The early 20th Century: The Establishment of Modernist Art

The early 20th Century: The Establishment of Modernist Art
First trans-Atlantic radio signal,1901 Wright Brothers’ first flight, 1903 Albert Einstine,( Theory of Relativity) RMS Titanic sinks, 1912 World War I, Russian Revolution, Mexican Revolution Ends, 1924 The Great Depression,1930s Rise of Nazism in Germany,1930s World War II, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were responsible for one of the most radical innovations of the century. In their cubist paintings, these artists defied the long-held notion that painting provided a "window" into deep fictional space. Instead, they fractured forms and space into shifting planes and reduced their palette to a few muted tones. Yet Picasso never favored absolute abstraction as did Piet Mondrian, who eliminated any reference to visual reality from the rigorous compositions of straight lines and primary colors that he intended as the expression of an ideal and universal order. Surrealist artists, through a variety of styles and media, sought to exploit the internal world of imaginings and the unconscious. René Magritte, for example, employed precise illusionism to subvert expectations about reality. Others, including Joan Miró, employed the technique of automatism, making doodles or random marks on paper or canvas to trigger associations in the viewer's imagination. European surrealists provided a critical example for postwar American artists such as David Smith and Jackson Pollock. In his welded metal sculpture Smith incorporated "found" objects that, as a kind of sculptural equivalent to automatism, bore an accidental resemblance to a form or an idea. Pollock recorded his ideas and gestures on the canvas in dense webs of poured paint. Like his fellow abstract expressionists Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Pollock believed that abstraction would achieve all the expressive potential of representational art. By the 1960s, Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were exploring alternatives to abstract expressionism with subjects drawn from popular culture and a style informed by mass mechanical reproduction. As the twentieth century draws to a close, contemporary artists continue to explore these themes, simultaneously assimilating and rejecting the work of their predecessors.

Pre WWI: Symbolism and Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau - French for "The New Art." An art movement and style of decoration and architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, characterized particularly by the depiction of leaves and flowers in undulating lines, often flowing vines. Gustav Klimt (Austrian, ), Alphonse Mucha (Czechoslovakian, ), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, ), Aubrey Beardsley (English, ), Antonio Gaudí (Spanish, ), and Hector Guimard (French, ) were among the most prominent Artists associated with this style. The roots of Art Nouveau go back to Romantism , Symbolism, the English Arts and Crafts Movement and William Morris (English, ). Art Nouveau is also known as Jugenstil and Yellow Book Style, epitomizing what is sometimes called “fin de siécle” style. Pronounced: Art noo-voh' The World's Fair (Exposition Universelle) held in Paris in 1900 announced Art Nouveau as a significant new style in architecture and design. Visited by fifty-one million people, the fair included Art Nouveau architecture, furniture, jewelry, ceramics, posters, glass, textiles, and metalwork. While some pavilions were state sponsored, others were private. The greatest achievements of the new style were shown in the pavilion organized by Siegfried Bing, the art dealer and entrepreneur who in 1895 opened a shop and art gallery in Paris called L'Art Nouveau, which gave the movement its name. In his pavilion, visitors could see interiors by Georges de Feure, Eugène Gaillard, and Édouard Colonna, in which the furniture, fabrics, and decoration were all part of a "total work of art" unified by the same design. A pavilion designed by French architect Henri Sauvage housed the performances of the American dancer Loïe Fuller, whose wild dance with veils, in which she transformed herself into a flower, inspired many Art Nouveau artists. Jewelry by René Lalique was also exhibited at the fair. His famous dragonfly woman brooch, the most talked-about creation in his display, demonstrates the French jeweler's fascination with the world of nature and the theme of metamorphosis.

Gustav Klimt, ( ) Gustav Klimt, founder of the school of painting known as the Vienna Sezession, embodies the high-keyed erotic, psychological, and aesthetic preoccupations of turn-of-the-century Vienna's dazzling intellectual world. Klimt's style drew upon an enormous range of sources: classical Greek, Byzantine, Egyptian, and Minoan art; late-medieval painting and the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer; photography and the symbolist art of Max Klinger; and the work of both Franz von Stuck and Fernand Khnopff. In synthesizing these diverse sources, Klimt's art achieved both individuality and extreme elegance. Death and Life, painted before 1911 and revised 1915, oil on canvas, Collection of Frau Marietta Preleuthner, Vienna. He has been called the preeminent exponent of ART NOUVEAU. Klimt began (1883) as an artist-decorator in association with his brother and Franz Matsoh. In , Klimt executed mural decorations for staircases at the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; these confirmed Klimt's eclecticism and broadened his range of historical references. Klimt was a cofounder and the first president of the Vienna Secession, a group of modernist architects and artists who organized their own exhibition society and gave rise to the SECESSION MOVEMENT, or the Viennese version of Art Nouveau. He was also a frequent contributor to Ver Sacrum, the group's journal. Among the important decorative projects undertaken by Klimt were his celebrated Beethoven frieze (1902; Osterreichische Galerie), a cycle of mosaic decorations for Josef Hofmann's Palais Stoclet in Brussels ( ), and numerous book illustrations. Gustav Klimt was a Viennese painter and the founder of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian Art Nouveau movement. His early work, consisting principally of large murals for theaters, was painted in an unremarkable naturalistic style. After 1898, Klimt's work moved toward greater innovation and imagination, taking on a more decorative, symbolic aspect. He continued to paint murals, but the harsh public criticism of the three murals Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence ( , Vienna University; destroyed 1945) led him to concentrate on panel painting. Klimt's best-known works are his later portraits, such as Frau Fritsa Reidler (1906, Österreichische Galerie, Vienna), with their flat, unshadowed surfaces, translucent, mosaic colors and forms, and sinuous, curling background lines and patterns. Among his most admired works is the series of mosaic murals ( ) in the Palais Stoclet, an opulent private mansion in Brussels designed by the architect Josef Hoffmann, who was also a member of the Vienna Secession movement. Judith I 1901, Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna

Expressionism A movement in fine arts that emphasized the expression of inner experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in the artist. Expressionism, artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events aroused in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France. Artistic and literary movement born in the early years of the 20th century. Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes the visual object reality of his own objective image, which he feels is an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and form is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics. Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910, (Munich, Dresden, Berlin), as heir of a national trend related to Grünewald: the Wallgraf-Richartz museum, in Köln, has the richest collection of this era. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval art forms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement. Gustave Moreau was already saying not to believe in the reality of what he touched or saw, but instead in his own interior perception; expressionism has been holding this theory to its extreme application. The most famed German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict. Painters as varied as Georges Rouault, Henry de Waroquier, Marcel Gromaire, Edouard Goerg have also been qualified of ``French expressionists''. Other members were, in Belgium, James Ensor, Permecke, Van der Bergue, Servaes were seen as disciples of Jérôme Bosch and Bruegel, the Dutch Leo Gestel, the Danish Sörensen, the British Lyall Watson. Among the members of the Paris school, Soutine, Pascin and Modigliani have been attached to expressionism. Max Beckman ( ). The Night, Oil on canvas 4 ft 4 3/4 in x 5 ft 1/2 in. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany.

André Derain ( ) Derain believed that an artist's goal should be to make the strongest possible presentation of his emotional reaction to a subject by using bold color and strong linear patterns. Derain was in an unofficial organization of artists called Fauve. Fauve artistssaw unexpected shapes and colors that suggested new ways of communicating emotion. After about five years Derain and other artist had stopped using faive. They started modifing there own violent colors and found there ownmore personal styles. André Derain was a French painter who was a leader in several avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century. Born in Chatou, near Paris, he abandoned his early engineering studies to pursue an artistic career. In 1905, he became a member of the fauvist ("wild beast") group, along with Maurice de Vlaminck and Henri Matisse. The group was so named because of the savage nature of the bold and unrealistic color used by the artists (see Fauvism). Most of Derain's works of this period were landscapes and cityscapes, such as London Bridge (1906, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). They show the typical fauvist characteristics of raw color (often squeezed onto the canvas directly from the tube), choppy brushstrokes, frenzied composition, and lack of concern for perspective or the realities of a scene. After 1908, Derain began to experiment with other styles. The influence of Paul Cézanne led him to prefer quieter colors and more controlled compositions. His great Bathers (1908, location unknown) represented an attempt to combine the innovations of previous painters, such as Claude Monet and Cézanne, in a single all-encompassing synthesis. In 1910, Derain produced highly geometric, cubist-influenced works such as The Old Bridge at Cagnes (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.). His late work, after 1912, showed the influence of many styles-including classical French art and African sculpture-and tended to become increasingly traditional and derivative, characterized by muted color and fussily elaborated technique. Derain also designed woodcut book illustrations and, in 1919, he designed set decorations for Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. London Bridge, ” x 39” Museum of Modern Art,

Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better. -- Henri Matisse Henri Matisse ( ) Madame Matisse, "The Green Line" ( La Raie verte) Oil on canvas. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark. About the Painting: In his Paris studio with its windows looking out over a monastery garden, in 1908 Matisse created one of his most important works of the period : "The Red Room". The artist himself called this a "decorative panel" and it was intended for the dining room in the Moscow mansion of the famous Russian collector Sergey Shchukin. Matisse turned to a motif common in the works created that year: a room decorated with vases, fruits and flowers. Yet, as he wrote in 1908, "the basis of my thinking has not changed, but the very thinking has evolved and my means of expression have followed on." The luxuriant raspberry red fabric with its energetic twists of blue pattern seems to sink down from the wall, taking over the surface of the table and uniting it in a single whole, swallowing up the three-dimensional space of the room and masterfully confirming the decorative potential of the canvas surface. Matisse first made such uncompromising use of this compositional device here, in "The Red Room". But in affirming the flatness of the red colour, the artist managed to create within it the impression of space, space within which the female figure bending over the vase could move and within which the sharp angled view of the chair seemed natural. The window, through which we see a green garden with flowering plants, allows the eye to move into the depths of the canvas. Henri Matisse was born at Le Cateau-Cambrésis in the North of France on December 31, His parents, Emile Matisse and Héloise Gérars, had a general store selling household goods and seed. Henri planned on a legal career, and in 1887/88 studied law in Paris, in 1889 he was employed as a clerk in a solicitor’s office. It was in 1890 that he was first attracted to painting. Confined to his bed for nearly a year (1890) after an intestinal operation, he chose drawing as a pastime. Then the hobby took best of him and he decided for the painting career. The long years of learning followed: in 1891 Matisse studied under Bouguereau at the Académie Julian, and in 1892 transferred unofficially to Gustave Moreau’s studio at the Ecole Beaux-Arts, where he met Marquet, at the same time attending the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs. In 1894 his daughter Marguerite was born, though Matisse did not marry the mother, Amélie Paraere, till In 1896 he made a successful début at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and a year later displayed there his large canvas La Desserte, which showed the influence of the Impressionists. After Moreau’s death in 1898, he studied briefly with Cormon, then left the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and entered the Académie Carrière where he met Derain and Puy and attended evening classes in sculpture. In 1899 his son Jean, and then, in 1900, his son Pierre were born. Financial difficulties made him to stay for some time with his parents. During the period of Matisse participated in a group exhibition at Berthe Weil’s Gallery (1902), painted townscapes with Marquet in Paris, spent the summer of 1904 working with Signac and Cross at Saint-Tropez, and in painted views of Collioure. In 1905 and 1906 Matisse, his talent now fully developed, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants together with Derain, Marquet, Vlaminck, Roauault and others and sparked off controversy. The group was ironically nicknamed “Les Fauves” (The Wild ones). At that time Matisse displayed a tendency towards monumental, decorative compositions. If in 1900 it was only to earn some money that he took on the task of painting a frieze for the World Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris, in 1907 he worked with enthusiasm on a ceramic triptych, Nymph and Satyr, for Osthaus’s mansion in Hagen, Westphalia. In 1908 Matisse painted the monumental canvas The Red Room; and in executed two large decorative panels, The Dance and The Music on commissions from the Moscow businessman S. Shchukin. Sculpture, too, began to occupy a significant place in Matisse’s artistic endeavor and was exhibited for the first time in 1912, in New York. At this time, Matisse set forth the theoretical basis for his art in his Notes d’un peintre (1908) and expounded his views on painting in the art school (the Atelier Matisse), which he had organized. But soon teaching began to weigh heavily on the artist, and he withdrew more and more frequently to Issy-des-Moulineaux. In 1910 Matisse visited Munich to see an exhibition of Islamic art, in 1911 Seville, then Moscow on the invitation of S. Shchukin, and at the end of that year, Tangier, Morocco. From 1914 to 1918 he divided his time between Collioure, Paris and Nice. In 1918 a Matisse-and-Picasso exhibition opened at the Guillaume Gallery: it was to a certain extent indicative of the role of these two painters in contemporary art. In 1920 Matisse designed the stage sets and costumes for S. Diaghilev’s ballet The Nightingale (to Stravinsky’s music) and in 1939 for Léonide Massine’s ballet Rouge et Noir (to the music of Shostakovich’s first Symphony). In he painted a large decorative composition, The Dance, for the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania; the same years he fulfilled etching illustrations for Mallarmé’s Poésies. In Matisse produced cartoons for carpets, based on James Joyce’s Ulysses. During the Second World War Matisse lived in the south of France – Bordeaux, Ciboure, Nice. In 1941 he underwent a serious operation. Confined to bed for most of the ensuing period, he turned his attention to book design and illustrations. He designed and illustrated Henri de Montherlant’s Pasiiphaë in 1944, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Mariana Alcoforado’s Lettres Portugaises and Reverdy’s Visages in 1946, and Ronsard’s Amours in His unique book Jazz, published in 1947, contained a facsimile reproduction of the text written in the artist’s own hand and illustrations executed in gouache after Matisse’s cut-outs. It was only after the end of the war that Matisse turned anew to monumental compositions. He executed sketches for the stained-glass panel representing St. Dominique in the church at Assy (1948), the interior decoration for the Dominican chapel of Notre-Dame du Rosaire at Vence ( ), and sketches for the stained-glass panel Rose for the Uniate Church in New York (1954). In his last years he devoted a great deal of his time to cut-outs and brush drawings. The Musée Matisse was opened in 1952 at Le Cateau-Cambrésisi, the birthplace of the artist. Matisse died on November 3, 1954 and was buried in the cemetery at Cimiez. The art of our century has been dominated by two men: Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They are artists of classical greatness, and their visionary forays into new art have changed our understanding of the world. Matisse was the elder of the two, but he was a slower and more methodical man by temperament and it was Picasso who initially made the greater splash. Matisse, like Raphael, was a born leader and taught and encouraged other painters, while Picasso, like Michelangelo, inhibited them with his power: he was a natural czar. Matisse's artistic career was long and varied, covering many different styles of painting from Impressionism to near Abstraction. Early on in his career Matisse was viewed as a Fauvist, and his celebration of bright colors reached its peak in 1917 when he began to spend time on the French Riviera at Nice and Vence. Here he concentrated on reflecting the sensual color of his surroundings and completed some of his most exciting paintings. In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed as having duodenal cancer and was permanently confined to a wheelchair. It was in this condition that he completed the magnificent Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. Matisse's art has an astonishing force and lives by innate right in a paradise world into which Matisse draws all his viewers. He gravitated to the beautiful and produced some of the most powerful beauty ever painted. He was a man of anxious temperament, just as Picasso, who saw him as his only rival, was a man of peasant fears, well concealed. Both artists, in their own fashion, dealt with these disturbances through the sublimation of painting: Picasso destroyed his fear of women in his art, while Matisse coaxed his nervous tension into serenity. He spoke of his art as being like "a good armchair"-- a ludicrously inept comparison for such a brilliant man-- but his art was a respite, a reprieve, a comfort to him. Matisse initially became famous as the King of the Fauves, an inappropriate name for this gentlemanly intellectual: there was no wildness in him, though there was much passion. He is an awesomely controlled artist, and his spirit, his mind, always had the upper hand over the "beast" of Fauvism. Harmony in Red Oil on canvas. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Georges Rouault George Rouault, one of the original group of Fauves, is widely considered the most important Christian religious artist of the twentieth century. Rouault, born during the German bombardment of Paris in 1871, regarded World War I as an indication of what people could do to each other if left on their own: the title of one of the prints in the Miserére, his great series of mixed-media intaglio prints, is taken from Lucan's Pharsalia concerning the Roman Civil Wars, "Man is a Wolf to Man." In his paintings as well as in his prints, Rouault shows us that though "We think ourselves Kings," we are more accurately seen as circus clowns, each wearing our own mask to disguise our true nature ("Are we not all convicts?" asks the title of one of The Miserere) from ourselves. For Rouault, what saves us from ourselves, if anything can, is Christ and the Virgin Mary, both depicted throughout many of Rouault's works. George Rouault, one of the original group of Fauves, is widely considered the most important Christian religious artist of the twentieth century. Rouault, born during the German bombardment of Paris in 1871, regarded World War I as an indication of what people could do to each other if left on their own: the title of one of the prints in the Miserére, his great series of mixed-media intaglio prints, is taken from Lucan's Pharsalia concerning the Roman Civil Wars, "Man is a Wolf to Man." In his paintings as well as in his prints, Rouault shows us that though "We think ourselves Kings," we are more acurately seen as circus clowns, each wearing our own mask to disguise our true nature ("Are we not all convicts?" asks the title of one of The Miserere) from ourselves. For Rouault, what saves us from ourselves, if anything can, is Christ and the Virgin Mary, both depicted throughout many of Rouault's works. The Old King, ” x 30”. Museum of Art Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh

