Artistic Decline Research Articles

Kaluga icon painting: on the issue of the integrity and boundaries of the artistic phenomenon

As the title implies, the article provides a general overview of the Kaluga iconography as a unique regional iconographic tradition that formed in the 2nd half of the 18th century. The primary parameters of this phenomenon are identified, including technological, iconographic, and stylistic factors. Based of archival data and historical evidence, Kaluga’ icons are defined a number of monuments executed in the technique of tempera painting in a specific stylistic manner, for the most part inheriting of artistic direction named “zhivopodobie”. The main iconographic features of the products of the Kaluga icon painters are revealed, in particular, the iconographic renderings of Christ the Almighty and the Mother of God "The Life-Giving Spring" common in Kaluga. It also provides a classification of the main stylistic lines in the Kaluga icon painting, which took shape at the end of the 18th century. The question of the chronological boundaries of the phenomenon is considered. Based on the analysis undertaken, Kaluga iconography is determined to be a full-fledged center of regional icon painting that forms part of a broader context of late iconography. On the one hand, Kaluga's iconography aligns with general trends, with its unique writing style appearing in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, overtly influenced by significant European styles, and experiencing artistic decline in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the Kaluga iconography distinguishes itself through its singular stylistic and iconographic peculiarities, sufficient to demarcate it as a distinct artistic center.

Errant Kinship, Traveling Song: James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head

This article considers James Baldwin’s last published novel, Just Above My Head (1979), as the culmination of his exploration of kinship, reflecting on the ways distance and loss characterize African-American familial relations. By analyzing Baldwin’s representation of Hall Montana’s relationship to, and mourning of, his younger brother Arthur, this article argues that JAMH revises the terms of the black family to imagine an alternative, errant kinship that is adoptive, migratory, and sustained through songs of joy and grief. My approach to the novel’s portrayal of kinship is indebted to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990), in which he defines “errantry” as a fundamental characteristic of diaspora that resists the claustrophobic, filial violence and territorial dispossession that are slavery’s legacies. Baldwin represents errant kinship in JAMH through his inclusion of music and formal experimentation. Departing from previous scholarship that reads JAMH as emblematic of the author’s artistic decline, I interpret the novel’s numerous syntactic and figurative experiments as offering new formal insight into his portrait of brotherly love. Baldwin’s integration of two distinctive leitmotifs, blood and song, is therefore read as a formal gesture toward a more capacious and migratory kinship.

On Andrii Malyshko’s “Second Birth”

The cultural policy of the USSR provided for the deliberate displacement of Ukrainian (like every other national language) to the naive provincial periphery of the “great art” of the mighty Soviet Union, supposedly possible solely in the sphere of the Russian language. The renewed Soviet ideologization of literature in the postwar years led to a sharp decline in the artistic level of all literary fields. But even against the background of this general artistic decline, the caricaturised burlesque and travesty-like artificiality of Andrii Malyshko’s (1912–1970) poetry of the time is impressive. Malyshko’s so-called “second birth” in his late period represents a rare in its purity instance, where we can observe an ontological conflict of language and ideology that a Ukrainian artist of the Soviet period resolves in favor of language. Malyshko created not provincial peripheral streams, but a strong artistic and philosophical alternative to the blind, technocratic, and miserable in its Russified nature, imperial reality.

How Disgust Works: Truman Capote's “La Côte Basque”

Many Truman Capote critics consider his short story “La Cote Basque” to be the beginning of his artistic decline, a consideration anchored in the presumption that the story is disgusting. Drawing upon theories of affect and narrative, I argue that disgust is transitive, and offer a reinterpretation of the story as one about how disgust works, in both narrative and discourse, to critique the elite with whom Capote was associated. Considering the transitivity of disgust also facilitates a reexamination of critical responses to the story as a redirection of disgust away from the elites Capote critiqued onto the author himself. This reassessment demonstrates how disgust works as a key component of the riseand-fall narrative of Capote’s career that critics continue to perpetuate. Examining how disgust works in “La Cote Basque” and its reception therefore encourages a reassessment of the story, its author, and the construction of his critical legacy.

