Lecture, 1911-19
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1) Cubism emerged in the early 20th century, pioneered by Picasso and Braque, breaking from single-point perspective and representing objects from multiple views. 2) Duchamp further challenged notions of art with his "readymades" - mass produced objects designated as art by the artist simply choosing them. 3) Dada emerged during World War 1 as an anti-war movement embracing nonsense and chance procedures. Key figures included Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp in Zurich cabarets.
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Lecture, 1911-19
- 1. History of 20th Century Art Week 3 1911-1919
- 2. World War I The Shock of the New: The Powers that Be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frZieIjF18g
- 3. The Image and the Idea: Abstract & Conceptual Art Robert Delaunay, The First Disk, 1913-14 Duchamp, Fountain 1917 readymade (porcelain)
- 4. 1911 – Cubism: Closing the Curtain on the Window to the World Unknown, Ideal City with a fountain and statues of the virtues, 1500 Cezanne, Bibemus Quarry, 1895 passage • In the late 19th century, artists (Cezanne et al) begin to dismantle illusionistic space • Cezanne’s interest in the geometric foundations of forms will influence Cubism • Picasso & Braque begin to experiment with this in 1911 “It [Cézanne's impact] was more than an influence, it was an invitation. Cézanne was the first to have broken away from erudite, mechanized perspective…” - Georges Braque, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism
- 5. The Process of Looking: Kahnweiler’s Account • Cubism tried to unify the pictorial object by reconciling opposites, the depicted volumes of real objects and the flatness and shape of the canvas (Analytical Cubism) • Heighten the continuity of the canvas plane • Banished color so that they could emphasize shading (gray or tonal scale) • This created the lowest possible relief to heighten the recognition of depicted volume on a flat surface • To reduce painting to its essential elements—“autonomy and logic of the picture object” • Looking from multiple perspectives (composite) vs. one single (fixed) perspective Pablo Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910
- 6. Braque & Picasso Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911 Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), 1910
- 7. Georges Braque • Possibly originated from Braque’s memories of a Portuguese musician from Marseilles • Reduced color palette- ochers and umbers, silver, copper • Shallow planes set parallel to the picture surface (“as though a roller had pressed out the volume of the bodies” – Art Since 1900) • No consistent light source • Slight modeling through tints & shadows • Shapes also indicated by edges of form • As seen from multiple perspectives • Integration of text emphasizes flattened space (recalls posters hanging in dance halls & cafes) Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911
- 8. Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912
- 9. Pictures as Puzzles • Synthetic Cubism • First introduced by Braque (using same material, oilcloth) • Addition of actual collaged objects (rope & oilcloth) achieves total flattening of space • Some recognizable objects (knife, lemon, napkin, glass, pipe) • “JOU” refers either to the French word for game or newspaper (“journal”) • Chair caning indicates glass tabletop (as if looking through) • Shape of canvas reinforces tabletop shape (and resembles ship’s port hole) • Tension between suggested depth (tactile) and flatness (visual) • Overturns (or makes transparent?) traditional still life painting Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 Chardin Still Life with Pipe and Jug 1737
- 10. Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze, 1912 1912 – Cubist collage invented
- 11. 1912 – Cubist collage invented vs. DOG Icon Symbol Picasso, Violin, 1912, drawing/collage Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze, 1912
- 12. 1914 – The Lessons of Cubism: Tatlin & Duchamp Find the Found Object • Tatlin’s Constructions & Duchamp’s Readymades transform Cubist collage • Both anticipate a new world of mass-produced commodities made possible by industrialization • Tatlin involved in Cubo-Futurist avant-garde; went to Paris in 1914, saw Picasso’s constructions, and begins to make his own • Tatlin’s work departs from Duchamp in his interest in “truth to materials,” which will become Russian Constructivism Vladimir Tatlin Selection of Materials: Iron Stucco, Glass, Asphalt 1914 Man Ray Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy 1920-21 Rrose Selavy Precision Oculist
