 Kathe Kollwitz, Memorial Sheet for Karl Liebknecht, , woodcut  Themes of war and poverty dominate her oeuvre  Her prints celebrate the plight of the working class  This work was created in response to the assassination of the German communist leader Liebknecht, killed during the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919  Memorializes the man without advocating his ideology  A lamentation  Composition divided into three horizontal sections  Wood block printing technique -> stark black and white to magnify the grief

 The most talked about “ism” of twentieth- century art, Cubism was the joint invention of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque  The first branch of cubism, known as "Analytic Cubism", was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France  In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, (using synthetic materials in the art) the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity

 PABLO PICASSO, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, June–July 1907  First Cubist work -> influenced by Cezanne, and perhaps African masks  Picasso was not consciously trying to break with the western pictorial tradition that dated back to Giotto, but he did  Picasso’s African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with the two figures on the right in his painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which were inspired by African artifacts  Depicts five prostitutes in a bordello on Avignon Street in Barcelona -> each posing for a customer - > three on left painted more conservatively, two on right more radical  Gone is the traditional concept of an orderly, constructed, and unified picture space that mirrors the world *CUBISM

ANALYTIC CUBISM

 Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911, oil on canvas  Analytical Cubism -> worked in concert with Picasso to develop this style  Rejected naturalistic and conventional painting  Fractured forms; breaking down objects into smaller forms  Clear edged surfaces sit on the picture plane, not recessed in space  Nearly monochrome  An exploration of shapes; only realistic elements are stenciled letters and numbers

 Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907, photography  Stieglitz photographed the world as he saw it, arranged little and allowed people and event to make their own compositions  Depicts the poorest passengers on aship traveling from the United States to Europe  Represents social divisions of society  Steerage = the part of the ship for passengers with the cheapest tickets  Diagonals and lines act as framing devices

 Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz, later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction“  According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was “anti-art”. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics

 Duchamp, Fountain, 1950 (original 1917), china with black paint  Ready-made sculpture, actually a found object that Duchamp deemed to be a work of art  Entered in an unjuried show, but rejected  Signed by the “R. Mutt”, a pun on the Mutt and Jeff comic strip  Title “Fountain” a pun -> fountains spout liquid up, a urinal is meant to collect it  Added irony of placing it upside down