CUBISM Cubism: An art movement developed by

CUBISM Cubism: An art movement developed by
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque which showed different aspects of the subject matter simultaneously. Subject matter was reduced to a pattern of signs which signified the various aspects of the subject, and the artist’s reactions to that subject.

PICASSO

Born in Málaga on October 25, 1881, Picasso was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher, and María Picasso y Lopez. Until 1898 he always used his father's name, Ruiz, and his mother's maiden name, Picasso, to sign his pictures. After about 1901 he dropped “Ruiz” and used his mother's maiden name to sign his pictures. Picasso's genius manifested itself early: at the age of 10 he made his first paintings, and at 15 he performed brilliantly on the entrance examinations to Barcelona's School of Fine Arts. He passed the examinations in a single day. It normally took a student a month to complete the exams. At sixteen he was admitted, with scholarship, to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. It was the most prestigious art school in Spain at that time. Pablo Picasso, The Old Fisherman, 1895 Picasso painted this at the age of 14.

Pablo Picasso, The Old Guitarist, 1903, oil on panel, 48x33”
Between 1900 and 1902, Picasso made three trips to Paris, finally settling there in He found the city's bohemian street life fascinating, and his pictures of people in dance halls and cafés show how he assimilated the postimpressionism of the French painter Paul Gauguin and the symbolist painters called the Nabis. The themes of the French painters Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as the style of the latter, exerted the strongest influence. Picasso's The Old Guitarist, shows his evolution toward the Blue Period, so called because various shades of blue dominated his work for the next few years. Expressing human misery, the paintings portray blind figures, beggars, alcoholics, and prostitutes, their somewhat elongated bodies reminiscent of works by the Spanish artist El Greco.

Pablo Picasso, La Repasseuse (Woman Ironing), 1904
Picasso’s companion during this sojourn in Paris (at 19 he made his first trip to Paris with Casagemas), Carles Casagemas, became completely despondent over a failed love affair after the artists arrived back in Spain. He eventually returned to Paris without Picasso and, in front of his friends, shot himself in a restaurant. Picasso experienced pangs of guilt for having abandoned Casagemas ( though he soon had an affair with the very woman who had precipitated the suicide), and he later claimed that it was the death of his friend that prompted the gloomy paintings of his Blue Period.

Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905, oil on canvas, 6’11”x7’7”

Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905, oil on canvas, 6’11”x7’7”
Shortly after settling in Paris in a shabby building, Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the first of many companions to influence the theme, style, and mood of his work. With this happy relationship, Picasso changed his palette to pinks and reds; the years 1904 and 1905 are thus called the Rose Period. Many of his subjects were drawn from the circus, which he visited several times a week; one such painting is Family of Saltimbanques (1905, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.). In the figure of the harlequin, Picasso represented his alter ego, a practice he repeated in later works as well. “Between 1905 and 1906 Picasso was preoccupied with the subject of acrobatic performers who traveled from town to town, performing on makeshift stages. Called saltimbanques, these itinerant entertainers often dressed as Harlequin and Pierrot, the clownish characters from the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte who complete for the amorous attentions of Columbine.”5 Dating from his first decade in Paris are friendships with the poet Max Jacob, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, the art dealers Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, and the American expatriate writers Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, who were his first important patrons; Picasso did portraits of them all.

Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1906
In this portrait, new spatial and planar shifts occur that herald the beginning of the development of Picasso’s cubist period.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 8’x7’8”

An early sketch reveals that it was originally conceived to include seven figures - five prostitutes, a sailor seated in their midst, and entering from the left, a medical student carrying a book. ... He soon abandoned the male figures. By doing so, he involved the viewer much more fully in the scene. No longer does the curtain open up at the left to allow the medical student to enter. Now the curtain is opened by one of the prostitutes as if she were admitting us, the audience, into the bordello. We are implicated in the scene.... Of all the nudes, the two central ones are the most traditional, and thier facial features, particularly their brows and oval eyes, are closely related to Gertrude Stein’s in his portrait of her. But their bodies are composed of a series of long lozenge shapes, hard angles, and only a few traditional curves. It is unclear whether the second nude from the left is standing or sitting. ... As in his portrait of Gertrude Stein, the masks freed him from representing exactly what his subjects looked like and allowed his to represent his idea of them instead. ... They freed him from a slavish concern for accurate representation, and they allowed him to create a much more emotionally charged scene than he would have otherwise been able to accomplish. Rather than offering us a single point of view, he offers us many, both literally and figuratively. The painting is about the ambiguity of experience. Pablo Picasso, Medical Student, Sailor, and Five Nudes in a Bordello (Study for Demoiselles d’Avignon), Paris, 1907 We know a great deal about Picasso’s process as he worked on the canvas from late 1906 into the summer months of 1907, not only because many of his working sketches survive but also because the canvas itself has been submitted to extensive examination, including X-ray analysis. This reveals early versions of certain passages, particularly the figure on the left and the two figures on the right, which lie under the final layers of paint.

