Cold Modernism

Author : Jessica Burstein
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271053763
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cold Modernism written by Jessica Burstein and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores a significant but overlooked aspect of early twentieth-century modernism, one that focuses on surface appearance rather than interiority or psychological depth. Looks at the writers Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy, the artists Balthus and Hans Bellmer, and the fashion designer Coco Chanel"--Provided by publisher.

Author : Robert Genter
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812200071
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Late Modernism written by Robert Genter and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism—Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born. In Late Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950s were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners—abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others—debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960s.

Author : Benjamin Balthaser
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472902555
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Anti-Imperialist Modernism written by Benjamin Balthaser and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anti-Imperialist Modernism excavates how U.S. cross-border, multi-ethnic anti-imperialist movements at mid-century shaped what we understand as cultural modernism and the historical period of the Great Depression. The book demonstrates how U.S. multiethnic cultural movements, located in political parties, small journals, labor unions, and struggles for racial liberation, helped construct a common sense of international solidarity that critiqued ideas of nationalism and essentialized racial identity. The book thus moves beyond accounts that have tended to view the pre-war “Popular Front” through tropes of national belonging or an abandonment of the cosmopolitanism of previous decades. Impressive archival research brings to light the ways in which a transnational vision of modernism and modernity was fashioned through anti-colonial networks of North/South solidarity. Chapters examine farmworker photographers in California’s central valley, a Nez Perce intellectual traveling to the Soviet Union, imaginations of the Haitian Revolution, the memory of the U.S.–Mexico War, and U.S. radical writers traveling to Cuba. The last chapter examines how the Cold War foreclosed these movements within a nationalist framework, when activists and intellectuals had to suppress the transnational nature of their movements, often rewriting the cultural past to conform to a patriotic narrative of national belonging.

Author : Greg Barnhisel
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780231216593
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cold War Modernists written by Greg Barnhisel and published by . This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War.

Author : Sarah Rogers
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429615310
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modern Art in Cold War Beirut written by Sarah Rogers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-14 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances examines the entangled histories of modern art and international politics during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Positing the Cold War as a globalized conflict, fraught with different political ideologies and intercultural exchanges, this study asks how these historical circumstances shaped local debates in Beirut over artistic pedagogy, the social role of the artist, the aesthetics of form, and, ultimately, the development of a national art. Drawing on a range of archival material and taking an interdisciplinary approach, Sarah Rogers argues that the genealogies of modern art can never be understood as isolated, national histories, but rather that they participate in an ever contingent global modernism. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, Cold War studies, and Middle East studies.

Author : Pamela M. Lee
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262357038
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Think Tank Aesthetics written by Pamela M. Lee and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism. In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such institutions as the RAND Corporation, she maps the multiple and overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians, economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians. Lee recounts, among other things, the decades-long colloquy between Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND analyst, and his former professor, the famous art historian Meyer Schapiro; the anthropologist Margaret Mead's deployment of innovative visual aids that recall midcentury abstract art; and the combination of cybernetics and modernist design in an “Opsroom” for the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile (and its restaging many years later as a work of art). Lee suggests that we think of these connections less as disciplinary border crossings than as colonization of the specific interests of arts by the approaches and methods of the sciences. Hearing the echoes of think tank aesthetics in today's pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in academia's science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee wonders what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts.

Author : Jennifer Josten
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300228600
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mathias Goeritz written by Jennifer Josten and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major work in English on Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990), this book illuminates the artist's pivotal role within the landscape of twentieth-century modernism. Goeritz became recognized as an abstract sculptor after arriving in Mexico from Germany by way of Spain in 1949. His call to integrate abstract forms into civic and religious architecture, outlined in his "Emotional Architecture" manifesto, had a transformative impact on midcentury Mexican art and design. While best known for the experimental museum El Eco and his collaborations with the architect Luis Barrag n, including the brightly colored towers of Satellite City, Goeritz also shaped the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum at Guadalajara's School of Architecture and the iconic Cultural Program of Mexico City's 1968 Olympic Games. Josten addresses the Cold War implications of these and other initiatives that pitted Goeritz, an advocate of internationalist abstraction, against Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, ardent defenders of the realist style that prevailed in official Mexican art during the postrevolutionary period. Exploring Goeritz's dialogues with leading figures among the Parisian and New York avant-gardes, such as Yves Klein and Philip Johnson, Josten shows how Goeritz's approach to modernism, which was highly attuned to politics and place, formed part of a global enterprise.

Author : Li-Chun Hsiao
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1498569102
Total Pages : 191 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan written by Li-Chun Hsiao and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches argues that what appeared to be a "genesis" of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the "splendid isolation" within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which "Free China" lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of "pure literature" and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War.

Author : Roland Vegso
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 082324556X
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Naked Communist:Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture written by Roland Vegso and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the "world" names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti-Communist "aesthetic ideology." The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.

Author : Katherine M. Bourguignon
Publisher : Ashmolean Museum Oxford
ISBN 13 : 9781910807217
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America's Cool Modernism written by Katherine M. Bourguignon and published by Ashmolean Museum Oxford. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This catalogue looks at a current in interwar American art that is relatively unknown. The familiar story of America in the 'roaring Twenties' is that of 'The Great Gatsby', the Harlem Renaissance, and the Machine Age; while the 1930s are known as the Steinbeckian world marked by the Depression and the New Deal. This exhibition focuses on the artists who grappled with the experience of modern America with a cool, controlled detachment, almost completely eliminating people from their pictures. For some artists this treatment reflected an ambivalence and anxiety about the modern world. Factories without workers and streets without people. Factories without workers and streets without people could seem strange and empty places. George Ault (1891-1948) and Niles Spencer (1893-1952) painted eerie factories with darkened windows. Their precise, orderly painting style adds to the unsettling atmosphere of their work. In 'Manhattan Bridge Loop' (1928), Edward Hopper (1882-1967) captured the stilled, quiet mood of the city, including a solitary pedestrian. For others, this cool treatment of contemporary America was a positive more response - an expression of optimism and pride. Skyscrapers and bridges become studies in geometry; and cities are cleansed and ordered with no crowds and no chaos. Louis Lozowick's (1892-1973) prints capture the energy of the city in curving sprawls and buildings soaring into the sky; while Ralston Crawford (1906-78) and Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) depicted the architecture of industrial America - factories, grain elevators, water plants - as the country's new cathedrals, glorious in their scale and feats of engineering, yet oddly emptied of people. The detached, frozen appearance of the scenes creates an uncertain or ambiguous atmosphere.