Maria Rentetzi. Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Pp. 279, illus., charts, tables, map. - Brigitte Strohmaier, and Robert Rosner. Marietta Blau-Stars of Disintegration: Biography of a Pioneer of Particle Physics, trans. and ed. Paul F. Dvorak. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2006. Pp. 220, illus., charts, tables.

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 281-283
Author(s):  
Deborah Coen
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-33
Author(s):  
Jacqueline H. Rider

Organized in 1887 by religious, financial, and social leaders in Manhattan, the Church Club of New York holds a library of some 1,500 volumes. It documents the religious roots and theological framework of New York’s financial elite, the birth of the Episcopal Church, and mainline American Protestantism’s reaction to the Social Gospel movement in the early 20th century. This essay discusses how titles illustrate the challenges these gentlemen confronted to their roles and their church’s identity in a rapidly changing society. Industrialization, modernization, immigration were all affecting their personal, professional, and spiritual lives.  It also reflects on how the collection as a whole mirrors the evolution of one sector of 20th century American culture.


Author(s):  
Annika Marie

Stuart Davis was a painter, printmaker, muralist, and arts activist who played a prominent role in the development of American modernism in the first half of the 20th century. Visually, he brought the formal and technical experimentation of the European avant-garde to depictions of the modernity of the American metropolis. As a prolific writer and powerful spokesman, Davis was a committed cultural advocate, working to explain and defend modern abstract art, promoting artists’ rights, and arguing for the democratization of culture and art’s formative impact on society. Davis’s early style relates to the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century brand of realism that combines a direct, spontaneous, journalistic naturalism with everyday scenes of urban street life. The turning point for the young Davis was the New York Armory Show of 1913. Through the exhibit Davis was exposed to Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dada. However, Davis’s embrace of the formal rigor of European abstraction did not lead him to purely non-objective painting. Maintaining that form and content were equally important, he argued that European modernism’s visual fragmentation, instability, and simultaneity provided the visual means by which to express contemporary American urban life.


Author(s):  
Carla Cesare

Lilly Reich was a German-born designer who created interiors, displays, and exhibitions in the early to mid-20th century. She was active in the Deutscher Werkbund and in the Bauhaus, and was the first female architect to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996. Reich’s career as a female designer has been said by critic Beatriz Colomina to be an example of the collaborative nature of architecture in which women have often played an unspoken role. Reich was one of the few female designers to have played a leading role in the early 20th century, yet she has gained little academic renown. As is common for female designers of the time they are often known in relation to their work with more prominent male architects or designers; for Reich, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was both a personal and professional partner. Reich, who came from a wealthy manufacturing family, studied in 1908 at the Wiener Werkstätte and then in 1910 at the Höhere Fachschule für Dekorationskunst in Berlin. Like many women of the period she focused on textiles, needlework, and fashion as well as set design and display.


Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-193
Author(s):  
Stephanie Becker

Throughout the early 20th century, A. Thomas Nelson took snapshots while traveling the United States and Canada. His wife, Catherine Nelson, made a selection of these and placed them within eight photographic albums, later acquired by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Using one of these, “Snapshots from Travels in the United States and Canada (1904–1940),” as a case study, this article explores preservation practices for early 20th-century vernacular albums. While such albums are a valuable part of any collection, they present many complex preservation challenges due to the variety of materials contained within a single object. Critical questions about cataloging, digitizing, and rehousing methods guide decisions on how to stabilize the album's fragile condition and allow for access. This case study offers insight for collection managers and archivists who find themselves caring for similar snapshot albums.


Author(s):  
Lara Kuykendall

The Ashcan School was a group of American artists that began exhibiting together in the early 20th century and advocated for total freedom in style and subject matter. Also known as Urban Realists because of their focus on urban, public spaces including trains, streets and parks, restaurants and bars, and other spaces of popular entertainment, Ashcan members included Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, and George Bellows. "Ashcan" was initially a pejorative term applied to the group because they employed dark colors and painterly, unblended brushstrokes, which were thought to make their works appear dirty or unfinished. The Ashcan School was initially associated with a secessionist art group called The Eight, which also included postimpressionists Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson. The Eight rebelled against the National Academy of Design, the principal art school and host of prestigious juried exhibitions in New York, because they sought greater stylistic freedom and more control over their exhibition opportunities. Implicitly, the Ashcan painters also rebelled against The Ten, a group of American Impressionists, because they thought their predecessors’ works were too delicate in style and genteel in subject matter.


Author(s):  
Ewa Morawska

This chapter examines David Berger's The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact (1983). The wave of pogroms in Russia in 1881–2 forcefully brought to the surface a complex of demographic, ideological, and cultural developments that had been working their way through the Jewish communities of the Pale since the mid-19th century and which were to affect profoundly modern Jewish history. Commemorating the centennial of those catalytic years and their aftermath, especially the mass emigration and resettlement of Russian Jews during the three decades that followed, the book under review re-examines the impact of these events on different areas of life of 20th-century Jewry. The volume consists of fourteen short essays presented originally as papers at the 9th Annual Conference on Society in Change held at Brooklyn College in March of 1981. The Legacy of Jewish Migration reads well, and the variety of topics treated in the book successfully holds the reader's attention; also, bibliographies appended to each selection are useful and up to date.


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