Chapter 33: The Development of Modernist Art - The Early 20 th Century

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1 Chapter 33: The Development of Modernist Art - The Early 20 th Century During the first half of the 20 th century, rampant industrialization matured into international industrial capitalism, which fueled the rise of consumer economics. These developments presented society with great promise and significant problems. Change brought elation and anxiety, euphoria and alienation. These emotions would characterize Europe for the early decades. World War I, the Great Depression, the rise of totalitarianism, and World War II exacerbated this schizophrenic attitude. The arts reflected this same mind set in the lofty utopian vision of the Bauhaus and De Stijl, on one hand, and the scathing social commentary of the Dada artists, on the other. New discoveries in many fields forced people and society to revise radically their understanding of the world. This change was rooted in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment of the previous centuries. Artists precipitated in this reassessment, often acknowledging these new discoveries by shifting the theoretical bases of their work. Much of the history of early 20 th century art is a history of a radical rejection of traditional limitations and definitions both of art and the universe. One of the fundamental Enlightenment beliefs was faith in science. Because it was based on empirical or observable, fact, science provided a mechanistic conception of the universe which provided for many an alternative to traditional religious teachings. As promoted in the classic physics of Isaac Newton, the universe was a huge machine consisting of time, space, and matter. The early 20 th century witnessed an astounding burst in scientific activity that challenged this model. The new theories espoused by Planck, Einstein, Rutherford and Bohr, shattered the existing faith in the objective reality of matter. Time and space were no longer thought of as absolute, rather, time and space are relative to the observer and linked to a four dimensional space time continuum. These new scientific theories and understandings of the universe changed the view of physical nature and raised the curtain on the Atomic Age. In addition to physics, there were great advances in chemistry and biology that yielded knowledge of polymers, plastics, fertilizers, vitamins, antibiotics, and many others, which resulted in many products that improved life. Technological advances led to the development of radios, radar, television, cinema, municipal transport systems, electrical street lighting and home appliances. Chemical technology led to great advance in fighting disease famine, food production, and processing. Philosophy, psychology, and economic theory, underwent significant changes as challenges to the primacy of reason and objective reality emerged. Friedrich Nietzsche ( ), a German intellectual rejected the rational. He believed that Western society was decadent and suppressed because of excessive reliance on reason at the expense of emotion and passion. He blamed Christianity as the reason for this and

2 insisted that societies could attain liberation and renewal only when they acknowledged that God was dead. Sigmund Freud ( ) examined the irrational mind and destabilized the long held belief in the rational nature of humanity. He developed the principles for what became known as psychoanalysis. He argued in his research that the unconscious and inner drives control human behavior. This unconscious control is due to repression of uncomfortable past experiences or memories. Making people aware of their suppressed memories could heal them. Carl Jung ( ) expanded on Freud s theories. Jung believed therapists could understand behavior and personality of an individual by identifying patterns in his or her dreams. Jung further said that the unconsciousness is composed of two facets, a personal unconscious and a collective unconscious. The collective unconscious comprises memories and associations all humans share, such as archetypes (original models) and mental constructions. According to Jung, the collective unconscious accounts for the development of myths, religions, and philosophies. Marxism Industrialization greatly effected society in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. The owners and managers of the industrial giants wielded extraordinary economic and social power. Do to the widening gap between the leaders of industry and the laborers, the popularity of Marxism grew. In the early 20 th century people faced fundamental and revolutionary challenges in how they viewed the world. These changes would be reflected in the art that was produced. World War I and the Russian Revolution The development of advanced European and American societies led to expansion. This expansion has been called imperialism. This imperialism was capitalist and expansionist establishing colonies as raw material resources, manufacturing markets, and territories. This also brought on the great missionary thrusts into Africa and other places. The goal was to bring the light of Christianity and civilization to backward peoples and educating inferior races. Darwin s influence was evident in the thinking that imperialism was also survival of the fittest. The development of nation states did not lead to peace and harmony. Nationalism and the imperialistic spirit led to competition instead. Countries negotiated treaties and alliances to protect their interests. These alliances led to World War I, which lasted from WWI destroyed any romantic illusions about war. Nine million people were killed in battle. The introduction of poison gas added to the horror of the inhumanity. The devastation of WWI brought widespread misery, social disruption, and economic collapse.

3 The Russian Revolution saw the collapse of the Czar and the triumph of the Bolsheviks, later called Communists, led by Lenin ( ). Russia was officially named the Soviet Union in The end of WWI was followed ten years later by the Great Depression of the 1930 s. The Great Depression was devastating to Western economies. By % of the British workforce was unemployed, 40 % of the German workers, and production in the United States had fallen to 50 %. This all created a fertile breeding ground for the totalitarian forces that came to the forefront in some European countries and Japan: Mussolini in Italy, Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, and Adolf Hitler in Germany and Tojo in Japan. These ruthless seizures of power evolved into WWII. Millions died in the fighting and the attempt to extinguish the Jewish race in what has been termed the Holocaust. There was also the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Japan. WWII ended in The war s economic, physical, and psychological devastation tempered the elation people felt at the conclusion of the global hostilities. The Evolution of Modernism and the Avant-Garde Artists, like others were deeply affected by the devastating events of the early 20 th century. Some responded with energy and optimism and others with bleak despair. Changes in the art world also influenced artistic developments. The challenges of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the various renegade and alternative exhibitions diminished the academies authority, thought they remained a presence. For artists working within the crucible of historical turmoil, contending with shifting institutional structures with in the art world, and acknowledging the significance of Modernism led to an incredibly fertile period for the evolution of art, especially the avant-garde. Early 20 th century avant-garde artists were in the forefront of aggressively challenging traditional and often cherished notions about art and its relations to society. As the old social order collapsed and new ones ( such as communism and corporate capitalism) took their places, one of the self-imposed tasks school after school of avant-garde artists embraced was the search for new definitions and uses for art in a radically changed world. The term avant-garde emerged in art after it was in use in politics. This prompted the general public to associate the avant-garde artists with radical political thought and anarchism. While this was so, in contrast, other avant-garde artists in essence withdrew from society and concentrated their attention on art as a unique activity, separated from society at large. These artists pursed an introspective examination of artistic principles and elements (continuing the modernists goals), resulting in an increasing focus on formal qualities of art.

