PAINTER IN ARTISTIC STRUGGLE WITH TRADITION
The Concept of Anxiety as Influenced by Harold Bloom Cover Image

Malarz w artystycznych zmaganiach z tradycją. Harolda Blooma koncepcja lęku przed wpływem.
PAINTER IN ARTISTIC STRUGGLE WITH TRADITION The Concept of Anxiety as Influenced by Harold Bloom

Author(s): Manfred Bator
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Fine Arts / Performing Arts
Published by: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Eugeniusza Gepperta we Wrocławiu
Keywords: anxiety; Harold Bloom

Summary/Abstract: In a letter to another poet, Wallace Stevens, American poet and essayist,wrote: [...] I consciously resigned from reading mannered poets such as Eliotor Pound, in order to avoid taking anything from them, even unconsciously. In contrast to that attitude, young German expressionists with fullconsciousness seek inspiration at the beginning of their artistic career mainly in post-impressionist movement, discovering in direct or indirectcontact (exhibitions) the power of color and their own creative power, dueto what did their precursors. In his publication entitled ‘The anxiety of influence’,Bloom wrote that ‘poetic influence is not required to make poetsbecome less original; equally often it makes them more original, thoughnot necessarily better’. The main animators of expressionism in German painting and graphics (Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka,George Grosz, Max Bechstein, Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, Vasily Kandinsky,Alexei Jawlenski, Franz Marc, August Macke, Egon Schiele) turned out tobe maybe not better than Precursors, but undeniably original. Undoubtedlyartistic path of each of these artists can be decomposed according toBloom’s scheme, based on six revisions for allowing to understand ... how one poet walks away from another, which would confirm the legitimacyof using Bloom’s philosophical-literary theory in relation to visual arts.Such awareness validates the idea of interpreting artistic career of Polish renown artist Zdzislaw Nitka, who gave his habilitation dissertation the following title: Painter on the shoulders of the artist – that is a tributeto the masters.

  • Issue Year: 2016
  • Issue No: 1 (20)
  • Page Range: 158-193
  • Page Count: 36
  • Language: Polish