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Daniel Albright's book, Music's Monisms, explores the concept of 'monism' in relation to musical modernism. The book provides a wealth of reflections and references, offering a comprehensive understanding of literature and music. However, the book's focus on monism is not thoroughly examined and often takes a backseat. Albright argues that modernist music challenges the boundaries between language and languagelessness, questioning the dichotomies that shape our thinking and organization of the world. While the book presents intriguing insights, it lacks theoretical rigor and fails to fully grapple with the complexities of modernist art and aesthetics. The text also critiques Joseph N. Albright's book, Music's Monisms: Schoenberg, Wagner, and the Philosophy of History, particularly the chapter on Wagner. The author highlights the naming dynamics in Wagner's work and asserts that musical meaning is always uncertain. However, the author criticizes Albright for not addressing the political complexities of Wagner's legacy, such as his revolutionism and anti-Semitism. The text suggests that a more deconstructive reading could have been achieved through a deeper engagement with Nietzsche's writings, which heavily influenced Wagner's operas. Overall, the text emphasizes the historical and political implications of the book's analysis of Wagner's music. [Extracted from the article]

The development of art in Austria after 1918 remains little explored; the main focus of research continues to be fin‐de‐siècle Vienna. Where interwar Austrian modernism is studied at all, interest is mostly limited to the municipal housing sponsored by the Social Democratic council. The main concern of this essay is to examine the reasons for this inconsistency and comparative neglect. It explores the ways in which the historiography of Austrian post‐war modernism has been informed by wider historical assumptions, about the role of the First World War as a cultural‐political caesura, for instance, or by ambivalence about interwar Austrian history and its slide into fascism, or valorization of the avant‐garde. A comparison is also drawn with accounts of art in interwar Czechoslovakia, where modernist practices are much celebrated since they have assumed a legitimating function for Czech and Slovak culture in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1971, Pakistan‐born lawyer and artist Iqbal Geoffrey (1939–2021) lodged a discrimination case against the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This essay connects Geoffrey's complaint, which he filed with the New York State Division of Human Rights, to MoMA's situation at the centre of activist debates over race and equality during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the museum's prominent role in exporting US art around the world during the Cold War. At a time when Asian modernists received a mostly transactional, diplomatic welcome from US cultural institutions including MoMA, Geoffrey mobilized his legal, artistic, and epistolary practices to stake his claim to permanent belonging within the US art world. Today, his case raises questions over where expanding histories of 'global modernism' meet incomplete histories of 'American' modernism, against a backdrop and the legacies of the Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with an unsolicited letter to Barnett Newman written by the Indian modernist F. N. Souza, this essay seeks to reframe our understanding of the decline of modernism. Art‐historical consensus holds that, as the 1960s progressed, modernist art was swept aside by demands for political engagement to which it could not adapt. Souza's letter complicates this. On one hand, it criticizes Newman's latest paintings for expressing modernist values such as autonomy, transcendence, and universality, for amounting to the claim that 'colour is ethics'. But on the other, rather than abandoning such concepts, as did most advanced art in the 1960s, Souza demands another, political modernism, one capable of grounding itself in reflection on the movement's historical complicity with colonialism and racism. This was a difficult project, and I reject the view that it was inherently progressive; indeed, I draw out the reactionary attitudes to which it could all‐too‐easily lead. Souza's desire, by 1969, to move beyond these without abandoning the historicity of modernism positions him closer to Newman than his letter suggests. Both proceeded, in ways that refuse the schematic alternatives of traditional art history, by making work that addressed political reality through the reflexive critique of modernism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers an account of the ways in which successive generations of Black artists in Britain engaged with modernism during the UK's transformation from a monocultural to a post‐imperial society. Whereas the first wave (including Frank Bowling and Anwar Shemza) sought to reconcile their late colonial backgrounds with the tenets of high modernism – the autonomy of the artwork, the disinterested beholder, and universalist claims of timeless aesthetic value – the second wave (including Rasheed Araeen and Gavin Jantjes) turned to minimalism, performance, and photo‐text to de‐centre modernism's core assumptions that relied on formalist discourse. Collage and montage practices among the UK‐born third wave (including Sonia Boyce, Maud Sulter, and Donald Rodney), which entailed the hyphenation of cross‐cultural elements, thus call for a deeper look at transculturation processes active since modernism's beginning, but which were not previously recognized on account of formalist hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by Stuart Hall's essay 'Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three "Moments" in Post‐War History' (2006), this special issue looks closely at the multi‐faceted genealogies of Black British modernism since the arrival of the 'Windrush generation'. It brings together a range of essays in different formats by artists and art historians on topics and methods that have been central to the AHRC‐funded Black Artists and Modernism project from which it emerges. In particular, the introduction centralizes the lack of attention paid to the material and conceptual nature of artworks made by Black British artists, and asks how a reappraisal of their work can contribute to an expanded understanding of modernism. Re‐evaluating David Medalla's participatory artwork A Stitch in Time (1967–72), which originated in the late 1960s but has since taken on multiple lives in various locations across the globe, we consider why and how it continues to be occluded from orthodox narratives of conceptual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Danish architect, designer and cultural critic, Poul Henningsen (1894–1967), was one of the most internationally oriented figures of Danish modernism. During the 1920s, however, he insisted that Danish conditions and traditions were different from elsewhere, and that Danish art and architecture had developed its own way into modernism; that is to say, he subscribed to Danish exceptionalism. Henningsen voiced reservations about Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius; they were too propagandistic and had reduced modernist ideas to a narrow set of stylistic motifs or even fads. His change in conviction in 1930 developed through a somewhat belated re‐engagement with