In the summer of 1906, during Picasso's stay in Gósol, Spain, his work entered a new phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian, and African art. His celebrated portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) reveals a masklike treatment of her face. The key work of this early period, however, is Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), so radical in style—its picture surface resembling fractured glass—that it was not even understood by contemporary avant-garde painters and critics. Destroyed were spatial depth and the ideal form of the female nude, which Picasso restructured into harsh, angular planes. It is quite probable that Picasso was influenced by Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre and Cezanne’s The Large Bathers. Les demoiselles d'Avignon shows the influence of African art, especially their masks. Picasso had been introduced to African art by Matisse who had first seen small African masks and statues at the studio of Andre Derian. Les demoiselles d'Avignon was not titled by Picasso, but twelve years later by a friend in jest referring to a brothel in Barcelona. Many art historians consider this painting the single most important artwork in the development of Modern Art. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 8’x7’8”

Profoundly influenced by these late Cézanne paintings, Picasso and Braque executed a series of landscapes in 1908 that were very close to Cézanne's, both in their color scheme (dark greens and light browns) and in their drastic simplification of form into geometric shapes. In Braque's Houses at L'Estaque (1908, Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland) and in Picasso's Houses at Horta (1909, Museum of Modern Art, New York), houses have a three dimensional, cubic quality. It was upon seeing these paintings that French art critic Louis Vauxelles coined the term Cubism.In these early cubist paintings, Picasso and Braque introduced other devices that undermine the illusion of space. For example, they abandoned conventional perspective: Buildings, instead of appearing one behind the other, appear one on top of the other. Moreover, in Houses at Horta, Picasso not only reduced the houses into cubic shapes but also transformed the background in the same manner. By treating earth and sky in the same way, Picasso made the canvas appear more unified, but in the process he also introduced ambiguity—by no longer differentiating what is solid from what is void. Georges Braque Houses at L’Estaque 1908, oil 28x23” Pablo Picasso,The Reservoir at Horta De Ebro,(Houses at Horta) 1909

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, oil on canvas, 40x29”
Inspired by the volumetric treatment of form by the French postimpressionist artist Paul Cézanne, Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque painted landscapes in 1908 in a style later described by a critic as being made of “little cubes,” thus leading to the term cubism. Some of their paintings are so similar that it is difficult to tell them apart. Working together between 1908 and 1911, they were concerned with breaking down and analyzing form, and together they developed the first phase of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism. Monochromatic color schemes were favored in their depictions of radically fragmented motifs, whose several sides were shown simultaneously. Picasso's favorite subjects were musical instruments, still-life objects, and his friends; one famous portrait is Daniel Henry Kahnweiler .

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1910
By 1910, when Picasso painted hisPortrait of Ambroise Vollard , the language of cubism had become flatter and more consistent,but also more ambiguous. In this work, Picasso fragmented a human figure into a series of transparent geometric planes that intersect at a variety of angles. But none of these planes give the illusion of three-dimensionality—that is, of volume as in a cube. By this stage in analytical cubism, it had become progressively evident that there were no cubes in cubism. In fact, Picasso seemed to be dismantling the idea of three-dimensional form altogether, not only by fragmentation, but also by his use of Cézanne's passage technique. With Portrait of Ambroise Vollard Picasso merged figure and environment, solid and void, background and foreground. The resulting composition is visually consistent but does not appear to conform to the physical laws of nature.

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, oil, oilcloth, and paper on canvas with rope trim.

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, oil, oilcloth, and paper on canvas with rope trim. A technique called collage, invented by Picasso, initiated the second phase of cubism in 1912, termed Synthetic Cubism. Collage, from the French word coller meaning “to glue,” involved pasting a piece of paper or other material to the surface of a painting. In his Still Life with Chair Caning (1912, Musée Picasso, Paris, France), Picasso included a piece of oil cloth printed to look like chair caning. This was a radical act, for nobody had ever before put anything but paint on a painting. Just as important, oil cloth was a material that had had no previous connection with art. Its inclusion implied that art could be created with scissors and glue as well as with brushes and paint. Both Picasso and Braque began to include bits of newspaper, wallpaper, or advertising in their paintings. Collage opened the door for any object or material, however ordinary, to be included within (and possibly even to replace) a work of art. (In these works different signifying systems or languages of representation are at work.) Reinforcing this tendency to merge art with outside elements was the inclusion in Still-life with Chair Caning of the painted letters JOU, a reference to the beginning of the word journal (French for “newspaper”) or possibly to the word jouer (French for “to play”). Picasso, after all, was playing with forms. In this work, Picasso combined several visual languages (such as paint, oil cloth, and newsprint) with a verbal language (the lettering).Instead of working toward a consistent, unified surface as analytical cubism had done, synthetic cubism tended toward multiplicity by combining a variety of styles, surfaces, and visual languages into one painting. Synthetic Cubism routinely combined abstract and representational forms, as well as a variety of textures: wood grain, sand, printed matter, and so on. Sometimes these different textures were incorporated by means of collage; other times theartist simply painted an area to look like another surface, such as wood. The later work of Picasso and Braque underwent numerous stylistic changes, but a great deal of it continued to show the influence of cubism.However, the ways that they used cubism no longer fit neatly into the strictly defined categories of analytical or synthetic cubism.

Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman
(Fernande Olivier), 1909, bronze, ht. 16” Picasso created cubist sculptures as well as paintings. The bronze bust Fernande Olivier (also called Head of a Woman, 1909, Museum of Modern Art) shows his consummate skill in handling three-dimensional form.

Guitar, 1913 Sheet metal & wire. Bull’s Head, 1943 Assemblage of bicycle seat and handlebars. Picasso made constructions—such as Guitar—from odds and ends of wood, metal, paper, and nonartistic materials, in which he explored the spatial hypotheses of cubist painting.

