Art and Journals on the Political Front, 1910-1940 - Hardcover

9780813015354: Art and Journals on the Political Front, 1910-1940

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813015359 ISBN 13: 9780813015354

Publisher: University Press of Florida, 1997

"An invaluable source of information on the textual and visual rhetoric of nationalisms in the early twentieth century. . . . Its attempt to illuminate the intersection between the mass media and the politics of representation is successful and rich. . . . This book will be of the highest interest to scholars of modernism, nationalism, and propaganda studies . . . and to historians of the press, typography, radical movements, and literature." --Patricia G. Berman, Jewett Arts Center, Wellesley College

"Provides a uniquely focused contribution to our knowledge of visual expression between the world wars. The little-studied symbiosis of an avant-garde politicization of the mass media emerges here as a wonderful paradox. That is the broader value of the collection, but each individual essay presents a focused study of materials largely unknown to us. . . . Will prove essential reading for political historians [as well as] journalism and mass media scholars."--John F. Moffitt, New Mexico State University

Focusing on the period from the years just prior to World War I to the onset of World War II, contributors to this volume investigate the nexus of art, avant-garde thought, and politics as it appears in (explicitly or implicitly) partisan journals. The art and journals in question frequently helped to politicize the artistic avant-garde in Italy, Russia, Hungary, Germany, Spain, the United States, Mexico, and France and contributed to the international currents of communism and fascism. In this beautifully illustrated edition, which includes 101 black-and-white photographs and 8 color plates, these essayists--all distinguished art historians and scholars--explore the subtle nuances of this political-artistic rhetoric.

CONTENTS
1. Lacerba: Interventionist Art and Politics in Pre-World War I Italy, Christine Poggi
2. The Press for a New Art in Russia, 1917-1921, Christina Lodder
3. From Avant-Garde to "Proletkult" in Hungarian �migr� Politico-Cultural Journals, 1922-1924, Oliver A. I. Botar
4. Picture as Weapon in the German Mass Media, 1914-1930, Sherwin Simmons
5. Political Practice and the Arts in Spain, 1927-1936, Jordana Mendelson with Estrella de Diego
6. Art on the Left in the United States, 1918-1937, Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt
7. Graphics of the Mexican Left, 1924-1938, Alicia Azuela
8. News Magazines and the Politicization of Architecture in France during the 1930s, Isabelle Gournay

Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, associate professor of art history at Marist College, is coeditor of The Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West, 1910-1930 (UPF, 1992) and editor of Survivor from a Dead Age: The Memoirs of Louis Lozowick (1997).

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Review:

The period just before World War I through the beginnings of World War II was one of the most explosive in history--and art was at war as well. Art and Journals on the Political Front: 1920-1940, a fascinating collection of essays and artwork, shows the many faces of that parallel war, the war of images, from the United States's and Mexico's graphic leftists to the propagandist art that promoted communism and fascism in Russia, Italy, and Germany. The essay "Picture as Weapon in the German Mass Media, 1914-1930" both explains and depicts the passionate socialist attack on the bourgeois and the satirizing of political figures such as Kaiser Wilhelm and Trotsky, among other media weapons. "Political Practice and the Arts in Spain" catalogs the major political shifts that occurred leading up to the Spanish Civil War, including the verbal and visual rhetoric--often directed toward the illiterate Spanish working class--between rightist magazine Arriba and leftists Octubre and Nueva Cultura. Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt presents a new multicultural outlook on the questions of discontent that fed two global wars.

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