Browsing by Subject "Modern art"

This dissertation explores the influence of anarchism on the development of modern art in Mexico and the Americas from 1910 to 1950. It argues that art was an integral component of anarchist movements and that the philosophy and politics of anarchism guided major aesthetic debates about modern art in Mexico. Two key figures anchor this study: Ricardo Flores Magón (1874-1922) was an anarchist writer, activist, and head of the Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano, an anarcho-communist group of exiled Mexican anarchists living in the U.S. Dr. Atl (1875-1964) was a landscape painter, early proponent of muralism, and promoter of Mexican folk art. These figures are a starting point for unveiling a wide network of well-known and marginalized artists, writers, and intellectuals who engaged with anarchist philosophies. Using previously unexplored archival sources, correspondence, and unpublished manuscripts, this study examines a range of different artistic works—paintings and murals, cartoons and drawings, correspondence and book illustrations—that ranged in form and style from realism to impressionism and expressionism. By examining the reproduction and translation of these works throughout Mexico, the U.S., and South America, this dissertation also shows how anarchist art production transcended linguistic and cultural divides and furthered efforts to construct a hemispheric network of transborder solidarity.

The literati stereotype of Modern Chinese Art began as a conservative adaption of Chinese nationalist reform during the early twentieth century. Modern stereotypes provided an intuitive, common-sense way of acting and negotiating the complexities of difference. The Fantastic Theater of Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century chronicles an alternate history of Chinese émigrés’ embrace of the stereotypical image of literati culture. That stereotype was a modern form of visibility and recognition of Chinese identity. From China to diverse Western locales—Geneva, London, France, New York, and California—the literati stereotype reconciled the dual undesirable conditions of Westerners’ absent understanding and negative misunderstanding of China. The stereotype was a positive compromise of optics, expectations, and self-presentation.The visual archive of the literati stereotype examines literati scholars and their associations with learning, philosophy, and ink painting. Sculpture, books, design, advertising, ceramics, photography, architecture, and personal ephemera allow me to assemble a new approach to the artists Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), Lang Jingshan (1892-1995), Zhang Shuqi (1900-1957), Yu Jingzhi (1900-1980), and Wang Jiyuan (1893-1975), to write a different history of the Bollingen Foundation, the lives of the Chew Family and their China Art Center in Carmel, and Mai-mai Sze, the little-known translator of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting.