Stephen Eric Bronner revisits the modernist project's groundbreaking
innovations, itsexperimental imagination, and its utopian politics.
Reading the artistic and intellectual achievements of the movement's
leading figures against larger social, political, and cultural trends,
he follows the rise of a flawed yet salient effort at liberation and its
confrontation with modernity.
Modernism at the Barricades features chapters on expressionism,
futurism, surrealism, and revolutionary art and includes fresh
perspectives on the work of Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky, and
Emil Nolde, among others. The volume illuminates an international avant
garde intent on resisting bureaucracy, standardization, scientific
rationality, and the increasing commodification of mass culture.
Modernists sought new ways of feeling, new forms of expression, and new
possibilities of experience while seeking to refashion society.
Liberation was their aim, along with the invigoration of daily life--yet
their process entangled political resistance with the cultural.
Exploring both the political responsibility of the artist and the
manipulation of authorial intention, Bronner reconfigures the modernist
movement for contemporary progressive purposes and offers insight into
the problems still complicating cultural politics. He ultimately
reasserts the political dimension of developments often understood in
purely aesthetic terms and confronts the self-indulgence and political
irresponsibility of certain so-called modernists today. The result is a
long overdue reinterpretation and rehabilitation of the modernist legacy
for a new age.
