th
19
CENTURY
ART
Early Expressionism
1905 - 1925
• Expressionism was opposed to academic
standards that had prevailed in Europe and
emphasized the artist's subjective emotion,
which overrides fidelity to the actual
appearance of things.
• The subjects of expressionist works were
frequently distorted, or otherwise altered.
• Landmarks of this movement were violent
colours and exaggerated lines that helped
contain intense emotional expression.
Application of formal elements is vivid,
jarring, violent, or dynamic.
• Expressionists were trying to pinpoint 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 them.
• Many artists of this period assumed that the
chief function of art was to express their
intense feelings to the world.
Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
• Pronounced Moonk
• Norwegian painter
• An important inspiration for the
German Expressionist movement
• Spent time in Paris where he learned
from Impressionist and PostImpressionist art
• Most productive period was 1892-
• Munch was a forerunner for
Expressionism, a style that portrayed
emotions through distorting form and
colour
• He produced paintings, etchings,
lithographs, and woodcuts that expressed
modern anguish with unequaled power
• Munch was an outsider, brooding and
melancholy, who called his painting his
“children”
• His mother and eldest sister died of
comsumption when he was young,
leaving him to be raised by a fanatically
religious father
Edvard Munch, Self Portrait with a Wine Bottle, 1906
• Even as an adult,
Munch was so afraid
of his father that he
ordered “Puberty,”
his first nude
painting, to be
covered at an exhibit
that his father
attended
Edvard Munch, Puberty, Oil on
canvas, 1894-95
• “Illness, madness, and death were the
black angels that kept watch over my
cradle,” Munch wrote of his painful youth
• He was treated for depression at a
sanatorium
• He realized that his psychological
problems were a catalyst for his art
• He specialized in portraying extreme
emotions like jealousy, sexual desire, and
loneliness
• He aimed to induce a strong reaction in his
viewers
• Although Munch often went for months
without painting, once he began to work,
he painted in a frenzy
• Shows the fear of
losing one’s mind
• Every line heaves with
agitation; there is no
relief for the eye
• Blood red clouds
• When Munch first
exhibited the painting,
it caused such an
uproar, the exhibit was
closed
Edvard Munch, The Scream,
1893
• After one bout of nonstop work, heavy
drinking, and a disastrous love affair,
Munch suffered a nervous break down.
• Afterwards determined to put aside his
tormented themes, his work became more
optimistic but less moving
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907)
• An important precursor of Expressionism
• German born
• She worked in isolation, developing a
completely modern style
• Brief career, cut short by her death from
childbirth
• She concentrated on
single figures: wideeyed, often nude,
self-portraits and
portraits of peasants
Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait,
1906
Modersohn-Becker, Reclining Mother and Child, 1906
Symbolism
• The forerunner of Surrealism
• Artistic and literary movement that thrived
in the last decade of the nineteenth
century
• Discarded the visible world of surface
appearance for the inner world of fantasy
Rousseau (1844-1910)
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•
•
•
French painter
He was an untrained hobby painter
Quit his job at age 40 to paint full time
He believed that his fantastic, childlike
landscapes - full of strange, lurking
animals and tree sized flowers - were
realistic paintings
• His figures were
flat and the scale,
proportion, and
perspective were
skewed
Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897
• Despite- or perhaps because of- these
“flaws,” his stiff jungle scenes have an air
of mystery and otherworldliness to them
• He studied plants and
animals at the Paris zoo,
but his technical
limitations were clear
• He meticulously finished
the painting’s surface so
that no brushstrokes
were visible
Henri Rousseau, Eve, 1906-07
Odilon Redon (1840-1916)
• Pronounced Ruh Don
• Another French painter
• The creatures of Redon’s imagination were
even more bizarre than Rousseau
• Create works that evoke a hallucinatory world
• Radiant colour and line to inform his erotic,
perverse visions
• Influenced by the poetry of Poe and
Baudelaire
• Redon used
iridescent colour to
evoke a magical
netherworld
• Painting alludes to
the mythological
musician
• Canvases sparkled
with glowing colour
• Disembodied head
beside fragment of
his lyre
Redon, Orpheus, 1913
Twentieth
Century
• Styles quickly replacing one another
• However, one theme was constant: art
concerned itself less with exterior reality
and more with interior vision
• It declared all subjects fair game
• It liberated form (as in Cubism) from
traditional rules and freed colour (in
Fauvism) from accurately representing an
object
• At the core of this philosophy of rejecting
the past, called modernism, was a
relentless quest for radical freedom of
expression
• No longer needing to please the patron,
the artist stressed private concerns,
experiences, and imagination as the sole
source of art
Fauvism
1904-1908
• Only a blip on the screen of world art
• First avant-garde art movement of the
twentieth century
• Avant-garde: new and unusual or
experimental ideas, especially in the arts,
or the people introducing them.
