The dialectics of vision: Oskar Kokoschka and the historiography of expressionistic sight

In his seminal essay ‘On the Nature of Visions’, Oskar Kokoschka proposes a theory of expressionistic sight that advocates the centrality of both optical and psychological processes in the development of this sensorial construct. The present study argues that Kokoschka’s novel handling of the role of vision in the image forming process implicitly elucidates expressionistic sight as a process fashioned through the dialectical tension that arises from these two prevalent, though oppositional views of artistic vision in the early twentieth century. As such, the historiography of expressionistic sight offered by Kokoschka stands in stark contrast to other prevailing histories written by his interlocutors in fin-de-siècle Germany and Austria

Constructing the Viennese Modern Body Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet

This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, one informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following question: How and to what end was the human body discussed, portrayed, and utilized as an aesthetic metaphor in turn-of-the-century Vienna? By scrutinizing theatrically “hysterical” performances, avant-garde puppet plays, and images created by Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele and others, Nathan J. Timpano discusses how Viennese artists favored the pathological or puppet-like body as their contribution to European modernism. This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, one informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following question: How and to what end was the human body discussed, portrayed, and utilized as an aesthetic metaphor in turn-of-the-century Vienna? By scrutinizing theatrically “hysterical” performances, avant-garde puppet plays, and images created by Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele and others, Nathan J. Timpano discusses how Viennese artists favored the pathological or puppet-like body as their contribution to European modernism

L’arc de cercle, or the Movement of Modernism (1620–2020)

Timpano reviews the visual manifestation of the arc de cercle—a specific movement in hysterical attacks coined by Jean-Martin Charcot in the 1870s—in order to better comprehend how and why hysteria was not the invention of nineteenth-century French medicine, but rather, a theatrically expressive “attitude” identifiable throughout the visual and performing arts from the Early Modern period to the present era. His research demonstrates that any distinction between “dramatic swooning” and “hysterical arcs” was largely an arbitrary division for artists and theater directors working from the Baroque era to the contemporary scene. Instead, the codification of the arc de cercle by modern medicine in the late nineteenth century was, in truth, a rather late attempt to explain a long-standing tradition of hysterical expressions that had already found power and meaning in the realm of the arts

Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum, a retrospective exhibition organized by the Centre Pompidou, in collaboration with Tate Modern and the Finnish National Gallery/Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, accordingly highlights her multifaceted approach to art making and the questions her work intentionally provokes. The entirety of the Tate press materials, including the catalogue, exhibition leaflet, and opening wall text, reiterate to audiences that Hatoum is a Lebanese-born Palestinian artist living and working in London. [...]the shape and color of the block interestingly (and perhaps tellingly) recalls the Kaaba (“Cube” in Arabic), or the structure at the center of the Great Mosque in Mecca. Themes of exile and displacement are continued in the final piece of the exhibition, a sculptural installation titled Undercurrent (red) (2008), which consists of interwoven red electrical cables that form a square mat, or quilt, on the concrete floor of the gallery

The Curious Case of Aubrey Beardsley’s Poe “Illustrations”

Abstract This article addresses the uniqueness of Aubrey Beardsley’s late nineteenth-century Poe “illustrations” as works that enjoy a complex relationship with the writer’s theory of graphicality—specifically the dichotomy that exists between exteriority and interiority in both text and image. This essay posits that Beardsley’s use of vague open-endedness (in terms of visual narrative) was deliberately intended to reside in tandem—but not supersede or compete with—the graphicality of Poe’s words. By theorizing the exteriority/interiority binary around two Poesian themes—decay and speciesism—this study seeks to explain how the iconography of Beardsley’s images is at the very crux of graphicality, especially as this concept applies to writing-as-art and the art of illustration

Emilio sanchez in new york and latin america

"This book focuses on the life and artistic activities of Emilio Sanchez in New York, and Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s. More specifically, the book will consider Sanchez in the wider context of mid-century Cuban artists, and cross-cultural exchange between New York, Cuba, and the Caribbean. The book includes a foreword by Dr. Ann Koll, former Executive Director/Curator of the Emilio Sanchez Foundation, and an introduction by Dr. Nathan Timpano, University of Miami Department of Art and Art History. This book will be of interest to scholars in modern art, Caribbean studies, architectural history, and Latin American and Hispanic studies"-