Pablo Picasso,Large Bather
1921, Oil on canvas 1917 took Picasso to Rome while designing sets for the Ballets Russes. This classical influence showed up in his work from Large Bather is from that period, and exemplifies the concerns he had at that time. The first impression the viewer has of the figure is monumental. One never feels that this is a representative of an actual person. It is not a portrait. One has only to bring to mind the ancient fertility fetishes, and African figurative sculpture, to see that this figure is certainly in that tradition. It seems to be the modern incarnation of these figures. Picasso has made the figure seem heavy and almost immoveable in the weight he has given the lower limbs. The anatomical elements are shaded realistically, which contributes to the illusion of great masses of flesh. The vertical composition makes the weight of the figure seem even more pronounced, as if it can not be contained within the frame. The quiet, youthful expression of the face is in dramatic contrast to the body, which seems exaggerated and androgenous, at once masculine and feminine. The draped chair seems almost throne like in its treatment. This is not the particular, this is the archetype.

Pablo Picasso, Seated Bather, 1930
During World War I ( ), Picasso went to Rome, working as a designer with Sergey Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He met and married the dancer Olga Koklova. In a realist style, Picasso made several portraits of her around 1917, of their son (for example, Paulo as Harlequin;1924, Musée Picasso), and of numerous friends. In the early 1920s he did tranquil, neoclassical pictures of heavy, sculpturesque figures, an example being Three Women at the Spring (1921, Museum of Modern Art), and works inspired by mythology, such as The Pipes of Pan (1923, Musée Picasso). At the same time, Picasso also created strange pictures of small-headed bathers and violent convulsive portraits of women which are often taken to indicate the tension he experienced in his marriage. Although he stated he was not a surrealist, many of his pictures have a surreal and disturbing quality, as in Sleeping Woman in Armchair (1927, Private Collection, Brussels) and Seated Bather (1930, Museum of Modern Art).

Pablo Picasso, Bather with a Beach Ball, 1932

Pablo Picasso Weeping Woman, 1937

Theoretical cubism soon became too formalized and dogmatic for Picasso
Theoretical cubism soon became too formalized and dogmatic for Picasso. During the 1920s he alternated cubist-inspired works such as The Three Musicians (1921; Philadelphia Museum of Art) with depictions of monumental and classically modeled figures such as his Mother and Child. Subsequently, through the 1930s, he added certain aspects of surrealism to his work, including the use of the double image to create a shifting frame of reference and the idea of one object being metamorphosed into another. The tenets of surrealism also suggested to Picasso the use of symbolic archetypes (see symbolism, art) such as the minotaur, the horse, and the bull. Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921, oil on canvas, 6’8”x6’2”

Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932
Several cubist paintings of the early 1930s, stressing harmonious, curvilinear lines and expressing an underlying eroticism, reflect Picasso's pleasure with his newest love, Marie Thérèse Walter, who gave birth to their daughter Maïa in Marie Thérèse, frequently portrayed sleeping, also was the model for the famous Girl Before a Mirror (1932, Museum of Modern Art). In 1935 Picasso made the etching Minotauromachy, a major work combining his minotaur and bullfight themes; in it the disemboweled horse, as well as the bull, prefigure the imagery of Guernica, a mural often called the most important single work of the 20th century.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, 11’5”x25’6”

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, 11’5”x25’6”
Picasso was moved to paint the huge mural Guernica shortly after German planes, acting on orders from Spain's authoritarian leader Francisco Franco, bombarded the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Completed in less than two months, Guernica was hung in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of The painting does not portray the event; rather, Picasso expressed his outrage by employing such imagery as the bull, the dying horse, a fallen warrior, a mother and dead child, a woman trapped in a burning building, another rushing into the scene, and a figure leaning from a window and holding out a lamp. Despite the complexity of its symbolism, and the impossibility of definitive interpretation, Guernica makes an overwhelming impact in its portrayal of the horrors of war. It was on extended loan at New York City's Museum of Modern Art from 1939 until 1981, when it was returned to Spain at Madrid's Prado Museum. In 1992 the work was moved to the city's new museum of 20th-century art, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Dora Maar, Picasso's next companion to be portrayed, took photographs of Guernica while the work was in progress.

“If you want to draw, you must shut your eyes and sing.”
Pablo Picasso, 1950

As a young man Amedo Modigliani ( ) traveled throughout Italy, and studied in Florence and Venice in He moved to Paris in 1906 and was introduced to African art by some of the Cubists he met there. He met Constantin Brancusi, who encouraged him as a sculpture, and from he create many sculptures of elongated, stylized heads. This motif, reflecting the influence of the African masks and sculpture he had studied, and would anticipate the style of his painting in later years. Woman with Velvet Neckband suggests the face as a mask. The face seems to float in front of the rest of the head. The face is the intersection of the many curved lines that comprise the composition. The lighter value of the face, neck, and collar separate them from the rest of the painting which is executed in darker tones of red and green. Edges of the subject and the other objects in the painting are more geometrical than physical. In this sense the influence of the Cubists can be seen. All the contour lines seem to have a beginning and an end, with a smooth curve in between. Would this be the appropriate mask to convey the personality of the sitter, and therby be a revealing portrait? Amedeo Modigliani,Woman with Velvet Neckband, Oil on paper mounted on cardboard

