punishment. This book is based on research into penal history, dress history in relation to uniforms and corporeal identity, criminological debates, oral histories, and 19th- and 20th-century prison art and literature. Material from correspondence and interviews with prisoners, prison reform groups, those who work as designers in prisons, and curators of prison photography and dress informed the study. To demonstrate the value of the clothes themselves to researchers, Ash also wrote an article for the Journal of Design History on ‘The prison uniforms collection at the galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, UK’ (2011). The book was reviewed by journals including Journal of Design History (2011), British Journal of Criminology (2011), Textile History (2011), Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology (2010) and Crime Media Culture (2010). Related talks included ‘Prison clothing as political resistance’ at NCAD Dublin (2010). BBC Radio 4 made the book the focus of an episode of Thinking Allowed (2009), and Ash was interviewed about women prisoners' attitudes to uniforms and prison clothing for ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2013).

The prototype in 20th-century art

This article examines the complex relation between science, technology and art at the close of the 19th century, which provoked a critical engagement with the notion of the prototype among modernist artists such as Duchamp, Klee, Kandinsky and Vasareli, among many others. Little attention has been given so far to the extent to which the prototype featured both as physical model and as conceptual strategy, and the way it traverses the artistic landscape of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. By drawing attention to the conscious investment of the prototypical in the art of the early 20th century, this article reflects on the concept of the prototype, whose emergent beauty signalled its impending irrelevance.

The Autopoiesis of the Artworld after the End of Art

This article critically adapts and applies the views of Niklas Luhmann on the social system of art. Luhmann’s systems theory does not have an adequate account of ‘the artworld’. Yet by conceiving of the artworld as an autopoietic social system, Luhmann’s highly original work can be brought to bear in the sociology of art. This article applies that work by reviewing some historical changes in the autoreference of the artworld as a social system and the type of reference of works of art in the same periods. While 20th-century art saw the dominance of autoreference, which replaced a century-old mimetic reference to reality (social, natural or transcendent), current art seems to be moving in the direction of ‘defamiliarization’, taking social reality as its referent. While some philosophers have noted the ‘end of art’, contemporary art seems to be moving more in the direction of some form of sociology.

Alternative Histories of Soviet Visual Culture

Alternative Histories of Soviet Visual Culture Oliver Johnson (bio) Mikhail Allenov , Teksty o tekstakh (Texts on Texts). 397 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003. ISBN 5867932133. Ekaterina Degot' , "Mysliashchii realizm: Spetsial'nyi proekt 2-i Moskovskoi biennale sovremennogo iskusstva" (Thinking Realism: A Special Project of the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Modern Art). 120 pp. World Art Muzei, no. 26 (2007). Galina Iankovskaia , Iskusstvo, den'gi i politika: Khudozhnik v gody pozdnego stalinizma (Art, Money, and Politics: The Artist in the Years of Late Stalinism). 312 pp. Perm': Perm' State University, 2007. ISBN 5794408553. Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture. 284 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. ISBN-13 978-0300119619. $26.00. Aleksandr Morozov , Sotsrealizm i realizm (Socialist Realism and Realism). 271 pp. Moscow: Galart, 2007. ISBN-13 978-5269010519. Igor' Narskii, Oksana Nagornaia, Ol'ga Nikonova, Boris Rovnyi, and Iuliia Khmelevskaia, eds., Oche-vidnaia istoriia: Problemy vizual'noi istorii Rossii XX stoletiia. Sbornik statei (Eye-Witnessed History: Problems in the Visual [End Page 581] History of Russia in the 20th Century. A Collection of Articles). 479 pp. Cheliabinsk: Kamennyi poias, 2008. ISBN-13 978-5887710679. Ol'ga Roitenberg , Neuzheli kto-to vspomnil chto my byli...: Iz istorii khudozhestvennoi zhizni 1925-1935 (Surely Somebody Remembers That We Existed...: From the History of Artistic Life, 1925-35). 559 pp. Moscow: Galart, 2008. ISBN 978-5269010632. How do we know what the Soviet Union looked like? The complexity of answering this apparently innocuous question should not be underestimated. A spontaneous response might be: we know what it looked like because there are photographs, films, works of art, buildings, monuments, even entire cities from which we can see for ourselves. Certainly this visual record is a valuable historical document, which allows us to view certain features of the Soviet cultural environment, but it does not provide a historical context for what we are seeing. Much of the visual environment of the Soviet Union was constructed in the image of a future socialist utopia, yet the sociopolitical reality of this promise was left unfulfilled. To "look back" on Soviet culture is to invest it with the significance of subsequent events and to mold our interpretations according to contemporary models: fatalism, nostalgia, irony, and prejudice are some of the more common features of a post-Soviet cultural history. A challenge faced by scholars is to negotiate these obstacles in order to consider the visual environment of the Soviet Union not as a unique and isolated aesthetic phenomenon but as part of a coherent narrative of 20th-century culture based on a dialogue that spans historical periods and political boundaries. A representation of this problem is provided by a recent exhibition in the new Garazh Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow by the acclaimed artist couple Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, titled Al'ternativnaia istoriia iskusstv (An Alternative History of Art).1 This ambitious "total installation" explores the constructed narrative of 20th-century Russian art through the device of a transgenerational group exhibition.2 The Kabakovs present the audience with a chronological story that traces the creative dialogue of three fictitious artists: Charles Rosenthal, a student of Marc Chagall who attempts to reconcile the [End Page 582] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Charles Rosenthal, 12 Commentaries on Suprematism, #3 pure forms of Suprematism with the socially applied art of Socialist Realism (Figure 1); an alternative Ilya Kabakov, a provincial Soviet artist of the 1970s who finds inspiration in the work of Rosenthal; and Igor Spivak, a Ukrainian artist of the post-Soviet generation who is nostalgic for the straightforward optimism of Soviet socialism. This is not the first Kabakov exhibition to feature these fictional characters, but it is the most comprehensive, comprising a huge number of works arranged through 33 rooms of a specially constructed gallery space sealed off within the vast hall of Konstantin Mel'nikov's constructivist landmark, the Bakmet'evskii Garazh.3 It is also part of a much-publicized return to Russia by Kabakov, who has not exhibited in his home country since his emigration to the United States in 1988.4 An Alternative History of Art is an exhibition that explores...

