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THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERNIST ART
THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY
TEXT PAGES 960–1029
1. A number of scientists, psychlogists, writers and politicians were instrumental in changing our view of the world from the Enlightenment belief in a mechanistic universe o the belief that reason and knowledge would lead to progress and the moral impovement of humanity. Match the individual on the left with the brief description of their work on the right.
__2___ Max Planck1. Wrote Interpretation of Dreams
__3___ Charles Darwin 2. Developed Quantum theory
__6___ Albert Einstein 3.Theory that survival of the fittest was basis of
evolution
__1___ Sigmund Freud 4. Advocated collective unconscious
__4___ Carl Jung 5. Lead Bolshevik revolution
__5___ V. I. Lenin 6. Described matter as another form of energy
__8___ Karl Marx 7. Philosopher who held that god is dead
__7___ Friedrich Nietzsche8. Champion of working classes, wrote Das Capital
2. How have the discoveries of modern science affected our view of reality?
The major scientists shattered the existing faith in the objective reality of matter, and in so doing, paved the way for a new model of the universe.
3. Give the approximate dates for the folowing significant twentieth-century events thatinfluenced art as well as the rest of society:
World War I: 1914–1918
Russian Revolution: 1917
The Great Depression: 1930s
World War II: 1939–1945
4. List two general directions taken by avant guarde artists in response to the turmoil:
a.They criticized political and social institutions.
b.Others withdrew from society and concentrated their attention on art as a unique activity, separate from society at large.
EXPRESSIONISM IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
1. What is meant by the term “Expressionism”?
Art that is the result of the artist’s unique inner or personal vision and often has an emotional dimension.
2. List three movements classified as expressionist:
a. Fauvism
b. German Expressionism/Die Brücke
c. German Expressionism/Der Blaue Reiter
3. In what year was the exhibition held in which the name "Fauve" was coined?
1905
What did it mean?
“Wild beasts,” referring to the shockingly bright colors.
4. Name two Fauve painters.
a. Henri Matisseb. André Derain
Describe the characteristics that Fauve paintings have in common.
Color was liberated from its descriptive function and used for both expressive and structural ends. Color was most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyor of meaning. They combined outward expressionism, in the form of a bold release of internal feelings through wild color and powerful, even brutal, brushwork, and inward expressionism, awakening the viewer’s emotions by these devices.
5. Name two artists who belonged to Die Brücke (The Bridge).
a. Ernst Ludwig Kirchnerb.Emil Nolde
Why did they select the name Die Brücke? What did it signify?
Die Brücke signifies from the concept of the artists paving the way for a more perfect age by bridging the old and the new. It means “The Bridge.”
Name three sources for their art.
a.German medieval art
b.architecture
c. graphic arts
6. What beliefs were shared by members of the Blue Rider (Der Blau Reiter) group?
Der Blaue Reiter means “The Blue Rider”; the founders shared an interest in blue and horses.
Name two artists who belonged to this group.
a. Vassily Kandinskyb. Franz Marc
7. Who was Gertrude Stein and what was her significance for the avant-garde of Paris?
Gertrude Stein was a writer, specializing in experimental writing, who lived in Paris with her brother Leo. They hosted avant-garde salons with international guests. She was an art patron of Picasso, Gauguin, Cézanne, Renoir, and Braque. She and Leo were collectors and facilitators of interaction among the avant-garde.
Who painted a famous portrait of her?
Picasso.
8. Identify three probable sources of the dislocation of form seen in Picasso's Demoisellesd'Avignon (FIG. 33-9).
a.Cézanne’s treatment of form and space.
b.Ancient Iberian sculptures.
c.African sculpture.
9. Name two Cubist painters.
a. Georges Braqueb.Robert Delaunay
10. What idea did the Cubists adopt from Cézanne?
The analysis of form.
11. What is the basis of Cubist pictorial space, and how does it differ from Renaissance perspective?
They dissected life’s continuous optical spread into its many constituent features, which they then recomposed, by a new logic of design into a coherent artistic object. They rejected naturalistic depictions.
12. What is Orphism and who was its founder?
Orphism was named after Orpheus, Greek god with magical powers of music-making, by Guillaume Apollinaire who believed art, like music, was divorced from representation of the visible world. Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Delaunay founded Orphism.
13. How does Synthetic Cubism differ from Analytic Cubism?
Synthetic Cubism no longer relied on a decipherable relation to the visible world. Artists constructed paintings and drawings from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent a subject.
14. What is a collage?
Collage comes from the French word coller, “to stick.” A collage is a composition of bits of objects, such as newspaper or cloth, glued to a surface.
15. Name three sculptors whose abstracted froms derive from the experiments of the Cubists:
a. Jacques Lipchitzb. Aleksandr Archipenkoc. Julio González.
