Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Aesthetic Legacy Of Evolution: The History Of The Arts As A Window Into Human Nature, Aaron Kozbelt

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Harlem And Abroad: Notes To An International 'Renaissance', Joshua I. Cohen

Publications and Research

Like other intractable figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement’s visual artists sometimes exceeded their expected parameters, and thus their anticipated representativeness of a locality. Their images, in other words, did not automatically disclose Harlem-bound or even US-bound concerns. Now familiar through continual reproduction in exhibition catalogues, scholarly monographs and literary compendia, certain artworks from the period – such as Archibald J. Motley’s Blues (1929; Figure 1) and Aaron Douglas’s Congo (c. 1928; Figure 2) – subverted any definition of the Harlem Renaissance that would hinge on a narrowly delimited urban geography or national imaginary. Motley, who painted ‘Blues’ during …

Photography And Modernisms, Ellen Handy

Open Educational Resources

Today we live in a post-modern era, but for most of the 20th century, modernism was the dominant perspective in the arts and culture at large. And photography was the perfect modern medium. It literally provided artists and audiences with a new vision, using the technology of the camera to frame modern experience. As a recently invented medium with ties to mass media, photography departed from many fine art traditions. The drastic multiplicity of avant garde movements within which photography operated produced a constellation of loosely linked modernisms, rather than single avant garde program.

Almost all of the many avant …

Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern 'Primitivist' Uses Of African And Oceanic Art, 1905-8, Joshua I. Cohen

Publications and Research

Fauve painters “discovered” African and Oceanic sculpture beginning in 1905. From that time, Vlaminck first collected African art; Derain studied Oceanic works at the British Museum in spring 1906; and Matisse struggled to paint a Kongo-Vili statuette he purchased in fall 1906. Fauve interests in shallow-relief, relatively naturalistic, and surface-ornamented sculptural works suggest conformity with turn-of-the-century artistic and scientific ideas conflating heterogeneous strains of so-called “primitive” material culture. Nevertheless, the dominant conceptual framework of “primitivism” has tended to limit art-historical understandings of external formal influences on modernism, which can be gleaned here by investigating the particular objects the Fauves appropriated.