cubism, which he understood as an aesthetic and ideologic worldview expressed in art and architecture, design and fashion, and through which he also embraced the international style. Henningsen represents an interesting case study in the continuous negotiations and conflicts around the role of national traditions and international influences in art, design and architecture in Denmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most accounts of Judith Weir's music focus on her mature, apparently postmodern approach. By contrast, my analysis of the early withdrawn works highlights a series of creative dialogues with some of Weir's older British and Continental contemporaries, and more historical models. These interactions reveal that modernism and the avant-garde were essential to the evolution of Weir's musical language—a formative experience that has been downplayed in attempts by critics to distance Weir from modernism. The gendered reception of Weir's music is also noted, in which her natural modesty and withdrawal of early works have been portrayed as symptoms of feminine uncertainty, self-criticism, and anxiety. This discourse is recalibrated by relating it first to creativity theories, in which dialogue, uncertainty, and serendipity are valued, and second to the more widespread practice of withdrawing works, which illustrates how self-censorship is a common and vital part of creative practice, irrespective of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that there are inflections of modernism in André Bazin's realist aesthetics and that he should be considered an early champion of post–World War II modernism in cinema. Within classical film theory, which took its point of departure in the silent cinema era, modernism is taken to be incompatible with realism. Moreover, both modernism and realism are seen to rely on the principle of medium specificity in this context, whereas Bazin argued that aesthetic progress in cinema is intrinsically related to the medium's capability to be impure. Recently, we have seen several attempts at connecting Bazin's aesthetics with high‐modernism in the visual arts. However, I argue that it is more instructive to focus on their differences. This comparison is relevant for developing a deeper understanding of the form of modernism at stake in Bazin's aesthetics, especially when it comes to the question of the spectator's role in the constitution of meaning. Furthermore, Bazin's proto‐modernist aesthetics must be discussed with an eye to his ardent support of what he considered a new avant‐garde in narrative cinema and his lasting, but often misunderstood, interest in ambiguity as an aesthetic category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores early twentieth-century Swedish attitudes towards modernism. It uses as its focus Wilhelm Stenhammar's incidental music for Shakespeare's As You Like It, composed in 1920 for a production directed by Per Lindberg. It argues that by 1920, 'modernism' in Sweden was associated with particular styles that differed between disciplines. The term 'modern', however, had the same meaning across disciplines, and referred to cultural forms that aimed to reach a mass audience. As a collaborative form, theatre is particularly useful for exploring conflicting ideas about modernism as practitioners involved frequently held opposing views. This was the case here—Stenhammar and Lindberg had differing attitudes towards 'modernism', but were united by a common goal of creating 'modern' art. Through an investigation of the 1920 production, I argue that Stenhammar's music was central to the play's success, and was received as 'modern' in part because of its diatonic language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the line drawn between art and the everyday; and some attempts to erase it by artists and art theorists. We look at the sensibility of artists who notice and make work from everyday experience. In modernity the conscription of everyday materials and objects to collage and assemblage develops this sensibility within an aesthetic conception of visual art. Looking at Duchamp's readymades, we consider his claim that these objects are chosen with indifference to their aesthetic properties. We then consider the aesthetic requirements of a medium that directs response to works of art. Briefly, with our conception of a medium in mind, we deliberate upon Modernism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism; and the border between the poetic and poetry. We conclude with a lesson to be drawn from Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film, Paterson. Along the way, we cling to some of Kant's insights concerning the fine arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the internet transforming musical practices? In this article, through a study of five prominent popular and cross-over music genres spanning the period from the late 1990s to the present, we examine how the internet has augmented the creative, aesthetic, communicative, and social dimensions of contemporary music. The five genres are microsound, hauntology, hypnagogic pop, chillwave, and vaporwave. Analysing the internet-based practices associated with these genres poses methodological and theoretical challenges. It requires new research tools attentive to the online practices involved in their creation and reception. To this end we adapt the Issue Crawler software, an established digital research method that analyses networks of hyperlinking on the worldwide web. In addition, it requires a theoretical framework that can respond to music's profuse mediations in the digital environment. We propose that reconceptualizing genre in music by reference to a theory of mediation offers such a framework. The essay concludes by reflecting on the implications of our analysis for theorizing music and place, and for problematizing existing historical periodizations, notably that of modernism and postmodernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his classic paper 'Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism', Kendall Walton highlights the special sense of contact with their subjects that photographs typically engender and argues that we must postulate photographic transparency in order to explain their capacity to do so. He also downplays the epistemic advantages historically associated with the medium and instead finds the source of our medium-specific appreciation of photographs largely in their transparency. I argue that Walton errs in both these respects. I offer a simpler, deflationary means of explaining the contact phenomenon, one that does not mandate that we see through photographs, and I show how an epistemic advantage associated with the medium can be brought together with this deflationary understanding to yield a two-factor analysis of our experiences in looking at photographs. I conclude with an application of this two-factor approach to an iconic photograph from the modernist canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents criticism on the book "After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism," written by Robert B. Pippin. Particular focus is given to how the book focuses upon the work of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and what his views might be on Modernism in art. Additional topics discussed include the work of the artist Édouard Manet, the history of the development of Modern aesthetics in art and the work of the artist and painter Paul Cézanne.