16. What new material and technique did Julio Gonzalez contribute to modern sculpture?
Welded iron and bronze.
17. How did Fernand Léger modify Cubist practices?
Purism, founded by Le Corbusier, opposed Synthetic Cubism on the grounds that it was out of touch with the machine age. Léger compromised Cubist analysis of form with the Purist’s broad simplification and machinelike finish of the design components.
18. What were the Futurists trying to express in their art?
The Futurists were concerned with a well-defined sociopolitical agenda, advocating revolution, both in society and in art. They aimed to usher in a new, more enlightened era.
19. Name two Futurist painters:
a. Giacomo Ballab. Gino Severini
Name one Futurist sculptor: Umberto Boccioni
CHALLENGING ARTISTIC CONVENTIONS
1. How did the attitude of the Dadaists toward war differ from that of the Futurists:
The Dadaists were revolted at the butchery of the World War. They 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. The Futurists believed war had a cleansing action. They depicted war in a sanitized way.
2. What was the original purpose of the Dada movement?
It initially formed as a reaction to the horror and disgust about the war.
Although shortlived, Dadaism had important consequences for later art. What were they?
They unlocked new avenues for creative invention, thereby fostering a more serious examination of the basic premises of art than had prior movements.
3. Name four artists connected with the Dada movement.
a.Jean (Hans) Arpb. Marcel Duchamp
c.Hannah Höchd. Kurt Schwitters
4. How did Jean Arp utilize chance in his work?
For one collage, he took sheets of paper, tore them into roughly shaped squares, haphazardly dropped them onto a sheet of paper on the floor, and glued them down. Chance helped Arp preserve a certain mysterious vitality in his work.
5. What is a readymade?
Mass-produced common objects (found objects) the artist selects and sometimes “rectifies” by modifying their substance or combining them with another object.
Who developed them?
Marcel Duchamp.
6. Describe a "photomontage''
Many images pasted together into one image, a technique used in early German art postcards.
Who developed the technique?
The Berlin Dadaists, particularly Hannah Höch.
7. What did Schwitters mean by the term merz?
He used the term as a generic title for a whole series of collaged images; it derives from the word “kommerzbank” (commerce bank), which appeared in one of his collages.
TRANSATLANTIC ARTISTIC DIALOGUES
1. Who were the Eight and what type of painting did they do?
Eight American artists who gravitated into the circle of the influential and evangelical artist and teacher Robert Henri. They eventually became the Ashcan School. They produced images depicting the rapidly changing urban landscape of New York City.
2. Where and when was the Armory show held and what was its significance?
Early 1913, in the armory of the New York National Guard’s 69th Regiment. It was one of the major vehicles for disseminating information about European artistic developments in the United States. The show contained more than sixteen hundred works by American and European artists.
3. Name an influenctial work that was exhibited at the Armory show which particularly shocked the public:Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp.
What was so upsetting about it?
Critics in general found the show to be “pathological,” and one critic described the Futurist-Cubist style painting as “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
4. Who was the founder of the PhotoSecession group and Gallery 291? Alfred Steiglitz.
What type of photography did he practice?“Straight, unmanipulated” photographs.
5. The American photographer who was interested in photographic abstraction was:
Edward Weston.
6. In what way did the work of Man Ray express the ideas of Dada?
He incorporated found objects into many of his works. He used chance and the dislocation of ordinary things to surprise viewers, as well as humor.
7. Name two American artists who were influenced by Cubism:
a. Marsden Hartleyb.Stuart Davis
8. What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The flowering of art and literature in Harlem in the 1920s. It was a manifestation of the desire of African Americans to promote their cultural accomplishments, to cultivate pride among their fellow African Americans, and to spread racial tolerance across the United States.
9. List two traits shared by the so-called Precisionists, one thematic, one stylistic:
a. Thematic: a fascination with the machine’s precision and importance in modern life.
b. Stylistic: Tended towards Synthetic Cubism’s flat, sharply delineated planes.
Name two artists who are considered Precisonists:
a. Charles Demuthb. Georgia O’Keeffe
10. Although the artist Georgia O’Keeffewas first associated with the Precisionists in New York, she is best known for her work in New Mexico.
Two of her favorite subjects werecow skulls and flowers.
Describe her style:
She strips the subjects to their purest forms and colors to heighten their expressive power, reducing details to a symphony of basic colors, shapes, textures, and vital rhythms, almost to the point of complete abstraction.
EUROPEAN ART IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR I
1. What was the purpose of Neue Sachlichkeit artists?
All of the artists served at some point in the German army and thus had firsthand involvement with the military, which deeply informed their worldview and their art.
List three artists associated with the movement:
a. George Groszb. Max Beckmannc. Otto Dix
2. For what type of subject is George Grosz most famous?
Caustic indictments of the military.
