Word: appell
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Harvard undergraduates will immediately recognize the true nature of Alfred Appel Jr.'s Art of Celebration--it is essentially a Literature and Arts B Core course on 20th-century modernism. And like good old Lit. & Arts B, the plum of the Core requirement, it is full of pretty pictures, music and references to movies and contemporary pop culture (FUN!). You'll enjoy yourself, pick up a good mouthful of cocktail party fodder, and, astonishingly, learn something as well...
Upon this premise, Appel cantilevers the argument that "Yes" versus "No" is the primary aesthetic division of the 20th century. He outlines a hypothetical, prescriptive bookshelf spanning the range of 20th century art. The "No" shelf includes Kafka, T.S. Eliot, George Grosz and the pantheon of Pop art, which emphasize chaos and mass hysteria in the modern age and the mob of mankind. This is the "No" that is countered by the affirmative "Yes" of Matisse, Lachaise, Brancusi and Delaunay, Joyce, Nabokov and Chagall, along with "Yes" shelfmates W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Richard Wilbur...
...Appel leads the way through this bound gallery, he delivers the heart and soul of any Lit. and Arts B course. Themes! Yes, themes abound, wonderfully packaged and ready for short-answer essays. Vitality and Birth are set off in verbal neon and illustrated with Lachaise's rather indelicate nudes. Like Nighttown in Joyce's Ulysses, the modernist future is promising. Molly Bloom is celebrated in all her fecund glory...
...crops up repeatedly in The Art of Celebration. Gerald Murphy's "Razor" (1924), for instance, is a "signal work in the evolution of a self-conscious American vernacular art," a celebration of "small technological advances and the utilitarian elegance of industrial design." After High Modernism has run its course, Appel points to the resurrection of the vernacular in the wake...
...Appel also applauds the modernist glorification of construction, the city and technological innovation. Fernand Leger's "The City" (1919) is his point of departure, its "grandly optimistic if not utopian" vista ushering in a hopeful era of activity and communication. Likewise, Stuart Davis's painting "Swing Landscape" (1938), with its jazz dance composition, suggests a sense of connection, counter to T.S. Eliot's charge of "nothing connects" in "The Waste Land...