The article presents criticism on the book "After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism," written by Robert B. Pippin. Particular focus is given to how the book focuses upon the work of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and what his views might be on Modernism in art. Additional topics discussed include the work of the artist Édouard Manet, the history of the development of Modern aesthetics in art and the work of the artist and painter Paul Cézanne.

The article presents criticism on the book "After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism," written by Robert B. Pippin. Particular focus is given to how the book focuses upon the work of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and what his views might be on Modernism in art. Additional topics discussed include the work of the artist Édouard Manet, the history of the development of Modern aesthetics in art and the work of the artist and painter Paul Cézanne.

The article presents criticism on the book "After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism," written by Robert B. Pippin. Particular focus is given to how the book focuses on the work and viewpoints of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Additional topics discussed include Hegel's views on art, the work of artists including Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, and insights on the techniques used in modernist art.

The traditional appraisal that artists in Brazil were unable or unwilling to depict black subjects during the Imperial and early Republican periods is at odds with much of what was actually produced. Following the success of abolitionist imagery in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of visual artists in Brazil actively established a critical discourse that linked race and inequality as early as the 1890s, two decades before such critiques became widespread in literature and the social sciences. Specific works by Eliseu Visconti, Antonio Ferrigno and Modesto Brocos are singled out and examined, in this respect. The final section of the essay examines the issue of self-representation, focusing on the work of Arthur Timótheo da Costa in the 1900s and 1910s. A marked contrast exists between the relatively neglected efforts of these artists and the much lauded drive of Brazilian modernism to embrace the theme of race, after 1922.

