Browsing by Author "Antliff, Mark"

ABSTRACT

My dissertation studies the intersection of popular entertainment and the visual arts in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century and the dialogue that formed between this subculture and the avant-garde factions of Paris and Italy. While this project will focus on the Italian Futurist Gino Severini (1883-1966), it is not conceived of as a monograph. Instead I will use Severini as a case study to help make sense of a complicated world in which the boundaries between bohemia and the bourgeoisie, masculinity and femininity, and art and popular culture are transgressed and blurred. Severini is particularly well suited to this discussion because nearly all of the 170 paintings, sketches, and pastels that he produced between the time that he arrived in Paris and the outbreak of the First World War take as their subject a prime example of Parisian popular culture--Montmartre's dance-halls. My study will address how form and content interrelate in these works, analyzing the ongoing evolution of his style and the manner in which he developed his imagery to cater to both commercial and avant-garde audiences. It will also seek to make sense of the reception of Severini's work both in France and elsewhere. In order to make sense of his artistic career and to divine the importance of his life and work to the greater political and cultural environment of early twentieth-century Europe, I will also explore Severini's actual participation in dance-hall culture, his self-fashioning as a dandy and a foreigner, and his attempt to find a niche for himself in Paris while still maintaining a foothold in the Italian avant-garde. Gino Severini's unique posturing within the culture of Bohemian Paris and the rich visual record that he left behind provide a perfect platform from which to deepen our understanding of the multitude of factors influencing the Parisian avant-garde and its subsequent impact on avant-gardes throughout the rest of the Western world.

Color, Hygiene, and Body Politics: French Neo-Impressionist Theories of Vision and Volition, 1870-1905, explores the little studied "pragmatic" dimension of Neo-Impressionist theory and practice to reveal the full social and political import of Divisionist technique. Specifically, it examines how Neo-Impressionist painters such as Georges Seurat (1859-1891), Paul Signac (1863-1935), and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), as well as their anarchist allies, applied artistic and political tenets to their daily practices, including hygienic habits and medical treatments. Neo-Impressionist Divisionism was based on a physiological awareness that the balanced use of three optical nerves generated a sense of harmony. By examining the ethical aspects of neuro-psychological color theories in nineteenth-century Europe, this research demonstrates that this awareness was not merely a matter of optics, but a part of the prevalent socio-ethical discourse of energy efficiency.

The first chapter, "Color Perception and Mental Labor: Divisionism and the Ethic of Nineteenth-Century Neuro-psychology," examines the history of nineteenth-century neuro-psychology to address how, in the fields of art and science, color perception was identified as an action. The chapter focuses on widespread neuro-psychological notions of "reflex theory," "nervous fatigue," and "homeostasis," all of which regulated the Neo-Impressionist concept of color harmony. Illuminating the Neo-Impressionist neural ethic, this chapter focuses on the behavioral phase of the Neo-Impressionist aesthetics neglected by previous studies.

The second chapter, "Neuro-psychological Space in Color and Dynamism," explores how this behavioral discourse was visualized in Neo-Impressionist painterly space. Contrary to Kantian a priori space, prominent theorists, such as Taine, Spencer, and Ribot who influenced the Neo-Impressionists, upheld the idea of dynamic space. As the raison d'être for this new space resided in the dynamic interaction between the self and the world, action became fundamental to its formation. Color in such new spaces was the perceptual bedrock, since optical nerves defined external objects chiefly as color. This chapter underscores the connection between dynamism and color in painterly space, through which the viewer could voluntarily engage with the world.

The third chapter, "Therapeutic Color and the Neo-Impressionists' Daily Practices," delves into the Neo-Impressionists' health-related pursuits including their commitment to hydrotherapy, color therapy, and homeopathy, all associated with an ecological concern for the equilibrium between the self and the environment. This comprehensive examination reveals an overlooked behavioral aspect of Neo-Impressionist theory, which was a critical dimension of their world-view that sought to merge art and life. The first section examines the artists' commitment to bathing and hydrotherapy through an analysis of the art and writings of Camille Pissarro and his anarchist allies. The second part examines the theory of color therapy developed by Dr. Paul Ferdinand Gachet, and his impact on the Neo-Impressionists. In the final section, I consider the broader implications of the Neo-Impressionist embrace of homeopathic practices with reference to a theory of ecological equilibrium.

Art historians have identified a rightward turn in the artistic climate of France in the interwar period, one opposed to an avant-garde accused of being foreign to national culture, and reflective of a broader cultural and political shift towards the right. However, a study detailing the strength and variety of forces opposed to modernism and the avant-gardes in this period has yet to be written.

