Art History: Modernism

Front 1

Joseph Paxton

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The Crystal Palace, embodied the spirit of British innovation and industrial might that the Great Exhibition was intended to celebrate. Industrial Architecture: 300,000 panes of glass on wrought-iron framework. (Beginnings of Modernism)

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Gustave Eiffel

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The Eiffel Tower, had been constructed for an earlier International Exposition in 1889. Eiffel brought the original idea of beauty before structure. With the use of new technology, wrought iron provided much needed strength, flexibility, and durability for the tower. Due to his use of new materials Eiffel claimed that his proposed tower would symbolize "not only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industry and Science in which we are living."[1] Eiffel was able to build his tower because he acknowledged the fact that in order to take the next step in engineering, industry and science would need to be embraced by the modern engineer in order to create modern structures. (Beginnings of Modernism)

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Richard Morris Hunt

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Court of Honor, World's Columbian Exposition, The Court of Honor was the architectural showpiece of the exposition. At the right is the Columbian Fountain. The ensemble of neoclassical palaces and Venetian waterways set a tone of imperial splendor and aesthetic sophistication, which Chicago's fair supporters hoped would counter the city's reputation as commercial center lacking in refinement and high culture. (Beginnings of Modernism)

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Louis Sullivan

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Wainwright Building, Aesthetically, the Wainwright Building exemplifies Sullivan's theories about the tall building, which included a tripartite (three-part) composition (base-shaft-attic) based on the structure of the classical column. The skyscraper must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. Despite the classical column concept, the building's design was deliberately modern, featuring none of the neoclassical style that Sullivan held in contempt. (Beginnings of Modernism)

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Paul Cezanne

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Mont Sainte-Victoire 1885-1887, He uses geometry to describe nature, and uses different colours to represent the depth of objects. (Beginnings of Modernism)

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Paul Cezanne

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Mont Sainte-Victoire 1902-1904, He uses geometry to describe nature, and uses different colours to represent the depth of objects. (Beginnings of Modernism)

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Paul Cezanne

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Still Life with Basket of Apples, His interest was not in the objects themselves but in using them to experiment with shape, color, and lighting. He arranged his still lifes so that everything locked together. Edges of objects run into each other. Giving form and mass to objects through the juxtaposition of brushstrokes and carefully balanced colors and textures, he gave the painting a sense of comforting stability. (Beginnings of Modernism)

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Andre Derain

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Mountains at Collioure, The work features long strokes of colours such as bright green, blue, mauve and pink. The entire scene is under a jade and turquoise sky. The tiny strokes are contrasted with the sloping mountains behind, which are painted as broad, flat color planes with thick outlines. There is no shadowing to suggest distance but rather meandering lines and unique shapes. (Expressionism)

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Henri Matisse

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Femme Au Chapeau (Woman with a Hat), Depicts Matisse's wife, Amelie. The divisionist brushstrokes of his earlier work to a more expressive style. Its loose brushwork and "unfinished" quality shocking viewers as much as its vivid, non-naturalistic colors. The term fauve ("wild beast"), coined by an art critic, became forever associated with the artists who exhibited their brightly colored canvases. (Expressionism)

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Henri Matisse

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Le Bonheur de Vivre, In the picture, there are several nude bodies of women and men in a landscape drenched with vivid color. Considered controversial. (Expressionism)

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Pablo Picasso

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The Old Guitarist, Picasso restricted himself to a cold, monochromatic blue palette; flattened forms; and the emotional, psychological themes of human misery and alienation, which are related to the Symbolist movement. A timeless expression of human suffering. The image reflects the struggling twenty-two-year-old Picasso’s sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden; he knew what it was like to be poor, having been nearly penniless during all of 1902. (Expressionism)

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Pablo Picasso

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Family of Saltimbanques, The work depicts six saltimbanques, a kind of itinerant circus performer, in a desolate landscape. Family of Saltimbanques is a covert group portrait of Picasso and his circle, symbolized as poor, independent and isolated. (Expressionism)

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Erich Heckel

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Standing Child, German expressionism reflected the enormous social, cultural, and political changes of that decade. (Expressionism)

