1. The 20th Century – 1900 - 1909
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_8y0sQ0HME
“The world has
changed less since
the time of Jesus
Christ than it has in
the last thirty years.”
Charles Peguy
1913
Ford Motor Company, Model T
The Shock of the New, 1980, Robert Hughes
2. Klimt,
Jurisprudence,
1903-07,
Vienna Secession &
Austrian Expressionism
Schiele, Nude Self-Portrait in Gray with Open Mouth, 1910 Univ. of Vienna
gouache and black crayon
6. German Expressionism – Der
Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider( &
Die Brücke (The Bridge)
Franz Marc, The Fate of the Animals, 1913, oil Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
Street, Dresden, 1908, oil
7. Futurism
(Italy)
Giacomo Balla, Girl Running on a Balcony, 1912, oil
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913
9. • Depended on European
imperialism
• “To go “back in time” to
a less civilized, less
evolved state (“Civilization
has fallen from me little by little”
-Gauguin)
• Rejection of civilized and
corrupt Western world
• To identify the self with
the other & to find one’s
natural identity (Gauguin
had partial Peruvian
ancestry)
• Hybrid art –“purity and
primacy pursued through
hybridity and pastiche” –
Art Since 1900
(European, Tahitian,
Egyptian, Peruvian,
Indonesian aesthetics,
etc)
“I Am African” campaign, 2006, advertisement
Primitivism
10. Group Work
• Identify the main visual and conceptual
characteristics of the artwork
• Identify the central critical issues and
connect them with pertinent vocabulary
• Select one question to present to the class
• Select one person to present (change
each week); 5 minutes to informally
present your findings
11. Austria, 1900
Hans Olbrich, Secession Building, 1897-98
Freud’s Interpretation of
Dreams published 1900 in
Vienna, founder of
psychoanalysis
To liberate “repressed
instincts and unconscious
desires”, the dream or “rebus”
is an indication that those
desires long to be free
Klimt, Schiele (Kokoschka
also considered)
“To each age its art, to art its freedom”
12. Gustav Klimt
co-founder of Secession and 1st
President
sought to separate from
conservative Academy of Fine
Arts in 1897, during decline
Austro-Hungarian empire
embraced Art Nouveau
(Jugendstil in German)
trained as architectural decorator
(School of Arts & Crafts)
advocate for union between all
arts: gesamkunstwerke
14. • Portraits & public commissions
for allegorical works
• In 1894, University of Vienna
commissioned 3 ceiling
paintings (philosophy, medicine,
jurisprudence)
• Supposed to extol Enlightenment
beliefs, but actually exposed
darker, more ambiguous issues
• Rejected by University, regarded
as pornographic & perverted
• Many works deal with battle
between life and death, good
and evil, depicting skeletal,
emaciated figures and
threatening female forms
• Furies: Roman mythology,
female personifications of
vengeance; Graces above:
Greek goddesses of charm,
beauty and nature (fertility) -
truth, justice, law
• “punishment psychologized as
castration” (Art Since 1900)
Klimt, Jurisprudence, 1903-07, Univ. of Vienna
17. Egon Schiele
• under tutelage of Klimt, but
rejected Art Nouveau style in
favor of Expressionist style
• embattled artist who
exploited his own
persecution for fame
• in 1912 jailed (24 days)
for kidnapping and
corrupting a minor and
publicly reviled for explicit
images of self and
teenage girls, drawings
publicly burned
• him, his wife and unborn
child died in Spanish Flu
Epidemic of 1918
• produced 300 paintings
and 3,000 works on paper
19. Voyeurism and exhibitionism
Explicit nudes of self and
women
• Embodiment of “psychosexual
disturbance”? vs. the classical
nude or social type (proper
portrait)
• the damaged self, exposed,
gaunt – arms amputated, ribs
exposed, body dirtied
Schiele, Nude Self-Portrait in Gray with Open Mouth, 1910
gouache and black crayon
Michelangelo
David
1501
20. What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and
serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject
matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind,
rather like a good armchair which provides
relaxation from physical fatigue.