Mendelssohn's Other Concerto: The Changing Reception of the Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 40, in D minor

Felix Mendelssohn's two mature piano concertos, Op. 25 in G minor (1831–32) and Op. 40 in D minor (1837), were widely performed in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the D-minor Concerto fell completely out of favor and came to be regarded as a work the composer had completed hurriedly. However, the numerous extant autograph sources for the second Concerto reveal that Mendelssohn considered it worthy of the meticulous revision customary of his major artistic efforts. The problematic reception of the D-minor Concerto was due to a convergence of factors, not the least of which was the highly favorable reception of its predecessor, Op. 25, deemed historically significant due to its formal innovations. But more subtle forces also shaped the decline of Op. 40, including a perceived seriousness of musical content as opposed to popularizing virtuosic display, as well as a long history of performance by women and amateurs rather than male virtuosi. In addition, the second Piano Concerto's biographical association with Mendelssohn's 1837 honeymoon and thus with modern critiques of his all too happy, “bourgeois” marriage linked the work to a larger anti-Semitic narrative of a supposed artistic decline.

Business, Sex, and Ethics in The Wayward Bus

Most critics consider The Wayward Bus , published in 1947, inferior book, evidence of Steinbecks alleged artistic decline after his great works of the 1930s. Warren French, for example, claims that the book is loaded with hokey symbolism and is disappointingly banal.1 Jackson Benson calls the characters among [Steinbecks] least lifelike and convincing.2 Roy Simmonds sums up the scholarly criticism by concluding that The Wayward Bus is book of stereotyped characters and . . . worn-out themes that completely fail to address the problems and preoccupations of the times.3 Whatever the defects of The Wayward Bus , it deserves more careful reading than it usually receives. In fact, Simmonds is wrong to criticize the book for not addressing the problems of postwar America. Peter Lisca is closer to the mark when he notes that The Wayward Bus (along with Cannery Row and The Pearl) represents an examination of the underlying assumptions of modern civilization.4 Howard Levant makes similar point when he calls the novel a trenchant, accurate portrayal of the darker side of the American dream.5

The Closure of the Crown Film Unit in 1952: Artistic Decline or Political Machinations?

The Crown Film Unit produced some of the most famous documentary films of the Second World War, including such productions as Target for Tonight, Listen to Britain and Fires Were Started. It continued making films for the post-war Labour government until it became one of the first casualties of the new Conservative government early in 1952. This article examines and concludes that its eventual demise was caused by such mundane factors such as cost overruns, poor organisation and a collapse of creativity rather than as a result of a Conservative-inspired political vendetta against an internationally acclaimed socialist propaganda machine.

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ENAMELED AND GILDED GLASS MADE FOR THE MAMLUKS: THE END OF AN ERA, THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ONE

The present article deals with fifteenth-century production of enameled and gilded glass in the Mamluk period, a little known aspect of an industry that saw its heyday during the late thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth. Usually dismissed as virtually non-existent after the turn of the fifteenth century, the scale and technical and artistic qualities of Mamluk glass unquestionably declined; four surviving mosque lamps, however, help to reconstruct an essential history of the craft in Cairo from the 1410s to the 1470s. These four lamps, which are very similar to the well-known fourteenth-century production in shape, dimensions, and decorative program, include enameled and gilded inscriptions that mention the names of their patrons and can therefore be studied in an appropriate context. Two lamps are dedicated to the Mamluk sultan al-Mu'ayyad Abu Nasr Shaykh (r. 1412-21) and were specifically made for his madrasa (Qur'anic school) built in 1410-15. The third one carries the name of the powerful emir Qani-bay al-Jarkasi (d. 1462), who served in various important positions under the rule of the sultan al-Malik al-Zahir Jaqmaq (r. 1438-53). The last lamp is in the name of the sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf Qait-bay (r. 1468-96). While there is no question that the first three lamps were made in a Cairene workshop, thus offering evidence of both a continuity of production and an obvious artistic decline, the object in Qait-bay's name has always been regarded as an export of European origin (Venice or, more recently, Barcelona) on the basis of its decoration and of the presumed disappearance of the industry in Egypt in the late fifteenth century. In the article, I suggest that, after all, Qait-bay's lamp may represent the swan song of a declining production in Cairo before the demise of the Mamluks and the Ottoman conquest.