To understand and begin to answer the question of this article, I compare Heidegger's position to Hegel's, since the two appear structurally similar and Heidegger is explicitly indebted to Hegel's aesthetics. On the basis of this comparison, I argue that abstract art has the potential to play an important role on Heideggerian grounds. I conclude that modernist art should be understood not as a supplement to the project of self-realization that characterizes Hegelian freedom but rather as a disruptive event that could potentially challenge the constraining technological mindset that is characteristic of our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Beckett within the context of the French modernist cinema of the 1960s, with a particular focus on the overlaps between Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad, which Beckett saw on its release in 1962, and the film of Comédie, which he made a year later. Both films narrate the banal story of a bourgeois love triangle through a radical experiment with form; both are animated by similar concerns in their exploration of the presence of the camera, the use of non-synchronous sound and gesture, and the relation between cinema and theatre. Beckett's refined awareness of film technique suggests a heightened awareness of Resnais's recent experiments in film form. I argue that Beckett's late aesthetic of non-synchronicity, its dialectic of the live and the recorded, of presence and absence, is fundamentally altered by his work for the screen and by his formative encounter with the modernist cinema of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I argue that René Magritte visualises an aesthetic of the uncanny sublime by sustaining a tensive dynamic between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown. Because the revealing of the sublime is deferred, Magritte’s perspective derives more from a modernist post-religious context that is neither dependent on a metaphysical absolute, nor a secular renunciation of the sacred. This article therefore challenges the view that Magritte’s surrealist art belongs either to an anti-sublime tradition, one that dismantles any illusory solace to transcendent qualities, or a postmodern ideology that posits a fundamental split between representation and reality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Vanessa Bell presents a problem for the history of art in Britain. As a member of the Bloomsbury group she is famous, yet her art itself is relatively little known, and there is no consensus as to whether it can be taken seriously. This essay examines the obstacles to a reassessment of her work and their implications for the wider field of British art studies. Challenging the worst stereotype of Bell as silent, apolitical and derivative, it proposes new approaches to her art through the idea of conversation, which recurs in her painting and letters. Through detailed analysis of images, primary texts and the long-term critical debate, it draws attention to the complexities of Bell’s response to modernist art and theory, and to the critical, cosmopolitan nature of her practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the interpretation of African sculpture as part of the genre of primitive art in France between World War I and World War II. Particular focus is given to how French colonialism and the dominance of Paris, France as the center of the global art world during this period influenced French perceptions regarding the significance of African sculpture. Other topics explored include definitions of aesthetic modernism, art critiques regarding the concept of primitivism, and literature on material culture studies.

Larry Shiner has risen to an impassioned defence against my criticisms of an iconic figure, claiming that I have 'misrepresent[ed] Kristeller's central aim' and therefore missed 'the real shortcomings of Kristeller's essay' and 'obscure[d] substantive issues behind simplistic dichotomies'. These, and a series of disagreements over countless small details, take up the first part of his reply. He then proceeds to summarize his own book's achievements in correcting Kristeller's shortcomings. Shiner acknowledges difficulties in Kristeller's formulations, but accepts their purport and actually expands the reach of Kristeller's thesis. Whatever else one might wish to say about these charges (which are quite impressive as a list but each disputable taken in turn), Shiner remains an unrepentant exponent of Kristeller's views. I realize that dogmas die hard, and it is only to be expected that if one challenges the central tenets of a legacy one will meet with entrenched reactions. Given the word-limit I have been allotted for my counter-reply, I will confine myself to the more substantive issues as these concern Kristeller's arguments, reserving for a possible future occasion any difficulties I may have with Shiner's own theses. My response will take the form of a series of questions followed by my own proposed answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wigmore's `The Problem of Proof', published in 1913, was a path-breaking attempt to systematize the process of drawing inferences from trial evidence. In this paper, written for a conference on visual approaches to evidence, I look at the Wigmore article in relation to cubist art, which coincidentally made its American debut in New York and Chicago the same spring that the article appeared. The point of the paper is to encourage greater attention to the complex meanings embedded in visual diagrams, meanings overlooked by the prevailing cognitive scientific approaches to the Wigmore method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of central Europe agree that the fin de siècle was a time of artistic ferment and change that was critical in the formation of the 'modern', but ignore the influence and role of the nobility, assuming that nobles were insignificant actors in the cultural realm. This article contests that notion by investigating the janus-faced artistic nobility in Munich. The author argues that nobles played an important role in the artistic markers of Munich's fin de siècle (Secession, art nouveau, cabaret); more importantly, many nobles were instrumental in the reception and propagation of ideas that informed the European avant-garde, and acted as a model for a European variant of alternative modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the alliance between painterly modernism and right-wing politics in France at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Political struggles took on an aesthetic dimension in the cultural battles waged around 1900. Maurice Denis's monumental group portrait Homage to Cézanne (1900) serves as the focus of my inquiry. This painting is often cited and reproduced in histories of French modernism, but has yet to be examined within its historical and political moment. Although Homage does not directly reference contemporary political events, Denis's formal and compositional choices in Homage were informed by Adrien Mithouard's right-wing nationalist cultural politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes an art which, demonstrating a sense of moral duty and a will for social engagement, sought to contribute to the reconstruction of Britain following the 1939–45 war. Two models of theory and practice are distinguished in response to the potential of this moment: in the first, modern ideas about a synthesis of art and architecture (something approaching a ‘total work of art’) were consulted and revived in a British context; in the second, ideas were forged that established a new relationship between art works and their environment which maintained the link between art and architecture, yet did not imply an ultimate dissolution of one within the other. These two models are set within an historical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the role of visual arts in Great Britain during the Victorian and Modernist period. The author explained that many British historians find it difficult to give a distinction and power interpretation between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries art. On the other hand, historian W. C. Wees has written one earliest account of radical art before 1914.

