Early 20th Century Styles
1. What changes happen in the 20th century?
2. How is art affected by these changes?
3. What are the 10 major movements of the early 20th century?
4. What is early 20th century music like?
5. What is early 20th century literature like?
6. What is early 20th century architecture like?
7. Is everything relative?
1. What changes happen in the 20th century?
- Transformation of society thru science and technology:
Car
rocket propulsion
Film
airplanes
Radio
impersonal war
Air Conditioning
Albert Einstein
Women’s Rights
Communism
assembly lines
skyscrapers
escalators/elevators
Sigmund Freud
and more!!!
- “Multiverse replaces universe”
- Discontinuity, chaos, controversy are the new norms
2. How is art affected?
A. Many streams instead of mainstream art.
No real coherent time line of art/movement overlap
B. Some artists search for meaning/purpose/message
C. Some build on Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cezanne, making form, color &
shape as justifications for art
D. Some focus on traditional subjects in new ways
E. Some strip art of subjectivity, moving to the psychological and imaginative
F. Some look to machines, modernity, and motion to define art
G. Some see the art of creating as replacing the importance of the creation itself
H. Lots of new media – synthetic paints, steel, alloys, Plexiglas, plastic, foundobject art
I. Academy art is SO over! No more Salons!!!!!!! :]
3. What are the 10 major movements of the early 20th century?
- Vienna secession
- Fauvists
- German Expressionism
- Neoprimitivism
- Cubism
- Futurism
- Dada
- Surrealism
- Social Realism
- Non-objective art
A. Vienna Secession
a. Build off Gauguin specifically
b. Focus on composition and exotic
c. Decoration is more important than accuracy
I. Gustave Klimt
- Use of close-cropped figures
- Influenced by Ravenna’s mosaics
- Has a flat, stylized, decorative style
B. Fauvists (“wild beasts”)
- Build off Gauguin & Van Gogh
- Use non-naturalistic color to convey feeling
- Loose, simple designs, no unnecessary items
I.
Henri Matisse
Portrait with Green Stripe
The Blue Window
- “Life-affirming art, art of the human spirit”
- Paints while ill – makes a career out of it
- Finished up career with paper cut and collage
- “Degenerate” art show
C. German Expressionism:
- Explores feelings and emotions
- Sometimes light/sometimes dark and sinister
- Includes “Die Brucke” and “Blue Rider” groups
I.
Edvard Munch
The Scream
- Expressionism built on him
- Influenced by post-imp. Color and design
- Influenced by terribly sad life
- Scream shows expressive topic, color, line, shape
- He made “scream” 50 x
- Helped artists escape Nazi Germany
II.
Franz Marc
Great Blue Horses
- “Blue Rider” w/ Kandinsky
- Very spiritual, influenced by Friedrich
- Died at battle of Verdun
- Great Blue Horses shows animals as the innocent
III.
Wassily Kandinsky
Improvisation #30
- “Blue rider”
- “Non- objective art” – No reference to reality
- Very musical
Painted in all
during lifetime
D. Neoprimitivism:
- Inspired by collections of African and Polynesian art shown in Paris at the time
- Inspired by Gauguin as well
I.
Constantin Brancusi
Bird In Flight
The Kiss
II.
Amedeo Modigliani
Head
Yellow Sweater
- Influenced by Brancusi!
E. Cubism:
- 1907: founded by Picasso and Brague
- Influenced by Cezanne: break everything down to shape and form
- Mathematical: looks for total reality in all three dimensions and planes
- Objects broken up and reassembled
- Analytical cubism
- Synthetic cubism
- “Analyzing, detaching, selecting and geometricizing before distilling the essence from
nature and sense experience”
I.
Pablo Picasso
Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon
Three Musicians
- 1886-1973
- Very varied career
- Early on created technically perfect canvasses
- Age 19-20 goes to Paris
- Styles:
• Tried realism and impressionism too
• “Blue period”
• “Pink period”
• “Cubism”
• Classical revival
• Social realism
• Simplicity
II.
