1. Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head
(Spirit of the Age,) 1920
mixed media (tape measure,
ruler, wallet, watch, tin cup, etc)
History of
20th
Century Art
1920 - 1929

2. 1920: “Art is Dead!” - Dada Fair held in Berlin
• Dada Berlin formed as
attack on bourgeois German
society
• Politically mobilized &
aligned with the Communist
party which was found in
Germany in 1919
• Shared distaste for earlier
20th
century avant-garde
movements (Expressionism
& spirituality, Cubism’s
emphasis on aesthetics,
Futurism & typography) ,
though influenced by them
• Revolutionized exhibition
practice by having a fair (“a
parody of the display of
commodities”)
• Photomontage emerges as
a major strategy to
deconstruct the image &
dismantle Weimar consumer
culture (driven by
commodity images and
advertizing)
Hoch and
Haussman
Dummy with a pig’s head
dressed as German officer

3. Hannah Hoch
• The “It Girl” of a circle of male artists in
Berlin Dada
• Demonstrates major tenets of Berlin
Dada (anti-aesthetic, illogical, non-
hierarchical, politically driven and left
wing)
• Images clipped and collaged together
with no apparent formal logic
• Grotesque juxtapositions, distortions of
scale
• To disrupt and make illegible mass-
produced images & texts (magazines,
etc)
• Inventory of major German figures
(Einstein, Friedrich Ebert, Kathe Kollwitz
(a German Expressionist artist), Marx,
Lenin) with Dada sayings written
throughout (“Dada is not an art trend”)
• Major Berlin Dadaists in lower right
quadrant, including Hoch above map of
European countries where women can
vote Hannah Hoch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife through
the Beer Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919
“..from an iconically rendered narrative to a purely structural
deployment of textual material” – Art Since 1900

4. Cubist Collage vs. Dada Photomontage
Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze, 1912
Hannah Hoch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife through
the Beer Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919

5. Heartfield, The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks
for Big Gifts. Motto: Millions Stand Behind Me!, from AIZ, No. 26, 1932

6. John Heartfield – A New Logic of Photomontage
• Also a Berlin Dadaist
• Anglicized his German name to protest
German nationalism and anti-British
sentiment during WWI
• Designer for AIZ (widely circulated
Communist publication); images
protested against emerging fascist
movements (particularly in Germany
before Hitler elected Chancellor)
• Developed more direct, aesthetically
cohesive photomontage technique
through airbrushing (vs. chaotic early
photomontage)
• As “communicative action” (toward just
democracies and seeking emancipation from
authoritative political systems)
• To appeal to working class, to mobilize
• Anonymous “fat cat” behind him, mocking
the Nazi salute as a plea for cash
(Nazism funded by big business to defeat
a Communist proletarian revolution) Heartfield, The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks
for Big Gifts. Motto: Millions Stand Behind Me!, from AIZ, No. 26, 1932

7. Gustav Klutsis,
Let us Fulfill the Plan of the
Great Projects
1930, lithograph poster
• Photomontage for Russian
voting poster
• Reads “Fulfilled plan, Great
work”
• Hand represents the
collective/mass subject
• Emphasis on the worker and
laborer in Communist Russia
and their political participation in
the electoral process
• Socialist propaganda in wake of
October 1917 Russian
Revolution and overthrow of the
monarchy

8. Dada in Film
Entr’acte
1924
By Rene Clair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnXdYxvBHf8

9. 1923 – The Bauhaus holds first
public
exhibition in Weimar Germany
• Like Berlin Dada, the Bauhaus begin with
the Weimar Republic in 1919 and ended with
it, in 1933 when Hitler shut it down
• Inspired by Arts & Crafts movement around
turn of the century (creative collab. between
art & industry)
• To unite fine & applied arts
(gesamtkunstwerk)
• Socialist and humanitarian organization;
championed the worker
• Walter Gropius its first director
• Viewed the Gothic cathedral as a precedent
and metaphor
• To rebuild the world after it had been
destroyed by war?
Together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure
of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture
and painting in one unity, and which will one day rise toward
heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal
symbol of a new faith. – Gropius, Bauhaus manifesto, 1919
Ruins of Cathedral of
St. Quentin, France,
1918
Lyonel Feininger
Cathedral of the Future
1919, woodcut

10. Kurt Schwitters
Merzbau: The Cathedral of
Erotic Misery
1923-
Hannover, Germany
"Becoming absorbed in art is like going to church."