Oskar Kokoschka, ( ) Austrian Expressionist Painter. Expressionism - An Art movement dominant in Germany from , especially Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, which are usually referred to as German Expressionism, anticipated by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, ), Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, ), Paul Gauguin (French, ) and others. Expressionists sought to visually portray a quality of inner experience, the emotions of the artist (expressive qualities) communicated through emphasis and distortion, which technically can be found in artworks of any period. In 1907 Oskar Kokoschka started to study at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and worked for the 'Wiener Werkstätte'. Kokoschka's interests were not only limited to painting, but also to literature. His work at that time was considered as extremely violent and destructive. Due to this he was expelled from art school. By 1910 he went to Berlin and worked at the magazine "Der Sturm" as an illustrator. At the beginning of World War I he volunteered for the Austrian Army. In 1915 he was seriously wounded, taking years for his recovery. In 1919 he was appointed professor at the Dresden Academy of Art. During the 1930s with the rise of the national socialist party the political situation began to leave a harsh impression on the art scene. In 1939 Kokoschka and his wife fleed to England, while his work was displayed in Munich in a mockery exhibition of degenerated art. After the end of World War II he returned to Austria. In 1953 he started running his "School of Seeing" at the 'Sommerakademie für bildende Künste' in Salzburg. The Tempest (The Bride of the Wind) 1914, Oil on canvas. 5’ 11 ¼ “ x 7’ 3”. Kunstmuseum, Basle

Max Beckmann ( ) Departure, Beckmann's first painting in triptych form, was begun in May 1932. Within a short time the Nazis came to power, and Beckmann, having been forced to resign his teaching position at the Stadel Art School in Frankfurt, moved to Berlin. The painter had been living in Frankfurt since 1915, where he had risen to a position of dignity and prestige as one of the city's leading artists. His work had been shown in many European cities and in America. During the middle 'twenties Beckmann had been featured in important exhibitions in Mannheim and Berlin, and he had been honored with large retrospective exhibitions-one in Mannheim in 1928, another in Basel and Zurich in Important art critics and museum directors were among his friends, and he enjoyed the patronage of collectors such as Baron Rudolph von Simolin, Reinhard Piper, and Lilly von Schnitzler, "whose house in Frankfurt was one of the last grand salons for the gathering of noted writers, philosophers, and artists." Departure, Oil on canvas. triptych, center panel 84 3/4 X 45 3/8"; side panels each 84 3/4 X 39 1/4“ The Museum of Modern Art, New York

George Grosz ( ) Founder of the ‘Dada’ art movement in Berlin, 1917 Grosz's works of the 1920s were influenced by a complicated political and economical situation in the post-war Germany and Europe and in one sentence can be characterized as political and social satire. His last works in America were collages, which partly recall his Dada period and partly were influenced by Pop Art. Georg Ehrenfried Gross was born on 26 July 1893 in Berlin into the family of Karl Ehrenfried Gross, an innkeeper, and his wife Marie Wilhelmine Luise. When the boy was only seven years old his father died. Together with his mother he lived alternately in Berlin and Stolp in Pomerania, where George started secondary school in In 1908 he was expelled from school for having returned a trainee teacher's blow. After passing the entrance exam he began his studies at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden. While in the Academy he specialized in graphic art and started to co-operate with satirical magazines as early as In 1912 Grosz (then Gross) joined the graphic art course at the College of Arts and Crafts in Berlin. In 1913 he spent several months in Paris at Colarossi's studio. The main subjects of his drawings of the period are crimes and orgies, erotic subjects; his cartoons find publication in "Ulk", "Lustige Blätter" and other periodicals. He also did his first book illustrations and began painting in oils. With the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered, but was discharged from the army several months later following a surgical operation. During this period in Berlin Gross met various authors, artists and intellectuals, among them those with whom he would found the Berlin Dada in 1917. In 1916 the artist in protest against nationalism and patriotism altered his name to George Grosz. The same year he painted the earliest of his oils known, among them Lovesick and Suicide and a year later he published his first two albums, the "Erste George Grosz Mappe" and "Kleine Grosz Mappe". Following the revolution in Russia, an artists' association, the "November Group" was established in Berlin in 1918, and Grosz joined it, soon after becoming a member of the Communist Party. In 1919, with the publisher Wieland Herzfelde (of Malik Publishing House), he started a magazine called "Die Pleite", and collaborated with Franz Jung on "Jedermann sein eigener Fussball" (Everybody his own football) and with John Hoexter and Carl Einstein on "Der blutige Ernst" (The bloody seriousness). His drawings, tartly critical of bourgeois society, appeared in various Malik publications; the artist also produced portfolios and books, which regularly aroused scandals. In 1921 his album "Gott mit uns" (God with us) brought Grosz charges of defaming the Reichswehr (army); in 1924 he was prosecuted for offences against public morality by his album "Ecce Homo" (the album was confiscated as being pornographic); in 1928 for his drawing "Shut up and keep serving the cause" he was accused of blasphemy. All these scandals only helped consolidate his fame. In 1924 the artist became chairman of the artists' association "Rote Gruppe" (Red Group); until 1927 he was a regular contributor to Communist publications. In 1928 he was co-founder of the "Association Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschlands" (German Association of Revolutionary Artists). Grosz's works of the 1920s were influenced by a complicated political and economical situation in the post-war Germany and Europe and in one sentence can be characterized as political and social satire. He himself wrote about that time: "Everywhere, hymns of hatred were struck up. Everyone was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the Junkers, the Communists, the army, the property owners, the workers, the unemployed, the black Reichwehr, the control commissions, the politicians, the department stores, and the Jews again. It was an orgy of incitement, and the republic itself was a weak thing, scarcely perceptible. … It was a completely negative world, topped with colorful froth that many imagined to be true, happy Germany before the onset of the new barbarism." p 53 In 1932, invited to lecture to the Arts Student League in NY, Grosz visited the USA, and the following year emigrated there together with his wife and two sons. In the USA he resumed teaching with the Art Students League in NY. In the USA both his works and behavior changed radically – no more attacks on society, the artist's commitment to the class struggle was gone. This resignation was not sincere; in his autobiography, "Ein kleiness Ja und ein Grosses Nein" (A Small Yes and a Big No), Grosz later wrote: "My motto was now to give offence to none and be pleasing to all. Assimilation is straightforward once one overcomes the greatly overvalued superstition concerning character. To have character generally means that one is distinctly inflexible, not necessarily for reasons of age. Anyone who plans to get ahead and make money would do well to have no character at all. The second rule for fitting in is to think everything beautiful! Everything – that is to say, including things that are not beautiful in reality." Only once he lost control, when he learnt about the death of a friend in a concentration camp. He published anti-fascist album "Interregnum", which was not a success, moreover met criticism, since Americans did not see any danger in fascism at the time and the artist's pictures seemed an absurd exaggeration. Grosz taught at the Art Students League till He also had a private art school, his students were mainly society ladies. From 1937 to 1939 he was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled him to devote time to his own work. He was not rich, but he got by comfortably. In 1938 Grosz was stripped of his German citizenship, numerous of his works were burnt by the Nazis. On the whole Grosz's artistic works during his American period are not very interesting. Of more importance maybe his teaching activities and the autobiography "A Little Yes and Big No" published in In 1954 Grosz was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1958 to the Academy of Fine Arts of Germany. His last works in America were collages, which partly recall his Dada period and partly were influenced by Pop Art. In 1959 Grosz returned to Berlin for good, and only a month later he died there, in his house. The Pit Oil on canvas. 153 x 94.6 cm. Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS, USA.