- 13. Marcel Duchamp • Prankster, provocateur, the consummate iconoclast • Dabbled in various styles (Cubo- Futurism) • Grew tired of “retinal art” because it privileged sight over mind • Disliked standards of artistic taste & bourgeois control of the arts • Work became series of questions about the nature of art, a “self-critique” or intellectual game Playing Chess, Pasadena Museum of Art, 1963 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No.2, 1912 Eadweard Muybridge Descending Stairs and Turning Around 1884-85
- 14. Art After Painting? • For Duchamp, painting had become inadequate and boring • A newly industrialized world demanded a new art • Art & utility/usefulness • Also intrigued by indifference in art • Inspired by Picabia, Roussel and their interest in art as form of negation and word play • Q: How does an artist represent this new culture of commodities in his/her work? Painting is over. Who’d do better than this propeller? Tell me, could you do that? – Duchamp to Brancusi, Leger @ Salon de la Locomotion Aerienne, 1912 A: The Readymade http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHp1zbW_IE8 The Alhambra. Sears Modern Homes Mail Order Catalog, 1920-25
- 15. The Readymade : appropriated product positioned as art….”He CHOSE it!” “Can one make works that are not works of art?” - Duchamp Traditional Art • Materials (painting, bronze/marble sculpture) • Made by single artist, attributed to that artist, expressive of that artist’s style & ideas (subjective) • One-of-a-kind • Non-utilitarian (not useful) • Decorative or of aesthetic value Readymade • Industrial materials • Anonymous creator (objective) • Mass-produced • Utilitarian or useful (once was) • Expressive of artist’s indifference (no aesthetic value?) Thomas Struth, Art Institue of Chicago, IL, Chicago, 1990 Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913
- 16. Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913
- 17. dada DADAD ADA Dada signified nothing, it is nothing, nothing nothing -Francis Picabia, 1915 Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17
- 18. 1916 – “A Farce of Nothingness”: Dada in Zurich • In response to WWI (Switzerland was neutral, a refuge for anti-war artists and bohemians) • International movement (Zurich, NYC, Paris, Berlin) in keeping with anti-nationalist spirit • No set practice or leader • Shared love of play, chance, absurdity, farce & radical experimentation • Involved in poetry, performance & ephemeral art making (many Dada works no longer exist) • Name has multiple meanings (Ball: “to Germans it [dada] is an indication of idiotic naivete and of a preoccupation with procreation and the baby carriage.” Emmy Hennings, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916 The Shock of the New: The Powers that Be, Robert Hughes, 1980 Restaurant “Meierei,” Zurich location of Cabaret Voltaire 1916 http://art.docuwat.ch/videos/?alternative=3&channel_id=17&skip=0&subpage=video&video_id=123
- 19. 1916 – “A Farce of Nothingness”: Dada in Zurich Hugo Ball, “Magical Bishop” costume Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916
- 20. Cabaret Voltaire • Named for the 18th century French satirist, Voltaire, who wrote Candide • Meant to be a “vaudevillian mockery of ‘the ideals of culture and of art’” • In performances, spoke in different languages, chanted, made noise with typewriters, drums, laughing, dancing, hiccupping • Ball gave the last performance dressed up as a “bishop” (in cardboard outfit, colored in blue, scarlet and white) and performed Karawane • Ball believed Janco’s masks Hugo Ball, “Magical Bishop” costume Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916 referred to ancient Greek and Japanese theater, they demanded a “tragic-absurd dance” http://www.ubu.com/sound/ball.html
- 21. Paul Klee’s “Miniature Sublime” • WWI Soldier • German Expressionism • Went to Tunis (in Tunisia, Northern Africa) and enamored with its light and color • Abstract reminiscence of his trip as colorful grid • Poem inscribed: Paul Klee “Once emerged…”, 1918 Once emerged from the gray of night that hard and costly and thick with fire the God-filled evening emerged and arches over Now toward the ether, showering in blue Vanishing over glaciers toward the wisdom of stars • The sublime
- 22. 1916 – American avant-garde photo receives an advocate in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work • By this time, Stieglitz known in U.S. and Europe, and his Gallery 291 in NYC had mounted exhibitions of Matisse, Picasso, & Picabia’s work • Also exhibited works by members of his Photo-Secessionist group (founded 1902) • First championed Pictorialist photography • When introduced to Strand’s work, he gave him exhibition at 291 and featured him in Camera Work •Began to favor more truthful & direct photographic aesthetic as seen in Strand’s cropped abstractions • “Straight Photography” and modernist art share aesthetic concerns Francis Picabia, C’est ici Stieglitz, 1915, illustration Paul Strand, Abstractions, Porch Shadows Connecticut, 1917
- 23. Paul Strand, Abstractions, Porch Shadows Connecticut, 1917
