Four Metaphors of Modernism

Exploring the significance of metaphor in modern art \u201cWhere do the roots of art lie?\u201d asked Der Sturm founder Herwarth Walden. \u201cIn the people? Behind the mountains? Behind the planets. He who has eyes to hear, feels.\u201d Walden\u2019s Der Sturm-the journal, gallery, performance venu [...]
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Exploring the significance of metaphor in modern art \u201cWhere do the roots of art lie?\u201d asked Der Sturm founder Herwarth Walden. \u201cIn the people? Behind the mountains? Behind the planets. He who has eyes to hear, feels.\u201d Walden\u2019s Der Sturm-the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin (1910-1932)-has never before been the subject of a book-length study in English. Four Metaphors of Modernism positions Der Sturm at the center of the avant-garde and as an integral part of Euro-American modern art, theory, and practice.Jenny Anger traces Walden\u2019s aesthetic and intellectual roots to Franz Liszt and Friedrich Nietzsche-forebears who led him to embrace a literal and figurative mixing of the arts. She then places Der Sturm in conversation with New York\u2019s Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Anonyme (1920-1950), an American avant-garde group modeled on Der Sturm and founded by Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Working against the tendency to examine artworks and artist groups in isolation, Anger underscores the significance of both organizations to the development and circulation of international modernism. Focusing on the recurring metaphors of piano, glass, water, and home, Four Metaphors of Modernism interweaves a historical analysis of these two prominent organizations with an aesthetic analysis of the metaphors that shaped their practices, reconceiving modernism itself. Presented here is a modernism that is embodied, gendered, multisensory, and deeply committed to metaphor and a restoration of abstraction\u2019s connection with the real.