Modern Art 2: Modernist Architecture, Dada and Surrealism, Abstract
Expressionism, Figural Expressionism, Postwar Sculpture, Color Field
Modernist Architecture
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Dada
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Walter Gropius
Director of Germany's Bauhaus school of design
Conceived buildings in terms of 20th century technology with no
reference to the past
Glass boxes
Mass produced designs
Used only
Bauhaus, by Walter Gropius, at Dessau, Germany, 1919 to 1925.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Drew layouts with continuity in mind so that walls, ceilings
and floors flow seamlessly just as room merge with each other
and the outside environment
No posts or columns
Insistence on natural forms and materials and respect for the
environment
Wright, “Falling Water” 1936 Pennsylvania
Falling Water
This house seems to emerge from the rocks
Built mostly of rough stone this houses form echoes the
native rock ledges
Cantilevered terraces hover over a rushing waterfall
House irregular spaces flow like the water
Wright, Guggenheim Museum 1959, NY
Curves for right angles, giant abstract sculpture
Founded in Zurich in 1916 by a group of refugee from ww I
Named after nonsense word
Protested the madness of war- overthrown all authority and cultivate
absurdity
Main strategy was to denounce and shock
Awaken the imagination
Jean Arp
Chance collages – made from random collage
Experimented with new forms
Characteristic works included playful egg like shapes suggest living
creatures
Arp, “mountain, table, anchors, navel” 1925
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Marcel Duchamp
Invented a new form of art called readymades
By mounting a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool
His most controversial readymade was porcelain urinal he signed R.Mutt
Readymades opened the door for art that was purely imaginary rather than visual
He changed the concept of art
Duchamp, “Fountain” 1917
Surrealism
1920-1930,Founded by André Breton
Grew out of Freudian free association and dream analysis
Automatism – form of creating without conscious control to tap unconscious imagery
Surrealism which implies going beyond realism used bizarre and irrational to express buried truths unreachable
through logic
Two forms – improvised art and realistic techniques to present hallucinatory scenes
Joan Miro
Worked spontaneously moved the brush over the canvas drawing squiggles in a
trancelike state
Invented unique biomorphic signs for natural objects like the sun, moon and
animals
evolved into pictograms
Semi-abstract shapes stylized alluded to real objects
Brilliantly coloured and whimsical
Miro, “Dutch interior II” 1920
Max Ernst
Dadaist and surrealist
Tried to jolt the viewer to mental attention n with ambiguous titles
“Two children threatened by a Nightingale”
Invented frottage new method for generating surprising imagery
Placed sheet paper over rough surface rubbed with a soft pencil, he then
elaborated on these images to produce imagery
Ernst “Two children threatened by a Nightingale”1924
Derived from his pet cockatoos death when he was a child and that for years he
confused birds and humans
Salvador Dali
Based his technique on critical paranoia – his own irrational fears
Placed painting beside his bed, recorded hand painted dream photographs
Represented his hallucinations with meticulous realism
Distorted objects and placed them in unreal dream landscapes
Dali, The Persistence of Memory” 1931
Limp watch and strange lump of flesh
Watches appear to be decomposing, fly and ants swarm over them
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Rene Magritte
Painted disturbing illogical images with clarity
Placed everyday objects in congruous settings and transformed them into
shock
This disturbing juxtaposition of familiar sights is unnatural contexts compel
a new vision of reality beyond logic
Magritte, The False Mirror” 1928
Abstract Expressionism
 Abstract expressionism was about encompassing as “art” not just the product of artistic creation but the process
of creating it
 Action painting – stressed energy, action, kineticism and freneticism
 Began late 1940’s early 50’s
 Partially in reaction to devastation of WWII
 Liberated themselves from geometric abstraction and the need to suggest recognizable images
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Jackson Pollock
Abandoned the paintbrush altogether, dripping, and pouring commercial
paints on to vast roll canvas on the floor
Energy made visible in mural sized abstract paintings
Also abandoned conventional artistic considerations like foreground,