-Henri Matisse
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Matisse, 1946
21. France, 1906 – Cezanne dies. Post-impressionism ends
& Fauvism begins
• Cezanne only became famous
at the end of his life in 1904,
surviving years of ridicule,
receives several
retrospectives from 1904-07
• Admired for ordered and
methodical process (small,
discrete strokes)
• Akin to Divisionist (aka
pointilist) process
• Return to French classical
forms (geometry) & subjects
• To this, Matisse added
“epileptic” pure color
(discovered when moved
south near Mediterranean
Sea)
• Title (“Luxury, Tranquility &
Pleasure”) taken from poem
by Baudelaire
Cezanne
Large Bathers
1906
Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme et Volupte, 1904-05
22. Matisse & Fauvism
• short-lived movement, lasted a
season and began with a scandal
at the 1905 Salon d’Automne
• Also included Andre Derain &
Maurice de Vlaminck (his original
inspiration)
• Name (“wild beasts”) coined by
critic Louis Vauxcelles
• Reflects what Matisse thought to
be “four trends” in Post-
Impressionism (light, color,
expression, primitivism)
• Divisionist process abadoned
• Pairing pure complementary
colors for visual tension &
balance
• flat planes of nonmimetic color
• unified pictorial surface
• Allover composition (addresses
entire canvas) Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, oil
23. Matisse, Open Window, 1905
“What counts most with colors are
relationships. Thanks to them and
them alone a drawing can be
intensely colored without there being
any need for actual color.” - Matisse
25. • Only painting entered in 1906
Salon des Independents
• Result of numerous sketches
• Arcadian landscape inspired
by French classicism
• Pairs visual beauty and
sensual pleasure
• flat planes of unmodulated
pure color on large scale
• clashes of primary hues
• thick contour lines in bright
hues
• deformed bodies merging
together
• stylistic disunity
• discrepancies of scale
Ingres
Turkish Bath
1862
Matisse, Bonheur de vivre (joy of life), 1905 (5.5’x 8’)
Matisse in Paradise
26. Art is a finger up the
bourgeoisie ass
-Pablo Picasso
28. The Gaze Interrupted
• Two important analyses (Alfred Barr &
Leo Steinberg)
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil,
7’x7’
Barr
-1st cubist painting
(since clothed,
male figures
removed)
-Once an allegory
on mortality, sin
(sailor in center) &
virtue (student at
side), now a purely
formal composition
-Stylistic shift:
Iberian to African
influences
Steinberg
-a “sexual
metaphor” (fear of
sex)
-Emphasized by
spatial distortion,
stylistic disunity,
format (square), &
table as phallis
-Figures are
disconnected & only
interact with viewer
(implicated in this)
-Their gaze, doubled
with the association to
African art, makes the
feeling of fear and
danger more palpable
“…my first exorcism painting” - Picasso
29. The Birth of Venus,
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879
30. From Sex Kitten to Dominatrix
Marilyn Monroe, Bert Stern, 1962 Maitresse Francoise (Annick Foucault)
31. 1908 - Wilhelm Worringer publishes Abstraction and Empathy
• Abstraction a primordial urge
• These artists look to tribal art and
Worringer’s ideas to develop their work
• Worringer: two opposed styles throughout
history: realism (engagement with world) vs.
abstraction (withdrawal from it)
• Marc and Wassily Kandinsky formed Der
Blaue Reiter in Munich, 1911 as search for
“spiritual awakening” through art
• St. George (patron saint Moscow)—symbolic
of Christian Book of Revelations, second
coming of Christ during the Apocalypse
• Included in almanac are expressionist works,
tribal art, art of children, Japanese masks and
prints
Vassily Kandinsky, Final study for cover of the
Blaue Reiter Almanach, 1911, drawing
“I caught a strange thought…it had settled in my
open hand like a butterfly—the thought that people
once before, a long time ago, like alter egos, loved
abstractions as we do now. Many an object hidden
away in our museums of anthropology looks at us
with strangely disturbing eyes. What made them
possible, these products of a sheer will to
abstraction?” – Franz Marc, WWI
32. The Blue Rider – Art & The Natural World
• German Expressionism
• Abstraction as empathy &
engagement
• The spiritual is best expressed in
abstract forms
• Color and line “ignite” the spirit &
correspond to particular emotions
• They also correspond to music
(notes, chords, melodies)
Kandinsky, Lyrical, 1911, oil
Kandinsky’s Questionnaire,
1923
34. Franz Marc
• Interest in the spiritual,
nature & animal world
• Also had a visual system,
endowing types of line with
emotive characteristics
(organic vs. geometric)
and colors with moods &
gender (blue=male,
yellow=female)
• Admired the
Impressionists & Post-impressionists
• In his animal pictures, he
projects human qualities &
anxieties
• “all being is flaming
suffering”
• Died in WWI
(My work is)…“a pantheistic penetration into