This article profiles Mário de Andrade, Brazilian artist and leader of cultural modernism. His musical vision emphasized an ideological focus on social reality in Brazil and the utilization of native resources in pursuit of a nationalist esthetic. Under his influence, Brazilianism became a legitimate inspiration for creative expression.

Discovered in 1940 a few months after the military collapse of France, the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux were to become for many writers and artists of the post-war period a symbol of the twin births of art and homo sapiens. This new primitivism may be explained with reference to three contexts: the institutional recognition of Modernism by the French state; the Gaullist rehabilitation of national cultural identity after Vichy; and French resistance to growing American cultural hegemony. In each case, the cultural reconstruction of France privileges the originary moment symbolized by Lascaux. The work of Georges Bataille, René Char and Maurice Blanchot, however, explores and problematizes the originary status of prehistoric art in terms of anthropology, ontology and aesthetics. Far from providing a solid foundation for cultural reconstruction, Lascaux comes to represent the suspended and precarious nature of human existence in the post-war years and to function as a caution against the dangers implicit in the quest for cultural origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the contents of Michael Fried's trilogy books about modernism. 'Manet's Modernism'; 'Absorption and Theatricality'; 'Courbet's Realism'; Three aspects of modernism.

Comments on the interpretations of the United States' mass cultural influence to other countries. Contribution of modernism in art to the growth of mass culture; Effects of mass culture globalization; Description of the US culture; Account on the cultural relationship between the United States and other countries.

Focuses on the importance and complexities of the frame as an element of presentational context in artworks. Conventions and the work's actual physical surroundings that form presentational context; Practices of display and reproduction of the schools of modernism and postmodernism; Various styles and functions of frames over the history of Western art; Role of frames in the reading a painting's composition.

Examines some of the arguments of Clement Greenberg's Modernist art criticism within the work of Greenberg himself and of Michael Fried who provided logical conclusions to some Modernist tenets. Ideological elements of the rise of Greenberg's paradigm; Reasons for the decline of the popularity of Greenberg's paradigm.

Argues that Frank Cizek's teaching of child art before the 1930s should be debated as a modernist practice. Historical background of Cizek's work; Problematics of modernism; Definitions of modernism; Rhythmical forms evolved through a process of spiritual self-discovery; Cizek's teaching method with children.

Discusses the use of the concept of 'the gaze' in late modernist art. Argument that flatness does not offer a secure base on which to build a definition in painting; Conscious play with the gap between pre-conception and perception; Relationship between the duration of making and that of viewing.

The article presents information on the persistent attempts to create a science of art, which would comprise laws governing the right use of color, line, form, proportion and rhythm during the early nineteenth century. Chemist George Field called this "the aesthetical science". Accordingly, this transformation is part of the foundations of modernism and consists of the penetration into the nineteenth century of ideas originating in the Enlightenment and earlier. In his book "Chromatography," Field he discusses the science of classification of colors.

Discusses images that contemporary men and women have artistically addressed within the context of the social issues of 1980s and 1990s. Postmodernist avant garde artists' addressing of aspects of religious tradition and theological concern; Regendering of divinity; Broadening or redefinition of the humanity of Christ; Application of religious imagination to a prophetic tradition; Call to sacralize suffering and martyrdom for redemptive cause.