Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art

Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art
Author: Jessica Sjöholm
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2022
Genre: Art and society
ISBN: 9780367566876

"Based on hitherto overlooked archival material, this book reveals Nell Walden's significant impact on the Sturm organisation through a feminist reading of supportive labour that highlights the centrality of collaborative work within the modern art world. This book introduces Walden as an ardent collector of modernist and indigenous art and critically contextualises her own art production in relation to expressionist concepts of art and to gendered ideas on abstraction and decoration. Visual analyses highlight how she collaborated with professional and experimental women photographers during the Weimar era and how the circulation of these photographs served as a means to intervene in the public sphere of culture in interwar Germany. Finally, the book provides an analysis of Walden's continuing work for Der Sturm after her voluntary exile from Germany to Switzerland in 1933 and highlights the importance of women's supportive labour for the canonisation and institutionalisation of modern art in museums and archives. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, and gender studies"--

Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art

Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art
Author: Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000527131

Based on hitherto overlooked archival material, this book reveals Nell Walden’s significant impact on the Sturm organisation through a feminist reading of supportive labour that highlights the centrality of collaborative work within the modern art world. This book introduces Walden as an ardent collector of modern and indigenous art and critically contextualises her own art production in relation to expressionist concepts of art and to gendered ideas on abstraction and decoration. Visual analyses highlight how she collaborated with professional and experimental women photographers during the Weimar era and how the circulation of these photographs served as a means to intervene in the public sphere of culture in interwar Germany. Finally, the book provides an analysis of Walden’s continuing work for Der Sturm after her voluntary exile from Germany to Switzerland in 1933 and highlights the importance of women’s supportive labour for the canonisation and institutionalisation of modern art in museums and archives. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, and gender studies.

Historic Avant-Garde Work on Paper

Historic Avant-Garde Work on Paper
Author: Sascha Bru
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2024-03-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1003856667

This book examines the many functions of paper in the fine art and aesthetics of the early twentieth-century modernist or historic avant-garde (Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism and many more). With its many collages and photomontages, the historic avant-garde is generally considered to have transformed paper from a mere support into an artistic medium and to have assisted in art on paper gaining a firm autonomy. Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book shows that the story of paper in the avant-garde has thereby hardly been told. The first section looks at a selection of canonized individual avant-gardists’ work on paper to demonstrate that the material and formal analysis of paper in the avant-garde’s artistic production still holds much in store. In the second section, chapters zoom in on forms and formats of collective artistic production that deployed paper to move around reproductions of fine art works, to facilitate the dialogue between avant-gardists, to better promote their work among patrons, and to make their work available to a wider audience. Chapters in the third section lay bare how certain groups within the avant-garde began to massively create monochrome works, because these could be easily reproduced when transferred to, or reproduced as, linocuts. In the last section of the book, chapters explore how the avant-garde’s attentiveness to paper almost always also implied a critique of the ways in which paper, and all that it stood for, was treated and labored in European culture and society more broadly. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, modernism, and design.

Performing Religion on the Secular Stage

Performing Religion on the Secular Stage
Author: Sharon Aronson-Lehavi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 122
Release: 2023-06-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000894940

This book examines the relations between Western religion, secularism, and modern theater and performance. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi posits that the ongoing cultural power of religious texts, icons, and ideas on the one hand and the artistic freedom enabled by secularism and avant-garde experimentalism on the other, has led theatre artists throughout the twentieth century to create a uniquely modern theatrical hybrid–theater performances that simultaneously re-inscribe and grapple with religion and religious performativity. The book compares this phenomenon with medieval forms of religious theater and offers deep and original analyses of significant contemporary works ranging from plays and performances by August Strindberg, Hugo Ball (Dada), Jerzy Grotowski, and Hanoch Levin, to those created by Adrienne Kennedy, Rina Yerushalmi, Deb Margolin, Milo Rau, and Sarah Ruhl. The book analyzes a new and original historiography of a uniquely modern theatrical phenomenon, a study that is of high importance considering the reemergence of religion in contemporary culture and politics.

100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922

100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922
Author: Isabel Wünsche
Publisher: Böhlau Köln
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2022-12-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3412525650

The First Russian Art Exhibition (Erste Russische Kunstausstellung), which opened at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin on October 15, 1922, and later travelled to Amsterdam, introduced a broad Western audience to the most recent artistic developments in Russia. The extensive show – more than a thousand works, including paintings, graphic works, sculptures, stage designs, architectural models, and works of porcelain – was remarkably inclusive in its scope, which ranged from traditional figurative painting to the latest constructions of the Russian avant-garde. Coming on the heels of the Treaty of Rapallo, the exhibition was a first cultural step towards bilateral relations between two young and yet internationally isolated new states – the Weimar Republic and the Russian Soviet Republic. Moving away from the narrow focus on the avant-garde, the volume presents new research that examines the exhibition's broader historical scope and cultural implications. The reception of the exhibition within artistic circles in Germany, Europe, the United States, and Japan in the 1920s is addressed, as well as the disposition of many of the works exhibited. The combination of longer, thematic essays and short features, along with reproductions of newly identified works and a selection of unpublished archival materials make this book valuable to both a scholarly and a general readership.