Alias Man Ray: the art of reinvention

[An artist] so deforms the subject as almost to hide the identity of the original, and creates a new form.-Man Ray Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, the artist known as Man Ray (1890-1976) revealed multiple artistic identities over the course of his career-New York Dadaist, Parisian Surrealist, international portraitist, and fashion photographer--and produced important works as a photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer, and maker of objects. Alias Man Ray considers how the artist's life and career were shaped by his turn-of-the-century American Jewish immigrant experience and his lifelong evasion of his past. As an exploration of the artist's deliberate cultural ambiguity, which allowed him to become the first American artist to be accepted by the Paris avant garde, this book examines the dynamic connection between Man Ray's working-class origins, his assimilation, the evolution of his art, and his willful construction of his own artistic persona, as evidenced in a series of subtle, encrypted self-references throughout the artist's career. Beautifully illustrated, Alias Man Ray will stand as a definitive study of an incomparable figure in 20th-century art.

Lajos Fülep: On Art and Architecture

Fülep, Lajos (1885-1970) - Hungarian philosopher, art historian. One of the dominant, though partly forgotten, figures in 20th century Hungarian art philosophy and art history. Some experts regard his oeuvre as a being dated, and for this reason consider it unnecessary to study his work however there are a number who consider him ``the creator of modern Hungarian art history´´, and the real founder of the methodological approach called ``Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte´´ (art history as the history of ideas/spirit), even preceding the works of Max Dvorak in this field. This paper looks at his writings on architecture and on art philosophy related to architecture. The titles in order of appearance: The role of the memory in the artistic creation (1911), Hungarian Architecture (1918), Expedience and art in the architecture (1944), A great opportunity in the rebuilding of Budapest and the country (1948).

Empirical relationships between beauty and justice: Testing Scarry and elaborating Danto.