Perhaps the most durable legacy of Cubism was its impact on entirely nonobjective art. Such art first appeared between 1910 and 1920, mainly in Russia and then the Netherlands. Kasimir Malevich became a leader of Russian nonobjective art. He found what he believed was the logical and inevitable conclusion toward which European art was moving. "I fled to the form of the Square," Malevich wrote, "to free art from the [weight] of the objective world."Malevich's focus on the square resulted in a style called Suprematism. Malevich's paintings assemble plane forms together to create floating images. In one painting from his Suprematist Painting series, a black rectangle is poised over a red rectangle. For Malevich, four-sided figures represented the most profound images in art. Malevich believed such shapes replaced the commonplace objects of the everyday world to form an artistic "blueprint" for an ideal world and for superior expression. Malevich's purely geometric abstract style was at the heart of a nonobjective art movement that swept westward from Russia after World War I ended in It combined with the principles of a Dutch group called De Stijl to influence generations of artists throughout the remainder of the 1900's. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915, oil on canvas, 23x19”

The primary spokesperson for the movement was Piet Mondrian
The primary spokesperson for the movement was Piet Mondrian. Like many artists of his time, he spent several years in Paris absorbing the lessons of Cubism. Mondrian returned to the Netherlands briefly during the war. There he met fellow painters Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck, with whom he formed De Stijl. Architect J. J. P. Oud and designer Gerrit Rietveld joined later. De Stijl sought the collaboration of artists in the related fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, and industrial and graphic design. The movement emphasized the need for "abstraction and simplification." Almost immediately, De Stijl painters began exhibiting simplified compositions in the form of rectangles and straight lines. They restricted their palette to the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow. Under the influence of De Stijl, Mondrian's painting was transformed from the Cubism he had practiced in Paris into a style much tighter and more geometric. In Composition, he typically limited his palette to a few bright colors plus black and white. His forms consist of squares, rectangles, and horizontal or vertical bands of black. With such works, Mondrian made the artistic statement that paintings were no longer "windows" to another world. Instead, they were physical objects subject to the same design principles as a house or a chair. In Composition, Mondrian removed the depth-producing devices that even the Cubists used, such as shading, modeling, and perspective. In this painting, Mondrian was no longer concerned with producing the illusion of depth. His composition forces the eye to move from side to side, from the center of the canvas to the edge. Piet Mondrain, Composition, 1925 De Stijl (The Style) developed in the Netherlands at the same time as Russian nonobjective art and worked toward the same conclusions. Like the Russian artists, artists in De Stijl tried to produce a legitimate response to the chaos of World War I.

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1943

Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico
Chacmool, Toltec-Maya Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico C Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1929 1898–1986, English sculptor. Moore’s early sculpture was angular and rough, strongly influenced by pre-Columbian art. About 1928 he evolved a more personal style which has gained him an international reputation. His works, in wood, stone, and cement (done without clay models), are characterized by their smooth, organic shape and often include empty hollows, which he showed to have as meaningful a shape as solid mass. During World War II, when materials for carving were scarce, he was commissioned by the government to do a series of drawings of the London underground bomb shelters (1940). His favorite sculptural subjects have been the mother and child and the reclining figure. Moore executed an abstract screen and a reclining figure for the Time-Life Building in London (1952–53), a bronze group for Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts in New York City (1962–65), and a monument for the Univ. of Chicago (1964–66). In the Art Gallery of Toronto, a gallery has been dedicated entirely to his works.

Futurist Sculpture 1882–1916, Italian futurist painter and sculptor. He played a primary role in the drafting of the manifesto of futurism in 1910 and was the major figure in the movement until In his famous, characteristic painting, The City Rises (1910; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City), he interpreted powerfully the technological turbulence of modern civilization. Influenced by Medardo Rosso, Boccioni turned to sculpture in 1912 and sought to translate light and motion into mass. His sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913; Mus. of Modern Art) embodies his concept of “lines of force” to replace the use of straight lines. Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, bronze, ht. 43”

Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss, 1908,
Romanian sculptor. Brancusi is considered one of the foremost of modern artists. In 1904 he went to Paris, where he worked under Mercié. He declined Rodin’s invitation to work in his studio. Because of his radical, economic style, his abstract sculptures, The Kiss (1908), Sleeping Muse (1910), and the portrait of Mlle Pogany (1923; Musée d’Art moderne, Paris) were the subjects of much controversy. He altered his technique from modeling to carving c.1910.

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1919, bronze, ht. 54”
In 1927 Brancusi won a lawsuit against the U.S. customs authorities who attempted to value his sculpture as raw metal. The suit led to legal changes permitting the importation of abstract art free of duty. Brancusi’s work is notable for its extreme simplification of form, its organic and frequently symbolic character, and its consummate craftsmanship. He had a profound understanding of materials, working primarily in metal, stone, and wood. Bird in Space (1919; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) is a characteristic work.

SURREALISM Surrealists were greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s book Interpretation of Dreams. These artists believed in an art based on Freud’s psychoanalytic technique of free association as a means of exploring the imagination and entering the world of myth, fear, fantasy and dreams.

Giorgio DeChirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914, 33x27”
De Chirico had produced paintings which revealed strange and disquieting juxtopositions of reality. His paintings reflected the interests of a group of Italian artists who produced works called Metaphysical Paintings. Both Dada artists and Surrealists were greatly influenced by DeChirico’s images.