Wassily Kandinsky ( ) Ranked among the artists whose work changed the history of art in the early years of the 20th century, the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky is generally regarded as one of the originators of abstract painting, or abstract expressionism. In both his painting and his theoretical writings he influenced modern styles. Spending many years of his life in Germany, Kandinsky became an instrumental force in the development of German expressionism. Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky spent his early childhood in Odessa. His parents played the piano and the zither and Kandinsky himself learned the piano and cello at an early age. The influence of music in his paintings cannot be overstated, down to the names of his paintings Improvisations, Impressions, and Compositions. In 1886, he enrolled at the University of Moscow, chose to study law and economics, and after passing his examinations, lectured at the Moscow Faculty of Law. He enjoyed success not only as a teacher but also wrote extensively on spirituality, a subject that remained of great interest and ultimately exerted substantial influence in his work. In 1895 Kandinsky attended a French Impressionist exhibition where he saw Monet's Haystacks at Giverny. He stated, "It was from the catalog I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture..." Soon thereafter, at the age of thirty, Kandinsky left Moscow and went to Munich to study life-drawing, sketching and anatomy, regarded then as basic for an artistic education. Ironically, Kandinsky's work moved in a direction that was of much greater abstraction than that which was pioneered by the Impressionists. It was not long before his talent surpassed the constraints of art school and he began exploring his own ideas of painting - "I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could..." Now considered to be the founder of abstract art, his work was exhibited throughout Europe from 1903 onwards, and often caused controversy among the public, the art critics, and his contemporaries. An active participant in several of the most influential and controversial art movements of the 20th century, among them the Blue Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc and the Bauhaus which also attracted Klee, Lyonel Feininger ( ), and Schonberg, Kandinsky continued to further express and define his form of art, both on canvas and in his theoretical writings. His reputation became firmly established in the United State s through numerous exhbitions and his work was introduced to Solomon Guggenheim, who became one of his most enthusiastic supporters. In 1933, Kandinsky left Germany and settled near Paris, in Neuilly. The paintings from these later years were again the subject of controversy. Though out of favor with many of the patriarchs of Paris's artistic community, younger artists admired Kandinsky. His studio was visited regularly by Miro, Arp, Magnelli and Sophie Tauber. Kandinsky continued painting almost until his death in June, his unrelenting quest for new forms which carried him to the very extremes of geometric abstraction have provided us with an unparalleled collection of abstract art. Composition VI, 1913, oil on canvas, Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

Dada Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968 Bicycle Wheel Ready-made 1913, France
Dada: A western Europe artistic and literary movement ( ) that sought the discovery of authentic reality through the abolition of traditional culture and aesthetic forms. Between the two World Wars, painting lost some of the raw, modern energy it began the century with and became dominated by two rather philosophical movements, Dada and Surrealism, which arose partly as a reaction to the senseless atrocities of World War I. But artists were also becoming introspective, concerned with their own subconscious dreams: Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories were well known by this time, and painters explored their own irrationalities and fantasies in search of a new artistic freedom. A western Europe artistic and literary movement ( ) that sought the discovery of authentic reality through the abolition of traditional culture and aesthetic forms. Dada (French: "hobby-horse"), nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished primarily in Zürich, New York City, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hannover, Germany. in the early 20th century. Several explanations have been given by various members of the movement as to how it received its name. According to the most widely accepted account, the name was adopted at Hugo Ball's Cabaret (Café) Voltaire, in Zürich, during one of the meetings held in 1916 by a group of young artists and war resisters that included Jean Arp, Richard Hülsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Emmy Hennings; when a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the word dada, this word was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. A precursor of what was to be called the Dada movement, and ultimately its leading member, was Marcel Duchamp, who in 1913 created his first ready-made (now lost), the "Bicycle Wheel," consisting of a wheel mounted on the seat of a stool. Man Ray (Emanuel Rabinovitch) The Gift (Le Cadeau) 1921, France Jean Arp , Automatic Drawing /8 x 8 1/8 in, France

Marcel Duchamp ( ) Using cubist techniques Duchamp tried to show movement on canvas, which makes him close to Futurists. Doubling, overlaying images fix different phases of the movement of a figure on canvas. The Nude Descending a Staircase, shown at the Salon des Indépendants, aroused sharp criticism even among the Cubists, (One called it “Explosion in a shingle factory”) to say nothing about the general public. 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. Marcel Duchamp was born on 28 July 1887, in Blainville, near Rouen, France, into the family of a well to-do-notary. Both parents respected and encouraged cultural activities; four of their children became artists - Raymond Duchamp-Villon ( ), sculptor, Suzanne Duchamp, poetess and artist, better known under the name of Crotti, Marcel Duchamp himself, and the half brother of the three, Gaston, painter, who is known as Jacques Villon. In 1904, Marcel came to Paris to join his two elder brothers, who had given up law and medicine in favor of artistic careers. Marcel entered the Académie Julian, but did not attend classes much. Between 1906 and 1910 Duchamp hesitated between different styles, the most influential on him were Fauvism (Paradise, ; Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel, 1910) and Cubism (Chess Players, 1911). In , he was a member in the painters' group known as the "Golden Section", together with Roger de la Fresnaye, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, Alexander Archipenko, and others. Using cubist techniques Duchamp tried to show movement on canvas, which makes him close to Futurists. Doubling, overlaying images fix different phases of the movement of a figure on canvas (Sad Young Man in a Train. 1911; Nude Descending a Staircase. 1912; King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes. 1912). The Nude Descending a Staircase, shown at the Salon des Indépendants, aroused sharp criticism even among the Cubists, to say nothing about the general public. 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 his works of the complicated structures are pushed out by laconic, rigid mechanical forms, which created contradicting correlations of volume and flatness (Bride, 1912; Chocolate Grinder, 1914). When Duchamp arrived in NY in 1915, he was pleasantly surprised to find that he was a famous man. On his arrival, he met Walter and Louise Arensberg, who became his main patrons and collectors. (Walter Arensberg's impressive collection of modern art, including all of the numerous Duchamp works, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art today.) 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. In putting painting aside, Duchamp exhibited his first ready-mades – manufactured banal objects of every-day life, which taken out of place and their prime usage, demonstrated abilities of abstract forms. Was it the search for new forms in art or just a wish to make scandals? Difficult to say. But they were definitely to demonstrate Duchamp's profound contempt for the bourgeois conception of art. Thus in 1917 at the exhibition of a new Society for Independent Artists Duchamp submitted the Fountain. The "Fountain" was a urinal, and Duchamp did not dare sign it with his real name, instead he used the pseudonym R. Mutt. In the artist worked on a big composition 'The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.' This composition is in mixed and complicated techniques - oil and varnish painting on glass, collage of paper, foil and wire, some shapes obtained by chance effects, such as dust blown on to the drawings - and is supposed to symbolize the circulation of instinctive wishes and hidden work of unconscious. In 1923 the work was officially declared unfinished. Around 1920, Duchamp proceeded with his ready-mades, but they became more complicated. Instead of buying manufactured objects to inscribe and sign, Duchamp made several constructions, such as Fresh Widow; The Brawl at Austerlitz. After 1923 Duchamp actually left art and devoted himself to playing chess, art critic and literary activities. Together with Katherina Dreier he founded the "Société anonyme" for the propagation of modern art in America; preference was given to anti-traditional, cubist, futurist and dadaist works. From 1942 to 1944, together with Max Ernst and André Breton, he edited the surrealist periodical "VVV", in New York. Attempts to understand Duchamp's works have resulted in multiple books and magazine articles. "Duchamp himself calmly tolerated all interpretations of his art, even the most far-fetched, since he was interested in them as the creations of the people who formulated them, although not necessarily as the truth." (Marcel Duchamp. Art as Anti-Art. By Janis Mink. Taschen Verlag p. 8) But was there any 'truth' and any reason for his works? Thus about one of his most famous ready-mades Bicycle Wheel, he sincerely said, that he liked spinning it occasionally with his hand, just to watch it, "I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace." Though the least spectacular, Marcel Duchamp became one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His experiments in the field of optical illusions, cinema, moving constructions and ready-mades paved the road for new artistic forms such as op-art, kinetic art, installation. At the end of his life Duchamp became an idol of the new generation of avant-garde American artists. Nude Descending a Staircase Oil on canvas x 89 cm. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Pablo Picasso ( ) This picture was painted when Pablo was 16 years old. He proves that his talents of depicting realistic images, Use of light and shadow as well as color, were refined at such an early age. First Communion, , oil on canvas, Museo Picasso, Barcelona.

