Tag: modernism

NEW POETRY FLOWERING ON THE STEM OF THE OLDEST

November 3, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 October 2022, under the headline “TS Eliot’s Waste Land was a barren place. But at least a spirit of optimism still prevailed”. He promised “a new start”. I made no comment. What should I resent? No, not a response to the Tory leadership chaos but lines from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. This month marks the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s masterpiece, one of […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: antisemitism, christianity, modernism, optimism, pessmism, poetry, ralph ellison, the waste land, ts eliot, virginia woolf

HOME IS A FOREIGN PLACE

May 16, 2020 by Kenan Malik

Home is a Foreign Place. The title of Zarina Hashmi’s perhaps most famous work, a set of 36 ideograms, sums up many of the tensions that suffused both her work and her life. Zarina (she preferred to be called simply by her first name), who died last month, was one of the most important postwar modernist artists, for whom displacement and loss was the key theme. ‘Memory’, she once said, ‘is the only lasting possession we have. I have made […]

Categories: Culture & Books, International, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: art, home, india, modernism, nasreen mohamedi, pakistan, partition, zarina hashmi

A MOSQUE LIKE NO OTHER

November 9, 2019 by Kenan Malik

Faidabad, in the northern suburb of Uttara, is among the poorest areas in Dhaka. The narrow dirt streets and the shacks that line the main arterial road are witness to that. It is far from any tourist spot – it can take a couple of hours of driving through Dhaka’s chaotic traffic and legendary jams to reach Faidabad from the centre of the city. Faidabad is also home to a remarkable mosque, modernist, austere and strikingly beautiful. Designed by Marina […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Photos • Tags: bait ur rouf mosque, bangladesh, bengal, dhaka, islam, islamic architecture, marina tabassum, modernism, mosques, photography

SARTRE ON GIACOMETTI

July 16, 2017 by Kenan Malik

I remember when I saw my first Giacometti statue. It was in the Foundation Maeght, near St Paul de Vence, in Provence. The gallery was founded by two local art dealers, Marguerite and Aimé Maeght, who were friends with many of great figures of modernism. The Foundation Maeght houses one of the great collection of twentieth century art – Chagall, Braque, Bonnard, Miro, Leger, Kandinsky, Hepworth, Hartung, Soulages, Takes, Kelly, Lam… And outside stands the Giacometti courtyard, a gloriously rich collection of […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: art, existentialism, giacometti, human nature, modernism, sartre, sculture

REVOLUTIONARY ART, BUT A MESS OF A SHOW

February 16, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The great works of Russian artists of the early 20th are among the most thrilling and inspiring in the history of art. But they are also so well known to have become almost a cliché. Any show of revolutionary Russian art has to balance a number of different issues. It has to reveal why the works of art are so thrilling. It has to accommodate many of the different schools and perspectives – from neo-realism to neo-primitivism, from rayonism to […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: alexander rodchenko, arkaidy shaiket, art, bolsheviks, boris ignatovich, kazimir malevich, modernism, russian revolution, russian revolutionary art, soviet union, stalin, vladimir tatlin

A PROFOUNDLY POETIC ANOMALY

December 4, 2016 by Kenan Malik

What is modernism? And what is modernist art? The images here look strikingly like 20th century modernism – Malevich, Miro, Kandinsky, Klee, El Lissitzky, or more recent artists such as Agnes Martin. In fact they come from seventeenth century Rajasthan, in India, and were created within the Hindu Tantric tradition. The images draw upon key symbols of Tantric cosmogony, such as the bindu, a dot symbolizing the undifferentiated absolute, to the negative space of the shunya, the absolute void of […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: abstract art, art, franck andre jamme, india, indian art, modernism, tantric art

ISTANBUL THROUGH A DIFFERENT EYE

February 21, 2015 by Kenan Malik

Yener Torun is an Istanbul-based architect with a wonderful eye for the colours and forms of a city. His Instagram photos are stunning, revealing not simply what a city can look like, but also what we often do not see. Yener generously allowed me to republish some of his photos on Pandemonium. So here, through the eye (and lens) of Yener Torun, is Istanbul as few will have have seen it, not the Istanbul of ancient buildings, grand mosques and tradition, but […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: istanbul, modernism, photography, yener torun