- 24. Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz, Sun’s Rays – Paula, Berlin, 1889
- 25. Pictorialist vs. Straight Photo Pictorialism • Early photographic movement • Imitated painting (as valid art form) • Often staged or manipulated • Used tricks like soft focus, greased lens, drawing on negative, etc… Edward Steichen, Rodin and the Thinker, 1902 Straight Photo • Even present in this early work by Stieglitz • Image has clarity, lacks melodrama • Light through window mimics photographic process • Three of same photo suggest mechanical reproduction & serial image Alfred Stieglitz, Sun’s Rays – Paula, Berlin, 1889
- 26. From the Window to the Frame Albrecht Durer, from Four Books on Human Proportions, 1528 Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10, 1939
- 27. 1917a – Mondrian discovers abstraction & DeStijl • Moves to Paris in 1912 to study Cubism • Extended the Cubist grid to pure abstraction • Considered the abstract form symbolic of spiritual transcendence • Distilled recognizable forms to intersecting vertical & horizontal lines (as “immutable” truths) • The grid destroys hierarchy in the image (order of importance) • A tension/dialectic of opposites in horizontals and verticals • This work still doesn’t fulfill his aims because it still upholds the traditional figure-ground composition Piet Mondrian, Grey Tree, 1911, oil Mondrian, Composition in Line, 1917, oil
- 28. Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Red, Black, Blue and Grey, 1920, oil
- 29. Neoplasticism • Represents his mature style, Neoplasticism • How does he resolve the figure-ground problem? • Superimposed planes were eliminated (crossed lines) • Space divided into various rectangles, some different shades of white, some in color • The modular grid was developed & determined by the canvas proportions (allover composition) • Primary colors added to grid • Non-hierarchical Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Red, Black Blue and Grey, 1920, oil
- 30. DeStijl • The DeStijl publication had been founded in 1917 by painters and poets sympathetic to Mondrian’s ideas (including Theo van Doesburg) DeStijl album cover, The White Stripes, 2000 • Interested in the application of Mondrian’s theory of Neoplasticism to utopian living spaces • To reduce architecture to its most basic forms • Likened to painting because of planar units in each Spatial Color Composition for an Exhibition, Berlin, 1923, DeStijl
- 31. Gerrit Rietveld Red and Blue Chair 1917-18 De Stijl
Editor's Notes
- How did artists continue to experiment and play with visual forms and materials during the second decade of the 20th century?
- How did the devastation of WWI affect art and artists during this period? World War I began and ended during this decade, from 1914-1918 and as you know, had a tremendous influence on world history. It pitted the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) against the Allies (Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, and eventually, the U.S.). Centered on Europe where we are focusing much of our attention, it caused the deaths of over 9 million and wounded over 20 million, largely a result of improvements in the machinery of war, which had the ability to inflict mass casualties and ghastly injuries. Mainly made up of trench warfare using machine guns, tanks and chemical weapons, World War I ushered in modern warfare. Imagine how this must have affected the artists working during this time who either served as soldiers (Paul Klee, Max Ernst), with many of them dying in training or on the battlefield (the Futurists Umberto Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia are a couple, Franz Marc the German Expressionist) or who saw friends and family return home gravely injured physically and mentally? How might this have affected what they produced? How could this catastrophic event have influenced the rather optimistic belief in the possibilities of industrialization and modernization that flourished at the start of the century?
- In your readings, you probably recognized two dominant artistic practices throughout 1911-19. It is during this decade that we see the first pure abstract paintings, but it is also during this decade that we see the first steps toward conceptual art, in the work of Marcel Duchamp. While these emphases on optical experience and form on one hand and art as an intellectual exercise or idea on the other may look totally different, I would argue that they are actually two sides of the same coin. Neither attempt to reproduce the visual world as it had been shown in art prior to 1900. Your book posits about Cubism, the first art movement we will discuss today that the artists and thinkers associated with it were interested in “the superiority of conceptual knowledge over perceptual realism.” They wanted to show us what could not be seen but only imagined, a kind of fourth dimension.