Pablo Picasso ( ) Science and Charity Oil on canvas. Museo Picasso, Barcelona, Spain. “Everyone wants to understand art. Why don’t we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only an insignificant part of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.” Picasso Portrait of Gertrude Stein Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. The Beginning: Childhood and Youth Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born October 25, 1881 to Don José Ruiz Blasco ( ) and Doña Maria Picasso y Lopez ( ). The family at the time resided in Málaga, Spain, where Don José taught drawing at the local school of Fine Arts and Crafts. The first ten years of Pablo’s life passed in Málaga. The family was far from rich, and when 2 other children were born (Lola (Dolorès) in 1884 and Concepción (Conchita) in 1887) it was often difficult to make both ends meet. When Don José was offered a better-paid job, he accepted it immediately, and the Picassos moved to the provincial capital of La Coruna, where they lived for the next four years. There, in 1892, Pablo joined the school of Fine Arts, but mostly his father taught him. By 1894 Pablo’s works became so perfect for the boy of his age that his father recognized Pablo’s amazing talent, handed him his brush and palette and declared that he would never paint again. In 1895 Don José got a professorship at “La Lonja”, the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and the family settled there. Pablo passed his entrance examination on an advanced course in classical art and still life at the same school. He was the best than senior students in their final exam projects. “Unlike in music, there are no child prodigies in painting. What people regard as premature genius is the genius of childhood. It gradually disappears as they get older. It is possible for such a child to become a real painter one day, perhaps even a great painter. But he would have to start right from the beginning. So far as I am concerned, I did not have that genius. My first drawings could never have been shown at an exhibition of children’s drawings. I lacked the clumsiness of a child, his naivety. I made academic drawings at the age of seven, the minute precision of which frightened me.” Picasso. In 1896 Pablo’s first large “academic’ oil painting, “The First Communion”, appeared in an exhibition in Barcelona. His second large oil painting, “Science and Charity” (1897) received honorable mention in the national exhibition of fine art in Madrid and was awarded a gold medal in a competition at Málaga. Pablo’s uncle sent him money for further studying in Madrid, and the youth passed entrance examination for advanced courses at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. But already in the winter he abandoned the classes. His everyday visits to the Prado seemed to him much more important. At first he copied the old masters, trying to imitate their style; later they would be the source of ideas for original paintings of his own, and he would re-arrange them again and again in different variations. Picasso’s time in Madrid, however, came to a sudden end. In summer 1898, caught with scarlet fever, he came back to Barcelona, then, to regain health, he went to the mountain village of Horta de Ebro and spent long time there to return home only in spring 1899. In Barcelona he frequented Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), the café, where artists and intellectuals used to meet. He made friends, among others, with the young painter Casagemas, and the poet Sabartés, who would later be his secretary and lifelong friend. In Quatre Gats Picasso met the vivid representatives of Spanish modernism, such as Rusinol and Nonell; he was very enthusiastic about new directions in art, he said farewell to “classicism” and started his enduring search and experiments. The relations with his parents strained, they could not understand and forgive him the betrayal of “classicism”. In October 1900 Picasso and Casagemas left for Paris, the most significant artistic center at the time, and opened studio at the Montmartre. Art dealer Pedro Manach offered Picasso his first contract: 150 Francs per month in exchange for pictures. His first Paris picture “Le Moulin de la Galette” (Guggenheim Museum, New York). In December he departed for Barcelona, Málaga, and Madrid where he became co-editor of Arte Joven. But already in May 1901 he returned to Paris. This restless life with constant travels continued all his life, though later he would become more or less settled, but never finally settled. The Blue and Rose periods In February 1901 Picasso’s friend Casagemas committed suicide: he shot himself in a Parisian café because a girl he loved had refused him. His death was a shock, Picasso returned to it again and again: Death of Casagemas, multicolored, and the same in blue, “Evocation – The Burial of Casagemas”. In this latter canvas the compositional and stylistic influence of El Greco’s “The Burial of Count Orgaz” could be traced. Picasso started to use almost exclusively blue and green. “I began to paint in blue, when I realized that Casademas had died” Picasso. Caught with restlessness and loneliness, he constantly moved between Paris and Barcelona, depicting in blue isolation, unhappiness, despair, misery of physical weakness, old age, and poverty. In the allegorical La Vie (1903), all in monochrome blue, again the man has the face of his deceased friend. In 1904 Picasso finally settled in Paris, at 13, Rue Ravignan (until 1909), called “Bateau-Lavoir”. He met Fernande Olivier, a model, who would be his mistress for the next seven years. He even proposed to her, but she had to refuse because was already married. They paid frequent visits to the Circus Médrano, whose bright pink tent at the foot of the Montmartre shone for miles and was quite close to his studio. There Picasso got ideas for his pictures of circus actors. The pub Le Lapin Agile (The Agile Rabbit) was a meeting place of young artists and authors. In the pub Picasso got acquainted with the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. The landlord, Frédé, accepted pictures as payment, that made his café attractive for the artists and he acquired a splendid collection of pictures, including, of course, one by Picasso “At the Lapin Agile”, with Picasso as a harlequin and Frédé as a guitar player. The picture “Woman with a Crow” shows Frédé’s daughter. By 1905 Picasso lightened his palette, relieving it with pink and rose, yellow-ochre and gray. His circus performers, harlequins and acrobats became more graceful, delicate and sensible. In 1906 the art dealer Ambroise Vollard bought most of Picasso’s “rose” pictures, thus started his life free of financial worries. Accompanied by Fernande he again traveled to Barcelona, then to Gosol in the north of Catalonia, where he painted “La Toilette”. Deeply impressed by the Iberian sculptures at the Louvre he began to think over and to experiment with geometrical forms. Between Two Wars Classicism and Surrealism In 1918 Olga and Picasso married. Contacts with high society through the ballet and the marriage brought changes in his lifestyle. The young family moved into an apartment, which occupied two floors at 23 Rue La Boétie, acquired servants, then chauffeur, and moved in different social circles, no doubt due to Olga’s influence. The chaotic artists’ get-togethers gradually changed into receptions. Picasso’s image of himself had changed, and this was probably reflected in more conventional language he adopted in his art, the way in which he consciously made use of artistic traditions and was almost never provocative. After cubism Picasso returned to more traditional patterns, but not exactly the classical ones, this style, a’la classical, was called “classicist style” The Lovers., from time to time he returned to cubism. His collaboration with the Ballet Russe went on: he worked on décor for “Le Tricorne”; drew the dancers; in 1920 began to work on décor for Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella. With the birth of his son Paul (Paolo) (1921) he again and again returned to Mother and Child theme. Mother and Child. To 1921 belongs his cubistic Three Musicians, in which he for the first time used a group of people as a cubist subject: three figures from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte (Pierrot, Harlequin and a monk) playing trio. Though created in his post-cubist period, the picture came to be regarded as the climax of cubism. “Those who set out to explain a picture usually go wrong. A short time ago Gertrude Stein elatedly informed me that at last she understood what my picture ‘Three Musicians’ represented. It was a still life!” Picasso. In 1923 Picasso composed The Pipes of Pan, which is regarded as the most important painting of his “classicist period”. Other interesting works: The Seated Harlequin. Women Running on the Beach. “Of all these things – hunger, misery, being misunderstood by the public – fame is by far the worst. This is how God chastises the artist. It is sad. It is true.” Picasso God had chastised Picasso, by mid-twenties he became so popular that “had to suffer a public that was gradually suppressing his individuality by blindly applauding every single picture he produced.” Added to this, there were marital problems. His wife Olga, the former ballet dancer, for whom the attention and admiration of the public was necessary, vital, and natural, could not understand his crisis. Picasso tried to rescue his independence by taking an interest in the unknown, the unfamiliar, he set up a sculptor’s studio near Paris and began to make numerous artistic experiments. Series of assemblages on Guitar theme, using objects such as a shirt, a floor-cloth, nails and string, sculptures. In 1927 Picasso met seventeen-year old Marie-Thérèse Walter. She became his mistress shortly afterwards. Much of his work after 1927 is fantastic and visionary in character. His Woman with Flower of 1932 is a portrait of Marie-Thérèse, distorted and deformed in the manner of surrealism, which was so fashionable at the time. even Picasso could not really avoid being influenced by this group of Parisian artists, although, conversely, they regarded him as their artistic stepfather. “I keep doing my best not to lose sight of nature. I want to aim at similarity, a profound similarity which is more real than reality, thus becoming surrealist.” Picasso Picasso himself admitted that the worst time of his life began in June Marie-Thérèse was pregnant with his child, and his divorce from Olga had to be postponed again and again: their common wealth had become a subject for the lawyers. During this time of personal crisis Picasso would supplement his arsenal of artistic weapons in the form of a bull, either dying or snorting furiously and threatening both man and animal alike: being Spanish, Picasso had always been fascinated by bull fights, bu the “tauromachia”. October 5th 1935 his second child, daughter Maria de la Concepcion, called Maya, was born. In 1936 he met Dora Maar, a Yugoslavian photographer. Later, during the war, she became his constant companion. Portrait of Dora. Wartime Experience “Guernica, the oldest town of the Basque provinces and the center of their cultural traditions, was almost completely destroyed by the rebels in an air attack yesterday afternoon. The bombing of the undefended town far behind the front line took exactly three quarters of an hour. During this time and without interruption a group of German aircraft – Junker and Heinkel bombers as well as Heinkel fighters – dropped bombs weighing up to 500 kilogrammes on the town. At the same time low-flying fighter planes fired machine-guns at the inhabitants who had taken refuge in the fields. The whole of Guernica was in flames in a very short time.” The Times, April 27, The Spanish government had asked Picasso to fulfill a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition. He planned the topic “painter and studio”, but when he heard about events in Guernica, he changed his original plans. After numerous sketches and studies, Picasso gave his own personal comprehensive view of a historical fact. His gigantic mural Guernica has remained part of the collective consciousness of the twentieth century, because “Guernica” has been serving as a forceful reminder of it. In 1981, after forty years of exile in New York, the picture found its way back to Spain. This was because Picasso had decreed that it should not become Spanish property until the end of fascism. In October 1937 Picasso painted the “Weeping Woman” as a kind of postscript to “Guernica”. In 1940 when Paris was occupied he held an action: handed out photos of Guernica to German officers. When asked “Did you do this?” he replied, “No, you did”. Whether the world-known military brains could not perceive the symbolism of the picture, or the world fame of Picasso stopped the Nazis, he was not arrested. He went on working. During the wartime he met a young woman painter, Françoise Gillot, who would later become his third official wife. With his Charnel House of 1945 Picasso concluded the series of pictures, which he started with “Guernica”. The relationship between the two paintings becomes immediately obvious when we consider the rigidly limited color scheme and the triangular composition of the center. But the nightmare has now been overtaken by reality itself. The Charnel House was painted under the impact of reports from the concentration camps which had been discovered and liberated. It was not until now that people realized how many monsters had been born while reason slumbered. It was a time when millions of people had been literally pushed to one side – a turn of phase which Picasso expressed rather vividly in the pile of dead bodies in his Charnel House. After WWII. The Late Works In 1944 after liberation of Paris he joined the Communist Party, became an active participant of Peace Movement; in 1949 the Paris World Peace Conference adopted a dove created by Picasso as the symbol of the various peace movements; in 1950 and in 1961 (for the second time) he was awarded Lenin Peace Prize. He protested against American invasion in Corea, against Soviet occupation of Hungary. In his public life he always standed on humanistic positions. After the WWII Françoise gave birth to his two more children born: Claude (1947) and Paloma (1949). Paloma is a Spanish word for “dove”, the girl was named after the peace fighters symbol. More women come into his life, come and go, like Sylvette David; or stay longer, like Jacqueline Rogue. Another woman came into his life and settled beside, was she better than the previous ones, or just new? All his life he had to change places of life, women, manner of painting, materials, with which he worked. Some people say that this helps to stay young, maybe… In summer 1955 Picasso bought “La Californie”, a big villa near Cannes. From his studio he could see his enormous garden, which he filled with his sculptures. The south and the Mediterranean were just right for his mentality, they reminded of Barcelona, of his childhood and youth. He created there: “Studio ‘La Californie’ at Cannes” (1956), Jacqueline in the Studio. (1956). By 1958 however ‘La Californie’ became one more tourist attraction at Cannes. There had been a constantly increasing stream of admirers and of people trying to catch a glimpse, so that it had become necessary to move house. Picasso bought Chateau Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence. Picasso’s move was reflected in his art with an increasing reduction in his range of colors to black, white and green. Mass media turned Picasso into a celebrity, the public deprived him of privacy and wanted to know his every step, “but his art was given very little attention and was regarded as no more than the hobby of an ageing genius who could do nothing but talk about himself in his pictures.” Picasso’s late works are an expression of his final refusal to fit into categories. He did everything he wanted in art and there was not a word of criticism. His adaptation of “Las Meninas” by Velászquez, his experiments with Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, did he really try to discover or to create something, or did he just laugh at our stupidity, at our inability to see the obvious? A number of elements had become part of constant pattern: Picasso’s use of simplified imagery, the way he let the unpainted canvas shine through, his emphatic use of lines, and the sketchiness of the subject. “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them”, Picasso explained in In the last years of his life painting had become an obsession with Picasso, and he would date each picture absolutely precisely, thus creating in his latest works a vast amount of similar paintings, crystallizations of individual moments of timeless happiness, knowing that in the end everything would be in vain. On April 8, 1973 he died, at last. Picasso was buried in the grounds of his Chateau Vauvenargues. “The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it will always remain in the present. I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I have wanted to express something, I have done so without thinking of the past or the future. I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I have wanted to say something, I have said it in such a way as I believed I had to. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress, but it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.” Picasso. The Old Guitarist Oil on panel. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

Pablo Picasso “In the Demoiselles d’Avignon I painted a profile nose into a frontal view of a face. I just had to depict in sideways so that I could give it a name, so that I could call it ‘nose’. And so they started talking about Negro art. Have you ever seen a single African sculpture – just one- where a face mask has a profile nose in it?” Picasso. “Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, and an English book is a blank to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?” Picasso. Cubism “Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, and an English book is a blank to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?” Picasso. “Negro period” In 1907 after numerous studies and variations Picasso painted his first cubistic picture - “Les demoiselles d’Avignon”. Impressed with African sculptures at ethnographic museum he tried to combine the angular structures of the “primitive art” and his new ideas about cubism. “In the Demoiselles d’Avignon I painted a profile nose into a frontal view of a face. I just had to depict in sideways so that I could give it a name, so that I could call it ‘nose’. And so they started talking about Negro art. Have you ever seen a single African sculpture – just one- where a face mask has a profile nose in it?” Picasso. Picasso’s new experiments were met very differently by friends, some were sincerely disappointed, and even horrified, others were interested. The art dealer Kahnweiler really liked the Demoiselles and took it for sale. Picasso’s new friend, the artist Georges Braque ( ), was so enthusiastic about Picasso’s new works that the two painters for several years to come were to explore together the possibilities of cubism. In the summer of 1908 they started by going on a holiday in the country together, only to find afterwards that they had painted similar pictures independently of each other. “Analytical” cubism. With Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table (1909) the critics mark the beginning of Picasso’s “analytical” cubism: he gives up central perspective, splits up forms in facet-like stereo-metric shapes. The famous portraits of Fernande Woman with Pears, and of the art dealers Vollard and Kahnweiller are fulfilled in the “analytical” cubist style . By 1911 Picasso’s relationships with Fernande experienced crisis: he broke with her and started a new liaison, with Eva Gouel (Marcelle Humbert), whom he called “Ma Jolie”. “Synthetic” or “Collage” cubism. By 1912 the possibilities of the “analytical” cubism seemed to be exhausted. Picasso and Braque started new experiments: within a year they were composing still lifes of cut-and-pasted scraps of material, with only a few lines added to complete the design. Still-Life with Chair Caning. These collages led to synthetic cubism: paintings with large, schematic patterning, such as “The Guitar”. “Cubism has remained within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond. Drawing, design and color are understood and practiced in cubism in the spirit and manner that are understood and practiced in other schools. Our subjects might be different, because we have introduced into painting objects and forms that used to be ignored. We look at our surroundings with open eyes, and also open minds. We give each form and color its own significance, as far as can see it; in our subjects, we keep the joy of discovery, the pleasure of the unexpected; our subject itself must be a source of interest. But why tell you what we are doing when everybody can see it if they want to?” Picasso. The World War I ( ) changed the life, the mood, the state of mind, and, of course, the art. His French fellow artists, Braque and Derain, were called up into the army at the beginning of the war. The art dealer, the German Kahnweiler, had to go to Italy, his gallery was confiscated. Picaso’s pictures became somber, more often realistic features appear. Pierrot. “When I paint a bowl, I want to show you that it is round, of course. But the general rhythm of the picture, its composition framework, may compel me to show the round shape as a square. When you come to think of it, I am probably a painter without style. ‘Style’ is often something that ties the artist down and makes him look at things in one particular way, the same technique, the same formulas, year after year, sometimes for a whole lifetime. You recognize him immediately, but he is always in the same suit, or a suit of the same cut. There are, of course, great painters who have a certain style. However, I always thrash about rather wildly. I am a bit of a tramp. You can see me at this moment, but I have already changed, I am already somewhere else. I can never be tied down, and that is why I have no style.” Picasso. In 1916 the young poet Jean Cocteau brought the Russian Impressario Diaghilev and the composer Erik Satie to meet Picasso in his studio. They asked him to design the décor for their ballet “Parade”, which was to be performed by the Ballet Russe. The meeting and Picasso’s affirmative answer brought to his life deep changes for years to come. In 1917 he traveled to Rome with Cocteau and spent time with Diaghilev’s ballet company, worked on décor for “Parade”, met Igor Stravinsky and fell in love with the dancer Olga Koklova. He accompanied ballet group to Madrid and Barcelona because of Olga, and persuaded her to stay with him. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA.