Forward Soviet! History and Non-Fiction Film in the USSR , and: Zhivye golosa kino: govoriat vydaiushchiesia mastera otechestvennogo kinoiskusstva (30-e–40-e gody). Iz neopublikovannogo (review)

Reviewed by: Forward Soviet! History and Non-Fiction Film in the USSR, and: Zhivye golosa kino: govoriat vydaiushchiesia mastera otechestvennogo kinoiskusstva (30-e–40-e gody). Iz neopublikovannogo Sergei Kapterev Graham Roberts, Forward Soviet! History and Non-Fiction Film in the USSR. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999. xii + 196 pp. ISBN 1-86064-282-9. $39.50. Lev A. Parfenov, ed. Zhivye golosa kino: govoriat vydaiushchiesia mastera otechestvennogo kinoiskusstva (30-e–40-e gody). Iz neopublikovannogo. Moscow: Belyi bereg, 1999. 434 pp. ISBN 5-89652-008-5. The formal dissolution of the Soviet system of thought and behavior has imparted to the phenomenon of the Soviet cinema a finality that, one could expect, would be conducive to the appearance of comprehensive monographs employing advanced methodologies of contemporary film scholarship. Such developments as the close correlation of stylistic patterns and technological innovations, new advances in the field of film semiotics, the influence of cultural studies, the "decentralization" of historiographical research (with greater significance attached to "peripheral" micronarratives and clusters of factual material), and more precise and systematic techniques of textual analysis, all might well be combined with unprecedented opportunities in the realm of archival research.1 Unfortunately, these expectations have remained largely unfulfilled. Too bad: the diversity of Soviet cinema – qualitative, experimental, and paradoxical – can be a stimulus both for cinema studies and the study of Soviet history. Its sad record of unfulfilled creativity – together with a much more optimistic record of resiliency and resistance in the face of formidable ideological pressure, and no less formidable conformity – are likely to retain their didactic value for the foreseeable future. Two recent publications selected for this review provide a glimpse of how the history of the Soviet cinema is treated today outside and inside Russia. The aim of this selection is to compare methodologies and ideologies characterizing contemporary scholarship and to try to establish some of the key issues which, in the opinion of this author, may be blamed for the gnoseological delays in the reassessment of the Soviet cinema's 70-year-long development. [End Page 815] In a time when attacking "grand narratives" has become a norm, British film scholar Graham Roberts's Forward Soviet! is a welcome return to older patterns of storytelling. Describing and analyzing the development of Soviet documentary ("non-fiction") film from its pre-revolutionary origins and first propagandist efforts of the Civil War to the pioneering cinematic exposés of the glasnost' era (the last work in the filmography is a TV production shown in 1989), Roberts concentrates his attention on outstanding talents and works, emphasizing quality and inventiveness. This makes his book both a historiographical work and a treatise on documentary aesthetics: cinematic representations of actuality are evaluated as products of and comments on parallel historical events, and in accordance with their contribution to the development of cinematic art. In seven chapters, the author covers the most significant stages in the development of the Soviet documentary, analyzing its creative growth in the first years of Soviet cinema, the causes of its artistic decline, and, later, partial rebirth in the course of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. More often than not, Soviet documentary film exemplified political aesthetics, and Roberts's approach leads the reader to reflect on the dangerous beauty of inspired and sophisticated propaganda. The historical sublime is the object – and the source – of most important examples of the Soviet documentary tradition: Dziga Vertov's delirious advertising of urbanism, industrialization, and communist enterprise; Esfir Shub's assemblage-like historical chronicles; and epic accounts of the Great Patriotic War created by Soviet filmmakers, associated with both non-fiction and fiction cinema, in the 1940s. Knowledge of the enormous losses, crimes, and defeats that constitute the tragic material of Soviet history and that were not allowed to be recorded on film, cannot but make one consider even the most optimistic and aesthetically satisfying Soviet "non-fiction" films as documents of sorrow, as episodes in a grandiose social and human drama. However, the historical and the political do not undermine the artistic: they merge and supplement one another. Roberts points out the "apparent paradox" represented by the willingness of non-fiction filmmakers "to adapt their creative...

