Articles

At the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York City––a show attuned to the intense political divisions and racial tensions in the United States today––one artist stood out for her reuse of images of resistance from various moments in the history of modernity, marked by figures such as Marx and Engels, Muhammad Ali, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s Veterans Day (2016), a large oil painting on linen, stages these images in a domestic interior space with yellow wallpaper speckled...

In 1951, Tristan Tzara looked back upon Dada and its works and attempted to summarize the breadth of their aggression: “Dada took the offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety.” For Tzara, however, this had a specific goal: to “direct . . . [their] attacks against the very fundaments of society, language as the agent of communication between individuals, logic as the cement” (Tzara, “Introduction,” 404). In many ways, Dadaist poetry uniquely embraced and embodied these attacks. To...

M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.

In 1927, Christian Zervos, the editor of the prominent art magazine Cahiers d’Art, published an article on the “Dernières œuvres de Picasso.” This article discussed the new direction in Pablo Picasso’s recent body of surrealist-influenced paintings: unlike the restrained compositions of the postwar rappel à ordre, these paintings demonstrated a new expressive dynamism, and signaled Picasso’s openness to novel, disruptive currents in the cultural life of les années folles. For Zervos, this body...

For a book weighing in at just under 100 pages, not counting various forewords and introductions, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde has had an enormously outsized influence. How many books can claim to have engendered an entire volume of responses just two years after their initial publication? However, as the book’s many critics have noted, Bürger oversimplifies the complex and multifarious phenomenon of the avant-garde, pays scant attention to the specificities of individual works and...

Dorothy Strachey, the older sister of the biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, and of the psychoanalyst and translator of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, published her only novel, Olivia, in 1949, under the pseudonym of “Olivia.” Written in 1933, when Olivia Strachey was 68, and only published when she was 83, Olivia, set in the 1880s, tells the story of a 16-year old girl from London, who is sent to a French “pension,” Les Avons, just outside of Paris. Olivia is immediately enchanted by the...

If later testimonies are to be believed, around 1927 Peruvian poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat (1905-1936) published in Lima, under the title Celuloide ( Celluloid), a magazine devoted to film news and reviews. Literary historians, however, have surmised that the magazine must have only been a project which never came to fruition, as no copy of the publication, nor contemporary evidence of its existence, has to this day been found. The legend of this magazine has undoubtedly become enrooted in...

The cinema and aviation go arm in arm through life. They were born on the same day. —Fernand Léger, “Speaking of Cinema”

On February 8, 1912, Canadian activist Gertrude Harding orchestrated a protest in the form of a midnight destruction of rare orchids in Kew Gardens. Since the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew operated as a central node in Britain’s colonial network, a “depot for the interchange of plants wherever it saw commercial possibilities,” Harding’s targeted liberation of colonial subjects struck at the deceptively ornamental center of English power. Acting in the name of the Women’s Social and Political...

The current war is the most beautiful futurist poem. —F.T. Marinetti

Accounts of black personalities long lost to narratives of modernism are belatedly finding their way into the historical record, precipitated by the recent advent of scholarship and exhibitions dedicated to this recovery process. As a result, black artists, models, and performers who previously attracted little critical attention are slowly emerging from obscurity to command consideration in their own right. Among these newly recognized figures is the Guadeloupean dancer and model Adrienne...

Foreign-language broadcasting projects in the United Kingdom and the United States faced momentous challenges during World War II, a time when totalitarian regimes had successfully appropriated wireless technology for propaganda purposes. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would argue, countries such as Nazi Germany had turned radio into an agent of political repression by creating passively receptive audiences who uncritically absorbed fascist doctrines. When war broke out in Europe, Hitler’s...

On October 4, 1923, the American composer George Antheil made his highly anticipated Paris debut at the Champs Elysées Theatre, in front of a rioting audience. A few minutes into the recital the crowd became unsettled; members of the audience started to protest the offensive nature of the music, others jumped to the musician’s defence, and before long the house was out of control. Unbeknownst to Antheil, the riot was in fact staged by his friends Marcel L’Herbier and Georgette Leblanc, who...

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, in the midst of World War I, fifteen hundred volunteer troops staged a violent uprising in the Irish capital of Dublin and in strategic positions across the then-British colony. In retaliation, the English deployed ground troops and sailed the gunboat Helga up the Liffey River. In the ensuing fighting, Dublin’s main thoroughfare, Sackville Street, was almost utterly destroyed, and over three hundred buildings were damaged in the city, including many major...

“Respectfully submitted for your perusal—a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown.” So begins Rod Serling’s characteristically clipped voice-over narration near the beginning of “To Serve Man,” a 1962 episode of the cannily uncanny half-hour television series The Twilight Zone, in which one such Kanamit arrives in his spaceship in New York City and soon afterward appears before the Security Council of the United...

[T]he interface brings with it strong messages. —Lev Manovich

“The task of a museum,” wrote Italian critic and curator Pietro Maria Bardi in 1951, “should be to make resound, to interpret with perspicacity and appropriate technique, those monuments that sing: thus will be avoided the risk of useless sentimentalities, dangerous neutralities, hybrid educations, and eclecticism.” Bardi’s proclamation was rooted in a line from Paul Valéry’s “Eupalinos, or the Architect” (1921), a Socratic dialogue in which the ancient Greek architect Eupalinos is said to have...

In the editorial statement of the first issue of Rhythm, John Middleton Murry writes: “Our intention is to provide art, be it drawing, literature or criticism, which shall be vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface, and be the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch.” He would later explain that the magazine treated rhythm as “the distinctive element in all the arts, and that the real purpose of ‘this modern movement’ . . . was to reassert the preeminence...

Birds and certain varieties of birds have long been potent symbols related to war and conflict. But as airplane technologies developed in rapid tandem with the coming and arrival of the Second World War, the connection between avian and aviation reached new heights in the cultural imagination. The symbolism of doves, for instance, takes on unsettling connotations in T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (1942), where a descending dove breaks through the air with flames of incandescent terror...

Given the tradition that the Analects contain nothing superfluous, I was puzzled by the verses re length of the night-gown and the predilection for ginger. . . . Those passages of the Analects are, as I see it, there to insist that Confucius was a Chinaman, not born of a dragon, not in any way supernatural, but remarkably possessed of good sense. —Ezra Pound, The Confucian Analects