Modernism - Couverture souple

Walz, Robin

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1405832592 ISBN 13 : 9781405832595

Editeur : Pearson Education Limited, 2008

Synopsis

In the early decades of the twentieth century Modernist artists, composers, and writers barraged European sensibilities with chaotic images, dissonant sounds, and incomprehensible novels. Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon was panned by the art critics. Parisian audiences booed the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. James Joyce had to have Ulysses privately published to circumvent British and American censors. Yet today, such works of art, music, and literature are considered contemporary classics. 

Although Modernism has become an accepted feature of the cultural landscape, retracing the history of this movemnet within its original cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts helps us to see what was culturally vital and revolutionary about it, both then and now.

This book is designed to bring the main features and contributions of Modernism, historical, cultural, intellectual, economic and political, to a general audience in a clear, readable and jargon-free style.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Robin Walz is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alaska Southeast. He has published books and articles on Modernism and aspects of popular culture in the twentieth century.  

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

So you think you know what makes the world go round? Read about the ideas that revolutionized the twentieth century.

The twentieth century was a period of seismic change on a global scale, witnessing two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the establishment of a global economy, the beginnings of global warming and a complete reversal in the status of women in large parts of the world.

Many of these changes were brought about thanks to "big ideas" that irrevocably altered the way humans viewed their world. Short Histories of Big Ideas are brief, easy-to-understand introductions to the concepts that shaped the twentieth century. Each volume explains the key aspects of an idea and provides a concise history of its growth and influence on our world perspective.

 

“...a sweeping overview of the varieties of modernism and modernist works that have become part of contemporary culture and consciousness. Moving with ease across genres and national borders, Walz guides us through the aesthetics, social projects, and historical contexts of leading modernists and their works.” Prof Charles Rearick, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

 

Can art change the world?

 

The modernist movements of the early twentieth century launched a cultural revolution without which the multi-media-driven world in which we live today would not have been possible.  Today modernism is enshrined in art galleries and university courses.  Its techniques of abstraction and montage, and its creative impulse to innovate and shock, are the stock-in-trade of commercial advertising, feature films, television and computer-generated graphics.

 

In this concise cultural history, Robin Walz vividly recaptures what was revolutionary about modernism.  He shows how an aesthetic concept, arising from a diversity of cultural movements, from Cubism and Bauhaus to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and operating in different ways across the fields of art, literature, music, design and architecture, came to turn intellectual and cultural life and assumptions upside down, first in Europe and then around the world.

 

From the nineteenth century origins of modernism to its postmodern legacies, this book will give the reader access to the big picture of modernism as a dynamic historical process and an unfinished project which still speaks to our times.

 

Robin Walz (Associate Professor of History, University of Alaska) is an intellectual and cultural historian and the author of Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (2000).

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Pearson Education Limited
• Date d'édition: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1405832592
• ISBN 13: 9781405832595
• Reliure: Broché
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 216
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible