Revisions of Fascism: History, Aesthetics, and Affect seminar, American Comparative Literature Association, Washington DC, 2019
During the interwar period, a number of landmark colonial revival projects sought to create highl... more During the interwar period, a number of landmark colonial revival projects sought to create highly accurate representations of early America. The restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, the construction of the Thorne miniature period rooms, and the documentation of outmoded crafts in the Index of American Design were all projects that produced immersive, voyeuristic, and transporting experiences for viewers. Drawing on the reactions that early viewers had to these works, I understand them in terms of the uncanny. These revivalist designs were extreme in that they exploited viewers’ irrationality and invited them to suspend their disbelief in order to really feel themselves to be within the past. Each one sought to revivify the past, to animate previously inert places and objects, and in this way to mitigate the barriers of time and space. But these projects were also part of the complex development of fascist and anti-fascist politics in the United States during this period. Although they ostensibly worked to politicize aesthetics, to create art that would serve a democracy under threat, their immersive and transportive qualities also worked to aestheticize politics, and to promote fascist fantasies of early American life. This paper explores how an aesthetics of the uncanny was central to historical revivalism in the United States context and proposes that it can also be a useful framework for understanding fascist aesthetics more broadly.
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With a revelatory analysis of how the postwar French tapestry revival provided a medium for modern art and a model for its discourse and marketing on both sides of the Atlantic, Weaving Modernism presents a fascinating reexamination of modernism’s relationship to decoration, reproducibility, and politics. Tapestry offered artists a historically grounded medium for distributing and marketing their work, helped expand the visibility and significance of abstraction at midcentury, and facilitated modernism’s entry into the dominant paradigm of the postwar period. K. L. H. Wells situates tapestry as part of a broader “marketplace modernism” in which artists participated, conjuring a lived experience of visual culture in corporate lobbies, churches, and even airplanes, as well as in galleries and private homes. This extensively researched study features previously unpublished illustrations and little-known works by such major artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, and Frank Stella.
With a revelatory analysis of how the postwar French tapestry revival provided a medium for modern art and a model for its discourse and marketing on both sides of the Atlantic, Weaving Modernism presents a fascinating reexamination of modernism’s relationship to decoration, reproducibility, and politics. Tapestry offered artists a historically grounded medium for distributing and marketing their work, helped expand the visibility and significance of abstraction at midcentury, and facilitated modernism’s entry into the dominant paradigm of the postwar period. K. L. H. Wells situates tapestry as part of a broader “marketplace modernism” in which artists participated, conjuring a lived experience of visual culture in corporate lobbies, churches, and even airplanes, as well as in galleries and private homes. This extensively researched study features previously unpublished illustrations and little-known works by such major artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, and Frank Stella.
The sheer size and location of Le Corbusier’s tapestries at Chandigarh calls his muralnomad practice into question. For how could such large tapestries ever be moved, and why would a state government want to be nomadic in the first place? Moreover, why would such a supposedly French artistic practice be considered appropriate for an Indian capital? When numerous Indian users of the capitol complex critiqued the tapestries, Le Corbusier and his initial scholars attributed this displeasure to the Indians’ unfamiliarity with modernism. The Chandigarh tapestries thus highlight the debate over whether Le Corbusier’s modernist capital was an imperialist imposition or a welcome sign of Indian’s postcolonial modernity. This paper investigates the production and subsequent reception of the Chandigarh tapestries in order to understand how this medium, which was constructed as both “French” and “nomadic,” was positioned within the capitol complex of Chandigarh and how later scholars have tried to come to terms with their seeming incongruity.
In these ways the print renaissance and the tapestry revival used notions of craft to mitigate against the negative connotations of reproduction. But they also used craft as a means to justify modernist abstraction to postwar American audiences. Art prints and tapestries helped position abstraction as part of longer craft traditions in the decorative and graphic arts. Dealers and critics repeatedly argued that viewers who found modernist art disconcerting as paintings would find it more palatable as weavings or prints. Moreover, these reproductive crafts enabled artists, dealers, curators, and critics to articulate the concept of medium specificity to their audiences, for modernists explained their engagement with both reproduction and the abstraction of pure form as the exploration of specific craft media. This paper thus argues that the print renaissance and the tapestry revival played a crucial role in marketing modernist abstraction to postwar American audiences by linking fine art and its reproduction to the tradition, rigor, and accessibility of crafts.
Yet Rockefeller was acquiring these handmade tapestries in the age of Xerox and color photography, in the age, that is, of mechanical reproduction. Indeed, Rockefeller often chose which Picasso paintings he wanted to have as tapestries by flipping through books on the artist and looking at the images, treating monographs such as Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art and Hommage à Pablo Picasso like catalogs from which he could order. He acquired tapestries of works that were already available to him as reproductions, and he even reproduced in tapestry three paintings that were already in his own private collection. For these reasons, Rockefeller’s collection of Picasso tapestries cannot be reduced to a Benjaminian desire to acquire a substitute for the work of art in the quickest and cheapest way possible. For tapestries are manually, not mechanically, produced and reproduced. Moreover, these Picasso imitations were made at a time when tapestry reformers were forcefully arguing that the medium should no longer imitate painting, but strive for autonomy and media purity. At this moment in history, the practice of the reproductive tapestry appeared to be an archaic anomaly.