The problem addressed by the student was the creation of private, separate spaces within a larger area. It was determined that folding screens could be utilized in a variety of settings and situations thereby providing a flexible solution.As the creation of the folding screens progressed, the student was exposed to ideas and motivating concepts within the artworld which influenced him to consider a more sculptural response to the problem. A shift of the emphasis from the purely functional to a viewer oriented. perceptual interaction with the sculptural space was the result; although the sculptures did not have the obvious usefulness of the folding screens, the student found the sculptures to be personally useful in his artistic development.The primary method of constuction utilized was welding. Several of the sculptures were the result of combining wooden elements and assemblages with welded steel. Sevendifferent artworks were created, three being folding screens and four being sculptural barriers. / Department of Art

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Sydney, 2007. / Title from title screen (viewed 26 March 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy to the Dept. of Art History and Theory, Faculty of Arts. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: Linda Eaton, Winterthur Museum. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Institute of Fine Arts, 1990. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (v. 1, p. 213-231).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, August 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Orientador: José Leonardo do Nascimento / Banca: Omar Khouri / Banca: Fabíola Cristina Alves / Resumo: Essa pesquisa analisa as relações existentes entre a série História de Ismael Nery e seu sistema filosófico, nomeado Essencialismo. Na série executada em 1932, e composta por cerca de dezesseis desenhos à nanquim, nota-se uma aproximação à estética do surrealismo, no entanto, suas produções desde 1926 parecem estar coadunadas ao seu sistema filosófico, e, evidenciar a estruturação de seu projeto estético. Através da iconologia foi analisada a ocorrência desse binômio: estética e filosofia; por meio da revisão bibliográfica foram atualizados seus dados biográficos a fim de elucidar incongruências historiográficas. Além das composições, foram também analisadas as poesias de Ismael Nery, as quais da mesma forma comprovam o pensamento filosófico do artista e refletem as pinturas como um espelho da representação artística. A fim de, compreender e comprovar o essencialismo na história de Ismael Nery, e, sua importância na construção do imaginário artístico no modernismo brasileiro. Como suporte teórico-metodológico utilizado para as análises contamos com os pressupostos de E. Panofsky. / Abstract: This research investigate the existing relations between the series Ismael Nery's History and his philosophical system, named Essentialism. In this 1932 series, constituted of about sixteen drawings in Indian ink, it can be noted a closeness to the aesthetics of surrealism, however, his productions since 1926 seemed to be connected to his philosophical system and they seem to indicate an structure of his aesthetic project. Through the iconology it was analyzed both his aesthetic and his philosophy; through the bibliographical revision his biographical dates were update aiming at revealing some historiographic inconsistencies. Besides the compositions, Ismael Nery's poetry were also analyzed, which on the same way prove the philosophical thoughts of the artist and they reflect the paintings, as a mirror of the artistic representation. The essentialism in the history of Ismael Nery could be better understood and comprehended and, above all, his importance in the artistic imagery in the Brazilian Movement. As theoretical-methodological framework for the analyses it was used the concepts of E. Panofsky. / Mestre

This study proposes to illustrate that the twentieth century passage from modernity to postmodernity, with its induction of socio-cultural development and attitudinal change, exists as a fundamental means of informing the character of contemporary graphic design practice1. Today, in contrast to the intentions of this study, many appraisals of graphic design work would seem to place too much emphasis on the analyses and evaluation of the stylistic character of creative practices and not enough on the theoretical, historical and attitudinal issues surrounding them. As such, this study attempts to reveal the meaning and moreover the relevance of philosophical, social, cultural and critical theory for contemporary, postmodern graphic design practices. This is done in order to provide graphic designers with a reflective awareness of the structure of the cultural context within which they work, and takes into account twentieth century cultural theory and twentieth century, western graphic design practice, within the framework of the passage from modernity to postmodernity.

