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Art and the Environment: New Visions from Old

Anne Gray

in Australia’s Empire

This chapter examines the ways artists have portrayed the Australian landscape, and how this reflects both their own relationship to the environment and that of their society. It analyses how the ... More

This chapter examines the ways artists have portrayed the Australian landscape, and how this reflects both their own relationship to the environment and that of their society. It analyses how the continuities between European and colonial artistic styles and techniques produced the so-called ‘new visions from old’. It argues that that reliance on imperial borrowings was not the hallmark of an inauthentic, derivative culture but the key to an original vision of Australia’s Empire.Less

Introduction

David Roberts

in The Total Work of Art in European Modernism

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, namely to attempt an overview of the theory and history of the total work in European art since the French Revolution. This is perhaps the first ... More

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, namely to attempt an overview of the theory and history of the total work in European art since the French Revolution. This is perhaps the first book in English to treat the total work of art as a key concept in aesthetic modernism. It argues for twin lineages of the total work—a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic—which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s on. This critical period from the turn of the century to the 1930s forms the central focus of the present study. These key years of the European avant-garde are explored from two closely related perspectives: the meta-aesthetic and the metapolitical. The remainder of the chapter sketches the framework of the present inquiry; provides the definition of the total work that underpins this study; followed by an outline of the subsequent chapters.Less

Introduction

Karol Berger

in Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity

This chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book, claiming that, in the later eighteenth century, European art music began to take seriously the flow of time from past to future. ... More

This chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book, claiming that, in the later eighteenth century, European art music began to take seriously the flow of time from past to future. Until then, music was simply “in time”; “earlier” and “later” mattered little to the way it was experienced and understood. From that point on, music added the experience of linear time, of time's arrow, to its essential subject matter. It could no longer be experienced with understanding unless one recognized the temporal ordering of events. The chapter also argues that this change in the shape of musical time was not a development internal to music alone, but rather, with the onset of modernity, part of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to conceive of time.Less

Introduction: Medardo Rosso: An Origin Story

Sharon Hecker

in Moment's Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture

This introductory chapter discusses how nineteenth-century art, defined by the birth of the nation-state and nationalism, is teeming with transnational forms of circulation. Italian sculptor Medardo ... More

This introductory chapter discusses how nineteenth-century art, defined by the birth of the nation-state and nationalism, is teeming with transnational forms of circulation. Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso took advantage of new international networks being created by so-called “cultural mediators” (middlemen—art dealers, critics and literary figures—who regularly traveled abroad), including exhibition opportunities and art markets throughout Europe. In doing so, he presaged the nomadic, itinerant status of twentieth- and twenty-first-century sculpture. The chapter offers a methodological challenge to the grand narrative of the nineteenth century by reframing a single artist within a cultural context characterized by transnational exchange and new forms of mobility. It provides an original, transnational way to comprehend Rosso and is intended as a model for future studies of pan-European modern art.Less

The European Aesthetics of Khedivial Power

Adam Mestyan

in Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt

This chapter focuses on the creation of spaces which brought a new political aesthetics—the European political aesthetics. Strikingly different from Muslim patriotism, images of Ismail Pasha as a ... More

This chapter focuses on the creation of spaces which brought a new political aesthetics—the European political aesthetics. Strikingly different from Muslim patriotism, images of Ismail Pasha as a sovereign ruler were created according to western European styles of representation. This representation system was a tool to fabricate the sovereign image of the khedive, to obscure his Ottomanness. The government production of a history of “independence” started at this moment with the instrumentalization of European art. The chapter then looks at the life of Paul Draneht Bey, who helped to fabricate this “internal Europe” and directed the theaters between 1869 and 1878. It concludes with an exploration of the “portrait of the pasha” and the main product of early khedivial culture: Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Aida (1871).Less

What Was Tonality?

Susan McClary

in Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form

At first glance, eighteenth-century European art music would seem to have little in common with the blues. Not only do the musical practices themselves bear scant resemblance to one another, but the ... More

At first glance, eighteenth-century European art music would seem to have little in common with the blues. Not only do the musical practices themselves bear scant resemblance to one another, but the temporal, geographical, and social locations of the personnel involved—disenfranchised African Americans versus composers working under the patronage of Italian courts and German churches—demand radically different modes of historical analysis. Yet just as many artists during our own era have found the blues a compelling template for musical and cultural expression, so eighteenth-century musicians embraced with great enthusiasm the particular cluster of conventions we call tonality. By juxtaposing these highly conventionalized discourses from two very distant cultural contexts, this chapter proposes to defamiliarize temporarily the musical premises those in musicology most often accept as “purely musical.” As with the blues in Chapter 2, it asks how eighteenth-century procedures intersected with and helped to structure the social world in which they played active roles. The eighteenth century was a period of almost unparalleled confidence in the viability of a public sphere in which ideas could be successfully communicated, differences negotiated, consensus achieved. The chapter asks why the particular musical conventions that crystallized during this period appealed so much to musicians and audiences of the Enlightenment. What needs did they satisfy, what functions did they serve, what kinds of cultural work did they perform? The chapter concentrates especially on tonality, the convention that undergirds and guarantees all the others, discussing how it constructed musical analogs to such emergent ideals as rationality, individualism, progress, and centered subjectivity.Less

