The paper is devoted to the 19th century conceptions of the relation between the individual and the society and their influence on art. It will be discussed on the example of Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine. Close analysis and explication of these two philosophies will show that the influence is, in fact, always two-way: an individual takes inspiration from the prevailing world-view and at the same time can co-form it. As a result of a comparative study of art and philosophy, further perspectives for the research on the influence of the “intellectual climate” on the art of the early 20th century will be drawn.
The article is devoted to the subject of the New Objectivity movement in German art in the mid 1920s, its causes and consequences. The detailed depiction of post-war reality in New Objectivity painting with its social criticism and commitment is presented as the most suitable exemplification of Peter Bürger’s famous theory of the avant-garde. In his account of avant-garde, Bürger paid most attention to the avant-garde criticism of the institution of art in a bourgeois society and to dialectics of autonomy of art. However, he did not give many examples of such understood avant-garde art, mentioning only Dadaism and surrealism. This text tries to find another examples for Bürger’s theory, New Objectivity being a per-fect one. Not only was it very strongly connected with a social, economical and political situation of its times but it also tried to resolve the problem of art’s au-tonomy by praising artistic engagement and commitment to the society. High-lighting this sphere of activity of the artists of the New Objectivity and putting it together with Bürger’s ideas may help to understand better both New Objectivity, little known in Poland, and Theory of the Avant-Garde.
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