- Picasso returns his “borrowed” Iberian stoneheads to the Louvre from which they had been stolen by Pieret, Apollinaire’s secretary -Picasso’s early interest in Iberian and African heads nurtured his distortion of the form. It grew until he eventually fragmented the form altogether, analyzing its various components. Georges Braque began experimenting with Cubism first them began a collaboration with Picasso that would last from 1908 until 1914
- -Kahnweiler was Picasso’s dealer during the Cubist period, and wrote the most important early account of it, “The Rise of Cubism” in 1920—this is where “analytical cubism” was coined
- What is the iconic? -a conventional, formulaic style in which the image resembles the thing it portrays, no matter the style, even if abstract shapes, they serve as counterpart to object they depict (i.e. triangle for a torso) (vs. the symbolic—arbitrary signs that bear no visible or audible connection to the meanings or objects they refer to, i.e. “dog”
- Duchamp withdrew from the Cubist group when they rejected this work, Nude Descending a Staircase, and brothers (assoc. with this group_ encouraged him to withdraw this painting from the 1912 Salon des Independents. -Called “explosion in a Shingle factory”—this slur shows the influence of industrialization and factory produced goods -Then abandons painting, abandons Cubism, as he would later do with art, in part because of its tendency towards institutionalization—Cubism had become a doctrine, and this work was rejected by the group that est this doctrine
- What is art? (ontological) How do we know its art? (epistemological) Who determines what art is? (institutional) – Art Since 1900 Fountain was submitted to American Society of Independent. Artists for first exhibition on April 17. The show was not juried & Duchamp in charge of hanging committee. The show accepted all submissions but this one
- An international movement, “Dada”—means baby talk in German, “hobbyhorse” in French, mult meanings in diff languages – A rewriting of the arts, starting all over, beginning again with nonsense, like child’s play -Grew out of artist’s dissatisfaction with middle class values, conservative traditions in art making, the tragedy of WWI – in some cases, it emphasizes a nihilistic approach to art and life; also emphasizes chance and accident in making art. Hugely influential on later art movements, in particular AbEx, Pop Art movements in US. Many Dadaist works no longer exist. Emphasis on their ephemerality. -Dada as the anti-movement -advocated a distaste for beauty, “beauty is dead,” morality, “systems”, pictorialism or illusionism in ptg, “the new artist protests”, preservation of freedom, independence--“art is a private affair. The artist produces for himself” -also interested in the unconscious (Freud, Jung) – art for self-revelation and catharsis Hans Arp, Collage of Squares Arranged Acc to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17 -Dadaist formal exercise combines cubism, collage, futurism, readymade etc -cut small squares of commercial paper, drops them, and glues them in place -resistance to the egoism of expressionist art (in favor of anonymity, like Duchamp resisted the traditional elements of art – composition, authorship, etc)
- Like Duchamp, who was affiliated with Dada, these artists shared a dislike of schools and doctrines, fixed ways of doing anything, and bourgeois or middle class morality and propriety, church and state, and art market
- Following Ball’s departure, Dada was made into a more cohesive movement by Tristan Tzara who wrote a manifesto (in 1918), opened a gallery, and produced a publication, Dada
- Stieglitz enrolled as an engineering student in Berlin in 1882 and took a course in photochemistry Had no previous art training, no interest in the ‘art world’
- Overall, modern (avant-garde) artists no longer sought objectivity, a desire to accurately reproduce the external world, or as Duchamp calls it, the “retinal art” tradition. They either abstracted the form by breaking it up into geometric planes, like the Cubists, by turning it into a chaotic assemblage of bright brushstrokes, like the Fauves, or they favored complete nonobjectivity, as in the case of Mondrian above, and removed all representational forms in favor of pure abstraction. In a sense, the interest in the image beyond the window (like the woman in Durer’s print above) becomes an interest in the frame itself. What remains is the grid, the flat, rectangular, or square, form. As you have read, much early 20th century art, in keeping with true modernist self-reflexivity, explored this tension between image and frame. Remember Robert Storr’s definition of modernism: “Modernism…is that art that takes itself—its compositional techniques, methods of image making, physical presence, and constructive or destructive relation to the traditions of art—as its primary subject. Before modernist art is about anything else—an image, a symbol, the communication of an experience—it is about the logic and structure of the thing that carries meaning, and about how that thing came into being. In this respect, all modernist art is essentially abstract, even though only some modernist art looks it.” Abstraction, even pure abstraction, abounds during the second decade of the 20th century in the work of Mondrian, Malevich, Leger, Arp, and the Delaunays, among many others. It will continue to be a primary avenue for artistic exploration throughout the 20th century.