Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism (from Greek νέος nèos, "new" and Latin classicus, "of the highest rank")[1] is the
name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music,
and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of classical antiquity.
Neoclassicism was born in Rome in the mid-18th century, at the time of the rediscovery of
Pompeii and Herculaneum, but its popularity spread all over Europe as a generation of
European art students finished their Grand Tour and returned from Italy to their home
countries with newly rediscovered Greco-Roman ideals.[2][3] The main Neoclassical movement
coincided with the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, and continued into the early 19th
century, laterally competing with Romanticism. In architecture, the style continued throughout
the 19th, 20th and up to the 21st century.

European Neoclassicism in the visual arts began c. 1760 in opposition to the then-dominant
Baroque and Rococo styles. Rococo architecture emphasizes grace, ornamentation and
asymmetry; Neoclassical architecture is based on the principles of simplicity and symmetry,
which were seen as virtues of the arts of Rome and Ancient Greece, and were more
immediately drawn from 16th-century Renaissance Classicism. Each "neo"-classicism selects
some models among the range of possible classics that are available to it, and ignores others.
The Neoclassical writers and talkers, patrons and collectors, artists and sculptors of 1765–1830
paid homage to an idea of the generation of Phidias, but the sculpture examples they actually
embraced were more likely to be Roman copies of Hellenistic sculptures. They ignored both
Archaic Greek art and the works of Late Antiquity. The "Rococo" art of ancient Palmyra came as
a revelation, through engravings in Wood's The Ruins of Palmyra. Even Greece was all-but-
unvisited, a rough backwater of the Ottoman Empire, dangerous to explore, so Neoclassicists'
appreciation of Greek architecture was mediated through drawings and engravings, which
subtly smoothed and regularized, "corrected" and "restored" the monuments of Greece, not
always consciously.
 Primitivism
Primitivism is a utopian idea that is distinctive for its reverse teleology. The utopian end toward
which primitivists aspire usually lies in a notional "state of nature" in which their ancestors
existed (chronological primitivism), or in the supposed natural condition of the peoples that live
beyond "civilization" (cultural primitivism).[3]

The desire of the "civilized" to be restored to a "state of nature" is as longstanding as

civilization itself.[3] In antiquity the superiority of "primitive" life principally found expression in
the so-called Myth of the Golden Age, depicted in the genre of European poetry and visual art
known as the Pastoral. Primitivist idealism between gained new impetus with the onset of
industrialization and the European encounter with hitherto unknown peoples after the
colonization of the Americas, the Pacific and other parts of what would become the modern
imperial system.

During the Enlightenment, the idealization of indigenous peoples were chiefly used as a
rhetorical device to criticize aspects of European society.[4] In the realm of aesthetics, however,
the eccentric Italian philosopher, historian and jurist Giambattista Vico (1688–1744) was the
first to argue that primitive peoples were closer to the sources of poetry and artistic inspiration
than "civilized" or modern man. Vico was writing in the context of the celebrated contemporary
debate, known as the great Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. This included debates
over the merits of the poetry of Homer and the Bible as against modern vernacular literature.

In the 18th century, the German scholar Friedrich August Wolf identified the distinctive
character of oral literature and located Homer and the Bible as examples of folk or oral
tradition (Prolegomena to Homer, 1795). Vico and Wolf's ideas were developed further in the
beginning of the 19th century by Herder.[5] Nevertheless, although influential in literature,
such arguments were known to a relatively small number of educated people and their impact
was limited or non-existent in the sphere of visual arts.[6]

The 19th century saw for the first time the emergence of historicism, or the ability to judge
different eras by their own context and criteria. A result of this, new schools of visual art arose
that aspired to hitherto unprecedented levels of historical fidelity in setting and costumes.
Neoclassicism in visual art and architecture was one result. Another such "historicist"
movement in art was the Nazarene movement in Germany, which took inspiration from the so-
called Italian "primitive" school of devotional paintings (i.e., before the age of Raphael and the
discovery of oil painting).

Where conventional academic painting (after Raphael) used dark glazes, highly selective,
idealized forms, and rigorous suppression of details, the Nazarenes used clear outlines, bright
colors, and paid meticulous attention to detail. This German school had its English counterpart
in the Pre-Raphaelites, who were primarily inspired by the critical writings of John Ruskin, who
admired the painters before Raphael (such as Botticelli) and who also recommended painting
outdoors, hitherto unheard of.