Biomorphic Surrealists produced largely abstract compositions, which sometimes suggested organisms or natural forms. Formost of these surrealists was Joan Miro. Automation was the creation of art without conscious control and used types of planned accidents to provoke reactions closely related to the subconscious experience. Joan Miro was the master of this technique. He was born in the Catalonia region of Spain but moved to Paris in He resisted joining the Surrealism movement officially, but even his earliest works exhibit a closeness to the Surrealist style. Miro's paintings typically combine folk tales, humor, and absurdity. In Le Port, he developed an art of both abstraction and fantasy in a painting populated by strange and fantastic shapes that suggest living forms. Miro claimed that he generated his forms without preparation or planning, allowing his mind and his hand to wander playfully across the surface of the picture. Joan Miro, Le Port, 1945 BIOMORPHIC SURREALISM

Paul Klee, Mask of Fear, 1932 Paul Klee used fantasy images to represent the non-visible world. He felt the unconscious was revealed in archaic signs and patterns that are evident in the art of primative cultures. He was the son of a musician and a violinist himself. He felt that painting and music were both means of spiritual expression. 1879–1940, Swiss painter, graphic artist, and art theorist, b. near Bern. Klee’s enormous production (more than 10,000 paintings, drawings, and etchings) is unique in that it represents the successful combination of his sophisticated theories of art with a very personal inventiveness that has the appearance of great innocence. The son of a music teacher, Klee himself was a violinist, and musical analogies permeate his writing and his approach to art. He traveled through Europe, open to many artistic influences. In 1911 he became associated with the Blaue Reiter Group and later exhibited as one of the Blue Four. Klee’s awakening to color occurred on a trip to Tunis in 1914, a year after he had met Delaunay and been made aware of new theories of color use. Thereafter his whimsical and fantastic images were rendered with a luminous and subtle color sense. Klee’s works are neither abstract nor figurative, but have strong elements of both approaches. World famous by 1929, Klee taught at the Bauhaus (1922–31) and at the Düsseldorf academy (1931–33) until the Nazis, who judged his work degenerate, forced him to resign. He and his family fled Germany for his native city in 1933.

1887–1985, Russian painter. In 1907, Chagall left his native Vitebsk for St. Petersburg, where he studied under L. N. Bakst. In Paris (1910) he began to assimilate cubist characteristics into his expressionistic style. He is considered a forerunner of surrealism. After some years in Russia, Chagall returned to France in 1922, where he spent most of his life. His frequently repeated subject matter was drawn from Jewish life and folklore; he was particularly fond of flower and animal symbols. His major early works included murals for the Jewish State Theater (now in the Tretyakov Mus., Moscow). Among his other well-known works are I and the Village. He designed the sets and costumes for Stravinsky’s ballet Firebird (1945). Much of Chagall’s work is rendered with an extraordinary formal inventiveness and a deceptive fairy-tale naïveté. Chagall illustrated numerous books, including Gogol’s Dead Souls, La Fontaine’s Fables, and Illustrations for the Bible (1956). A museum of his work opened in Nice in 1973. Marc Chagall, I and the Village, 1911, 6’4”x4’10”

Salvador Dali, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937 ILLUSIONISTIC SURREALISM
The strong concern of the metaphysical painters with the evocative power of symbols suggested deliberate investigation of dream imagery according to the principles of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Dalí’s precise realistic technique was admirably suited to the creation on canvas of the hallucinatory atmosphere of dreams. In 1929 Dalí moved to Paris and became officially a surrealist.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory,

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
The work of the Illusionistic Surrealists contains highly realistic representations of dream states or hallucinations. Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory is an example of what the artist called "hand-painted dream photographs." Works like these brought a new level of realism to painting. The Illusionistic Surrealists believed that realism, if pressed to extreme detail, could undercut the viewer's sense of reality, resulting in something almost ridiculous. There is a theatrical flavor to these works, particularly in Dali's paintings, where watches droop and a jellyfish walks on the land. The Illusionistic Surrealists hoped that by demonstrating the absurdity they saw in worldly existence they could awaken others to the irrational within themselves.

Salvador Dali, The Hallucinogenic Bullfighter, 1970

A meticulous, skillful technician, Magritte is noted for works that juxtapose ordinary objects in unusual contexts. Everyday objects are reproduced in exact detail but placed in incongruous settings and combinations: A huge bright-green apple pushes out at the walls of a room; men fall like raindrops over rooftops; a giant heavy boulder floats across a clouded blue sky. Magritte’s work conveys a sense of mystery, uneasiness, and even fear by presenting an environment totally unlike that of everyday experience. Rene Magritte, Time Transfixed, 1938

Rene Magritte, The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images, 1928-29, oil on canvas, 2x3’1”
Early in his career Magritte introduced words into his paintings, contrasting the varying degrees of reality in the name of an object, the image of the object, and the object itself. Among his best-known works in this vein is La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images, , Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Below the painted image of a smoker’s pipe appears the written declaration, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). Magritte displayed a mordant wit in creating surrealist versions of famous paintings, such as Madame Récamier de David (1949, private collection). In this painting an elaborate coffin is substituted for the reclining woman in the famous portrait by Jacques-Louis David.

Rene Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933

Alexander Calder, Big Red, 1959, painted sheet metal and steel wire, 6’1”x9’6”
In the early 1930s Calder experimented with abstraction, first as a painter and later as a sculptor. He was influenced by his meetings with such European abstract artists as Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Piet Mondrian. He also began to experiment with motion, a process that led to his development of the two modes of sculpture for which he is famous, the mobile and the stabile. Calder's mobiles (so named by the French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp) are suspended, elegantly balanced arrangements of abstract, organic forms. The stabiles (so named by Arp) are stationary abstract forms that frequently convey a humorous suggestion of animal shapes

Meret Oppenheim, Object (Le Déjeuner en Fourrure), 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, life size. The fusion of sexuality, humor, and scandal made Oppenheim’s 1936 submission to the New York exhibition the perfect Surrealist object. The Surrealists insisted on the use of the objective world as the arena for their interest, locating ruptures through humor and irony. The significance and multiple possibilities of Surrealist objects was brought home to American audiences in this 1936 show. Audiences were shocked.The issue of transformation played a major role in Surrealism, as it would in later in Pop Art. This meant not simple visual illusionism with one thing resembling another, but that one thing in the world could have multiple or an overly determined array of meanings.

Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing, 1947
The spirit of Existentialsim is perhaps best expressed in the midlife sculpture of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti ( ). Although Giacommetti never claimed he pursued Existentialst ideas in his art, it is hard to deny that his works capture the spirit of that philosophy. Indeed, Sartre, Giacometti’s friend, saw the artist’s figurative sculptures as the epitome of existentialist humanity - alienated, solitary, and lost in the world’s immensity. Giacommetti had produced sculptures based on human models earlier in his career, but around 1940 he abandoned such direct observation and began to work from memory. His sculptures of the 1940’s, such as Man Pointing, were thin, virtually featureless figures with rough, agitated surfaces. Rather than conveying the solidity and mass of conventional bronze figurative sculpture, these severely attenuated figures seem swallowed up by the space surrounding them, imparting a sense of isolation and fragility.

Man Ray, Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924,
Among the Surrealists who had also been part of the Dada movement was Man Ray. In 1921, he moved to Paris, where he showed his paintings in the first Surrealist exhibition of He worked as a fashion and portrait photographer, and avant-garde filmmaker. His experiments with photographic techniques include the Rayograph, made without a camera by placing objects on light-sensitive paper. Man Ray’s most famous photograph, Le Violon d’Ingres, combines Dada wordplay with Surrealist imagery. The nude recalls the odalisques of Ingres, while the title refers to Ingres’ hobby - playing the violin. By adding sound holes, Man Ray puns on the similarity between the nude’s back and the shape of a violin. The combination of the nude and the holes exemplifies the dreamlike imagery of Surrealism. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, many Surrealist artists immigrated to New York City. This influx of European artists to the United States proved to be an enormous inspiration to young American artists, who suddenly found themselves in the company of great European masters.

Dadaism In the years following World War I, many artists saw even Cubism as too tame and too rational for a world left in turmoil by the war's destruction. The movement called Dada was born in Zurich, Switzerland, though it later flourished in New York City and Paris. The Dada movement was an expression of irrationality directed at a world the Dadaists believed had lost all reason and concern for human values. Yet, through its self-imposed irrationality, Dada opened a new world of creative impulse. It developed guidelines that would encourage the use of chance occurrences and the conscious mind in creating art. Early members of the group included Jean Arp and Marcel Janco. Dada originated in 1916 in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The members of the group selected the word randomly from a French dictionary. Early in its history, Dada was primarily a literary movement in which poetry was created from a random selection of words. To create a Dada work of art, Arp used a similar technique. He placed torn pieces of paper into a box, and after shaking the box, he allowed the scraps to spill out onto a sheet of paper. He then pasted the pieces down according to the pattern in which they fell. He allowed randomness and chance to dictate the final composition of the picture. Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild, 1919 Arp's German colleague Kurt Schwitters also adopted an unconventional approach to making art. Schwitters's work developed out of the Synthetic Cubism style, but he was even more aggressive in incorporating everyday objects into his works. Schwitters incorporated actual trash, including a button and a used envelope, in this composition. By using identifiable rubbish, Schwitters raised questions about the difference between art and nonart.

MARCEL DUCHAMP Is Art a commodity or an idea?
Is Art a representation of something in the world, or is it a thing in the world itself?

Marcel Duchamp,Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 ,
Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 caused a sensation when shown at the New York Armory Show of 1913 The Nude Descending a Staircase, Shown at the Salon des Indépendants, it had aroused sharp criticism even among the Cubists, to say nothing about the general public. However in 1913, the picture was the hit of the New York Armory Show; it scandalized the American public to such a degree that it made the artist popular overnight. While most of the viewers were outraged with the exhibited pictures, especially with the Nude, the others were sincerely delighted by the European break with academic and traditional art. In the United States Marcel Duchamp and his friend Francis Picabia soon became the center of the circle of painters around the Stieglitz gallery. The group had adopted an anti-art attitude and was thus a movement parallel to the Zurich Dadaism.

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel,1913
First “Ready-Mades”-They demonstrated, in the most irritating fashion to the art world of Duchamp’s day, that art could be made out of virtually anything and that it required little or no manipulation by the artist. For Duchamp the conception, the discovery was what made a work of art, not the uniqueness of the object. 26 “Duchamp was unfazed by the criticism, having already set himself in opposition to all art that he referred to as retinal because he felt it appealed to the eyes alone. In 1913, he exhibited a bicycle wheel turned upside down and mounted on a kitchen stool (Bicycle Wheel, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania). This was the first of what came to be known as readymades, ordinary objects made into art simply by changing their context—that is, by exhibiting them as art.

Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915
In Advance of the Broken Arm (Snow Shovel), Duchamp destroys the stable historical referent by detaching a snow shovel from its commonly understood function. This piece questions the very nature of art and representation. Ready-Made- Signified a generation’s revolt against tradition, Western Civilization, and the cult of the old master-piece.

