Modern Art Notes, Fall '07

INDTROCUTION AND CHAPTER 1 – CLASS AND HANDOUTS

(Note: “[….]” are SLF’s thoughts and comments. All textual and plate references are to Aronson, 5th Ed. unless otherwise noted.) “C” = classroom, “WB” = Prof. William Barrett


CLASS: 8/28/07 - General Background, Phenomenology, etc.
Class: What is “modern” and “modernism?” Text says we are still in the modern period, so the definition is open-ended. WB: Breaking with nature is the essence of modernism.
Intro Text: “Interpretation” [the thing can’t speak for itself, needs explaining]

In-class movie: Robert Irwin
LS: Installation Art, Phenomenology.
Irwin wants us to perceive ourselves perceiving.
Art portrays cultural values. Art defined by people and people should redefine art, when appropriate.
Space dictates art. Perception in context.
Value lies in the experience, ephemeral.
Most art is free. The “thread” is the wonderment and pursuit of wonder.

Q: How does Irwin define “art?”
A: Existential Theatre

Email: What struck me was Irwin’s devotion to existential philosophy; how existence in context creates personal experience/perception which he believes is the essence of art. Heidegger (which I think he was reading) believes individual worldly experience is the essence of life. This is a radical shift from the Cartesian view of a scientific mass consciousness or objective truth.

Irwin’s sort of an existential performance artist, both philosopher and “playwright.” This mime dramaturge adapts theatrical nomenclature: “ephemera” (theatre’s sublime essence), scrims, lighting, color gel, geometry, texture, and a sense of place. When Irwin removes the frames from his paintings, he metephorically breaks theatre’s “third wall,” liberating “art” into Heidegger’s world of experience. Museum visitors are transformed into actors, living the art, even Waiting for Godot.


CLASS: 9/4/07 - Philosophy, Aesthetics, Romanticism
Art is mirror and window, communication and expression. Historically, art was skill in replicating what was done before, but Romanticism changes this paradigm. Viewer becomes an active participant in completing the meaning. [it asks, but doesn’t explain…a visual/emotional Socratic method, answered by experience].

Romanticism was a rebellion which built the foundation for all that followed.

LS: “Romanticism” A western cultural phenomena beginning around 1750 and ending about 1850 that gave precedence to feeling and imagination over reason and thought. More narrowly, the art movement that flourished from 1800 to 1840.

Romanticism aesthetics based on creativity, not convention.

LS: Art criticism: support opinion with evidence: 1) formal analysis, 2) contextual (content/subject matter, e.g., time period, class, race, gender, social milieu, circumstances, and place of exhibition.

HANDOUT (9/4/07)

How to Take Notes in College (res ipsa loquitur)

The Language of Art (p. 17)

Composition: Overall plan or structure; relationship among component parts; arrangement of formal elements.

Plane: Flat surface having direction in space, vertical, horizontal, circular, etc.

Balance: Harmonious blending of formal elements, e.g., “symmetry,” and “asymmetrical balance,” an uneven distribution with equilibrium producing aesthetically pleasing result.

Line: The path traced by a moving point. Formal lines based on geometry and are often expressive, e.g., straight and crooked, up and down, the happy face. See Calder’s Cat which refutes the semiotic (study of signs and symbols) argument that signifier and signified have no natural relationship to each other.

Shape: Lines enclosing space create shape, both regular (geometric) and irregular (biomorphs), both open and closed. Expressive qualities of shape: open and closed, associations (squares, for example). Modeling lines form “hatchings” or “crosshatchings” creates the illusion of mass and volume, and can also suggest shading.

Light and Color: Prisms break down color to hues with 7 principal hues. White light contains all hues. Complementary colors are contrasting: furthest away from each other on the color wheel (opposite), e.g., red and green.
Value is the relative lightness or darkness: the amount of light reflected from an object at its maximum saturation (intensity) and characteristic of both achromatic (no color) and chromatic.

Intensity (saturation) is relative “brightness” or “dullness” of a color; adding white, for example, increases value but decreases intensity, if black added, both value and intensity are reduced, grey reduces intensity, but value stays the same.
Expressive Qualities Warm (red, orange, and yellow), cool (blue, green, violet).

Texture: Actual or simulated.

Stylistic Terminology
Subject matter refers to actual elements while content refers to themes, values or ideas.
Naturalistic/realistic depicts real objects as we see them without distortion, opposite of: non representational, nonfigurative. Not all representational art is realistic, e.g., the abstract cow p. 23 Handout.
Illusionistic – convincingly realistic.
Representational art may not be faithful to the subject:
Idealized depicts object according to accepted standards of beauty.
Stylized depicts certain features as non-organic surface elements.
Romanticized depicts nostalgia, emotional, fanciful and/or mysterious.
Abstract – generally don’t depict real objects. Possibly conveys the essence of an object. Subject may be recognizable (representational) but in a non-naturalistic form.

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Handout 9/25
Formal Analysis—Composition: line, color, space and mass, scale.

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DVD #1 Great Ideas of Philosophy: Aesthetics: Philosophy of the Arts

Modern definition: “Aesthetics” is the intellectual approach to artistic interpretation.
Ancient: Plato said art is the philosophical study of beauty. But is art beauty? No, it can be disturbing, like Guernica.

Plato’s Aesthetics: Only one idea is perceptible to the senses: beauty. Art transcends reality to reach this idea of beauty. However, art imitates life and as such, is imperfect (not a pure idea). The imitation can never equal the pure idea. He disliked poets and artists as misguided and dangerous, believing that only philosophers could grasp ideas.

[Note: Similar to the great Hebrew “renunciation” of physical deities and “graven images” of God. Incarnation of ideas destroy their inherent truth.]

Aristotle’s Poetics rebuts Plato saying art and poetry are good for the public and “pure ideas” are unimportant. In dissecting the elements of tragedy, he argues in favor of “objective structure” (principles) of art: order and symmetry and the three unities: 1) action, 2) time, 3) place.

Edmund Burke (1729-97) said aesthetics requires disinterested contemplation. Like Aristotle, he felt that beauty was good as part of God, that people have an innate sense of beauty. He defined the “sublime” as something where the viewer is drawn in, overwhelmed; simultaneously fascinated and terrified. [see Alfred Hitchcock]

Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) believed art was the light of rational understanding.

Kant (1724-1804): Individuals are torn between nature and morals. Beauty is not rule-bound, but based on subjective nature. Not an exact science.

Hegel (1770-1831) WB says Hegel rejects Kant and any consideration of nature or cosmic dimension of beauty, continuing “beauty in nature is not a proper subject for philosophical aesthetics. Romantic art spiritualizes. It’s the end of the dialectic (nature v. philosophy), a complete synthesis. He rejects representational theories. Art = expression (interior, subjective). So, the study of beauty becomes the philosophy of art, i.e., the study of a purely human product (WB).

Schopenhauer (1788-1860) Impulse to live seen in music and art. Music the embodiment of will to live.

Nietzsche (1844-1900) Art is the will to power. Duality in art: Apollonian is classical/representational with order and harmony but Dionysian is Romanticism (expression, passion, disorder), not systematic, but impassioned, mythological.

John Dewey (1859-1952) Art sociological, experiential. Art as experience.

William Barrett (1913–1992) "Modern art touches a sore spot, or several sore spots, in the ordinary citizen of which he is totally unaware. “The more irritated he becomes at modern art the more he betrays the fact that he himself, and his civilization, are implicated in what the artist shows him."

Irrational Man: Modern art is simpler than academic art, but goes against the grain because viewers secretly understand its intent all too well, i.e., a representation of spiritual poverty. People are more comfortable with sentimental feelings based on false ideals or religion.

Major change from importation of foreign art incorporated into modern taste. Classical humanism is now gone as witnessed by primitive forms (modern art), giving rise to a new and radical conception of man and a breakdown of Western tradition. The flattening of space happened (in the opposite) once before in history, when the Renaissance developed perspective, a major shift from Medieval man who looked inward. See Joyce for literary flattening of time, space, and climaxes (no beginning, middle and end), and flattening of values (big and small treated equally, see Cezanne). Cubism also has no subject or progression.

Art no longer original, but mass production like movies and TV
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DVD #2 Landmarks of Western Art – Romanticism

Based on French Revolution (1789) and a “new age.”
The term “Romantic” from the Arthurian romances with their heroic, personal, passionate themes. Burke said that Romanticism was a contrast between beauty and something “larger” [like the Arthurian Grail?] where reason yields to passion and triumph of the individual.

Gericault and Delacroix (see below)

Constable painted landscapes, famously The Hay Wain of 1821” which conveys a pastoral feeling with its ranges of countryside colors.

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CLASS: 9/4/07 – Chapters 1 and 2.
Video: Brushstrokes, the Master’s Hand
Tempera, egg. Tishin, fingerpainting. “Divisionism combines separate colors in each stroke, but from a distance, it looks like one color. Van Gogh, no blending of colors.


