RELATED TERMS: Bauhaus;
An important reference point for the modern movement was the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’. This concept, though it plays a key role in the theory and practice of modernist avant-gardes, is notoriously difficult to define. In broad outline, it suggests both the blurring of boundaries between art and life and the synthesis of different arts into a unified style or collective project.
The dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk … figured as a decisive switchboard of various modernist agendas and self-definitions. It illuminates how modernism, by negotiating the dialectics of art and technology, of the aesthetic and the political, of high art and modern mass culture, aspired to couple artistic experimentation to social reform and to reshape the present in the name of a different future. (Koepnick, 2016, p.274)
The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk conveys an enthusiasm for cultural renewal that emerged along with Romanticism in the early nineteenth century (Roberts, 2011). The term was first used by the German writer and philosopher K. F. E. Trahndorff in in his work Aesthetics or Doctrine of Worldview and Art of 1827. However, the synthesis of the arts fusion has long appeared in history. The German opera composer Richard Wagner used the term in two 1849 essays “Art and Revolution” and “The Artwork of the Future” and the word has become particularly associated with his aesthetic ideals. (HiSoUR)
Synthesis of arts (German: Gesamtkunstwerk) is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so. A Gesamtkunstwerk is a work that combines various arts such as music, poetry, dance / pantomime, architecture and painting. The compilation is not arbitrary and illustrative: the components complement each other necessarily. (HiSoUR)
Gesamtkunstwerk … also means “total work of art”, “ideal work of art”, “universal artwork”, “synthesis of the arts”, “comprehensive artwork”, “all-embracing art form” or “total artwork”, (HiSoUR)
It refers to a type of autonomous artwork that integrates simultaneously and related to different media or artistic disciplines, the Gesamtkunstwerk has a “tendency to eradicate the boundary between aesthetic structure and reality” (Odo Marquard). (HiSoUR)
It is not a reference to the divine creation, as was customary in art between Gothic and Baroque, but it claims its own validity. (HiSoUR)
References
Charnley, K. (2020) ‘Art, design and modernity: the Bauhaus and beyond’, Open Arts Journal, (9), pp. 43–56. doi: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2020w04.
HiSoUR (no date) Gesamtkunstwerk, HiSoUR- Hi So You Are. Available at: https://www.hisour.com/gesamtkunstwerk-21215/ (Accessed: 30 November 2021).
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