Modernism and the Classics in Central European Art

Central European Modernists radically re-invented the classical tradition in art between the two world wars. This book breaks new ground in elucidating how Fauvists, Expressionists, Cubists and Surrealists successively constructed and deconstructed the classics for their own ends. The First World War changed forever the way artists conceived of their art, and of the role of the classics in it. This was above all true in Germany, where the trauma of war and its aftermath made the classical arcadias so beloved of neoclassical art seem a distant dream. Yet while some Fauvists continued to cling in escapism to classical idylls, many Expressionists instead turned to the classics for a new language with which to express the suffering of war.Elsewhere in central Europe, and in Czechoslovakia above all, Cubist artists re-cast the classics in radical new ways in their search to construct new artistic forms. Then as the cosmopolitanism of the 1930s ebbed away, Nazi artists too turned back to the classics, and above all to Greek sculpture, for inspiration for their racial and political ideal. Striking out on their own, the Surrealists consciously injected disorder into their art, simultaneously rejecting and embracing the classical tradition in a way never seen before in Western art. Tracing the complex relationship of Modernism and the classics in central Europe, this book writes a new chapter in the history of classical reception in the arts. Through engagement with Central European scholarship not currently available in English, it makes accessible key material on these artists.