This book reveals how, when, where and why vitalism and its
relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts
of energy became seminal from the fin de siecle until the Second
World War for such Modernists as Sophie Tauber-Arp, Hugo Ball,
Juliette Bisson, Eva Carriere, Salvador Dali, Robert Delaunay,
Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini
and John Cage. For them Vitalism entailed the conception of life as
a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of
energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by
mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate
what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution.
Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the
first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de
siecle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through
absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic
therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports,
particularly rugby; water sports, the Olympic Games and physical
culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force.
This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave
Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second
part illuminates how simultaneously vitalism became aligned with
anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology,
spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states",
alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the
Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson,
Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carriere, John
Gerrard Keulemans, Laszlo Mohology-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von
Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of
the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism,
particularly Bergson's theory of becoming, became associated with
Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality,
atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion,
negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin,
Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir
Tatlin alongside Cage's concept of Nothing. After investigating the
widespread engagement with Bergson's philosophies, Vitalism and art
by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First
World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and
any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book
will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum
curators and visitors plus readers and scholars working in art
history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult
studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science,
philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies,
museum studies and curatorship.
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