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The early 20th century. The early 20th century is a time of great change when Western ideas about reality transformed radically.
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For example, in the year 1900 Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams which was an influential work that argued that the unconscious and inner drives, of which people are largely unaware, control human behavior. These ideas would become very influential to 20th century artists, most notably the Surrealists who we will discuss in the next video. In 1902 Marie and Pierre Curie successfully isolated the radioactive element radium for the first time.
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In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first motor operated aircraft. 66 years later, man would walk on the moon. In 1905, Albert Einstein created his theory of relativity which changed our thinking about time, space, and matter. Matter could no longer be considered solid; it was a form of energy. The modern world was now coming to terms with a new, urban, industrial and secular society. A tsunami of city jobs opened in factories, drawing rural people into crowded cities and
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a new, impersonal urban environment.
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New wealth was created from the new industrialized society.
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Simultaneously class tensions brought violent revolutions that took place in Russia, Mexico, and China. In medicine, improved vaccines and public health led to longer life expectancies and a lower birth rate. Governments expanded into new areas such as education, regulation of money, factories, and product safety. The characteristics of art in the early 20th century reflect these great transformations of rapid changes, diversity, individualism, and exploration.
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Growing out of the innovations of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists a dizzying array of dislocating new styles began to emerge and challenge middle class values. Searching for forms to express this new age, European artists were inspired by ancient and non-Western cultures. This is when the modern age completed its breakaway from the artistic thoughts and techniques of the Renaissance which, up until that time, had dominated Western art for 500 years.
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As the new century dawned, forward-thinking artists in France studied the work of the post-Impressionists. Some were inspired by the analytical orientation of artists such as Paul Cezanne and Georges Seurat, while others were focused on the more expressive capabilities of formal elements as expressed by artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Inspired by the expressive camp, the French artist Henri Matisse led a group of artists
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who experimented with flat areas of vivid color and energetic brushwork.
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Their wild and dissonant colors had no regard for the subject’s natural colors and was shocking to the sensibilities of the time. For their “orgy of pure tones,” a critic had referred to them as Les fauves which means the “the wild beasts.” The Fauves, became their nickname. The Fauves used elements of design as ends in themselves. As expressions of the essence of things. Essentially, they liberated color from having to describe the observable world.
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The influence of Fauvism led artists to question the role of color in painting and the representation of reality. In the Fauvist painting, color is always vivid and pure. Color takes precedence over drawing and the reality of the representation. With this incredible break with tradition – Henri Matisse has been regarded as one the leading figures in modern art and is arguably one of the most important artists of the first half of the 20th century.
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In addition to the expressive capabilities of artists such as Van Gogh and Gaugin, Matisse spent time in Algiers, Morocco and Spain and was influenced by African, Islamic and Moorish art. With his use of vivid colors and arabesque lines, Matisse always paints joy. In his day he was criticized because he lived through both world wars without his artwork every reflecting that reality. Even his daughter Marguerite was captured and tortured by the Nazis his artwork never
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suggested this reality because his work was born of a different place. He had said that with painting, he had discovered a kind of paradise. This work, Woman with a Hat was scandalous when first shown during the Salon show in Paris in 1905. The young woman is none other than Matisse’s’ wife Amélie. In her portrait he made no attempt to use suave harmonies of cool and warm tones. Instead, colors sing at maximum intensity.
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This freedom of composition and the many jarring non-naturalistic colors such as the red, green, and yellow on the face and the sketchy, patchiness of the work shocked the public. In regards to this work, one critic wrote that “A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public.” After this work was singled out for attacks, the famous writer and art collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein stepped in and purchased the work.
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Even though Fauvism lasted a little over 2 years, it had a profound effect on art. Breaking with tradition, color was now freed from the strict description of the natural world. Color became an independent expressive element in and of itself and Fauvism, an expressive style.
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Let’s discuss the term: Expressionism. Expressionism is a general term for art that emphasizes inner-feelings and emotions over objective depiction. Instead of painting what is “outside” artists with their wildly expressive forms and colors began to suggest what was “inside.” So expressionism in art is a vehicle for the portrayal of inner psychological states and can even be traced from 17th century Baroque art all the way to the work of the Romantic
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artist, Eugene Delacroix who was influential to the Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh. Similar to the Fauves, progressive German artists of the day admired the work of the post-Impressionists but were also powerfully moved by the introspection and intensity of the work by Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch. We call these artists the German Expressionists.