the pulsating flow of blood in nature, in trees,
in animals, in the atmosphere.” - Marc
Franz Marc, The Fate of the Animals, 1913, oil
35. The Bridge – Art & the City
• German Expressionism
• The Bridge (Die Brucke) formed in
1905 in Dresden; Kirchner its head
• Got name from Nietzche passage in
his Thus Spoke Zarathustra (man as a
bridge between animal and
Superman)
• Call to break free from conservative
past toward modern, liberated present
• All members were architecture
students
• Saw the primal in the urban
environment
• Main theme of modern anxiety and
chaos
• Kirchner believed the war would
destroy his creative powers (he was
declared unfit for service)
• Committed suicide in 1938 following
his inclusion in Hitler’s “Degenerate
Artists”
Kirchner, Self-Portrait as a Soldier, 1915, oil
37. The Bridge - “The Metropolitan Type” (Georg Simmel, 1903)
• Germany rapidly
industrializing
• Bustling
shopping district
in Dresden
• Middle-class
citizens
• Lack of
architecture
• The city as
chaotic,
primitive,
alienating
• Masklike faces
of women
• Blasé attitude to
protect oneself
from threatening
external forces
• Distorted space
• Garish colors
• Bold, blue line
connects and
separate
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
Street, Dresden, 1908, oil
Walker Evans &
James Agee
from Many Are Called,
published 1966 (taken late
1930s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfZu--psur8
http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/3/63
38. 1909 – The Futurist Manifesto is Published
• F.T. Marinetti self-appointed
leader
• Celebrated progress &
industrialization
• Glorified speed,
violence, war, anarchy,
misogyny
• Attacked middle class
values
• Aligned with Fascist
movement in Italy
• Experimented with new
media (photo, film,
performance)
• First movement to
utilize mass culture
(newspaper) to
promote itself
The Terminator, 1984
a speeding automobile…is
more beautiful than the victory
of Samothrace”
Enrico Prampolini, Portrait of Marinetti, 1925
40. Futurist Strategies
• Explored synesthesia – breaking
down of boundaries between
different senses (sight, sound, etc)
• Explored kinesthesia – sense of
body position, movement, weight
• Aligned itself with technologies of
vision and representation, such as
chronophotography
• To overcome media specificity
(painting, sculpture, film, music and
literature as static separate things)
Thais, 1916, Bragaglia (director)
only surviving full-length Futurist film
Giacomo Balla, Girl Running on a Balcony, 1912, oil
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA6znP94GHg
41. Futurism & Photography
• Marey’s studies of the body in
space—an early form of stroboscopy
(using interrupted light to show slow
motion)
• Marey a physiologist who, once seeing
Muybridge’s work in stop motion, turned
to photography vs. graphics as a way of
recording motion
• Developed a photographic gun with a
circular plate that created near
instantaneous photos from a single
viewpoint, then used a slotted disk in
front of the camera to break up
movement in set intervals registered on
a single photographic plate
• To avoid superimposition of the images,
the subjects were clothed totally in black,
and wore metal-studded strips on their
arms and legs
Etienne-Jules Marey, Figure in Motion, 1880s
42. FreeWord
Poetry
• From Zang Tumn Tuum, 1914, first
collection
• Typographic and orthographic (a
correct writing system (punctuation,
spelling, etc) for written language)
experimentation
• An expression of Marinetti’s
experience of the sights, sounds,
smells of Tripoli (capital of Libya)
• Purely phonetic, textual, graphic
performance, ontamontapoeic in
nature
http://www.ubu.com/sound/marinetti.html Marinetti, Dune, Parole in Libertà, score, 1914
43. Close Read: 1903
Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau), 1892
44. Primitivism & The Female Nude
• a revision of Manet’s
Olympia
• flips scene (spirit
instead of Laura)
• averts eyes of
Teha’amana
(adolescent Tahitian
wife) vs. direct gaze
so that she is looked
upon not looking at
us
• rotates her body to
expose buttocks
(submissive vs. in
control)
• “dream of sexual
mastery”, both
“desire and dread of
feminine sexuality”
(Art Since 1900)
• Noa Noa, ca. 1895
• “The gaze”
Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau), 1892
45. The Female Nude
From Goddess
(Courtesan?)
to Concubine
to Prostitute
Titian
Venus
Of
Urbino
Ingres, Odalisque
Manet, Olympia
46. Matisse & Primitivism
Matisse’s Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra, 1907
• subtitle added decades
later, recalls trip to N. Africa
(Biskra)
• admired African art’s
“inverted planes and
proportions
• palm fronds echo contours
of body
• highly criticized during
exhibition at Salon des
Independents in 1907
“If I met such a woman in the street, I should run away in
terror. Above all I do not create a human, I make a picture.” -
Matisse