4 Expressionism in Early 20 th Century Art Aspects of all the avant-garde movements contributed to the emergence of expressionism. Expressionism refers to art that is the result of the artist s unique inner or personal vision that often has an emotional dimension. This contrasts with art focused on the visual description of the empirical world. This was a rejection of Renaissance sensibilities that had governed the western art world for the previous 500 years. The term expressionism was popularized in the avant-garde journal Der Strum. The editor Herwarth Walden proclaimed: We call art of this century Expressionism in order to distinguish it from what is not art. We are thoroughly aware that artists of previous centuries also sought expression. Only they did not know how to formulate it. There are several movements of the 20 th century that are classified as expressionist. Some of this expressionist art evokes visceral emotional responses from the viewer, whereas other such artworks rely on the artist introspective revelations. Often the expressionists offended viewers and even critics, but the sought empathy connection between the internal states of artists and viewers not sympathy. Fauvism In 1905, at the Salon d Automne in Paris, a group of young painters under the leadership of Henri Matisse exhibited canvases so simplified in design and so shockingly bright in color that a startled critic described the artists as fauves (wild beasts). The Fauves were totally independent of the Academy and the official Salon. The fauve movement was driven by the desire to develop an art that had the directness of Impressionism but that also used intense color juxtapositions and their emotional capabilities, the legacy of artists such as Van Gogh and Gauguin. The Fauves had seen the work of these artists in retrospective exhibitions in Paris in 1901 and 1903, but went even further in liberating color from its descriptive function and using it for both expressive and structural ends. They produced works of great spontaneity, rich surface textures, lively linear patterns and above all bold colors. The fauves went beyond any earlier artists by using contrasting colors applied in sweeping brushstrokes and bold patterns. They combined outward Expressionism, in the form of bold release of internal feelings through wild color and powerful brutal brushwork, with inward expressionism, awakening the viewer s emotions by these very devices. The fauves were never officially organized and disintegrated within five years. While short lived, the movement had tremendous influence in the direction of art by demonstrating color s structural, expressive, and aesthetic capabilities. Henri Matisse ( ) was the dominant figure of the group. He realized that color could play a primary role in conveying meaning and focused his efforts on developing this notion. Women with a Hat is composed in a traditional manner; however the seemingly arbitrary colors immediately strike the viewer. Matisse explained, What

5 characterized fauvism was that we rejected imitative colors, and that with pure colors we obtained stronger reactions more striking simultaneous reactions, and there was also the luminosity of our colors. Matisse s reference to luminosity linked him to Cezanne, who argued that painters could only represent light by color and not reproduce it. Color therefore became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyer of meaning. The maturation of these color discoveries can be seen in Matisse s Red Room (Harmony in Red). The viewer is confronted with the interior of a comfortable prosperous household with a maid placing fruit and wine on the table. The color selections and juxtapositioning generate much of the feelings of warmth and comfort. The objects are depicted in simplified, fattened forms. The table and wall are painted the same, bringing about separation only by a dark line. The front edge of the table is eliminated. The painting was originally painted in green, then blue, before Matisse final settled on red. The blue patterning contrasts greatly with the red. Matisse said, Color was not given to us in order that we might imitate Nature. It was given so that we could express our own emotions. Andre Derain ( ) shared many of Matisse s goals. In The Dance, perspective is flattened and color delineates space. Here, Derain indicates light and shadow not by value, but by contrasts in hue. Color does not describe the local tones of objects; instead it expresses the pictures content. German Expressionism: Die Brucke (The Bridge) The boldness and immediacy of the fauves appealed to The German Expressionists. Although color plays an important role in their work, the expressiveness of their images is due as much to the wrenching distortions of form, ragged outline, and agitated brushwork. This resulted in savagely brutal, powerful, and emotional canvases in the years leading up to World War I. The first of the German Expressionist artists gathered in Dresden in 1905 under the leadership of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner ( ). The group thought of themselves as paving a way for a more perfect age by bridging the old age and the new. Their name Die Brucke (The Bridge) is derived from this concept. Kirchner s early studies had instilled in him a deep admiration for German medieval art. Like the British artists with the Arts and Crafts movement, members of this group modeled themselves on their ideas of medieval craft guilds by living together and practicing all the arts equally. These artists protested the hypocrisies and materialistic decadence of those in power. Kirchner, in particular focused on the detrimental effects of industrialization, such as the alienation of individuals in cities, which he felt fostered a mechanized impersonal society. The later move to Berlin by most of the group furthered this belief.

