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Cuban Painting at the Turn of the Century (1902–1930): The Nexus between Traditional and Vanguard

Anelys Alvarez

in Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora

Art historian Anelys Alvarez reviews the tumultuous first three decades of the Cuban Republic (1902–30) and their impact on painting and other visual arts such as sculpture. First, she questions the ... More

Art historian Anelys Alvarez reviews the tumultuous first three decades of the Cuban Republic (1902–30) and their impact on painting and other visual arts such as sculpture. First, she questions the conventional dichotomy between traditional (or academic) and avant-garde (or modernist) art in Cuba during this period. She then recovers several forgotten artists, such as Antonio Rodríguez Morey, María Capdevila, and Manuel Mesa, who were active on the island before the rise of modernism in the 1930s. Alvarez reappraises a whole generation of painters who served as an artistic bridge between the late nineteenth century and the first generation of avant-garde (vanguardista) painters in 1927.Less

Concrete Cuba

Abigail McEwen

in Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora

Art historian Abigail McEwen focuses on the so-called concretos, a generation of abstract Cuban painters that emerged during the 1950s and included Luis Martínez Pedro, Mario Carreño, José M. ... More

Art historian Abigail McEwen focuses on the so-called concretos, a generation of abstract Cuban painters that emerged during the 1950s and included Luis Martínez Pedro, Mario Carreño, José M. Mijares, and the Romanian-born Sandú Darié. According to McEwen, the concretos saw themselves as the last generation of the island’s artistic avant-garde, which contradicted their predecessors’ quest for a vernacular expression of national identity in the visual arts while striving for modernization and cosmopolitanism. She shows that the abstract turn in Cuba was both an aesthetic revolt against figurative art and a political protest against the Batista regime. The abstract art movement gradually waned after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, with its preference for narrative and representational art.Less

Elizabeth Bowen: Surrealist

Keri Walsh

in Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things

This chapter approaches the emerging notion of Irish surrealism in a seemingly unlikely corner: Bowen’s fiction. Seldom considered in the context of a modernist avant-garde, Bowen's work has been ... More

This chapter approaches the emerging notion of Irish surrealism in a seemingly unlikely corner: Bowen’s fiction. Seldom considered in the context of a modernist avant-garde, Bowen's work has been read within the history of the novel of manners, and as a chronicler of Anglo-Irish anxiety and ambivalence. Underrepresented until recently, however, are the specifically modernist commitments of her art. Bowen's career-long attention to the effects of new technologies on consciousness; her willingness to revise older forms of fiction and to experiment with techniques influenced by painting, cinema, and radio; as well as her depictions of women struggling to resist inherited Victorian roles and fulfil their desires for autonomy, education, travel, and love align her with a modernist tradition. Yet rather than classifying her with such innovators, even those critics attending to her modernist style and technique figure such experiments as idiosyncrasies. Where her prose subverts expectations of realist fiction, Bowen is more often described as an eccentric writer than one participating in modernism. Uncovering Bowen's dialogue with surrealism allows us to see her ‘strangeness’ in a new light, as part of her intermodernist (drawing on Kristin Bluemel’s term) engagement with avant-garde, continental discourses.Less

Introduction: Lignes: An Intellectual Review after the Death of Both Intellectuals and Reviews

Adrian May

in From Bataille to Badiou: Lignes, the Preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987-2017

Lignes is introduced as the most useful review through which to provide a narrative of French intellectual culture and the preservation of French Theory (or la pensée 68) since the 1980s. After a ... More

Lignes is introduced as the most useful review through which to provide a narrative of French intellectual culture and the preservation of French Theory (or la pensée 68) since the 1980s. After a brief introduction to both intellectuals and reviews, a history of the significant developments in French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century is provided. The methodological approach to Lignes and its editor Michel Surya is then delineated, and the book is situated between intellectual, cultural history approaches and previous studies of periodical publications before a summary of the coming chapters is provided.Less

The Source of an Avant-Garde Voice: Music and Photography in José Moreno Villa

Regina Galasso

in Translating New York: The City's Languages in Iberian Literatures

This part studies the New York prose and poetry of José Moreno Villa, one of the most overlooked cultural figures of twentieth-century Iberian Studies. As a gateway to the context surrounding Moreno ... More

