Chapter 33: The Development of Modernist Art - The Early 20th Century
During the first half of the 20th century, rampant industrialization matured into
international industrial capitalism, which fueled the rise of consumer economics. These
developments presented society with great promise and significant problems. Change
brought elation and anxiety, euphoria and alienation. These emotions would characterize
Europe for the early decades. World War I, the Great Depression, the rise of
totalitarianism, and World War II exacerbated this schizophrenic attitude. The arts
reflected this same mind set in the lofty utopian vision of the Bauhaus and De Stijl, on
one hand, and the scathing social commentary of the Dada artists, on the other.
New discoveries in many fields forced people and society to revise radically their
understanding of the world. This change was rooted in the Scientific Revolution and the
Enlightenment of the previous centuries. Artists precipitated in this reassessment, often
acknowledging these new discoveries by shifting the theoretical bases of their work.
Much of the history of early 20th century art is a history of a radical rejection of
traditional limitations and definitions both of art and the universe.
One of the fundamental Enlightenment beliefs was faith in science. Because it was
based on empirical or observable, fact, science provided a mechanistic conception of
the universe which provided for many an alternative to traditional religious
teachings. As promoted in the classic physics of Isaac Newton, the universe was a huge
machine consisting of time, space, and matter. The early 20th century witnessed an
astounding burst in scientific activity that challenged this model. The new theories
espoused by Planck, Einstein, Rutherford and Bohr, shattered the existing faith in the
objective reality of matter. Time and space were no longer thought of as absolute, rather,
time and space are relative to the observer and linked to a four dimensional space time
continuum. These new scientific theories and understandings of the universe changed the
view of physical nature and raised the curtain on the Atomic Age.
In addition to physics, there were great advances in chemistry and biology that yielded
knowledge of polymers, plastics, fertilizers, vitamins, antibiotics, and many others, which
resulted in many products that improved life. Technological advances led to the
development of radios, radar, television, cinema, municipal transport systems, electrical
street lighting and home appliances.
Chemical technology led to great advance in fighting disease famine, food production,
and processing.
Philosophy, psychology, and economic theory, underwent significant changes as
challenges to the primacy of reason and objective reality emerged. Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900), a German intellectual rejected the rational. He believed that Western
society was decadent and suppressed because of excessive reliance on reason at the
expense of emotion and passion. He blamed Christianity as the reason for this and
insisted that societies could attain liberation and renewal only when they acknowledged
that God was dead.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) examined the irrational mind and destabilized the long held
belief in the rational nature of humanity. He developed the principles for what became
known as psychoanalysis. He argued in his research that the unconscious and inner
drives control human behavior. This unconscious control is due to repression of
uncomfortable past experiences or memories. Making people aware of their suppressed
memories could heal them.
Carl Jung (1875-1961) expanded on Freud’s theories. Jung believed therapists could
understand behavior and personality of an individual by identifying patterns in his or her
dreams. Jung further said that the unconsciousness is composed of two facets, a personal
unconscious and a collective unconscious. The collective unconscious comprises
memories and associations all humans share, such as archetypes (original models) and
mental constructions. According to Jung, the collective unconscious accounts for the
development of myths, religions, and philosophies.
Marxism
Industrialization greatly effected society in the 19th and 20th centuries. The owners and
managers of the industrial giants wielded extraordinary economic and social power. Do
to the widening gap between the leaders of industry and the laborers, the popularity of
Marxism grew.
In the early 20th century people faced fundamental and revolutionary challenges in how
they viewed the world. These changes would be reflected in the art that was produced.
World War I and the Russian Revolution
The development of advanced European and American societies led to expansion. This
expansion has been called imperialism. This imperialism was capitalist and expansionist
establishing colonies as raw material resources, manufacturing markets, and territories.
This also brought on the great missionary thrusts into Africa and other places. The goal
was to bring the “light” of Christianity and civilization to “backward peoples” and
educating “inferior races.” Darwin’s influence was evident in the thinking that
imperialism was also survival of the fittest.
The development of nation states did not lead to peace and harmony. Nationalism and
the imperialistic spirit led to competition instead. Countries negotiated treaties and
alliances to protect their interests. These alliances led to World War I, which lasted from
1914-1918. WWI destroyed any romantic illusions about war. Nine million people were
killed in battle. The introduction of poison gas added to the horror of the inhumanity.
The devastation of WWI brought widespread misery, social disruption, and economic
collapse.
The Russian Revolution saw the collapse of the Czar and the triumph of the Bolsheviks,
later called Communists, led by Lenin (1870-1924). Russia was officially named the
Soviet Union in 1923.
The end of WWI was followed ten years later by the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
The Great Depression was devastating to Western economies. By 1932 25% of the
British workforce was unemployed, 40 % of the German workers, and production in the
United States had fallen to 50 %.
This all created a fertile breeding ground for the totalitarian forces that came to the
forefront in some European countries and Japan: Mussolini in Italy, Joseph Stalin in the
Soviet Union, and Adolf Hitler in Germany and Tojo in Japan. These ruthless seizures of
power evolved into WWII.
Millions died in the fighting and the attempt to extinguish the Jewish race in what has
been termed the Holocaust. There was also the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Japan.
WWII ended in 1945. The war’s economic, physical, and psychological devastation
tempered the elation people felt at the conclusion of the global hostilities.
The Evolution of Modernism and the Avant-Garde
Artists, like others were deeply affected by the devastating events of the early 20 th
century. Some responded with energy and optimism and others with bleak despair.
Changes in the art world also influenced artistic developments. The challenges of
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the various renegade and alternative exhibitions
diminished the academies’ authority, thought they remained a presence.
For artists working within the crucible of historical turmoil, contending with shifting
institutional structures with in the art world, and acknowledging the significance of
Modernism led to an incredibly fertile period for the evolution of art, especially the
avant-garde. Early 20th century avant-garde artists were in the forefront of
aggressively challenging traditional and often cherished notions about art and its
relations to society. As the old social order collapsed and new ones ( such as
communism and corporate capitalism) took their places, one of the self-imposed
tasks school after school of avant-garde artists embraced was the search for new
definitions and uses for art in a radically changed world. The term avant-garde
emerged in art after it was in use in politics. This prompted the general public to
associate the avant-garde artists with radical political thought and anarchism. While this
was so, in contrast, other avant-garde artists in essence withdrew from society and
concentrated their attention on art as a unique activity, separated from society at large.