Chapter 1
THE SOURCES OF MODERN PAINTING

Modern art is the culmination of a “gradual metamorphosis” over 100 years resulting from (1) social upheaval, revolutions in US and France, industrial revolution in England, and (2) art bound up with capitalism, industrialism and democracy.

Changing Perspectives: From Renaissance to Baroque (2)
Modern art challenges linier “perspective space” which was “single point” (mathematical-optical principles, or a “rational system”) since Italian artists in the 15th C. (2). High Renaissance (early 16th C.) e.g., Raphael, used architectural elements for balance (3). da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian, all gave up studying nature in favor of High Renaissance, then later, e.g. Michelangelo, developed “mannerism” which portrayed extreme attenuation, twisting, choreographed and distorted poses, and irrational spaces. (4)

17th C. Counter-Reformation sought to cleanse mannerism’s excesses. Caravaggio’s (1572-1610) “naturalism” (early Baroque) reverts back to early Renaissance while later Baroque used more color and texture (5).

Modern art and romanticism broke with these traditions with irrational systems of distorted space, textured brushstrokes, creative use of color, examination of contemporary events, and generally a mood or feeling v. a static scientific recording.
Added the subjective and sublime.

Making Sense of Turbulent World: Neoclassicism and Romanticism (5)
18th C. Neoclassicism dominated Europe and US, second half of 18th C. after famous archeological excavations, e.g., Pompeii and Rome. It used “perspective recession” to govern space, subordinating atmospheric effects and incorporated “Formal Order” (proportion, symmetry, harmony and order).

Subjects for neoclassical: antiquity (glazed surfaces).
Subjects for romantics: middle-ages (textured surfaces).


Modern art broke with Romanticism by use of increased subjective feeling via brushstrokes, [seems like the Romantics were fairly modern, especially Turner whose work is impressionistic although he’s not an Impressionist.]

David ’s work transcended Neoclassicism into early Romanticism and shaped attitudes that shaped 20th C. The Oath of Horatii (1784) (1.2) narrow stage behind proscenium, illusion of sculptural modeling v. location within pictorial space.

Goya (1746-1828) (1.14 at 9) Disasters of War (1810-11) early political commentary. Portrays the anti-hero, e.g., civilians being executed. [Seems like early realism with its political commentary, see Gericault, contrast with Daumier].

Gericault (pronounced “Jericho”) (1791–1824) First artist to paint the “news” [sometimes with disguised social commentary, perhaps an early realism like Daumier, albeit using more traditional technique] The Disasters of War (1810) (1.14 at 9) Raft of the Medusa (1819) and also painted residents of a mental hospital. Romanticism plumbs the depths of the human mind. [From DVD#2, Gericault conspicuously absent from Aronson].

C: The Raft is composed of two triangles, death and despair in foreground, hope and life in the background. “Modeling” is using highlight shadowing to show 3D space.

Delacroix (1798-1863) The Lion Hunt (1858) (1.15 at 9) French Romantic Movement, exotic themes, Baroque color and brushwork. [was life model on the Raft.]
DVD#2. Like Gericault he painted current events, particularly the July Revolution of 1830 (Gericault dead by then).

Friedrich (1774-1840) (10) The Cloister Graveyard in the Snow (1819) (1.16) Spooky romantic landscapes. [DVD#2] Inspired by Romantic ideas, feelings and religion.

JMW Turner (1775-1851) Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1834) (1.18). Light and atmosphere on landscape, almost abstract. DVD#2 More academic than Constable, read Goethe, the Romantic German, and had more appreciation for the old masters. He believed truth is “felt” not just seen. C: His painting of a train has a photographic effect.

[Why wasn’t he considered the first Impressionist v. Monet?]



Academic Art and the Salon (13)
“Academy” started with Plato. Academies established standards to regulate and advance art. Strict rules, e.g., copying officially approved plaster casts. Romantics challenged system. French Academy of Beaux-Arts (fine arts) esp. 1648, artists couldn’t show (jury system) without them. Avant-garde revolted against establishment.

Chapter 2
REALISM, IMPRESSIONISM, AND EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY

CLASS 9/11/07
What factors contributed to modern art? See below, but also Academy restrictions/orthodoxy stirred artistic rebellion.

New Ways of Seeing: Photography and its Influence (15)
Photography part of journalistic revolution, i.e. critical writing, especially satire. [Its inability to capture sentimental idealism (pictorialism being a poor attempt) possibly encouraged flat, stark, unmodeled “Olympia-like” compositions where reality stares right into the “lens.”]

Daguerre (1789-1851) co-invented and publicly demonstrated photography in1839. Artists became conscious of photography while photographers tried to match paintings. 2.1 Early daguerreotype (no negatives) still life in 1837. Developed cropping.

Talbot (1800-77) English. Invented the negative.

Rejlander used Talbot’s invention to create photographic collage.

O’Sullivan Ancient Ruins (1837) (20) (2.12 at 20) Documentary photography

Mathew Brady (1823-96) Dead Soldier (1863) (2.13)

A Chastened Vision: Realism in Art (21)

CLASS 9/11/07
Realism: Why? Social upheaval, individual liberty, moral consciousness, moral outrage, 1815 a post-Napoleon restoration king installed, July Revolution (1830) saw overthrow of one monarch in favor of another who, in turn, abdicated in 1848.
What? Contemporary socio-political commentary, journalistic reporting, suffering, injustice, limited colors, chiaroscuro (shading), lithographs.

Compare to pictorialism - soft and out of focus, soft edges, mostly in photography, but also in painting.

French Realism:

Honore Daumier (1808-79) greatest satirical artist. The Third Class Carriage (1864) (2.14 at 21) using dramatic chiaroscuro. Themes similar to Cervantes and Moliere. He turns simple illustration into scene of pathos; jailed for political caricatures. Rue Transnonain (1834) (2.15 ) shows horror (dead bodies) at injustice.

Gustave Courbet (1819-77) most important realist portrays an unsentimental record of contemporary life: A Burial at Ornans (1849) (2.16) contains no illusionist depth or formal composition. He parodied Academy-style art, and was a radical, country boy anarchist/rural republican.

English Realism:

Ford Maddox Brown (1821-93) provided social commentary via class differences in Work, 1852 (2.18 at 24), but also illustrates the dichotomy between the virtues of hard work and the class system which marginalizes that work.

Seizing the Moment: Impressionism and the Avant-Garde (24)

[With so many artists trying to please the Academy, I’m amazed by their creativity despite the establishment’s narrow expectations; when children enter art contests their work is likely to be less creative than art just for fun, and what is an artist if not a child?]

Edouard Manet (1832-83) had iconoclastic ideas (not an impressionist), but still sought approval of the Academy. His first submission, 1858 of a contemporary drunk commoner was rejected as was Luncheon on the Grass (1863) (2.19) which created scandal when exhibited at Salon des Refuses as a conscious affront to tradition by failing to “encode” as idealized allegory instead of contemporary nudity.

Influenced by photography and Asian art, he used silhouettes to collapse space and flatten forms, making canvas two dimensional. Olympia 1863 (2.20 at 26) Venus reclining becomes an unidealized modern woman (prostitute). Volume of figure created from “contours” with light and dark pattern and linear emphasis. Accepted in the Salon (1865) but hung high to avoid vandalism

He was an inspiration to and leader of the impressionists. Over time, his work became more impressionistic. His last painting was of a woman Bar at Follies Bergere (1882)/

RB: Manet controversial, Zola called his art “truth and justice.” Unlike Impressionists, he copied/paid homage to old masters and avoided plein air. Olympia sat in Louvre’s basement until 1917.

Strong influence of Asian art, especially color woodcut prints with near-far juxtapositions, brilliant, solid colors offset by contour drawing.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) (p30) Landscape painter. Impression: Sunrise (1872) (2.27) “Impressionism” derisively named after this painting; critics said it was “unfinished.” There’s harmony of sky and water, “atmospheric dissolution.” Reflections suggested by short, broken brush strokes and ghostly forms described with loose patches of color v. gradations of light and dark.

RB: loved plein air (immediacy and light) and painted limited figures. He often painted along side Manet, Renoir and Pissaro. Instead of grey shade, he used colors and no black shadows, but shaded colors reflected complementary/contrasting colors. Trains fascinated him. His “series” show changes in light, e.g. the haystack and cathedral [See Andy Warhol’s Marilyn prints http://webexhibits.org/colorart/marilyns.html ]. He remained poor most of his life.

[Plein air (outdoor chaos) similar to photographs, un-posed and natural, a seemingly random slice of time and space].

Painting ceases to be an imitation of nature, but a metamorphosis of sunlight, shadow, reflection on water, moving clouds. [a visual interior monologue].

