|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Beuys
were the leading artists of their generations to recognize the rich
possibilities that animism and shamanism offered. While each of
these artists' connection with shamanism has been written about
separately, Evan Firestone brings the four together in order to
compare their individual approaches to anthropological materials
and to define similarities and differences between them. The
author's close readings of their works and examination of the
relevant texts available to them reveal fresh insights and new
perspectives.The importance of indigenous beliefs in animism for
Kandinsky's philosophy of art and practice, especially the animism
of inanimate objects, is analyzed for the first time in conjunction
with his well-known enthusiasms for Symbolism and Theosophy.
Ernst's collage novel, La femme 100 tetes (1929), previously found
to have significant alchemical content, also is shown to
extensively utilize shamanism, thereby merging different branches
of the occult that prove to have remarkable similarities. The
in-depth examination of Pollock's works, both known and overlooked
for shamanic content, identifies textual sources that heretofore
have escaped notice. Firestone also demonstrates how shamanism was
employed by this artist to express his desire for healing and
transformation. The author further argues that the German edition
of Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1957)
helped to revitalize Beuys's life and art, and that his ecological
campaigns reflected a new consciousness later termed ecoanimism.
Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Beuys
were the leading artists of their generations to recognize the rich
possibilities that animism and shamanism offered. While each of
these artists' connection with shamanism has been written about
separately, Evan Firestone brings the four together in order to
compare their individual approaches to anthropological materials
and to define similarities and differences between them. The
author's close readings of their works and examination of the
relevant texts available to them reveal fresh insights and new
perspectives.The importance of indigenous beliefs in animism for
Kandinsky's philosophy of art and practice, especially the animism
of inanimate objects, is analyzed for the first time in conjunction
with his well-known enthusiasms for Symbolism and Theosophy.
Ernst's collage novel, La femme 100 tetes (1929), previously found
to have significant alchemical content, also is shown to
extensively utilize shamanism, thereby merging different branches
of the occult that prove to have remarkable similarities. The
in-depth examination of Pollock's works, both known and overlooked
for shamanic content, identifies textual sources that heretofore
have escaped notice. Firestone also demonstrates how shamanism was
employed by this artist to express his desire for healing and
transformation. The author further argues that the German edition
of Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1957)
helped to revitalize Beuys's life and art, and that his ecological
campaigns reflected a new consciousness later termed ecoanimism.
Mist and fog engender fascination and mystery, enticing with their
wispy veils and vapourous moods, and they are the stuff of dreams
and visions. 'The mists of time' and 'in a fog' are common
expressions that substantiate the long association of mist and fog
with the passage of time, the vagaries of memory and feelings of
uncertainty. Mist and fog obscure, conceal and when they dissipate,
reveal. Vapourous atmosphere in art and life masks evil and can
elicit presentiments of death. It also has been used in art to
convey the splendours of the spiritual world and the terrors of the
supernatural. The metaphorical meanings that have accrued to mist
and fog, encouraged by their indeterminate and transitory nature,
and the emotions to which they give rise, are variously evident in
the work of major artists and their contemporaries. This book
focusses on mist and fog from the late eighteenth to the early
twentieth centuries in the places they most proliferated. Examples
of literature that employ mist and fog as metaphor and in allegory
from antiquity to Joseph Conrad serve to amplify many of the
paintings discussed.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|