These artists pursed an introspective examination of artistic principles and elements
(continuing the modernists’ goals), resulting in an increasing focus on formal qualities of
art.
Expressionism in Early 20th Century Art
Aspects of all the avant-garde movements contributed to the emergence of expressionism.
Expressionism refers to art that is the result of the artist’s unique inner or personal
vision that often has an emotional dimension. This contrasts with art focused on the
visual description of the empirical world. This was a rejection of Renaissance
sensibilities that had governed the western art world for the previous 500 years.
The term expressionism was popularized in the avant-garde journal Der Strum. The
editor Herwarth Walden proclaimed: “We call art of this century Expressionism in
order to distinguish it from what is not art. We are thoroughly aware that artists of
previous centuries also sought expression. Only they did not know how to formulate
it.”
There are several movements of the 20th century that are classified as expressionist.
Some of this expressionist art evokes visceral emotional responses from the viewer,
whereas other such artworks rely on the artist introspective revelations. Often the
expressionists offended viewers and even critics, but the sought empathy – connection
between the internal states of artists and viewers – not sympathy.
Fauvism
In 1905, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, a group of young painters under the leadership
of Henri Matisse exhibited canvases so simplified in design and so shockingly bright in
color that a startled critic described the artists as fauves (wild beasts). The Fauves were
totally independent of the Academy and the official Salon. The fauve movement was
driven by the desire to develop an art that had the directness of Impressionism but that
also used intense color juxtapositions and their emotional capabilities, the legacy of
artists such as Van Gogh and Gauguin. The Fauves had seen the work of these artists in
retrospective exhibitions in Paris in 1901 and 1903, but went even further in liberating
color from its descriptive function and using it for both expressive and structural ends.
They produced works of great spontaneity, rich surface textures, lively linear patterns and
above all bold colors. The fauves went beyond any earlier artists by using contrasting
colors applied in sweeping brushstrokes and bold patterns. They combined outward
Expressionism, in the form of bold release of internal feelings through wild color
and powerful brutal brushwork, with inward expressionism, awakening the
viewer’s emotions by these very devices.
The fauves were never officially organized and disintegrated within five years. While
short lived, the movement had tremendous influence in the direction of art by
demonstrating color’s structural, expressive, and aesthetic capabilities.
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was the dominant figure of the group. He realized that color
could play a primary role in conveying meaning and focused his efforts on developing
this notion. Women with a Hat is composed in a traditional manner; however the
seemingly arbitrary colors immediately strike the viewer. Matisse explained, “What
characterized fauvism was that we rejected imitative colors, and that with pure
colors we obtained stronger reactions – more striking simultaneous reactions, and
there was also the luminosity of our colors.” Matisse’s reference to luminosity linked
him to Cezanne, who argued that painters could only represent light by color and not
reproduce it. Color therefore became the formal element most responsible for pictorial
coherence and the primary conveyer of meaning.
The maturation of these color discoveries can be seen in Matisse’s Red Room
(Harmony in Red). The viewer is confronted with the interior of a comfortable
prosperous household with a maid placing fruit and wine on the table. The color
selections and juxtapositioning generate much of the feelings of warmth and comfort.
The objects are depicted in simplified, fattened forms. The table and wall are painted the
same, bringing about separation only by a dark line. The front edge of the table is
eliminated. The painting was originally painted in green, then blue, before Matisse final
settled on red. The blue patterning contrasts greatly with the red. Matisse said, “Color
was not given to us in order that we might imitate Nature. It was given so that we
could express our own emotions.”
Andre Derain (1880-1954) shared many of Matisse’s goals. In The Dance, perspective
is flattened and color delineates space. Here, Derain indicates light and shadow not by
value, but by contrasts in hue. Color does not describe the local tones of objects; instead
it expresses the pictures content.
German Expressionism: Die Brucke (The Bridge)
The boldness and immediacy of the fauves appealed to The German Expressionists.
Although color plays an important role in their work, the expressiveness of their images
is due as much to the wrenching distortions of form, ragged outline, and agitated
brushwork. This resulted in savagely brutal, powerful, and emotional canvases in the
years leading up to World War I.
The first of the German Expressionist artists gathered in Dresden in 1905 under the
leadership of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). The group thought of themselves as
paving a way for a more perfect age by bridging the old age and the new. Their name
Die Brucke (The Bridge) is derived from this concept. Kirchner’s early studies had
instilled in him a deep admiration for German medieval art. Like the British artists with
the Arts and Crafts movement, members of this group modeled themselves on their ideas
of medieval craft guilds by living together and practicing all the arts equally.
These artists protested the hypocrisies and materialistic decadence of those in power.
Kirchner, in particular focused on the detrimental effects of industrialization, such as the
alienation of individuals in cities, which he felt fostered a mechanized impersonal
society. The later move to Berlin by most of the group furthered this belief.
Street, Dresden, provides a glimpse into the frenzied urban activity of this German city
before WWI. Rather than offering the distant panoramic urban view of the
Impressionists, this street is jarring and dissonant. The women coming toward the viewer
are almost confrontational and menacing as they are forced upon the viewer by the steep
perspective. Harshly rendered, the women’s features seem ghoulish and garish due to the
clashing colors, and add to the expressive impact of the image. These expressive uses of
the formal elements would influence the work of Edvard Munch.
Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was older than other Bridge artists and was invited to join the
group in 1906 because he was pursuing similar ideas in his work. The content of Nolde’s
work was centered mainly on religious imagery. In contrast to the quiet spirituality and
restraint of traditional themes, Nolde’s paintings are visceral and forceful. Saint Mary
of Egypt among Sinners depicts her before her conversion to Christ. She is shown
entertaining lusty men groping her. Far from an enticing scene it displays a brutal
ugliness. The distortions of form, color contrasts, and raw brushstrokes amplify the
harshness of the figures.
Borrowing ideas from Van Gogh, Munch, the Fauves, and African and Oceanic Art,
Die Brucke artists created images that derive much of their power dissonance and a
seeming lack of finesse. The harsh colors, aggressive brushwork, and distorted
forms expressed the painter’s feelings about the injustices of society and their belief
in a healthful union of human of human beings and nature. Their use of such
diverse sources reflects the expanding scope of global contact from colonialism and
international capitalism. By 1913 the group dissolved and each member worked
independently.
