The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism
Inspired by Richard Wagner's idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Polina Dimova's At the Crossroads of the Senses traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia-the physiological or figurative blending of senses-as a modernist phenomenon from its ......
In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist "science of imaginary solutions," a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other movements. Over a century after Jarry "made the gesture of dying," Katie L. Price and Michael R. ......
Long considered the embodiment of national resilience and fraternal loyalty in the wake of World War I, Fernand Leger's art overshadows a far less heroic story, one that prompts a demythification of his legendary identification with the working class and provokes important questions about psychic trauma. This book draws on Leger's wartime letters ......
Traces the history of American genre painting from 1905 to 1945. Examines how artists such as John Sloan, Norman Rockwell, and Jacob Lawrence adapted to an era of rapid urbanization, mass media, and modernist art.
Smell loomed large in cultural discourse in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the midcentury fear of miasma, the drive for sanitation reform, and the rise in artificial perfumery. Meanwhile, the science of olfaction remained largely mysterious, prompting an impulse to "see smell" and inspiring some artists to picture scent in order to better ......
Examines the involvement of African Americans in the New Deal art programs, shifting emphasis from individual artists toward broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience.
A collection of critical and creative essays exploring pataphysics, a late nineteenth-century French absurdist precursor to Dadaism, surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd. Reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.
Sculptors Against the State considers the relation of anarchist ideology to avant-garde sculpture through an examination of three iconic artists whose work transformed European modernism: Umberto Boccioni, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Addressing such complex subjects as sexual liberation, homosexuality, the history of emotions, the ......