Gender and the Woman Artist in Early Modern Iberia

Gender and the Woman Artist in Early Modern Iberia
Author: Catherine Hall-van den Elsen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2024-01-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1003833632

This monograph explores the social constructs surrounding artistic production in early modern Iberia through the lenses of gender and class by examining the rarely considered contribution of creative women in Spain and Portugal between 1550 and 1700. Using the life-stage framework popular in texts of the period and drawing on a broad spectrum of materials including conduct guidebooks, treatises and conventual rules, this book examines the constraints imposed by gender-related social structures through microhistories of nuns, married, and unmarried women. The text spans class boundaries in its analysis of the work of painters, engravers, and sculptors, many of whom have until now eluded scholarly attention in English-language publications. An extensive bibliography promotes new avenues of inquiry into women’s contributions to the visual arts of the period. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s history, early modern Iberian studies, and Renaissance studies.

Women, Collecting, and Cultures Beyond Europe

Women, Collecting, and Cultures Beyond Europe
Author: Arlene Leis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2022-11-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000781410

This book examines collecting around the world and how women have participated in and formed collections globally. The edited volume builds on recent research and offers a wider lens through which to examine and challenge women’s collecting histories. Spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first (although not organized chronologically) the research herein extends beyond European geographies and across time periods; it brings to light new research on how artificiallia and naturallia were collected, transported, exchanged, and/or displayed beyond Europe. Women, Collecting and Cultures Beyond Europe considers collections as points of contact that forged transcultural connections and knowledge exchange. Some authors focus mainly on collectors and what was collected, while others consider taxonomies, travel, patterns of consumption, migration, markets, and the after life of things. In its broad and interdisciplinary approach, this book amplifies women’s voices, and aims to position their collecting practices toward new transcultural directions, including women’s relation to distinct cultures, customs, and beliefs as well as exposing the challenges women faced when carving a place for themselves within global networks. This study will be of interest to scholars working in collections and collecting, conservation, museum studies, art history, women’s studies, material and visual cultures, Indigenous studies, textile histories, global studies, history of science, social and cultural histories.

Sexually Explicit Art, Feminist Theory, and Gender in the 1970s

Sexually Explicit Art, Feminist Theory, and Gender in the 1970s
Author: Christian Liclair
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2022-05-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000564363

Structured around sexual desire as the central analytical category, this monograph systematically approaches a heterogeneous array of artworks to purposefully examine the entanglements of art, feminist theory, gender, and sexuality. This book considers the potential of sexually explicit art to challenge a socially constructed conception of sexuality as well as gender, and explores the sexually explicit as a means to (re-)claim agency for marginalized subjectivities and to emancipate desire from within the patriarchal and heteronormative system. In distinct case studies, the author focuses on works by four US-American artists – Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Semmel, Betty Tompkins, and Tee A. Corinne – and situates them in relation to contemporaneous debates associated with the insurgent Sexual Liberation Movements of the 1970s. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies.

Queer Methodology for Photography

Queer Methodology for Photography
Author: Asa Johannesson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2024-02-01
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1003846254

This book presents new ways of approaching photographic discourse from a queer perspective, offering discussions on what a queering methodology for photography may entail by drawing links between artistic strategies in photographic practice and key theoretical concepts from photography theory, queer theory, critical theory, and philosophy. With different examples of conceptual perspectives, including representation, formalism, and mediumlessness, it seeks to diversify queer methodology for photography. While primarily addressing photography, this book is entwined with broader philosophical questions concerning identity, difference, and the creations of systems of thought that limit the possibilities of existence to binary categorisation. It proposes a new concept of the photographic image that addresses its materiality, in the form of the poetic and the political, in relationship to a generative principle that is named as a queer quality: the photograph’s ability to voice queer concerns also beyond its role as representation. This book will be of interest to scholars working in photography, art history, queer studies, new materialism, and posthumanism.

Intimacy, Photography, Shame

Intimacy, Photography, Shame
Author: Harrison Adams
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2024-11-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1040186580

This study argues that intimacy requires an overcoming of shame, and each of these artists, in their own way, uses photography to frame moments that can be shameful to some and intimate others, leaving it to the viewer to navigate this affectively perilous terrain. From the cancellation of Mapplethorpe’s retrospective The Perfect Moment to the obscenity trial in Cincinnati shortly thereafter, to Hujar’s lesser-known but equally “hardcore” imagery, to Goldin’s gritty depictions of domestic violence and substance abuse, to the accusations of child pornography thrown at Mann’s photographs of her own children, the photographers at the heart of this book have probed the limits of acceptability. But there is more to their work than merely controversy; it’s what causes the controversy that matters. The notion of intimacy is at stake in some of our most important human relationships, and thus a great deal hinges on both achieving and preserving intimacy. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, photography and gender studies.