Early20thpost 1

1901 Pablo Picasso Self-Portrait 1901

Kandinsky, Improvisation 28
Founder of the “Blue Rider” school of German Expressionism
Representative elements of art eliminated: birth of abstract art
Subconscious sensations in art
Titles inspired by musical compositions
Dominant black lines broadly play horizontally, vertically, diagonally
Lines define space, color added at intervals around lines

Kirchner, Street, Dresden
Founder of “The Bridge” a German Expressionist movement that saw itself as a bridge between traditional and modern art
Jarring and dissonant colors and shapes, clashing colors
Confrontational art
Ghoulish figures, seemingly fashionably dressed but in reality they appear threatening
Tilted perspective
Bright pink street offset by darker sinister figures
Paint thickly applied in broad brushstrokes

1906 'Rouault was a deeply religious man, considered by some to be the greatest religious artist of the 20th century. The terrible compassion with which he shows his wretched creatures makes a powerful impression. A savage indictment of human cruelty; she is a travesty of femininity although poverty drives her still to prance miserably before her mirror in hope of work. Yet the picture does not depress but holds out hope of redemption. This work is for Rouault a profoundly moral one. She is a sad female version of his tortured Christ, a figure mocked and scorned, held in disrepute.' From: D Solle, Great Women of the Bible in Art and Literature (Eerdmans 1994)

"Then came the awesome Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, the shaker of the art world (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Picasso was a little afraid of the painting and didn't show it except to a small circle of friends until 1916, long after he had completed his early Cubist pictures. Cubism is essentially the fragmenting of three-dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining so that shapes and parts of the human anatomy are seen from the front and back at the same time. The style was created by Picasso in tandem with his great friend Georges Braque , and at times, the works were so alike it was hard for each artist quickly to identify their own. The two were so close for several years that Picasso took to calling Braque, "ma femme" or "my wife," described the relationship as one of two mountaineers roped together, and in some correspondence they refer to each other as "Orville and Wilbur" for they knew how profound their invention of Cubism was.

Picasso, Gertrude Stein 1906
Famed patron of the arts in Paris
Said to have posed 80 times for the painting
Influence of ancient sculpture, African abstraction, Cézanne
Beginnings of Cubism seen in the angularity of the image
Heavy-lidded eyes, mask-like face
Head painted separately and not from life. Picasso was asked it if looked like Stein. He responded, “It will.”

"Then came the awesome Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, the shaker of the art world (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Picasso was a little afraid of the painting and didn't show it except to a small circle of friends until 1916, long after he had completed his early Cubist pictures. Cubism is essentially the fragmenting of three-dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining so that shapes and parts of the human anatomy are seen from the front and back at the same time. The style was created by Picasso in tandem with his great friend Georges Braque , and at times, the works were so alike it was hard for each artist quickly to identify their own. The two were so close for several years that Picasso took to calling Braque, "ma femme" or "my wife," described the relationship as one of two mountaineers roped together, and in some correspondence they refer to each other as "Orville and Wilbur" for they knew how profound their invention of Cubism was.

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
First cubist painting
Heavily influenced by Cézanne, African art
Five prostitutes from Avignon Street in Barcelona
No movement, an indication that one is standing in a doorframe, one is seated near a table with a still life
Most are posing for customers in a living room
Three on left: more conservative; other two: more radical, reflects the split in Picasso
Multiple views of each person, all seen at the same time: face seen from side, below, frontally, all from different perspectives
Angular wedges act like facets
Shaded for three-dimensionality

Georges Braque, Piano and Mandola (Piano et mandore), winter 1909–10 Picasso, Accordionist, 1909-1910

Braque, The Portuguese, 1911
Each object has a fragment of surfaces
Simultaneously juxtapose different aspects under various angles
Uniform harmony of color: shadings of monochromatic tones
Man holding a guitar, elements of the composition have to be reconstructed
Cubist interest in using letters and numbers which add and detract from “the meaning” of the work
Painting seems to ask you to decode it, but resists a firm conclusion

1910 1911

Braque, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe and Glass, 1913
A collage: strips of paper roughly and oddly cut
Charcoal drawing beneath the paper
Some of the paper is newspaper with printed words to entice interpretation
Some papers have the charcoal drawing continued into their surface
The pipe is not drawn, but cut out of brown paper

Picasso, Guernica
Painted for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair
Picasso rarely concerned with politics in his art
Guernica bombed 26 April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War
Town of 7000 with no military infrastructure, 70% of town destroyed
News shocked the world
Bull: Minotaur, symbol of violence; blood of the bull symbolic of sacrifice; bull symbolic of Spain herself
Influence of Grünewald
Gaping mouth, bared teeth, tongue sticking out
Dagger like forms
Pietà: stigmata on the Child, ladder of the crucifixion behind
Horse: seems to have newsprint on it
Horse is a pyramid shape within an overall pyramid composition
Fallen soldier with broken sword indicates futility of war
Done in black and white to simulate news photo or newspaper print
Largest painting he ever did

1937 The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? When the rebellion began, the legally elected and democratic republican government of Spain appointed me director of the Prado Museum, a post which I immediately accepted. In the panel on which I am working which I shall call Guernica , and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death...