• Before the sky was blue and grass was
green
• But in canvases by Fauve artists, the sky
was mustard-yellow , trees tomato-red,
and faces pea-green
• The publics response was hostile
• The group got its name from a critic who
called them “wild beasts” (fauves)
• Others termed the work “raving madness,”
“a universe of ugliness,” and “the naïve
and brutal efforts of a child playing with its
paintbox”
• The Fauves’ radical departure from
tradition originated when they saw
retrospectives on van Gogh, Gauguin, and
Cezanne from 1901-1906
• Another influence on the fauves’ refusal to
imitate nature was their discovery on nonEuropean tribal arts
Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958)
• Did everything in extreme
• When he ate lamb, he ate a
whole leg; when he went
cycling; he rode 150 miles in
one day
• Physically a big man who was
extremely sure of himself
• He taught boxing, played the
violin in seedy cafes, and
wrote soft-core porno novels
• A self-taught artist
• Overwhelmed by the
1901 van Gogh show,
he started squeezing
paint on the canvas
straight from the tube,
smearing bold colours
thickly with a palette
knife
• He placed daubs of
clashing colours side
by side to intensify
their effect
Maurice de Vlaminck, The Orchard,
1905
Andre Derain (1880-1954)
• Pronounced duh REN
• Strong colour
• Bold, directional brushstrokes eliminated
lines and the distinction between light and
shade
• Later in life he turned to the Old Masters
for inspiration and his work became dry
and academic
• In his harbor and
beach scenes, the
differing strokes- from
choppy to flowing –
give a sense of
movement to sky and
water
Andre Derain, Boats in the Port of
Collioure, 1905
Andre Derain, Big Ben, 1905
Georges Rouault (1871-1958)
• Pronounced Roo OH
• Worked with the Fauves briefly
• Used expressive brushwork and glowing
colour
• Other Fauves painted urbane, joyous
canvases, his were filled with pain and
suffering
• Devout Catholic
• Lifelong concern was to redeem humanity
through exposing evil
• In his early work, he concentrated on
condemning prostitutes and corrupt judges
• Later he portrayed sad circus clowns
• After 1918, virtually all his work was on
religious subject
• Aging Biblical king
• Heavy, black lines
compartmentalizing
bodies into richly
coloured segments in
his mature oils have the
feel of stained glass
• Simplified bodies have a
powerful, expressive
function, to
communicate his
religious faith
Rouault, The Old King, 1916-37
Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
• The idea that art does not represent, but
reconstructs, reality
• “Colour was not given to us in order that
we should imitate Nature,” he said, but “so
that we can express our own emotions”
• A minimalist before the term existed
• Matisse sought to eliminate nonessentials
and retain only a subject’s most
fundamental qualities
• He gained notoriety as leader of the
Fauves’ 1905 show
• Matisse lived in trying times (countless
strikes, uprisings, assassinations, and two
world wars) and yet his paintings ignored
all social or political controversy
• Matisse believed paintings should not only
be beautiful but should bring pleasure to
the viewer
• Matisse came late to painting, having
trained to be a lawyer to please his father
Henri Matisse The Dance 1910
• Matisse perfectly evoked sensual nudes
in line drawings with barely a dozen
strokes
• In his last years, Matisse
was bedridden
• He fastened a charcoal stick
to a bamboo fishing pole
and was able to sketch huge
figures on the ceiling above
his bed
• His favourite activity was to
cut fanciful shapes out of
brightly coloured paper to be
glued onto large-scale
collages
Henri Matisse, Les Betes de
la Mer, 1950
• Used colour to transform
a conventional subject
into a vibrating, original
design
• The unexpected streak
allows the head to
compete with the
assertive background
• Stressed surface pattern,
placing equal emphasis
on foreground and
background
Henri Matisse, The Green
Stripe, 1905
Sculpture
Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957)
• Rumanian artist
• Shaved away detail almost to the
vanishing point
• Saw reality in terms of a few basic,
universal shapes: the egg, the smooth
pebble, and the blade of grass
• Whatever the subject, he simplified its
form
• Left home at age 11 to work as a shepherd
and wood-carver
• He then made his way from Bucharest to
Paris on foot
• Offered a job as assistant to Rodin
• Brancusi refused, saying, “No other tree
can grow in the shadow of an oak”
• Represents not an actual
bird but the concept of
flight
• When “Bird in Space” was
brought to the U.S. for a
Brancusi show, a custom
inspector refused to
exempt it from duty as a
sculpture
• He instisted that in no way
did it resemble a bird,
therefore, not a work of art
but a hunk of metal to be
taxed as raw material
Brancusi, Bird in Space,
1927
Amadeo Modigliani (1884-1920)
• Known primarily for paintings of reclining
nudes
• Was brash in both sculpture and zest for
life
• Too handsome for his own good, Modi (as
he was called) plunged into the bohemian
life in Paris
• Poor as a pauper, he dressed to the hilt,
with flying red scarf and loud corduroy suit
• When the mood
struck, he was
wont to strip off
his clothes,
shouting to
astounded café
patrons, “Look at
me! Don’t I look
like a god?”
• Spent the night in bars, chanting poetry, swilling
down cheap wine and absinthe, and smoking
hashish
• He treated his mistress horribly
• Once, in a violent rage, he threw her out the
window
• “People like us have different rights from other
people because we have different needs which
put us … above their morality,” he wrote
• Modi painted portraits for a few francs to
buy drink, but poverty was a real
handicap when it came to sculpture
• For wood to carve he stole railway ties
• Modi carved simplified figures that radiate
Primeval power
• After drinking all night and selling the suit
he was wearing to buy more wine, he
caught pneumonia in the bitter cold of
dawn.
• Died at the age of 35
• Figures have
long, thin
necks, sloping
shoulders, tilted
heads with
small mouths,
long noses, and
blank slits for
eyes
Amadeo Modigliani, Nu couche de dos
(Reclining Nude from the back),1917
Amadeo Modigliani Nude Sdraiato
Amedeo Modigliani, Tete, 1911-12
Fin