This part studies the New York prose and poetry of José Moreno Villa, one of the most overlooked cultural figures of twentieth-century Iberian Studies. As a gateway to the context surrounding Moreno Villa's New York, this part begins with a prefatory discussion of Federico García Lorca and his epistolary writing in which he assesses travel to New York as one of the most useful experiences of his life while also repeatedly noting the continuous linguistic negotiations surrounding him while in the city. Then, this part introduces Moreno Villa and the fruits of his transatlantic travel: Pruebas de Nueva York (1927) and Jacinta la pelirroja (1929). Overall, it argues that Moreno Villa's past experiences coupled with his vulnerable linguistic position, as a result of travel, tuned him in the languages of photography, jazz, and the careful use of Spanish, English, and other languages. In doing so, this part proposes that Moreno Villa's literary New York brought his readers more than a superficial experience but one that introduced new discourses and considerations of language and its relationship to other media.Less

Cover Girls: Mulatas and Artists between the Avant-Garde and the Popular in the Republic

Alison Fraunhar

in Mulata Nation: Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba

This chapter studies in the interweaving of popular and fine art forms during the Republican era, focusing on artwork of popular magazine covers and avant-garde painters of the period, with ... More

This chapter studies in the interweaving of popular and fine art forms during the Republican era, focusing on artwork of popular magazine covers and avant-garde painters of the period, with particular analysis of the work of several well-known (and several less so) painters and illustrators. In the chapter, the two formal approaches are connected by the deployment of the mulata in many of the artworks and illustrations. These artworks, fine and popular, were crucial in shaping consensus through vernacular imagery and well known national symbols, particularly (but not exclusively) the mulata. Both graphic and fine artists were shaped by international travel and residence abroad, introducing them to international stylistic currents against and through which they generated images that resonated with national identity. Not only did artists travel, but tourism continued to rise, bring foreign tastes, further shaping culture on the island. In addition to international connections, artists were at the vanguard of important political activism against corrupt government.Less

Introduction

Laura Scuriatti

in Mina Loy's Critical Modernism

The introduction offers a brief outline of standard and more recent scholarship on Loy and her reception; it introduces the concept of “critical modernism,” on the basis of fundamental works ... More

The introduction offers a brief outline of standard and more recent scholarship on Loy and her reception; it introduces the concept of “critical modernism,” on the basis of fundamental works dedicated to the theory of the avant-garde, and argues that Loy’s highly diverse corpus of works adheres to well-known protocols of avant-garde and modernist aesthetics, but simultaneously questions them. The chapter also offers a brief summary of the book’s argument and of the single chapters; it outlines the tension in Loy’s corpus between an affirmative early modernist aesthetic, and a critical stance which destabilizes the categories of artwork, artist and art, relating this tension to a broader critique of normative notions of gender, identity and subjectivity.Less

Mailer's Sound

Phil Ford

in Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture

In “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer gave hipness a philosophy and a manifesto. Mailer, along with many other figures in the 20th-century avant garde, believed that sound not only represents but ... More

In “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer gave hipness a philosophy and a manifesto. Mailer, along with many other figures in the 20th-century avant garde, believed that sound not only represents but embodies concrete experience, and that it has a unique power to actualize the energetic processes of human life in its listeners. “The White Negro” and his novel An American Dream articulate a strain of postwar radical critique for which it is abstraction from life that has resulted in the totalitarian horrors of modernity, and they outline a program of Existential liberation in which sound is the medium for the exchange of human energies. For Mailer, writing is a quasi-musical project, an attempt to create a literary “sound” that, like a musical performance, issues from risky endeavors whose outcomes are never known in advance.Less

Introduction: the red Atlantic

Barnaby Haran

in Watching the red dawn: The American avant-garde and the Soviet Union

This chapter sets up the book by considering another of introductory themes. ‘The red Atlantic’ involves an American-Russian transnationational interchange across several media in relation to the ... More

This chapter sets up the book by considering another of introductory themes. ‘The red Atlantic’ involves an American-Russian transnationational interchange across several media in relation to the aesthetic of the machine as a signifier of the influence of American technology on Soviet communism. For the Soviets, America represented the means to construct communism in the USSR, albeit without a capitalist economy. It asserts the need to think beyond the Franco-American paradigm as a means of figuring the emergent radical culture of the 1930s. The putative area of ‘American Constructivism’ mainly involved cultural interrelations of American communists and Soviet counterparts. Finally, there is a consideration of methodology including assessments of transnationalism, Interdisciplinarity, and the avant-garde.Less

