THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND CRITICAL THEORY, PART TWO It was the fate of the Frankfurt School, or the Institut für Sozialforschung, to be in the wrong place doing the right thing. The members of the School, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Herman Marcuse, Franz...
Marcel Duchamp, Part Three Although, when The Large Glass was “completed,” Marcel Duchamp claimed to have given up art for chess. However, upon his death in 1968, it was revealed that the old trickster had one one last work of art, Étant Donnes. On one...
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND CRITICAL THEORY PART ONE “A categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind; to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” Theodor W....
Das Staatliche Bauhaus The Fate of the Bauhaus Buildings The decline of the school probably began in 1928 when the founding Director, Walter Gropius departed but the last two directors were under pressures that Gropius escaped. Mies was able to do little more to save...
Das Staatliche Bauhaus The Decline of the Bauhaus The town fathers of Weimar disliked the high number of Jewish faculty, the surprising presence of too many women as students, and the supposedly left-wing politics of the school and its insistent modernity. In a move...
Das Staatliche Bauhaus Contradictions within the Bauhaus In the most recent scholarly work on the Bauhaus, Bauhaus. Workshops for Modernity. 1919-1933, Museum of Modern Art, 2009, for the Museum of Modern Art, Barry Bergdoll wrote about the contradictions that existed...
LOOKING INTO THE GLASS Carefully and obsessively fabricated by Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even a.k.a, The Large Glass was a summation of decades of re-thinking the definition of “art” and the role of the...
Das Staatliche Bauhaus Bauhaus and the Modern World In the beginning, the Bauhaus was founded upon the precedents of arts and crafts, deeply rooted in a Romantic and Germanic notion of a return to a medieval way of life. The founding image of the Bauhaus was the...
Das Staatliche Bauhaus Founding the Bauhaus, 1919-1923 Historically as an art school and as a design movement, the Bauhaus stands as a counterweight to the solipsism and Surrealism in Paris and the anger and turmoil in Berlin. To a certain extent, the Bauhaus can be...
New Objectivity New Theories of Painting in Germany, 1920s The Great War ended with the notorious Treaty of Versailles, a treaty, which inflicted humiliating reparations upon the German peoples, leaving them with feelings of despair and anger and a stunned disbelief. ...
School of Paris The Young Artists The significance of the School of Paris lies chiefly, not in its innovations, but in the lack of innovation. The decades between the wars were conservative on several fronts. First, there was the well-known “Return to Order” which,...
Marcel Duchamp, Part One Marcel Duchamp began his career as a painter and ended it as a maker of carefully crafted objects. Using a combination of intellectual, aesthetic, and psychological viewpoints, this podcast discusses Duchamp’s decision to...
The School of Paris Recall to Order After the Great War, the fabric of European society was in tatters. An entire generation of young men had been killed in a senseless slaughter on the Western Front. A generation of young women would never find mates and a...
SURREALISM AND ITS OBJECTS ART BECOMES FETISH Surrealism was initially practiced in written form as textual production, as a means of freeing the literary mind from “writerly” conventions. Just as Sigmund Freud took dictation, so to speak, writing down what his...
SURREALIST THEORY The Marvelous Mind of Surrealism In the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, André Breton wrote, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states — outwardly so contradictory — which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality,...
POSTMODERN PAINTING AS BRICOLAGE Postmodern painting can be characterized as a reaction against the “rule” of Modernist painting. Using the art of David Salle, Julian Schanbel, Carol Maria Mariani, MarkTansey and Eric Fischl, this podcast discusses the...
THE MAKING OF SURREALISM SURREALISM 1924 – 1939 Wounded and home from the Front, the dying poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, went to a play by Diaghilev, Parade. The sets had been made by his good friend, Pablo Picasso, the music was by Erik Satie, the by Leonide...
