Autumn in Bavaria, 1908

Kandinsky, Improvisation 28

•Founder of the “Blue Rider” school of German Expressionism

•Representative elements of art eliminated: birth of abstract art

•Subconscious sensations in art

•Titles inspired by musical compositions

•Dominant black lines broadly play horizontally, vertically, diagonally

•Lines define space, color added at intervals around lines

Kirchner, Street, Dresden

•Founder of “The Bridge” a German Expressionist movement that saw itself as a bridge between traditional and modern art

•Jarring and dissonant colors and shapes, clashing colors

•Confrontational art

•Ghoulish figures, seemingly fashionably dressed but in reality they appear threatening

•Tilted perspective

•Bright pink street offset by darker sinister figures

•Paint thickly applied in broad brushstrokes

1906

'Rouault was a deeply religious man, considered by some to be the greatest religious artist of the 20th century. The terrible compassion with which he shows his wretched creatures makes a powerful impression. A savage indictment of human cruelty; she is a travesty of femininity although poverty drives her still to prance miserably before her mirror in hope of work. Yet the picture does not depress but holds out hope of redemption. This work is for Rouault a profoundly moral one. She is a sad female version of his tortured Christ, a figure mocked and scorned, held in disrepute.'

From: D Solle, Great Women of the Bible in Art and Literature (Eerdmans 1994)

"Then came the awesome Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, the shaker of the art world (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Picasso was a little afraid of the painting and didn't show it except to a small circle of friends until 1916, long after he had completed his early Cubist pictures. Cubism is essentially the fragmenting of three-dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining so that shapes and parts of the human anatomy are seen from the front and back at the same time. The style was created by Picasso in tandem with his great friend Georges Braque, and at times, the works were so alike it was hard for each artist quickly to identify their own. The two were so close for several years that Picasso took to calling Braque, "ma femme" or "my wife," described the relationship as one of two mountaineers roped together, and in some correspondence they refer to each other as "Orville and Wilbur" for they knew how profound their invention of Cubism was.

Picasso, Gertrude Stein 1906

•Famed patron of the arts in Paris

•Said to have posed 80 times for the painting

•Influence of ancient sculpture, African abstraction, Cézanne

•Beginnings of Cubism seen in the angularity of the image

•Heavy-lidded eyes, mask-like face

•Head painted separately and not from life. Picasso was asked it if looked like Stein. He responded, “It will.”

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon•First cubist painting•Heavily influenced by Cézanne, African art•Five prostitutes from Avignon Street in Barcelona•No movement, an indication that one is standing in a doorframe, one is seated near a table with a still life•Most are posing for customers in a living room•Three on left: more conservative; other two: more radical, reflects the split in Picasso•Multiple views of each person, all seen at the same time: face seen from side, below, frontally, all from different perspectives•Angular wedges act like facets•Shaded for three-dimensionality

Braque, The Portuguese, 1911

•Each object has a fragment of surfaces

•Simultaneously juxtapose different aspects under various angles

•Uniform harmony of color: shadings of monochromatic tones

•Man holding a guitar, elements of the composition have to be reconstructed

•Cubist interest in using letters and numbers which add and detract from “the meaning” of the work

•Painting seems to ask you to decode it, but resists a firm conclusion

Braque, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe and Glass, 1913

•A collage: strips of paper roughly and oddly cut

•Charcoal drawing beneath the paper

•Some of the paper is newspaper with printed words to entice interpretation

•Some papers have the charcoal drawing continued into their surface

•The pipe is not drawn, but cut out of brown paper

Picasso, Guernica

•Painted for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair

•Picasso rarely concerned with politics in his art

•Guernica bombed 26 April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War

•Town of 7000 with no military infrastructure, 70% of town destroyed

•News shocked the world

•Bull: Minotaur, symbol of violence; blood of the bull symbolic of sacrifice; bull symbolic of Spain herself

•Influence of Grünewald

•Gaping mouth, bared teeth, tongue sticking out

•Dagger like forms

•Pietà: stigmata on the Child, ladder of the crucifixion behind

•Horse: seems to have newsprint on it

•Horse is a pyramid shape within an overall pyramid composition

•Fallen soldier with broken sword indicates futility of war

•Done in black and white to simulate news photo or newspaper print

•Largest painting he ever did

1937The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? When the rebellion began, the legally elected and democratic republican government of Spain appointed me director of the Prado Museum, a post which I immediatley accepted. In the panel on which I am working which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death...

