van Doesburg, Theo (1883–1931)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Dutch Painter ◽  
Architecture And Design ◽  
Theo Van Doesburg ◽  
De Stijl

Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch painter, designer, and art theorist. As the founder and major polemicist of the avant-garde movement known as De Stijl (The Style), he was instrumental in developing an abstract style based on primary colors and geometry. Tirelessly promoting De Stijl across Europe, van Doesburg played a crucial role in the development of Modernist art, architecture and design in the first half of the twentieth century. Born Christian Emil Marie Küpper in Utrecht, van Doesburg was the son of the photographer Wilhelm Küpper. His pseudonym was developed from the name of his stepfather, Theodorus Doesburg, whom he regarded as his natural father. Van Doesburg became a painter around 1900. His early work was influenced by Post-impressionism and Fauvism, but in 1915 he discovered the work of Piet Mondrian and underwent a profound transition. Mondrian had developed an austere visual style based on primary colors and orthogonal grids. This convinced van Doesburg to pursue spiritual harmony based on mathematical order.

De Stijl (1917–1932)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Geometric Form ◽  
Natural Form ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Theo Van Doesburg ◽  
De Stijl

De Stijl (The Style) was an avant-garde artistic group founded in the Netherlands in 1917. The name was also applied to a journal used to propagate the group’s theories and published between 1917 and 1932. Led by the painters Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, the group developed an abstract, elemental style based upon primary colors, geometric planes and right angles. Pursuing spiritual harmony based upon mathematical order, De Stijl formulated a universal language of pure form and color. This became paradigmatic of modernist visual art and design. In 1915 the painter and theorist Theo van Doesburg encountered the work of Piet Mondrian, who had developed a visual style consisting of primary colors and asymmetrical, orthogonal grids. Mondrian was inspired by the mystical ideas of the Theosophists, particularly the eccentric mathematician M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, who devised a Neo-Platonic philosophy based upon pure geometric form. Influenced by Schoenmaekers’ publications The New Image of the World (1915) and Principles of Plastic Mathematics (1916), Mondrian developed an artistic philosophy known as Neo-Plasticism (Nieuwe Beelding): This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour … [This art allows] only primary colors and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical line.

Filla, Emil (1882–1953)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Moseman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Theo Van Doesburg ◽  
De Stijl

Emil Filla (b. 4 April 1882 in Chropyně in Moravia; d. 6 October 1953 in Prague) is regarded as one of the main leaders of Czech Cubism in early twentieth-century Prague. Best known for paintings that interpret Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in a Czech context, Filla also produced accomplished sculptures, drawings, and prints. His early career was inaugurated by exhibiting with the group Osma (The Eight) (active 1907–8), of which he was a founding member. In 1909 he joined the Mánes Society and became co-editor of its journal Volné Směry (Free Directions) (ed. 1909–11). Filla was a founding member and leading figure of Skupina výtvarných umělců (the Group of Fine Artists) (active 1911–14) and assumed editorship of the group’s journal Umělecký Měsíčník (published 1911–14). From 1914 to 1920 Filla resided in the Netherlands, where he was active in anti-war politics. In 1920 Filla returned to Prague and resumed work with the Mánes Society. He collaborated with Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg on the first issue of De Stijl in 1917. After 1920 he left behind the analytic and synthetic cubist aesthetic for which he is best known and turned to figural themes. He was briefly influenced by Surrealism in the 1930s as a result of his friendship with Czech Surrealist and Devětsil member Jindřich Štyrský.

scholarly journals Hacia Arts & Architecture La revolución editorial de John Entenza (1938-1945)

2018 ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Daniel Díez Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Intellectual Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Architecture And Design ◽  
Siglo Xx

Resumen En enero de 1945 Arts & Architecture puso en marcha el programa CaseStudy House, un experimento ideado por John Entenza que les reservaríaa él y a su revista un lugar importante en la historia de la arquitectura moderna del siglo XX. Desde que asumió la dirección de Arts & Architectureen 1940, Entenza supo rodearse de creadores y artistas como Alvin Lustig,Ray y Charles Eames, Herbert Matter o Julius Shulman, que contribuyerona elevar el estándar gráfico de su publicación y le confirieron una identidadinnovadora que respaldaba visualmente el discurso intelectual vanguardista de compromiso con la arquitectura y el diseño modernos que defendía en sus páginas. Este artículo analiza los orígenes, las estrategias de trasformación y los nombres propios que hicieron realidad una revista que, cincuenta años después de su desaparición en 1967, sigue resultando tan atractiva y radical como cuando se editaba.AbstractIn January 1945 Arts & Architecture launched the Case Study House program, an experiment devised by John Entenza that would reserve for him and his magazine an important place in the history of modern architecture of the twentieth century. From the moment he took over the direction of Arts & Architecture in 1940, Entenza knew how to seduce creators and artists such as Alvin Lustig, Ray and Charles Eames, Herbert Matter and Julius Shulman, who contributed to raise the graphic standard of his publication and gave it an innovative identity that visually supported the avant-garde intellectual discourse of commitment to modern architecture and design that it defended in its pages. This article analyzesthe origins, the strategies of transformation and the proper names that made the magazine a reality that, fifty years after its disappearance in 1967, continues to be as attractive and radical as when it was published.