[Stasis to kinesis: Realism/proto-impressionism similar to still photographs, but Monet/impressionism is more like a movie or time-elapsed photography. Note how photography shows same progression from still life (Plate 2.1, an 1837, a still life studio photo), to plein air camera, Plate 2.30 in 1859, but Monet painted what a still camera couldn’t truly catch.]

Starting in the 1880’s (36) Monet becomes more experiential, pushing his art to “anti-naturalistic subjectivity and abstraction.” See Les Nuages (Clouds) (1906-20) (2.38) in 1920’s one of his last paintings and his water Lilly installation art.

Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) p. 32 Figure painter created dream world. Moulin de la Galette (1876) (2.31) Fairyland in contemporary dress. Young people had clear skin (no visible brush strokes), but background and clothing had obvious strokes. C: Shows “immediacy,” like a snapshot or a voyeuristic look at informal subject.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) p. 32 Wealthy photographer and influenced by Japanese prints. Ballerina and Lady with a Fan (1885) (2.34) POV from above, photographic fragments (uses cropping heavily) translated into color, uses “visual puns” like faces of spectators and foreground dancers (not in 2.34 however). [depicts live action].

Berthe Morisot (1841-95) (35) Painted modern domestic life, e.g., mother and child in Hide and Seek (1873) (2.36) Manet her brother-in-law.

Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) American who also painted modern domestic life with “daring modernity” 2.37 Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) (2.37) and, like Degas, theatre. She was influenced by Japanese art/graphics and was an excellent printmaker.

19th Century Art in the United States (37)
While Europeans were revolting against the Academy system, Americans were content to master tradition. Hudson River School (rural, pastoral landscapes) merged realism with idealized (even religious) interpretations of nature and owed much to European romanticism, e.g., Turner. They used vivid colors and light v. the more sedate French Barbizon school of landscape.

Frederic E. Church (1826-1900), Twilight in the Wilderness (1860) (2.43) Brilliant sunset, “pantheistic”view of nature with god in all things.

Whistler (1834-1903) an ex-patriot American (friends with Manet and exhibited at the Salon) used Japanese inspired style and named his work as if music, e.g. Symphony in White II: The Little White Girl (1864) (2.23 at 28).

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) (p. 42) Illustrator for Harper’s Weekly. The Fox Hunt (1893) (2.49) “…graceful silhouettes, cropped forms, and slanted perspectives” demonstrate japonisme and emotional intensity from simple scenes. Self taught, Civil War vet.

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) realist who dissected cadavers ala daVinci. Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871) (2.50) his first treatment of outdoor subject shows a “magical clarity as if time were suspended in a single moment.” Influenced by photography.


Chapter 3
POST – IMPRESSIONISM (46)

Post-impressionists were schooled in Impressionism and many continued to respect it. Mostly French, spanning from late 19th to early 20th centuries. Seurat, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh all wanted to move beyond the “relatively passive” rendering of perceptual experience and give expression to ideas and emotions. Same time as industrial waste polluted waterways and Nietzsche announced the death of God. They found little use for utilitarianism and abandoned the Realist tradition of Daumier, Courbet, and Manet; thus favoring the ideal or romantic over the real, symbol over sight, and conceptual over perceptual.

The Poetic Science of Color: Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists

Georges Seurat (1859 – 91) Master of the poetic tableau, trained in academic tradition of the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts. La Grande Jatte (1886) (3.1 at 47) was the show stopper at the eighth and final big Impressionist event. Its figures are mannequin-like with no arms, similar to Egyptian tomb paintings. Figures are arranged in diminishing perspective, but inconsistencies of scale abound—a 15th Century exercise in linear perspective.

Influenced by Egyptian art and pop culture posters. Admired Ingress and completed many drawings with a black grease crayon and conte crayon. Loose brush work similar to Impressionists, but with more classical, carefully constructed lines. He was a quasi-realist, painting working class, e.g., The Bathers.

He felt art should be scientific and created inside a studio, although his drawings/studies appear to have been drawn plein air. He coined the phrase Divisionist, meaning that colors are mixed in the eye, not the pallet, and used Pointillism for this effect. This refined what Impressionists began. By using dots, each color has maximum saturation because it’s not mixed with any other color and he used complementary colors for even greater effect. Later work included “framing” and plein air beach scenes.

Paul Signac (1863–1935) p. 49 Seurat’s colleague and disciple.

Form and Nature: Paul Cezanne (50)

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) Father of modern art, most revolutionary ideas of late 1800’s, ushered in 20th C. art. Felt that Impressionism ignored qualities of Western painting, e.g., he limited depth perspective. He also embraced nature.

Difficult relationship with father, he was afraid of naked women, and his early work tormented with dark scenes of rape and murder. He copied the great masters at the Louvre daily. Boyhood friends with Zola, but split up late in life after Zola insulted him in book. Turned down by the Salon and ridiculed for his primitive peasant art. Pissaro mentored him, encouraged the use of lighter colors and heavier brushstrokes which he did, but Cezanne also used those brushstrokes to organize paintings, not just to represent an object.

The Bay from L’Estque (1885) (3.6 at 52) The scene does not “recede into a perspective of infinity in the Renaissance or Baroque manner.” He portrayed sunlight (which he said can’t be reproduced) with color. He realized that the eye “takes in a scene both consecutively and simultaneously, with profound implications for...painting.”

Cezanne was able to concentrate on the relations and spatial tensions among real objects using multiple perspectives. Still Life with Basket of Apples (1895). After 1890, his brushstrokes became larger and more abstractly expressive, color floating across canvass, less anchored by objects. Monte Sainte-Victoire (1906) (3.10 at 54) best example. Died lonely, afraid of people, a total recluse. Also, 1906 the unfinished The Large Bathers (1906) (3.11 at 55).


A Visual Language of the Heart and Soul: Symbolism

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) (58) worked in isolation seeking the poetic. Poor, unsophisticated, self-taught, started painting in middle age and romanticized his life (soldier) and sought artistic fame. His child-like in temperament and painting was ridiculed and taken advantage of (art entered into evidence in his criminal defense). He trouble with perspective, more of a colorist than draftsman—he used a “pentagraph” to project animal photographs for him to trace.

Carnival Evening (1886) (3.15 at 59), The term Fauves (beast) may have derived from one of his 1890’s jungle scenes. He never left Paris or saw a jungle during this period, but studied exotic plants (used 50 “greens”). The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) (3.16 at 59) is eerie, supernatural. Was admired by Picasso. The Dream (1910) (not pictured): lady on couch, jungle dream: summarized life’s work.


Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) (60) Most influential Symbolist, or anti-Realist (art as dreamy abstraction). , . Rejected optical naturalism, used color for purely decorative effect. Influenced by primitive art, in his work we find the origins of “modern primitivism.” He was a successful stockbroker, exhibited in the Salon, and exhibited with and collected the artwork of, the impressionists, especially Cezanne. Then lost his job, left his wife and became a full time artist, seeking the adventures of his childhood travels. Even tried creating an art colony with Van Gogh. Accomplished ceramicist.

Vision after the Sermon (1888) (3.17 at 61) a watershed work fully realizing his revolutionary ideas. Be in Love and You Will Be Happy (1889) woodcut, and his last work, the 4X12 mural summing up his work, Where Do We Come From? What are We” Where Are We Going? (1898) (3.19 at 62).


Van Gogh (1853-1890) (63) Iconoclast, died at 37, influence of personality on painting. Father a preacher, Van Gogh followed in his footsteps. Brother Theo an art dealer. Started as traditional Dutch landscape artist, early work dark, mostly working class. Never gave up perspective. Later emphasis on linear movement of paint. Exposure to Impressionists lightened his pallet, also heavy Japanese influence. Pointillist. Night Café (1888) (3.20 at 64) nightmarish greens and reds. Starry Night (1889) (3.22) was abstract version of earlier painting of same name. Most creative effort last few years of his life. Wanted an artists’ commune, but failed when Gauguin left, cut off ear that night.

A New Generation of Prophets: The Nabis (Hebrew for prophet)

Appeared in 1884 with Vuillard and Bonnard using a “synthesizing” approach to earlier masters. Also, Serusier.


Vuillard Woman in Blue with Child (1899) (3.24 at 67)
Bonnard at 68.


Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) (70) Illustrator of modern life and printmaker, like Daumier. Color lithographs, mostly the human figure in movement and employing a linear quality. Learned from Degas. Moulin Rouge (red windmill)– La Goulue (glutton) (1891) (3.29 at 71). Invented pictorial posters. Lived in a brothel.

Class 9/25. Installation art not a commodity or something for sale.
“Kitsch” has an intentional manufactured look, Spenser Gifts.



Chapter 4
ORIGINS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN (72)

Pattern of backward-looking stylistic revivals since 16th C. especially 19th and 20th C. monumental civic architecture, but new forms found in worlds’ fairs and railway stations since they were without tradition. Also, structural iron used in the Royal Pavilion, the Crystal Palace (iron and glass), and Eiffel’s Truyere Bridge (1880-84), France (4.2) Monet found a new experience in light and space. By the end of the 19th C., iron was used decoratively via Art Nouveau. Department stores also have no precedent, so they were explored in the Art Nouveau movement, see Horta, below.