Pablo Picasso Three Musicians Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA. Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor, generally considered by some to be the greatest artist of the 20th century. He was unique as an inventor of forms, as an innovator of styles and techniques, as a master of various media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history. He created more than 20,000 works. Between Two Wars Classicism and Surrealism In 1918 Olga and Picasso married. Contacts with high society through the ballet and the marriage brought changes in his lifestyle. The young family moved into an apartment, which occupied two floors at 23 Rue La Boétie, acquired servants, then chauffeur, and moved in different social circles, no doubt due to Olga’s influence. The chaotic artists’ get-togethers gradually changed into receptions. Picasso’s image of himself had changed, and this was probably reflected in more conventional language he adopted in his art, the way in which he consciously made use of artistic traditions and was almost never provocative. After cubism Picasso returned to more traditional patterns, but not exactly the classical ones, this style, a’la classical, was called “classicist style” The Lovers., from time to time he returned to cubism. His collaboration with the Ballet Russe went on: he worked on décor for “Le Tricorne”; drew the dancers; in 1920 began to work on décor for Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella. With the birth of his son Paul (Paolo) (1921) he again and again returned to Mother and Child theme. Mother and Child. To 1921 belongs his cubistic Three Musicians, in which he for the first time used a group of people as a cubist subject: three figures from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte (Pierrot, Harlequin and a monk) playing trio. Though created in his post-cubist period, the picture came to be regarded as the climax of cubism. “Those who set out to explain a picture usually go wrong. A short time ago Gertrude Stein elatedly informed me that at last she understood what my picture ‘Three Musicians’ represented. It was a still life!” Picasso. In 1923 Picasso composed The Pipes of Pan, which is regarded as the most important painting of his “classicist period”. Other interesting works: The Seated Harlequin. Women Running on the Beach. “Of all these things – hunger, misery, being misunderstood by the public – fame is by far the worst. This is how God chastises the artist. It is sad. It is true.” Picasso God had chastised Picasso, by mid-twenties he became so popular that “had to suffer a public that was gradually suppressing his individuality by blindly applauding every single picture he produced.” Added to this, there were marital problems. His wife Olga, the former ballet dancer, for whom the attention and admiration of the public was necessary, vital, and natural, could not understand his crisis. Picasso tried to rescue his independence by taking an interest in the unknown, the unfamiliar, he set up a sculptor’s studio near Paris and began to make numerous artistic experiments. Series of assemblages on Guitar theme, using objects such as a shirt, a floor-cloth, nails and string, sculptures. In 1927 Picasso met seventeen-year old Marie-Thérèse Walter. She became his mistress shortly afterwards. Much of his work after 1927 is fantastic and visionary in character. His Woman with Flower of 1932 is a portrait of Marie-Thérèse, distorted and deformed in the manner of surrealism, which was so fashionable at the time. even Picasso could not really avoid being influenced by this group of Parisian artists, although, conversely, they regarded him as their artistic stepfather. “I keep doing my best not to lose sight of nature. I want to aim at similarity, a profound similarity which is more real than reality, thus becoming surrealist.” Picasso Picasso himself admitted that the worst time of his life began in June Marie-Thérèse was pregnant with his child, and his divorce from Olga had to be postponed again and again: their common wealth had become a subject for the lawyers. During this time of personal crisis Picasso would supplement his arsenal of artistic weapons in the form of a bull, either dying or snorting furiously and threatening both man and animal alike: being Spanish, Picasso had always been fascinated by bull fights, bu the “tauromachia”. October 5th 1935 his second child, daughter Maria de la Concepcion, called Maya, was born. In 1936 he met Dora Maar, a Yugoslavian photographer. Later, during the war, she became his constant companion. Portrait of Dora. Wartime Experience “Guernica, the oldest town of the Basque provinces and the center of their cultural traditions, was almost completely destroyed by the rebels in an air attack yesterday afternoon. The bombing of the undefended town far behind the front line took exactly three quarters of an hour. During this time and without interruption a group of German aircraft – Junker and Heinkel bombers as well as Heinkel fighters – dropped bombs weighing up to 500 kilogrammes on the town. At the same time low-flying fighter planes fired machine-guns at the inhabitants who had taken refuge in the fields. The whole of Guernica was in flames in a very short time.” The Times, April 27, The Spanish government had asked Picasso to fulfill a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition. He planned the topic “painter and studio”, but when he heard about events in Guernica, he changed his original plans. After numerous sketches and studies, Picasso gave his own personal comprehensive view of a historical fact. His gigantic mural Guernica has remained part of the collective consciousness of the twentieth century, because “Guernica” has been serving as a forceful reminder of it. In 1981, after forty years of exile in New York, the picture found its way back to Spain. This was because Picasso had decreed that it should not become Spanish property until the end of fascism. In October 1937 Picasso painted the “Weeping Woman” as a kind of postscript to “Guernica”. In 1940 when Paris was occupied he held an action: handed out photos of Guernica to German officers. When asked “Did you do this?” he replied, “No, you did”. Whether the world-known military brains could not perceive the symbolism of the picture, or the world fame of Picasso stopped the Nazis, he was not arrested. He went on working. During the wartime he met a young woman painter, Françoise Gillot, who would later become his third official wife. With his Charnel House of 1945 Picasso concluded the series of pictures, which he started with “Guernica”. The relationship between the two paintings becomes immediately obvious when we consider the rigidly limited color scheme and the triangular composition of the center. But the nightmare has now been overtaken by reality itself. The Charnel House was painted under the impact of reports from the concentration camps which had been discovered and liberated. It was not until now that people realized how many monsters had been born while reason slumbered. It was a time when millions of people had been literally pushed to one side – a turn of phase which Picasso expressed rather vividly in the pile of dead bodies in his Charnel House. After WWII. The Late Works In 1944 after liberation of Paris he joined the Communist Party, became an active participant of Peace Movement; in 1949 the Paris World Peace Conference adopted a dove created by Picasso as the symbol of the various peace movements; in 1950 and in 1961 (for the second time) he was awarded Lenin Peace Prize. He protested against American invasion in Corea, against Soviet occupation of Hungary. In his public life he always standed on humanistic positions. After the WWII Françoise gave birth to his two more children born: Claude (1947) and Paloma (1949). Paloma is a Spanish word for “dove”, the girl was named after the peace fighters symbol. More women come into his life, come and go, like Sylvette David; or stay longer, like Jacqueline Rogue. Another woman came into his life and settled beside, was she better than the previous ones, or just new? All his life he had to change places of life, women, manner of painting, materials, with which he worked. Some people say that this helps to stay young, maybe… In summer 1955 Picasso bought “La Californie”, a big villa near Cannes. From his studio he could see his enormous garden, which he filled with his sculptures. The south and the Mediterranean were just right for his mentality, they reminded of Barcelona, of his childhood and youth. He created there: “Studio ‘La Californie’ at Cannes” (1956), Jacqueline in the Studio. (1956). By 1958 however ‘La Californie’ became one more tourist attraction at Cannes. There had been a constantly increasing stream of admirers and of people trying to catch a glimpse, so that it had become necessary to move house. Picasso bought Chateau Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence. Picasso’s move was reflected in his art with an increasing reduction in his range of colors to black, white and green. Mass media turned Picasso into a celebrity, the public deprived him of privacy and wanted to know his every step, “but his art was given very little attention and was regarded as no more than the hobby of an ageing genius who could do nothing but talk about himself in his pictures.” Picasso’s late works are an expression of his final refusal to fit into categories. He did everything he wanted in art and there was not a word of criticism. His adaptation of “Las Meninas” by Velászquez, his experiments with Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, did he really try to discover or to create something, or did he just laugh at our stupidity, at our inability to see the obvious? A number of elements had become part of constant pattern: Picasso’s use of simplified imagery, the way he let the unpainted canvas shine through, his emphatic use of lines, and the sketchiness of the subject. “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them”, Picasso explained in In the last years of his life painting had become an obsession with Picasso, and he would date each picture absolutely precisely, thus creating in his latest works a vast amount of similar paintings, crystallizations of individual moments of timeless happiness, knowing that in the end everything would be in vain. On April 8, 1973 he died, at last. Picasso was buried in the grounds of his Chateau Vauvenargues. “The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it will always remain in the present. I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I have wanted to express something, I have done so without thinking of the past or the future. I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I have wanted to say something, I have said it in such a way as I believed I had to. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress, but it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.” Picasso. Guernica, detail, 1937, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Madrid

Georges Braque ( ) GEORGES BRAQUE ( ) The French painter, graphic artist and designer was initially influenced by Fauvism, but his style completely changed when he saw the work of Cézanne and Picasso. Braque's style is fragmented, dislocated. He introduced the method of sticking bits and bobs onto the canvas, a style known as papier colle. After the First World War (winning bravery awards for his service), his style became totally divergent from his friend Picasso's; Braque worked in the same style he had before the war, though his angles softened and his colours became muted and soft, and his subjects of choice were still-life and interiors. He also designed sets and costumes, and illustrated books. In 1961, he had the honour of being the first living artist to exhibit at the Louvre in Paris, and was given a state funeral two years later. GEORGES BRAQUE ( ) The French painter, graphic artist and designer was initially influenced by Fauvism, but his style completely changed when he saw the work of Cézanne and Picasso. Braque's style is fragmented, dislocated. He introduced the method of sticking bits and bobs onto the canvas, a style known as papier colle. After the First World War (winning bravery awards for his service), his style became totally divergent from his friend Picasso's; Braque worked in the same style he had before the war, though his angles softened and his colours became muted and soft, and his subjects of choice were still-life and interiors. He also designed sets and costumes, and illustrated books. In 1961, he had the honour of being the first living artist to exhibit at the Louvre in Paris, and was given a state funeral two years later. Still-Life: Le Jour, 1929, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Piet Mondrian ( ) ( ) Founder of the DeStijl movement in 1917, Mondrian was one of the most original thinkers of early twentieth century art, as he pushed for a simplification in art, restricting his palette to the ‘plastic’ essentials of the primary colors. Mondrian lived a fastidious lifestyle, was obsessively tidy, and elements of these personality traits can be seen in his pursuit of the abstract, through works such as Composition in Black, Red, Grey, Yellow and Blue of Mondrian’s influence is clear in much advertisement art of the 1930s and thereafter, and furniture design, decorative and industrial design owes much to this Dutch artist. Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter who carried abstraction to its furthest limits. Through radical simplification of composition and color, he sought to expose the basic principles that underlie all appearances. Born in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, on March 7, 1872, and originally named Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Mondrian embarked on an artistic career over his family's objections, studying at the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts. His early works, through 1907, were calm landscapes painted in delicate grays, mauves, and dark greens. In 1908, under the influence of the Dutch painter Jan Toorop, he began to experiment with brighter colors; this represented the beginning of his attempts to transcend nature. Moving to Paris in 1911, Mondrian adopted a cubist-influenced style, producing analytical series such as Trees ( ) and Scaffoldings ( ). He moved progressively from seminaturalism through increased abstraction, arriving finally at a style in which he limited himself to small vertical and horizontal brushstrokes. In 1917 Mondrian and the Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg founded De Stijl magazine, in which Mondrian developed his theories of a new art form he called neoplasticism. He maintained that art should not concern itself with reproducing images of real objects, but should express only the universal absolutes that underlie reality. He rejected all sensuous qualities of texture, surface, and color, reducing his palette to flat primary colors. His belief that a canvas—a plane surface—should contain only planar elements led to his abolition of all curved lines in favor of straight lines and right angles. His masterly application of these theories led to such works as Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue ( , Tate Gallery, London), in which the painting, composed solely of a few black lines and well-balanced blocks of color, creates a monumental effect out of all proportion to its carefully limited means. When Mondrian moved to New York City in 1940, his style became freer and more rhythmic, and he abandoned severe black lines in favor of lively chain-link patterns of bright colors, particularly notable in his last complete masterwork, Broadway Boogie-Woogie ( , Museum of Modern Art, New York City). Mondrian was one of the most influential 20th-century artists. His theories of abstraction and simplification not only altered the course of painting but also exerted a profound influence on architecture, industrial design, and the graphic arts. Mondrian died in New York on February 1, 1944. ( ) Founder of the DeStijl movement in 1917, Mondrian was one of the most original thinkers of early twentieth century art, as he pushed for a simplification in art, restricting his palette to the ‘plastic’ essentials of the primary colours. Mondrian lived a fastidious lifestyle, was obsessively tidy, and elements of these personality traits can be seen in his pursuit of the abstract, through works such as Composition in Yellow and Blue of Mondrian’s influence is clear in much advertisement art of the 1930s and thereafter, and furniture design, decorative and industrial design owes much to this Dutch artist. Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue, 1921, oil on canvas, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Black Iris III, 1926, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
Cow's Skull with Calico Roses, 1932, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago. Gerogia O’Keeffe ( ) Georgia O'Keeffe was an American abstract painter, famous for the purity and lucidity of her still-life compositions. O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. She taught art in Texas from 1913 to In 1916 the American photographer and art gallery director Alfred Stieglitz (whom she married in 1924) became interested in her abstract drawings and exhibited them at “291,” his gallery in New York City; her work was shown annually in Stieglitz's galleries until his death in 1946 and was widely exhibited in other important institutions. O'Keeffe, who moved to New Mexico in 1949, is best known for her large paintings of desert flowers and scenery, in which single blossoms or objects such as a cow's skull are presented in close-up views. Although O'Keeffe handles her subject matter representationally, the starkly linear quality, the thin, clear coloring, and the boldly patterned compositions produce abstract designs. A number of her works have an abstracted effect, the flower paintings in particular—such as Black Iris (1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)—in which the details of the flower are so enlarged that they become unfamiliar and surprising. In the 1960s, inspired by a series of airplane flights, O'Keeffe introduced motifs of sky and clouds, as seen from the air, into her paintings. One of her largest works is the mural Sky above Clouds (1965, collection of the artist), which is 7.3 m (24 ft) wide. O'Keeffe's paintings hang in museums and private collections throughout the United States. Georgia O'Keeffe is best known for her large paintings of desert flowers and scenery, in which single blossoms or objects such as a cow's skull are presented in close-up views. Although O'Keeffe handles her subject matter representationally, the starkly linear quality, the thin, clear coloring, and the boldly patterned compositions produce abstract designs. A number of her works have an abstracted effect, the flower paintings in particular—such as Black Iris (1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)—in which the details of the flower are so enlarged that they become unfamiliar and surprising.

