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Marcel Duchamp

ure, largely seen as the servant of the ever-expanding bourgeoisie, "had served conservative political ends," especially in France where government sponsorship of academic art traditions led, in part, to the link between the artistic and political radicalism that opposed the old order.

The institutionalized hypocrisy and anti-Semitism revealed in the Dreyfus Affair, which began in 1894, was highly divisive and, though not all avant-garde artists supported Dreyfus, the affair "reinforced the perception of artists and intellectuals as defenders of ideals and moral positions irrespective of conventions." The growth of avant-garde movements throughout Europe--the various German Expressionists, the Italian Futurists, the Vienna Secession--coincided with the emergence of many new ideas in politics, philosophy, and psychology. Intensifying urbanization, the mechanization of society, and the rapid development of scientific and technical innovations produced a feeling of unstoppable change whose eventual destination was unknown but often wildly imagined as possessing possibilities that were the cause of increasing uneasiness. The materialism of industrialized society seemed to be displacing older values and the social order lacked the stability of former times. In politics Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' Communism and the Anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin and Petr Kropotkin held that the progressive nature of European capitalism was an illusion. In literature, writers such the playwrights Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde, and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky "exposed the social and moral dilemmas associated with materialism," while the Symbolist poets in France began to reject the notion of a realist basis for art and promoted the "world of the imagination [as] a source of spiritual renewal."

Among philosophers the most influential were Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche. The latter's ideas were based on Arthur Schopenhauer's metaphys...

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Marcel Duchamp. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:31, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689442.html