Gucci or Göller? Architectural Theory Past and Present

The nocturnal sky shows glimmering nebulas among the splendid miracle of stars—either old extinct systems scattered throughout the universe, or cosmic dust taking shape around a nucleus, or a condition in between destruction and regeneration. They are a suitable analogy for similar events on the horizon of art history. They are signs of a world of art passing into the formless, while suggesting at the same time a new formation in the making. This phenomenon of artistic decline and the mysterious phoenixlike birth of new artistic life arising from the process of its destruction is all the more significant for us, because we are probably in the midst of a similar crisis. Gottfried Semper Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or Practical Aesthetics (1860)

Art, Ideology, and Entertainment in Soviet Cinema

The historical simultaneity of cinema's emergence as a mass medium and the Bolshevik revolution virtually determined that the new regime would appropriate film as a key weapon of mass persuasion. Lenin's famous dictum that us the most important of all arts is the captures the ambition to appropriate all means available, especially modern ones, to effect a programme of sociopolitical engineering. It does not, however, ipso facto mean that Bolshevism played a pioneering and unique role in manipulation of the moving picture. Lenin made rather a confession of faith, by itself entirely derivative and unexceptional, in the power of film to inform and persuade. His statement actually betrayed Russia's relative backwardness, for he projected for Bolshevism what had already been demonstrated under capitalism. Equally noteworthy is that he, no less than Stalin, who later intervened systematically in film production, had almost no appreciation of cinema as art, that is, as a medium of creative expression. Both viewed it in purely utilitarian terms, the former having scant sensibility for the fictional feature film and the latter preoccupied with word more than image and increasingly unwilling or unable to distinguish fictional constructions from reality. Their belief in cinema's enormous public power was expressed primarily, especially in the latter case, through mania for control.(1) Since Soviet cinema, even more than that of Nazi Germany, arguably provides a case sui generis for state domination of the medium, its historiography has been periodized and heavily contoured by political developments. The relative ideological and economic freedom of the 1920s supported a pluralistic film culture, remembered for the avant-garde and classics of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko et al. After the first Party Conference on Cinema in 1928 the film industry suffered progressive economic and artistic decline, being consigned by the tenets of Socialist Realism (reality envisioned in terms of its revolutionary development) and the Stalin-cult of servility and artistic banality until the 1950s. A quantitative and qualitative revival began under Khrushchev and continued through the late 1960s. The conservatism of the Brezhnev era, while not as suffocating as Stalinism, meant general stagnation as the state prevented release of the more enterprising artistic projects. Only with glasnost in the 1980s did cinema again enjoy freedom comparable to that of the 1920s. The institutional and aesthetic form of Soviet cinema, as well as its ideological thrust, cannot be understood without reference to politics, especially the ambitions of Lenin and Stalin. Yet the medium also respected other dictates, some artistic and theoretical, some economic and some technical. It is in exploration of these that the recent spate of publications on Soviet cinema proves most illuminating and challenges aspects of the conventional historiography. Even before the dramatic changes leading to the dissolution of the former Soviet Union stimulated rethinking of the Soviet experience, new methodologies in social and cultural history prompted revisionism. Interdisciplinary interest in film, drawing attention to marketing strategies, popular as well as critical reception, international trade patterns, motion picture financing, the paradigms of genre cinema and the studio system, began to chip away at traditional interpretations. In conjunction with the recent opening of archives and unprecedented dialogue between former Soviet scholars and the west, these approaches are generating fresh perspectives on Soviet cinema. Three of the five books considered here, two of which belong to a new series from Routledge, bring together papers read to international and interdisciplinary conferences at which former Soviet scholars were represented. Historians, political scientists, art historians, filmmakers, and scholars of literature and film theory present topics ranging from detailed formal analyses of specific motion pictures to interpretive readings of periods and genres. …

"Quid Moror Exemplis"?: Mythological "Exempla" in Ovid's Pre-Exilic Poems and the Elegies from Exile

OVID'S MYTHOLOGICAL EXEMPLA sometimes seem excessively ornamental, or simply excessive, especially in the poems from exile. Nonetheless, we need not conclude that the frequent use of exempla throughout his works exemplifies contemporary rhetorical excesses, nor that Ovid's exilic exempla in particular prove his own artistic decline.' I shall argue below that, in both the pre-exilic poems and the elegies from exile, many of his apparently superfluous or inappropriate examples function to demonstrate the limits of the usefulness of paradigms and the desire to master tradition rather than be mastered by it. Particular attention will be given to Tr. 1.5, which illustrates many of the similarities between Ovid's pre-exilic and exilic techniques and anticipates many characteristics of the mythological examples found in subsequent Ovidian poems.