11. Bauhaus – 1919 - 1922
• Focused on fundamentals of materials (natural) and arts
& crafts
• Two parts to curriculum: 1) instruction in craft workshops,
led by “workshop masters” (sculpture, carpentry, metal,
pottery, weaving, etc); 2) instruction in artistic “form
problems,” led by “form masters,” (Paul Klee, Kandinsky,
Itten)
• Early Form Masters (e.g. Itten, who taught Vorkers
course) examined the mystical qualities of natural forms,
the psychology of color, and used Old Master works as
models Johannes Itten, The Beginning, 1916
Paul Klee
Angelus Novus
1920

12. Bauhaus – 1923 on – From
Medievalist to Industrialist
• Laszlo Maholy-Nagy takes over Vorkers
course; school transformed into a
Constructivist model which embraced
new media and industrial technologies
• Maholy-Nagy self-taught, made
photomontages and kinetic metal
constructions with made-to-order parts
• To align art & industry; goal of functional,
inexpensive, and beautifully designed
products
• Made manifest in move to industrial city
of Dessau where transformed to an
“institute of design”
Walter Gropius, Bauhaus (exterior), 1925-26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVnF9A3azSA&feature=related LazloMaholy-Nagy,Light-SpaceModulator,1930

13. The Bauhaus Today
Marianne Brandt, Kandem table lamp for
Korting & Mathiesen, 1928
IKEA Forsa lamp
Mies van der Rohe, 860-880 Lakeshore Drive, 1948-51, Chicago

14. 1924 – Andre Breton publishes first issue of La Revolution Surrealiste
• Longest lasting artistic revolution in the
20th century, from 1920s-60s
• To invest everything in ordinary outer
life with poetry of the inner life, to make
the ordinary extraordinary
• Engaged in a study of how the
unconscious mind could be used to
affect reality
• Founded Bureau of Surrealist
Research in 1924; manifesto issued
same year
Surrealism proposes a gathering of the greatest possible
number of experimental elements, for a purpose that cannot yet
be perceived. All those who have the means to contribute…are
urgently requested to come forward: let them shine the light on
the genesis of invention, or propose a new system of psychic
investigation or freely criticize morality or simply entrust us with
their most curious dreams. – Bureau statement to press
Man Ray, Waking Dream Séance, 1924

15. The Circle of Influence
• Movement self-consciously rooted in history (art, literature, etc); Raphael & Dostoevsky
pictured above
• Also looked to non-traditional art forms (popular imagery, art of the insane – Hans Prinzhorn
published Artistry of the Mentally Ill in 1922)
• Indebted to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and in exploring subconscious desires,
however immoral, and the landscape of the mind
• Games and techniques for accessing the subconscious (automatism, frottage, fumage, etc)
Poe is Surrealist in adventure.
Baudelaire is Surrealist in
morality.
Rimbaud is Surrealist in the way
he lived, and elsewhere.
Mallarmé is Surrealist when he
is confiding.
Jarry is Surrealist in absinthe.
Nouveau is Surrealist in the
kiss.
-From Breton’s
Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924
Max Ernst, A Friends’ Reunion, 1922

16. Giorgio de Chirico
The Child’s Brain
1914, oil on canvas

17. Ernst, Two Children Are
Threatened by a Nightingale
1924
"First contact with hallucination.
Measles. Fear of death and the
annihilating powers. A fever-vision
provoked by an imitation mahogany
pane opposite his head, the grooves
of the wood taking successfully the
aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird's
head, a menacing nightingale, a
spinning top, and so on. Certainly
little Max took pleasure in being
afraid of these visions, and later
delivered himself voluntarily to
provoke hallucinations of the same
kind in looking obstinately at wood
panels, clouds, wallpapers,
unplastered walls, and so on." -
Ernst in his diaries

