Early Modernism: Literature Music and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916

Front Cover
Clarendon Press, 1994 - Art - 318 pages
Early Modernism is a uniquely integrated introduction to the great avant-garde movements in European literature, music, and painting at the beginning of this century, from the advent of Fauvism to the development of Dada.

In contrast to the overly literary focus of previous studies of modernism, this book highlights the interaction between the arts in this period. It traces the fundamental and interlinked re-examination of the languages of the arts brought about by Matisse, Picasso, Schoenberg, Eliot, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Ben, and many others, which led to radically new techniques, such as atonality, cubism, and collage. These changes are set in the context both of the art that preceded them and of a new and profound shift in ideas. Theories of the unconscious, the association of ideas, primitivism, and reliance upon an expressionist intuition led to a reshaped conception of personal identity, and Butler examines the representation of the modernist self in the work of figures including Mann, Joyce, Conrad, and Stravinsky.

Accessible and wide-ranging, the book is lavishly illustrated with over sixty illustrations, many in color. It provides an elegant and incisive guide to a momentous period in the history of European art.

 

Contents

THE DYNAMICS OF CHANGE
1
Georges Braque Landscape at La Ciotat summer 1907 Oil on canvas
13
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MODERNIST AESTHETIC
25
Georges Braque Houses at lEstaque August 1908
58
Pablo Picasso Ma Jolie Woman with a Zither or Guitar 191112
66
THE MODERNIST SELF
89
Henri Matisse Blue Nude Nu BleuSouvenir de Biskra 1907
106
THE CITY
133
LONDON AND THE RECEPTION OF MODERNIST IDEAS
209
ASPECTS OF THE AVANTGARDE
241
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
287
INDEX
297
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

Christopher Butler is the author of Interpretation, Deconstruction and Ideology (Clarendon Paperback, 1984), and After the Wake: An Essay on Contemporary Avant-Garde (Clarendon Press, 1980 o/p 1991). He is the editor of the World's Classics edition of Henry James's The Ambassadors (1985), and is the Literature Delegate to the Press.

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