Jan van Gool als geschiedschrijver

Jan van Gool als geschiedschrijver

Artisanal Responses to Artistic Decline: The Cabinetmakers of Paris in the Era of Industrialization

Journal Article Artisanal Responses to Artistic Decline: The Cabinetmakers of Paris in the Era of Industrialization Get access Lee Shai Weissbach Lee Shai Weissbach University of Louisiville Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 16, Issue 2, Winter 1982, Pages 67–81, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/16.2.67 Published: 01 December 1982

The Emigration of Potters from Athens in the Late Fifth Century B.C. and Its Effect on the Attic Pottery Industry

Although pottery schools that imitated Attic pottery were established during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., few successfully challenged the productive Attic workshops. In the second half of the fifth century, however, schools that had an impact on Attic pottery distribution were begun at Thurii, Taras, Falerii, Syracuse, Lipari, Olympia, Corinth, Smyrna, and Olynthos. Most appear to have been founded by Attic-trained potters who decided to leave Athens at this time. Their emigration caused a reduction in personnel in the Attic pottery industry that resulted in an increased reliance on cheaper, mass-produced pots. With the exception of the two earliest schools, the majority were founded during or immediately after the Peloponnesian War. Potters would not have left Athens because of lack of markets abroad, since the war did not adversely affect the distribution of Attic pottery. While wartime conditions, especially the plague, depleted the general work force, the protracted war may have also prompted some craftsmen to abandon Athens, especially metics who had previously considered permanent residency; in addition, slaves could have escaped more easily during wartime. Both groups combined to form a large segment of skilled craftsmen; still the number of 6migrds need not be large since the pottery industry was relatively small. The artistic decline that resulted from the emigrpation of potters from Athens permitted the continued development of the new local schools during the late fifth and early fourth centuries. As the fourth century progressed, the importance of Attic pottery as an export ware gradually declined. During the sixth and fifth centuries, various pottery schools that imitated the popular Attic styles were established around the Mediterranean; but few schools could compete successfully with the productive Attic workshops and their effect on Attic pottery distribution was minimal.' During the second half of the fifth century, however, a number of pottery schools that effectively challenged the Athenian monopoly were established. Because many of them, at their inception, produced pottery closely resembling Attic wares in both style and technique, they probably were founded by Attictrained potters and painters who decided to leave Athens du ing this period. A reduction in personnel in th Attic pottery industry, which such emigration would cause, is suggested by the apparent decline in the number of pots produced and the increased reliance on cheaper, mass-produced pots by the late fifth century. This combination of events may be responsible in part for the gradual decline of Attic pottery as an export ware during

Waiting for Diaghilev

There has never been a comprehensive critical study of Diaghilev's life and artistic accomplishment, or even a serious one. Diaghilev: His Artistic and Private Life by Arnold Haskell (in collaboration with Walter Nouvel), published in 1935, only six years after its subject's death, is both too cursory and too imperceptive to be of more than passing interest. Of the book's three hundred fifty-odd pages, eight suffice to deal with the post-Sleeping Princess years, a period that saw the creation of works as significant for one reason or another as Le Renard, Mercure, Les Noces, Les Biches, The Triumph of Neptune, Ode, Apollo and Prodigal Son. But, then, it was Haskell who in this and numerous other volumes gave currency to the still widely held view of Diaghilev's career as divisible into three phases, one glad, one sad, one bad: Artistic Triumph and the Conquest of the West (1909-1920); The Sleeping Princess (1921); The Search for Lost Youth, leading to Artistic Decline (1922-29). To the highly suspect judgments implicit in this formulation of growth and decay Serge Lifar's Serge Diaghilev. His Life, His Work, His Legend, published in 1940, lend inadvertent support by treating Diaghilev's biography and career up to 1922 as history, and the years after 1923 (at which time Lifar joined the Russian Ballet and almost simultaneously entered Diaghilev's private life) as the

Echoes of Women’s Voices. Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence.

Aristocratic women exerted unprecedented political and social influence in Florence throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During this period, female members of the powerful Medici family governed the city for the first and only time in its history. These women also helped shape the city's artistic life, commissioning works of music, art, and theater that were inscribed with their own concerns and aspirations. Echoes of Women's Voices examines the patronage of individuals and institutions, particularly convents, which have remained, until now, largely neglected by scholars. Through commissions, patrons sought to promote a vision of the world and their place in it. The unique social norms, laws, educational backgrounds, and life experiences of female patrons meant the expression of a worldview that differed significantly from that of their male counterparts. Joining exceptional archival research with telling analysis of significant examples of music, art, and drama, Kelley Harness challenges the prevailing view that Florence saw a political and artistic decline during this period. She argues convincingly that the female domination of these years brought forth artistic patronage that was both continuous and well-conceived.