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In their work they distorted color, scale, and space to convey their subjective feelings about what they saw. Their concerns were emotional and spiritual, and after the start of WW1, German Expressionism became a bitter protest movement as well as a style of modern art. It’s important to remember that this was a pivotal moment. After the end of WW1 in 1918, we see the end of the German empire and monarchy and the establishment of the Weimar republic in its place.
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We also have the Influenza pandemic of 1918 that decimated the German army. This kind of pandemonium in people’s lives resulted in both a darkness and a creativity in the arts. German artists sought, through expressionism, to come to terms with the human condition. There were two German Expressionist groups: The Bridge and The Blue Rider. The Bridge combined traditional art with African and Oceanic motifs as well as tribal art and flat areas of Fauvist coloring to create their style.
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They saw themselves as an avant-garde group that bridged the gap between the classical past and their perception of art of the future. In this work, Street Scene, Berlin by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner we are confronted with large figures that are crowded together in a dynamic street scene. Their bodies are stretched and angular and painted with bold contrasting colors. The work is amplified by its rough and aggressive brushwork. These expressive distortions intensify the emotional effect.
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The Blue Rider group was led by the Wassily Kandinsky who we spoke about in the previous lecture. Inspired by the Fauves, the aim of The Blue Rider group was to express spiritual truths through their art. They believed in the connection between visual art and music; the spiritual and symbolic associations of color; and a spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting. Kandinsky was fond of using musical and spiritual terms to describe his artistic thought and process.
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In this work Blue Mountain, he said he was creating a choir of colors. Here he does something very modern. Despite the representations of horsemen and the landscape. Kandinsky appears to elevate color itself to be the subject matter. Kandinsky eventually created some of the very first nonrepresentational art. By rejecting the subject matter of the material world, Kandinsky felt he had been summoned to create a great new era of spirituality for the modern world.
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On the heels of the Fauves is one of the most important and influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century, Cubism. Inspired by the structural experiments of Paul Cezanne and the creative abstractions and power of African sculpture that was first seen at the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and French artist Georges Braque created Cubism in 1907.
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Where the Fauves had liberated color, the Cubists now began liberating structure. This groundbreaking work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a menacingly large 8’ square painting of five women in a brothel. In preparation for this work, Picasso created more than 100 sketches and preliminary paintings. Here Picasso wrestled with the problem of depicting three dimensions in a two-dimensional picture plane. He has merged figure with ground – emphasizing the 2-dimensional elements and dramatically
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rejecting the 500-year-old Renaissance system of linear perspective. This work feels fractured as if a large pane of glass was placed over the painting and violently struck. The figure on the left suggests features of an Egyptian style. The two central figures are re-imagined in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the faces of the two figures on the right are informed by African sculpture. As Picasso once stated, these inspirations moved him to "liberate an utterly original
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artistic style of compelling, even savage force.” Where traditional European artists had always pursued their idea of beauty, Picasso through stylization and distortion, celebrates the ferocious power of the ugly. Look at this figure on the right, is this her front side or her backside, look at the menacing fruit at the bottom, looking like a sharp weapon. Picasso didn’t publicly exhibit this work till 1916 and many of his peers, that had
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previously seen the work in his studio, thought it was very distasteful. Offending the Paris art scene of his day, this work was met with almost unanimous shock, distaste, and outrage. Georges Braque, who would later work with and develop Cubism with Picasso was fascinated but disturbed when he first viewed the work and told Picasso, “You may give all the explanations you like, but your painting makes one feel as if you were trying to make us eat cotton waste and wash it down with kerosene.”
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The Fauvist Andre Derain commented that “One day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas."