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23
Refers to the struggle for power between the sexes. Brides domain is the upper half and the bachelor mechanism is below. In 1915 Duchamp moved to New York City where he remained, for the most part, until In addition to the readymades, he produced a small collection of unusual paintings and objects during this time, including his mysterious and complex masterpiece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even ( , Philadelphia Museum of Art). Also known as TheLarge Glass, it is made of lead foil, oil paint, and wire forms sandwiched between large panes of glass. The top half of the glass features a strange mechanical form that represents the bride, while the bottom half, representing the bachelors, includes diagrammatic renderings of both a coffee grinder and objects resembling dressmakers’ mannequins.

What is a masterpiece? What is its value?
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q , color reproduction of the Mona Lisa altered with a pencil, 5x7” 1919 his picture L.H.O.O.Q. to a Dada demonstration in Paris Demystifies traditional art, or as he called it, “retinal art” (art intended only to please the eye.) This work questions the place of the masterpiece in the contemporary ideas in art. He called such works ready-made-aided. What is a masterpiece? What is its value?

Fountain, 1917 R. Mutt (Marcel Duchamp)
“Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made this fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took the ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object.” Defense for Mr. Mutt by Duchamp after it was rejected by the shows exhibition committee (which had included Duchamp, who had submitted the work under the name of Mutt.)

The Early 1900's Art in North America

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907, photogravure, 10x11”
Stieglitz was attracted above all to arrangements of form that stirred his deepest emotions. His aesthetic approach crystalized during the making of 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 rapidly grew bored with the company of the properous passengers in the ship’s first-class section. He walked as far forward on that level as he could, when the rail around the opening onto the lower deck brought him up short. This level was reserved for steerage passengers, the government was returning to Europe after refusing them entrance into the United States. The finished print fulfilled Stieglitz’s vision so well that it shaped his future photographic work, and its haunting mixture of found patterns and human activity has continued to stir viewer’s emotions to this day.

Stieglitz’s concern for positioning photography as an art form with the same fine art status as painting and sculpture was also pursued by Edward Weston ( ). In addition to taking straight photography, like those of Stieglitz, Weston experimented with photographs that moved toward greater abstraction, paralleling developments in other media. Nude is an example of this photographic style. The image’s simplicity and the selection of a small segment of the human body as the subject result in a lyrical photograph of dark and light areas that at first glance suggests a landscape. Further inspection reveals the fluid curves and underlying sketetal armature of the human form. This photograph, in its reductiveness, formally expresses a study of the body that verges on the abstract. Edward Weston, Nude, 1925, platinum print

Georgia O’Keeffe, Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, 1931
Georgia O'Keeffe came to represent the new American approach to art. O'Keeffe, who was married to Alfred Stieglitz, spent her career painting particularly American subjects in realistic detail. She created dozens of abstract paintings, but she is perhaps best known for her carefully observed paintings of simple objects, such as shells, rocks, and flowers. In such works as Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, O'Keeffe combined precise observation with a keen sense of design.

Precisionism was the first new style of the 1900's to emerge in the United States. It originated in the 1920's with Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler as its leaders. Precisionism merged with Cubism and realism into a distinctly American style. Precisionism eliminated the complexities of Analytic Cubism but made something more abstract and angular of its realistic themes. The subject matter of Precisionist painting consisted largely of views of the buildings and industrial structures typical of the American landscape. For example, Demuth's My Egypt portrays a grain elevator in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927, oil on composition board, 3’x2’6”

During the 1930's, Benton attempted to move the center of the American art world away from New York City to the heartland of the country, the Midwest. Benton and other regionalists cultivated a nostalgic interest in the local scenes of American life that were disappearing. As the spokesperson for regionalism, Benton attacked European art and the international character of New York-based artists, especially those associated with Alfred Stieglitz. To counteract European art, Benton developed a monumental style that found its expression in many large murals in public buildings. Benton's mature style can be seen in murals he painted titled America Today. In such works, Benton referred to Renaissance painting for stylistic influences. His figures, with their bulging, muscular bodies, resemble those seen in the paintings by Michelangelo. Thomas Hart Benton, City Building, from the mural series America Today, 1930

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930, oil on beaverboard, 2’6”x2’1”
Grant Wood received art training in Paris during the early 1920's. On a trip to Germany in 1928, he discovered the works of Flemish and German artists of the 1400's that inspired him to return to realism. Wood was soon producing paintings that combined ease of understanding with an unassuming charm. Wood's American Gothic is perhaps the most famous of all regionalist paintings. It transcends the seriousness of most regionalist art in favor of a delicate humor. The humor comes from Wood's placement of a typical American farmer and his daughter with European Gothic-style windows in the background.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas, 2’6”x4’9”

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas, 2’6”x4’9”
Edward Hopper ( ) produced paintings during the Depression era evoking the national mindset. However, rather than depict historically specific scenes, he took as his subject the more generalized theme of the overwhelming loneliness and echoing isolation of modern life in the United States. Trained as a commercial artist, Hopper studied painting and printmaking in New York and Paris before returning to the United States. He then concentrated on scenes of contemporary American city and country life, painting buildings, streets, and landscapes that are curiously muted, still, and filled with emply spaces. Motion is stopped and time suspended, as if the artist recorded the major details of a poignant personal memory. From the darkened streets outside a restaurant in Nighthawks, the viewer glimpses the lighted interior through huge plate-glass windows, which lend the inner space the paradoxical sense of being both a safe refuge and a vulnerable place for the three customers and the counterman. The seeming indifference of Hopper’s characters to one another and the echoing spaces that surround them evoke the pervasive loneliness of modern humans. Although Hopper invested works such as Nighthawks with the straightforward mode of representation, creating a kind of realist vision recalling that of 19th century artists such as Thomas Eakins and Henry Ossawa Tanner, he simplified the shapes in the painting, moving toward abstraction in order to heighten the mood of the scene.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley, 1935, gelatin silver print
During the Depression era, the Farm Security Administration hired American photographer Dorothea Lange ( ) in 1936, sending her to photograph the dire situation of the rural poor the Great Depression had displaced. At the end of the assignment to document the lives of migratory pea pickers in California, Lange stopped at a camp in Nipomo and found the migrant workers there starving because the crops had frozen in the fields. Among the pictures she made on this occasion was Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley, which like American Gothic, has achieved iconic status. Generations of viewers have been moved by the mixture of strength and worry in the raised hand and careworn face of a young mother, who holds a baby on her lap. Two older children, who cling to her trustfully while turning their faces away from the camera, flank her.

