Artistic Modernism

03 Oct 1994 12:00

---

Especially before the first World War. Especially Futurism. And technology. Attitudes towards the past. And apocalyptic change. And reason. And emotion. And violence. Links to: counter-cultures; contemporary scientific ideas; ideas of decadence, and revolutionary renewal; Romanticism.

Modernist architecture interests me enough to get its own entry.

Recommended:
• Jacques Barzun
  • Classic, Romantic and Modern
  • The Energies of Art
  • Of Human Freedom
• William R. Everdell, The First Moderns [Review: Only Dissect!]
• Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art
• O. B. Hardison, Jr., Disappearing through the Skylight [much of which I profoundly disagree with]
• Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
• Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle

To read:
• Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe [Blurb]
• Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study
• Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (eds.), Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism
• John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation ["Tours and describes 25 visionary environments created by fiercely independent artists over the past century, from the soaring spires of the Watts Tower in L.A. to the junk-and-flower-filled labyrinths of Howard Finster's Paradise Garden in Georgia."]
• Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America
• Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community
• Butler, Early Modernism
• Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life [Blurb]
• Joseph Cornell [very strange American artist; biography by Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway]
• Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods
• Laura Catherine Frost, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism
• John Gray Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground: Art, Science, and Anarchism in Fin-de-siecle France
• Karen Jacobs, The Eye's Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture
• Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918
• Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908--1922
• J. M. Mancini, Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show [Blurb. Or: On or about December 1910, a generation of talented young artists hit upon a mode of self-presentation which meshed almost perfectly with trends which had been developing in the art world for several decades]
• Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917--1946
• Museum of Modern Art [i.e. I don't know the name of the editor], Machine Art
• Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism and the Invention of Collage
• Precisionism in America
• Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes [Blurb, intro]
• George Rickey, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution
• Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism
• Richard Candida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California
• Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats [On the strength of this]