Futurism
Begun in 1909 in Italy
An interpretation of Cubism
Saw artistic heritage of Italy as a strangulation of contemporary art
Glorified machines, action, adventure, World War

Duchamp, 1912

Boccioni, 1913 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
“ Break open the figure and enclose it in its environment”
Figure appears to disappear behind a blur of movement
Figure dynamically walking in space
cf. Nike of Samothrace

Futurists
Machine Romanticism
Anti-pacifist (stultification of society)
Unique Forms of Continuity

De Stijl
The Style, begun in 1917
Natural outgrowth of Cubism to its most analytical
Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944)
Renounced all representation in paintings
Concentrated on a severely limited palette and series of shapes
Primary colors: red, yellow and blue
Neutrals: black, white, grey
All forms at right angles
Balance of composition

Mondrian imposed rigorous constraints on himself, using only primary colors, black and white, and straight-sided forms. His theories and his art are a triumphant vindication of austerity. Diamond Painting in Red, Yellow, and Blue (c. 1921-25; 143 x 142 cm (56 1/4 x 56 in)) appears to be devoid of three-dimensional space, but it is in fact an immensely dynamic picture. The great shapes are dense with their chromatic tension. The varying thicknesses of the black borders contain them in perfect balance. They integrate themselves continually as we watch, keeping us constantly interested. We sense that this is a vision of the way things are intended to be, but never are.

Composition No. 10 1939-42

The Schroder House, Utrecht Gerrit Rietveld architect, at Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1924 to 1925

De Stijl
Rietveld, Schroder House, Utrecht, Netherlands
Architectural interpretation of a DeStijl painting
Colors in conformity with DeStijl paintings
Private rooms on bottom floor
Living room upstairs
Designed with sliding partitions to open or close space
Shifting free-floating interior
Large flat areas of space define exterior
Vertical flat columns of color break up exterior white spaces

Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915
Suprematism
Concerned with pure form
Very early example of the artist’s work, discarding figuration
Non-objective reality
“ The supremacy of pure feeling”
Geometric patterns dominate on a white ground
Universal accessibility of abstract art
Arrangement of geometric planes suggests airplane movement
Modern Russian Art

Naum Gabo, Column 1920 -21
Constructivism
Used synthetic materials: glass, plastic, metal
Industrial design methods
Forgoes traditional sculpture: stone or bronze
Opens up column’s structure, see into interior
Viewer can experience interior of volume of space
Two intersecting planes rise up through the middle
Vertical and horizontal elements balanced by circular looping forms

Tatlin, Monument to the Third International
Design principles based on inner behavior and loading capacities of a diverse assemblage of material
Formal response to Cubism, Futurism
Experimented with glass, iron, sheet metal, wood
Believed that non-objective art was the ideal for a new society, free of past symbolism
Honors the Russian Revolution of 1917
Huge glass and iron building that would have been world’s largest
Center of Moscow, propaganda and news center for the Soviet Union
Axis pointed to star Polaris: symbol of universal humanity
Three geometrically shaped chambers were to rotate around a central axis inside a titled spiral cage
Each chamber housed a facility for a different kind of government activity
Each rotated at a different speed
Bottom: glass structure for lectures and meetings, rotated once a year
Middle: room intended for administrative needs, rotated monthly
Top: information center rotated daily
Existed only as a metal and wooden model, now lost or destroyed
Lacks a main façade; seems to burrow into the earth

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919-20

Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915
Suprematism
Concerned with pure form
Very early example of the artist’s work, discarding figuration
Non-objective reality
“ The supremacy of pure feeling”
Geometric patterns dominate on a white ground
Universal accessibility of abstract art
Arrangement of geometric planes suggests airplane movement
Modern Russian Art

Malevich 1918 White paintings

Kasimir Malevich, White Cross

Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism

Ready mades

Untitled (Medici Boy) 1942-52 Grand Hotel Semiramis 1950

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59 Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955

Dada
Movement begins in 1916 in Zurich
Dada means hobbyhorse(? Maybe)
Movement essentially merges into Surrealism by 1924
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain
A ready-made
American Society of Independent Artists sponsored a show that any artist who paid $6 could enter; the show was without a panel of experts; Fountain was refused
A fixture from the JL Mott Iron Works company, signed it R Mutt
Humorous reference to comic strip Mutt and Jeff
Art is not in the artist’s creation, but in his selection of an object as a work of art
Ironic title: few women would have known what this was or had seen it before