18. Surrealist Automatism
• Ernst called this “collage painting”
most important contribution to
surrealism
• Recalls fever-vision or
hallucination of a bird in wood
grain next to childhood bed while
sick as a child
• Recalls death of younger sister
when Ernst was 6yrs. old
• Nightingale represents ominous
presence (death) or hope?
• Faceless man (abducting child?)
reaches for doorknob attached to
frame (where does it lead?)
• Miro’s work shows a biomorphic
automatism
• Suggests organic forms (people
kissing) but introduces decorative
abstraction
Ernst, Two Children Are
Threatened by a Nightingale
1924
Joan Miro, The Kiss, 1924

19. Surrealism , Objective Chance & Doubling: The “Marvelous”
• Introduced in Breton’s
autobiographical novels, here
L’amour fou (Mad Love)
• Breton discovered this in a Parisian
flea market (found object)
• Recognized it as a fulfillment of an
automatic idea he was thinking of
cendrier Cendrillon (Cinderella
ashtray) & a poem he had written 10
yrs. earlier (a premonition?)
• The spoon infinitely redoubles itself
(spoon is a slipper with a slipper for
a heel and so on)
• Represents “objective chance” that
triggers a desire or something
already subconsciously known to the
person who discovers it (to Breton,
this desire was for love)
• Discovery of the object is a
fulfillment of that desire
• Could be read as a metaphor for a
woman (the shoe, the spoon as
womb)
“…beautiful as the chance encounter of a
sewing machine and an umbrella on a
dissecting table” – Lautreamont, 19th
century
Breton, Slipper-Spoon, 1934

20. The Hundred
Headless
Woman
Max Ernst, Elephant Celebes (detail), 1921
Man Ray, Untitled (published in
“La Revolution
Surrealiste”), 1924 Rene Magritte, Le Viol, 1934
Hans Bellmer, La Poupee, ca. 1935
How do representations of
the female form fulfill
surrealist aims?
Doubling & redoubling – an
extension of the fated sign in
“objective chance” & related to
Freud’s compulsion to repeat driven
by unconscious drives. The doubled
image expresses that desire.
Photographic tricks like the double
negative are well-suited for these
ideas.
“The uncanny” – doll
or automaton as
ghost of the living
body (a double)

21. Rene Magritte
& doubling
Rene Magritte,
The Human Condition, 1933
oil on canvas
• Belgian painter and
commercial artist
• Often combines
images with text
• Examines arbitrary
nature of words as
signs (“language
game”)
• Illusory nature of
images & language
• Simulacrum
(Foucault)
• What is the real
landscape? Is it all a
series of images with
no origin?

22. George Grosz, Pillars of Society, 1926

23. 1925 – New Objectivity in Weimar Germany
• First exhibition of these new “magical realists” in
1925
• Organized by Hartlaub, the curator, who
observed a return to figuration
• Signals end of German Expressionism & Dada
• Reflects political turmoil, social disorganization
and disillusionment in early years of Weimar
Republic
• Chronicled rise of fascism & corrupt ruling class
in Germany (Grosz)
• Captured thriving artist bohemian society
(Schad)
• Hartlaub recognized a tension between old world
classicism (Ingrismus - seen in Picasso’s work)
and Verismus (realism) in the above artists’
works
• Here all members of military, church and state
are corrupt & grotesquely rendered
• Borrow from Dadaist collage aesthetic combined
with painterly objectivity
George Grosz, Pillars of Society, 1926
I drew and painted from a spirit of contradiction, and
attempted in my work to convince the world that this world is
ugly, sick and mendacious’ - Grosz, 1924
Nazi officer
w/ apocalyptic
scene coming
from head
Politician with
steaming pile
of feces
Priest blessing
the army