6 Street, Dresden, provides a glimpse into the frenzied urban activity of this German city before WWI. Rather than offering the distant panoramic urban view of the Impressionists, this street is jarring and dissonant. The women coming toward the viewer are almost confrontational and menacing as they are forced upon the viewer by the steep perspective. Harshly rendered, the women s features seem ghoulish and garish due to the clashing colors, and add to the expressive impact of the image. These expressive uses of the formal elements would influence the work of Edvard Munch. Emil Nolde ( ) was older than other Bridge artists and was invited to join the group in 1906 because he was pursuing similar ideas in his work. The content of Nolde s work was centered mainly on religious imagery. In contrast to the quiet spirituality and restraint of traditional themes, Nolde s paintings are visceral and forceful. Saint Mary of Egypt among Sinners depicts her before her conversion to Christ. She is shown entertaining lusty men groping her. Far from an enticing scene it displays a brutal ugliness. The distortions of form, color contrasts, and raw brushstrokes amplify the harshness of the figures. Borrowing ideas from Van Gogh, Munch, the Fauves, and African and Oceanic Art, Die Brucke artists created images that derive much of their power dissonance and a seeming lack of finesse. The harsh colors, aggressive brushwork, and distorted forms expressed the painter s feelings about the injustices of society and their belief in a healthful union of human of human beings and nature. Their use of such diverse sources reflects the expanding scope of global contact from colonialism and international capitalism. By 1913 the group dissolved and each member worked independently. German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) The Blue Rider was a second major German expressionist group formed in Munich in The two founding members were Vassily Kandinsky ( ) and Franz Marc ( ), whimsically selected this name because of their mutual interest in the color blue and horses. This group of artists produced paintings that captured their feelings in visual form while also eliciting intense visceral responses from the viewer. Kandinsky was born in Russia and moved to Munich in 1896 and soon developed a spontaneous and aggressive avant-garde style. Kandinsky was one of the first artists to explore complete abstraction as evidence in Improvisation 28. Kandinsky s motivation to eliminate representational elements stemmed from his interest in Theosophy (a religious and philosophical belief system that incorporates a wide range of tenets from other sources, Buddhism and mysticism) and the occult, as well as advances in science. Kandinsky was a true intellectual, widely read in philosophy, religion, history, the arts, and music. Kandinsky was one of the few early modernists to understand the new scientific theories of the era. Rutherford s exploration of atomic structure convinced Kandinsky that material objects had no real substance, thereby shattering his faith in the world of tangible things.

7 Kandinsky articulated his ideas in his influential treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in He believed that artists must express the spirit of their innermost feelings by orchestrating color, form, line, and space. He produced many works adhering to these principles. Ultimately, Kandinsky saw these abstractions as evolving blue prints for a more enlightened and liberated society emphasizing spirituality. Franz Marc, like many other German Expressionists, grew increasingly pessimistic about the state of humanity as WWI loomed on the horizon. His perceptions of human beings a deeply flawed led him to turn to the animal world for his subjects. Animals, he believed, were more beautiful, more pure than humanity and thus more appropriate as a vehicle to express inner truth. In his quest to imbue his paintings with greater emotional intensity, Marc focused on color and tried to develop an iconography of color that represented ideas or feelings. Blue is the male principle, severe and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, happy, and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy. These efforts liked him to other avant-garde artists struggling to redefine the practice of art. Fate of the Animals was painted in 1913 when tension of the impending war had pervaded society and emerged in Marc s art. The animals appear trapped in a forest while some apocalyptic event is destroying them. The entire scene is distorted and shattered into fragments. The lighter and brighter colors of his iconography are missing. The blues and reds, colors of severity and brutality, dominate. Marc found himself at the front lines in WWI just a year after painting this work. He wrote to his wife that Fate of the Animals is like a premonition of this war horrible and shattering. I can conceive that I painted it. The tragic irony of this was his death in action in the War in Embracing Abstraction The expressionist departure from any strict adherence to illusionism in art was a path followed by other artists. Pablo Picasso ( ) was among those who most radically challenged artistic conventions and moved most aggressively into abstraction. Picasso was a Spanish artist whose importance in the history of art is undisputed. He made huge contributions to new ways of representing the surrounding world. He was perhaps the most prolific artist in history and worked in nearly every medium. Picasso mastered all aspects of observational drawing and the styles of the late 19 th century by the time he entered the Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts in the 1890 s. His prodigious talent led him to experiment with a wide range of visual expression first in Spain and then in Paris when he moved there in He remained a traditional artist in his sense of preparatory drawings for each major work, but he was modernist in his enduring quest for innovation, his lack of complacency, and his insistence on constantly challenging himself and others around him. Picasso was constantly experimenting and shifted from one style to another. He went from somber Spanish realism, to

8 impressionism, to the so called Blue Period ( ) that reflected Picasso s melancholy state of mind. This period is reflected in the art works in which he used primarily blue colors to depict worn, pathetic, and alienated figures. In 1906, Picasso was looking for new ways to depict form. He was influenced by ancient Iberian sculpture, and the late paintings of Cezanne, and African masks. The expansion of colonial empires in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries resulted in wider exposure of European and American artists to art from Africa, India, and other faraway locales. This influence can be seen in Picasso s Portrait of Gertrude Stein, who along with her brother, were friends and patrons of the avant-garde. Picasso struggled with the painting leaving it unfinished after 80 sittings. Picasso told Stein I can t see you any longer when I look. On resuming the portrait in 1907, Picasso painted Stein s head as a simplified planer form, incorporating aspects derived from African masks and sculptures. Later in 1907, the influence of African art and Cezanne can be more clearly evidenced in Les Demoiselles d Avignon (literally the young ladies of Avignon ). This painting is historically very significant because it is viewed as opening the door (or some would say, Pandora s Box) to a radically new method of representing form in space. The work began as a symbolic picture to be titled Philosophical Bordello, portraying male clients intermingling with women in the reception room of a brothel. By the time he finished, he had eliminated the male figures, simplified the rooms details to a suggestion of drapery and a schematic foreground still life. Picasso became fully absorbed in the problem of finding a new way to represent the five figures in their interior space. Instead of representing them as continuous volumes, he fractured their shapes and interwove them with the equally jagged shapes of the drapery and empty space to where the distinction between the foreground and background is unclear. Here Picasso pushed Cezanne s treatment of form and space to a new level. Picasso furthered the radical nature of this work by depicting the figures inconsistently. The three young women to the left are portrayed with relatively calm and ideal features, like figures from ancient Iberian sculpture. The greatly distorted figures to the right directly display Picasso s increasing fascination with the power of African sculpture. Picasso must have further distorted the bodies in response to the faces, breaking them into ambiguous planes that suggest multiple points of view at once. Gone completely is the traditional concept of an orderly, constructed, and unified pictorial space that mirrors the observable world. In its place are the beginnings of a new representation of the world as a dynamic interplay of time and space. Picasso explained, I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them. For many years Picasso only showed Les Demoiselles d Avignon to other painters. One of the first to see it was Georges Braque ( ). Using this painting s revolutionary ideas as a point of departure, Braque and Picasso formulated Cubism around 1908.