German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)
The Blue Rider was a second major German expressionist group formed in Munich in
1911. The two founding members were Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Franz
Marc (1880-1916), whimsically selected this name because of their mutual interest in the
color blue and horses. This group of artists produced paintings that captured their
feelings in visual form while also eliciting intense visceral responses from the viewer.
Kandinsky was born in Russia and moved to Munich in 1896 and soon developed a
spontaneous and aggressive avant-garde style. Kandinsky was one of the first artists to
explore complete abstraction as evidence in Improvisation 28. Kandinsky’s motivation
to eliminate representational elements stemmed from his interest in
Theosophy (a religious and philosophical belief system that incorporates a wide
range of tenets from other sources, Buddhism and mysticism) and the occult, as well
as advances in science. Kandinsky was a true intellectual, widely read in philosophy,
religion, history, the arts, and music. Kandinsky was one of the few early modernists to
understand the new scientific theories of the era. Rutherford’s exploration of atomic
structure convinced Kandinsky that material objects had no real substance, thereby
shattering his faith in the world of tangible things.
Kandinsky articulated his ideas in his influential treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in
Art, published in 1912. He believed that artists must express the spirit of their
innermost feelings by orchestrating color, form, line, and space. He produced many
works adhering to these principles. Ultimately, Kandinsky saw these abstractions as
evolving blue prints for a more enlightened and liberated society emphasizing
spirituality.
Franz Marc, like many other German Expressionists, grew increasingly pessimistic
about the state of humanity as WWI loomed on the horizon. His perceptions of human
beings a deeply flawed led him to turn to the animal world for his subjects.
Animals, he believed, were “more beautiful, more pure” than humanity and thus
more appropriate as a vehicle to express inner truth. In his quest to imbue his
paintings with greater emotional intensity, Marc focused on color and tried to develop an
iconography of color that represented ideas or feelings. Blue is the male principle, severe
and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, happy, and sensual. Red is matter,
brutal and heavy. These efforts liked him to other avant-garde artists struggling to
redefine the practice of art.
Fate of the Animals was painted in 1913 when tension of the impending war had
pervaded society and emerged in Marc’s art. The animals appear trapped in a forest
while some apocalyptic event is destroying them. The entire scene is distorted and
shattered into fragments. The lighter and brighter colors of his iconography are missing.
The blues and reds, colors of severity and brutality, dominate. Marc found himself at the
front lines in WWI just a year after painting this work. He wrote to his wife that Fate of
the Animals “is like a premonition of this war – horrible and shattering. I can
conceive that I painted it.” The tragic irony of this was his death in action in the War in
1916.
Embracing Abstraction
The expressionist departure from any strict adherence to illusionism in art was a path
followed by other artists. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was among those who most
radically challenged artistic conventions and moved most aggressively into abstraction.
Picasso was a Spanish artist whose importance in the history of art is undisputed. He
made huge contributions to new ways of representing the surrounding world. He was
perhaps the most prolific artist in history and worked in nearly every medium.
Picasso mastered all aspects of observational drawing and the styles of the late 19 th
century by the time he entered the Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts in the 1890’s. His
prodigious talent led him to experiment with a wide range of visual expression first in
Spain and then in Paris when he moved there in 1904. He remained a traditional artist in
his sense of preparatory drawings for each major work, but he was modernist in his
enduring quest for innovation, his lack of complacency, and his insistence on constantly
challenging himself and others around him. Picasso was constantly experimenting and
shifted from one style to another. He went from somber Spanish realism, to
impressionism, to the so called Blue Period (1901-1904) that reflected Picasso’s
melancholy state of mind. This period is reflected in the art works in which he used
primarily blue colors to depict worn, pathetic, and alienated figures.
In 1906, Picasso was looking for new ways to depict form. He was influenced by ancient
Iberian sculpture, and the late paintings of Cezanne, and African masks. The expansion
of colonial empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in wider
exposure of European and American artists to art from Africa, India, and other
faraway locales.
This influence can be seen in Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein, who along with her
brother, were friends and patrons of the avant-garde. Picasso struggled with the painting
leaving it unfinished after 80 sittings. Picasso told Stein “I can’t see you any longer
when I look.” On resuming the portrait in 1907, Picasso painted Stein’s head as a
simplified planer form, incorporating aspects derived from African masks and sculptures.
Later in 1907, the influence of African art and Cezanne can be more clearly evidenced in
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (literally “the young ladies of Avignon”). This painting is
historically very significant because it is viewed as opening the door (or some would say,
Pandora’s Box) to a radically new method of representing form in space. The work
began as a symbolic picture to be titled Philosophical Bordello, portraying male clients
intermingling with women in the reception room of a brothel. By the time he finished, he
had eliminated the male figures, simplified the rooms details to a suggestion of drapery
and a schematic foreground still life. Picasso became fully absorbed in the problem of
finding a new way to represent the five figures in their interior space. Instead of
representing them as continuous volumes, he fractured their shapes and interwove them
with the equally jagged shapes of the drapery and empty space to where the distinction
between the foreground and background is unclear. Here Picasso pushed Cezanne’s
treatment of form and space to a new level.
Picasso furthered the radical nature of this work by depicting the figures inconsistently.
The three young women to the left are portrayed with relatively calm and ideal features,
like figures from ancient Iberian sculpture. The greatly distorted figures to the right
directly display Picasso’s increasing fascination with the power of African sculpture.
Picasso must have further distorted the bodies in response to the faces, breaking them
into ambiguous planes that suggest multiple points of view at once. Gone completely is
the traditional concept of an orderly, constructed, and unified pictorial space that
mirrors the observable world. In its place are the beginnings of a new
representation of the world as a dynamic interplay of time and space. Picasso
explained, “I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them. For many years Picasso
only showed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to other painters. One of the first to see it was
Georges Braque (1882-1963). Using this painting’s revolutionary ideas as a point of
departure, Braque and Picasso formulated Cubism around 1908.
Cubism
Cubism represented a radical turning point in the history of art, nothing less than the
destruction of pictorial illusionism that had dominated Western art for the past 500 years.
