Vitalist Modernism

Vitalist Modernism
Author: Fae Brauer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000826910

This book reveals how, when, where, and why vitalism and its relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts of energy became seminal from the fin de siècle until the Second World War for such Modernists as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hugo Ball, Juliette Bisson, Eva Carrière, Salvador Dalì, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and John Cage. For them, Vitalism entailed the conception of life as a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution. Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de siècle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports, particularly rugby, water sports, the Olympic Games and physical culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force. This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second part illuminates how simultaneously Vitalism became aligned with anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology, spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states", alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson, Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carrière, John Gerrard Keulemans, László Moholy-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism, particularly Bergson’s theory of becoming, became associated with Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality, atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion, negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin alongside Cage’s concept of Nothing. After investigating the widespread engagement with Bergson’s philosophies and Vitalism and art by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum curators and visitors, plus readers and scholars working in art history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies, museum studies and curatorship.

Biocentrism and Modernism

Biocentrism and Modernism
Author: OliverA.I. Botar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 135157373X

Examining the complex intersections between art and scientific approaches to the natural world, Biocentrism and Modernism reveals another side to the development of Modernism. While many historians have framed this movement as being mechanistic and "against" nature, the essays in this collection illuminate the role that nature-centric ideologies played in late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century Modernism. The essays in Biocentrism and Modernism contend that it is no accident that Modernism arose at the same time as the field of modern biology. From nineteenth-century discoveries, to the emergence of the current environmentalist movement during the 1960s, artists, architects, and urban planners have responded to currents in the scientific world. Sections of the volume treat both philosophic worldviews and their applications in theory, historiography, and urban design. This collection also features specific case studies of individual artists, including Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock.

The Art of Ectoplasm

The Art of Ectoplasm
Author: Serena Keshavjee
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2023-10-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1772840394

The legacy of the Hamiltons’ psychic archive In the wake of the First World War and the 1918–19 pandemic, the world was left grappling with a profound sense of loss. It was against this backdrop that a Winnipeg couple, physician T.G. Hamilton and nurse Lillian Hamilton, began their research, documenting and photographing séances they held in their home laboratory. Their extensive study of the survival of human consciousness after death resulted in a stunning collection of hundreds of photographs, including images of tables flying through the air, mediums in trances, and, most curious of all, ectoplasm—a strange, white substance through which ghosts could apparently manifest. The Art of Ectoplasm invites readers to explore the Hamiltons’ research and photographic evidence which has attracted international attention from scholars and artists alike. Notable figures like Arthur Conan Doyle participated in the Hamilton family’s séances, and their investigations garnered support among the psychical scientific community, including renowned physicist Oliver Lodge, the inventor of wireless telegraphy. In the century since their creation, the Hamilton photographs (now housed at the University of Manitoba) have continued to perplex and inspire as the subject of academic study, comedic parody, and artistic and cinematic renderings. This fascinating collection reflects on the history and legacy of the startling and uncanny images found in the Hamilton Family archive. As contemporary society continues to feel the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Art of Ectoplasm offers a compelling look at a chapter in social history not entirely unlike our own.

The Earth That Modernism Built

The Earth That Modernism Built
Author: Kenny Cupers
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2024-11-26
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1477330216

Rewrites the history of architectural modernism for an age of environmental crisis and enduring colonialism.

The Geometry of Modernism

The Geometry of Modernism
Author: Miranda B. Hickman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0292709439

Addressing both the literature and the visual arts of Anglo-American modernism, The Geometry of Modernism recovers a crucial development of modernism's early years that until now has received little sustained critical attention: the distinctive idiom composed of geometric forms and metaphors generated within the early modernist movement of Vorticism, formed in London in 1914. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, as well as Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Butler Yeats, Hickman examines the complex of motives out of which Lewis initially forged the geometric lexicon of Vorticism—and then how Pound, H.D., and Yeats later responded to it and the values that it encoded, enlisting both the geometric vocabulary and its attendant assumptions and ideals, in transmuted form, in their later modernist work. Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.

The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture

The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture
Author: Charissa Terranova
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2016-08-12
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317419510

The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture collects thirty essays from a transdisciplinary array of experts on biology in art and architecture. The book presents a diversity of hybrid art-and-science thinking, revealing how science and culture are interwoven. The book situates bioart and bioarchitecture within an expanded field of biology in art, architecture, and design. It proposes an emergent field of biocreativity and outlines its historical and theoretical foundations from the perspective of artists, architects, designers, scientists, historians, and theoreticians. Includes over 150 black and white images.

Biological Modernism

Biological Modernism
Author: Carl Gelderloos
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2019-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810141345

Honorable Mention for the DAAD/GSA Book Prize for the Best Book in Germanistik or Cultural Studies Biological Modernism identifies an intellectual current in the Weimar Republic that drew on biology, organicism, vitalism, and other discourses associated with living nature in order to redefine the human being for a modern, technological age. Contrary to the assumption that any turn toward the organic indicated a reactionary flight from modernity or a longing for wholeness, Carl Gelderloos shows that biology and other discourses of living nature offered a nuanced way of theorizing modernity rather than fleeing from it. Organic life, instead of representing a stabilizing sense of wholeness, by the 1920s had become a scientific, philosophical, and disciplinary problem. In their work, figures such as Alfred Döblin, Ernst Jünger, Helmuth Plessner, and August Sander interrogated the relationships between technology, nature, and the human and radically reconsidered the relationship between the disciplines as well as the epistemological and political consequences for defining the human being. Biological Modernism will be of interest to scholars of German literature and culture, literary modernism, photography, philosophical anthropology, twentieth-century intellectual history, the politics of culture, and the history of science.

Art as Organism

Art as Organism
Author: Charissa N. Terranova
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2015-10-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0857728946

What if modernism had been characterised by evolving, interconnected and multi-sensory images – rather than by the monolithic objects often described by its artists and theorists? In this groundbreaking book, Charissa Terranova unearths a forgotten narrative of modernism, which charts the influence that biology, General Systems Theory and cybernetics had on art in the twentieth century. From kinetic and interactive art to early computer art and installations spanning an entire city, she shows that the digital image was a rich and expansive artistic medium of modernism.

The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde

The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde
Author: Professor Isabel Wünsche
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2015-10-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 147243269X

The artists of the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde found inspiration as well as a model for artistic growth in the creative principles of nature. Isabel Wünsche analyzes the artistic influences, intellectual foundations, and scientific publications that shaped the formation of these artists. Particular emphasis is given to the holistic worldviews and organic approaches prevalent among artists of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde and the emergence of the concept of Organic Culture.

The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde

The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde
Author: Isabel W?nsche
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351541781

The artists of the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde found inspiration as well as a model for artistic growth in the creative principles of nature. Isabel W?nsche analyzes the artistic influences, intellectual foundations, and scientific publications that shaped the formation of these artists, the majority of whom were based in St. Petersburg. Particular emphasis is given to the holistic worldviews and organic approaches prevalent among artists of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde, specifically Jan Ciaglinski, Nikolai Kulbin, and Elena Guro, as well as the emergence of the concept of Organic Culture as developed by Mikhail Matiushin, practiced at the State Institute of Artistic Culture, and taught at the reformed Art Academy in the 1920s. Discussions of faktura and creative intuition explore the biocentric approaches that dominated the work of Pavel Filonov, Kazimir Malevich, Voldemar Matvejs, Olga Rozanova, and Vladimir Tatlin. The artistic approaches of the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde were further promoted and developed by Vladimir Sterligov and his followers between 1960 and 1990. The study examines the cultural potential as well as the utopian dimension of the artists? approaches to creativity and their ambitious visions for the role of art in promoting human psychophysiological development and shaping post-revolutionary culture.