Title:
"Benevolent Anarchy": Siting Marcel Janco, 1916-1966
"Benevolent Anarchy": Siting Marcel Janco, 1916-1966
Author(s)
Pavel, Carrie H.
Advisor(s)
Hollengreen, Laura
Bafna, Sonit
Bafna, Sonit
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Abstract
Figuring in the indexes of an international, multidisciplinary array of anthologies, Marcel Janco (1895-1984) is known as a founding member of the Dada movement in Zurich, a pioneer of modern architecture in Romania, and a central member of the New Horizons group that conceived a national style of painting in Israel. Over the course of his remarkably prolific career, he produced hundreds of paintings, woodblock prints, plaster reliefs, sculptures, works of scenography, and designed over forty residential and institutional buildings. Yet his peripatetic career and diverse output complicate an integrated understanding of his oeuvre, which, crucially, comprised many experimental works that sought to occupy the often porous boundary between visual art and architecture. In scholarship, international borders suggest firm disciplinary distinctions—to Romanians, Janco is an architect; to Israelis, a painter—that belie the variety of forms and methods that characterized his interdisciplinary practice. This study seeks to integrate these multiple interpretations through a framework that allows comparative study between his art and architectural work, as well as between the disparate sites that hosted or promoted it.
The biographical structure of this study is divided into three parts defined by an initial immigration—to Zurich in 1916, to Bucharest in 1921, and to Mandatory Palestine in 1941—that situate his work within national borders having distinct cultural implications and expectations. A central question raised concerns the separate, often unarticulated ways that distinct art forms are permitted to interpret or lay claim to cultural material. If the methods of the historical avant-garde were predicated on strategies that aimed to render material culture meaningless, what is the result when these strategies are deployed at an architectural scale? By eschewing disciplinary distinctions to locate Janco’s creative work along a continuum of scales, methods, and functions, this study ultimately seeks to clarify and confront the complex dynamics involved in the reception of his work.
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Date Issued
2024-07-27
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Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Dissertation