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Even Henri Matisse thought Picasso was ridiculing the modern movement and making a bad joke. Matisse had called the painting’s figures, “hideous whores.” The Cubist painters rejected the traditional idea that art should copy nature, or that artists should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. Instead, they wanted to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So, they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these
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within a shallow, relief-like space. The Cubists viewed their subjects from multiple angles. Initially avoiding bright colors, the Cubists used neutral colors to focus on structure. Even though Picasso made the initial breakthrough, Braque worked to more fully develop the language of Cubism. If we compare Cezanne’s Gardanne from 1886 to Braque’s Houses at l’Estaque in 1908 we can see a direct progression in the development of cubism.
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Where Cezanne’s work still suggests perspective and depth, Braque’s shapes seem to overwhelm the canvas without any semblance of shapes receding into space. Matisse would comment dismissively that this work seemed to be nothing but a bunch of little cubes – hence the name Cubism. There are two styles of Cubism. The first is Analytical Cubism (referring to analysis of form). In Analytical Cubism the subject matter is viewed from various angles, then painted abstractly
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with geometric references to these views. The palette is neutral without the emotional distractions of color. In this portrait, The Portuguese, Braque has painted a man sitting at a table strumming a guitar. The man has been reduced into small pieces and recombined with the background, creating a shallow space. Stenciled letters and numbers play with the perception of 2D, and 3D space. The second style is called Synthetic Cubism (referring to piecing together or synthesis
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of form), which is a style of Cubism that re-introduces, color, textured and patterned surfaces and the use of cutout shapes. Here we see the introduction of what is called collage which is a work made by gluing various materials, such as paper scraps, photographs, and cloth on a flat surface.
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In Still life with Chair Caning, Picasso is forcing us into a discussion of art and craft by introducing industrially produced objects into his art such as the fake printed chair caning and the rope frame. He’s introducing low commercial culture into high fine art culture. We can see the letters JOU over a fragmented shape suggestive of a bundled newspaper. These letters could be playfully referencing the first letters of Journal, or jouer, the French word to play.
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Picasso continued his influential Cubist explorations into other art forms such as sculpture, where, using sheet metal, he introduced flat, overlapping forms to construct his famous work, Guitar. Most sculptures up to this point were either carved or modeled. However, since the creation of this work, most contemporary sculptures have now been constructed, in some form. Because of his incredible breakthroughs with Cubism, Pablo Picasso is considered, with
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justice, one the most influential artists of the first half of the 20th century. He is a giant in modern art history.
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Trailing behind painting, sculpture in the early 20th century soon began its break with the past and began its own march towards abstraction.
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Compared to the innovative paintings of the day, sculpture was still firmly tied to tradition, and lagged behind. In fact, some of the earliest and most adventurous sculptors of the early 20th century were actually the great innovators of painting, such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. At the start of the 20th century, Auguste Rodin was still considered the most influential sculptor of the day. However, sculptors such as the Romanian Constantin Brancusi, began to liberate their artwork
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from those older traditions in radical new ways. Here we can see Brancusi’s progression from a more traditional romantic naturalism to abstraction.
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Inspired by the abstract elegance of ancient sculpture from the Cyclades which are islands in the Aegean Sea, Brancusi began to simplify his forms down to their bare essence. Brancusi once stated, “What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things. Starting from this truth it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.”
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In this work, Bird in Space, Brancusi’s elegant sculpture is meant to embody the essence of flight. The work was considered so new and radical that, in 1928, the sculpture was taxed an import duty when it was brought into the United States. Confused custom officials classified Bird in Space as a “domestic utensil or surgical instrument” and charged the owner/carrier $240.
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The duty was paid. Then later after a successful court battle in which both sides called witnesses, the money was refunded. It was determined that this indeed was a work of art exempt from import duty. It’s important to remember that Modern art, because it was so new and so radical, presented problems relating to the definition of the term art. Let’s quickly discuss early Modern Art in the United States.
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The United States, being a much younger country than its European counterparts, was artistically conservative by comparison in the early 20th century. Most American artists at this time were painting like the European artists had in the mid-1800s.
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However, when the International Exhibition of Modern Art, more popularly known as The Armory Show, burst on to the scene in 1913, things began to rapidly change. The Armory Show was one of the most spectacular cultural events in 20th century history. The controversial show of approximately 1300 works was seen by more than 300,000 people in New York, Boston, and Chicago. Critics from the New York Times described the show as “pathological.”