background and focal point and perspective
Expanded the very definition of what art was
Pollock, No 1 (Lavender Mist), 1950
Arshile Gorky
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Pioneered automatic painting
Freely brushed washes of glowing colour inside clearly outlined biomorphic
shapes
Oval splotches of flowing primary colour
Gorky, “Water of the Flowery Mill” 1944
Willem de Kooing
Developed a style of slashing brushstrokes
Known for a series of women paintings
Frontal images appear to both dissolve into and emerge out of fiercely brushed
paint
Characteristic – yellow, pink and buff colours
De Kooing, “Woman I”1950-52
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Franz Kline
Converted to abstraction after viewing his normal sized sketches
blown up on a wall with a slide projector
Black brushstrokes against white background
Used housepainters brush on huge white canvases
Linear forms like trains and girders
Kline, “Mahoning” 1956
Robert Motherwell
Known for more than 100 paintings known as elegies for the doomed
Spanish republic
Oval shapes wedges between irregular, vertical bands in black and
white and brown
Motherwell, “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 34” 1953-54
Figural Expressionism
 A few postwar painters kept figurative painting alive in the trend towards complete abstraction
 Believed in the modernist principle that art must express a truth beyond surface appearance
Jean Dubuffet
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“L’Art Brut” (raw or crude art)
– term he used to describe western art that was overthrown by the
jungle, lavatory and mental institution
Believe that art was lifeless in comparison to the art of graffiti or turned
out by mental patients and criminals
Jean Dubuffet “The Cow with the Subtle Nose” 1954
Frida Kahlo
200 fantasized self-portraits dealing with subjects seldom dealt with in western
art like childbirth, miscarriage, and abortion
Kahlo, “Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” 1940
Postwar Sculpture
 Worked with new materials like scrap metal , new techniques like welding, and
new forms of assemblages mobiles
 Abstraction and experimentation
Henry Moore
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Biomorphic shapes
Also based his work on natural forms like shells, pebbles and
bones
Subjects – reclining figure, mother and child and family
Minimized surface detail and simplified forms
Forms have holes that are as important as the solid areas of his
works
Truth to material – respected the medium
Moore, “Reclining Mother and Child” 1960-61
Alexander Calder
Sculpture in motion – mobiles
Suspended discs of sheet metal painted black, white and primary
colours from wires and rods
Four dimensional drawings – always moving
Intended to delight and surprise
Calder, “lobster trap and fish tale” 1939
David Smith
Invented chance and surprise to enter the process of creation believing sculpture
should pose a question no offer a solution
Welding and riveting sheet metal
Best known for cubi series of balanced stainless steel cubes and cylinders
Smith, “Cubi X” 1963
Louise Nevelson
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Created a novel form of art
Sculptured walls – cubicles full of carpenter s cast offs: newel posts,
balusters, molding
Painted 11 foot high wall in one colour usually flat black, later white and
gold
Nevelson “Sky Cathedral” 1958
Colour Field
 Vast expanses or fields of colour, canvas huge almost mural-sized
Mark Rothko
 8 ft high paintings
 Interested in the relationship between one colour an another – large patches of
colour that seemed to hover within colour fields
 Rothko, “Blue, Orange, Red” 1961
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Barnett Newman
Gave up texture, brushwork, drawing, shading and perspective for flat fields of pure
colour sliced by one or two off centre stripes
Intellectual who wrestled with profound philosophic and religious issues tried to find
innovative visual equivalents
Huge scale important to his meaning = scale equals feeling
Newman “Voice of Fire” 1951-52
Helen Frankenthaler
Combined Pollock's pouring and John Marins watercolours
Thinned oil, poured from coffee cans onto unprimed sail cloth, guided flow with
sponges and wipers
Stain paintings
White fabric shines through irradiating colour with light like stained glass
Frankenthaler “The Bay” 1963
Morris Louis
Perfected the spontaneous yet composed method of stained
canvas
Poured diluted paint, titled canvas to guide the flow into
characteristic forms – veils, stripes and florals
Produced paintings without single brushstroke
Louis, “ Point of Tranquility” 1959-60