2. What is The Meaning of "Avant-Garde"?
• In fine art, the term "avant-garde" (from
the French for 'vanguard') is traditionally
used to describe any artist, group or style,
which is considered to be significantly ahead
of the majority in its technique, subject
matter, or application.
3. What is Cubism?
•Cubism is an art movement that made its
debut in 1907. Pioneered by Pablo Picasso
and Georges Braque, the style is
characterized by fragmented subject matter
deconstructed in such a way that it can be
viewed from multiple angles simultaneously.
4. Key Ideas & Accomplishments
• The artists abandoned perspective, which had been used to
depict space since the Renaissance, and they also turned
away from the realistic modeling of figures.
• Cubists explored open form, piercing figures and objects by
letting the space flow through them, blending background
into foreground, and showing objects from various angles.
Some historians have argued that these innovations
represent a response to the changing experience of space,
movement, and time in the modern world. This first phase of
the movement was called Analytic Cubism.
5. Artworks and Artists of Cubism
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
(1907)
Artist: Pablo Picasso
6. •Picasso's painting was shocking even to his
closest artist friends both for its content and for
its formal experimentation.
•The subject matter of nude women was not in
itself unusual, but the fact that Picasso painted
the women as prostitutes in aggressively sexual
postures was novel.
8. • In this painting, Braque shows the influence of Picasso's
Les Demoiselles of the previous year and the work of
Paul Cézanne.
• From Cézanne, he adapted the uni-directional, uniform
brushwork, and flat spacing, while from Picasso he took
the radical simplification of form and use of geometric
shapes to define objects.
• There is, for example, no horizon line and no use of
traditional shading to add depth to objects, so that the
houses and the landscape all seem to overlap and to
occupy the foreground of the picture plane.
10. • By 1909, Picasso and Braque were collaborating, painting largely
interior scenes that included references to music, such as musical
instruments or sheet music.
• In this early example of Analytic Cubism, Braque was
experimenting further with shallow spacing by reducing the color
palette to neutral browns and grays that further flatten out the
space.
• The piece is also indicative of Braque's attempts to show the
same item from different points of view.
• Some shading is used to create an impression of bas-relief with
the various geometric shapes seeming to overlap slightly.
• Musical instruments such as guitars, violins, and clarinets show
up frequently in Cubist paintings, particularly in the works of
Braque who trained as a musician.
12. • Futurism is one of the most important Italian avant-
garde movements of the 20th century.
• It was founded in Milan by the Italian poet Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti who launched the Futurist
Manifesto on 5 February 1909. That moment saw the
birth of the Futurists, a small group of radical Italian
artists working just before the outbreak of the First
World War.
• Among modernist movements, the Futurists rejected
anything old and looked towards a new Italy. At that
period, the weight of the Italian cultural history was felt
as particularly oppressive in the country and the
Futurists were inspired to change it.
15. • This pioneering work launched Futurism
when it was exhibited in Milan in the 1911 Mostra
d'arte libera (Exhibition of free art). The painting
combined the brushstrokes and blurred forms of
Post-Impressionism with Cubism's fractured
representations.
• Originally entitled Il lavoro (Work), it depicts
the construction of Milan's new electrical power
plant. In the center of the frame, a large red horse
surges forward, as three men, their muscles
straining, try to guide and control it.
16. Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910 – 1911)
Artist: Carlo Carrà
17. •This painting commemorates the funeral
of Galli, an anarchist killed during strike
action. Hundreds, including women and
children, attended his funeral
procession, which was led by a cohort of
anarchists.
•The painting captures the moment that
police mounted on horseback attacked
the procession.
18. Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)
Artist: Giacomo Balla
19. •This humorous painting shows a woman, as she walks
her small black Dachshund down a city sidewalk.
• Cropped to an extreme close-up, the woman's feet,
along with the bottom folds of her black dress, as well
as the dog's feet, tail and floppy ears are multiplied
and depicted in varying degrees of transparency and
opacity.
•The fine metal leash becomes four parabolic curves
connecting the woman to the dog. This repetition and
replication of the moving elements creates a sense of
forward motion which is in opposition to the
pavement's diagonal lines.
23. • Goncharova was a leader of the Russian avant-garde and a
key figure in the Moscow Futurists.
• Here, she depicts a cyclist pedaling past storefronts which
display advertisement hoardings.
• The Russian Futurist fascination with print, text, and
typography can be seen in the bold letters on these
billboards. Translated, the words read "hat", "silk" and
"thread", along with an isolated "Я" which functions as an
artist's signature. The choice of these items probably reflects
Goncharova's interest in textiles and design and may relate
to her proto-feminist emphasis on the equal importance of
women's work.
24. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
Artist: Umberto Boccioni
25. •A man strides powerfully forwards, his
form aerodynamically deformed by the
speed at which he is traveling.
•Geometrically rendered, helmeted and
faceless with massive thighs and
shoulders but armless, the figure seems
both superhuman and robotic, a kind of
machine man of the modern age.
27. •Vibrantly colored, this kaleidoscope of whirling
diagonals, cones, and elliptical forms depicts the
amusements of Coney Island including its
famous rollercoaster, which the artist described
as "an intense arabesque its surging crowd and
the revolving machines generating... violent,
dangerous pleasures".
•The fragments of brightly colored lights, rides,
signs, and the Mardi Gras crowd create an
intoxicating feeling of celebration.
29. •This image is part of Sant'Elia's design for a
new city and this reflects the architect's
ideas of modernity.
•He expressed these in The Manifesto of
Futurist Architecture in 1914, writing that
"We must invent and rebuild our Futurist
city like an immense and tumultuous
shipyard, active, mobile, and everywhere
dynamic, and the Futurist house like a
gigantic machine".
31. •As a train travels diagonally towards the
viewer, it begins to dematerialize,
fracturing into elliptical and diagonal
planes of varying degrees of
transparency.
•The work conveys the experience of a
train passing by closely, reflecting the
overwhelming sounds, sights, and
motion.
33. • Ambrosi was a second-generation Futurist who
focused on Aeropittura (Aeropainting), a significant
theme within the movement throughout the 1930s.
• In this image he combines an aerial landscape of
Rome with the profile of Mussolini, which juts
heroically from the buildings and streets. This
represents Mussolini as part of the capital city, woven
into the fabric of the country and important to its
success. Many Futurists were closely associated with
Fascism and this image is clearly propagandistic in
tone.
34. Dada
•Dada was an art movement
formed during the First World
War in Zurich in negative
reaction to the horrors and folly
of the war.
37. • The drawing is one of a series of
mechanistic portraits and imagery
created by Picabia that, ironically, do not
celebrate modernity or progress, but,
like similar mechanistic works by
Duchamp, show that such subject
matter could provide an alternative to
traditional artistic symbolism.
39. • Ball designed this costume for his performance of the
sound-poem, "Karawane," in which nonsensical
syllables uttered in patterns created rhythm and
emotion, but nothing resembling any known
language.
• The resulting lack of sense was meant to reference the
inability of European powers to solve their diplomatic
problems through the use of rational discussion, thus
leading to World War I - equating the political
situation to the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel.
41. •Hans Arp made a series of collages
based on chance, where he would
stand above a sheet of paper,
dropping squares of contrasting
colored paper on the larger sheet's
surface, and then gluing the squares
wherever they fell onto the page.
43. •Duchamp was the first artist to use a readymade
and his choice of a urinal was guaranteed to
challenge and offend even his fellow artists.
•There is little manipulation of the urinal by the
artist other than to turn it upside-down and to
sign it with a fictitious name. By removing the
urinal from its everyday environment and
placing it in an art context, Duchamp was
questioning basic definitions of art as well as the
role of the artist in creating it.
44. LHOOQ – (1919)
Artist: Marcel Duchamp
•This work is a classic example of Dada
irreverence towards traditional art.
Duchamp transformed a cheap postcard
of the Mona Lisa (1517) painting, which
had only recently been returned to the
Louvre after it was stolen in 1911.
45.
46. Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar
Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany – (1919)
Artist: Hannah Höch
47. •Hannah Höch is known for her collages and
photomontages composed from newspaper and
magazine clippings as well as sewing and craft
designs often pulled from publications she
contributed to at the Ullstein Press.
•As part of Club Dada in Berlin, Hoch unabashedly
critiqued German culture by literally slicing apart
its imagery and reassembling it into vivid,
disjointed, emotional depictions of modern life.
48. The Spirit of our Time – (1920)
Artist: Raoul Hausmann
49. • This assemblage represents
Hausmann's disillusion with
the German government and
their inability to make the
changes needed to create a
better nation.
51. •Ernst's use of photomontage was less political
and more poetic than those of other German
Dadaists, creating images based on random
associations of juxtaposed images.
• He described his technique as the "systematic
exploitation of the chance or artificially provoked
confrontation of two or more mutually alien
realities on an obviously inappropriate level -
and the poetic spark that jumps across when
these realities approach each other".
55. •The random objects leave behind a
shadowy imprint that dissociates
them from their original context.
These works, with their often
strange combination of objects and
ghostly appearance, reflected the
Dada interest in chance and the
nonsensical.
