Early Twentieth Century

• The beginning of the 20th century (1900s)

was one of the most rapid changing

environments in human history!

• In 1900- Sigmund Freud published the

Interpretation of Dreams- exploring the

power and influence of the subconscious

mind on all of us

• 1903- The Wright Brothers flew the first

power-driven aircraft

• 1903- Marie and Pierre Curie isolated the

radioactive element radium for the first

time

• 1905- Albert Einstein changed our

conception of time, space, and substance

with his theory of relativity. Matter could

no longer be solid; rather, it was a form of

energy!

1913: Henry Ford introduced the first moving assembly line for cars. Within 18 months it took only 1.5 man-hours to build a Model T

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

• Changed life in incalculable ways

• Thousands of new jobs opened in city-

based factories, drawing rural people

into a new, crowded and impersonal

urban environment

• Business-orientated capitalism moved

the workplace farther from family life

than it had ever been before

• Most wage work became much more

unpleasant

REVOLUTION

• The most violent revolutions of the

century- in Russia, Mexico and China

sprang up from class tensions

• Better vaccines and public health lead to

longer life expectancies and a lower

birth rate

World War I1914-1918

A global war originating in Europe that from 28

July 1914 to 11 November 1918.

More than 70 million military personnel,

including 60 million Europeans, were mobilized

in one of the largest wars in history.

Over 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians

died as a result of the war (including the victims

of a number of genocides)

a casualty rate exacerbated by the belligerents'

technological and industrial sophistication, and

the tactical stalemate caused by grueling trench

warfare

It was one of the deadliest conflicts in history,

and paved the way for major political changes,

including revolutions in many of the nations

involved.

Photography

Louis Daguerre continued to experiment and by 1837 had created the first practical photographic process

1890s sees the commercialization of film and the camera

Photography has impacted society by allowing people to see others whom they would never have an opportunity to see otherwise.

This includes wars, poverty, factory conditions presidents, politicians, other countries and foreign people.

The work of Lewis Hine helped end child labor in the United States

Lewis Hine. Breaker Boys. 1908

Friedrich Nietzsche1844-1900

God is Dead.

it conveys his view that the Christian God is no longer

a credible source of absolute moral principles.

Nietzsche recognizes the crisis that the death of God

represents for existing moral assumptions: "When

one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to

Christian morality out from under one's feet. This

morality is by no means self-evident... By breaking

one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in

God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary

remains in one's hands."

The death of God is a way of saying that humans are

no longer able to believe in any such cosmic order

Man becomes God

Art in the 20th

Century

• Came from a series of revolutions in thinking

and seeing

• Characteristics:

• Rapid change

• Diversity

• Individualism

• Exploration

• 20th century artists have helped us see the

world in new ways and revealed new levels

of consciousness

FAUVISM C. 1905

Characteristics:• explosive colors and

impulsive brushwork

• Grew from Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

• color/art generates its own

artistic energy

• Believed that only color could

express pure emotion***

• stark juxtapositions of

complementary hues

• sketchy brushwork

THE FAUVE MOVEMENT LASTED LITTLE MORE THAN TWO YEARS FROM 1905-1907

• Yet it was the one of the most influential developments

in early 20th century painting

• The Fauves took color farther from its traditional role of

describing the natural appearance of an object

• Their work led to an increasing use of color as an

independent expressive element

Henri Matisse.Harmony in Red

1948

• Colors of the fruit are bold and flat

• The window looks out a radically simplified yet intensely colored scene

The Fauves and Expressionism

• Inspired by the work of Cezanne, van Gogh

• Tried to express enthusiasm for life

• In Matisse’s work every part of the painting is expressive: the lines, the colors, the subject, and the composition itself

• Frequently reduced his subjects to a few outlines, rather than fill in all of their details

• Better preserves the original impulse of feeling

• Joy of Life- pure color across the surface, lines largely freed from descriptive roles, align with simplified shapes to provide a lively rhythm in composition

ANDRÉ DERAINLONDON BRIDGE1906• Brilliant, invented color is balanced by some use of traditional perspective

• Note the pure touches of yellow, blue and green in the lower left- these are expanded versions of the pointillist dots of Seurat

André Derain . Mountains at Collioure (1905)

Andre Derain. Portrait of Henri Mattise. 1905

Cubism

Cubism, 1900s-1910

Characteristics:

• emphasize pictorial composition over personal expression

• splintered shapes, flattened space

• geometric blocks of color

• multiple angles

• Reconstruction of objects

• battle between what the eyes see and what the mind knows to be there – based on Einstein’s theory of relativity

• some works drew from the primitive art of Africa, Pre-Columbian America and Oceania

Metaphysics • In his Introduction to Metaphysics of 1903, Henri Bergson argues that human consciousness experiences space and time as ever-changing and heterogeneous.

• With the passage of time, an observer accumulates in his memory a store of perceptual information about a given object in the external visible world, and this accumulated experience becomes the basis for the observer’s conceptual knowledge of that object

• By contrast, the intellect or reasoning faculty always represents time and space as homogenous.

• Bergson argued that intellectual perception led to a fundamentally false representation of the nature of things, that in nature nothing is ever absolutely still.

• Instead the universe is in a constant state of change or flux.

• An observer views an object and its surrounding environment as a continuum, fusing into one another.

PABLO PICASSOGIRL WITH MANDOLIN1910

•Picasso, fragments the girl's body into facets that are modeled to simulate their projection out of the flat picture plane toward the viewer and that portray her in movement as she strums her mandolin.

•What Picasso is trying to depict here is the fourth dimension, the space/time continuum.

