Early Modernism

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Early Modernism The Artist as Idea Maker
Vol. 1 -1904-1920s
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• A series of isms
• Local traditions in art have given way to
  international trends
• Three isms are most important and have branched
  off throughout the 20th century- Expressionism,
  Abstraction, and Fantasy
• Expressionism- the human community
• Abstraction- the structure of reality
• Fantasy- the individual human mind
• Realism continues as a trend along with other
  movements throughout the 20th century
• Modernism allowed artists to assert their freedom
  to create in a new style and provide them with a
  mission to define the meaning of their times
• Influenced by- the beginning of the atomic age
• -existentialism (Nietzsche)- God is
  Dead
• -the invention of psychoanalysis
• Freud-inner drives control human behavior
• Jung-collective unconscious
• -The Russian Revolution
• -The Great War (humanitys inhumanity)
• -The Great Global Depression
• -the rise of the Avant Garde

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• Expressionsim-
• -release of the artists inner vision
• -evoke feelings from the viewer
• Fauvism- very short-lived
• full of violent color and bold distortion, brutal
  brushstrokes
• Shocking to the critics and the public
• Called Fauves- wild beasts
• Artists wore the label with pride
• Sense of liberation and experimentation held the
  group together
• Colors structural, expressive, and aesthetic
  capabilities

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Henri Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905-06

• Flat planes of color, bold outlines come from
  Gauguin-also humanity in a state of nature- pagan
  scene like a bacchanal
• genius of omission- radical simplification
• The act of painting was joyous for him and his
  paintings show this

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• Believed that color was the formal element most
  responsible for pictorial coherence
• Color was not meant to imitate nature, but to
  express inner emotions

Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911
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• Fauvism with political connotations
• Reminiscent of stained glass because Roualt was
  an apprentice
• A figure of merciless authority clutching flowers

Roualt, The Old King, 1916-37
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• German Expressionism- Die Brucke (The Bridge)
• Color is important, but equal to that of
  distortion of images and violent brushstrokes
• Movement centered in Dresden, Germany and led by
  Ernst Kirschner
• Thought of themselves as bridging the old age of
  art with the new
• Influenced by medieval craft guilds- lived and
  worked together equally
• Focused on the detrimental effects of
  industrialization

Kirschner, Self Portrait, 1915
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• Most of Emile Noldes paintings were religious
  like Roualt
• Slashing, violent brushstrokes for non-angry
  subject matter

Nolde, Wildly Dancing Children, 1912
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• Austrian painter related to the group
• Like Van Gogh- saw himself as an inner visionary,
  a witness to inner truth
• Tortured psyche influenced by Freuds work

Kokoschka, Self Portrait, 1913
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• Kathe Kollwitz
• Worked almost exclusively in printmaking and
  drawing
• Themes of inhumanity and injustice
• The plight of workers and war victims
• Pacifist- son died in WWI

Kollwitz, The Survivors, 1923
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• Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)- another German
  Expressionist movement
• Produced feeling is visual form

Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913

• Complete abstraction- non-objective
  work-elimination of representation
• Knew about music, literature, science (the atomic
  theory)- material objects have no structure or
  purpose
• Orchestration of color, form, line, and space-
  blueprints for an enlightened and liberated
  society, emphasizing spirituality

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• Armory Show of 1913 introduced America to Fauvism
  and German Expressionism
• Started in NY and traveled to Chicago and Boston
• Armory show contained over 1600 pieces of art-
  exposed American viewers and artists to work
  going on in Europe
• Very controversial- NY Times called it
  Pathological
• Alfred Steiglitz, a photographer, was pivotal in
  supporting American abstractionists
• Marsden Hartley was an American living in Munich
  and was directly influenced by these European
  movements

Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914
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• Followed Matisses genius of omission
• Disturbed the basic shape of the material as
  little as possible
• Interested in primitive carvings and their formal
  simplicity and coherence

Brancusi, Golden Bird, 1919
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Moore, Reclining Figure, 1935-36

• Henry Moore- simplicity of form continued
• Also influenced by prehistoric- Monoliths
• Classical motif that has been eroded

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ABSTRACTION

• The process of analyzing and simplifying observed
  reality
• First rediscovered by Cezanne
• Picasso- staggering contributions to the history
  of art and the development of abstraction
• Traditional artist in that he made careful
  studies of his work
• Quest for innovation, insistence on challenging
  established views, constant experimentation
• Found inspiration from African sculpture (due to
  widened colonialism)
• Fractured shapes, jagged planes, illegible
  space-tension between 2d and 3d
• Inconsistency of treatment of the women