The Cubists rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms
abstracted from the conventionally perceived world. These artists pursued the analysis of
form, breaking it into its many parts and then reconstructing it by a new logic of design,
into a coherent aesthetic object. The art of painting had to move far beyond the
description of observed reality. This rejection to traditional practice was in the spirit of
the times where everything was being questioned because of the crumbling of the
concrete Newtonian world, fostered by the physics of Einstein and others. The French
writer and theorist Apollinaire wrote about Cubism:
Authentic cubism is the art of depicting new holes with formal elements
borrowed not from the reality of vision, but from that of conception. This
tendency leads to a poetic kind of painting which stands outside the world of
observation; for even in simple cubism, the geometrical surfaces of an object
must be opened out in order to give a complete representation of it….
Everyone must agree that a chair, from whatever side it is viewed, never
ceases to have four legs, a seat and a back, and that if it is robbed of one of
these elements, it is robbed of an important part.
Cubism received its name after Matisse described some of Braque’s work to a critic as
having been painted “with little cubes,” and the critic went on in his review to speak of
“cubic oddities.”
Analytic Cubism
Historians refer to the first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Picasso and Braque, as
Analytic Cubism. In order to present multiple views at once to fully describe an object,
the traditional approach of drawing from one point of view was no longer effective. So
the Cubists began to dissect the forms for the viewer to inspect on the canvas. In simple
terms Analytic Cubism involves analyzing form and investigating the visual vocabulary
(pictorial elements) for conveying meaning.
Braque’s painting, The Portuguese, from 1911, is a great example of this approach. The
subject was from Braque’s memories of a Portuguese musician in a bar in Marseilles.
Braque concentrated his attention on dissecting the form and placing it in a dynamic
interaction with the space around it. He dramatically reduced color, unlike the Fauves
and German Expressionists, so that the viewers would focus on form. Braque has so
dissolved the subject that it is difficult to discern. The large intersecting planes suggest
the man and guitar; smaller planes penetrate and hover over the larger planes. The use of
light and shadow to model suggest form and transparency. There is a planned
inconsistency to which areas are in front and which behind. The stenciled letters and
numbers add to the complexity and the confusion between two dimensional and three
dimensional forms and levels of space.
Picasso and Braque pioneered the exploration of visual vocabulary – for example,
composition, two dimensional shape, three dimensional form, and value – and its role in
generating meaning. Further the inclusion of elements such as recognizable letters and
numbers seems to anchor the painting in a world of representation, thereby exacerbating
the tension between representation and abstraction. Constantly shifting imagery makes it
impossible to arrive at any definitive reading of the image, leaving ambiguity and doubt.
Picasso and Braque avoided color to unify paintings that radically disrupted viewer
expectations about the representation of time and space. Their contemporary,
Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) worked toward a kind of color Cubism. Apollinaire
called this style Orphism, after Orpheus, the Greek god with magical music making
powers. Apollinaire believed art, like music, was divorced from representation of the
visible world. He along with his wife, who was also an artist, became convinced that the
rhythms of modern life could best be expressed through color harmonies and
dissonances. Champs de Mars, or The Red Tower, was painted between 1909-1912
and depicted the Eiffel Tower. It was still considered an engineering marvel many years
after it was built in 1889. The title refers to the field in which the Eiffel Tower stands.
Delaunay broke the monuments perceptual unity into colored shards the advance or
recede according to the relative hues and values of the broken shapes. The structure
ambiguously rises and collapses, and has been interpreted as commentary on societal
collapse prior to World War I. Delaunay himself wrote, describing the imagery, “The
synthesis of a period of destruction: likewise a prophetic vision with social
repercussions: war and the base crumbles.”
Delaunay’s experiments with color strongly influenced the Futurists and the German
Expressionists. These artists found in his art a means for intensifying expression by
suggesting violent motion through shape and color.
Synthetic Cubism
In 1912, Cubism entered a new phase when the style no longer relied on a decipherable
relation to the observed world. In, Synthetic Cubism, artists constructed paintings and
drawings from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a
subject. Still Life with Chair-Caning (1912) is the work that marked this point of
change in Picasso’s work and history. The painting has pasted onto the canvas a piece of
oilcloth printed to look like chair-caning. Framed with a piece of rope the work
challenges the viewers understanding of reality. The caning looks real, yet it is an
illusion. In contrast, the painted abstract areas do not imitate real objects, yet does this, in
a sense make them more real than the caning illusion? The letters JOU appear, as in
many Cubist paintings, and refer to the French word Journaux or journal for newspaper.
Picasso and Braque delighted in visual puns. The JOU is also referring to the words
jouer and jouir the French words for “to play” and “to enjoy.”
Collage
Picasso and Braque continued to explore the medium of collage which was introduced
into the realm of High Art in Still Life with Chair Caning. From the French word
coller, meaning “to stick,” a collage is a composition of bits of objects, such as
newspaper of cloth, glued to a surface. Braque’s, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe and Glass, is
done in a variant of collage called papier colle (stuck paper), or gluing assorted paper
shapes to a drawing or painting. Roughly rectangular shapes of various printed and
colored papers dominate the composition. The faux bois (false wood) paper with
molding provides an illusion whose concreteness contrasts with the lightly rendered
objects on the right. Five pieces of paper overlap each other in the center of the
composition to create a layering of flat planes that both echo the space the lines suggest
and establish the flatness of the works surface. The shapes seem to oscillate back and
forth in space. Shapes push planes back in some places and makes them transparent in
others.
Viewers of this work must realize that this is not an illusion of the observable world, but
rather it is a visual game to determine all the various changes in representation. Braque
no longer analyzed the observed world, here he constructed or synthesized objects and
space alike from the materials he used. Picasso stated at this time in Cubism
development: “Not only did we try to displace reality; reality was no longer in the
object…. [In] the papier colle…. [w]e didn’t any longer want to fool the eye; we
wanted to fool the mind…. If a piece of paper can be a bottle, that gives us
something to think about in connections with both newspapers and bottles too.”
Like all collage, the papier colle technique was modern in its medium – mass produced
never before found in “high art” – and modern in the way the artist embedded the arts
“message” in the imagery and in the nature of everyday materials. While usually viewed
in terms of formal innovations, Cubism and collage was viewed by the public in
sociopolitical terms as revolutionary and subversive in nature. Cubism’s attack on
artistic tradition was viewed also as an attack on society’s complacency and status quo.
