4. 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)
5. "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.
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7. "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.
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9. Georges Braque, Piano and Mandola (Piano et mandore), winter 1909–10 Picasso, Accordionist, 1909-1910
14. 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...
21. 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.
42. Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through Germany’s Last Wiemar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch , 1919
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46. 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."
49. 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.
66. 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
78. 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.
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