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5 •• How to prescribe a cure for the ills of art Oscar Vázquez The jaundiced patient lies only somewhat conscious of her attendants. To her right, an avuncular older physician testing her pulse; to her left a member of the Sisters of Charity who holds, presumably, the patient’s child while extending a cup of medicinal tea or soup. More than simply a representation of what may have been witnessed in any number of hospitals or homes in the years following cholera and influenza pandemics of the early 1890s, Pablo Ruiz Picasso’s 1897 Ciencia y Caridad (Science and
Richly illustrated with over 110 colour and black and white images, the book productively contests the supposedly exclusive feminine aspect of the style moderne (art deco). It explores how alternative, parallel and overlapping experiences and expressions of decorative modernism, nationalism, gender and sexuality in the heady years surrounding World War I converge in the protean figure of the deco dandy. As such, the book significantly departs from and corrects the assumptions and biases that have dominated scholarship on and popular perceptions of art deco. The book outlines how designed products and representations of and for the dandy both existed within and outwith normative expectations of gender and sexuality complicating men’s relationship to consumer culture more broadly and the moderne more specifically. Through a sustained focus on the figure of the dandy, the book offers a broader view of art deco by claiming a greater place for the male body and masculinity in this history than has been given to date. The mass appeal of the dandy in the 1920s was a way to redeploy an iconic, popular and well-known typology as a means to stimulate national industries, to engender a desire for all things made in France. Important, essential and productive moments in the history of the cultural life of Paris presented in the book are instructive of the changing role performed by consumerism, masculinity, design history and national identity.
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
pavilion contained monumental works by some of the greatest figures in twentieth century art, giving a remarkable profile to the Spanish nation. The pavilion itself was modernist, designed by architects J. L. Sert and L. La Casa; the sculpture was by Alberto, Julio Gonzalez, Pablo Picasso and, surprisingly, the leading American sculptor Alexander Calder. As a personal friend of many Spanish artists involved in the
containing fine examples of African and Oceanic sculpture, became a regular haunt of the avant-garde. Picasso later recalled with nostalgia: ‘When I went along to the Trocadéro, there was no-one there, just an old custodian. It was very cold; there was no fire. Everything was verminous and moth-eaten ; the walls were covered with turkey twill. It was there I found my defence. I thought it was wonderful
made use of diverse value systems and terms of reference with quite distinct origins. Variegated sets of terminology overlapped in what Spaniards had to say, and in how they conceived their social roles. The trajectory of the artist Pablo Picasso is an exemplary instance of such phenomena. At the turn of the century, and – we might imagine – on course to be foundational for ‘modernism’, Picasso’s work is fraught with pressures emanating from diverse views of life with conflicting provenances. Not least among these, once more, is that ancient institution: the Catholic
may be that, given the way the art market works, such forgeries constitute the only way to question it. To observe that in this case, and any number of similar ones, the experts were mistaken, or deceived, or even defrauded, is also to concede that the usefulness of expertise in such cases is extremely limited. Picasso himself was constantly being asked by dealers to authenticate his own work, and
actual, rather than imagined, air raids was Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica. Picasso’s contribution to the World Fair held in Paris in May and June 1937 toured Britain in the autumn and winter of that year, attracting 15,000 visitors when it was exhibited at the Whitechapel gallery in east London. The admission charge was a pair of boots for Republican soldiers in Spain.30 The violent and chaotic nature of Picasso’s painting reflected the nature of the attack on Guernica, in which civilians fleeing the bombing were strafed from the air as they attempted to escape
Picasso’s inspiration on his work. In London their associations with members of Wyndham Lewis’s Group X and others affected Lett’s work more profoundly, while Morris remained indifferent to the vagaries of the avant-garde. Throughout the 1920s Lett exhibited his work at the Casa d’Arte Braglia, Rome (through Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti) and in New York under the auspices of The Little Review and the Société Anonyme, for example. Morris also held highly successful exhibitions in London in 1924 and later in 1926 when they settled back in Britain. He also showed at the
posed the machine as a novel aesthetic and conceptual framework, a strategy elucidating the manners and means of artistic invention and production.12 A rethinking of classical art on the wake of Léger’s mechanical style, purism and L’Esprit Nouveau disseminated the machine far and wide throughout the 1920s. Prampolini’s mechanical art stemmed from these premises, pursuing a neoclassical manner predicated on geometry and abstraction, leading to a confluence of the technological with the primitive which was also at work in the cubists and Picasso. Informed by