Word: modernists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...premise of the book is that modernism is a heartening enterprise, a celebration, and should be recognized and applauded as such. Modernist "primitivism" in the vein of Picasso, Derain, Lachaise and Matisse was an attempt to reinvigorate culture, to rediscover the visceral in art, and its impact was a widespread and undeniable celebration of the senses, from Picasso's "The Race" (painted in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and "The Waste Land") to Josephine Baker's Paris performances to the jazz rage of the 1920s and 1930's. Modernism brought with it a sense of sophisticated gusto. It seemed...
...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...
...Modernist celebration of (highlight now) the vernacular is another theme that 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...
...proof by definition? Is some wine-bound snobbery at work, even in utopia?" But you forgive the prof, `cause, ya know, this education thing is an uphill climb. A spoonful of sugar helps the culture go down, and, fortunately for us, Alfred Appel Jr. is as hopeful as the modernist masters he celebrates...