The New Mythology

Abstract

After the Great War, the emerging values in art were purification and organization. Furthermore, Constructivism emerged in the early USSR as a determined effort to rethink the role of art in the milieu of a social tabula rasa. Artistic attempts to reconstitute primal qualities were linked with the effort to revitalize art by vanquishing “Art” altogether. The quest for a new realism affirmed the primal qualities in art as abstract or concrete, the terms of which were recapitulated in the 1936 publication Circle. Contemporaneously, Finnegans Wake was being serialized in the journal Transition, and James Joyce’s “Work in Progress” came to exemplify a new mythology for all the arts. The chapter concludes with a look at the exponents of abstraction and Surrealism in their American exile during the Second World War, as these opposing initiatives began to merge in their quest for a new mythology.