Week 3 Lecture, 20th Century
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The document provides an overview of art history from 1911-1917, covering the development of Cubism, Dada, abstraction, and other modern art movements. It discusses key artists and works, including Picasso and Braque's experiments with Cubism, Duchamp's readymades, Malevich's suprematist paintings, and Mondrian's transition to pure abstraction through his Neoplastic style. The document also covers the origins of Dada in Zurich during World War I and Alfred Stieglitz's promotion of modernist photography in America through his journal Camera Work.
![1911 – Cubism: Closing the Curtain on the Window to the World ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],Unknown, Ideal City with a fountain and statues of the virtues , 1500 Cezanne, Bibemus Quarry , 1895 “ 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 passage](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Week 3 Lecture, 20th Century
- 1. History of 20 th Century Art Week 3 1911-1919
- 14. dada DADA DADA Dada signified nothing, it is nothing, nothing nothing -Francis Picabia, 1915 Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance , 1916-17
- 15. Class Activity “ If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases [it] creates a new image of the unit of length.” –Duchamp Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages , 1913-14
- 20. From the Window to the Frame Albrecht Durer, from Four Books on Human Proportions , 1528 Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10 , 1939
Editor's Notes
- 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 20 th 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 20 th 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 20 th century.