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Josep Renau and the politics of culture in Republican Spain, 1931-1939 : re-imagining the nation / Karl-Henrik Bjerström

Author
Bjerström, Carl-Henrik
Published
Brighton ; Chicago : Sussex Academic Press, 2016.
Physical Description
xvi, 241 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

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Contents
The making of an avant-garde artist (1907-1930) -- The turn to politics (1930-1933) -- Ethics through aesthetics : the politics of cultural reform (1931-1933) -- Art to guide the masses : Orto and Estudios (1932-1934) -- Creating a cultural popular front : Nueva cultura (1935-1936) -- Mobilising for survival : Renau's early war posters (1936) -- Radical nation-building : 'popular culture' in war (1936-1938) -- Propaganda against all the odds (1937-1939).
Summary
"At once pragmatic and utopian, the Spanish artist, critic and political activist Josep Renau engaged in multiple ways in the volatile cultural conflicts of interwar Europe, which converged on Spain in the Second Republic's battle to modernise both politics and society (1931-1939). Renau used his idiosyncratic artwork and agit-prop, inspired by the Constructivists and the German avant-garde, to critique the timidity of the Republic's first democratising reforms. To envision an alternative, he launched arts organisations and magazines whose goal was to begin the work of redefining Spanish national self-image through cultural innovation. The ideas Renau developed would soon come to shape government policy during the war in Spain (1936-39) when Renau served as the Republic's Director General of Fine Arts. In power, Renau was a tireless cultural innovator, whose initiatives not only helped mobilise tens of thousands of Republicans but also shaped the new collective imaginaries emerging from the conflict. This book offers the first interdisciplinary and contextualised analysis of the relationship between art and politics in Renau's work at the time of Spain's pivotal attempt to pursue democratic forms of modernisation"--
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ISBN
9781845197391 (hardback)
1845197399 (hardback)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 220-236) and index.
Source of Acquisition
Purchased with funds from the Edward J. and Eleanor Black Nichols Library Endowment Fund; 2016
Endowment Note
Edward J. and Eleanor Black Nichols Library Endowment Fund
View MARC record | catkey: 19821637