The deconstruction of the observable world was viewed as anarchist in nature and was
part of the destabilization of society. Many artists and writers of the period allied them
selves with various anarchist groups whose utopian visions appealed to progressive
thinkers. The impact of Cubism extended beyond the realm of the art world.
Cubist Sculpture
Cubism also inspired new approaches to sculpture. Picasso created Guitar in 1912. He
explored the volume via flat planar cardboard surfaces. (This work is a maquette, or
model; the finished sculpture was to be made of sheet metal). By presenting what is
essentially a cutaway view of the guitar, Picasso allowed the viewer to examine both
surface and interior space, both mass and void. Some scholars have suggested that
Picasso derived the cylindrical form that serves as a sound hole on the guitar from the
eyes on masks from the Ivory Coast of Africa.
Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) was one on the most successful sculptures to adapt into
three-dimensions the planar, fragmented dissolution of form central to Analytic Cubism
painting. Born in Latvia, he lived and worked many years in France and the United
States. He worked out his ideas for his sculptures in clay before creating them in stone or
bronze. In Bather, Lipchitz broke up the continuous form into cubic volumes and
planes. This work represents a parallel analysis of dynamic form in space that Picasso
and Braque were exploring in paint.
Aleksandr Archipenko (1887-1964) was a Russian sculptor who explored similar ideas
to Lipchitz. Woman Combing Her Hair, is a statuette that introduces, in place of a
head, a void with a shape of its own that figures importantly into the whole design.
Enclosed spaces have always existed in figurative sculpture. But here the space
penetrates the figures continuous mass and is a defined form equal in importance to the
mass of bronze. It is not simply the negative counterpart to the volume. Archipenko’s
shows the same fluid intersecting planes seen in cubist painting and the relation of the
planes is similarly complex. Archipenko’s figure is still somewhat representational, but
like Cubist painting is casting off the last vestiges of representation.
Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942) was a friend of Picasso and shared his interest in the artistic
possibilities of new materials and new methods borrowed from both the industrial
technology and traditional metal working. Born to a family of metal workers in
Barcelona, Spain, Gonzalez helped Picasso construct a number of welded sculptures.
This contact allowed Gonzalez to refine his own sculptural vocabulary. Using ready
made bars, sheets, or rods of welded or wrought iron and bronze, Gonzalez created
dynamic sculptures with both linear elements and volumetric forms. In his version of
Woman Combing Her Hair, the figure is reduced to interplay of curves, lines, and
planes – virtually complete abstraction. Although Gonzalez’s sculpture received limited
exposure during his lifetime, it became particularly important for sculptors in subsequent
decades that focused their attention on the capabilities of Welded metal.
Purism
Charles Edouard Jeanneret known as Le Corbusier is today best known as one of the
most important modernist architects. Also a painter, he founded in 1918 a movement
called Purism, which opposed Synthetic Cubism on the grounds that it was becoming
merely an esoteric, decorative art out of touch with the machine age. Purists maintained
that machinery’s clean functional lines and pure forms of its parts should direct the
artist’s experiments in design, whether in painting, architecture, or industrially produced
objects. This “machine aesthetic” inspired Fernand Leger (1881-1955), a French
painter who had early on painted with the Cubists. He devised an effective compromise
of tastes, bringing together meticulous Cubist analysis of form with the Purist’s
broad simplification and machine like finish of the design components. He retained
from his Cubist practice a preference for cylindrical and tube shaped motifs,
suggestive of machine parts.
In an early work, The City, Leger incorporated the effects of modern posters, billboard
advertisements, harsh flashing electric lights, the noise of traffic and the robotic
movements of people. He depicted the mechanical commotion of contemporary cities.
Futurism
There were artists who pursued many of the ideas of the Cubists, but also had an equally
important well defined sociopolitical agenda. They were called The Futurists. Futurism
began as a literary movement, but soon encompassed the visual arts, cinema, theatre,
music, and architecture. Indignant over the social and political decline of Italy, the
Futurists published numerous manifestos in which they aggressively advocated
revolution, both in society and in art. Like the German Expressionists, they hoped to
usher in a new, more enlightened era.
In their quest to launch Italian society toward a glorious future, the Futurist’s championed
war as a means of washing away the stagnant past. They saw war as a cleansing agent.
The Futurists agitated for the destruction of museums, libraries, and similar repositories
of accumulated culture, which they described as mausoleums. They called for radical
innovation in the arts. Of particular interest was the speed and dynamism of modern
technology. One Futurist stated that, “a speeding automobile is more beautiful than the
Nike of Samothrace” by then representative of classicism and the glories of past
civilization. Futurist art often focuses on motion in time and space, incorporating
the Cubist discoveries derived from the analysis of form.
Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) was one of the leaders of the Futurist movement. He
was both a painter and a sculpture as were many of the early Modernists. What we want
he claimed, is not fixed movement in space but the sensation of movement itself:
“Owing to the persistence of images on the retina, objects in motion are multiplied
and distorted, following one another like waves in space. Thus a galloping horse has
not four legs, it has twenty.”
In Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1912-13, Boccioni demonstrates this approach.
Boccioni also applied this dictum to his sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in
Space, cast in 1913; it is perhaps the definitive work of Futurist sculpture. The piece
highlights the formal and spatial effects of motion rather than their source, the
striding human figure. The figure is so expanded, interrupted, and broken, in plane
and contour that it seems to disappear in the blur of its movement. Although this
work bears a curious resemblance to Nike of Samothrace, it is evident how far this
modern work departs from the ancient one. Boccioni’s sculpture is notable for its ability
to capture the sensation of movement.
Gino Severini (1883-1966) painted Armored Train, a work that encapsulates the
Futurist philosophy artistically and politically. What can we tell about this train? Is war
good or bad? What leads you to that understanding from the work? Where are the
consequences of war, death and destruction? How does this differ from Goya’s The
Third of May?
Once World War I broke out, the Futurist group began to disintegrate, largely because so
many of them felt compelled to join the Italian army because of their pro-war views.
Some of them were killed in the war including Boccioni. The ideas that Futurism
promoted became integral to fascism that emerged in Italy shortly their after.
