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Dutch Neorealism and Cinema Magic: The Case for a Filmic Modernism

By Stephanie Lebas Huber,

In May 1929, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held an exhibition of German paintings under the banner of “Neue Sachlichkeit,” based on Gustav Hartlaub’s seminal 1925 show at the Kunsthalle Mannheim of the same title. The Amsterdam leg of the tour exhibited many of the same artists included in the original program. Well-known painters such as George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Carl Mense, and George Schrimpf hung alongside several other artists who did not appear in the Mannheim iteration, including Franz Radziwill, Christian Schad, and Carl Grossberg.

“A curiously intimate sort of audience”: Moviegoing and Public Life in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bum

By Nolan Gear,

Why moviegoing?

Corroding Geometries: Elsa Gramcko, Automobility, and the Paradoxes of Venezuelan Modernity, 1955–1965

By Devon Zimmerman,

Desdoblamiento after Colonization: Julia de Burgos’s Latinx Modernism

Black and white photograph of modern hospital

By Laura Lomas,

Julia de Burgos (1914–53), one of Puerto Rico’s greatest poets, haunts the American literary imagination from the borders of the modern. Her ghostly presence, desperate and furious, searches for interlocutors on the bridge to Welfare Island, historically a warehouse for the poor, the criminalized and sick just east of the United Nations. Julia’s barefoot figure wandering across that bridge in her bata, just as she describes in letters to her sister Consuelo in 1953, positions her to catch the eye of today’s visitors to the newly restored and renamed Roosevelt Island, which offers no physical reminders of this important Puerto Rican and American poet’s residence there. Nothing in the island’s glistening white granite park mentions the two poems Burgos wrote in English when Roosevelt Island was Welfare Island, months before her death in Spanish Harlem.

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Postcolonial Modernism and the Camera Eye: Eliot Elisofon’s Photographs of African Art

By Emily Hyde, Rowan University

1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to “Africa South of the Sahara.” Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. “The Sacrificial Egg” is Achebe’s first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of his novel Things Fall Apart. Unlike that classic novel, the story begins in a recognizably modern Nigeria, with a young clerk named Julius Obi sitting alone in a colonial shipping office, gazing at his typewriter.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Schizoaffectivity of Whiteness

By Michael Abraham

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), Toni Morrison calls for “studies of the technical ways in which an Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness. . . . Such studies,” she continues, “will reveal the process of establishing others in order to know them, to display knowledge of the other so as to ease and to order external and internal chaos.” In demonstrating the reflexive role that Africanist personae play in white American literature—the manner by which white people construct blackness as a screen for the projections that enable, through simultaneous disavowal and enforcement, their identifications as white—“Such studies will reveal the process by which it is made possible to explore and penetrate one’s own body in the guise of the sexuality, vulnerability, and anarchy of the other” (Morrison, Playing, 53).

Schlegel Capitalism: E. M. Forster and the Cultural Form of Modernist Adventure

By Sam Waterman, NCH

Margaret’s plea to her somewhat work-phobic younger brother might sound a little odd, since she does not—work, that is. Instead, as she enigmatically puts it in the preceding line, she “pretends” to work, engaging in a host of cultural activities with an energy redolent of work, perhaps, but with few of its economic imperatives. What this strange formulation pretending to work might mean in the context of E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel—indeed, in the context of 1910 more broadly—is one way to frame the question posed by this essay.

Maus, Modernism, and the Mass Ornament

By Georgiana Banita

A seemingly minor episode in Françoise Mouly’s biography holds special significance for the intersection of comics and the avant-garde during Art Spiegelman’s early career. In 1975, having arrived in New York with only $200 in her pocket and eager to improve her English by reading comics, Mouly had a part in Richard Foreman’s play Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation, performed by his Ontological-Hysteric Theater at 491 Broadway. Despite her shaky command of English, Mouly had no trouble slipping into her role. Almost none of the dialogue was delivered live by the actors. The avant-garde director, seated on the edge of the stage with an electronic keyboard that spliced together music and speech, narrated the entire event. The play was a hit.

Willa Cather’s Queer Economy

By Joseph Dimuro

Whenever she found that monied interests were shaping aesthetic taste in American culture, Willa Cather decried the deleterious effects their contrary values had on what she called genuine art. In interviews, essays, stories, and novels written throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, Cather’s critique of consumerism, in particular, took on what John N. Swift calls a “protest against a pervasive materialist commodity culture” and led her to create characters that Guy J. Reynolds claims “embody Cather’s suspicion of the corrosive impact of acquisitiveness, allied to her wariness about how economic modernism [was] producing an increasingly consumerist society.”

Marianne Moore’s Tone Technologies: Elocution, Poetry, Phonograph

By Allison Neal

In a letter written on August 30, 1964, Marianne Moore recounts listening to an old recording of her poem, “Rigorists,” that was playing that night on the BBC. “We had dinner at a little Greek Casa Blanca (very near) but stayed up late to hear me on the BBC—on a borrowed transistor,” Moore writes to her friend Hildegard Watson.

Primitivisms in Dispute: Production and Reception of the Works of two Brazilian Artists in Paris in the 1920s

By Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni

The condition of Paris as the main artistic capital from the end of the 19^th to the mid-20^th century caused it to attract an expressive contingent of foreign artists, and among those, dozens of Brazilian artists who were attracted by what was seen as the world capital of arts. They encountered, however, an extremely competitive universe, in which national origins were important components to recognition.

A Feeling for Wood Itself: Lynd Ward’s Arboreal Modernism

By Olivia Badoi, SLU Madrid

Walking among a series of prints by the American wood engraver Lynd Ward (1905–85), Art Spiegelman was surprised to find himself transported from a chic Binghamton art gallery into a primordial forest. Though he had not left the gallery, Spiegelman was surrounded by networks of branches, trees, and woods reaching out at him from the prints on the wall. Within this gallery-turned-forest, Spiegelman gained a new appreciation of the power of Ward’s arboreal aesthetic. Singling out a particularly noteworthy print, Spiegelman describes “a panoramic treescape of a young man in shadows, groping and climbing through the dense neuronal wickerwork of dappled trunks and branches, carefully exploring and working his way through the maze of marks that surround him.”