Surrealism A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement. Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike. The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content. Rousseau, Henri: The Dream Oil on canvas, 6' 8 1/2" x 9' 9 1/2"; The Museum of Modern Art, NY

Georgio De Chirico ( ) Italian Painter who moved to Germany and France. De Chirico's Metaphysical paintings were hugely influential on Surrealist artists, who recognized in them the eloquent expression of the unconscious and nonsensical to which they themselves aspired. "In words and by example, Ernst, Tanguy, Magritte, and Dali, among others, showed a rare unity in acknowledging de Chirico as a forerunner master." Giorgio de Chirico was born in Greece into the family of an Italian railroad engineer and later studied in Athens, Florence and Munich, where he was much influenced by Nietzsche's philosophy and Arnold Böcklin's Symbolist art. In 1910, de Chirico moved to Paris where he made contact with Picasso and befriended Guillaume Apollinaire ( ), French poet and leader of the avant-gardistic movement rejecting poetic traditions in outlook, rhythm, and language. In Paris he began to produce highly troubling dreamlike pictures of deserted cities, eg. The Great Tower, The Soothsayer's Recompense, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, etc.; pictures with fantastic combinations of images that carried a charge of mystery, eg. Love Song, Portrait prémonitoire de Guillaume Apollinaire, The Uncertainty of the Poet, et al. The same haunting shapes tend to appear again and again in poetic combinations. In 1917 in the Ferrara military hospital, de Chirico met a compatriot, also a painter, Carlo Carrà ( ), and together they founded Metaphysical painting. Although the movement was short-lived, it was perhaps the most original and important movement in the Italian art of the 20th century, and the highest point in de Chirico's painting career. De Chirico's Metaphysical paintings were hugely influential on Surrealist artists, who recognized in them the eloquent expression of the unconscious and nonsensical to which they themselves aspired. "In words and by example, Ernst, Tanguy, Magritte, and Dali, among others, showed a rare unity in acknowledging de Chirico as a forerunner master." (p. 165 in Modern Art. By Sam Hunter et al. Harry N.Abrams, Inc. 2000) In 1918 de Chirico and Carrà contributed to the periodical Valori Plastici which gave a literary aspect to Metaphysical painting. By the 1930s, however, de Chirico had moved to a more conventional form of expression. His great interest in archeology and history took the form of Neo-Baroque paintings full of horses, still-lifes, and portraits. The Surrealists, in particular, condemned his later work. In 1929 de Chirico wrote Hebdomeros, a dream novel; but in the 1930s, after he had returned to Italy, he renounced all his previous work and reverted to an academic style, and to his study of the techniques of the old masters. He published his autobiography Memorie della mia vita in 1945. Mystery and Melancholy of a Street Oil on canvas. 88 x 72 cm. Private collection.

Joan Miró ( ) Personages in the Night Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails, 1940, gouache & turpentine paint on paper, private collection, U.S.A. Joan Miró was a Spanish painter whose surrealist works, with their subject matter drawn from the realm of memory and imaginative fantasy, are some of the most original of the 20th century. Miró was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona and studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Academia Galí. His work before 1920 shows wide-ranging influences, including the bright colors of the Fauves, the broken forms of cubism, and the powerful, flat two-dimensionality of Catalan folk art and Romanesque church frescoes of his native Spain. He moved to Paris in 1920, where, under the influence of surrealist poets and writers, he evolved his mature style. Miró drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry. These dreamlike visions, such as Harlequin's Carnival (1925, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo) or Dutch Interior (1928, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), often have a whimsical or humorous quality, containing images of playfully distorted animal forms, twisted organic shapes, and odd geometric constructions. The forms of his paintings are organized against flat neutral backgrounds and are painted in a limited range of bright colors, especially blue, red, yellow, green, and black. Amorphous amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance. Miró later produced highly generalized, ethereal works in which his organic forms and figures are reduced to abstract spots, lines, and bursts of colors. Miró also experimented in a wide array of other media, devoting himself to etchings and lithographs for several years in the 1950s and also working in watercolor, pastel, collage, and paint on copper and masonite. His ceramic sculptures are especially notable, in particular his two large ceramic murals for the UNESCO building in Paris (Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun, ). Miró died in Majorca, Spain, on December 25, 1983. Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism; Miró was influenced by and part of all the movements of Modern Art, making him an important figure in European art during an investigational age. The Spanish painter spent his winters in Paris and the summer at the family farm near Barcelona, and after the German invasion of France lived mainly in Majorca. The energy Miró conveyed through his work was an extension of his personality: fun, frivolous and experimental. He produced widely accessible works, exhibiting in Spain and America. In a criticism of Picasso, he expressed concern for the mania for publicity that was gripping the art scene, while Miró maintained modesty and devotion to his work despite world-wide fame.

Max Ernst ( ) In 1924 André Breton published the First Surrealist Manifesto. Max Ernst was among those who shared the views and aims of the Surrealists and took an active part in founding the new movement. Ernst's invention of the frottage (pencil rubbings on paper or canvas) technique dates to the early 1920s. In this technique Ernst fulfilled a series of works, resulting in the publication of his famous "Histoire Naturelle". Frottage, which realizes the surrealistic principle of 'psychological automatism', Ernst applied in painting as well, inventing the so-called grattage (scrapings), . Max Ernst was born on 2 April 1891 in Brühl, near Cologne, the first son of Philipp Ernst, teacher of the deaf and amateur painter, and his wife, Luise, née Kopp. Max Ernst never received any formal artistic training. In he studied philosophy and psychiatry at Bonn University and took a deep interest in painting. In 1914 Ernst got acquainted with Jean (Hans) Arp, and their lifelong friendship began. With the outburst of the First World War Ernst was conscripted to the army, where he served in the field artillery till the end of the war, never dropping his interest in art. It was during the war, in 1916, when he took part in the "Sturm" exhibition in Berlin. To the same period date his first contacts with Dada artists. After demobilization Ernst settled in Cologne, where, together with Johannes Theodor Baargeld, a pseudonym for Alfred Grünwald ( ), he founded a group of Dadaists. Their exhibition of 1920 at the Winter Brewery in Cologne was closed by the police on the grounds of obscenity. The works of this period are mostly 'junk' assemblages (e.g. Fruit of a Long Experience, 1919) and collages of printed matter. School text-books, educational placards and mail-order catalogs became his main source of materials. Cut-outs of different objects and patterns supplied by quotations come into absurd compositions, full of sarcasm. (e.g. The Hat Makes the Man. 1920; Dada-Gauguin, 1920, etc.) In 1922, Max Ernst, following an invitation of his Dadaist friends, Gala and Paul Eluard, Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and others, moved to Paris. The same year he painted A Reunion of Friends, where he depicted himself and all his associates. In the paintings of his early Parisian period the artist was able to successfully combine the techniques of painting, assemblage and collage in large-scale paintings with enigmatic plots, e.g. Oedipus Rex, 1922; Teetering Woman, 1923; Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924; etc.) In 1924 Ernst traveled to Indochina with Gala and Paul Eluard. In 1924 André Breton published the First Surrealist Manifesto. Max Ernst was among those who shared the views and aims of the Surrealists and took an active part in founding the new movement. Ernst's invention of the frottage (pencil rubbings on paper or canvas) technique dates to the early 1920s. In this technique Ernst fulfilled a series of works, resulting in the publication of his famous "Histoire Naturelle". Frottage, which realizes the surrealistic principle of 'psychological automatism', Ernst applied in painting as well, inventing the so-called grattage (scrapings), e.g. Eve, the Only One Left to Us, 1925. In the late 1920s Ernst turned to the beloved motifs of German Romanticism and revived them in a new, Surrealistic, manner: dark forests, mysterious caves, gloomy cliffs, dead moonlight, figures and faces which appear like ghosts from interlacing branches and twigs. (Fishbone Forest, 1927, Hunter 1926, Vision Induced by the Nocturnal Aspect of the Porte St. Denis. 1927, Bird in a Forest, The Horde, 1927) Between 1929 and 1939 in addition to large-sized pictures in the collage, frottage and grattage techniques, Ernst began producing books of collages, the best known are the collage-novels "La Femme 100 têtes" and "Une Semaine de bonté". It was in these books that the character with the strange name of "Loplop" appeared; Loplop took on the role of a narrator and commentator. As a pictorial image Loplop appeared in Ernst's works a little bit later, a bird-like fantasy creature, which represented the artist himself as his "private phantom", as Max Ernst himself once put it. The artist in the shape of Loplop appeared in his works in person, either in caption or pictorial form, throughout his life. (e.g. Loplop Introduces a Young Girl. 1930; Loplop Introduces Loplop, 1930; La Foresta Imbalsamata. 1935, The Angel of Hearth and Home, 1937, Surrealism and Painting. 1942, etc.) Thus The Angel of Hearth and Home was painted in response to the defeat of the Republican Spain and expresses his feeling of helplessness with regard to the coming menace of fascism. In 1937 Ernst distanced himself from Breton and the Communist group of Surrealists, though he remained true to the chosen methods of work. In 1938 he left Paris and settled in Saint Martin d'Ardèche in the South of France, where his famous picture The Robing of the Bride was painted. With the outbreak of the Second World War Max Ernst was arrested by French authorities for being a "hostile alien". Thanks to the intercession of Eluard, he was discharged a few weeks later. Soon after the French occupation by the Nazis, he was arrested by the Gestapo, managed to escape and flee to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, a sponsor of the arts. In Ernst lived in NY, where together with other European emigrant painters, he not only worked but also shared his knowledge and experience with younger American colleagues, thus leaving a lasting and profound influence on the development of American modern art. The pictures of the period Europe After the Rain II, , Day and Night, 41/42, The Eye of Silence, 43/44; Vox Angelica, 1945; The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1945, etc., reflect in a surrealistic manner the tragic social reality. In Ernst lived in Arizona, surrounded by landscapes that resembled his own pictorial phantasmagorias. In the USA he got interested in sculpture and left a number of pieces, which mainly consisted of found objects assembled in ever-new combinations. In 1953 the artist returned to Europe and settled in France. In the 1950s Ernst got world acclaim. In his late works the artist returned to the subjects of his early, Dada period, e.g. A Virgin, A Widow and a Wife, 1946; Colorado of Medusa, Color-Raft of Medusa, etc. Max Ernst died on 1st April 1976 in Paris, one day before his 85th birthday. Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale Oil on wood with wooden elements x 57.1 x 11.4 cm. The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Daddy Longlegs of the Evening-Hope! (1940)
( ) A finger in every artistic pie, the Spaniard was a painter, sculptor, graphic artist and designer. He found his niche in cubism, via Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting. Dali was also a brilliant self-publicist, and quickly became the most famous representative of Surrealism after moving to Paris in The eccentric, dream-like works reflected the character of the artist perfectly. The anagram of his name 'Avida Dollars' seemed fitting, as in the late 1930s Dali was completely preoccupied with publicity and making money. There are two museums in the USA (Cleveland and Florida) and one in Spain (Figueras - his birthplace) completely devoted to Dali's work, though critics meet his output with mixed feelings. Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí I Domenech was born at 8:45 on the morning of May 11, 1904 in the small agricultural town of Figueres, Spain. Figueres is located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, only sixteen miles from the French border in the principality of Catalonia. The son of a prosperous notary, Dalí spent his boyhood in Figueres and at the family's summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques where his parents built his first studio. As an adult, he made his home with his wife Gala in nearby Port Lligat. Many of his paintings reflect his love of this area of Spain. The young Dalí attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Early recognition of Dalí's talent came with his first one-man show in Barcelona in He became internationally known when three of his paintings, including The Basket of Bread (now in the Museum's collection), were shown in the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in The following year, Dalí held his first one-man show in Paris. He also joined the surrealists, led by former Dadaist Andre Breton. That year, Dalí met Gala Eluard when she visited him in Cadaques with her husband, poet Paul Eluard. She became Dalí's lover, muse, business manager, and chief inspiration. Dalí soon became a leader of the surrealist movement. His painting, The Persistance of Memory, with the soft or melting watches is still one of the best-known surrealist works. But as the war approached, the apolitical Dalí clashed with the surrealists and was "expelled" from the surrealist group during a "trial" in He did however, exhibit works in international surrealist exhibitions throughout the decade but by 1940, Dalí was moving into a new style that eventually became known as his "classic" period, demonstrating a preoccupation with science and religion. Dalí and Gala escaped from Europe during World War II, spending in the United States. These were very important years for the artist. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Dali his first major retrospective exhibit in This was followed in 1942 by the publication of Dali's autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. As Dalí moved away from Surrealism and into his classic period, he began his series of 19 large canvases, many concerning scientific, historical or religous themes. Among the best known of these works are The Hallucinogenic Toreador, and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in the museum's collection, and The Sacrament of the Last Supper in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 1974, Dalí opened the Teatro Museo in Figueres, Spain. This was followed by retrospectives in Paris and London at the end of the decade. After the death of his wife, Gala, in 1982, Dalí's health began to fail. It deteriorated further after he was burned in a fire in his home in Pubol in Two years later, a pace-maker was implanted. Much of this part of his life was spent in seclusion, first in Pubol and later in his apartments at Torre Galatea, adjacent to the Teatro Museo. Salvador Dalí died on January 23, 1989 in Figueres from heart failure with respiratory complications. As an artist, Salvador Dalí was not limited to a particular style or media. The body of his work, from early impressionist paintings through his transitional surrealist works, and into his classical period, reveals a constantly growing and evolving artist. Dalí worked in all media, leaving behind a wealth of oils, watercolors, drawings, graphics, and sculptures, jewels and objects of all descriptions. Whether working from pure inspiration or on a commissioned illustration, Dalí's matchless insight and symbolic complexity are apparent. Above all, Dalí was a superb draftsman. His excellence as a creative artist will always set a standard for the art of the twentieth century. About the Painting: Daddy Longlegs of the Evening-Hope! was the first painting the Morses purchased for their collection in It was a Dalínian prophecy of the role air power would play in World War II: in the top center, Victory is born of a broken wing. The image of a limp plane oozing from a cannon is reminiscent of George de Chirico's The Philosopher's Conquest (1914) in The Art Institute of Chicago. An anguished soft face, known as "The Great Masturbator" in Dalí's paintings, occupies the center of this work. The head, infused with sunset colors, metamorphoses into an elastic female figure whose breasts are mimicked by two inkwells which suggest the signing of peace treaties. A grieving Cupid appears in the lower left; anguished no doubt because the world was violently changing. Yet Dalí told the Morses that according to an old French peasant legend, a daddy longlegs, like the one in the center of this painting, seen at evening is a symbol of good luck. So, Dalí offers hope in spite of the painting's bleak atmosphere. Daddy Longlegs of the Evening-Hope! (1940)