Marcel Duchamp “ Fountain”, 1917

Dada
Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
Diptych, but one panel is placed above the other
Females and males separated
Top: female exhales a gas; three strips of gauze in her sigh reveal this
She is a motor fueled by a “love gasoline”
Bottom: nine bachelors below in different costumes; shapes based on forms of uniformed Frenchmen: policemen, bellboys, priest, undertakers, etc.
Wheel resembles a chocolate grinder, a symbol of masturbation
Strip-tease is a spectacle
Sent to the Brooklyn Museum on exhibit, on the way back the glass panels were shattered. Duchamp glued the pieces together and proclaimed it as complete!

Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915-23

Dada
Kurt Schwitters, (1887 –1948)
Merz, 1921
Bits of paper pieced together from garbage Schwitters found
Found objects collaged together
Signed and dates as if it were a conventional painting

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through Germany’s Last Wiemar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch , 1919

The Armory Show
Armory Show of 1913 introduced European modern art to an American audience
Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase
Stieglitz established a gallery to showcase photography as an art form, and bring to America avant-garde European artists
Cubist painting, Futurist inspired
Most famous painting of the Armory Show, a succès de scandale
Earth tones
Person seen in profile descending stairs
Stairs more realistically rendered than the figure
Figure not recognizably nude

Surrealism
Breton proposes the unification of the subconscious with the conscious
Intended to be a total liberation of the mind
2 basic avenues of interpretation:Realistic objects (Dali, Magritte) and the so-called automatic surrealists who abstracted the real (Arp, Miro)
Imagery of dreams influenced by psychology, esp. Freud.
Emphasis in literature on automatic writing

Nostalgia of the Infinite, 1913-14 Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978) "De Chirico is often said to have used Renaissance space in his pictures, but as Rubin points out, this is a myth. De Chirican perspective was not meant to set the viewer in a secure, measurable space. It was a means of distorting the view and disquieting the eye. Instead of one vanishing point in his architectonic masterpiece, The Melancholy of Departure , 1914 there are six, none "correct." This cloning of viewpoints acts in a way analogous to Cubism. It jams the sense of illusionary depth and delivers the surface to the rule of the flat shape, which was the quintessential modernist strategy. In color, in tonal structure and in its contradictory lighting, Rubin argues, de Chirico's style up to 1918 "was as alien to its supposed classical, fifteenth-century models as it was dependent on the Parisian painting of its own moment."

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

Song of Love, 1914

Andre Breton, 1896 - 1966 Breton joined first in 1916 the Dadaist group, but after various quarrels continued his march forward: " Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the road." He turned then to Surrealism and cofounded with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault the review Littérature . Very important for his literary work were his wartime meetings with Apollinaire. His MANIFESTE DU SURRÉALISME was published in 1924. Influenced by psychological theories, Breton defined Surrealism as " pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In the Second Manifesto Breton stated that the surrealists strive to attain a "mental vantage-point (point de l'esprit) from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, will no longer be perceived as contradictions .“ Breton and his colleagues believed that the springs of personal freedom and social liberation lay in the unconscious mind. They found examples from the works of such painters as Hieronymus Bosch and James Ensor and from the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry - and from the revolutionary thinking of Karl Marx. The Surrealist movement was from the beginning in a constant state of change or conflict, but its major periodicals, La Révolution surréaliste (1924-30) and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930-33), channeled cooperation and also spread ideas beyond France.

Surrealism
Surrealism Manifesto appeared in 1924
Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924
Painting and sculpture together
Nightingale, a harmless bird, frightens two figures, one collapses
A third is a huddling female form reaching for a three-dimensional bell
Clearly drawn shapes, but oddly juxtaposed
Three-dimensional gate could swing closed, but would not enclose two figures
Strange house-like box with a lever is the stage for a painted figure which reaches for a button
Button not attached to anything

Elephant of the Celebes, 1921

Europe After the Rain, 1940-42

The Anti-Pope, 1941-42

Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989), Persistence of Memory, 1931
Hallucinatory, illusionistic, mysterious
Time is unfathomable
Emptiness, barrenness, uninhabited plane
Horizon drifts off endlessly
Irony of the softness of watches, which are supposed to be hard and keep crisp movements
One watch is covered with bugs in a patterned design
Bone-like features, maybe Dalí’s caricature
Hard outline of water and reflection
Sharply drawn, clear vision of features
Dead tree, but how could it ever grow on a solid block?
Titles often add to the confusion, irony, interest and symbolism