THE MISADVENTURES OF THE BLACK SQUARE

February 7, 2015 by Kenan Malik

Adventures of the Black Square. It is a brilliant title for an exhibition about twentieth century abstract geometric art. The black square is Kazimir Malevich’s Black Quadrilateral, first displayed in 1915 in the 0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition in St Petersburg; its adventures, the artistic reworking of that seminal concept through the following century. ‘One of the greatest legacies of the black square’, writes Iwona Balzwick, curator of the exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, ‘was that it landed like a […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: abstract art, alexander rodchenko, art, dora maurer, el lissitzky, gaspar gasparian, geraldo de barros, helio oiticica, lyubov popova, modernism, nasreen mohamedi, postmodernism, vladimir malevich, werner mantz

JACOB LAWRENCE AND THE GREAT MIGRATION (PART 3)

January 18, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This year marks the centenary of the beginning of the Great Migration, the exodus of six million African Americans from the US South to the northern cities. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is marking that anniversary by bringing together in an exhibition all 60 panels of Jacob Lawrence’s epic portrayal of the exodus. Lawrence was one of America’s most important twentieth century painters and his Great Migration series is perhaps his most famous work, a work as much […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, art, jacob lawrence, modernism, robert hughes, the great migration, usa

JACOB LAWRENCE AND THE GREAT MIGRATION

December 21, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Beginning in 1915, some six million black African Americans from the South joined an exodus to the northern cities – Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York and many others. This was the Great Migration. It was the result both of the conditions in which African Americans found themselves in the South and the labour needs of Northern employers. After post-Civil War Reconstruction, white supremacy had largely been restored across the South, enforced though the Jim Crow laws. It was a segregated […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, art, black culture, black identity, harlem renaissance, jacob lawrence, modernism, robert hughes, the great migration, usa

FROM AN UNEXPECTED PERSPECTIVE

November 30, 2014 by Kenan Malik

‘The modern city’, Alexander Rodchenko wrote, ‘has changed the psychology of the traditional perception to a great extent. It seems as if only a camera is able to illustrate modern life.’ There are few artists who have had a greater impact on modern photography than Rodchenko. Yet these days, at least in public consciousness, his name barely elicits a flicker of recognition. Born in St Petersburg in1891, Rodchenko was one of the founders of Constructivism and a key figure of […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Photos • Tags: constructivism, modernism, photography, rodchenko, soviet union

THE HUMAN HEART OF SACRED ART

March 5, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I have written a number of posts recently on the meaning of the sacred in art, including a discussion of music, in the wake of John Taverner’s death, and of the meaning of Marilynne Robinson’s novels. I pulled together some these posts and themes for an essay in the latest issue of New Humanist. It still feels like a work in progress; I will hopefully develop the ideas over time. There is a passage in Marilynne Robison’s novel Gilead in which the […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books • Tags: art, dante, dieric bouts, humanism, leszek kolakowski, marilynne robinson, modernism, religion, religious art, rothko, sacred

THE BEAUTY IN THE BRUTAL

December 1, 2013 by Kenan Malik

The architecture of London’s Southbank has always divided opinion. As brutalism goes, I can think of much better examples. Yet viewed through the camera lens rather than the human eye, there is something quite striking, even beautiful, about its concrete starkness.

Categories: Photos • Tags: architecture, london, modernism, photos

WHAT IS SACRED ABOUT SACRED MUSIC?

November 18, 2013 by Kenan Malik

The death last week of composer John Tavener has led me to think about the idea of the ‘sacred’ in music. A profoundly religious man – he was a convert to Russian Orthodoxy – Tavener’s faith and sense of mysticism suffused much of his music. Historically, and in the minds of most people today, the sacred in music is, as it was with Tavener, inextricably linked with religious faith. Yet, I think that we lose something of what is ‘sacred’ about sacred […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books • Tags: art, britten, classical music, leszek kolakowski, messiaen, modernism, religion, religious art, rothko, sacred, stravinsky

LONDON, OLD AND NEW

November 11, 2013 by Kenan Malik

It was a glorious day in London yesterday, a perfect excuse to have a wander through the City. There are few places in which architecture ancient and modern is so jumbled together. I stumbled across a little space that I never knew existed. St Dunstan in the East is a church originally built in the eleventh century, and rebuilt by Christopher Wren after it had been damaged in the Great Fire of London. It was bombed and almost destroyed during […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: architecture, churches, london, modernism