Pretty cool | The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell'Arte and the Modern Imagination

book: The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell'Arte and the Modern Imagination | Martin Green

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	• The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell'Arte and the Modern Imagination Martin Green Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Great book

This is an important book on an important subject. Green and Swan have identified and vividly explore the relationship of commedia dell'arte figures (and the French derivative, Pierrot) on a vast range of modernist art, literature, and performance. The result is a rich revelation of both the commedia (or commedic, as Green and Swan say) and modern culture. From Picasso and Stravinsky to the Bread and Puppet Theater, Green and Swan miss few of the major artists and writers profoundly influenced by the imagery, improvisatory style, and art of commedia. This book would be an excellent companion for a course on the subject and it opens to scholars a diverse terrain of topics for further and deeper study. Aside from all that, readers of this book will never view modern culture in quite the same way -- and the seemingly lost art of commedia is brought to life in Green and Swan's illumination of its components in the work of the greatest late nineteenth/early twentieth century artists. A must read.

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Pretty cool

This history was really interesting. The organization is strange; it's topical rather than chronological. I've used it for a reference project, but I think it's awesome enough for leisure reading. Green and Swan discuss how history, visual arts, music, literature are all related to the commedia in the 20th century. It's been great for my research, but it's a great, accessible history book. I rate it 4 because occasionally statements contradict each other, and of course, the organization is weird because Green wrote 4 chapters or so and Swan wrote the other 4.

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What do Stravinsky, Degas, Chaplin, Isak Dinesen, Meyerhold, Monty Python, and T. S. Eliot have in common? What do such disparate work as Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques," Bergman's "Sawdust and Tinsel," Waugh's "Put Out More Flags," and Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author" share? As [Green and Swan] persuasively argue in their new book, all have been influenced by the Italian commedia dell-arte. . . . Exaggeration, artifice, and a self-conscious theatricality are commedia's hallmarks; impertinence, mockery, and irony its weapons against the serious threats of the real world. No wonder, then, that commedia (along with the archetypes it supplies) exerted a fierce hold on the modernist imagination, and according to [the authors] left its imprint on virtually every area of Western culture from 1890 to 1930."-Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times"Green and Swan have given us an extraordinary interdisciplinary work. Using Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the saltimbanque paintings of Picasso and Schoenberg's musical experiments as the starting point, they examine the modernist consciousness, which evolved from the 16th-century concept of the commedia dell'arte character of Pierrot, the original free-spirited revolutionary of European improvisational theater. Green and Swan are sweeping and occasionally breathtaking as they link the masters of modern literary culture to the tragicomic, grotesque traditions of the Harlequin: in literature, Rilke, Kafka, Brecht, and Weill; in art, Chagall and Rouault; in music, Stravinsky and Ravel; in film, Keaton, Chaplin, and the German expressionist montage of Lang and Wiene. From commedia to Caligari, the theme of this enormously provocative book is revolt and the modern spirit. . . . an intellectual tour de force."-Choice

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