Childrens Culture And The Avant Garde

This volume explores the mutual influences between children’s literature and the avant-garde. Olson places particular focus on fin-de-siècle Paris, where the Avant-garde was not unified in thought and there was room for modernism to overlap with children’s literature and culture in the Golden Age. The ideas explored by artists such as Florence Upton, Henri Rousseau, Sir William Nicholson, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Marc Chagall had been disseminated widely in cultural productions for children; their work, in turn, influenced children’s culture. These artists turned to children’s culture as a "new way of seeing," allied to a contemporary interest in international artistic styles. Children’s culture also has strong ties to decadence and to the grotesque, the latter of which became a distinctively Modernist vision. This book visits the qualities of the era that were defined as uniquely childlike, the relation of childhood to high and low art, and the relation of children’s literature to fin-de-siècle artistic trends. Topics of interest include the use of non-European figures (the Golliwogg), approaches to religion and pedagogy, to oppression and motherhood, to Nature in a post-Darwinian world, and to vision in art and life. Olson’s unique focus covers new ground by concentrating not simply on children's literature, but on how childhood experiences and culture figure in art.

Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde is the first study that investigates the intricate influence of the avant-garde movements on children’s literature in different countries from the beginning of the 20th century until the present. Examining a wide range of children’s books from Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the USA, the individual chapters explore the historical as well as the cultural and political aspects that determine the exceptional character of avant-garde children’s books. Drawing on studies in children’s literature research, art history, and cultural studies, this volume provides comprehensive insights into the close relationships between avant-garde children’s literature, images of childhood, and contemporary ideas of education. Addressing topics such as the impact of exhibitions, the significance of the Bauhaus, and the influence of poster art and graphic design, the book illustrates the broad range of issues associated with avant-garde children’s books. More than 60 full-color illustrations demonstrate the impressive variety of design in avant-garde picturebooks and children’s books.

Focusing on his evocative and profound references to children and their stories, Children's Stories and 'Child-Time in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde studies the relationship between the artist's work on childhood and his search for a transfigured concept of time. As it changes the focus from Cornell's boxes to his multimedia works, this study also situates Cornell and his art in the broader context of the transatlantic avant-garde of the 1930s and 40s.

Within avant-garde communities, especially for the last century or so, one would almost think that we each spring, like monocled Athenas, from the split forehead of a god. But few have ever been born within the eternal network of the avant-garde, and even those who have been were children once. Childhood and family represent the most intimate links to the world from which the avant-garde departs: from what is worth saving of it, from what needs destroyed, or elements of both. There are as many ways of living and relating to one's origins within the avant-garde as there are in society at large; and the ways in which avant-gardists respond and relate to their families and childhoods define the modes, the strengths, and the weaknesses of their own understandings of the world that they create and the communities they form. And yet the discussion of family is scarcely to be seen, especially within the past century, and often must be gleaned from the shadowy corners of their histories and their work. Here are a few hints of this fundamental but often invisible facet of the avant-garde experience.

The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 brings the series of cultural histories of the avant-garde in the Nordic countries up to the present. It discusses revisions and continuations of historical practices since 1975.

An innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1600-1850 Academy to Avant-Garde" interrogates labels used in standard histories of the art of this period (Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classicism and Romanticism) and examines both established and recent art-historical methodologies, including formalism, iconology, spectatorship and reception, identity and difference. Key topics include Baroque Rome, Dutch Painting of the Golden Age, Georgian London, the Paris Salon, and the impact of the discovery of the South Pacific.The second of three text books, published by Tate in association with the Open University, which insight for students of Art History, Art Theory and Humanities. Introduction Part 1: City and country 1600-1760 1: Bernini and Baroque Rome 2: Meaning and interpretation: Dutch painting of the golden age 3: The metropolitan urban renaissance: London 1660-1760 4: The English landscape garden 1680-1760 Part 2: New worlds of art 1760-1850 5: Painting for the public 6: Canova, Neo-classicism and the sculpted body 7: The other side of the world 8: Inventing the Romantic artist

The book examines individual and collective visions for the material world of children, from utopian dreams for the citizens of the future to the dark realities of political conflict and exploitation. Surveying more than 100 years of toys, clothing, playgrounds, schools, children's hospitals, nurseries, furniture, posters, animation and books, this richly illustrated catalogue illuminates how progressive design has enhanced the physical, intellectual, and emotional development of children and, conversely, how models of children's play have informed experimental aesthetics and imaginative design thinking.

Soviet literature in general and Soviet children’s literature in particular have often been labeled by Western and post-Soviet Russian scholars and critics as propaganda. Below the surface, however, Soviet children’s literature and culture allowed its creators greater experimental and creative freedom than did the socialist realist culture for adults. This volume explores the importance of children’s culture, from literature to comics to theater to film, in the formation of Soviet social identity and in connection with broader Russian culture, history, and society.

Left Out presents an alternative and corrective history of writing for children in the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1949 a number of British publishers, writers, and illustrators included children's literature in their efforts to make Britain a progressive, egalitarian, and modern society. Some came from privileged backgrounds, others from the poorest parts of the poorest cities in the land; some belonged to the metropolitan intelligentsia or bohemia, others were working-class autodidacts, but all sought to use writing for children and young people to create activists, visionaries, and leaders among the rising generation.Together they produced a significant number of both politically and aesthetically radical publications for children and young people. This 'radical children's literature' was designed to ignite and underpin the work of making a new Britain for a new kind of Briton. While there are many dedicated studies of children's literature and childrens' writers working in other periods, the years 1910-1949 have previous received little critical attention. In this study, Kimberley Reynolds shows that the accepted characterisation of inter-war children's literature as retreatist, anti-modernist, and apolitical is too sweeping and that the relationship between children's literature and modernism, left-wing politics, and progressive education has been neglected.

Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary 'material turn' and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern 'invention' of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design-Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented ? critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children's use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.