3. List three adjectives that describe the style of Max Beckmann:
a.Violentb.Angularc. Rough paint surface
4. What mood did Otto Dix create in his War Triptych (FIG. 33-40)?
Devastating and horrific.
What stylistic characteristics help to create the mood?
Eerie lighting, dark colors, and direct portrayal of violence.
5. In what medium did Käthe Kollwitz do most of her work?
Printmaking, including woodcut, lithography, and etching.
What social class did she most often depict?
The poor.
6. List two German Expressionist sculptors.
a. Wilhelm Lehmbruckb.Ernst Barlach
7. According to Andre Breton, what was the purpose of the Surrealist movement?
“The future resolution of the states of dream and reality, in appearance so contradictory, in a sort of absolute reality, or surreality.”
8. Who was the major practitioner of the style known as pittura metafisica?
Giorgio de Chirico.
Describe the mood created with works like the one shown in FIG. 33-44:
Clear and simple, but sinister, strange, and ominous. Incongruous elements punctuate the scene’s solitude.
9. Name three painters connected with the Surrealist movement, and note what makes their work distinct.
a.Max Ernst
He began as an Expressionist, but after serving in the War became a Surrealist. He used found objects and the element of chance in his work; he used a technique called frottage, by combining the patterns achieved by rubbing a crayon or another medium across a sheet of paper placed over a surface with a strong textural pattern; and he also made collages.
b.Salvador Dalí
He explored his psyche and dreams in his work, including a deeply erotic dimension, and painted in a precisionist manner, making the world of his paintings as convincingly real as the most naturalistically rendered landscape based from nature.
c.René Magritte
His works achieve their power by subverting the viewer’s expectations based on logic and common sense, the conscious and the rational.
10. What materials did Oppenheim combine in Object represented on FIG. 33-48?
Fur and a teacup and saucer.
11. What type of subject matter did Frida Kahlo prefer?
The details of her life as symbols for the psychological pain of human existence.
12. List two techniques used by Surrealist artists to free their creative processes.
a.Dalí used his paranoiac-critical approach to encourage the free play of association as he worked.
b.Automatism: the creation of art without conscious control and various types of planned “accidents” to provoke reactions closely related to subconscious experience.
13. Many artists share the surrealist interest in fanasy, even though they were not formally associated with the group. However, Andre referred to one of them as “the most Surrealist of us all.” To whom did he refer? Joan Miró.
14. Who said "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible?" Paul Klee.
What did this artist mean by that statement?
Klee thought of painting as similar to music in expressiveness and in its ability to touch its viewer’s spirit through a studied use of color, form, and line, the formal elements of painting.
15. List three styles that Marc Chagall synthesized in his work.
a. expressionismb.Cubismc. Fauvism
What type of subject matter did he draw upon?
Themes from his childhood and memories from his homeland.
NEW ART FOR A NEW SOCIETY – UTOPIAN IDEALS
1. What did Malevich believe to be the supreme reality?
Pure feeling, which attaches to no object.
What type of forms did he use to express that reality?
Abstract, nonobjective forms—shapes not related to objects in the visible world.
2. An outstanding representative of the Constructivist movement was:
Naum Gabo.
Why did he call himself a "Constructivist"?
Because he built up his sculptures piece by piece in space, instead of carving or modeling them in the traditional way.
3. List three new materials used by Naum Gabo.
a. Celluloid b. Nylonc. Lucite
4. What did Vladimir Tatlin believe was the purpose of art?
To design a better environment for human beings and to create useful new products for society.
5. What basic colors and forms characterize Mondrian's mature work?
Red, blue, yellow, black, white, and gray; two primary directions (horizontal and vertical), in the form of rectangles and straight lines.
What did they symbolize for him?
Universal beauty and expression. He considered primary colors to be the purest colors and therefore the perfect tools to help an artist construct a harmonious composition.
6. Who designed the Schröder House (FIG. 33-56)?
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld.
What style does it reflect?
De Stijl.
7. What was the Bauhaus?
A German school of architecture and design, formerly named the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts, and later called the Staatliche Bauhaus (State School of Building).
Who founded it?
Walter Gropius.
Name three artists who taught there.
a.Vassily Kandinskyb.Paul Kleec.László Moholy-Nagy
8. What did MoholyNagy mean by "vision in motion"?
He believed society was heading toward a kinetic, time-spatial existence, with relativity of motion and its measurement: in short, the character of the modern age.
9. Who created a series called Homage to the Square, and what issues did the series explore?
Josef Albers. The series explored the relativity of the perception of colors.
10. Summarize Gropius’ design principles that were incorporated into the Bauhaus?
a.A decidedly positive attitude to the living environment of vehicles and machines.
b.The organic shaping of things in accordance with their own current laws, avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy.
c.Restriction of basic forms and colors to what is typical and universally intelligible.
d.Simplicity in complexity, economy in the use of space, materials, time, and money.