Arts and Crafts Movement and Experimental Architecture (75)
Mass market of machine-made goods at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 (Crystal Palace). Machines were destroying individual craftsmanship; Arts and Crafts reaction to re-elevate craftsmen. See Mackintosh for interior design (76), McKim, Mead and White continued academic neo-classicism, but mostly in public buildings, most experimentation on houses.

Chicago School: Origins of the Skyscraper (77)
Richardson proto-American work was the beginning of American modern, but Jenney’s Home Insurance Building (1884-5) in Chicago (4.11) contained true skyscraper construction, although only 10 stories. See Gothic Revival Woolworth building (1913) and Gothic Brooklyn Bridge (1883) by Roebling. Also, Louis Sullivan (79), “Form follows function” and his skyscraper innovations, expand on Jenney with vertical lines rather than Jenney’s horizontal emphasis. See Guaranty Trust Building (1894-5), Buffalo, NY (plate 4.12 at 79).

Chapter 5
ART NOUVEAU: BEGINNINGS OF EXPRESSIONISM (82)

The fin de siecle (fin duh see ehk luh) was a period of synthesis in the arts growing out of the English Arts and Crafts movement. Artist-poet William Morris (he also designed wallpaper) a big supporter. Poet John Ruskin said that art should be both “beautiful and useful,” and based on “forms found in nature.” The mystical visions of William Blake (1757-1827) were a precursor.

Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) created elaborate, highly stylized, black and white drawings, e.g. Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (1893) (5.3) with Romantic visions of evil, the erotic, and the decadent. He was associated with the literature of Oscar Wilde (he illustrated the poem Salome) and many art nouveau book illustrations and posters were based on his art.

Whiplash lines and curvilinear emphasis in decorative and even structure elements often characterize art nouveau.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) (84) was major figure in the Vienna “Secession Movement” c. 1897 and influenced by Byzantine mosaics (esp. 1905-10, his “golden period” often based on Ravenna, Italy’s mosaics). He studied applied art and decorative painting—dad a goldsmith—and evolved from a naturalist to a modern with a passion for erotic themes. Work often flat and freeze-like, liked square formats, and created allegorical works. Death and Life (1911) (5.6) The Kiss his most famous work.

Artistic Movement of the 1880’s and 90’s (forerunner to art nouveau) was largely shaped by the japonisme craze. Whistler proved his ability as a nouveau designer with The Peacock Room (1877) installation at the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC (5.7) Also, see Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), lamp (1900) (plate 5.8 at 86).

Gaudi (1852-1926) biomorphic and organic forms influenced as a student by Romantic and Symbolist concept of the Middle Ages. Church of the Sagrada Familiea, Barcelona (1883-1926) (5.9)

Horta (1861-1947) is considered the founder of Art Nouveau architecture with ornamental iron, whiplash lines, linear rhythms, arabesque designs, and tendril-like elements. See his Stairwell of Tassel House (1893) (plate 5.11 at 89) and department store at 89, both in Brussels.

Toward Expressionism: Late 19th C. Painting beyond France (91)

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), the first true expressionist, was a Norwegian/bohemian who worked in the naturalist mode. He impacted German Expressionism with his Scandinavian mystical approach and tortured psyche. The Scream (1893) (5.18 at 92) was expressionistic with loose brush strokes. He broke with the Impressionists in 1886, flattened space, and despite criticism, especially in his very anti-academic 1892 exhibition; he inspired future printmakers and wood carvers. He portrayed existential isolation, was afraid of women and consumed by morbid thoughts having lost his mother early.

James Ensor, Portrait of the Artist Surrounded by Masks (1899) also shows existential isolation and early surrealism which was also advanced by Bochlin, a German Symbolist. Island of the Dead (1880).

Chapter 6
THE ART OF MODERN SCULPTURE (97)

Sculpture was nearly forgotten art form v. painting during the 18th and 19th centuries. Academic classicism dictated all sculpture, no commissions without rigid conformity. Unlike painting which could be done cheaply, sculpture required monumental time and expense. Early experimentation used modeling plaster and was (instead of marble) allowing the artists’ “footprint” in the creation. It was more like painting, allowing some mistakes v. chipping away at stone. First modern sculptors were painters. Daumier was a painter-sculptor who used both to lampoon and make social commentary. The Obsequious (1833) bronze.

Degas considered the first modern sculptor using pigmented wax, thus revealing the touch of his hand and having the quality of sketches. He used a real tutu, human hair, satin slippers and wood pedestal creating a truly modern object: Little Dancer Fourteen Years Old (1881) (6.2 at 98). Guaguin Oviri (1894) glazed stoneware.

August Rodin (1840-1917) friends with Monet, was a moving force of a sculptural renaissance. He studied Michelangelo’s drawings and began drawing. Like Courbet, he rejected academic sentimental idealism. The Salon thought him offensively realistic and his work “unfinished.” The Age of Bronze (1876) was so realistic critics thought it casted from a live person. The Gates of Hell (1880-1917) (6.6 at 101) based on Dante’s Inferno remains one of the great masterpieces, including The Thinker atop the “gates.” The violent interplay a forerunner of 20th Century figurative Expressionist distortion.

The Burghers of Calais (1886) (6.8 at 103) portrays six individual, non-attached, non-heroic, non-touching figures whose personal suffering dominates asymmetrical negative space at eye level, thus personalizing the viewers experience and breaking down barriers between art and audience. Accentuated hands and feet. [Perhaps the first “installation” art???]

He “finished” the sculpture then added “clothing” so it would drape naturally. Also, the The Kiss.

Camille Claudel (1864-1943) was Rodin’s assistant and mistress. Chatting Women (1897) (6.12 at 105) onyx and bronze.

Chapter 7
FAUVISM (108)

Matisse: Fauvism is the “courage to return to the purity of means.” Circa 1900 to 1908, they rejected Symbolist’s aesthetics and fin-de-siecle morbidity and embraced representational nature and feeling like the Impressionists, but with heightened use of brilliant, arbitrary color (squeezed directly from tubes). It was color that directly communicated the artist’s experience of reality, although Fauvism remained representational with new pictorial values v. the abstraction of Kandinsky and other contemporary artists.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954), a colorist influenced by all schools, led the Fauves c.1905. His worked developed slowly from dark tonalities and literal subjects. He gave up law school and was commercially successful early in life. He was later influenced by Cezanne (some of his work could be characterized as “Cezannism”), but was never Cubist. Painting mostly female figures, he sometimes he left bare areas of canvas to accentuate brushstrokes. He was intrigued by the idea of the window: interior v. exterior space. Picasso influenced by Matisse (they were friends and even neighbors for a while).

Portrait of Mme Matisse/The Green Line 1905 (7.5). Use of color shocking on a common subject.
Joy of Life 1906 (7.6) contains the circle of woman dancing (inspired by Greek fishermen dance), later his motif.

Influence of African Art (113) by 1906 Matisse and others were collecting African art as first seen in ethnographic museums. Large influence on Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (7.7) which was abstracted from African sculpture and burned in effigy in Chicago. Le Luxe II (7.8) abandons perspective and is modeled by contour lines.

Wild Beasts Tamed: Derain, Vlaminck, and Dufy (115)

Andre Derain (1880 – 1954) London Bridge 1906 (7.9 at115)

Colors of the Spiritual Eye:

Georges Rouault (1871-1958) was more Expressionist than Fauve, concerned with religious, emotional and moralistic subjects; the prostitute symbol of societal rot.
The Old King 1916-36 (7.15 at 119) is geometrically abstract, colors intensified to glow like stained glass

Belle Epoque on Camera: The Lumiere Brothers and Lartigue (119)
Belle Epoque (“beautiful eye”) was a time of European peace and scientific/artistic advancement. During Fauvism, color photography made public in 1904 and commercially available in 1907.

Lumiere Brothers and Lartigue (1894-1986)


Modernism on a Grand Scale: Matisse’s Art after Fauvism (120)

After 1908 Matisse expanded on the color/line theme of Le Luxe II with Harmony in Red (The Dessert) 1908 (7.18 at 121) patterns from decorative fabric. He used flat red background to contrast with arabesque plant forms. Dance II (1909) (7.19) influenced by Greek vase drawings (and maybe Greek fishermen) explores elemental reality beyond time and place. [see Barrett’s comments on flattening of time, place, and space].

Matisse designed chapel stained glass and murals at age 80. He often worked in bed due to illness using a stick with a brush at the end and also cutting paper designs.