Front 14

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

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Street, Berlin, It shows two well-dressed prostitutes strolling the streets, surrounded by furtively glancing men. For Kirchner, the prostitute was a symbol of the modern city, where glamour and danger, and intimacy and alienation necessarily coexisted, and everything was for sale. The intense, clashing colors heighten the excitement and anxiety, and the tilted horizon destabilizes the scene. (Expressionism)

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Emil Nolde

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Masks, Reflection of his growing interest in non-Western cultures. Studying the masks at the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, Nolde was able to capture a variety of cultures all on one canvas – carnival masks (Expressionism)

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Kathe Kollwitz

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The Outbreak, Käthe Kollwitz inspired hope and determination in her Peasants’ War series. She sided with the peasant rebellion by creating a series of images that documented their great attempt for equality. Kollwitz was able to convey a peasant life in such a compelling way through her use of printmaking techniques. (Expressionism)

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Vassily Kandinsky

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Improvisation 28 (Second Version), Horse-and-rider motif symbolized his crusade against conventional aesthetic values and his dream of a better, more spiritual future through the transformative powers of art. the artist’s abstract canvases shared a common literary source, the Revelation of Saint John the Divine; the rider came to signify the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who will bring epic destruction after which the world will be redeemed. (Expressionism)

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Pablo Picasso

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Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. It depicts five naked women with figures composed of flat, splintered planes and faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards. These strategies would be significant in Picasso’s subsequent development of Cubism. He used distortion of female's body and geometric forms in an innovative way, which challenge the expectation that paintings will offer idealized representations of female beauty. (Cubism)

Front 19

Georges Braque

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Viaduct at L'Estaque, The distinctive characteristics of early Cubist landscapes are conspicuous: an elongated format, a detail-filled surface, and a sense of contraction caused by the elimination of the sky and of empty space. The landscape rises up vertically, the objects are almost devoid of volume, and the viaduct itself looks completely flat, like a paper cutout. Braque eschewed linear perspective with its single vanishing point, and painted the landscape from various points of view. Braque's reduction of his palette to various tones of green and brown constituted an important stage in the transition he made from the variegated color schemes of his earlier work to the typical Cubist monochrome. (Cubism)

Front 20

Georges Braque

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Violin and Palette, Objects are still recognizable in the paintings, but are fractured into multiple facets, as is the surrounding space with which they merge. The compositions are set into motion as the eye moves from one faceted plane to the next, seeking to differentiate forms and to accommodate shifting sources of light and orientation. "Violin and Palette” is one of an early piece of Braque for Analytic Cubism. Analytic Cubism is a style dealing with broke down objects and paints them in a two-dimensional space from every angle. (Cubism)

Front 21

Pablo Picasso

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Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Kahnweiler sat as many as thirty times for this portrait. No longer seeking to create the illusion of true appearances, Picasso broke down and recombined the forms he saw. Forms are fractured into various planes and faceted shapes and presented from several points of view. Despite the portrait’s highly abstract character, however, Picasso added attributes to direct the eye and focus the mind: a wave of hair, the knot of a tie, a watch chain. Out of the flickering passages of brown, gray, black, and white emerges a rather traditional portrait pose of a seated man, his hands clasped in his lap. Picasso is best known for pioneering Cubism in an attempt to reconcile three-dimensional space with the two-dimensional picture plane, once asking, “Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?” (Cubism)

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Pablo Picasso

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Bottle of Suze, In La Bouteille de Suze, Picasso used cut fragments of newsprint, wallpaper, and construction paper, as well as gouache and charcoal, to suggest a liquor bottle with a label and, on the left, a glass and an ashtray with cigarette and smoke. These abstract, fragmented elements all appear to rest on a blue table in front of a wall with diamond-patterned wallpaper and newsprint. Serving as a formal element, the newsprint also suggests the popular Parisian café activity of reading the paper while smoking and drinking. The texts add a political and social dimension to the image: they juxtapose newspaper articles referring to horrific events from the First Balkan war with stories of Parisian frivolity. Along with the texts, the distorted, fragmented forms in this Cubist image allude to such conditions of modernity as the lack of coherent perspectives or meanings in a constantly changing world. Picasso's work can thus be seen as simultaneously warning against the absurdity of modern life while also delighting in life's simple pleasures. (Proto-Dada)

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Pablo Picasso

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Mandolin and Clarinet, Having hollow sculptures which is revolutionary for the time period. Most sculptures prior to that were filled. (Porto-Dada)

