art
In the years leading up to the recent centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, perhaps the most significant revelation to emerge about the paragon of twentieth-century literature is that he had a strong interest in drawing. Over one hundred pages of drawings by Kafka, most of them previously unknown, were made public in 2021 by the National Library of Israel in an online repository, and they have opened the door to new consideration of the place of visual production in Kafka’s life and work. An extensive illustrated catalog with reproductions of all of Kafka’s known renderings, Franz Kafka: The Drawings, was published later that same year by Andreas Kilcher, and both the images and the book have inspired extensive commentary and reflection.
Despite its speaker’s early resolution to “go slowly,” Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (1919), an exuberantly frenetic work, rarely lets up.[2] There is one moment, however, just after Mirrlees evokes the Russian Revolution in the dreamt specter of “giant sinister mujik,” when this noisy poem draws to a temporary calm and reflects, or so it seems, on the limits of art (Mirrlees, Paris, 15):
In his dryly sardonic “praise” of Jewish patronage in relation to the then-dominant Secessionist aesthetic, the polemical critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936)—who, not insignificantly, had renounced Judaism one year earlier—implicitly conveys his belief that the Wiener Moderne style was as superficial as the Jewish-owned, Jugendstil homes that populated Vienna at the fin de siècle. Here, Kraus’s words were likely meant to recall those of his close friend, the modern architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933). Loos had argued in April 1900 that the Vienna Secession (which had been formed in 1897) was now synonymous with the Jewish bourgeoisie
There is no gentle way into the later twentieth-century work of the painter Prunella Clough. It is, as this paper will argue, a difficult kind of realism, embedded in an obdurate poetry of form. But for the viewer of Clough’s visual work or the reader of her extensive notes and diaries, it is also a brutal appraisal of the world at mid-century through an uncompromising reassessment of the process of paintings. “Considerations. Pickaxe etc. Multiple object forms repetitive, why?
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In 1969, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote to her ex-husband, Ben Nicholson, “so much depends, in sculpture, on what one wants to see through a hole!" What emerges in a sustained encounter with Hepworth’s work is her philosophy that sculpture is not simply a form carved or constructed out of specific material, but an intervention in a physical space, comprising the sculpture itself, the viewer, and the space surrounding it.
In October 2019, The Getty Center in Los Angeles opened its “Manet and Modern Beauty” exhibit, a major reappraisal of Manet’s late work.
Modernity seems very much to be with us still. Yet that explosive moment on either side of 1900 is long over, and what has come after is either a pale shadow of its former self or actively contests it. It is precisely that gap that Johanna Drucker explores in Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist, in terms of the book artist Iliazd (1894-1975) and of Drucker herself, who began her project as a graduate student in 1985 and returned to it in 2019 as the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor of Information Studies at UCLA.
The condition of Paris as the main artistic capital from the end of the 19th to the mid-20th 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.
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