Drawing on newspapers, art journals, art history books, and sources from private and national archives in France, my dissertation presents four detailed case studies of reactionary, anti-avantgardeist and anti-modernist critics, art educators and art historians during this period, expanding our understanding of the position and influence of these rightwing intellectuals. Analyzing their aims, the artists they supported, their audiences, their social networks, and finally their links to the French state, the dissertation will reconstitute the multiple and multifaceted platforms of conservative cultural activism, revealing the contours of a powerful, persistent, and often successful cultural and political agenda that sought to undermine or reverse the course of modernism.

Accounting for the strategies through which rightwing art world actors battling modernism and the avant-gardes sought to institutionalize their campaigns, this dissertation complicates and revises our understanding of the substantial challenges posed to modern art in the interwar period, demonstrating the power of these interventions while also pointing to the tacit complicity of the French state with these efforts.

Popular conceptions of anarchists as bomb-throwing saboteurs overshadow the central role of educational reform projects and artistic engagement with radical politics within anarchism’s program for social transformation—especially during the height of its popularity in Western Europe and the United States at the turn of the last century. My dissertation spotlights the critical intersection of radical pedagogy and artistic practice at the heart of anarchist praxis by highlighting how adults and children alike expressed, and thereby reinforced, anarchist ideals in a range of pedagogical and artistic practices within the longest-running anarchist educational project in United States history: the Modern School of New York and Stelton, New Jersey (1911-53). Although scholars have contributed a robust social and political history of the Modern School—most notably Paul Avrich’s The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (1980)—my research emphasizes the key role of children, children’s art, and anarchist notions of childhood in modernist praxis, which remain unexplored aspects of Modern School scholarship. Ultimately, the interplay of anarchist politics and creative praxis at the Modern School was a ground-up phenomenon in which children were not just a subject for anarchist artists or a stylistic influence within an anarchist context—but makers of an anarchist art whose creative processes performed the labor of anarchist politics.

This dissertation examines South African artist Irma Stern’s contributions to modernism in South Africa and to modernism as a global movement. It analyzes how Stern’s interactions with South Africans, combined with her early artistic training in Germany and her cultural connections to the South African Jewish community, helped her to bring critical issues of race, gender, and nation into focus through her work. This study goes beyond the work of previous scholars who have suggested that Stern was uninterested in social or political causes, arguing that Stern was acutely aware of how social and political themes contributed to modernism’s development in Europe. Moreover, this study concludes that Stern employed similar strategies to develop a South African modernism. Although she often spoke pejoratively about nonwhite South Africans, she was cognizant of the fact that the act of painting nonwhites made significant artistic and political statements.

Because Stern is virtually unknown in the United States, this study will do the following: 1) Introduce Stern to an American audience by discussing her work from the beginning of her artistic training in Germany in 1913 to her death in 1966; 2) Reconnect Stern to the larger global debates about modernism in the twentieth century; 3) Analyze Stern’s works that have received little or no attention in previous scholarship; and 4) Discuss the long-term influence that Stern’s work had in shaping the direction of South African art before, during, and after apartheid.

Formal analysis and close readings of Stern's oil paintings, drawings, travel narratives, and watercolors are crucial in understanding how she used her artistic talents to record visual interpretations of South African culture history. As one of only a few internationally respected South African artists of the apartheid era, an examination of Stern's work and career allows for a more complex understanding of how race, gender, and nation contributed to the development of modernism in South African art history.

While Italian art of the twentieth century is usually associated with either the avant-garde practices of Futurism or the classicism of Fascist visual culture, the Italian modernists' complex engagement with concepts of the ‘Baroque’ has yet to be explored. Through an extensive analysis of paintings, sculptures, publications, collecting practices, and exhibitions, my dissertation addresses this lacuna by investigating how the Baroque was discursively constructed and visually represented in Italian modernist artistic and cultural debates between 1880 and 1945. I study how artists and critics such as Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio De Chirico, Adolfo Wildt, Lucio Fontana, and Roberto Longhi championed or disparaged the Baroque in the context of heated debates over the import of Italy’s rich cultural heritage, its status in modern Europe, and the potential role of avant-garde art as a catalyst for national regeneration. In contrast to previous scholars I argue that the development of modern art in Italy was actively shaped by cultural perceptions about the Baroque. My dissertation therefore sheds new light on the role of style in the cultural politics of Italy, which in turn will transform our understanding of visual culture in modern Italy, and of twentieth-century representations of the Baroque in art, literature, and aesthetics.