24. Beckmann, Night, 1918-19

25. Max Beckmann
• Scene of ruthless torture at end of
WWI
• Expressionist angularity &
compressed space adds to sense
of aggression and violence
• German revolutionary on far right
revealing/concealing scene
• Grosz & Beckmann both German
soldiers in WWI; later turned
against war
• Would later be dubbed a
Degenerate Artist & forced to flee
(first to Amsterdam, then St.
Louis)
• Portraiture significant to New
Objectivity (subjectivity and
individualism)
Beckmann, Night, 1918-19
Beckmann
Self-Portrait
in Tuxedo
1927

26. New Objectivity Portraiture –
Christian Schad and Otto Dix
What we are showing is that art is still there…it is alive despite a cultural
situation that seems hostile to the essence of art as other epochs have
rarely been…thus artists disillusioned, sobered, often resigned to the
point of cynicism having nearly given up on themselves after a moment of
unbounded, nearly apocalyptic hope….have begun to ponder what is
most immediate, certain, and durable: truth and craft. – Hartlaub,
exhibition statement
Christian Schad, Self-Portrait, 1927
Schad, Agosta "the Winged One" and
Rasha "the Black Dove”, 1929

27. Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von
Harden, 1926
Dix: 'I must paint you! I simply must! … You
are representative of an entire epoch!'
Von Harden: 'So, you want to paint my
lacklustre eyes, my ornate ears, my long
nose, my thin lips; you want to paint my long
hands, my short legs, my big feet—things
which can only scare people off and delight
no-one?'
Dix: 'You have brilliantly characterized
yourself, and all that will lead to a portrait
representative of an epoch concerned not
with the outward beauty of a woman but
rather with her psychological condition.'

28. 1927 - Meanwhile, Across the Atlantic…
• American artists inspired by
“machine aesthetic”, particularly
Charles Sheeler & Ford Motors
• Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
opens in 1929 to showcase
modernist art in Europe
• Traced lineage to Post-
Impressionism (Cezanne, etc) &
Cubism
• Alfred Barr hired as first director;
school in radical European
modernism (DeStijl, Bauhaus, etc)
• MoMA’s exhibitions became the
standard for modern art museums
(focus on painting & sculpture, isolating the
works on pristine white walls)
Diagram of modern art movements 1890-1935, 1935

29. Precisionism
• Seems to support Duchamp’s statement that America’s greatest works are “her
plumbing and her bridges”
• NYC as beacon of new industrial age
• Celebration of American industry (Five panels from L to R: The Port, The White Way I
(Manhattan avenues), The Prow (skyscrapers), The White Way II (Broadway), The
Bridge (Brooklyn Bridge)
• Formatted as altarpiece to suggest industry as new religion?
• Combines Cubist and Futurist aesthetics
Joseph Stella, Voice of the City: New York Interpreted, 1920-22, 7+ ft. tall

30. Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930

31. Charles Sheeler
• Received commission to
photograph River Rouge Plant for
Ford Motors outside of Detroit
• 23 buildings and 93 miles of track
• Made series of photos, then
paintings inspired by them
• Completed 32 official photos, 9 of
which published in magazines
including Vanity Fair
• One had caption “an American
altar of the God-Objective of Mass
Production”
• Portrays industry as divinely
ordained and in harmony with
nature
• Anonymously controlled model of
efficiency
Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930
man nearly absent
Smoke merges
with clouds
Plant reflected in river

32. The Course of Empire
Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1835 Yves Marchand, Romain Meffre,
The Ruins of Detroit, 2010

33. Georgia O’Keeffe
• O’Keeffe would begin
working in this Precisionist
fashion when living in NYC
• Abandoned it when left for
American Southwest
• Applied modernist formal
concerns (abstraction,
reduction, cropping) to
organic naturalism
• Inspired by modernist
photography (Strand, etc)
• Feminizes the masculine
Precisionist view of the
city?
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia O’Keeffe
1918
Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Iris III, 1926