Bertram Charles Binning's depiction of British Columbia coastal scenes in his drawings and paintings of the mid 1940s to the early 1950s present images of sunlit seascapes in recreational settings; they are scenes of leisure and pleasure. The concern for leisure and pleasure was central to the artist's modernism, even after he began painting in a semi-abstract manner around 1948. In this particular construction of modernism, Binning offered pleasure as an antidote to some of the anxieties he observed in postwar culture. Binning also thought that art could contribute to life in a direct way. In the mid to late 1940s, Vancouver saw a series of artistic community projects which explored the possibility of art as a social force; the Art in Living Group, of which Binning was a member, believed that art could have a therapeutic value in relation to housing projects and community planning. In certain ways, the Art in Living Group was a response to rapid changes in the social matrix of Vancouver. Binning's personal artistic practice, however, appears to have existed outside of what was embraced in his participation in those community projects. His essentially personal, self-authenticating expression in the form of drawings may be seen to resist the idealism of his more 'public' production, that is, his own idealism, his demand for an art thoroughly harmonized with the public sphere. Moreover, in this more personal body of work, his choice of leisurely scenes, rendered in a style reminiscent of Matisse, can be seen as far removed from the urban tensions of the time. It also seems to suggest that the leisure-and-pleasure idealism which finds expression in these works was not only class-and gender- specific, but also antithetical to his strong desire to democratize art. Binning's preoccupation with personal expression took a turn when he shifted his concern from representational drawings to semi-abstract paintings. The shift coincided with his career move to the University of British Columbia as a professor of Art History in 1949. From then on, Binning's interest in regional cosmopolitanism became more pronounced in his work. In this sense, it is significant that Binning looked for guidance to Herbert Read's ideas about modern art and art education. At the same time, his reputation expanded beyond the West Coast. In 1954, Binning was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale. Binning's particular modernism, as represented by this range of work, all of which presents a pastoral version of Utopia , was in some ways profoundly at odds with the social circumstances of the time. Why was the interest in leisure and pleasure significant to his practice? What did it mean to promote this kind of idealism in the local context? And in what ways did it relate to the international art scene — for example, to the work of Matisse or to contemporary concepts of art? My thesis addresses these questions by situating Binning's work both regionally and internationally. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

The Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (b.1923) is an exemplar of modernism both in Europe and in Latin America. This thesis offers a broader understanding of his work by discussing his early paintings as a precedent to his more recognized production. Cruz-Diez's chief aim as an artist is the liberation of colour, a process undertaken with the motivation of being part of art history, in an avant-garde quest for what his original contribution to art could be. Transition, interaction, colour, space and time: these are the crucial concepts of the work of Cruz-Diez investigated in this thesis and positioned in the Latin American/European and Kinetic/Optical context. Today, Cruz-Diez's works from his first Physichromie (1959) onwards have been extensively explored both by him in numerous commentaries and by scholars. In contrast, only few works of the 1950s have been displayed and discussed. The key aspect of my argument is that 1959 is not an abrupt beginning to Cruz-Diez's work but the conclusive stage of a ten-year process of transition from figuration to abstraction. I demonstrate that there is indeed a drawn-out “passage” made of readings and experiments, of “successes” and" “failures”. I argue that this “passage” is articulated along three parallel paths: 1) the detachment from naturalistic or figurative representation; 2) the detachment from the concept of colour as a synonym of pigment on a support; and 3) the shift in emphasis from a “passive” to an “active” spectator.

This dissertation reconstructs the tradition of “democratic modernism” in the United States from its origins in the fertile avant-garde circles of the early 1910s through the maturation of American modernism as a cultural institution in the 1920s, the subsequent challenge to its authority by the radical social movements of the 1930s, and culminating in the ideological battles and profound geopolitical shift during and after World War II. It focuses on the overlapping intellectual careers of four literary figures – William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Burke, Archibald MacLeish, and Charles Olson – against the background of a wider cohort that included Marianne Moore, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, F. O. Matthiessen, Melvin Tolson, Ruth Benedict, Edward Dahlberg, Dwight Macdonald, and Allen Ginsberg. The dissertation argues that debates over form and experience, strongly influenced by the writings of Ezra Pound and John Dewey, defined these central figures’ efforts to conceptualize a democratic subject grounded in aesthetic experience. For the democratic modernists, the poetic subject became a metaphor for a fully realized democratic subject, and “poetry” came to symbolize not just verse but also a heightened aesthetic orientation towards society that could serve as the basis for cultural reform and, for a time, revolutionary transformation. In reconstructing democratic modernism as a tradition, this dissertation aims to rethink the origins of the postwar counterculture as the political and philosophical heir of radical democracy in the interwar period. As the counterculture emerged in the shadow of the Cold War, leading figures such as Olson and Ginsberg helped shift the political ideals of the 1930s left towards aesthetic practice, preserving a cultural space for radical democracy between official anti-Communism and the aesthetic autonomy professed by intellectual elites. It concludes that the “true contrary” that Olson urged his fellow poets and artists in the late 1940s to seek through aesthetic practice had been there before him and continues to be a relevant stance within American society. This tradition proposes that through an active and critical inquiry into the conditions of one’s experience and the values that make them up, any person through receptivity, imagination, and poetic speech, broadly construed, can mediate the seeming oppositions in society, creating new forms of understanding, ritual, and symbolic experience.