9 Cubism Cubism represented a radical turning point in the history of art, nothing less than the destruction of pictorial illusionism that had dominated Western art for the past 500 years. The Cubists rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world. These artists pursued the analysis of form, breaking it into its many parts and then reconstructing it by a new logic of design, into a coherent aesthetic object. The art of painting had to move far beyond the description of observed reality. This rejection to traditional practice was in the spirit of the times where everything was being questioned because of the crumbling of the concrete Newtonian world, fostered by the physics of Einstein and others. The French writer and theorist Apollinaire wrote about Cubism: Authentic cubism is the art of depicting new holes with formal elements borrowed not from the reality of vision, but from that of conception. This tendency leads to a poetic kind of painting which stands outside the world of observation; for even in simple cubism, the geometrical surfaces of an object must be opened out in order to give a complete representation of it. Everyone must agree that a chair, from whatever side it is viewed, never ceases to have four legs, a seat and a back, and that if it is robbed of one of these elements, it is robbed of an important part. Cubism received its name after Matisse described some of Braque s work to a critic as having been painted with little cubes, and the critic went on in his review to speak of cubic oddities. Analytic Cubism Historians refer to the first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Picasso and Braque, as Analytic Cubism. In order to present multiple views at once to fully describe an object, the traditional approach of drawing from one point of view was no longer effective. So the Cubists began to dissect the forms for the viewer to inspect on the canvas. In simple terms Analytic Cubism involves analyzing form and investigating the visual vocabulary (pictorial elements) for conveying meaning. Braque s painting, The Portuguese, from 1911, is a great example of this approach. The subject was from Braque s memories of a Portuguese musician in a bar in Marseilles. Braque concentrated his attention on dissecting the form and placing it in a dynamic interaction with the space around it. He dramatically reduced color, unlike the Fauves and German Expressionists, so that the viewers would focus on form. Braque has so dissolved the subject that it is difficult to discern. The large intersecting planes suggest the man and guitar; smaller planes penetrate and hover over the larger planes. The use of light and shadow to model suggest form and transparency. There is a planned inconsistency to which areas are in front and which behind. The stenciled letters and numbers add to the complexity and the confusion between two dimensional and three dimensional forms and levels of space.

10 Picasso and Braque pioneered the exploration of visual vocabulary for example, composition, two dimensional shape, three dimensional form, and value and its role in generating meaning. Further the inclusion of elements such as recognizable letters and numbers seems to anchor the painting in a world of representation, thereby exacerbating the tension between representation and abstraction. Constantly shifting imagery makes it impossible to arrive at any definitive reading of the image, leaving ambiguity and doubt. Picasso and Braque avoided color to unify paintings that radically disrupted viewer expectations about the representation of time and space. Their contemporary, Robert Delaunay ( ) worked toward a kind of color Cubism. Apollinaire called this style Orphism, after Orpheus, the Greek god with magical music making powers. Apollinaire believed art, like music, was divorced from representation of the visible world. He along with his wife, who was also an artist, became convinced that the rhythms of modern life could best be expressed through color harmonies and dissonances. Champs de Mars, or The Red Tower, was painted between and depicted the Eiffel Tower. It was still considered an engineering marvel many years after it was built in The title refers to the field in which the Eiffel Tower stands. Delaunay broke the monuments perceptual unity into colored shards the advance or recede according to the relative hues and values of the broken shapes. The structure ambiguously rises and collapses, and has been interpreted as commentary on societal collapse prior to World War I. Delaunay himself wrote, describing the imagery, The synthesis of a period of destruction: likewise a prophetic vision with social repercussions: war and the base crumbles. Delaunay s experiments with color strongly influenced the Futurists and the German Expressionists. These artists found in his art a means for intensifying expression by suggesting violent motion through shape and color. Synthetic Cubism In 1912, Cubism entered a new phase when the style no longer relied on a decipherable relation to the observed world. In, Synthetic Cubism, artists constructed paintings and drawings from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a subject. Still Life with Chair-Caning (1912) is the work that marked this point of change in Picasso s work and history. The painting has pasted onto the canvas a piece of oilcloth printed to look like chair-caning. Framed with a piece of rope the work challenges the viewers understanding of reality. The caning looks real, yet it is an illusion. In contrast, the painted abstract areas do not imitate real objects, yet does this, in a sense make them more real than the caning illusion? The letters JOU appear, as in many Cubist paintings, and refer to the French word Journaux or journal for newspaper. Picasso and Braque delighted in visual puns. The JOU is also referring to the words jouer and jouir the French words for to play and to enjoy.

