BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

Joan Miró. Still Life with Old Shoe. Paris, January 24-May 29, 1937 By Alexandra A Jopp Art had an important role in Communist revolutionary activity in Europe between the wars through the method of “socialist realism,” in which the French Communist Party tried to “dictate form as well as content to those artists who were Party members.” (Lewis 61) The approach was formulated in 1932 by Stalinist apparatchiks in the Soviet Union and covered all spheres of artistic activity – literature, drama, cinema, painting, sculpture, music and architecture. Helena Lewis affirms the main principles of socialist realism: “it was to be a historically truthful and concrete depiction of reality with a thematic emphasis on the coming of the revolution.” It was also important, according to the method, for artists to make their works consistent with the themes of socialist ideological reforms and the education of workers in the socialist spirit. As British art critic Herbert Read said, “Socialist re...

Artist Thomas Eakins 1889 Type Oil on canvas Dimensions 214 cm × 300 cm (84⅜ in × 118⅛ in)           Location John Morgan Building at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania By Alexandra A Jopp & Ronald Hawkins For the art historian who embraces semiotics, meaning is ever-changing. Aspects of works of art become wild cards whose interpretations vary across cultures and eras, so that, “An image means one thing in one context, something else in another.” (Hatt 208) In its strictest form, semiotics holds that all verbal “signs” (words) and, less obviously and more controversially, all visual “signs” (images) are arbitrary conventions, names and pictures that we connect to concepts for no other reason than that we, as a society, decided to do so. While this is the orthodox method (as defined by Ferdinand de Saussure), the reform school of semiotics (offered by Charles Sanders Peirce) takes a more realist app...

Le café La Fleur (55 rue des Alexiens 1000 Bruxelles) March 1953. From left to right: Marcel Mariën, Camille Goemans, Gérard Van Bruaene, Irène Hamoir,  Georgette Magritte, E.L.T. Mesens, Louis Scutenaire, René Magritte and Paul Colinet. By Alexandra A Jopp The “other” has performed many functions throughout human history. It has variously been a source of fear, fascination, inspiration, exoticism, disgust and many things in between. One consistent theme emerges, though: how one defines the other (whatever it may be in a given situation) often goes a long way toward defining oneself. This self-identification through proxy was never more true – or more intentional – than in the Surrealists’ conception of otherness and their investigation of it through ethnography. Surrealists went beyond mere curiosity about the exotic features of other cultures that typified movements such as Orientalism. In a world based on modern, rational thought that Surrealists found to be lack...