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F
- Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow, Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2018, pp 142-164
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
FABIANISM
The Fabian Society was a socialist organisation founded in 1884, which counted among its early members such writers as Edith Nesbit, Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, as well as Jerome K. Jerome, Arnold Bennett, Rupert Brooke, Harley Granville-Barker and Leonard Woolf, and numerous other public figures. Although its origins lay in the bohemian Fellowship of the New Life, the Society quickly came to be associated with a reformist managerial state socialism. At the heart of the Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose gradualist anti-MARXIST and anti-ANARCHIST stance, research agenda and policy of permeation of existing political parties came to define Fabianism in the long-term, as did its association with the Independent Labour Party and subsequently the Labour Party.
Although the executive of the Fabian Society had little interest in modernist art, individual members played an instrumental role in the development of modernism. The Fabians Holbrook Jackson and A. R. Orage founded the Leeds Art Club in 1903 and re-launched The New Age journal in 1907 with financial assistance from Shaw as a modernism-oriented literary and political magazine (see LITTLE MAGAZINES). Fabian socialism was one of the prominent ingredientsthedrals and castles. in the heady brew of Nietzschean philosophy, SPIRITUALISM, PSYCHOANALYSIS and modernist aesthetics that characterised both the Club and the journal in its early years. After the departure of Jackson and Orage to London, the Leeds Art Club, under the leadership of the Fabians Michael Sadler and Frank Rutter, continued to champion POST-IMPRESSIONIST art and Abstract Expressionist painting, displaying the work of Wassily Kandinsky as early as 1913.
READING
Bevir, Mark (2011) The Making of British Socialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Britain, Ian (1982) Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, c.1884–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, Wallace (1967) The New Age Under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Steele, Tom (1990) Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. Aldershot: Scolar Press.
FAUVISM
The name Fauves (‘Wild Beasts’) was teasingly bestowed by critic Louis Vauxcelles on a loose and relatively short-lived affiliation of artists including Henri Matisse (the senior figure in the group), André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck and some of Matisse's associates from his artistic training under the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts.
K
- Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow, Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2018, pp 204-207
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
KINO-EYE
The Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, chief proponent of Kino-Eye, a technique of Soviet FORMALIST documentary, together with his filmmaker comrades, or kinocs, pioneered a CINEMA of accelerated MONTAGE, variable SPEED and innovative camera placement which eliminated script, actors and staging of any kind. In his writing and filmmaking of the mid-1920s, Vertov advocated the importance of capturing unaltered EVERYDAY life, as against the stagey illusions and bourgeois fairy tales of the narrative film. This documentary aesthetic is combined with the spirit of formal EXPERIMENT sweeping through the wider Soviet AVANT-GARDE and the desire to renew perception by cross-breeding the human with the mechanical.
The Kino-Eye enlarges microscopic phenomena ordinarily invisible to the human eye. It slows time, subjecting movement to close analysis, while associative montage editing carefully arranges visual material according to theme and idea. This poetic documentary filmmaking would also serve a political end, teaching the audience to see from new, unexpected perspectives the often invisible world of the everyday, and to decode social relations, labour, the body and TECHNOLOGY. The influence of Vertov's poetic, montage-based political documentary is most powerfully felt in post-war France, in the Cinéma Vérité of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, in Jean-Luc Godard's post-Nouvelle Vague Dziga Vertov Group, and in the film essays of Chris Marker. The Kino-Eye method laid the groundwork for Vertov's masterpiece, Man With a Movie Camera (1929), voted in the 2014 Sight and Sound poll of international filmmakers and critics as the greatest documentary ever made.
READING
Hicks, Jeremy (2007) Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film. London: I. B. Tauris.
Vertov, Dziga (1985) Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press.
KITSCH
The word kitsch emerged in nineteenth-century Germany, pejoratively describing sentimental, cheap and lowbrow cultural products, especially commercial, mass-produced ones. The term was taken up by American art critic Clement Greenberg in his influential 1939 essay ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, which attempted to relate the tendency towards ABSTRACTION in modern art to the conditions of industrial MASS CULTURE in MODERNITY, of which kitsch was seen as symptomatic. For Greenberg, key characteristics of kitsch products are that they require little effort on the part of the viewer to understand them, that they offer only pre-digested clichéd meanings, and that they are formulaic, toothless copies of genuine culture.