11 Collage Picasso and Braque continued to explore the medium of collage which was introduced into the realm of High Art in Still Life with Chair Caning. From the French word coller, meaning to stick, a collage is a composition of bits of objects, such as newspaper of cloth, glued to a surface. Braque s, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe and Glass, is done in a variant of collage called papier colle (stuck paper), or gluing assorted paper shapes to a drawing or painting. Roughly rectangular shapes of various printed and colored papers dominate the composition. The faux bois (false wood) paper with molding provides an illusion whose concreteness contrasts with the lightly rendered objects on the right. Five pieces of paper overlap each other in the center of the composition to create a layering of flat planes that both echo the space the lines suggest and establish the flatness of the works surface. The shapes seem to oscillate back and forth in space. Shapes push planes back in some places and makes them transparent in others. Viewers of this work must realize that this is not an illusion of the observable world, but rather it is a visual game to determine all the various changes in representation. Braque no longer analyzed the observed world, here he constructed or synthesized objects and space alike from the materials he used. Picasso stated at this time in Cubism development: Not only did we try to displace reality; reality was no longer in the object. [In] the papier colle. [w]e didn t any longer want to fool the eye; we wanted to fool the mind. If a piece of paper can be a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connections with both newspapers and bottles too. Like all collage, the papier colle technique was modern in its medium mass produced never before found in high art and modern in the way the artist embedded the arts message in the imagery and in the nature of everyday materials. While usually viewed in terms of formal innovations, Cubism and collage was viewed by the public in sociopolitical terms as revolutionary and subversive in nature. Cubism s attack on artistic tradition was viewed also as an attack on society s complacency and status quo. The deconstruction of the observable world was viewed as anarchist in nature and was part of the destabilization of society. Many artists and writers of the period allied them selves with various anarchist groups whose utopian visions appealed to progressive thinkers. The impact of Cubism extended beyond the realm of the art world. Cubist Sculpture Cubism also inspired new approaches to sculpture. Picasso created Guitar in He explored the volume via flat planar cardboard surfaces. (This work is a maquette, or model; the finished sculpture was to be made of sheet metal). By presenting what is essentially a cutaway view of the guitar, Picasso allowed the viewer to examine both surface and interior space, both mass and void. Some scholars have suggested that Picasso derived the cylindrical form that serves as a sound hole on the guitar from the eyes on masks from the Ivory Coast of Africa.

12 Jacques Lipchitz ( ) was one on the most successful sculptures to adapt into three-dimensions the planar, fragmented dissolution of form central to Analytic Cubism painting. Born in Latvia, he lived and worked many years in France and the United States. He worked out his ideas for his sculptures in clay before creating them in stone or bronze. In Bather, Lipchitz broke up the continuous form into cubic volumes and planes. This work represents a parallel analysis of dynamic form in space that Picasso and Braque were exploring in paint. Aleksandr Archipenko ( ) was a Russian sculptor who explored similar ideas to Lipchitz. Woman Combing Her Hair, is a statuette that introduces, in place of a head, a void with a shape of its own that figures importantly into the whole design. Enclosed spaces have always existed in figurative sculpture. But here the space penetrates the figures continuous mass and is a defined form equal in importance to the mass of bronze. It is not simply the negative counterpart to the volume. Archipenko s shows the same fluid intersecting planes seen in cubist painting and the relation of the planes is similarly complex. Archipenko s figure is still somewhat representational, but like Cubist painting is casting off the last vestiges of representation. Julio Gonzalez ( ) was a friend of Picasso and shared his interest in the artistic possibilities of new materials and new methods borrowed from both the industrial technology and traditional metal working. Born to a family of metal workers in Barcelona, Spain, Gonzalez helped Picasso construct a number of welded sculptures. This contact allowed Gonzalez to refine his own sculptural vocabulary. Using ready made bars, sheets, or rods of welded or wrought iron and bronze, Gonzalez created dynamic sculptures with both linear elements and volumetric forms. In his version of Woman Combing Her Hair, the figure is reduced to interplay of curves, lines, and planes virtually complete abstraction. Although Gonzalez s sculpture received limited exposure during his lifetime, it became particularly important for sculptors in subsequent decades that focused their attention on the capabilities of Welded metal. Purism Charles Edouard Jeanneret known as Le Corbusier is today best known as one of the most important modernist architects. Also a painter, he founded in 1918 a movement called Purism, which opposed Synthetic Cubism on the grounds that it was becoming merely an esoteric, decorative art out of touch with the machine age. Purists maintained that machinery s clean functional lines and pure forms of its parts should direct the artist s experiments in design, whether in painting, architecture, or industrially produced objects. This machine aesthetic inspired Fernand Leger ( ), a French painter who had early on painted with the Cubists. He devised an effective compromise of tastes, bringing together meticulous Cubist analysis of form with the Purist s broad simplification and machine like finish of the design components. He retained from his Cubist practice a preference for cylindrical and tube shaped motifs, suggestive of machine parts.

13 In an early work, The City, Leger incorporated the effects of modern posters, billboard advertisements, harsh flashing electric lights, the noise of traffic and the robotic movements of people. He depicted the mechanical commotion of contemporary cities. Futurism There were artists who pursued many of the ideas of the Cubists, but also had an equally important well defined sociopolitical agenda. They were called The Futurists. Futurism began as a literary movement, but soon encompassed the visual arts, cinema, theatre, music, and architecture. Indignant over the social and political decline of Italy, the Futurists published numerous manifestos in which they aggressively advocated revolution, both in society and in art. Like the German Expressionists, they hoped to usher in a new, more enlightened era. In their quest to launch Italian society toward a glorious future, the Futurist s championed war as a means of washing away the stagnant past. They saw war as a cleansing agent. The Futurists agitated for the destruction of museums, libraries, and similar repositories of accumulated culture, which they described as mausoleums. They called for radical innovation in the arts. Of particular interest was the speed and dynamism of modern technology. One Futurist stated that, a speeding automobile is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace by then representative of classicism and the glories of past civilization. Futurist art often focuses on motion in time and space, incorporating the Cubist discoveries derived from the analysis of form. Umberto Boccioni ( ) was one of the leaders of the Futurist movement. He was both a painter and a sculpture as were many of the early Modernists. What we want he claimed, is not fixed movement in space but the sensation of movement itself: Owing to the persistence of images on the retina, objects in motion are multiplied and distorted, following one another like waves in space. Thus a galloping horse has not four legs, it has twenty. In Dynamism of a Cyclist, , Boccioni demonstrates this approach. Boccioni also applied this dictum to his sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, cast in 1913; it is perhaps the definitive work of Futurist sculpture. The piece highlights the formal and spatial effects of motion rather than their source, the striding human figure. The figure is so expanded, interrupted, and broken, in plane and contour that it seems to disappear in the blur of its movement. Although this work bears a curious resemblance to Nike of Samothrace, it is evident how far this modern work departs from the ancient one. Boccioni s sculpture is notable for its ability to capture the sensation of movement. Gino Severini ( ) painted Armored Train, a work that encapsulates the Futurist philosophy artistically and politically. What can we tell about this train? Is war good or bad? What leads you to that understanding from the work? Where are the