Systems of Art Historical and Philosophical Thought

Catherine M. Soussloff

in Foucault on Painting

The historio-critical situation for Foucault’s writings on painting, including a discussion of significant issues of translation and reception that impinge on the specific theoretical matters ... More

The historio-critical situation for Foucault’s writings on painting, including a discussion of significant issues of translation and reception that impinge on the specific theoretical matters addressed by each of his texts about painting.Less

Art, Architecture and Catholicism in La Modification

in Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of Michel Butor

This chapter examines the selective history of European art which underpins the cultural and romantic pilgrimages of the character of Léon Delmont in Michel Butor's novel La Modification. It analyzes ... More

This chapter examines the selective history of European art which underpins the cultural and romantic pilgrimages of the character of Léon Delmont in Michel Butor's novel La Modification. It analyzes the symbolic, psychological and reflexive functions of the various clusters of art-historical references that constitute the cultural coordinates both in Léon's conscious thought-processes and in the subconscious workings of his dreams. It argues that the references to the visual arts in the novel not only reflect the preoccupations and situation of the central character but also serve to ‘universalise’ those preoccupations and that situation.Less

War and Modernism in a Fable

Noel Polk

in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

In William Faulkner’s novel A Fable, which takes place in France during World War I, two scenes highlight modern European sculpture and painting. Thomas L. McHaney suggests that the painting might be ... More

In William Faulkner’s novel A Fable, which takes place in France during World War I, two scenes highlight modern European sculpture and painting. Thomas L. McHaney suggests that the painting might be one in Paul Cézanne’s Chateau Noir series. These modernist works of art form part of a multitude of references to European art, politics, and history throughout the novel, including references to the Levant. This chapter examines the paintings in A Fable and Cézanne’s stature as precursors of modernism and considers Faulkner’s introduction of the modern in twentieth-century European art as interpellations in the larger narrative.Less

What Painting Does

Catherine M. Soussloff

in Foucault on Painting

Where does a new theory of painting belong in the context of Foucault’s larger philosophical project?

From Fairy Tale to Opera in Four Moves

Richard Taruskin

in On Russian Music

The Love for Three Oranges was the only one of Sergey Prokofieff's eight operas to enjoy unqualified success and repertory status during the composer's lifetime. The opera, however, owes the credits ... More

The Love for Three Oranges was the only one of Sergey Prokofieff's eight operas to enjoy unqualified success and repertory status during the composer's lifetime. The opera, however, owes the credits for its title, and for the general outline of its plot, to the celebrated fiaba teatrale (fable for the theater) by Carlo Gozzi (1761). With each telling, the tale became further encrusted with theatrical artifice and literary doctrine, even as the tellers advertised naive simplicity. The end result manifested 250 years down the line, in a composition written by a Russian for performance in Chicago, in French. The core of the composition retained the original foretaste of the ban on all pathos that would dominate European art between the world wars in the name of a re-imagined “eighteenth century.” This was the one time that Prokofieff shone ahead of his time.Less

The Coming-of-age Film as a Genre: Attributes, Evolution, and Functions

Alistair Fox

in Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand: Genre, Gender and Adaptation

This chapter outlines the generic characteristics, categories, and dominant tropes of the coming-of-age film, relating it to the Bildungsroman in literature, and showing the influence on its ... More

This chapter outlines the generic characteristics, categories, and dominant tropes of the coming-of-age film, relating it to the Bildungsroman in literature, and showing the influence on its evolution of the French New Wave and European art cinema. The chapter concludes by speculating on why coming-of-age films are such a prominent feature in national cinemas, arguing that they play an important role in the development of collective memory and the transmission and reshaping of cultural values.Less

Art-cinema, Cultural Dislocation, and the Entry into Puberty: Vigil (Vincent Ward, 1984)

Alistair Fox

in Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand: Genre, Gender and Adaptation

This chapter explores how Vincent Ward exploits a characteristic coming-of-age story as a vehicle for addressing cultural dislocation on one hand, and Oedipal tensions and ambivalent attachments on ... More

This chapter explores how Vincent Ward exploits a characteristic coming-of-age story as a vehicle for addressing cultural dislocation on one hand, and Oedipal tensions and ambivalent attachments on the other, so that these personal issues are turned into a paradigmatic exemplification of a more general predicament faced by settlers living in a postcolonial situation. Ward’s use of techniques imitated from European art cinema is examined, along with the origins of the film in Ward’s own biography. Less