Futurism

• Begun in 1909 in Italy

• An interpretation of Cubism

• Saw artistic heritage of Italy as a strangulation of contemporary art

• Glorified machines, action, adventure, World War

Boccioni, 1913

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

•“Break open the figure and enclose it in its environment”

•Figure appears to disappear behind a blur of movement

•Figure dynamically walking in space

•cf. Nike of Samothrace

De Stijl

• The Style, begun in 1917• Natural outgrowth of Cubism to its most analyticalPiet Mondrian (1872 – 1944)• Renounced all representation in paintings• Concentrated on a severely limited palette and series of

shapes• Primary colors: red, yellow and blue• Neutrals: black, white, grey• All forms at right angles• Balance of composition

Mondrian imposed rigorous constraints on himself, using only primary colors, black and white, and straight-sided forms. His theories and his art are a triumphant vindication of austerity. Diamond Painting in Red, Yellow, and Blue (c. 1921-25; 143 x 142 cm (56 1/4 x 56 in)) appears to be devoid of three-dimensional space, but it is in fact an immensely dynamic picture. The great shapes are dense with their chromatic tension. The varying thicknesses of the black borders contain them in perfect balance. They integrate themselves continually as we watch, keeping us constantly interested. We sense that this is a vision of the way things are intended to be, but never are.

Composition No. 10 1939-42

De Stijl

Rietveld, Schroder House, Utrecht, Netherlands

• Architectural interpretation of a DeStijl painting

• Colors in conformity with DeStijl paintings

• Private rooms on bottom floor• Living room upstairs• Designed with sliding partitions to

open or close space• Shifting free-floating interior• Large flat areas of space define

exterior• Vertical flat columns of color break

up exterior white spaces

                                          

  

Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915

•Suprematism

•Concerned with pure form

•Very early example of the artist’s work, discarding figuration

•Non-objective reality

•“The supremacy of pure feeling”

•Geometric patterns dominate on a white ground

•Universal accessibility of abstract art

•Arrangement of geometric planes suggests airplane movement

Modern Russian Art

Naum Gabo, Column 1920 -21

•Constructivism

•Used synthetic materials: glass, plastic, metal

•Industrial design methods

•Forgoes traditional sculpture: stone or bronze

•Opens up column’s structure, see into interior

•Viewer can experience interior of volume of space

•Two intersecting planes rise up through the middle

•Vertical and horizontal elements balanced by circular looping forms

Tatlin, Monument to the Third International

• Design principles based on inner behavior and loading capacities of a diverse assemblage of material

• Formal response to Cubism, Futurism• Experimented with glass, iron, sheet

metal, wood• Believed that non-objective art was

the ideal for a new society, free of past symbolism

• Honors the Russian Revolution of 1917

• Huge glass and iron building that would have been world’s largest

• Center of Moscow, propaganda and news center for the Soviet Union

• Axis pointed to star Polaris: symbol of universal humanity

• Three geometrically shaped chambers were to rotate around a central axis inside a titled spiral cage

• Each chamber housed a facility for a different kind of government activity

• Each rotated at a different speed• Bottom: glass structure for lectures and

meetings, rotated once a year• Middle: room intended for administrative

needs, rotated monthly• Top: information center rotated daily• Existed only as a metal and wooden model,

now lost or destroyed• Lacks a main façade; seems to burrow into

the earth

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919-20