14 consequences of war, death and destruction? How does this differ from Goya s The Third of May? Once World War I broke out, the Futurist group began to disintegrate, largely because so many of them felt compelled to join the Italian army because of their pro-war views. Some of them were killed in the war including Boccioni. The ideas that Futurism promoted became integral to fascism that emerged in Italy shortly their after. Challenging Artistic Conventions Although Futurists celebrated the war and the changes they hoped it would effect, the mass destruction and chaos, horrified other artists. Humanity had never before witnessed such a wholesale slaughter on such a large scale over an extended period of time. Millions were killed, wounded, or blown to bits in great battles. The new arms technology made it a war of guns. Millions of tons of explosives, poison gas, and shells, made attack suicidal and trench warfare was stalemated. The mud filth and blood of the trenches, the pounding and shattering shells, and the terrible deaths and mutilations were a devastating psychological and physical experience for a generation brought upon the doctrine of progress and a belief in the fundamental values of civilization. Dada With war as a backdrop, many artists contributed to an artistic and literary movement that became known as Dada. This movement emerged, in large part, in reaction to an insane spectacle of collective homicide. They were utterly revolted by the butchery of the World War. Dada was international in scope beginning in New York and Switzerland and spreading to other areas. Dada was more of a mindset or attitude than a singular identifiable style. The Dadaists believed reason and logic had been responsible for the unmitigated disaster of world war, and they concluded that the only route to salvation was through political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. Thus, an element of absurdity is a cornerstone of Dada. Dada is a term unrelated to the movement, choosing the word randomly from the dictionary. The word is French for hobby horse. It satisfied the Dadaist s desire for something irrational and nonsensical The pessimism and disgust of these artists surfaced in their disdain for convention and tradition, characterized by a concerted and sustained attempt to undermine cherished notions and assumptions about art. Although the artist s cynicism and pessimism inspired Dada, what developed was phenomenally influential and powerful. By attacking convention and logic, the Dada artist s unlocked new avenues for creative invention, allowing artists to push boundaries farther than previous movements. Dada was in its subversiveness, extraordinarily avantgarde and very liberating. In addition to disdain, a current of humor and the whimsical, along with irreverence flows through much of the art. This can be seen in Duchamp s Mona Lisa, and Francis Picabia s, Portrait of Cezanne. The views of the Dadaists mirrored those of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others.

15 In its emphasis on the spontaneous and the intuitive, Dada had interest in the exploration of the subconscious that Freud promoted. Images rising out of the subconscious mind had a truth of their own, they believed, independent of conventional vision. Jean Arp ( ) pioneered the use of chance in composing his images. Tiring of the Cubist look in his collages, Arp took sheets of paper, tore them roughly into squares, haphazardly dropped them to a sheet of paper on the floor, and glued them into the resulting arrangement. The rectangular shapes unified the design, which Arp no doubt enhanced by adjusting the random arrangement to a quasi-grid. Even with some altering, chance had introduced an imbalance that seemed to Arp to restore to his work a certain mysterious vitality he wanted. Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance is a work done using this method. The operations of chance were for Dadaists a crucial part of this kind of improvisation. Chance could restore to a work of art its primeval magic power and find a way back to the immediacy it had lost through contact with Classicism. Arp s reliance on chance when creating his compositions reinforced the anarchy and subversiveness inherent in Dada. The most influential of the Dadaists was Frenchman Marcel Duchamp ( ), the central artist in the New York Dada and active in Paris at the end of Dada. In 1913 he exhibited his first ready-made sculptures, which were mass produced common, found objects the artist selected and sometimes rectified by modifying their substance or combining them with another object. Such works, he insisted, were created free from any consideration of either good or bad taste, qualities shaped by a society he and other Dada artists found bankrupt. Perhaps his most outrageous work was Fountain, a porcelain urinal presented on its back and signed R. Mutt and dated. The artist s signature was in fact a witty pseudonym derived from the Mott plumbing company s name and that of the Mutt and Jeff comic strip. Duchamp did not select the object for exhibition for its aesthetic qualities. The artness of this work lies in the artist s choice of his object, which has the effect of conferring the status of art on it and forces the viewer to see the object in a new light. Duchamp wrote, after Fountain was rejected from an unjuried show, Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view created a new thought for that object. Duchamp (and the generations of artists after him profoundly influenced by his art and especially his attitude) considered life and art matters of chance and choice freed from the conventions of society and tradition. Within his approach to art and life, each act was individual and unique. Every person s choice of found objects would be different. This philosophy of utter freedom for artists was fundamental to the history of art in the 20 th century. Duchamp spent much of World War I in New York, inspiring a group of American artists and collectors with his radical rethinking of the role of artists and of the nature of art.