Modernism Under Review: Reyner Banham's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960)

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-344
Author(s):  
Tyrus Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
International Style ◽  
History Of ◽  
Architecture And Design ◽  
Architectural Modernism ◽  
Modern Movement

This essay reconsiders Reyner Banham's classic study of early twentieth-century architecture and design, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, originally published in 1960. Banham surveyed the architecture, design, and visual arts of the ‘first machine age’, characterized by industrial production and motorized transportation, from a self-consciously thematized perspective within the ‘second machine age’, populated by expendable consumer technologies and images. This revisionist perspective enabled Banham to challenge long-standing myths propagated by the dominant figures of the modern movement. In his polemical emphasis on the contingency and plurality of that which had empirically transpired in first machine age, Banham rejected the reduction of the messy history of the modern movement to the victory of a putative ‘international style’. Banham reasserted the intimate connection of architectural modernism with the avant-garde artistic movements of the 1910s and 20s, emphasizing particularly the most radical ones such as expressionism, futurism, and dadaism.

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

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.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

Being Numerous

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Language Poets

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

Ważyk metafizyczny? / Ważyk – A Metaphysician?

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jerzy Święch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Late Phase ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Sufficiency

Summary Adam Ważyk’s last volume of poems Zdarzenia (Events) (1977) can be read as a resume of the an avant-garde artist’s life that culminated in the discovery of a new truth about the human condition. The poems reveal his longing for a belief that human life, the mystery of life and death, makes sense, ie. that one’s existence is subject to the rule of some overarching necessity, opened onto the last things, rather than a plaything of chance. That entails a rejection of the idea of man’s self-sufficiency as an illusion, even though that kind of individual sovereignty was the cornerstone of modernist art. The art of late modernity, it may be noted, was already increasingly aware of the dangers of putting man’s ‘ontological security’ at risk. Ważyk’s last volume exemplifies this tendency although its poems appear to remain within the confines of a Cubist poetics which he himself helped to establish. In fact, however, as our readings of the key poems from Events make clear, he employs his accustomed techniques for a new purpose. The shift of perspective can be described as ‘metaphysical’, not in any strict sense of the word, but rather as a shorthand indicator of the general mood of these poems, filled with events which seem to trap the characters into a supernatural order of things. The author sees that much, even though he does not look with the eye of a man of faith. It may be just a game - and Ważyk was always fond of playing games - but in this one the stakes are higher than ever. Ultimately, this game is about salvation. Ważyk is drawn into it by a longing for the wholeness of things and a dissatisfaction with all forms of mediation, including the Cubist games of deformation and fragmentation of the object. It seems that the key to Ważyk’s late phase is to be found in his disillusionment with the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Especially the poems of Events contain enough clues to suggest that the promise of Cubism and surrealism - which he sought to fuse in his poetic theory and practice - was short-lived and hollow.

EPISTEMOLOGY OF TONE: AN OBITUARY FOR JULIEN JALÂL ED-DINE WEISS

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (281) ◽  
pp. 71-79
Author(s):  
Stefan Pohlit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Modal System ◽  
Helpful Tool ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Major Discrepancy

AbstractDuring the 1980s, Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, founder of the Al-Kindi ensemble of Aleppo, invented a qānūn in just intonation with which he attempted to solve a major discrepancy between the theory and practice of maqām-scales. Weiss objected to the introduction of Western standards, observing that they distort the significance of interval ratios and prevent a comparative understanding of the modal system as a transnational phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the implementation of equal-semitone temperament emerged simultaneously with a notable invasion of sociological criteria into musical inquiry. The polarity observed between westernisation and tradition can be seen most visibly in the present search for identity amongst Middle- and Near-Eastern musicians, but this schismogenic process can also be observed in the history of the Western avant-garde, where microtonal explorations have been halted in favour of extra-musical conceptuality. While cross-cultural musicians are faced with a new climate of distrust, it seems most likely that the principles that draw us apart may originate in the very patterns of thought in which our notion of culture operates. Weiss's tuning system may serve as a helpful tool to foster a new and universal epistemology of tone, bridging and transcending the apparent contradictions between the two spheres.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

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