Front 24

Umberto Boccioni

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The City Rises, Boccioni thus emphasizes some among the most typical elements of futurism, the exaltation of human work and the importance of the modern town, built around modern necessities.[4] The painting portrays the construction of a new city, with developments and technology. Suburbs, and the urban environment in general, formed the basis of many of Boccioni's paintings, from the capture of the staccato sounds of construction in Street-pavers to the riot of sound and colour offered to the observer of street scenes. The City Rises is considered by many to be the very first truly Futurist painting. The City Rises does capture the group's love of dynamism and their fondness for the modern city. A large horse races into the foreground while several workers struggle to gain control of it, suggesting a primeval conflict between humanity and beasts. The horse and figures are blurred, communicating rapid movement while other elements, such as the buildings in the background, are rendered more realistically. Futurist painters were interested in technological progress and the energy of the urban environment. Their subjects included speeding trains, electricity, and the utopian dream of transforming Italy into a modern nation. This group of artists produced images of surging crowds, hard work, and dynamic machines. The City Rises is a monumental painting that depicts the construction of an electric power plant. In this idealized scene, the structure being built is overshadowed by the workers whose activities fill most of the canvas. Sought to infuse art with the speed, power and dynamism of the machine age. (Futurism)

Front 25

Gino Severini

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Armored Train in Action, Painted in 1915, the year Italy entered World War I, this work reflects a Futurist declaration of the same year: "War is a motor for art." Here, five faceless figures crouch in a militarized locomotive car, aiming their rifles in unison. Smoke from gun and cannon fire eclipse the natural landscape. Severini celebrated war, which the Futurists believed could generate a new Italian identity—one of military and cultural power. (Futurism)

Front 26

Robert Delaunay

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Homage to Bleriot, It is a pivot that relates Cubism and Expressionism. He developed in his abstract work, with representational motifs, to create an intense colourful retinal firework. By dedicating the painting to Louis Blériot, the pioneer of aviation, he taps into one of the main events fascinating the general public in 1910. (Cubism & Expresionism)

Front 27

Fernand Leger

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Three Women, This painting represents a group of three reclining nudes drinking tea or coffee in a chic apartment. While the reclining nude is a common subject in art history, these women's bodies have been simplified into rounded and dislocated forms, their skin not soft but firm, buffed, and polished. The machinelike precision and solidity with which Léger renders human form relates to his faith in modern industry and to his hope that art and the machine age would together reverse the chaos unleashed by World War I. Roy McMullen describes Fernand Leger in this period as trying to, “depict the beauty of urban life by portraying humans as geometric and mechanized figures integrated with their equally geometric and mechanized environments. The faces and mood of the women can relate to machines having no emotions. Fernand Leger was most likely overwhelmed by World War I, and wanted to see an environment that was calm and empty of violence. (Cubist?)

Front 28

Constantin Brancusi

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The Newborn, Supposed to represent birth. (Proto-Dada?)

Front 29

Hugo Ball

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Reciting the Sound Poem "Karawane", But the basis of Dada is nonsense! As a reaction to the political and social commotions after World War I, Dadaism was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their world was turned upside down. It highly influenced Surrealism and paved the way for many later modern art styles. (Dada Surrealism)

Front 30

Jean (Hans) Arp

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Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), Jean Arp and other Dada artists embraced chance as a tool for liberating creativity from rational thought. let the pieces flutter to the floor of his studio [. . . .] Some time later he happened to notice these same scraps of paper as they lay on the floor, and was struck by the pattern they formed. It had all the expressive power that he had tried in vain to achieve. How meaningful! How telling! Practically, as a process, the ‘law of chance’, he writes, “can only be experienced through complete devotion to the unconscious.” (Dada Surrealism)

Front 31

Marcel Duchamp

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L.H.O.O.Q, The readymade involves taking mundane, often utilitarian objects not generally considered to be art and transforming them, by adding to them, changing them, or (as in the case of his most famous work Fountain) simply renaming them and placing them in a gallery setting. The masculinized female introduces the theme of gender reversal. Primary responses to L.H.O.O.Q. interpreted its meaning as being an attack on the iconic Mona Lisa and traditional art. This cheap reproduction of the famous ideal of beauty that is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa has been adorned with a comical moustache and goatee. (Dada Surrealism)