Picasso, Les Demoiselles DAvignon, 1907 I
paint forms as I think them, not as I see them
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• Cubism
• a radical turning point in the history of art
• Dismissal of pictorial illusionism
• Cezannes idea of the cylinder, sphere, and cone
• New logic of design
• Painting moved far beyond the depiction of
  reality- mirrored societys fears of the
  uncertainty of a non-Newtonian world
• Received its name after Matisse described a work
  by Braque as having been painted in little cubes

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• Analytical Cubism
• Little contrast in color
• Complex and systematic design
• Faceted shapes, translucent divisions of space
• Differing views of the same subject in the same
  work
• Invented by Picasso and George Braque- at the
  same time, but not really in collaboration
• Retains some sort of depth

Picasso, Portrait of Vollard, 1910
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• Synthetic Cubism
• Invented by Braque and Picasso
• Puts forms back together after breaking them
  apart
• Collage Cubism after the French word for
  paste-ups
• Foreign materials are pasted onto the design-
  makes the collage look like a real surface
• Scraps are changed and painted on, giving them a
  double meaning
• Both represent and present (be themselves)
• Picture plane is in front of the surface

Braque, Gillet, 1914
New Space Concept- first since Masaccio
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• Started to add color to Cubsim in the 1920s
• Renaissance perspective gone wrong
• Jumble of flat shapes turn into a slight image
• Dog beats to a rhythm

Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921
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• Cubism in sculpture
• Fragmented, dissolved form
• Split into many planes
• Parallels with Braque and Picasso

Lipchitz, Bather, 1917
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• Movement of Purism invented by architect Le
  Corbusier, the architect
• Opposed Synthetic Cubism because it was out of
  touch with the machine age
• Thought that design should come from the clean
  functional lines of machines
• Ferdinand Leger- clean lines mixed with Cubist
  sensibility
• Very precise and very large!! (7X9)

Leger, The City, 1919
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• FUTURISM
• Cubism was adapted to stand for the dynamism of
  modern life- always moving and changing
• Futurists rejected the past and exalted the
  beauty of the machine
• Showed motion in a static image
• 2oth century energy
• Many of the artists of the movement were killed
  in WWI- by the machines that they loved

Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913
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• DADA
• Started as a reaction to the horrors of WWI and
  Nihilism
• Began independently in Zurich and NY
• French for hobbyhorse
• Believed that reason and logic had been
  responsible for war
• Only hope was anarchy, irrationality, and
  intuition
• Pessimism and disgust of the artists helped them
  reject tradition-
• Arp pioneered the use of chance in artwork-
  releassed him from the role of artist
• For Dadaists, the idea of chance comes from the
  unconsciousness- influenced by Freud

Jean Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws
of Chance, 1916-17
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• Duchamp was the central figure in NY Dada scene
• Exhibited his first ready-made sculptures- mass
  produced common products selected by the artist
• Free from the opinions of the population- neither
  good or bad taste
• Forces viewers to see the artness of objects

Duchamp, Fountain, 1913
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• Surrealism-
• most Dada artists joined the Surrealist movement
  as well
• Included many similar ideas -used Dada techniques
  to release the unconscious
• Exploration of ways to express in art the world
  of dreams and the unconscious
• Inspired by Freud and Jung- interested in the
  nature of dreams
• In dreams, people moved beyond the constraints of
  society
• To bring inner and outer reality together
• Two forms of Surrealism
• Biomorphic (interested in life forms)- Miro
• Naturalistic (recognizable scenes of nightmare
  or dream images)-Magritte, Dali

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• Precursor to Surrealism
• Disquieting sense of forboding and creepiness
• As if another world exists beneath the one that
  is visible- influenced by Nietzsche who said
  foreboding tha underneath this reality in which
  we live and have our being, another altogether
  different reality lies concealed

De Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street,
1914
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• Interested in Collage and decalcomania-
  transferring oil paint from another surface
• Used rubbings called Frottage- joined
  fragmented images from newspapers and magazines
  to create a disjointed image

Max Ernst, La Toilette de la Mariee, 1940
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Salvidore Dali, Illuminated Pleasures, 1929

• The celebrity of the group
• Dreamlike, disquieting combination of images-
  sexual in nature, convincingly real

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• Joan Miro- organic forms that expand and contract
  visually
• Used automatism- planned accidents
• Element of hallucination
• Began paintings as collages so that he could move
  elements around at will
• Combination of unconscious and conscious
  image-making

Miro, Le Petit Rose, 1933
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Klee, Golden Fish, 1922

• Used fantasy images to represent the non-visible
  world
• Thought that humanitys deeper nature could be
  found in primitive shapes and symbols
• Studied nature and science, especially the
  processes of growth and change

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Oppenheim, Luncheon in Fur, 1936

• Humor and eroticism of Surrealism translated into
  sculpture
• Magical transformation of forms and textures to
  show the absurdness of everyday objects