Diego RiveraGirl with

ArtichokesDiego1913

Oil on Canvas

Juan GrisStill Life with

Checked Tablecloth1915

Oil on Canvas

• splintered shapes, flattened space and geometric blocks of color

• multiple angles • Reconstruction of objects

Diego RiveraPortrait of

Two Women1914

• splintered shapes, flattened space

• geometric blocks of color

• Multiple angles

Pablo PicassoLes Demoiselles d’Avignon

1907

•Young Ladies of Avignon

Radical departure from traditional composition

Influence of African sculpture and masks from the Ivory

Coast

Fractured, angular figures intermingle with sharp

triangular shapes in the background

Reconstruction of image and ground with its fractured

triangulation of from

Picasso shattered the measured regularity of Renaissance

perspective

Primitivism in Modern Art

• During the early 1900s, the aesthetics of traditional African, Pre-Columbian and Oceanic sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed the development of modern art

• Starting in the 1870s, thousands of African sculptures arrived in Europe in the aftermath of colonial conquest and exploratory expeditions.

• They were placed on view in museums in Paris, Berlin, & London

• At the time, these objects were treated as artifacts of colonized cultures rather than as artworks, and held so little economic value that they were displayed in pawnshop windows and flea markets.

• Theory of Primitivism – “Back to Basics”

• arguments about the supposed superiority of indigenous peopleswere chiefly used as a rhetorical device to criticize aspects of European society

GEORGES BRAQUE.THE PORTUGUESE 1911

•Braque alongside Picasso are considered the inventors of

Cubism

The subject is broken down into facets and recombined

with the background

Cubism is a reinvention of pictorial space

Realized that the two-dimensional space of the

picture plan was very different from the three-dimensional

space we occupy.

A reconstruction of objects based on geometric

abstraction.

breaking these objects into smaller elements, Braque and Picasso are able to overcome the unified singularity of an

object and instead transform it into an object of vision

Diego RiveraPortrait of Two Women1914

Influenced by the works of Picasso and Braque

Rivera adopted their dramatic fracturing of form, use of multiple

perspective points, and flattening of the picture plane.

Characterized by brighter colors + larger scale + highly textured surfaces

coincide with both the Mexican Revolution and World War I, reflect Rivera's

expatriate role and explore issues of national identity.

Many incorporate souvenirs of Mexico from afar and are infused with

revolutionary sympathy and nostalgia.

Zapatista Landscape

1915

Later, he would describe it as "probably the most faithful expression of the Mexican mood that I have ever achieved."

The elements of this outdoor still life included a serape, a sombrero, a rifle, a cartridge belt, a wooden ammunition box, and the mountains of Mexico.

What could be the shadow of the gun is painted white. The reds are very red, the blues are an intense luxurious blue: as they are in Mexico.

The sombrero, combined with a shape that suggests an all-seeing eye, asks the viewer to look for a face; it's as elusive as a Zapatista.

In the lower-right-hand corner there's an unfolded piece of blank paper, attached to the canvas by a nail, painted in a skillful trompe-l'oeil manner: it's a kind of manifesto from the millions of Mexicans who remained illiterate

Guernica1937

• In 1936, a civil war began in Spain between the democratic Republican government and fascist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, attempting to overthrow them.

• Picasso’s painting is based on the events of April 27, 1937, when Hitler’s powerful German air force, acting in support of Franco, bombed the village of Guernica in northern Spain, a city of no strategic military value.

• It was history’s first aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population.

• It was a cold-blooded training mission designed to test a new bombing tactic to intimidate and terrorize the resistance.

• For over three hours, twenty five bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, reducing it to rubble.

• Twenty more fighter planes strafed and killed defenseless civilians trying to flee.

• The devastation was appalling: fires burned for three days, and seventy percent of the city was destroyed.

• A third of the population, 1600 civilians, were wounded or killed.

Futurism

FUTURISM1910S-1920S

Characteristics:

-rejection of everything old, dull,

“feminine” and safe

-promoted the exhilarating “masculine”

experiences of warfare and reckless speed

(of modern technology and urban life)

-It emphasized speed, technology, youth,

and violence, and objects such as the car,

the airplane, and the industrial city.

-Adding a sense of speed and motion and

celebration of the machine

MARCEL DUCHAMPNUDE DESCENDING A

STAIRCASE1912

•By multiplying the image of a moving object, Futurists

expanded the Cubist concepts of simultaneity of vision and metamorphosis

Translated the speed of modern life into works that

captured the dynamic energy of the new century

Duchamp was influenced by stroboscopic photography, in which sequential camera images show movement by freezing successive instants.

The painting presents the movement of a body

through space, seen all at once, in a single rhythmic

progression.

Eadweard Muybridge was an

English photographer

important for his pioneering

work in photographic studies

of motion.

The Horse in Motion. 1878

1878

Umberto BoccioniThe City Rises 19101910

Considered the first Futurist painting.

Here, Boccioni illustrates the construction of a modern city.

The chaos and movement in the piece resemble a war scene-as indeed war was presented in the Futurist Manifesto as as the only means toward cultural progress

Natalia Goncharova.The Cyclist. 1913

Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog. 1912

Sonia Delaunay-TerkLe Bal Bullier

1913

FAUVISM1

CUBISM2

FUTURISM3

• Henri Matisse• Georges Braque• Maurice de Blaminck• Andre Derain• Raoul Dufy

• Pablo Picasso• Georges Braque• Fernand Leger• Juan Gris• Robert Delaunay• Sonia Delaunay• Jacques Lipchitz• Diego Rivera

• Umberto Boccioni• Giacomo Balla• Gino Severini• Carlo Carra• Natalia Goncharova• Luigi de Guidici• Primo Conti• Anton Giulio Bragaglia• Enrico Prampolini• Fortunato Depero