Chapter 8
EXPRESSIONISM IN GERMANY (124)

Expressionism reflects the artist’s obsessions, emotional and physical, or as Kandinsky said, their “inner necessity.” They revealed inner meaning through outer form, direct and often crude, eliciting emotion in the viewer. German Expressionism (1905 – 1914) drew from native traditions of medieval sculpture, folk art and children’s art. Many of these artists were architecture students in Munich. E-mail comments of 10/27:

I'm renaming the Munich Zeitgeist to"Scheisse-geist" if you excuse my French, merde!

I was thinking about these "quaint" Germans getting in touch with their "Inner Hun" and stumbled across something which proves my comments weren't crazy after all. Besides the Munich-based German modernistic theatre (led by a guy named "Fuchs," no relation), which was a corollary to the contemporary nationalistic art movement just before WWI, here are the dates and works of a not-half-bad German artist who kept up with the avant garde and later became world renowned in other fields.
Vienna Period (1907-1912) [Good time and place for an artist]Munich Period (1913-1914) [Ditto]World War I (1914-1918) [Too bad he wasn't killed]Here are some of his works:http://www.snyderstreasures.net/pages/hartworks.htm


Nolde The Last Supper 1909 (8.2 at 125) was “visionary religious” work.

Ludwig Kirchner (1880 – 1938) An architecture student, his wooden sculptural primitivism was influenced by African and Oceanic art. Street, Dresden 1908 (8.3 at 127) is a dreamy, curvilinear swirl of urban nocturne, not unlike Munch’s style. He rejected class consciousness and snobbery in favor of the bohemian and befriended poets and other anti-establishment types. He loved nightlife, especially Berlin’s busy, erotic nightlife. He though photography took over representation. In 1937 the Nazis exhibited his work as “degenerate art” and ridiculed him. 1938 he shoots himself after long illness/war wounds.

129 Pictorial effect from high POV.

Graphic Impact: Expressionist Prints (131)
Die Brucke (p.126) or the “bridge” was an association of German Expressionists who revived printmaking/woodcut as a major art form and were inspired by African and Oceanic art.

Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) social commentator and protester. She was the first of the German Social Realists to develop out of Expressionism c. WWI. Death Seizing a Woman 1934 (8.15) was a lithograph, her preferred medium for wide distribution, reflects her personal tragedy.

Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) at 135

Vasily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) who wrote a book, “The Blue Rider,” was the first abstract artist. He earlier founded the Blue Rider Group. Born in Moscow, he refused a law professorship in Russia to study painting, moved to Munich soon founded an art school.

In 1909 he led a revolt against the Munich art establishment; since 1890 Munich was a center for experimental art. Abstraction based on his “epiphany” [sounds like Joyce] seeing his painting but unable to delineate a subject. In his book, Concerning the Spirituality of Art (1911) he linked art and music and said that art and color in particular should be concerned with the expression of the spiritual or soul v. the material. Unlike Cubists, he was painterly and improvisatory v. cubist geometric mode. Titles often taken from music, like Sketch for Composition II 1910 (8.17) employing a pictorial vocabulary of figures, but highly abstracted. It shows a disturbance on the left, and serenity right. [Classical music, in turn, has both “visual” and emotional cues (you can “see” the music—just ask George Balanchine—and “hear” the painting). Art (especially allegorical art) and music rotate from tumult to serenity, and then back again without stopping on a neutral (read “boring”) axis long enough to avoid excited anticipation of the next rotation (“what’s going to happen next”). In some sense, neither follows Aristotelian “beginning, middle and end,” but rather a Mobius loop of inner life reflecting our never-ending change of emotions. One could say that the “objective” senses and “subjective” emotions are inseparable, Cartesian dogma, notwithstanding. Compare to Joyce and modern lit.].

Composition VII 1913 (8.18 at 136) is more linear traveling from chaos, lower left, to nirvana, upper right. However, no matter how comfortable the viewer is on top right, he knows that chaos lurks not far away. There’s no permanency.

Franz Marc (1880-1916) A Blue Rider in the spirit of German Romanticism and lyrical naturalism. The Large Blue Horses 1911 (8.19 at 137) bright blue (masculine) colors, sculpted close up. [Heavily cropped like photographs].

Paul Klee (1879-1940) inventive son of a Swiss musician, he developed a personal language of signs and symbols completing 9000 works, including prints and watercolors which he completed in Tunisia in 1914. He played violin one hour daily and his art reflects aesthetic melody. Mentored by Kandinski, he belonged to the Blue Rider Group. As poet and diarist, he used his enormous verbal skills to create titles that were integral parts of his work. As a musician he did “polyphonic” painting. He created puppets for his son.

Early work, chiaroscuro and tonality, then moved to shapes, equilibriums and quasi-physics, converting the scientific revolution into art. Goes to nature not to reproduce it, but to grasp its essence. He went from cubism to pure color as subject, painting squares.

1923 Involved with Bauhaus (founded by Gropius in 1919) breaking down the art v. architecture distinction, promoting both in everyday life. 1932 mosaic pointillism, rhythm, color. 1933 anti-Nazi drawings, returned to Switzerland.

Schiele (1880-1918) of Vienna Single Drawing of a Nude Model before a Mirror 1910 (8.26 at 142)

Kokoschka (1886-1980) also of Vienna The Tempest 1914 (8.29 at 144) of artist and lover swept through time and space.


Chapter 9
FIGURATIVE TRADITION IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCULPTURE (145)

Figurative tradition central to the development of modernism.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) said he “sculpts like a painter” to put order into his feelings. Back I through Back IV (1909 – 1930) (9.5 at 147) are four monumental reliefs in contrast to his flattened paintings.

Ernst Barlach (1870 – 1938) was a story teller, poet, playwright, and printmaker. The Avenger (1914) 9.9 at 149) integrates humor, pathos and primitive tragedy. It tells a story through abstracted art.

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) abstracted figurative sculptor (considered the father of modern sculpture) influenced sculpture with his abstract portrayal of his obsessive themes such as Sleeping Muse (1916) (9.11 at 151) which eventually was transformed into an egg shape. The egg was yet another theme, but The Kiss (1916) (9.16) breaks completely with Rodin in this block-shaped primitive. Finally, he grows even more abstract with his bird obsession portraying a bird’s trajectory. Bird in Space (1925) (9.17). He designed his own bases which he considered integral to the work.


Chapter 10
CUBISM (156)

Cubism jointly developed by collaboration between Picasso and Braque in France between 1908 – 1914. It was never itself abstract, but it helped usher in nonobjective art later in the 20th Century whereas photography took over literal representation. Cubism goes beyond illusionist reality to embrace space itself, having no fixed form and a different conception of the difference between time and space. The poet Apollinaire became the literary apostle of Cubism.

Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) born to art-teacher father in Andalusia (although he considered himself Catalan), a rural superstitious area fixated on death. His father, a pigeon painter, taught young Pablo. We see dualism in treatment of young women, pure and savaged; the death of his young sister scared him for life, death lurking over many of his works. Much of his work was allegorical and he changed course with each new lover (muse/siren). Wife Olga danced for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. Picasso and Matisse both designed costumes and sets for Massine and Balanchine, music by Stravinsky and Ravel.

Picasso: Magic, Sex and Death I DVD His art was “fluid,” you never knew where he was going. See the 1956 movie The Mystery of Picasso by French director, Clouzot, for the suspense of not knowing what’s coming next. Most of his work is a search for a “sacred father.”

Late in life he was made frequent allegorical references to death. Each ex girlfriend becomes a grotesque. Did ceramics in the 1950’s, helped with the peace movement in the 1960’s. Toward the end he feverishly cannibalized European art.


Blue Period (1901-1904) Blue was the color of the moment in Paris and the earlier Symbolist Gauguin used blue, too.

La Vie (1903) (10.2 at 159) originally a self portrait, this large allegorical composition possibly inspired by Tarot cards; see the up and down directions. It’s a polarized view of women, Madonnas or prostitutes suffering from VD.

Rose Period Between 1905-6 Picasso was preoccupied with acrobatic performers.

Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) (10.6 at 162) a response to Matisse’s Joy of Life, this is possibly the most important work of modern art, and the first Cubist work; it shatters all convention and has been called the “cornerstone of twentieth-century art.” The figures are five prostitutes on Barcelona’s Avignon Street. Inspired by El Greco’s Opening of the Fifth Seal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2205grec.jpg Demoiselles was a response to The Joy of Life (1905) at 112 by Matisse. The two figures on right are based on African art which he said “they use as a weapon.”

Guernica Cubism with a conscience. Until 1930 Picasso was apolitical, but the Spanish Civil War, especially an attack on the Prada, got his attention. Heavily influenced by Goya, he sided with the republicans and assumed directorship of the Prada from which he evacuated its paintings.

George Braque (1882-1963) (p. 164) associated with the Fauves. Buildings have varying perspectives using conflicting orthogonals (in Linear Perspective drawing, the diagonal lines that can be drawn along receding parallel lines (or rows of objects) to the vanishing point.).

Houses at L’Estaque (1908) (10.11 at 167) established the syntax of early Cubism.