16 Dada spread throughout much of Western Europe, arriving as early as 1917 in Berlin, where it soon took on an activist political edge, particularly in response to the economic, social, and political chaos in the city after World War I. The Berlin artists developed a new intensity for a technique called photomontage (pasting parts of many images together into one image). This technique had been in popular and private culture and was used on postcards long before the 20 th century. A few years earlier, the Cubists had named the process collage. Unlike Cubist collage, the parts of Dada collage were made almost entirely of found details, such as pieces of magazine photographs, usually combined into deliberately antilogical compositions. Collage lent itself well to the Dada desire to use chance when creating art and anti-art. One of the Berlin Dadaists who perfected the photomontage technique was Hannah Hoch ( ). Her works not only advanced the absurd illogic of Dada by presenting the viewer with chaotic, contradictory, and satiric compositions, but they also provided scathing and insightful commentary on two of the most dramatic developments during the Weimar Republic ( ) in Germany the redefinition of women s social roles and the explosive growth of mass print media. In, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, Hoch arranged an eclectic mixture of cutout photos in seemingly haphazard fashion. On closer inspection, we see that Hoch carefully placed photographs of some of her fellow Dadaists among images of Marx, Lenin and other revolutionary figures in the lower right. She also placed cutout lettering saying Die grosse Welt dada (the great Dada world). She also juxtaposed the heads of German military leaders on the bodies of exotic dancers, providing a wicked critique of German leaders. A photograph of Hoch s head appears in the lower right hand corner, juxtaposed with a map of Europe showing the progress of women s enfranchisement. Kurt Schwitters ( ) worked non-objectively, finding visual poetry in the cast off junk of modern society and scavenged in trash bins for materials, which he pasted and nailed together into designs such as our example Merz 19. Merz is a word that Schwitters nonsensically derived from the word kommerzbank (commerce bank), and used as a generic title for a whole series of works. The recycled elements acquire new meanings through their new uses and locations. Elevating objects that are essentially trash to the status of high art fits well with Dada philosophy. The European Effect on American Art: Transatlantic Artistic Dialogue John Singer Sargent, James McNeil Whistler, and Mary Cassatt were American arts that spent much of their productive careers in Europe, while many European artists ended their careers in the United States in anticipation and because of World War I. Visionary patrons supported the efforts of American and other artists to pursue modernist ideas. Some of the patrons were matrons or women as opposed to men. Thus there support might be labeled matronage.

17 The art scene in America before significant European Modernist influence was quite varied yet profoundly realist. Many American artists were committed to presenting a realistic, unvarnished look at life, much like the mid-19 th century French Realists. One such group has been called The Eight. They were a group of American artists who gravitated to the circle of influential and evangelical artist and teacher Robert Henri ( ). Henri encouraged these artists to make pictures from life. These images depicted the rapidly changing urban landscape of New York City. Because these paintings captured the bleak and seedy aspects of city life, The Eight eventually became known as The Ashcan School and were referred to as the apostles of ugliness. John Sloan ( ) wandered the streets of New York observing human drama. His main focus was on the working class, which he viewed as the embodiment of the realities of life. So immersed was Sloan into his views of the working class, that he joined the Socialist party and ran for office on their ticket. His works often depicted the down trodden, prostitutes, and drunkards. Sloan s depiction of these subjects was not as one who saw these things as immoral and evil, something to be removed, like the reformers of the day, rather, he saw them as victims of an unfair social and economic system. Sixth Avenue and 30 th Street (1907), depicts the street corner of this name in New York. We see the elevated train and shops of that area. A drunken woman in a white dress stumbles toward the viewer as a pair of well dressed ladies or street walkers look on in amusement. This scene is not uplifting nor does it show the well to do. Instead it records the everyday happenings of the working class. Sunday-Women Drying Their Hair (1913), depicts three women on the roof of their tenement taking some time to dry their hair after washing it. George Bellows ( ) Bellows first achieved notice in 1908, when he and other pupils of Robert Henri organized an exhibition of mostly urban studies. While many critics considered these to be crudely painted, others found them audacious and a step beyond the work of his teacher. Bellows taught at the Art Students League of New York in 1909, although he was more interested in pursuing a career as a painter. His fame grew as he contributed to other nationally recognized juried shows. Bellows' series of paintings portraying amateur boxing matches were arguably his signature contribution to art history. These paintings are characterized by dark atmospheres, through which the bright, roughly lain brushstrokes of the human figures vividly strike with a strong sense of motion and direction. George Luks ( ) also painted scenes of urban life. He lived what he painted. He was a boxer and had a temper which often landed him in fights. It is perhaps fitting that he died in 1933 as a result of injuries sustained in a bar fight. Huston Street painted in 1917, is an example of Luks work that demonstrates his loose, roughly painted style. Allen Street painted in 1905, is also demonstrative of Luks style.

18 Everett Shinn ( ) created paintings which found their subject matter in the slums as well as in middle-class café society and in theatrical activities. His theater scenes were usually done in oil, his slum and lower-class pictures in pastel. Unlike John Sloan, who felt a genuine reformer s commitment to lower-class urban themes, Shinn viewed the entire city as a bright, glittering spectacle to savor and to enjoy until the end of his life. His art reflects the influences of Daumier, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Louis Forain. The Armory Show and Its Legacy One of the major vehicles for disseminating information about European Artistic developments in the United States was the Armory Show, which occurred in early This large scale endeavor got its name from its location, the armory of the New York National Guard s 69 th Regiment. It was organized largely by two artists Walt Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies. The Armory Show contained more than 1,600 artworks by European and American artists. Among the European artists represented were Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Kirchner, as well as Expressionist sculpture Wilhelm Lehmbruck and organic sculpture Constantin Brancusi. This show exposed American artists and public to the latest in European artistic developments. The Show was immediately controversial. The New York Times described the show as pathological, and other critics demanded the exhibition be closed as a menace to public morality. The work that was most maligned was Marcel Duchamp s Nude Descending a Staircase. The painting suggests a single figure in motion down a staircase in a time continuum. The work has much in common with the Cubists and Futurists. One critic described the work as an explosion at a shingle factory, and newspaper cartoonists had a field day lampooning the painting. Photography The Armory Shoe traveled to Chicago and Boston after New York and was a significant catalyst for discussion and serious thought about recent developments in art. Another catalyst was Alfred Stieglitz ( ). Committed to promoting the avant-garde in the United States, he established an art gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, which became known as simply 291. He exhibited the latest in American and European art. The gallery played an important role in the history of early 20 th century art in America. Stieglitz also channeled his energies into photography. He took his camera wherever he went, photography whatever he saw around him. He believed in making only straight unmanipulated photographs, rather than using various techniques to alter the image or add additional information beyond what was original in the scene. Stieglitz said he wanted to hold a moment, to record something completely that those who see it would relive an equivalent to what is expressed.

