Modernism and Its Merchandise


Book Description

Examines the literary and visual works of the Spanish vanguardists, which engaged with and incorporated the mass-produced commodities of the Machine Age and anticipated the modern fields of material culture, technology studies, and network theory.




Art and Form


Book Description

This important new study reevaluates British art writing and the rise of formalism in the visual arts from 1900 to 1939. Taking Roger Fry as his starting point, Sam Rose rethinks how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement’s significance to art history today. In the context of modernism, formalist critics are often thought to be interested in art rather than life, a stance exemplified in their support for abstract works that exclude the world outside. But through careful attention to early twentieth-century connoisseurship, aesthetics, art education, design, and art in colonial Nigeria and India, Rose builds an expanded account of form based on its engagement with the social world. Art and Form thus opens discussions on a range of urgent topics in art writing, from its history and the constructions of high and low culture to the idea of global modernism. Rose demonstrates the true breadth of formalism and shows how it lends a new richness to thought about art and visual culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Accessibly written and analytically sophisticated, Art and Form opens exciting new paths of inquiry into the meaning and lasting importance of formalism and its ties to modernism. It will be invaluable for scholars and enthusiasts of art history and visual culture.




Designed to Sell


Book Description

Designed to Sell presents an engaging account of mid-twentieth-century department store design and display in America from the 1930s to the 1960s. It traces the development of postwar philosophies of retail design that embodied aesthetics and function and new modes of merchandise display, resulting in the emergence of a new type of industrial designer. The evolution of aesthetics in department stores during this period reflected larger cultural shifts in consumer behaviour and lifestyle. Designed to Sell explores these changes using five key case studies and original archival sources to reveal the link between designers and consumption beyond the design of individual objects. It argues that design is not simply connected to retail consumption, but that it is capable of controlling how and where customers shop and what they are drawn to purchase. This book contextualises this discussion and brings it up to date for students and scholars interested in design, retail, and interior history.




The Merchandise Mart


Book Description

A huge complex spanning two city blocks, the Merchandise Mart is the largest wholesale design center in the world. The brainchild of James Simpson of Marshall Field & Company, it was planned to house Field's huge wholesale division and prop up sagging sales. Executed by the architectural firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White--of Opera House and Field Museum fame--the Mart was the world's most complex mixed-use structure: a warehouse, a department store, and a commercial office tower. All this was presented in a successful blend of elements from the Chicago School, classicism, and Art Deco, built on former Chicago & North Western Railway property and air space over the tracks. Unfortunately, Field's suffered from the Great Depression, and so the Mart stood almost empty during World War II. In 1946 Joseph P. Kennedy purchased the Merchandise Mart for $16 million (it had cost $32 million to build). Under Kennedy's managerial flair; the Mart thrived. Renovations between 1986 and 1991 injected new life into the building and today the Marchandise Mart is an enduring monument to the brash, inventive, and successful Chicago spirit.




Misfit Modernism


Book Description

In this book, Octavio R. González revisits the theme of alienation in the twentieth-century novel, identifying an alternative aesthetic centered on the experience of double exile, or marginalization from both majority and home culture. This misfit modernist aesthetic decenters the mainstream narrative of modernism—which explores alienation from a universal and existential perspective—by showing how a group of authors leveraged modernist narrative to explore minoritarian experiences of cultural nonbelonging. Tying the biography of a particular author to a close reading of one of that author’s major works, González considers in turn Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, Jean Rhys’s Quartet, and Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. Each of these novels explores conditions of maladjustment within one of three burgeoning cultural movements that sought representation in the greater public sphere: the New Negro movement during the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s Paris expatriate scene, and the queer expatriate scene in Los Angeles before Stonewall. Using a methodological approach that resists institutional taxonomies of knowledge, González shows that this double exile speaks profoundly through largely autobiographical narratives and that the novels’ protagonists challenge the compromises made by these minoritarian groups out of an urge to assimilate into dominant social norms and values. Original and innovative, Misfit Modernism is a vital contribution to conversations about modernism in the contexts of sexual identity, nationality, and race. Moving beyond the debates over the intellectual legacies of intersectionality and queer theory, González shows us new ways to think about exclusion.




Cold Modernism


Book Description

"Explores a significant but overlooked aspect of early twentieth-century modernism, one that focuses on surface appearance rather than interiority or psychological depth. Looks at the writers Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy, the artists Balthus and Hans Bellmer, and the fashion designer Coco Chanel"--Provided by publisher.




The Cambridge History of Modernism


Book Description

This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.




Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons


Book Description

Exploring legal treatises, court decisions, political illustrations, photographs, and modernist literature, this volume reveals that the ambiguous status of corporate intention in the first half of the twentieth century provoked conflicting theories of meaning and interpretation still debated today.




Bodies of Modernism


Book Description

Reveals the links, both positive and negative, between disabled bodies and aspects of modernism and modernity through readings of a wide range of literary texts




Legal Modernism


Book Description

Modernism in legal theory is no different from modernism in the arts: both respond to a cultural crisis, a sense that institutions and traditions have lost their validity. Some doubt the importance of the rule of law, others question the objectivity of legal reasoning. We have lost confidence in the justice of our legal institutions, and even in our very capacity to identify justice. Legal philosopher David Luban argues that we cannot escape the modernist predicament. Accusing contemporary legal theorists of evading rather than confronting the challenge of modernity, he offers important and original objections to pragmatism, traditionalism, and nihilism. He argues that only by weaving together the broken narrative and forgotten voices of history's victims can we come to appreciate the nature of justice in modern society. Calling a trial the embodiment of the law's self-criticism, Luban demonstrates the centrality of narrative by analyzing the trial of Martin Luther King, the Nuremberg trials, and trial scenes in Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus. With these examples, Luban explores several of the tensions that motivate much more contemporary legal theory: order versus justice, obedience versus resistance, statism versus communitarianism. ". . . an illuminating account of how contemporary legal theory can be understood as an expression of 'the modernist predicament' by exploring the analogy between modernism in the arts and modernism in law, politics, and philosophy. . . . a valuable critical discussion of modern legal theory." --Choice David Luban is Morton and Sophia Macht Professor of Law at the University of Maryland and Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. His other books include Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study.