Braque, Picasso, and the Development of Cubism (167)

Their collaboration invented and developed Cubism. Picasso completely revises Three Women in response to L’Estaque.

“Analytic Cubism,” 1909-11 (168) breaks things down, monochromatically deconstructing objects and figures.

Violin and Palette (1909) (10.16 at 170) Braque’s still life subjects still recognizable (although not modeled continuously), but within shallow, unrecognizable space. The interstices between objects harden into paint shards and appear as concrete as depicted objects.

Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910) (10.18 at 171) Picasso applies Braque’s violin deconstruction to a human figure. While fairly monochromatic, its white pigment shimmers in “prismatic magic.”

“Synthetic Cubism,” 1912-14 (172) rather than deconstructing objects, synthetic cubism adds color and builds up larger objects, mostly through Picasso’s invention of the collage and Braque’s pasted papers; both techniques influenced the Dada and Surrealists. It sort of reconstructs analytical deconstruction resulting in new realties.

Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) (10.21 at 173) Picasso combines pictorial vocabularies using an actual oil cloth for chair caning for this first collage painting.

Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass (1912) (10.23 at 175) Picasso takes up Braque’s paper cutout, but with greater irony, color, disparate subjects, and spatial acrobatics painting on a simulated wood surface.

Constructed Spaces: Cubist Sculpture (176)

Constructed sculpture is assembled from disparate, often unconventional materials and invented by Braque, but developed by Picasso. Guitar references reality, but is not a mere imitation.

Development in Cubist Painting in Paris (182)

Fernand Leger (1881-1955) at 186 sought to create beautiful object with machine elements.

The City (1919) (10.42 at 187) uses a vocabulary of Synthetic Cubist collage rather than Leger’s prior use of heavily modeled forms which “projected” out of the surface.

Other Agendas: Orphism and other Experimental Art in Paris, 1910-14 (186)

Robert Delaunay (1885 – 1941) at 187 was one of the first French abstractionist. Sonia Delaunay, his wife, The poet Guillaume Apollinaire christened Delaunay's style "Orphism," after Orpheus, the musician of Greek legend whose eloquence on the lyre is a mythic archetype for the power of art.

Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (1913) this “disk” abandoned all pretense of subject. It shows his fascination with color to demonstrate simultaneous sensations of depth and movement without reference to the natural world.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) (190), an instinctive Dadist, he started with fauvists, discovered Cézanne, and then was among the first Cubists to desert Cubism. His early Cubist work was “retinal” meaning it appeals mainly to the eye. For him art was merely an “intellectual tool” to access “retinal” (sensory) painting and avoid anesthetized aesthetic. He experimented with color and simultaneity. Work often tasteless, like his “ready mades” (made of common objects) like urinals. Works included a mustachioed Mona Lisa. Created schematic drawings for “precision” painting.

Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) (10.48) suggests staccato motion (dis- multiplication, like multiple exposure film, the more exposures, the faster the motion) not static like Cubist works. Photography may have played a major influence, especially the movies. [The paining looks like the projection of movie film stuck in a projector, bouncing up and down]


Chapter 11
FUTURISM, ABSTRACTION IN RUSSIA, AND de STIJL (193)

Post Cubist artists sought to “discover a universal visual language able to transcend mundane experience… and place the viewer in an alternative, ultimate spiritual world.” This radical movement wanted to destroy art school, museum and most convention. It has no unified style.

Futurism in Italy
Verged on total abstraction, but still drew upon imagery from the material world, mostly: speed and dynamism of modernity (the Alpha Romeo of art).

Giacomo Balla (1871 – 1958)

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Leash in Motion (1912) (11.3 at 195) uses a multiplication of legs, feet, and leash demonstrated motion like Nude Descending a Staircase, but in a more cartoonist style.

Umberto Boccioni (1882 – 1916) was perhaps the most talented Italian Futurist.

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) (11.11 at 199) was his most impressive sculpture and translates of his paintings into three dimensional space showing movement in two dimensions.

ABSTRACTION – like music. It turns in on itself and explores possibilities, a stream of consciousness, the art is us, and we are the art. But what if the art is like a machine (as in Mondrian pure “mathematics,” below), are we the machine, does the machine become us?

Early Abstraction in Russia at 199
A Russian movement known as World Art was influenced by Art Nouveau, French Symbolists and Post-Impressionist Nabis, and integrated these styles with influences of Byzantine and Russian painting and decorative traditions

Supermatism (the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art) at 203.

Kzimir Malevich (1878 – 1935) took Cubist geometry to its most radical conclusion. His work contains hard-edged geometric purity v. Kandinsky’s more painterly Expressionism.

Suprematist Composition: White Square on White (1918) (11.19 at 204) is his final, most extreme phase realized in monochromatic paintings.

El Lissitzky (1890 -1941) was part of the Jewish renaissance in Russia, around the 1917 revolution.

The Constructor (Self Portrait) (1924) (11.22) is a photographic double exposure showing the artists with his architectural tools superimposed.

Kandinsky returned to Russia in 1914, organized museums, and continued to paint. White Line, No. 232 (1920) (11.23 at 207) is transitional with use of sharp lines and curved lines in strong colors v. his earlier work, see 8.17 and 8.18)

Russian Constructivism (206) this utopian movement (c. 1922 to 1930’s) sought to improve the human condition through integrating art and life with Cubist-based industrial art. Materials were assembled rather than carved or molded and, in sculpture, it focused on space rather than mass (negative rather than positive space).
Vladimir Tatlin (1895-1953) (208) founded Russian Constructivism.

Model for Monument to the Third International (1920) was a stick built model for a 1300 foot tower to showcase Russia’s industry.

Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) was an abstract painter who turned his talents to the “revolution.”

Untitled advertising poster (1924). Typographical/mixed media (photo within graphics) innovations with his state-sponsored advertising poster.

De Stijl in the Netherlands (213) The “style” WWI group of artists with Piet Mondrian the best known.

Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) Dutch Calvinist family, dad both preacher and painter. He was a philosopher who painted. His style progressed from representational to abstract toward his goal of the expression of pure reality, believing that only pure plastics (neo-plasticism) could achieve this goal (finding reality’s atomic façade and splitting the atom to achieve the lowest common denominator). Plastic reality was the action of color and forms. Thus, the painting creates its own reality v. both representational and the romantic evocation of the artist’s emotions. Removes clutter. “Hague School” blends French and Dutch techniques.

Composition in Color A (1917) (11.34 at 216) abstract squares, maybe a tree originally as he abstracted trees further and further from representation.


Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942) (cover art)


Chapter 12
EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE (219)
Chapter 16
MODERN ARCHITECTURE BETWEEN THE WARS (329)


In the late Nineteenth Century, there was tension between Art Nouveau/Arts and Crafts with modernist minimalism.

Modernism in Harmony with Nature “Art should grace, not disgrace nature.” FLW

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1959) worked for Louis Sullivan until 1893 where he completed drawings, mostly of homes. Developed prairie style in his early years and rejected, at least in part, European modernity; instead Europeans learn from him.

Robie House, Chicago (1909) (12.3 at 221) a masterpiece of Wright’s “Prairie Style with a strong horizontal emphasis. Interior and exterior spaces transformed into each other. [Note Matisse’s infatuation with windows and Mondrian’s floating planes and rectangles. Seems like installation art]. House centered around the hearth, cantilevers and steel beams.

The German Contribution—Behrens and Industrial Design (226)
Peter Behrens (1868 – 1940) formerly a painter, he experimented with old forms.

AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin (1908) is an early glass a steel structure and was built to maximize space, air and light; keeping workers comfortable was a priority not seen before. Socially responsible building as industry played a powerful role and promoted the national image. [Governments run by companies are fascist—see Busch, George W].

De Stijl (The Style) (232) was named for the group’s magazine.

Gerrit Rietveld (1888 – 1964) also a cabinet maker.

Schroder House (1924) (12.21) good example of the style with detached interlocking panes of rectangular slabs [Mondrian?] appearing like a Constructivist sculpture.

Red and Blue Chair (1917) (12.22) functional sculpture… intentional manufactured look.


MODERN ARCHITECTURE BETWEEN THE WARS (329)

Bauhaus After 1919 Berlin became a world capital of art and architecture, including Bauhaus in the 20’s founded by Walter Gropius (later joined by Kandinsky and Klee) and International Style in the 30’s. They used modernism to improve mankind and transcend political polarization. Bauhaus was a crafts school originally, Gropius believing that all architects should be craftsman, perhaps an outgrowth of the earlier arts and crafts movement. Its biggest achievements were probably interior, product and graphic design.


Armchair, Model B3 (1927) by Marcel Breuer was the first machine made tubular steel chair.

Walter Gropius (1881 – 1929) (331) joined with Adolph Meyer in 1911. He developed what later became known as the “International Style.”

