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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > Design styles > Modernist design & Bauhaus
'Does full justice to the remarkable achievements of an unlikely
martyr' Mail on Sunday 'A fascinating study of a handful of the
potential motivations behind violent political acts through the
balanced examination of a remarkable woman' All About History Lady
Constance Lytton (1869-1923) was the most unlikely of suffragettes.
One of the elite, she was the daughter of a Viceroy of India and a
lady in waiting to the Queen. She grew up in the family home of
Knebworth and in embassies around the world. For forty years, she
did nothing but devote herself to her family, denying herself the
love of her life and possible careers as a musician or a reviewer.
Then came a chance encounter with a suffragette. Constance was
intrigued; witnessing Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst on trial
convinced her of the urgent necessity of votes for women and she
went to prison for the cause as gleefully as any child going on a
school trip. But, once jailed, Constance soon found that her name
and her connections singled her out for unwelcome special
treatment. By now, 1909, the suffragettes were hunger striking and
the government had retaliated with force-feeding. The stories that
began to leak out of bungled operations, of dirty tubes, of screams
halfheard through brick walls, of straitjackets and handcuffs
outraged the suffragettes. Constance decided on her most radical
step yet: to go to prison in disguise. Taking the name Jane Warton,
she cut her hair, put on glasses and ugly clothes and got herself
arrested in Liverpool. Once in prison, she was force-fed eight
times before her identity was discovered and she was released. Her
case became a cause celebre, with debate raging in The Times and
questions being asked in the House of Commons. Lady Constance
Lytton became an inspiration and, in the end, a martyr. In this
extraordinary new biography, Lyndsey Jenkins reveals for the first
time the fascinating story of the woman who abandoned a life of
privilege to fight for women s rights.
Still Modernism offers a critique of the modernist imperative to
embrace motion, speed, and mobility. In the context of the rise of
kinetic technologies and the invention of motion pictures, it
claims that stillness is nonetheless an essential tactic of
modernist innovation. More specifically, the book looks at the ways
in which photographic stillness emerges as a counterpoint to motion
and to film, asserting its own clear visibility against the blur of
kinesis. Photographic stillness becomes a means to resist the
ephemerality of motion and to get at and articulate something real
or essential by way of its fixed limits. Combining art history,
film studies and literary studies, Louise Hornby reveals how
photographers, filmmakers, and writers, even at their most kinetic,
did not surrender attention to points of stillness. Rather, the
still image, understood through photography, establishes itself as
a mode of resistance and provides a formal response to various
modernist efforts to see better, to attend more closely, and to
remove the fetters of subjectivity and experience. Still Modernism
brings together a series of canonical texts, films and photographs,
the selection of which reinforces the central claim that stillness
does not lurk at the margins of modernism, but was constitutive of
its very foundations. In a series of comparisons drawing from
literary and visual objects, Hornby argues that still photography
allows film to access its own diffuse images of motion;
photography's duplicative form provides a serial structure for
modernist efforts to represent the face; its iterative structure
articulates the jerky rhythms of experimental narrative as
perambulation; and its processes of development allow for the world
to emerge independent of the human observer. Casting new light on
the relationship between photography and film, Hornby situates the
struggle between the still and the kinetic at the center of
modernist culture.
Vincent van Gogh becomes only 37 years old. Only the last 10 years
of his life he is engaged in painting. Restlessly and exhausting he
travels through the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and France.
Together with his colleagues Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin
he is regarded today as one of the most important artists of the
expressionism movement. This comic guide, written and drawn by
Willi Bloss, catches the main marks of the master's life and refers
optically to the unerring style that van Gogh used for his sketches
Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art,
2018 Many Latin American artists and critics in the 1920s drew on
the values of modernism to question the cultural authority of
Europe. Modernism gave them a tool for coping with the mobility of
their circumstances, as well as the inspiration for works that
questioned the very concepts of the artist and the artwork and
opened the realm of art to untrained and self-taught artists,
artisans, and women. Writing about the modernist works in
newspapers and magazines, critics provided a new vocabulary with
which to interpret and assign value to the expanding sets of
abstracted forms produced by these artists, whose lives were shaped
by mobility. The Mobility of Modernism examines modernist artworks
and criticism that circulated among a network of cities, including
Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Havana, and Lima. Harper Montgomery maps
the dialogues and relationships among critics who published in
avant-gardist magazines such as Amauta and Revista de Avance and
artists such as Carlos Merida, Xul Solar, and Emilio Pettoruti,
among others, who championed esoteric forms of abstraction. She
makes a convincing case that, for these artists and critics,
modernism became an anticolonial stance which raised issues that
are still vital today-the tensions between the local and the
global, the ability of artists to speak for blighted or
unincorporated people, and, above all, how advanced art and its
champions can enact a politics of opposition.
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