19 Stieglitz waged a lifelong campaign to win a place for photography among the fine arts. He founded the Photo-Secession group which mounted traveling shows in the United States and abroad. He also published an influential journal titled Camera Work. Stieglitz, in his own work, saw the subjects in terms of form and of the colors of his black and white materials. He was attracted above all to arrangements of form that stirred his deepest emotions. This approach is seen in one of his best known works The Steerage, taken during a voyage to Europe with his first wife and daughter in Traveling first class, Stieglitz grew bored with the prosperous passengers and walked as far forward as he could. He discovered a level in the ship that was reserved for steerage passengers, those who the government was returning to Europe after refusing entrance into the United States. Stieglitz said of this scene when he saw it, I stood spellbound. I saw shapes relating to one another a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me: simple people; the feeling of the ship, ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was away from the mob called rich. Rembrandt came into my mind and I wondered would he have felt as I did If I had captured what I wanted, the photograph would go far beyond any of my previous prints. It would be a picture based on related shapes and deepest human feeling a step in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery. This description reveals Stieglitz s abiding interest in formal elements of the photograph an insistently modern focus. Its mixture of found patterns and human activity stirs viewer s emotions even to this day. Edward Weston ( ) experimented with straight photography by emphasizing the abstract through the composition of the picture. By zooming in on a segment of a form Weston forced the viewer to focus on formal qualities. Nude is an example of his style. The images simplicity and the selection of a small segment of the human body, result in a photograph of dark and light areas that at first glance suggest a landscape. The photograph, in its reductiveness, formally expresses a study of the body that verges on abstract. The American Artist Man-Ray ( ), worked with Duchamp through the 1920 s producing art in the spirit of Dada. Man-Ray incorporated found objects in into many of his works. He also brought an interest in mass-produced objects and technology, as well as a dedication to exploring the psychological realm of human perception of the exterior world. With Cadeau (Gift), Man-Ray took the found mass produced iron and glued on a row of tacks, subverting its proper function of smoothing and pressing. This malicious sense of humor gave Man-Ray s art its characteristic edge. Marsden Hartley ( ) was an American introduced to Modernism at Stieglitz s 291 gallery. He traveled to Europe in 1912, visiting Paris, where he became acquainted with the work of the Cubists, and Munich where be was drawn to the work of the Blaue Reiter, especially Kandinsky s work. Hartley developed his own style called Cosmic Cubism. With the heightened militarism in Germany and eventual outbreak of World

20 War I, Hartley immersed himself in military imagery. Among his most famous paintings of this period is Portrait of a German Officer. It depicts an array of military images: German imperial flags, regimental insignia, badges and an Iron Cross. What is the message? Beyond the wartime context of militarism, Hartley added personal significance. It includes a reference to his homosexual lover, Lieutenant Karl von Freyberg, who was killed in battle a few months before this work was painted. Von Freyberg s initials are in the Lower left. To the right is his age when he died, 24. His regiment number 4 is in the center next to the letter E for his regiment, the Bavarian Eisenbahn. The influence of Synthetic Cubism is seen in the flattened planer images which appear almost as abstract patterns. The somber black background perhaps alludes to the death of von Freyberg. Stuart Davis ( ) was profoundly influenced by the European modernist works he saw in the Armory Show of Davis created what he believed was a modern American style by combining the flat shapes of Synthetic Cubism with his sense of jazz tempos and his perception of the energy of American culture. This painting, while painted in 1955, is typical of Davis s work. In this vibrant painting, Ready to Wear, he explored the American invention of ready to wear clothing, a term first employed in an 1895 Montgomery Ward catalog. The broad flattened areas of red, white, black, and blue may represent pieces of fabric, while the angular white shape in the upper right corner suggests a pair of scissors. With its bright palette and energetic composition, the painting celebrates not only the vitality of the ready to wear clothing industry but also America itself. The Harlem Renaissance While these traumatic changes where taking place in American art, there were also indigenous movements taking place. One such movement happened in the Black community. It was called the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance began in the 1920 s and was a manifestation of the desire of African Americans to promote their cultural accomplishments. They aimed to cultivate pride among blacks and racial tolerance across the United States. The Harlem Renaissance included writings of authors, such as Langston Hughes, jazz and blues music from Duke Ellington to Louis Armstrong, and visual artists. One such artist was Aaron Douglas ( ). Douglas arrived in New York in He was very sought after as a graphic artist. He was encouraged to create art that would express the cultural history of his race. Douglas incorporated motifs from African sculpture into compositions painted in a version of Synthetic Cubism that stressed angular planes. Noah s Ark was one of seven paintings based on a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson called God s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Douglas used flat planes to evoke a sense of mystical space and miraculous happenings. In Noah s Ark, lightning strikes and rays of light criss cross the pairs of animals entering the ark, while men load supplies in preparation for departure. The artist suggests deep