Browsing by Subject "Cubism"
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Item Rediscovering Maurice Maeterlinck and his significance for modern art(2011-05) Valeri, Laura Kathleen; Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 1948-; Shiff, Richard A.This thesis examines the impact of Maurice Maeterlinck’s ideas on modern artists. Maeterlinck's poetry, prose, and early plays explore inherently Symbolist issues, but a closer look at his works reveals a departure from the common conception of Symbolism. Most Symbolists adhered to correspondence theory, the idea that the external world within the reach of the senses consisted merely of symbols that reflected a higher, objective reality hidden from humans. Maeterlinck rarely mentioned symbols, instead claiming that quiet contemplation allowed him to gain intuitions of a subjective, truer reality. Maeterlinck’s use of ambiguity and suggestion to evoke personal intuitions appealed not only to nineteenth-century Symbolist artists like Édouard Vuillard, but also to artists in pre-World War I Paris, where a strong Symbolist current continued. Maeterlinck’s ideas also offered a parallel to the theories of Henri Bergson, embraced by the Puteaux Cubists Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. Bolstered by new scientific discoveries that legitimized the existence of unseen realms, and intrigued by the idea of the fourth dimension as infinite higher space, Cubists such as Metzinger responded to Maeterlinck’s highly popular 1908 play L’Oiseau bleu, finding there an analogy to the Cubist quest for higher realities. Despite Maeterlinck’s popularity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he has been largely ignored, especially with regard to twentieth-century art. By examining the responses of artists and contemporary critics to Maeterlinck, as well as the intersection of his theories with the larger cultural context, this thesis aims to bring Maeterlinck back into focus.Item Tracing the line : Francis Picabia's Transparencies in context(2012-05) Howard, Claire Fontaine; Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 1948-; Clarke, John R.Following his 1924 break with the Paris avant-garde, Francis Picabia (1879-1953) decamped to the French Riviera and soon began work on his radically new Transparency paintings. This series, which occupied Picabia from approximately 1928 to 1933, drew on classical imagery of biblical and mythological subjects, layering disparate human forms and natural motifs in sensuous compositions remarkable for their ambiguous pictorial space and sinuous lines. The Transparencies' resistance to narrative or allegory--notwithstanding their apparent clarity of reference--parallels the paintings' evasion of formal interpretation in spite of their classical beauty; both of these characteristics have made Picabia's Transparencies one of his most inscrutable and misunderstood bodies of work. To avoid treating the Transparencies as a non sequitur or as a conservative abandonment of earlier modernist goals, it is important to understand the sources of the concepts underpinning these works but originating in Picabia's earlier Cubist and Dada periods. Dimensionality, appropriation, figuration, and a rigorous commitment to individualism are all themes from Picabia's acclaimed work in the 1910s and early 1920s that continue into the Transparencies. Particularly relevant are the multivalent interpretations of the spatial fourth dimension--scientific, philosophical, and occult--that Picabia had first encountered in the context of Cubism and the Stieglitz Circle and, later, in his friend Marcel Duchamp's optical experiments. In the Transparencies Picabia's layered outlines both deny linear perspective and suggest projections of interior worlds. In 1936, Picabia affirmed his interest in the fourth dimension, referring specifically to the Transparencies' superimposition at the time he signed Charles Sirató's "Manifeste Dimensioniste." Picabia's visual synthesis of decades of avant-garde concerns in the Transparencies appealed to the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein, who became one of Picabia's closest friends and confidantes in the early 1930s after she saw his recent paintings. Stein's commentary on Picabia's work and their friendship in "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" and "Everybody's Autobiography" reveals the painter's impact on Stein at a turning point in her career, but also elucidates their shared search for new verbal and visual expressions of the human figure and higher dimensionality.