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) The Birthday, 1915, oil on canvas.
The romantic and the allegorical interested Chagall. The colors he favored were blues and greens, with a magical silvery glisten adding to the sparkle of the subjects. Chagall also designed costumes and sets for theatre, beautiful stained glass designs, and book illustration. Chagall's work is difficult to place into a category; he claimed his work was inspired by his early years, disagreeing with critics who wanted to place him as a Cubist or Surrealist. Marc Chagall was a Russian-born French painter and designer, distinguished for his surrealistic inventiveness. He is recognized as one of the most significant painters and graphic artists of the 20th century. His work treats subjects in a vein of humor and fantasy that draws deeply on the resources of the unconscious. Chagall's personal and unique imagery is often suffused with exquisite poetic inspiration. Chagall was born July 7, 1887, in Vitsyebsk, Russia (now in Belarus), and was educated in art in Saint Petersburg and, from 1910, in Paris, where he remained until Between 1915 and 1917 he lived in Saint Petersburg; after the Russian Revolution he was director of the Art Academy in Vitsyebsk from 1918 to 1919 and was art director of the Moscow Jewish State Theater from 1919 to Chagall painted several murals in the theater lobby and executed the settings for numerous productions. In 1923, he moved to France, where he spent the rest of his life, except for a period of residence in the United States from 1941 to He died in St. Paul de Vence, France, on March 28, 1985. Chagall's distinctive use of color and form is derived partly from Russian expressionism and was influenced decisively by French cubism. Crystallizing his style early, as in Candles in the Dark (1908, artist's collection), he later developed subtle variations. His numerous works represent characteristically vivid recollections of Russian-Jewish village scenes, as in I and the Village (1911, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), and incidents in his private life, as in the print series Mein Leben (German for “My Life,” 1922), in addition to treatments of Jewish subjects, of which The Praying Jew (1914, Art Institute of Chicago) is one. His works combine recollection with folklore and fantasy. Biblical themes characterize a series of etchings executed between 1925 and 1939, illustrating the Old Testament, and the 12 stained-glass windows in the Hadassah Hospital of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem (1962). In 1973 Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall (National Museum of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message) was opened in Nice, France, to house hundreds of his biblical works. Chagall executed many prints illustrating literary classics. A canvas completed in 1964 covers the ceiling of the Opéra in Paris, and two large murals (1966) hang in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The Birthday, 1915, oil on canvas.

Paul Klee ( ) ( ) Friends with Kandinsky, Macke, Marc, Delaunay and others, the Russian-Swiss painter (and writer) moved from creating black and white paintings to some of the most colourful and playful paintings of the early quarter of the last century. Klee did revert to a more sombre palette later in life, affected by mental stress, and produced paintings that have been subjected to psychoanalytical criticism. His output of about 8,000 works makes Paul Klee a fascinating artist, as his works move confidently between styles, from acutely abstract to figurative. A Swiss-born painter and graphic artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are replete with allusions to dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee is difficult to classify. Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children's art all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Klee grew up in a musical family and was himself a violinist. After much hesitation he chose to study art, not music, and he attended the Munich Academy in There his teacher was the popular symbolist and society painter Franz von Stuck. Klee later toured Italy ( ), responding enthusiastically to Early Christian and Byzantine art. Klee's early works are mostly etchings and pen-and-ink drawings. These combine satirical, grotesque, and surreal elements and reveal the influence of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor, both of whom Klee admired. Two of his best-known etchings, dating from 1903, are Virgin in a Tree and Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank. Such peculiar, evocative titles are characteristic of Klee and give his works an added dimension of meaning. After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist Lili Stumpf, Klee settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art. That same year he exhibited his etchings for the first time. His friendship with the painters Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke prompted him to join Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an expressionist group that contributed much to the development of abstract art. A turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter." He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor Red and White Domes (1914; Collection of Clifford Odets, New York City) is distinctive of this period. Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings, as in Once Emerged from the Gray of Night ( ; Klee Foundation, Berlin). These, part of Klee's complex language of symbols and signs, are drawn from the unconscious and used to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. He wrote that "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," and he pursued this goal in a wide range of media using an amazingly inventive battery of techniques. Line and color predominate with Klee, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects. Klee taught at the Bauhaus school after World War I, where his friend Kandinsky was also a faculty member. In Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), one of his several important essays on art theory, Klee tried to define and analyze the primary visual elements and the ways in which they could be applied. In 1931 he began teaching at Dusseldorf Akademie, but he was dismissed by the Nazis, who termed his work "degenerate." In 1933, Klee went to Switzerland. There he came down with the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, which forced him to develop a simpler style and eventually killed him. The late works, characterized by heavy black lines, are often reflections on death and war, but his last painting, Still Life (1940; Felix Klee collection, Bern), is a serene summation of his life's concerns as a creator. Death and Fire, 1940, 18” x 17”. Paul Klee-Stiftung, Bern

Edward Hopper ( ) ( ) Hopper spent almost his entire career in New York, but he travelled his native country extensively, making long journeys by car. Until 1923, Hopper was employed as a commercial illustrator, but turned to painting full-time and enjoyed a rapid rise to recognition as the outstanding exponent of American Scene Painting. His lonely figures sit in spare interior or exterior spaces, timeless and serene in their own worlds. Hopper himself disliked talking about his work and lived quietly with his artist wife. A favorite subject was the female nude in a city interior. Edward Hopper was an American painter whose highly individualistic works are landmarks of American realism. His paintings embody in art a particular American 20th-century sensibility that is characterized by isolation, melancholy, and loneliness. Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, and studied illustration in New York City at a commercial art school from 1899 to Around 1901 he switched to painting and studied at the New York School of Art until 1906, largely under Robert Henri. He made three trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910 but remained unaffected by current French and Spanish experiments in cubism. He was influenced mainly by the great European realists—Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, Edouard Manet—whose work had first been introduced to him by his New York City teachers. His early paintings, such as Le pavillon de flore (1909, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City), were committed to realism and exhibited some of the basic characteristics that he was to retain throughout his career: compositional style based on simple, large geometric forms; flat masses of color; and the use of architectural elements in his scenes for their strong verticals, horizontals, and diagonals. Although one of Hopper's paintings was exhibited in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, his work excited little interest, and he was obliged to work principally as a commercial illustrator for the next decade. In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad (Museum of Modern Art, New York City), a landmark in American art that marked the advent of his mature style. The emphasis on blunt shapes and angles and the stark play of light and shadow were in keeping with his earlier work, but the mood—which was the real subject of the painting—was new: It conveyed an atmosphere of all-embracing loneliness and almost eerie solitude. Hopper continued to work in this style for the rest of his life, refining and purifying it but never abandoning its basic principles. Most of his paintings portray scenes in New York or New England, both country and city scenes, all with a spare, homely quality—deserted streets, half-empty theaters, gas stations, railroad tracks, rooming houses. One of his best-known works, Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago), shows an all-night café, its few uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of electric lights. Although Hopper's work was outside the mainstream of mid-20th-century abstraction, his simplified schematic style was one of the influences on the later representational revival and on pop art. He died May 15, 1967, in New York City. Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Sculpture: Sculpture in the early 20th century strove to keep up with it’s two dimensional counterparts in that the artist was striving to stretch the viewing experience to see beyond the forms and shapes into the meanings and emotions of the artist during creation.

Umberto Boccioni ( ) In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Boccioni puts speed and force into sculptural form. The figure strides forward. Surpassing the limits of the body, its lines ripple outward in curving and streamlined flags, as if molded by the wind of its passing. Boccioni had developed these shapes over two years in paintings, drawings, and sculptures, exacting studies of human musculature. The result is a three-dimensional portrait of a powerful body in action. In the early twentieth century, the new speed and force of machinery seemed to pour its power into radical social energy. The new technologies and the ideas attached to them would later reveal threatening aspects, but for Futurist artists like Boccioni, they were tremendously exhilarating. Innovative as Boccioni was, he fell short of his own ambition. In 1912, he had attacked the domination of sculpture by "the blind and foolish imitation of formulas inherited from the past," and particularly by "the burdensome weight of Greece." Yet Unique Forms of Continuity in Space bears an underlying resemblance to a classical work over 2,000 years old, the Nike of Samothrace. There, however, speed is encoded in the flowing stone draperies that wash around, and in the wake of, the figure. Here the body itself is reshaped, as if the new conditions of modernity were producing a new man. b. 1882, Reggio Calabria, Italy; d. 1916, Sorte, Italy Umberto Boccioni was born on October 19, 1882, in Reggio Calabria, Italy. In 1901 he went to Rome, where he studied design with a sign painter and attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti. In Rome he and Gino Severini learned the techniques of divisionist painting from Giacomo Balla. Boccioni traveled in 1902 to Paris, where he studied Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. He participated in the Mostra dei rifiutati in 1905 and in the Esposizione di belle arti in 1906, both in Rome. Following a trip to Russia in 1906, Boccioni visited Padua and then moved to Venice, where he spent the winter of 1906–07 taking life-drawing classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti. In 1907 he settled in Milan. In 1909–10 Boccioni began to frequent the Famiglia Artistica, a Milanese artists’ society that sponsored annual exhibitions. During this period he associated with Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo, and met the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who had published the first Futurist manifesto in February of In 1910 Boccioni participated in the formulation of the two Futurist manifestos Manifesto dei pittori futuristi and Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista. He, Carrà, Russolo, and Severini signed the first, and were joined by Balla in signing the second. That same year Boccioni’s first solo exhibition was held at the Galleria Ca’ Pesaro in Venice. In the fall of 1911 the artist went to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire through Severini. Boccioni’s paintings were shown with those of Carrà, Russolo, and Severini in the first Futurist show in Paris, at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in The exhibition then traveled to London, Berlin, and Brussels. In 1912 Boccioni began concentrating on sculpture, and his Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista was published. From 1912 to 1914 he contributed articles to the Futurist publication Lacerba. In 1913 the artist showed sculpture and paintings in a solo show at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris, and his sculpture was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Galleria Futurista Permanente in Rome. His book Pittura e scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico) appeared in In July of 1915 Boccioni enlisted in the army with Marinetti, Russolo, and Antonio Sant’Elia. He suffered an accident during cavalry exercises in Sorte near Verona, and died on August 17, 1916. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space Bronze (cast 1931), 43 7/8 x 34 7/8 x 15 3/4" (111.2 x 88.5 x 40 cm).

Gaston Lachaise ( ) Lachaise, above all other sculptors since the Renaissance, is the interpreter of maturity. He is concerned with forms which have completed their growth, which have achieved their prime; forms, as he would say, in the glory of their fulfillment....It is no wonder that to a nation predominantly adolescent Lachaise’s insistence upon the mature is frightening. —Lincoln Kirstein American sculptor of French birth. Lachaise, Gaston (b Paris, 19 March 1882; d New York, 18 Oct 1935). American sculptor of French birth. He was the fourth child of Jean and Marie Barre Lachaise. His father, a cabinetmaker, encouraged his son’s artistic abilities, and in 1895 Lachaise entered the Ecole Bernard Palissy; in 1898 he continued his studies at the Académie Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Exceptionally talented, Lachaise exhibited in the Paris Salons of 1899, 1901, 1902 and 1904, despite his young age. Working in Paris during the early twentieth century, Gaston Lachaise found his lifelong muse in the ample figure of Isabel Dutaud Nagle, an American woman ten years his senior who was then married. When she left France for America in 1905, the young sculptor followed, never returning home. In America, Lachaise's talents as a sculptor blossomed in the company of Isabel, whom he married in It is remarkable that during the first fifteen years of Lachaise's mature career (1906–21), when he was developing an individual style, he was also employed as full-time assistant to two noted academic sculptors: Henry Hudson Kitson in Boston (1906–12) and Paul Manship in New York (1913–21). While working at these jobs to support himself, Lachaise nevertheless found time for his own sculptural projects, producing some of his most original work. Lachaise began the monumental "Standing Woman," his first full-size figure, upon arriving in New York in Over the next several years he made numerous revisions before exhibiting it publicly, as a painted plaster, at Stephan Bourgeois Gallery, New York, in February It was on this occasion that Bourgeois gave the work the poetic title "Elevation," a name that both Isabel and Lachaise disliked. Because of Lachaise's ever-precarious financial situation, the piece was not cast in bronze until 1927, in anticipation of his forthcoming exhibition at Brummer Gallery, New York, in February–March Several castings, some executed posthumously, exist of this sculpture. The Museum's cast, copyrighted 1927, was specifically made for Scofield Thayer's collection, which includes five other sculptures and twenty-nine drawings by Lachaise. The anatomical features of "Standing Woman" are undoubtedly based on those of Isabel, who was also the inspiration for a series of small plaster and bronze statuettes of a few years earlier. Her fully rounded torso is easily identified by the high narrow waistline, the broad flat back and buttocks, and the wide full breasts. In marked constrast to these massive horizontal forms are the elegantly poised hands and the tapered legs and slender feet, raised on tiptoe, upon which the entire weight of the figure is gracefully, and amazingly, supported. Although inspired by Lachaise's beloved, the figure in "Standing Woman" goes beyond the particulars of any single individual to suggest the more archetypal image of the ideal woman. Standing Woman (Elevation), 1927 Gaston Lachaise (American, born France, 1882–1935) Bronze; H. 73-7/8, W. 32, D. 17-3/4 in.

