Thomas Harrison: 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (1996)

The year 1910 marks an astonishing, and largely unrecognized, juncture in Western history. In this perceptive interdisciplinary analysis, Thomas Harrison addresses the extraordinary intellectual achievement of the time. Focusing on the cultural climate of Middle Europe and paying particular attention to the life and work of Carlo Michelstaedter, he deftly portrays the reciprocal implications of different discourses—philosophy, literature, sociology, music, and painting. His beautifully balanced and deeply informed study provides a new, wider, and more ambitious definition of expressionism and shows the significance of this movement in shaping the artistic and intellectual mood of the age.

1910 probes the recurrent themes and obsessions in the work of intellectuals as diverse as Egon Schiele, Georg Trakl, Vasily Kandinsky, Georg Lukàcs, Georg Simmel, Dino Campana, and Arnold Schoenberg. Together with Michelstaedter, who committed suicide in 1910 at the age of 23, these thinkers shared the essential concerns of expressionism: a sense of irresolvable conflict in human existence, the philosophical status of death, and a quest for the nature of human subjectivity. Expressionism, Harrison argues provocatively, was a last, desperate attempt by the intelligentsia to defend some of the most venerable assumptions of European culture. This ideological desperation, he claims, was more than a spiritual prelude to World War I: it was an unheeded, prophetic critique.

Publisher University of California Press, 1996
ISBN 0520200438, 9780520200432
264 pages

Reviews (Martino Marazzi; Tyrus Miller; Daniela Bini; Christopher Hailey; Richard Mattin; Dennis Sexsmith)
Review (Laura A. McLary, Monatshefte)
Review (Thomas Kovach, Austrian History Yearbook)
Review (Marco Codebo, Carte Italiane)
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Dawn Ades, Simon Baker (eds.): Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS (2006)

“In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled “enemy within” surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille’s still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso’s Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille’s radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.”

With contributions by Fiona Bradley, Neil Cox, Caroline Hancock, Denis Hollier, William Jeffett, CFB Miller, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker.

Publisher Hayward Gallery, London, with MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 2006
ISBN 1853322504, 9781853322501
272 pages

Exh. reviews: Peter Suchin (Frieze), Benjamin Noys (Radical Philosophy), John Phillips and Ma Shaoling (Theory, Culture & Society).
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Zenit, International Review of Arts and Culture, No. 1-43 (1921-26) [SH/FR/DE/RU]

Zenit, International Review of Arts and Culture, enjoyed a reputation as the only Yugoslav avant-garde journal, which was part of the international avant-garde scene at the beginning of the 1920s. Its founder, editor and the chief ideologist of the Zenit programme Ljubomir Micić, poet and art critic, intended to introduce social and artistic principles of avant-garde to Croatia and Serbia, particularly constructivism, futurism and Dada.

It was launched in February 1921 and published monthly in Zagreb (1921-23) and Belgrade (1923-26) until December 1926, when it was banned by the authorities. A total of 43 issues were published (including special number dedicated to young Czech artists, and No. 17-18 to the new Russian Art, edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky), as well as one poster, “Zenitismus”, and one issue of a daily Zenit newspaper dated 23 September 1922.

The magazine brought together a number of collaborators: Marijan Mikac, Jo Klek (Josip Seissel), Vilko Gecan, Mihailo Petrov, Boško Tokin, Stanislav Vinaver, Rastko Petrovic, Branko Ve Poljanski (Branko Micić), Dragan Aleksic, Milos Crnjanski, Dusan Matic and others. Other collaborators and contributors included the French poet Ivan Goll, Alexander Archipenko, Ilya Ehrenburg, Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, Louis Lozowick, Alexander Blok, Jaroslav Seifert. The visual contributions by Jo Klek and Mihailo Petrov epitomized Zenitist art and painting.

Zenit at Monoskop wiki

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