2-23-2024: ["World Cultures and Modern Art” ONLINE] Episode 1

Hi encounters, today's blog is just about the release online of a part [episode 1] of a material donated at a little library. It is organized in the following way: a brief foreword paragraph and annotations about the article, fully converted to a document format (link).

This has to be considered as a first Episode. About 20% of the catalogue is put online, so far, at the moment, until now.

Already the opening article, "Art as universal phenomenon" is proposed as a document. An outline of the document, topics and key words can help as a summary.

The original article has six main parts: Civilisation and the Janus Face of Europe; Signs of the East; Dialectic Resurrection of Totem, Fetish and Idol; Encounter of Ancient Amerindian Cultures with Technological Civilization; Musical Universalism; The Unity of the World in the Vision of Art.

The concluding word of the article, ART AS A MEDIATOR is kept alive, with the new perspective of more digital media, algorithmic tools to serve conceptual artists, digital painters, designers, and image creators.

Foreword

The encounter of 19th and 20th century European art and music with Asia, Africa, Oceania, Afro- and Indo- America
Exhibition on the occasion of the Games of the XXth Olympiad Munich 1972
June 16 to September 30
Haus der Kunst
from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. 
Bruckmann Publishers Munich

Note:
The webpage is an initiative to give access to a material, worth to be mentioned for its contents and for its historical value (says artgraphic-db); it was the catalogue of the above mentioned exhibition, containing contributions about art under the topic of cultures encountering (referring to the Olympics symbolic of people encountering).

To the knowledge of artgraphic-db, the catalogue was not published on a long term period and it has been a good opportunity to get a copy that is a pleasure to share in a digital form.

It has been said the following about the publishers (in that time): 
Studio Bruckmann was founded one year ago to serve as a communication center and gallery for the publishing and printing company Bruckmann Munchen; within a few months, it has become a well-known institution in Munich. .../... Renowed artists and authors are presenting their new works in Studio Bruckmann: Oskar Kokoschka, Max Bill, HAP Grieshaber, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Victor Vasarely

ARTICLE

Outline of the article:

 "Art as a Universal Phenomenon"

citation

Environmental awareness creates a bridge between the old accidental and the new programmed events of human existence 

Marshall McLuhan (https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/)

[changing concepts in art are clearly urgently required]

Key words: Eurocentric hierarchy;  interpenetration of world cultures; universalist aspect

[merger of far and near, of space and time] 

[beginnings of a world climate of creative influence embracing all peoples] 

•  Impressionism,

• Post-Impressionism,

• Art Nouveau,

• Fauvism,

• Expressionism,

• Cubism,

• Dadaism,

• Surrealism,

• Action Painting,

• Art Informel

- have taken over elements or methods from:

•  the art of Asia 

• or from art which until then had been designated primitive.

[promises touristic success]

Key words: muscle and mind; Pierre de Coubertin;

[world culture]

Whereas the term "world culture" evokes mild associations with:-

• world economy,

• world politics,

• world planning or, its opposite,

• world destruction,

Civilisation and the Janus Face of Europe 

citation

Our task is to realize the history of all known present and vanished cultures as a unity. 

Arnold J. Toynbee (quoted from memory)

[early cultures emerged …/…  along the river oases of Egypt and Mesopotamia]

Key words: Phoenician alphabet; code of King Hammurabi; Bel, the Lord of heaven and earth; Will Durant

In the first volume of his "History of Civilization" which he entitled "Our Oriental Heritage," Will Durant attributed most of the achievements of civilization to the Orient:

• agriculture and commerce,

• the horse and chariot,

• the minting of coins and the letter of credit,

• the trades and handicrafts,

• laws and government, 

• mathematics and medicine, 

• drainage systems, 

• astronomy and geometry, 

• the calendar and the clock,

• paper, ink, books, libraries, schools and much more besides.

[discovery of the personality]

Key words: Aristotle, Leonardo, Johann Sebastian Bach, Marcel Proust, Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein; Siemens and Krupp

Signs of the East 

[new markets and power]

Key words: mythical creatures assimilation; Kufic script; Turco- Islamic; Capella Ruccelai; Günter Bandmann; world of the fantastic; Temptation of St. Antony;

[Afro-Islamic world]

Key words: bizet, Saint-Saëns, Verdi; Delacroix and Ingres, Pierre Loti, Rudyard Kipling, August Macke; Conceptual Art;

[effect on the philosophy and literature of Europe]

citation

From the object, which no longer appears oppressive to me, a tension is emitted which grows in luminosity and continues like an echo in all directions to the limits of the canvas. The lofty teaching of Turner and the spiritual message of Zen painting have come home to me. 

André Masson, 1953

English scholars in a fifty-volumed work entitled "Sacred Books of the East" had drawn the attention of Europe to the mythological forms and beliefs of India. 

[In China and Japan writing has always been of outstanding importance.] 

Dialectic Resurrection of Totem, Fetish and Idol 

[The primitive artists belong without exception to pre-industrial economic systems] 

Encounter of Ancient Amerindian Cultures with Technological Civilization

citation

Until recently the fine arts employed the same means as those used by ancient man in his cave paintings - the manual means of drawing, incising, modelling, applying paint with a brush or spray technique. The computer compels art, as it were, to make the leap from the Stone Age to the Computer Age...

Herbert W. Franke

[a feeling of inferiority based on …/… the great European art styles.] 
[people and artist to be bridged via the simplicity of modern primitivism] 

[the virtue of an unprepossessed and independent art] 

Key words: Henri Rousseau's exotic motifs; Max Ernst's dream forests; Mayan calendar; Indian totem-pole; Aboriginal Indian symbols; Torres-Garcia and Gottlieb; Willi Baumeister and André Masson; Atlan, Victor Brauner and Paul Klee; Diego Rivera; biblia pauperum; José Clemente Orozco; David Alfaro Siqueiros; 

[megalithic edifices]

Key words: Julio Le Parc, Horacio Garcia Rossi, Francisco Sobrino, Marta Boto, Vardanega, Hugo Demarco; Frank Lloyd Wright; Henry Moore; Chac-Mool figures; Fritz Wotruba;

[radical art]

Key words: Action Painting to Pop Art; Conceptural Art -from Environment to Cybernetic Art-

Musical Universalism 

[Herder's "Stimmen der Völker in Liedern"] 
[Debussy's encounter] 
[The Rite of Spring, The Firebird and Petrushka] 
[encounter of the primitive African rhythm] 
[mantra and serial 12-note system] 

The Unity of the World in the Vision of Art 

citation

We know that the world is changing and that man is changing the world and the world man. Jean Paul Sartre

[emancipationists movements] 
[Encounters of the cultures] 
[art acts as a mediator]