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, 1936

Rene Magritte, 1898 - 1867 The fascinating and challenging images in Magritte's works stem from revelations of the mystery of the visible world. To him this world was a more than adequate source of lucid revelations, so that he did not need to draw on dreams, hallucinations, occult phenomena, cabalism. Nonetheless, preconsciousness - that is, the state before and during waking up - always played an important role in his work.
Magritte, The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images
“ This is not a pipe.” It is a picture of a pipe
Irony of contrasting images and titles
Clearly and precisely drawn
Firm three-dimensionality hovering in space

The Human Condition, 1934

The Son of Man, 1964

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954),
Two Fridas
Twin figures on a low bench
Barren landscape
Right: simple Mexican costume of Indian origin
Left: wedding dress
Two images express contradictory forces in Mexican feelings toward European and Native American traditions
Influence of folk art
Exposed hearts with arteries connect them
One artery ends in forceps spilling blood on dress, the other artery ends in a portrait of her husband as a child

Self portrait, 1926

A few small snips, 1935

Constellations, 1938 (linocut) Jean Arp (1887-1966)

Human Concretion, 1933

Joan Miro (1893 – 1983) Reveled in fantasy Biomorphic, carnival like shapes often inhabit his works The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers (from the Constellation series) . July 23, 1941

The Birth of the World 1925

Birthday, 1915 I and the Village, 1911 Marc Chagall (1887-1985) Personal mythology with childlike frankness Treasury of Russian Folklore

Paul Klee (1879 – 1940)
Taught at the Bauhaus
Deeply interested in the art of children
Combined deceptively simple drawings with sophisticated wit
Senecio, 1922

Ad Parnassum, 1932

Gallery 291
Stieglitz established a gallery to showcase photography as an art form, and bring to America avant-garde European artists
Stieglitz, Steerage
Voyage to Europe in 1907, saw steerage passengers allowed out for air
Moved around the ship to frame the composition
People unaware of the photographer, acting in a natural way
Photograph framed by natural horizontals, verticals, and diagonals of mast, stairs, walkways and funnels
Complexity of black, white and grey tones

Gallery 291
Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, Night, 1929
Stieglitz guided her career, exhibited her work at 291, then married her
Largeness of simple forms
Looming monolithic presence
Energy of lights of city
Influence of Cubism in shapes
Flatness and tilted perspective

Alfred Steiglitz, 1907

Georgia O'Keeffe , 1921 Georgia O'Keeffe , 1918

East River from the Thirtieth Story of the Shelton Hotel, 1928

Georgia O'Keeffe on the Portal, Ghost Ranch 1964

Red, White, and Blue , 1931

Black Cross, New Mexico, 1929 "I saw the crosses so often — and often in unexpected places — like a thin dark veil of the Catholic church spread over the New Mexico landscape," said Georgia O’Keeffe of the Southwestern territory near Taos , where she would eventually settle. A member of the circle of avant-garde artists who exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s New York gallery, 291, O’Keeffe married Stieglitz in 1924. She made her first visit to New Mexico in 1929. During late-night walks in the desert, she encountered mysterious crosses, one of which she transformed in Black Cross, New Mexico. These sacred monuments were probably erected near remote chapels (moradas) by secret Catholic lay brotherhoods called Penitentes.

Red Canna c. 1923

Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV , 1930 Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI , 1930

The Depression
Lange, Migrant Mother
Commissioned by the US Government to photograph the Great Depression
Came upon a deserted campground with a mother and her children living on frozen peas and dead birds
Two children turn away so we can concentrate on the mother’s face
Infant wrapped in rags
Look on face: strength, worry, concern, fear
Documentary Photography

Jacob Lawrence, Migration of the Negro 1941
Series depicts the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to industrial North around World War I.
Sixty panels in all
Trains seen as the link the series, appearing in first and last paintings
Improved social conditions of the North, comes at a price of overcrowding and prejudice
Flattened grey background with tilted perspective
Cubist shapes
Few brushstrokes indicate facial features
Little detail, simplicity and directness of message

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks
Motion is stopped, time suspended
A solitary diner with huge plate glass windows and no visible street entrance
Man and woman almost, but do not, touch
Evocative lighting
Vacant streets and storefronts
Little communication
People alone in a modern world
Abstract emptiness of much of the painting
Hawk: a bird that preys on others

Nighthawks, 1942

The Depression
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930
Expressions of disapproval
Austere costumes, bibbed overalls, starched shirts
Rural people
Window curtains echoed in dress of woman
Pitchfork reflected in jeans and shirt of farmer
Represents types artist knew his whole life
Clear, precise, realistic drawing

Bruce Thiher is the current tenant of the house in Eldon, Iowa, that served as the backdrop of American Gothic .

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Early20thpost 1

by bassmanb on Apr 19, 2010

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