Full Description
Artists and Radicalism in Germany, 1890-1933 traces the evolution of the German applied arts movement from 1890 through the interwar period, offering a fresh perspective on the role of radicalism and avant-garde labor in the history of modern art.
The book reveals how reforms in artistic and vocational education intersected with the professional politics of radical artists and the nature of intellectual labor. Challenging conventional views, Nikos Pegioudis reinterprets the conflict between modern art's advocates and opponents, arguing that professional politics—not merely political ideologies—shaped the historical avant-garde. In doing so, Artists and Radicalism casts new light on German modern art and its interpreters.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 Geistige Arbeit, Artistic Radicalism and the Applied Arts Movement
2 Applied Arts Reform, Politics of Artistic Professions and the Ideology of the Avant-Garde
3 A New Approach to Artistic Radicalism
1 Form and Reform: Intellectuals, Artists and the Hands of Production
1 Fine Artists, Crafts Reform, and the Art Proletariat
2 The Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk, the Arts and Crafts Reform, and the Politics of the Gesamtkünstler
3 The Third Arts and Crafts Exhibition, the Werkbund and the Tension Between the Designer-as-Artist and the Craftsman
4 The Crisis of Intellectual Labour and the Re-distribution of Skills
5 Discourse as a Way of Restructuring Crafts Hierarchies
6 The Designer's Workshop and the Clash with Small Craftsmen
7 The Werkbund, Lebensreform, and Socialist Revisionism
2 Reformist Radicalism: The Eloquent Silence of the Avant-Garde in Early Weimar Germany
1 An Inconclusive Secession from the Werkbund: the Arbeitsrat für Kunst between Revolution and Reform
2 Excursus: Organising Radicalism
3 A Second Moment of Silence: Proletarian Culture and the German Applied Arts Movement
4 Bauhaus (R)Evolution
5 Radicalism and Middle-Ground Modernism: Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, and Wilhelm Waetzoldt's Gedanken zur Kunstschulreform
3 The Death of Painting?
1 Men of the Past: A Crisis of Painting or a Crisis of Reform?
2 In Defence of Painting
3 Kitsch, or Avant-Garde and its Double
4 From Canvas to Poster and Back Again: the Art Proletariat between Avant-Garde, Propaganda, and Kitsch
4 A Struggle of Outsiders: Intellectual Labour and Artistic Radicalism in Late Weimar Germany
1 Intellectual Labour, Artistic Prominence, and Applied Arts Radicalism
2 ASSO's Artistic Paradigms
3 Outsider, 'Free-Floating', and 'Operative' Intellectuals
4 The Intellectual as an Outsider or Distance as a Means of Reorientation
5 The Visual Artist as Producer
6 From the Outsider to the Redundant Intellectual
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