Front 32

Marcel Duchamp

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Fountain, Submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in 1917, the first annual exhibition by the Society to be staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York, Fountain was rejected by the committee, even though the rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee. Fountain is perhaps the best known because the symbolic meaning of the toilet takes the conceptual challenge posed by the readymades to their most visceral extreme. (Dada Surrealism)

Front 33

Hannah Hoch

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Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, Known for her incisively political collage and photomontage works, Dada artist Hannah Höch appropriated and rearranged images and text from the mass media to critique the failings of the Weimar German Government. Höch drew inspiration from the collage work of Pablo Picasso. Höch preferred metaphoric imagery to the more direct, text-based confrontational approach of her contemporary John Heartfield. She rejected the German government, but often focused her criticism more narrowly on gender issues, and is recognized as a pioneering feminist artist for works such as Das schöne Mädchen (The Beautiful Girl). The Dada movement wished to critically examine German culture by not glossing over the negative aspects, but rather accentuating them. Hoch cut out pieces of images and text found in magazines, advertisements, newspapers and journals. She carefully pieced all these clippings back together in a way that made sense to her and as she felt appropriately served her purpose of critical examination. Dr. Juliana Kreinik simplified analysis of this photomontage by dividing it into four distinct sections. She called the upper-left corner “Dada Propaganda”, the lower-left corner “Dada Persuasion”, the lower-right corner “Dadaists” or “Dada World”, and the upper-right corner “Anti-Dadaists”. [6] In the center of the montage is an image of the head of Kathe Kollwitz, a German expressionist, floating above its dancer body. The dynamic movement of this central image seems to tie in the chaos that surrounds it and give a sense of movement and revolution to the busy montage. (Dada Surrealism)

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Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzsky)

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The Gift, Although made in the spirit of Dada, Man Ray's The Gift prefigured by several years a key artistic practice that would develop within the Surrealist movement: the “Surrealist object,” a type of three-dimensional art work that included found objects, modified objects, and sculpted objects. It consists of an everyday continental flat iron of the sort that had to be heated on a stove, transformed here into a non-functional, disturbing object by the addition of a single row of fourteen nails. The transformation of an item of ordinary domestic life into a strange, unnameable object with sadistic connotations exemplified the power of the object within dada and surrealism to escape the rule of logic and the conventional identification of words and objects. One represents domesticity and possibly femininity; the other represents carpentry and hence masculinity. (Dada Surrealism)

Front 35

Rene Magritte

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The Treachery of Images (Ceci ne Pas Une Pipe), His statement is taken to mean that the painting itself is not a pipe; it is merely an image of a pipe. Hence, the description, "this is not a pipe." This masterpiece of Surrealism creates a three-way paradox out of the conventional notion that objects correspond to words and images. (Dada Surrealism)

Front 36

Meret Oppenheim

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Object (Luncheon in Fur), Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. In so doing, she transformed genteel items traditionally associated with feminine decorum into sensuous, sexually punning tableware. Women were largely regarded as the subjects and muses of the men who dominated Surrealism. The artist possessed a wry wit and was keenly aware of how women were regarded by both the Surrealists and society. Suffused with humor, eroticism, and menacing darkness, her work reflected her critical explorations of female sexuality, identity, and exploitation. This fur-covered teacup, saucer, and spoon, covered in Chinese gazelle pelt, is an unsettling hybrid: civilization meets wild animal. (Dada Surrealism)

Front 37

Henry Moore

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Recumbent Figure, This is one of the earliest works in which Moore shows the female figure undulating like the landscape. (Dada Surrealism)

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Kazimir Malevich

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The Black Square, It is the first time someone made a painting that wasn’t of something. He made his intention clear; he wanted to completely abandon depicting reality and instead invent a new world of shapes and forms that belonged exclusively in the realm of art for art’s sake. Trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world. There’s no ‘right’ way to look at it, you could say it looks like a window into the night, or you could say it is just a black shape on a white canvas. Malevich set out to forever change the idea of painting to represent reality, and its intriguing to think how doing something simple or even seemingly dull, can sometimes be revolutionary; that’s what makes the Black Square a radical thing, however you look at it.