Fagus Shoe Factory, Alfeld-an-Leine, German (1911-25) (16.2 at 331) uses glass sheathing, even at corners, basically, Gropius invented the curtain wall.

Workshop Wing, Dessau (1925) was a multi-use educational complex and his most important work using ferroconcrete span.

International Style (machines for living) was a mixture of de Stijl art and architecture, Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright. It was first seen in a Mies van der Rohe – organized exhibit and the phase was coined at a later 1932 MOMA exhibition. It used only structural steel, ferroconcrete and contained no load-bearing walls or ornamentation. Focus moved from “mass” to “volume” in free-flowing space using standardized (cheap) units of construction. Also, no applied decoration or contrasting color.

Le Corbusier (1887 – 1965) (333) was a frustrated painter, brilliant critic and propagandist for his ideas condemning all forms of revivalism. Influenced by Cubism, he tried to reconcile man, machine and nature, so his work was a “machine for living” as he said.

Villa Savoye, Poissy, France (1928-30) (16.6 at 334) his early house design exemplified International Style, integrating inside and outside space [see Matisse’s window treatments for a similar theme] and integration a tuck-under early carport (a machine in the house).

Mies van der Rohe (1886 – 1969) (335) “less is more” influenced American skyscraper.


American Architecture

Chrysler Building, New York (1928-30) (16.12 at 338) by William Van Alen (1882 – 1954). Use of stainless and steel gargoyles.

Edgar K. Kaufmann House (Fallingwater)(FLW), Bear Run, PA (1934-7) (16.16 at 341)


Chapter 13
FANTASY TO DADA AND THE NEW OBJECTIVITY (236)

Dadaism (“dada” derivation unclear, hobby horse, baby talk?) was a response to the brutal, mechanized killing of WWI, rejecting reason, logic and Western ideals of progress as the underlying reason for war. They preferred anarchy, emotions, and the intuitive. Similar to the earlier Romantic movement and dream works of Redon, Ensor, and Rousseau provided a transition from Romanticism to fantasy.

Marc Chagall (1887 – 1985) (“dreamworld”) influenced by Jewish folktales and art, he enrolled in an experimental school directed by theater designer Lon Bakst, then moved to Paris where he associated with Apollinaire and the Cubists.

Paris Through the Window (1913) (13.2 at 237) the two-headed Roman god of doorways, Janis, shows the romantic yet real Paris.

Giorgio de Chirico (1888 – 1978) part of the “metaphysical” school that kept perspective, but used juxtapositions to shock. Nietzsche’s view of art expressing motivation led de Chirico to metaphysical examination of still life. Also, psychoanalysis. Referred to the “metaphysical content” of his paintings to refer to surprise and shock.

The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (1914) (13.6 at 240) deep perspective for personal effect; ominous mood from common scene. [The Third Man (Joseph Cotton/Orson Welles) has similar images, see 44b to 50 http://axion.physics.ubc.ca/thirdman/]


The Birth of Dada
WWI Zurich: young refugees converged and created confluence of art, literature, music, and theatre of absurd. [modernity’s pathos; a new (or at least newly explored) dimension of self]. Zurich Dada movement reexamined the foundations of art and wasn’t just to shock the bourgeoisie. [Note that modern emptiness stems from lack of rituals and mythology that bind; but they are rejecting tribal bonding (the one thing that could keep them sane) because bonding sows the seeds of war: “us v. them”].

Movement also in Berlin and Paris.


Hugo Ball: Hugo Ball reciting the poem Krawane at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (1916) (13.10 at 243) Photo: introduced abstract poetry. [Early performance art—gibberish, melodic syllables without meaning ].

Jean Arp (Zurich Dada) Fleur Marteau (1916) (13.14 at 246) Oil on wood. Biomorphic.


New York Dada: Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968 (see Ch. 10, p. 29) great intellect, chess player, archetypal of the Dadaist movement, leading renegade, more cerebral than visual. Art should be an intellectual tool, not representational; make art “aesthetically anesthetizing.” Early work showed humor, irony, and parody, often with word games like the Mona Lisa’s “LHOOQ” which means she’s got a nice ass.

Focused on “transformation” of objects through movement; used “dismultiplicatoin” to show how objects change through movement. The organic becomes mechanized “mechanomorphic” [opposite of Art Nouveau where the mechanized becomes organic?] Used found, everyday objects (“readymade”) and found relationships among them. The “Armory Show” (1913) introduced Dadaism to New York.

He tried to deny the possibility of defining art with these “readymades”:

Bottle Rack and Fountain (1917) (13.16 at 348) manufactured, found objects: rack and urinal; considered a seminal work and vastly influential. “Readymade.”

Bicycle Wheel, New York (1951) (13.17) mounted on kitchen stool. “Readymade.”

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even a/k/a The Large Glass (1915-23) (13.20) Readymade with assistance and manipulation.
This central work captured “chance environment” with transparency acts as paradigm of pointless erotic activity, or a “mechanistic and cynical interpretation of love.” Breton. The chocolate grinding equipment represents masturbation. This work is more cerebral than retinal.

Duchamp’s final work, Etant Donnes (1946-66) installed in Philadelphia allows the viewer to peek through an old door and see a naked woman holding a lamp.
http://www.freshwidow.com/etant-donnes2.html

Man Ray (1890 – 1976) Philadelphia-born Dadaist. He invented “Rayogrpahs,” photographic images made by placing objects near sensitized paper and exposing them to light.

Gift (replica of 1921 (13.24) an “assisted” readymade using nails on a flat iron makes sinister a common object.

“Art is Dead” Dada in Germany (254) post WWI Germany; Dadaists disgusted with bankrupt western culture and attacked it with collage and photomontage. Experimentations with noise-music and abstract phonetic poetry.

Hanna Hoch (1889 –1978) Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1920) photomontage: disjunctive context of ordinary images, a satiric panorama. [like phonetic poetry]

John Heartfield (1891 –1968) (256) created photomontages from newspaper clippings and retouched them, then photographed them and made photogravures for mass production. In Little German Christmas Tree (1934, 13.28) he twisted the tree into a swastika and altered the lyrics.
Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948) Merzbild 25A (1920) Assemblage (13.30 at 257) three-dimensional, e.g., wire mesh, and also contains newspaper clippings, political.


Max Ernst (1891 –1976) (258) influenced by Late Gothic fantasy and German Romanticism, he was a genius for using collages and photomontage for suggesting metamorphosis or double identify, thus creating part of the Surrealist “vocabulary.” He followed de Chirico with his own Gothic style to create “Romantic Realism,” a socking, ruthless realism from recognizable objects distorted and transformed.

Celebes (1921) (13.33 at 259) informed by a collage aesthetic, it touches the subconscious.

“New Objectivity” (259) in post WWI Germany; some German Expressionist leaders formed the November Group and were joined by the Dadaists and focused on the Workers’ Council for Art, part of Weimar Bauhaus. But the workers soon turned on the artists [gee wiz, how could this ever happen?], thus spawning Social Realism a//k/a New Objectivity. Otto Dix (mostly photography e.g. Dr. Mayer-Hermann) most associated with New Objectivity; also Grosz and Max Beckmann.

George Grosz (1893 – 1959) anti-war images.

Dedication to Oskar Panizza (1917-18) (13.34 at 260) shows “mankind gone mad” with dehumanized figures portraying alcohol, syphilis, and pestilence.

Many Dadaist works were shown at the Degenerate Art Show (1937) and were destroyed.

Chapter 15
SURREALISM (288)

Term coined by Apollinaire referring to his own drama and Diaghilev’s ballet, Parade, but the movement didn’t emerge until post-Dada in the early twenties. “Sur” means “high,” so surrealism is a high level of reality, more real than real via seeing the unseen. [Like great literature and dialogue]. Works often based on chance occurrences, dreams, contradictions (juxtapositions), and the uncanny (déjà vu). Also, the Freudian themes of Eros and Thanatos (Sex and Death).

Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924) founder and leader of the movement defined “psychic automatism” as dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation. E.g., automatic writing, irrational word games like “exquisite corpse” [French Mad-Libs, school of gibberish]. He also called it “superior reality” based on disinterested play of thought and omnipotence of the dream. [painting an uninhibited conscious dream] Heavily influenced by Freud…

Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) [try to find in various works]

1) Representability – ideas or feelings changed into picture; dream pictures are unconscious, but works of art are consciously produced.

2) Condensation –merges elements into a disguised form. In Rousseau’s The Dream, the jungle in condensed with a European sitting room, and day is condensed with night.

3) Displacement – moving an element out of its usual setting. Displacement can result in condensation in Rousseau’s picture is achieved by displaying the couch in the jungle.

4) Symbolism – Something that represents something else. In The Dream, the flowers, fruit, serpent, musician, etc. may be interpreted as the dreamer’s sexual fantasies.


