German and Austrian Modernism: Architecture, Art, Literature

GERMAN 145 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Explores the radical break with traditions of thinking, building, seeing, and representing that occurred at the end of the 19th-century in Germany and Austria, and the new forms of architecture, painting, and literature to which this break led over the following 40 years (1890–1930). Topics include, among others, the loss or destruction of coherence in general, more specifically the loss of a sense of a unified self, alienation in the industrial and urban world, the rejection of unified forms, and a turn from systematic thinking and representation to new aesthetics and means of perception. The Modernist aesthetic rebirth we will witness — with its desire, search, and push for new ways of seeing, understanding, and interacting with the self and the world — still informs our daily lives a hundred years later and looms large in our immediate surroundings at Harvard.