The Mexican Muralists

Prominent in the new Mexican mural movement was Diego Rivera ( ), a child prodigy who had enrolled in Mexico City’s Academia de San Carlos at age 11. From Rivera lived in Paris, where he befriended Picasso and worked in a Synthetic Cubist style. In 1919 he met David Alfaro Siqueiros, another future Mexican muralist. They began to discuss Mexico’s need for a national and revolutionary art. In Rivera traveled in Italy to study its great Renaissance frescoes, then began a series of monumental murals for Mexican government buildings, inspired by both Italian Renaissance and Pre-Columbian art of Mexico. Diego Rivera, National Palace Stairway Mural, , fresco,

Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934, fresco, 15’9”x37’2”

Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934, fresco, 15’9”x37’2”
Between 1930 and 1934 Rivera worked in the United States, painting murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. In 1932 the Rockefeller family commissioned him to paint for the lobby of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center a fresco on the theme Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future. When Rivera, a Communist, provocatively insisted on including a portrait of Lenin in the mural, the Rockefellers canceled his commission, paid him his fee, and had the unfinished mural destroyed. In response to what he called an act of cultural vandalism, Rivera re-created the mural in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, under the new title Man, Controller of the Universe. At the center of the mural, the clear-eyed young figure in overalls represents Man, who symbolically controls the universe through the manipulation of technology. Crossing behind him are two great ellipese that represent, respectively, the microcosm of living organisma as seen through the microscope at Man’s right hand, and the macrocosm of outer space as viewed through the giant telescope above his head. Below, fruits and vegtables rise from the earth as a result of his agricultural efforts. To Man’s left (viewer’s right), Lenin joins the hands of several workers of different races. To Man’s right, decadent captialists debauch themselves in a nightclub, directly beneath the disease-causing cells in the ellipse. (Rivera vengefully included in this section a portrait of the bespectacled John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) The wings of the mural feature, to Man’s left, the workers of the world embracing socialism, and, to the Man’s right, the capitalist world, which is cursed by militarism and labor unrest.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940, oil on canvas, 24x19”
Another influential Mexican painter of the 1930's was Frida Kahlo, who was married to Diego Rivera. Kahlo's paintings were largely autobiographical in subject matter. She produced many self-portraits depicting herself in different psychological states. Stylistically, she was interested in the kinds of heroic representation produced by her husband. However, more than Rivera, she was firmly rooted in the traditions of Mexico and almost always portrayed herself in traditional Mexican costumes. Her subject matter is also concerned with traditional Mexican culture. In,Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird Kahlo wears a thorn necklace that draws blood from her neck, referring to the ritual bloodletting practiced by Aztec priests in ancient Mexico.

Parts of this presentation are used under the
Fair Use Exemption of U.S. Copyright Law. BIBLIOGRAPHY • Adams, Laurie. Art Across Time (New York: McGraw Hill, 1999). • Arnason, H.H. & Prather, Marla, History of Modern Art (New York: Harry Abrams, • Brigstocke, Hugh, ed. The Oxford Companion to Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) • Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God (New York: Viking Press, 1969). • Cleaver, Dale. Art, An Introduction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1966). • Fineberg, Jonathan, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2000). • Fleming, William. Arts and Ideas (New York: Holt,Rinehart & Winston, 1988). • Hartt, Frederick. Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, & Architecture -4th Edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993). • Honour, Hugh & Fleming, John. The Visual Arts: A History (New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 2002). • Howells, Trevor ed., The World’s Greatest Buildings (San Francisco: Fog City Press, 2000). • Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991). • Janson, H.W.. History of Art - 2nd edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1986). • Janson, H.W. & Janson, A.F., History of Art, The Western Tradition, 6th edition (Upper Saddle River: Pearson-Prentice Hall, 2004). • Kleiner, Fred, Mamiya, Christin, & Tansey, Richard. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 2001). • Pierce, James Smith. From Abacus to Zeus (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977). • Skokstad, Marilyn. Art History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002). • Spielvogel, Jackson. Western Civilization (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2003). • West, Shearer, The Bulfinch Guide to Art History (New York: Little, Brown, & Co., 1996). ________________ • Opentopia < • Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2005 < © Microsoft Corporation. • Web Gallery of Art < • World Book 2004

CUBISM Cubism: An art movement developed by

Similar presentations

Presentation on theme: "CUBISM Cubism: An art movement developed by"— Presentation transcript:

Similar presentations

About project

Feedback

Log in

Auth with social network:

CUBISM Cubism: An art movement developed by

Similar presentations

Presentation on theme: "CUBISM Cubism: An art movement developed by"— Presentation transcript:

Similar presentations

About project

Feedback