Introduction

Leah Modigliani

in Engendering an avant-garde: The unsettled lansdcapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism

The central argument of the book is introduced; that the counter-tradition Jeff Wall helped develop with other artists in Vancouver has included a gendered bifurcation of space since its earliest ... More

The central argument of the book is introduced; that the counter-tradition Jeff Wall helped develop with other artists in Vancouver has included a gendered bifurcation of space since its earliest incarnation in 1970 as the "defeatured landscape." The introduction contains brief descriptions of Wall and his peers’ early work in relation to Wall’s international position as leader of the Vancouver School of Photo-Conceptualism; a brief discussion of existing theory about the development of avant-garde movements; and the necessity of understanding the avant-garde in the context of wider social contests of power, in particular settler colonial control over land and male control over women’s bodies and representations of them. The introduction also summarizes the need to intervene in current histories of avant-garde practice, dominant narratives that continue to frame male artists achievements in formal terms divested of the power dynamics that engender them or result from them.Less

/ The Translatability of Planetary Poiesis: Vicente Huidobro’s Creacionismo in Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel

Ignacio Infante

in After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics Across the Atlantic

This chapter analyzes the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different ... More

This chapter analyzes the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different avant-garde groups in Paris (cubism) and in Madrid (ultraísmo) during the late 1910s and early 1920s. Although it partly emerged as a poetic correlative to the avant-garde revolution brought forth by such cubist painters as Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, Huidobro’s poetry is rooted in what constitutes primarily a romantic conception of the poetic word as endowed with a productive force to re-create itself infinitely and, consequently, to bring about a radical transformation of experience. Working with different approaches to avant-garde poetics developed by critics such as Peter Bürger and René de Costa, the chapter focuses on Huidobro’s long prose poem composed in 1928 and published in Madrid as Temblor de cielo (1931) and in Paris as Tremblement de ciel (1932). I show here how Huidobro’s crucial bilingual poem narrativizes his avant-garde theory of poetic language as a planetary quest for the aesthetic ideal of becoming that Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have called, in reference to the poetics of Early German romanticism, the “literary absolute.”Less

Pythagoras in the Laboratory

Sarah M. Pourciau

in The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science

Chapter Five unfolds the startling consequences of this Wagnerian harmony theory both for the development of avant-garde poetic principles (particularly in France and Russia), and for the concurrent, ... More

Chapter Five unfolds the startling consequences of this Wagnerian harmony theory both for the development of avant-garde poetic principles (particularly in France and Russia), and for the concurrent, late-19th century emergence of a new discipline called “psychophysiology” (a forerunner of modern-day experimental psychology). It argues that the widely received theories of Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, and their followers, strive to translate the nature-philosophical “energy” of Wagner’s sounding spirit into a natural-scientific dialect of countable psychic vibrations and measurable psychic “tones.” The result is a new model of language science and a new understanding of poetics, which together both fulfill and pervert the thrust of their early 19th century predecessors.Less

X: A Quarterly Review and McGahern’s modernism

Tom Walker

in John McGahern: Authority and Vision

This chapter looks at the interconnected Dublin and London contexts to McGahern’s reception of literary and visual modernism. It does so primarily through the prism of the material and ideas ... More

This chapter looks at the interconnected Dublin and London contexts to McGahern’s reception of literary and visual modernism. It does so primarily through the prism of the material and ideas circulating in the magazine X: A Quarterly Review and among the coterie (Patrick Swift, Anthony Cronin and others) involved in its production – with whom McGahern had considerable contact leading up to and following his first appearance in print in the magazine. This context is accessed through fresh archival research, including drawing on some previously un-discussed correspondence between the editors, and their patrons and contributors. This is also aligned to broader theoretical and historical perspectives on the relationship between the abstract and the actual within visual and literary modernism, as well as the post-war fate of modernism and the avant-garde.Less

“Wood is a pleasant thing to think about”: William Blake and the Hand-Printed Books of the Hogarth Press

Michael Black

in Virginia Woolf and the World of Books

This chapter explores Woolf's interest in the eighteenth-century poet and visual artist William Blake, arguing his work embodied the avant-gardism to which modernists aspired.