Challenging Artistic Conventions
Although Futurists celebrated the war and the changes they hoped it would effect, the
mass destruction and chaos, horrified other artists. Humanity had never before witnessed
such a wholesale slaughter on such a large scale over an extended period of time.
Millions were killed, wounded, or blown to bits in great battles. The new arms
technology made it a war of guns. Millions of tons of explosives, poison gas, and shells,
made attack suicidal and trench warfare was stalemated. The mud filth and blood of the
trenches, the pounding and shattering shells, and the terrible deaths and mutilations were
a devastating psychological and physical experience for a generation brought upon the
doctrine of progress and a belief in the fundamental values of civilization.
Dada
With war as a backdrop, many artists contributed to an artistic and literary movement that
became known as Dada. This movement emerged, in large part, in reaction to an insane
spectacle of collective homicide. They were “utterly revolted by the butchery of the
World War. Dada was international in scope beginning in New York and Switzerland
and spreading to other areas. Dada was more of a mindset or attitude than a singular
identifiable style. The Dadaists believed reason and logic had been responsible for the
unmitigated disaster of world war, and they concluded that the only route to salvation
was through political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. Thus, an element of
absurdity is a cornerstone of Dada. Dada is a term unrelated to the movement, choosing
the word randomly from the dictionary. The word is French for “hobby horse.” It
satisfied the Dadaist’s desire for something irrational and nonsensical
The pessimism and disgust of these artists surfaced in their disdain for convention and
tradition, characterized by a concerted and sustained attempt to undermine cherished
notions and assumptions about art.
Although the artist’s cynicism and pessimism inspired Dada, what developed was
phenomenally influential and powerful. By attacking convention and logic, the Dada
artist’s unlocked new avenues for creative invention, allowing artists to push boundaries
farther than previous movements. Dada was in its subversiveness, extraordinarily avantgarde and very liberating. In addition to disdain, a current of humor and the whimsical,
along with irreverence flows through much of the art. This can be seen in Duchamp’s
Mona Lisa, and Francis Picabia’s, Portrait of Cezanne. The views of the Dadaists
mirrored those of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others.
In its emphasis on the spontaneous and the intuitive, Dada had interest in the exploration
of the subconscious that Freud promoted. Images rising out of the subconscious mind
had a truth of their own, they believed, independent of conventional vision.
Jean Arp (1887-1966) pioneered the use of chance in composing his images. Tiring of
the Cubist look in his collages, Arp took sheets of paper, tore them roughly into squares,
haphazardly dropped them to a sheet of paper on the floor, and glued them into the
resulting arrangement. The rectangular shapes unified the design, which Arp no doubt
enhanced by adjusting the random arrangement to a quasi-grid. Even with some altering,
chance had introduced an imbalance that seemed to Arp to restore to his work a certain
mysterious vitality he wanted. Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance is
a work done using this method. The operations of chance were for Dadaists a crucial part
of this kind of improvisation. Chance could restore to a work of art its primeval
magic power and find a way back to the immediacy it had lost through contact with
Classicism. Arp’s reliance on chance when creating his compositions reinforced the
anarchy and subversiveness inherent in Dada.
The most influential of the Dadaists was Frenchman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the
central artist in the New York Dada and active in Paris at the end of Dada. In 1913 he
exhibited his first “ready-made” sculptures, which were mass produced common, found
objects the artist selected and sometimes “rectified” by modifying their substance or
combining them with another object. Such works, he insisted, were created free from any
consideration of either good or bad taste, qualities shaped by a society he and other Dada
artists found bankrupt. Perhaps his most outrageous work was Fountain, a porcelain
urinal presented on its back and signed “R. Mutt” and dated. The artist’s signature was in
fact a witty pseudonym derived from the Mott plumbing company’s name and that of the
Mutt and Jeff comic strip. Duchamp did not select the object for exhibition for its
aesthetic qualities. The “artness” of this work lies in the artist’s choice of his object,
which has the effect of conferring the status of art on it and forces the viewer to see the
object in a new light. Duchamp wrote, after Fountain was rejected from an unjuried
show, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no
importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful
significance disappeared under a new title and point of view – created a new thought for
that object.
Duchamp (and the generations of artists after him profoundly influenced by his art
and especially his attitude) considered life and art matters of chance and choice
freed from the conventions of society and tradition. Within his approach to art and
life, each act was individual and unique. Every person’s choice of found objects
would be different. This philosophy of utter freedom for artists was fundamental to
the history of art in the 20th century. Duchamp spent much of World War I in New
York, inspiring a group of American artists and collectors with his radical rethinking of
the role of artists and of the nature of art.
Dada spread throughout much of Western Europe, arriving as early as 1917 in Berlin,
where it soon took on an activist political edge, particularly in response to the economic,
social, and political chaos in the city after World War I. The Berlin artists developed a
new intensity for a technique called photomontage (pasting parts of many images
together into one image). This technique had been in popular and private culture and
was used on postcards long before the 20th century. A few years earlier, the Cubists had
named the process collage. Unlike Cubist collage, the parts of Dada collage were made
almost entirely of “found” details, such as pieces of magazine photographs, usually
combined into deliberately antilogical compositions. Collage lent itself well to the Dada
desire to use chance when creating art and anti-art.
One of the Berlin Dadaists who perfected the photomontage technique was Hannah
Hoch (1889-1978). Her works not only advanced the absurd illogic of Dada by
presenting the viewer with chaotic, contradictory, and satiric compositions, but they also
provided scathing and insightful commentary on two of the most dramatic developments
during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) in Germany – the redefinition of women’s
social roles and the explosive growth of mass print media. In, Cut with the Kitchen
Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, Hoch
arranged an eclectic mixture of cutout photos in seemingly haphazard fashion. On closer
inspection, we see that Hoch carefully placed photographs of some of her fellow Dadaists
among images of Marx, Lenin and other revolutionary figures in the lower right. She
also placed cutout lettering saying “Die grosse Welt dada” (the great Dada world).
She also juxtaposed the heads of German military leaders on the bodies of exotic dancers,
providing a wicked critique of German leaders. A photograph of Hoch’s head appears in
the lower right hand corner, juxtaposed with a map of Europe showing the progress of
women’s enfranchisement.
Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) worked non-objectively, finding visual poetry in the cast
off junk of modern society and scavenged in trash bins for materials, which he pasted and
nailed together into designs such as our example Merz 19. Merz is a word that
Schwitters nonsensically derived from the word kommerzbank (commerce bank), and
used as a generic title for a whole series of works. The recycled elements acquire new
meanings through their new uses and locations. Elevating objects that are essentially
trash to the status of high art fits well with Dada philosophy.
The European Effect on American Art: Transatlantic Artistic Dialogue
John Singer Sargent, James McNeil Whistler, and Mary Cassatt were American arts that
spent much of their productive careers in Europe, while many European artists ended
their careers in the United States in anticipation and because of World War I. Visionary
patrons supported the efforts of American and other artists to pursue modernist ideas.
Some of the patrons were matrons or women as opposed to men. Thus there support
might be labeled matronage.
The art scene in America before significant European Modernist influence was quite
varied yet profoundly realist. Many American artists were committed to presenting a
realistic, unvarnished look at life, much like the mid-19th century French Realists.
One such group has been called The Eight. They were a group of American artists who
gravitated to the circle of influential and evangelical artist and teacher Robert Henri
(1865-1929). Henri encouraged these artists to make “pictures from life.” These images
depicted the rapidly changing urban landscape of New York City. Because these
paintings captured the bleak and seedy aspects of city life, The Eight eventually became
known as The Ashcan School and were referred to as “the apostles of ugliness.”
John Sloan (1871-1951) wandered the streets of New York observing human drama. His
main focus was on the working class, which he viewed as the embodiment of the realities
of life. So immersed was Sloan into his views of the working class, that he joined the
Socialist party and ran for office on their ticket. His works often depicted the down
trodden, prostitutes, and drunkards. Sloan’s depiction of these subjects was not as one
who saw these things as immoral and evil, something to be removed, like the reformers
of the day, rather, he saw them as victims of an unfair social and economic system.
Sixth Avenue and 30th Street (1907), depicts the street corner of this name in New
York. We see the elevated train and shops of that area. A drunken woman in a white
dress stumbles toward the viewer as a pair of well dressed ladies or street walkers look on
in amusement. This scene is not uplifting nor does it show the well to do. Instead it
records the everyday happenings of the working class. Sunday-Women Drying Their
Hair (1913), depicts three women on the roof of their tenement taking some time to dry
their hair after washing it.
George Bellows (1882-1925) Bellows first achieved notice in 1908, when he and other
pupils of Robert Henri organized an exhibition of mostly urban studies. While many
critics considered these to be crudely painted, others found them audacious and a step
beyond the work of his teacher. Bellows taught at the Art Students League of New York
in 1909, although he was more interested in pursuing a career as a painter. His fame grew
as he contributed to other nationally recognized juried shows.
Bellows' series of paintings portraying amateur boxing matches were arguably his
signature contribution to art history. These paintings are characterized by dark
atmospheres, through which the bright, roughly lain brushstrokes of the human figures
vividly strike with a strong sense of motion and direction.
George Luks (1867-1933) also painted scenes of urban life. He lived what he painted.
He was a boxer and had a temper which often landed him in fights. It is perhaps fitting
that he died in 1933 as a result of injuries sustained in a bar fight. Huston Street painted
in 1917, is an example of Luks work that demonstrates his loose, roughly painted style.
Allen Street painted in 1905, is also demonstrative of Luks’ style.
Everett Shinn (1876-1953) created paintings which found their subject matter in the
slums as well as in middle-class café society and in theatrical activities. His theater
scenes were usually done in oil, his slum and lower-class pictures in pastel. Unlike John
Sloan, who felt a genuine reformer’s commitment to lower-class urban themes, Shinn
viewed the entire city as a bright, glittering spectacle to savor and to enjoy until the end
of his life. His art reflects the influences of Daumier, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Louis
Forain.
The Armory Show and Its Legacy
One of the major vehicles for disseminating information about European Artistic
developments in the United States was the Armory Show, which occurred in early 1913.
This large scale endeavor got its name from its location, the armory of the New York
National Guard’s 69th Regiment. It was organized largely by two artists Walt Kuhn and
Arthur B. Davies. The Armory Show contained more than 1,600 artworks by European
and American artists. Among the European artists represented were Matisse, Derain,
Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Kirchner, as well as Expressionist sculpture
Wilhelm Lehmbruck and organic sculpture Constantin Brancusi. This show exposed
American artists and public to the latest in European artistic developments.
The Show was immediately controversial. The New York Times described the show as
“pathological,” and other critics demanded the exhibition be closed as a menace to public
morality. The work that was most maligned was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a
Staircase. The painting suggests a single figure in motion down a staircase in a time
continuum. The work has much in common with the Cubists and Futurists. One critic
described the work as “an explosion at a shingle factory,” and newspaper cartoonists had
a field day lampooning the painting.
Photography
The Armory Shoe traveled to Chicago and Boston after New York and was a significant
catalyst for discussion and serious thought about recent developments in art. Another
catalyst was Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Committed to promoting the avant-garde in
the United States, he established an art gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, which
became known as simply 291. He exhibited the latest in American and European art.
The gallery played an important role in the history of early 20th century art in America.
Stieglitz also channeled his energies into photography. He took his camera wherever he
went, photography whatever he saw around him. He believed in making only “straight
unmanipulated” photographs, rather than using various techniques to alter the image or
add additional information beyond what was original in the scene. Stieglitz said he
wanted “to hold a moment, to record something completely that those who see it
would relive an equivalent to what is expressed.”
Stieglitz waged a lifelong campaign to win a place for photography among the fine arts.
He founded the Photo-Secession group which mounted traveling shows in the United
States and abroad. He also published an influential journal titled Camera Work.
Stieglitz, in his own work, saw the subjects in terms of form and of the “colors” of
his black and white materials. He was attracted above all to arrangements of form
that stirred his deepest emotions. This approach is seen in one of his best known works
The Steerage, taken during a voyage to Europe with his first wife and daughter in 1907.
Traveling first class, Stieglitz grew bored with the prosperous passengers and walked as
far forward as he could. He discovered a level in the ship that was reserved for steerage
passengers, those who the government was returning to Europe after refusing entrance
into the United States. Stieglitz said of this scene when he saw it,
“I stood spellbound. I saw shapes relating to one another – a picture of shapes, and
underlying it, a new vision that held me: simple people; the feeling of the ship,
ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was away from the mob called rich. Rembrandt
came into my mind and I wondered would he have felt as I did… If I had captured
what I wanted, the photograph would go far beyond any of my previous prints. It
would be a picture based on related shapes and deepest human feeling – a step in
my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery.”