Constantin Brancusi Brancusi, Constantin (b Hobitza, Gorj, 19 Feb 1876; d Paris, 16 March 1957). French sculptor, draughtsman, painter and photographer of Romanian birth. He was one of the most influential 20th-century sculptors, but he left a relatively small body of work centred on 215 sculptures, of which about 50 are thought to have been lost or destroyed. Bird In Space, 1927, Bronze, Uniquecast approx 54” high. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Vladimir Tatlin ( ) Tatlin, Vladimir (Yevgrafovich) (b Kharkiv, 12 Dec 1885; d Novodevichy, Moscow, 31 May 1953). Ukrainian painter, designer, sculptor and teacher, active mainly in Russia. Tatlin, Vladimir (Yevgrafovich) (b Kharkiv, 12 Dec 1885; d Novodevichy, Moscow, 31 May 1953). Ukrainian painter, designer, sculptor and teacher, active mainly in Russia. The son of a railway engineer and a poet, he attended school in Kharkiv and trained as a merchant sea cadet, visiting Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, Asia Minor, Africa, Greece and Italy. He began his painting career as an icon painter in Moscow, but he subsequently attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1902–3), studying under Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov, before moving to the Penza School of Art (1904–10), where his tutors were Ivan Goryushkin-Sorokopudov (1873–1954) and Aleksey Afanas’ev (1850–1920). During the summer months he made copies of Russian church frescoes. This awareness of traditional painting techniques complemented the adventurous and Westernized art of his Moscow tutors Korovin and Serov. Between 1908 and 1911 he also became friendly with the Burlyuk brothers and Mikhail Larionov, who were instrumental in the evolution of Russian Futurism, the iconoclastic, absurdist, visionary development in Russian art and letters that arose independently of Italian Futurism. Introduced to the most adventurous exhibition groups and salons, including the World of Art and the Golden Fleece, Tatlin learnt rapidly about recent developments in Western European art. He also had access to the collections in Moscow of Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, whose acquisitions of works by Monet, Gauguin, Cézanne and the Nabis were complemented with recent paintings by Picasso and Matisse. The newest exhibition groups seized upon recent European developments from Paris and Munich, while simultaneously debating the independence of Russian cultural traditions of folk art and icon painting. Tatlin exhibited with many of the avant-garde groups, including the Jack of Diamonds, the Union of Youth and the DONKEY’S TAIL group, which was aggressively Russian in outlook and was inspired by non-Western, primitivist art, folk art and icon painting. Tatlin’s works employed compass and ruler to construct an unconventional picture space. Between 1911 and 1915 Tatlin worked in Moscow alongside the painters Aleksandr Vesnin, Nadezhda Udal’tsova, Lyubov’ Popova, Valentina Khodasevich (1894–1968) and Robert Fal’k, all of whom responded to the Cubist and Futurist ideas debated and published in the journal Soyuz Molodyozhi of the Union of Youth, with whom Tatlin was exhibiting in Tatlin was the first illustrator, at this time, of the key Russian Futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh (Mirskontsa, ‘The world backwards’; Moscow, 1912) and of the revolutionary painter-poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (Trebnik troikh, ‘The missal of the three’, 1913). In addition he had begun to work on stage designs, some of which he exhibited in 1912 at an exhibition at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture along with his paintings Monument to the Third International, , Wood, Iron, and Glass.

Women combing their hair?
Compare and contrast these two sculptures of the same theme and you find that they have radically different methods and outcomes to emotion, but strikingly similar characteristics with respect to abstraction and. Alexander Archipenko (American, born Russia, ), Woman Combing her Hair, 1915, Bronze, 35.6 x 8.6 x 8.3 cm, Tate Modern, London. Julio Gonzalez ( ) Spanish Artist, Woman Combing Her Hair. c , Iron Ht. 59", Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Found Object sculpture
Compare These sculptures made from everyday manufactured objects. What is the purpose? Pablo Picasso. Bull's Head, /8" high. Handlebars and seat of a bicycle. Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1951 Man Ray, The Gift, 1921

Henry Moore [English Abstract Sculptor, 1898-1986]
If a work of sculpture has its own life and form, it will be alive and expansive, seeming larger than the stone or wood from which it is carved. It should always give the impression, whether carved or modeled, of having grown organically, created by pressure from within. - Henry Moore, 1958, quoted by Edouard Roditi Reclining Figure Elmwood. (48.3; 89; 38 cm) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

Frank Lloyd Wright ( ) By the time of his death, Frank Lloyd Wright had become internationally recognized for his innovative building style and contemporary designs. He had created 1,141 designs, of which 532 were completed. His name had become synonymous with great design, not only because of the form of his designs, but also because of the function. In the end, he showed not just what to live in, but more importantly he influenced the very nature of how we lived. Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin on June 8, His parents, William Cary Wright and Anna Lloyd-Jones, originally named him Frank Lincoln Wright, which he later changed after they divorced. When he was twelve years old, Wright's family settled in Madison, Wisconsin where he attended Madison High School. During summers spent on his Uncle James Lloyd Jones' farm in Spring Green, Wisconsin, Wright first began to realize his dream of becoming an architect. In 1885, he left Madison without finishing high school to work for Allan Conover, the Dean of the University of Wisconsin's Engineering department. While at the University, Wright spent two semesters studying civil engineering before moving to Chicago in In Chicago, he worked for architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Wright drafted the construction of his first building, the Lloyd-Jones family chapel, also known as Unity Chapel. One year later, he went to work for the firm of Adler and Sullivan, directly under Louis Sullivan. Wright adapted Sullivan's maxim "Form Follows Function" to his own revised theory of "Form and Function Are One." It was Sullivan's belief that American Architecture should be based on American function, not European traditions, a theory which Wright later developed further. Throughout his life, Wright acknowledged very few influences but credits Sullivan as a primary influence on his career. While working for Sullivan, Wright met and fell in love with Catherine Tobin. The two moved to Oak Park, Illinois and built a home where they eventually raised their five children. In 1893, Sullivan and Wright ended their business relationship. Wright opened his own firm in Chicago, which he operated there for five years before transferring the practice to his home in Oak Park. Wright's early houses revealed a unique talent in the young, aspiring architect. They had a style all their own, mimicking that of a horizontal plane, with no basements or attics. Built with natural materials and never painted, Wright utilized low-pitched rooflines with deep overhangs and uninterrupted walls of windows to merge the horizontal homes into their environments. He added large stone or brick fireplaces in the homes' heart, and made the rooms open to one another. His simplistic houses served as an inspiration to the Prairie School, a name given to a group of architects whose style was indigenous of midwestern architecture. Later he became one of its chief practitioners. Some of his most notable creations include the Robie House in Chicago, Illinois and the Martin House in Buffalo, New York. In 1909, after eighteen years in Oak Park, Wright left his home to move to Germany with a woman named Mamah Borthwick Cheney. When they returned in 1911, they moved to Spring Green, Wisconsin where his mother had given him a portion of his ancestors' land; it was the same farm where he had spent much time as a young boy. In Spring Green he constructed Taliesin. They lived there until 1914 when tragedy struck. An insane servant tragically murdered Cheney and six others, then set fire to Taliesin. Many people thought this horrific event would be the end of Wright's career. He proved them wrong however, with his decision to rebuild Taliesin. Over the next 20 years Wright's influence continued to grow in popularity in the United States and Europe. Eventually his innovative building style spread overseas. In 1915, Wright was commissioned to design the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. It was during this time that Wright began to develop and refine his architectural and sociological philosophies. Because Wright disliked the urban environment, his buildings also developed a style quite different from other architects of the time. He utilized natural materials, skylights and walls of windows to embrace the natural environment. He built skyscrapers that mimicked trees, with a central trunk and many branches projecting outward. He proclaimed that shapes found in the environment should be not only integrated, but should become the basis of American architecture. A great example is the Larkin Company Administration Building in Buffalo, New York (1903), and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1943), which resembles the structure of a shell or a snail. In 1932, Wright opened Taliesin up as an architectural fellowship where young students could pay to work with and learn from him. Thirty apprentices came to live with him at Taliesin. Through the Taliesin Fellowship, Wright created masterpieces such as Fallingwater (the Kaufmann House) in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, and the SC Johnson and Son Wax Company Administration Center in Racine, Wisconsin. During this time, he married and separated from Miriam Noel and met his third wife, Olivanna Milanoff. The two lived happily at Taliesin for five years and raised a child there. As the couple grew older, the Wisconsin winters became too much for them. In 1937, Wright moved his family and fellowship to Phoenix, Arizona where he built Taliesin West and spent the last twenty years of his life. At Taliesin West, because of the comfortable year-round climate, Wright was able to integrate the outdoors with his indoor spaces. He designed high sloping roofs, translucent ceilings, and large, open doors and windows that created a subtle distinction between the home and the environment. Both Taliesin and Taliesin West were continuous living experiences for Wright as they constantly remained under construction. As his fellowship grew and the need for a larger facility became necessary, Wright continued to create additions and expansions on both homes. On April 9, 1959 at age ninety-two, Wright died at his home in Phoenix, Arizona. By the time of his death, he had become internationally recognized for his innovative building style and contemporary designs. He had created 1,141 designs, of which 532 were completed. His name had become synonymous with great design, not only because of the form of his designs, but also because of the function. In the end, he showed not just what to live in, but more importantly he influenced the very nature of how we lived. Fallingwater; Edgar Kaufmann House, Bear Run, PA,

Charles Edouard Jeannret-Gris (1887-1965)
One of the most famous houses of the modern movement in architecture, the Villa Savoye is a masterpiece of LeCorbusier's purist design. It is perhaps the best example of LeCorbusier's goal to create a house which would be a "machine a habiter," a machine for living (in). Located in a suburb near Paris, the house is as beautiful and functional as a machine. The Villa Savoye was the culmination of many years of design, and the basis for much of LeCorbusier's later architure. Although it looks severe in photographs, it is a complex and visually stimulating structure. As with his church of Notre Dame du Haute, Ronchamp, the building looks different from every angle. After falling into disrepair after the war, the house has been restored and is open to the public. The design features of the Villa Savoye include: AKA: Le Corbusier One of the most famous houses of the modern movement in architecture, the Villa Savoye is a masterpiece of LeCorbusier's purist design. It is perhaps the best example of LeCorbusier's goal to create a house which would be a "machine a habiter," a machine for living (in). Located in a suburb near Paris, the house is as beautiful and functional as a machine. The Villa Savoye was the culmination of many years of design, and the basis for much of LeCorbusier's later architure. Although it looks severe in photographs, it is a complex and visually stimulating structure. As with his church of Notre Dame du Haute, Ronchamp, the building looks different from every angle. After falling into disrepair after the war, the house has been restored and is open to the public. The design features of the Villa Savoye include: modulor design -- the result of Corbu's researches into mathematics, architecture (the golden section), and human proportion "pilotis" -- the house is raised on stilts to separate it from the earth, and to use the land efficiently. These also suggest a modernized classicism. no historical ornament abstract sculptural design pure color -- white on the outside, a color with associations of newness, purity, simplicity, and health (LeCorbusier earlier wrote a book entitled, When the Cathedrals were White), and planes of subtle color in the interior living areas a very open interior plan dynamic , non-traditional transitions between floors -- spiral staircases and ramps built-in furniture ribbon windows (echoing industrial architecture, but also providing openness and light) roof garden, with both plantings and architectural (sculptural) shapes integral garage (the curve of the ground floor of the house is based on the turning radius of the 1927 Citroen) Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine,

Le Corbusier Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp,

Gerrit Rietveld ( ) The Schröder-Schräder house was built in Utrecht in by the Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld. It is a pioneering work of modernism, with no historical ornament and a design which parallels the art of Cubism and De Stijl (Piet Mondrian). Schröder-Schräder House, Utrecht

The early 20th Century: The Establishment of Modernist Art

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The early 20th Century: The Establishment of Modernist Art

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