by Pericles Lewis Gustave Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary (1856) is the story of a bored housewife who has two extra-marital affairs but finds adultery almost as disappointing as marriage. The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions… Continue Reading Madame Bovary
Tag: Pericles Lewis
Fountain
by Pericles Lewis The most famous dada artist, Marcel Duchamp, living in New York, submitted to an exhibition a piece entitled “Fountain” (1917). One of his “ready-mades,” or mass-produced objects that he purchased and presented as art, “Fountain” was a urinal, turned upside down and signed “R. Mutt.” Duchamp was claiming, in effect, that he… Continue Reading Fountain
L.H.O.O.Q.
by Pericles Lewis In 1919, the same year in which T.S. Eliot wrote “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the dadaist Marcel Duchamp presented a less reverent way of relating to past artistic tradition. Duchamp exhibited one of his “assisted ready-mades,” which consisted of a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” on which he drew… Continue Reading L.H.O.O.Q.
Gordon Craig
Biography by Pericles Lewis The English actor and set designer Gordon Craig (1872-1966), along with the Swiss theorist Adolphe Appia, created methods for implementing Richard Wagner’s vision of the “total work of art” in the theater. Craig introduced some of the stylization typical of Appia into the English-speaking world in the first decade of the… Continue Reading Gordon Craig
The Seagull
by Pericles Lewis The first of Anton Chekhov‘s major dramatic works, The Seagull (1895), features an aspiring dramatist, Konstantin Treplev, who has cast a girl he loves, Nina, in a play to be performed at his mother’s country house. The “play within a play,” though going back to Shakespeare, became a central feature of twentieth-century… Continue Reading The Seagull
Anton Chekhov
Biography by Pericles Lewis In the plays of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), tragedy and comedy are inextricably intertwined. Although his major plays are suffused with an air of anxiety and pessimism akin to those of Henrik Ibsen, he insisted on calling The Seagull (1895) and The Cherry Orchard (1903) comedies. He gave Uncle Vanya (1896) the… Continue Reading Anton Chekhov
Apples and Oranges
by Pericles Lewis In the still-life “Apples and Oranges” (ca. 1895-1900), Paul Cézanne offers an example of how the interplay of colors and planes on the surface of a canvas can take on greater importance than the ostensible “subject” of the painting. Cézanne’s ambition to “make out of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the… Continue Reading Apples and Oranges
The Threepenny Opera
by Pericles Lewis In 1928, the same year in which he proclaimed himself a Marxist, Bertolt Brecht had his first international success with The Threepenny Opera, an adaptation of the eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera by John Gay, which Brecht wrote in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, who co-wrote several of his early plays and after the war… Continue Reading The Threepenny Opera
Bertolt Brecht
Biography by Pericles Lewis The most influential playwright of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht was a conduit for the impact of German expressionism on later modern drama. Brecht’s first play, Baal, written in 1918 but not produced until 1923, tells the story of a boorish and primitive poet who, from being a society sensation, degenerates… Continue Reading Bertolt Brecht
Theses on the Philosophy of History
by Pericles Lewis In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), the German-Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin presents a striking image of the fear that the individual human being had lost control of time in a modernity characterized by the rapid succession of world-changing historical events. Benjamin writes of Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus”… Continue Reading Theses on the Philosophy of History