Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture

Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture
Author: Michael D. Garval
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781409406037

The first English-language monograph on the French dancer and model, Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture explores the haunting legacy of this intriguing and glamorous figure, an international celebrity at the dawn of our star-struck modernity. Situating Mérode at a pivotal moment in the history of fame and visual culture, this study probes the neglected prehistory of a visual culture obsessed with celebrities and their images.

Dancing in the Blood

Dancing in the Blood
Author: Edward Ross Dickinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107196221

The book explores the revolutionary impact of modern dance on European culture in the early twentieth century. Edward Ross Dickinson uncovers modern dance's place in the emerging 'mass' culture of the modern metropolis and reveals the connections between dance, politics, culture, religion, the arts, psychology, entertainment, and selfhood.

Opera Acts

Opera Acts
Author: Karen Henson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2015-01-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1107004268

Opera Acts explores a wealth of new historical material about singers in the late nineteenth century and challenges the idea that this was a period of decline for the opera singer. In detailed case studies of four figures - the late Verdi baritone Victor Maurel; Bizet's first Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié; Massenet's muse of the 1880s and 1890s, Sibyl Sanderson; and the early Wagner star Jean de Reszke - Karen Henson argues that singers in the late nineteenth century continued to be important, but in ways that were not conventionally 'vocal'. Instead they enjoyed a freedom and creativity based on their ability to express text, act and communicate physically, and exploit the era's media. By these and other means, singers played a crucial role in the creation of opera up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Modernist Star Maps

Modernist Star Maps
Author: Aaron Jaffe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351916874

Bringing together Canadian, American, and British scholars, this volume explores the relationship between modernism and modern celebrity culture. In support of the collection's overriding thesis that modern celebrity and modernism are mutually determining phenomena, the contributors take on a range of transatlantic canonical and noncanonical figures, from the expected (Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald) to the surprising (Elvis and Hitler). Illuminating case studies are balanced by the volume's attentiveness to broader issues related to modernist aesthetics, as the contributors consider celebrity in relationship to identity, commodification, print culture, personality, visual cultures, and theatricality. As the first book to read modernism and celebrity in the context of the crises of individual agency occasioned by the emergence of mass-mediated culture, Modernist Star Maps argues that the relationship between modernism and the popular is unthinkable without celebrity. Moreover, celebrity's strange evolution during the twentieth century is unimaginable without the intercession of modernism's system of cultural value. This innovative collection opens new avenues for understanding celebrity not only for modernist scholars but for critical theorists and cultural studies scholars.

Women in the Arts

Women in the Arts
Author: Diane Touliatos-Miles
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-06-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1527553922

Women in the Arts: Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts, and Literature is a multi-disciplined celebration of past and present women creators. It marks a new departure in women’s studies, for it presents an interdisciplinary emphasis on the long-neglected area of women’s contributions to the various genres of the arts. Because of its unique historical approach, this pioneering collection of essays is useful in the areas of humanities and women’s studies as scholarly or pleasure readings. Many “firsts” are included in this anthology. There are chapters by three prominent award-winning living composers that discuss the plight of women in this male-dominated field and the pioneering contemporary innovations to the discipline of musical composition that women have contributed. Another chapter brings to light pioneering research on the names and musical compositions of the earliest women composers. Another gives historical evidence of the earliest documented women’s conservatory and its performers in the United States located in the Moravian Young Ladies’ Seminary in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The chapter on the MacDowell Colony reveals the history of how Marian MacDowell and her network of women’s music clubs helped to build the MacDowell Colony, a haven for artists that has continued through the twenty-first century. In the visual arts, one essay brings forth visual representations of women’s subjugation; another analyzes the photographic innovations and historical work of the woman pioneer, Nellie Ladd; the artistic contributions of two women of color, Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo, are contrasted in a historical perspective; and a fascinating historical analyses of women and tattoos is presented. In the area of literature, the “Potters” are celebrated for pioneering the first serial hand-made magazine in 1904; another writer, discusses how she represents the role of motherhood in her female characters; and arguments are presented of how women poets give voice to spiritual feminism. The thirteen diverse essays present original contributions to the disciplines of music, visual arts, and literature. By bringing forth this collection, it is hoped that there will be greater appreciation for the great diversity and range of women creators and the obstacles that they had to overcome. It is hoped that the essays will provide a historical documentation of the artistic voice of women that have until now been neglected.

The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918

The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918
Author: Paul Klee
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 1968
Genre: Artists
ISBN: 9780520006539

Paul Klee was endowed with a rich and many-sided personality that was continually spilling over into forms of expression other than his painting and that made him one of the most extraordinary phenomena of modern European art. These abilities have left their record in the four intimate Diaries in which he faithfully recorded the events of his inner and outer life from his nineteenth to his fortieth year. Here, together with recollections of his childhood in Bern, his relations with his family and such friends as Kandinsky, Marc, Macke, and many others, his observations on nature and people, his trips to Italy and Tunisia, and his military service, the reader will find Klee's crucial experience with literature and music, as well as many of his essential ideas about his own artistic technique and the creative process.