Two developments shook the world of visual art in the mid-19th century. The first was the
invention of the photographic camera, which arguably spurred the development of Realism in
art. The second was a discovery in the world of mathematics of non-Euclidean geometry, which
overthrew the 2000-year-old seeming absolutes of Euclidean geometry and threw into question
conventional Renaissance perspective by suggesting the possible existence of multiple
dimensional worlds and perspectives in which things might look very different.[7]

The discovery of possible new dimensions had the opposite effect of photography and worked
to counteract realism. Artists, mathematicians, and intellectuals now realized that there were
other ways of seeing things beyond what they had been taught in Beaux Arts Schools of
Academic painting, which prescribed a rigid curriculum based on the copying of idealized
classical forms and held up Renaissance perspective painting as the culmination of civilization
and knowledge.[8] Beaux Arts academies held than non-Western peoples had had no art or
only inferior art.

In rebellion against this dogmatic approach, Western artists began to try to depict realities that
might exist in a world beyond the limitations of the three dimensional world of conventional
representation mediated by classical sculpture. They looked to Japanese and Chinese art, which
they regarded as learned and sophisticated and did not employ Renaissance one-point
perspective. Non-euclidean perspective and tribal art fascinated Western artists who saw in
them the still-enchanted portrayal of the spirit world. They also looked to the art of untrained
painters and to children's art, which they believed depicted interior emotional realities that had
been ignored in conventional, cook-book-style academic painting.

Tribal and other non-European art also appealed to those who were unhappy with the
repressive aspects of European culture, as pastoral art had done for millennia.[9] Imitations of
tribal or archaic art also fall into the category of nineteenth-century "historicism", as these
imitations strive to reproduce this art in an authentic manner. Actual examples of tribal,
archaic, and folk art were prized by both creative artists and collectors.

The painting of Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso and the music of Igor Stravinsky are frequently
cited as the most prominent examples of primitivism in art. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, is
"primitivist" in so far as its programmatic subject is a pagan rite: a human sacrifice in pre-
Christian Russia. It employs harsh dissonance and loud, repetitive rhythms to depict
"Dionysian" modernism, i.e., abandonment of inhibition (restraint standing for civilization).
Nevertheless, Stravinsky was a master of learned classical tradition and worked within its
bounds. In his later work he adopted a more "Apollonian" neoclassicism, to use Nietzsche's
terminology, although in his use of serialism he still rejects 19th-century convention. In modern
visual art, Picasso's work is also understood as rejecting Beaux Arts artistic expectations and
expressing primal impulses, whether he worked in a cubist, neo-classical, or tribal-art-
influenced vein.
 Avant-garde
The avant-garde (/ˌævɒ̃ ˈɡɑːrd/; French: [avɑ̃ ɡaʁd]; from French, "advance guard" or
"vanguard", literally "fore-guard") are people or works that are experimental, radical, or
unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. It may be characterized by nontraditional,
aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, and it may offer a critique of the relationship
between producer and consumer.

The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo,
primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of
modernism, as distinct from postmodernism[citation needed]. Many artists have aligned
themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from
Dada through the Situationists to postmodern artists such as the Language poets around
1981.[not in citation given]

The avant-garde also promotes radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by
the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" ("The artist,
the scientist and the industrialist", 1825), which contains the first recorded use of "avant-
garde" in its now customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as [the people's]
avant-garde", insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest
way" to social, political and economic reform.

Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity. The Italian
essayist Renato Poggioli provides one of the earliest analyses of vanguardism as a cultural
phenomenon in his 1962 book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia (The Theory of the Avant-
Garde).]Surveying the historical, social, psychological and philosophical aspects of vanguardism,
Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art, poetry, and music to show that
vanguardists may share certain ideals or values which manifest themselves in the non-
conformist lifestyles they adopt: He sees vanguard culture as a variety or subcategory of
Bohemianism. Other authors have attempted both to clarify and to extend Poggioli's study. The
German literary critic Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the
Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with
capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work".
Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art-historians such
as the German Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (born 1941). Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-
avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for a dialectical approach to these
positions. Subsequent criticism theorized the limitations of these approaches, noting their
circumscribed areas of analysis, including Eurocentric, chauvinist, and genre-specific definitions.

Bibliography of Music Literature

The Bibliography of Music Literature (German: Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums), also known
as BMS or BMS online, is an international bibliography of literature on music. It considers all
kind of music and includes both current and older literature. Since 1968, the BMS editorial staff
has been working as the German committee for RILM, too.[1] The bibliography includes
monographs, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, articles and reviews from journals,
Festschriften, conference proceedings, yearbooks, anthologies, and essays from critical reports.
It contains printed media as well as online resources, data media, sound recordings, audiovisual
media, and microforms. Each record provides the title in the original language (for East
European- and Asian entries a German translation is added), full bibliographic data, a keyword
index, and mostly an abstract. Currently, BMS online has more than 315,000 records of
literature on music.[2] It is supplemented by the OLC-SSG Musicology, which incorporates the
contents of some more 150 music journals from 1993 onward. BMS online participates actively
on ViFaMusik,[3] the central gateway for music and musicology in Germany.