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Project title: Intellectualism and Anti-intellectualism in American Mode |
The research activity carried out under the Miniatura 5 grant was a sixteen-day search at the library and research center of the Terra Foundation for American Art in Paris, which is affiliated with the library of the French Fondation Custodia and the Frits Lugt Collection. The Terra Foundation’s Paris branch is the only European institution specializing exclusively in the collection of materials in the field of American art and American cultural history, which was of key importance for the theme of the present project, entitled "Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism in Statements and Writings by American Modernists." The materials acquired during the search allowed me to precisely define the directions and scope of further research, opened new interpretative perspectives and enabled me to select specific examples of American modernist artists in whose texts reflections on relations, analogies and oppositions between art and philosophical, scientific and technical thought occupy a special place.
The importance of my scholarly undertaking for the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the issues I am addressing stems primarily from the fact that my project, formally within the area of literary and cultural studies, is broadly interdisciplinary and innovative, for literary and extra-artistic, especially intellectual and scientific, interests and undertakings of American modernists have been underestimated in the past and are still relegated to (and often beyond) the margins of phenomena constituting the context of artistic creation by art historians, cultural historians and literary scholars alike. In my previous publications I have uncovered historical and specifically American reasons for this state of affairs. The publications planned as a result of this recent search will provide convincing evidence that artists articulating both their theoretical and critical reflections on art and aesthetic thought in general, as well as writing about their own artistic vision and practice, often reveal surprisingly broad and deep knowledge in areas that do not appear to be directly related to the creation of art. The importance of the desire of many prominent artists to integrate visual imagination with the rigors of scientific thinking, significantly intensified at the outset of the 20th century, is still not widely recognized in scholarly research, especially in the field of my own expertise, American Studies. Exposing the often surprisingly broad extra- artistic (especially intellectual) interests and ambitions of key representatives of American modernism that are revealed in their various texts, which often have significant literary and cognitive value, seems to be particularly important in terms of popularizing literature, art and the so-called high culture among a wide audience and has an impact on shaping attitudes towards knowledge as such.