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Other critics described the artists as “bomb throwers, lunatics, depravers.” It was a very important cultural moment because on a grand scale for the first time, it exposed the United States to European Modernism. Before the Armory Show there were just a few American artists that were aware of what was going on artistically in Europe. One of these was Alfred Stieglitz, an American photographer and owner of the 291 Gallery in New York.
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His gallery was the first to exhibit works by modern artists such as Cézanne, Matisse, Brancusi, Picasso, and Braque in America.
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Here we see Stieglitz’s famous photograph Steerage from 1907. Although the picture was taken in 1907, Stieglitz did not show it publicly until 1911, fearing it was too extreme in its abstraction for the art world as it was. Stieglitz loved recounting how Picasso had once complimented this work by saying, “This photographer is working in the same spirit as I am.”
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Stieglitz also began exhibiting the first American modernists, such as Georgia O’Keefe, whom he later married. She was one of the first American artists to practice pure abstraction. Some of O’Keefe’s popular paintings are abstracted and simplified works of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers and New Mexico landscapes. In architecture, leading American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, “destroyed the box,” so to speak, with his new prairie houses. Wright’s main concerns in architecture was
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to create a sense of open space while simultaneously creating a sense of shelter and appropriateness to the landscape and human scale. He was inspired by an encounter with a Japanese tea house that led to a deep interest in Japanese architecture and long stays in Japan. He found the asymmetrical balance, large extended eaves, and flexible open plan (with sliding doors and walls) of traditional Japanese houses more sensitive to nature and to human life
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than the often-static symmetry of traditional American Homes. To get an idea of how forward-thinking and influential Wright was, simply imagine a new automobile from 1909, the same year the house was built, parked in front of the house. Wow. What a contrast! During this time, in Italy, we see the rise of Futurism. Like many artists of the day, their visual vocabulary was directly inspired by Cubism. The Futurists attempted to capture in art, the vigor, speed, and militant pride that
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they felt characterized modern life. They celebrated motion and the machine. Their incendiary manifesto, written by the Milanese poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, called for the destruction of museums and libraries, which were scorned as “mausoleums” or structures that contained dead things. They glorified speed, violence, and warfare. Marinetti had stated that the world had been in enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed.
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He thought a roaring motorcar more beautiful than the much-celebrated classical statue the Victory of Samothrace.
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Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing for everything old and said, “We want no part of the past.” They celebrated, the car, the airplane, and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. Unfortunately, they later became aligned with Italian Fascism and Mussolini. In Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash from 1912, Balla is not trying to
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show us a dog in motion but rather give us the feeling of being in motion. In Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space the figure’s form isn’t contained but bursting outward like a flame to fuse with the space around it. The figure’s pose is also very reminiscent of the ancient Greek sculpture the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
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The exciting changes and rapid development of automobiles, airplanes and the movies, at this time is reflected in the futurist’s imagery. Glorifying modernity, they focused on depicting the intricacies of rhythm and motion. While technically not a member of the futurists, French artist Marcel Duchamp introduced motion to the language of Cubism to create his famous work, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, in 1912.
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In this work Duchamp was inspired by stroboscopic photography which revealed movement by capturing successive images of something in motion. This challenging painting would ignite criticism everywhere it was exhibited. In an exhibition in Paris, the hanging committee wanted the title changed or the painting withdrawn from the exhibition because “one doesn't paint a nude descending a staircase, that's ridiculous... a nude should be respected.”
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When this work was displayed at the Armory Show in New York in 1913 it was scandalous to Americans who were primarily accustomed only to naturalistic art. The work was ridiculed by critics as an “explosion in a shingle factory” and “a staircase descending a nude.” Even President Theodore Roosevelt weighed in after seeing the work at the Armory Show and compared it to a Navajo Indian rug in his bathroom and said the painting suffered by comparison.
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As we have seen the early 20th century was a time of rapid artistic change and development where preconceived, traditional concepts and values were increasingly challenged by the new, exciting, modern art. This concludes our lecture on art from the early 20th century. Thank you!
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