Many paintings based on different loves/wives
Dies at 91 (heart attack)
Georges Braque
Still Life With Violin
- Worked with Picasso to develop cubism
- Created collage by adding newspaper bits in art
- Kept working closely in analytical cubism
- Works generally seen as not as powerful as Picasso’s
F. Futurism:
- Seeks to “deliver Italy from its plague of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides, and
Antique dealers”
- Make way for machine and progress
I.
Umberto Boccioni
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
- Also did soccer player poster! :]
II.
Ferdinand Leger
The City
*** Both futurists and cubists were great influences on the American Precisionist painters
and O’Keefe and Ansel Adams
G. Dada:
- Nihilistic movement
- Challenge society and its expectations
- Art is reduced to the absurb
I.
Marcel DuChamp
LHOOQ
- Often uses found objects in art
H. Surrealism:
- Characterized by incongruous elements: sleeping and waking, childhood and adulthood,
reality and fantasy
- Placed a lot of value on the subconscious mind
- Value of childhood drawings, dreams, chance
I.
Marc Chagall:
I and the Village
- Russian Jew to Paris in 1914
- Sees his art as “dreams of the heart”
- Happy scenes of Russian Childhood
II.
Paul Klee:
Around the Fish
- Swiss, goes to Germany
- Used “psychic automatism”: the suspension of consciousness in order
to express subconscious ideas and feelings
III.
Joan Miro:
Personages with Stars
- Spanish
- Influenced by Klee, happiness of drawings
- Also used psychic automatism
IV.
Salvadore Dali:
Persistence of Memory
- Darker, deeper then others
- Much less spontaneous then others
- Called his work “hand printed dream photographs”
- Yee!
I. Social Realism:
- Strong Political ideas, protest art
I.
Diego Rivera:
- Mexico’s, if not Latin America’s, most internationally renowned artist
- Combines his interest in his culture and the technique of FRESCO
- 17+ major murals/mural series thru Mexico
- Showed powerful political messages thru art
II.
Jose Clemente Orozco:
Epic of American Civilization: Gods Of the Modern World
- Exiled from Mexico for political radicalism
III.
Pablo Picasso:
Guernica
- A response to the nationalists (led by Franco) and supported by Nazis
in bombing a Spanish town
- Lots of symbolism: horse, burning house, bull, woman w/child,
light/beacon, flower
IV.
Norman Rockwell:
- Social commentary of a more-understood kind
- 4 freedom paintings and others
J. Non Objective Art
- No apparent reference to reality
- Conveys mood
- Frees painter from relying on nature
I.
Wassily Kandinsky
(see Ger. Exp.)
II.
Piet Mondrian:
New York City I
- Dutch
- City inspired/new modern pattern
- Focused on intuition, balance, unity, stability
- Wanted to reduce painting to a language that didn’t require external
references to make sense
- His design was borrowed by Yves St. Laurent
4. What is early 20th Century music like?
- 20th C. music’s beginnings = Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky, 1913
- at its premier = chaos!
- Supposedly about Pagan dwellers, but it’s the sounds of the 20th C.: discord, the city,
the factory
- Shifting rhythm: sometimes the focus
- Fragmented melody
- Dissonant/angular
- Generally unpredictable
*** Too, Jazz and folk influences in other music
5. What is early 20th Century literature like?
- Just as art and music become more abstract and less complete so does literature
- Many truths/many perspectives
- Stream of consciousness/psychic automatism
- Themes of social breakdown, decay, chaos
- Direct, compressed, vivid
- Faulker’s Dry September
6. What is early 20th Century architecture like?
A. Art Deco:
Chrysler Building
- “Exposition des Arts Decoratifs”
- Highly geometric, eclectic
- “Popular style”
B. International Style
Bauhaus Machine Shop
Marseilles Community
- Open box is the basic unit of space
- Cube groups, cantilevers, “containers for living”, “machines a habiter”
- Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Geanneret) Church of Notre Dame du
Haut
C. Organic Architecture:
Price Tower
Falling Water
- Achieved through steel skeleton, reinforced concrete
- Used cantilevers
- Frank Lloyd Wright, “Architect is a poet. People live in these poems”
- Incorporate nature; don’t shut it off. Interior space should expand
without interruption.