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Book
Author Antliff, Allan, author

Title Anarchist modernism : art, politics, and the first American avant-garde / Allan Antliff
Published Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2001
©2001

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Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 WATERFT ART&ARCH  709.7309041 Ant/Ama  AVAILABLE
Description xiv, 289 pages, 4 pages of plates : illustrations (some colour) ; 26 cm
Contents 1. Modernists against the Academy, 1908-12 -- 2. The Armory Show Debate -- 3. Cosmism or Amorphism -- 4. Man Ray's Path to Dada -- 5. Hippolyte Havel and the Artists of Revolt -- 6. A New Internationalism -- 7. Nietzschean Matrix -- 8. Anarchist Unanimism -- 9. The Denouement of Anarchist Modernism
Summary "The relationship of the anarchist movement to American art during the World War I era is most often described as a "tenuous affinity" between two distinct spheres: political and artistic. In Anarchist Modernism, Allan Antliff reveals that anarchism was the formative force that lent coherence and direction to modernism in the United States between 1908 and 1920. Modernists participated in a wide-ranging movement that encompassed lifestyles, language, literature, and art, as well as politics. Antliff examines anarchism's influence on a telling cross-section of modern artists such as Robert Henri, Elie Nadelman, Man Ray, Adolf Wolff, and Rockwell Kent. He also traces the hitherto overlooked interactions among anarchist thinkers, critics, and cultural figures of the period including Emma Goldman, Alfred Stieglitz, John Weichsel, Walter Pach, Ezra Pound, and Ananda Coomaraswamy
In doing so, Antliff draws on a wealth of previously unknown materials, such as interviews and reproductions of lost works." "During the early twentieth century, anarchism generated a distinctive oppositional modernism and a cultural legacy that was largely forgotten once communism became established as the primary leftist discourse in American political life. By situating American art's evolution in the politics of the time, Antliff offers a richly illustrated history of the anarchist movement and also revives the creative agency of those who shaped and implemented modernism for radical ends."--BOOK JACKET
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-280) and index
Subject Anarchism in art.
Anarchism -- United States.
Arts, American -- 20th century.
Avant-garde (Aesthetics) -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
LC no. 00010605
ISBN 0226021033 (cloth : alk. paper)