Elaine Scarry (1999) proposes a correspondence between engagement with beauty and a sense of justice.Parallel to Scarry, Arthur Danto (2003) posits that 20th century artists avoided producing beautiful worksbecause of an offended sense of justice. In Study 1, the relationship between justice reasoning (DIT2;Rest et al., 1999a) and engagement with beauty (Diessner et al., 2008) is examined; there is a significantraw correlation ( r .23; p .05; N 132), which reduced to a nonsignificant r .01 when Opennessto Experience was partialed out. Study 2 examines the relationship between fairness as a characterstrength (cf. Peterson & Seligman, 2004) and engagement with beauty, finding a raw r .35, p .001(N 113). After partialing out Openness to Experience the r is .25, significant at p .009. Althoughthere is no significant association between justice reasoning and engagement with beauty, whenjustice/fairness is viewed as a character strength, Scarry’s hypothesis is empirically validated. Thus,justice-minded artists need not avoid beauty, as beautiful art may increase viewers’ sensitivity to justice.Keywords: beauty, justice, DIT, character strengths, trait fairness

O SURREALISMO NA LITERATURA BRASILEIRA

A survey of surrealist writing in Brazilian literature after the turn of the century, with reference to its various stages, publications and authors. A pathfinding and provocative study of a style that left its imprint on 20th-century arts and letters.

Exilios en la <i>Bauhaus</i>

The Bauhaus movement during the Weimar Republic is one of the most relevant events in 20th century art. Its importance is based on the absolute transformation of the aesthetic values. The human aspect of the Bauhaus brought together the paths of the artists’ lives. Walter Gropius was the undisputed soul of the School. While the socialist ideology of its members as well as its avantgarde artistic scheme furthered its success, they also caused its downfall and its persecution by the Nazis. The majority of the members of the Bauhaus had no choice but to go into exile.

Imagining Our Ancient Future Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism by Cathy Gere University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009. 287 pp. $27.50, £19. ISBN 9780226289533.

Gere explores how Arthur Evans's often-fanciful interpretations of Minoan civilization (as pacifist, matriarchal, and sexually free), religion, and architecture influenced 20th-century European writers, artists, and intellectuals.

No Country for young people? Anxieties in Australian society and education

Australia is often portrayed as a place in which young people are in jeopardy. In 19th century literature and art, the recurring motif of a child lost in “the bush” became an increasingly significant dimension of European settlers’ experiences of Australia, whereas during the latter half of the 20th century analogous cultural narratives shifted towards urban environments and the plight of young people endangered by their parents’ generation. In contemporary popular culture, Australia’s cities and suburbs are places where children are aborted, abandoned, exploited, murdered or never conceived. Like the bush-lost children before them, these “at risk” young people symbolise adult fears of self, society, and the future. My concern is that the most common public policy response to these persistent fears and insecurities is to retreat to a politics of complexity reduction. Many politicians and public opinion leaders see teachers and schools as being in the vanguard of people and institutions dedicated to Australian children’s educational ruin, and simplistically seek to “protect” them with blunt instruments such as back-to-phonics literacy and a national curriculum. I argue that Australia’s young people are much more seriously endangered by the symbolic violence of those who position them as docile receptors of whatever schools and teachers serve up to them, and who treat them as passive screens upon which to project their own anxieties.

Connections between Modern and Postmodern Art and Fashion

ABSTRACTThis paper undertakes to construe the affinities and divergences in the genres of art and fashion throughout the 20th century through the use of particular visual and theoretical examples, examined at greater length in a more extensive study of ‘The relationship between the artist and the fashion designer in the twentieth century’ (Vettese, 2005). Examination of the 20th century has revealed two particular periods – ‘Modernism’ and ‘Postmodernism’ – that were evident and fitting to this analysis. The research is a summation of these findings, where the differences and affinities in the mechanisms of 20th century art and fashion, including imposing messages and innovation in Modernism and the mixed messages, recycling and commercial aspects of Postmodernism, are disseminated.

Fetishes & Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century, by Roger Sansi.

<i>Fetishes &amp; Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20^th Century</i>, by Roger Sansi.

Heisenberg, Kandinsky, and the Heteromethod Convergence Problem: Lessons From Within and Beyond Psychology

During the past 100 years, advances in personality assessment have paralleled key events in art and physics; but for the most part, these parallels have gone unrecognized. In this article, I discuss the ways in which 2 movements in 20th-century art (cubism and nonrepresentational painting) and 2 principles from 20th-century physics (the uncertainty principle and the observer effect) combined to create an intellectual context for the process dissociation approach to personality assessment, a research strategy wherein naturally occurring influences on test scores are deliberately manipulated to illuminate underlying response processes. I discuss core elements of a process-focused paradigm for 21st-century personality assessment including (a) the need for researchers to explore test score divergences as well as convergences, (b) a view of the assessor as active shaper (rather than dispassionate observer) of testee behavior, and (c) the importance of integrating personality assessment concepts and methods with ideas and findings from disciplines within and outside psychology.