1925 group’s first exhibition at Galerie Pierre—Arp, de Chirico, Ernst, Klee, Man Ray, Masson, Miro, and Picasso. In 1927, Tanguy, Duchamp, and Picabia joined them; Dali in 1929. Matisse is also considered a surrealist, although not formally part of the group.

Two Strands:

Biomorphic or Abstract – Arp, Miro, Masson, Matta focusing on automatism (doodling).

Uncanny/super-realism – Details taken out of context—Dali, Tanguy, Magritte taken from Rousseau, Chagall, Ensor de Chirico and 19th C. Romantics.

Both were different from Dada in Romantic privileging of the unconscious (rather than machines). Dada (machine), surrealism (unconscious).

Hans Arp (1886—1966) worked with wood, made into painted reliefs, reverse collage.

Max Ernst (1891 –1976) (see prior chapter for Celebes). 1925 began use of “frottage” or rubbing over textured surface which intensified his perception of texture. Later used decalcomania (placing paper over wet object and pulling it away for new textures) revealing startled automatic forms.

Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924) (15.5 at 292) painting combined with Dada assemblage portraying a dream landscape.

Joan Miro (1893—1983) at 295. Catalonian. Fauve-Matisse and poetry/literature – influenced; friends of Picasso (his mentor), Gaudi (both Catalonians), Calder, and Hemmingway. Early work architectural paintings. Then disparate objects on farm and Dutch interiors with figures from Dutch masters. 1924 disassociated himself from pictorial convention, a “poison.” “Savage” period reflects Spanish Civil War. He returned to Stone Age cave paintings, e.g., puppets. Also used words, created ceramic murals and painted a series of “constellations.” Sought “equilibrium.”

Painting (1933) (15.13 at 296) Abstract intent reflected in neutral titles. Appears non-figurative, but some resemblances can be inferred.

Andre Masson (1896—1987) at 298. Revolutionary/anarchist scarred by WWI.

Yves Tanguy (1900—1955) at 299. Interest in writing, inspired by de Chirico’s work to become an artist.

Surrealism and the Americas at 301. Introduced in 1931 at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. 1936 MOMA “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.” By 1942 the center shifted to New York as artists fled WWII Europe.

Kiesler; Matta at 302; Lam

The Association of Delirious Phenomena:

Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989) at 303. Catalonian started painting realistic (loved Millet and used his characters), then impressionistic, then in 1928 started painting dreams; described “paranoiac-critical” as creating visionary reality from visions, dreams, memories and pathological distortions. His detailed technique enhanced the dream world making it more real than real. [like good literature or dialogue]. Collaborated with Bunuel and Hitchcock.

Accommodations of Desire (1929) (15.25 at 304) a collage portraying his sexual anxiety over an affair with a married older woman, Gala, whom he later marries. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/eusi/hod_1999.363.16.htm

The Persistence of Memory (1931) Miniaturist technique reflecting 15th C. Flemish art, it uses infinite space and morphology of hard surfaces (“hand painted dreams”) based on melted cheese http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=79018


Northern Europeans

Rene Magritte (1898 – 1967) at 307 explored how we “read” visual images and inspired by Ernst and de Chirico. His “meticulous realism” was ignored in favor of Miro and Masson. We see images as being outside ourselves, but the mental picture is inside.

The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images (1928-9) (15.29 at 307), a pipe with a caption “this is not a pipe” underscores his fascination with the relationship of language to the painted image and undermines our tendency to speak of images as if they are real things.

The False Mirror (1928) (15.30) introduces the Illusionistic theme of landscape as painting, but not actually nature itself. [it depicts the “mind’s eye”]

Hans Bellmer (1902 – 1975) part of second wave of Surrealism, influenced by German Dada, he assembled strange and sadistic constructions called “dolls,” then photographed the objects.

Doll (1935) Wood, metal, papier-mache.

Women and Surrealism

Meret Oppenheim (1913 – 1985)
Object (Luncheon in Fur) (1936) (15.36 at 311)

Picasso and Surrealism Picasso was never a true surrealist, not sharing the group’s obsession with the subconscious, although his work grew more emotional in the mid-twenties.

Guernica (1937) (15.46 at 316) structure based on cubist grid, a return to Analytical Cubism, but an expressionistic application.

Photography and Surrealism at 322 medium for capturing bizarre juxtapositions.

Man Ray (1890 – 1976)
Fingers (1930) (15.60 at 324) solarized gelatin-silver print from negative print.

Chapter 18
AMERICAN ART BEFORE WORLD WAR II (371)

Ashcan School prior to WWI, name from drawing with ashes depicting seedy urban life, a shift from earlier agrarian genre. Young artists revolted against the conservative National Academy of Design. Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery (Photo-secession c.1906) and the 1913 Armory Show introduced modernism to the US. Americans were deeply involved in modern art from almost the beginning. By the 30’s there was a spirit of nationalistic exceptionalism. Regionalists portrayed rural life, Social Realists more political, all under the American Scene umbrella. MOMA didn’t open until 1929.

The Eight and Social Criticism

Eight painters, rejected from the 1907 National Academy exhibition, formed a group, “The Eight” (mostly periodical illustrators doomed by photography) led by painter Robert Henri (who later founded an art school and was an influential teacher). The “Exhibition of the Eight” in 1908 a milestone in modern art.

Photography

Jacob Riis (1849-1914) portrayed the Lower East Side.

Five Cents a Spot, Lodging House, Bayard Street (c. 1889) (18.5 at 374)

Lewis Hine (1884-1940) also used the camera for social reform.

Child in Carolina Cotton Mill (1908) (18.6 at 375)


Alfred Stieglitz (1864 – 1946) with Steichen held exhibitions of European avant-garde, American pioneers of modernism, and New York Dada. Stieglitz campaigned successfully to make photography a “fine art.” He advocated “straight” photography (photos that look like photos) as high art, rejecting pictoralism that tried to imitate painting.

The Steerage (1907) (18.9 at 377)

Edward Steichen (1879 – 1973) country’s most famous and expensive photographer. Also, director of photography for MOMA.

* * *

Georgia O’Keefe (1887 – 1986) a modernist by nature, had solo exhibition at 291 in 1917; later married Stieglitz. Unlike others, she never trained in Europe. Mostly biomorphic. Her distillations or essence of nature were so exact, they became organic abstract.

Pink and Blue, II (1919) (18.18 at 381) chromatic relationships and organic form, possibly equating music and color like Kandinsky.


More photography…

Strand abandons pictorialism and follows the cubists.

Ansel Adams (1902 – 1984) a disciple of Stieglitz worked naturalistically.

Frozen Lakes and Cliffs, The Sierra Nevada, Sequoia National Park, California (1932) (18.23 at 383)

* * *

Synchromism and Precisionism

Synchromism (383) based on French color theorists, similar to Delaunay.

Precisionism (385) a/k/a “Cubo-Realism” is basically descriptive, but with geometric simplification.


Regionalists and Social Realists (387)

Fight against modernistic abstraction. Federal Arts Projects (FAP) part of the WPA.
“America Scene” covered a wide range of realist paintings from right wing Regionalists to left wing Social Realists, and to the Magic Realists (all included within the “American Scene”), but all were anti-European formalism and also anti-modern.

Thomas Hart Benton (1889 – 1975) of Kansas City rejected modernism and was darling of right wing critic Thomas Craven and Jackson Pollack’s teacher. Drunken, brawler, tough guy and trouble maker, he was the son of a politician and great nephew of his namesake, the first senator from Missouri. (Ken Burns 1988 DVD). Created clay model for all his paintings.

City Building, from the mural series America Today (1930) (18.31 at 388).

Grant Wood (1892 – 1942) (389)

American Gothic (1930) (18.33) deliberately archaizing style.

Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) (391) in contrasts to other Regionalists, he worked in urban settings. He thought the Regionalists caricatured America. Work derived from his sensitivity to light.

Early Sunday Morning (1930) (18.36 at 391) flat façade and dramatic lighting linked to interest in stage design.

American Photographers between the Wars

Funded by the Federal Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) considered the first documentary photographer:

Migrant Worker (1936) (18.44 at 395) called the “Madonna of the Depression. “

Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898 – 1995) staff photographer for Life, pioneer of pictorial journalism. The Kiss (1945) Times Square, Life Magazine.

Black History (398)

Romare Bearden (1914-1988) portrayed the Harlem Renaissance.

The Dove (1964) (18.52 at 398) cut paper, gouache, pencil, cardboard

Jacob Lawrence (1917 - ) black historical narratives.

No 1, from the Migration of Negroes series (1940) (18.53 at 398)

Mexican Artists

Diego Rivera (1886 – 1957) lived in Europe early century, but turned away from Cubism to develop modern, neoclassical murals with monumental forms and bold color.

Flower Day (1925) 18.54 at 399) classically balanced derives from Italian, Aztec and Mayan.

Frieda Kahlo (1907 – 1954)

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace (1940) (18.59 at 402) assumes the role of martyr, impaled by her necklace with a dead hummingbird.