This description reveals Stieglitz’s abiding interest in formal elements of the photograph
– an insistently modern focus. Its mixture of found patterns and human activity stirs
viewer’s emotions even to this day.
Edward Weston (1886-1958) experimented with “straight photography by emphasizing
the abstract through the composition of the picture. By “zooming in” on a segment of a
form Weston forced the viewer to focus on formal qualities. Nude is an example of his
style. The images’ simplicity and the selection of a small segment of the human body,
result in a photograph of dark and light areas that at first glance suggest a landscape. The
photograph, in its reductiveness, formally expresses a study of the body that verges on
abstract.
The American Artist Man-Ray (1890-1976), worked with Duchamp through the 1920’s
producing art in the spirit of Dada. Man-Ray incorporated found objects in into many of
his works. He also brought an interest in mass-produced objects and technology, as well
as a dedication to exploring the psychological realm of human perception of the exterior
world. With Cadeau (Gift), Man-Ray took the found mass produced iron and glued on a
row of tacks, subverting its proper function of smoothing and pressing. This malicious
sense of humor gave Man-Ray’s art its characteristic edge.
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was an American introduced to Modernism at Stieglitz’s
291 gallery. He traveled to Europe in 1912, visiting Paris, where he became acquainted
with the work of the Cubists, and Munich where be was drawn to the work of the Blaue
Reiter, especially Kandinsky’s work. Hartley developed his own style called “Cosmic
Cubism.” With the heightened militarism in Germany and eventual outbreak of World
War I, Hartley immersed himself in military imagery. Among his most famous paintings
of this period is Portrait of a German Officer. It depicts an array of military images:
German imperial flags, regimental insignia, badges and an Iron Cross. What is the
message? Beyond the wartime context of militarism, Hartley added personal
significance. It includes a reference to his homosexual lover, Lieutenant Karl von
Freyberg, who was killed in battle a few months before this work was painted. Von
Freyberg’s initials are in the Lower left. To the right is his age when he died, 24. His
regiment number 4 is in the center next to the letter E for his regiment, the Bavarian
Eisenbahn. The influence of Synthetic Cubism is seen in the flattened planer images
which appear almost as abstract patterns. The somber black background perhaps alludes
to the death of von Freyberg.
Stuart Davis (1894-1964) was profoundly influenced by the European modernist works
he saw in the Armory Show of 1913. Davis created what he believed was a modern
American style by combining the flat shapes of Synthetic Cubism with his sense of jazz
tempos and his perception of the energy of American culture. This painting, while
painted in 1955, is typical of Davis’s work. In this vibrant painting, Ready to Wear, he
explored the American invention of ready to wear clothing, a term first employed in an
1895 Montgomery Ward catalog. The broad flattened areas of red, white, black, and blue
may represent pieces of fabric, while the angular white shape in the upper right corner
suggests a pair of scissors. With its bright palette and energetic composition, the painting
celebrates not only the vitality of the ready to wear clothing industry but also America
itself.
The Harlem Renaissance
While these traumatic changes where taking place in American art, there were also
indigenous movements taking place. One such movement happened in the Black
community. It was called the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance began in
the 1920’s and was a manifestation of the desire of African Americans to promote their
cultural accomplishments. They aimed to cultivate pride among blacks and racial
tolerance across the United States. The Harlem Renaissance included writings of authors,
such as Langston Hughes, jazz and blues music from Duke Ellington to Louis Armstrong,
and visual artists.
One such artist was Aaron Douglas (1898-1979). Douglas arrived in New York in 1924.
He was very sought after as a graphic artist. He was encouraged to create art that would
express the cultural history of his race. Douglas incorporated motifs from African
sculpture into compositions painted in a version of Synthetic Cubism that stressed
angular planes. Noah’s Ark was one of seven paintings based on a book of poems by
James Weldon Johnson called God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse.
Douglas used flat planes to evoke a sense of mystical space and miraculous happenings.
In Noah’s Ark, lightning strikes and rays of light criss cross the pairs of animals entering
the ark, while men load supplies in preparation for departure. The artist suggests deep
space by the size differential of the figures. The unmodulated color shapes create a
pattern that cancels any illusion of three dimensional depth.
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) found his subjects in the modern culture and history of
African Americans. Lawrence moved to Harlem in 1927 at the age of ten. He was
greatly influenced by the African art and African American stories he found in the
library. He was inspired by the political art of Goya, Daumier, and Orozco, as well as
Harlem Renaissance artists. Lawrence found his subjects in the everyday life of Harlem.
In 1941, Lawrence began a 60 painting series titled the Migration of the Negro. This
series was different than previous historical paintings he created depicting Frederick
Douglas and Harriet Tubman. This series called attention to a contemporaneous event –
the ongoing exodus of black labor from the Southern United States to the North.
Hundreds of thousands of Black Americans migrated to the North following World War
I. They were seeking improved economic opportunities and more hospitable political and
social conditions. Lawrence was part of the migrating himself but did not realize it till
the 1930’s when he was older.
This major demographic shift was largely ignored by most Americans because it involved
African Americans. Black Americans found, however, that the North was as difficult and
discriminatory as the conditions they left behind in the South.
Lawrence’s series provides numerous vignettes capturing the migrating experiences.
No. 49 depicts discrimination that Black Americans faced in the North, the segregated
dining room with a barrier running down the center of the painting. To insure continuity
and visual integrity among the 60 paintings, Lawrence interpreted his themes
systematically in rhythmic arrangements of bold, flat, and strongly colored shapes. His
style displayed Cubist influence along with his memories of the patterns made by colored
scatter rugs that were on the floors of his childhood homes. Lawrence believed that every
subject he painted during his long career had important lessons to teach viewers.
Precisionism
Many American artists did not just passively absorb European ideas after the Armory
Show. For many American artists, the challenge was to understand the ideas of
modernist European art and filter them through an American sensibility.
Ultimately, many American artists set as their goal the development of a uniquely
American art.
One such group was called the Precisionists. This was not an organized movement, and
the artists rarely exhibited together, but they did share certain thematic and stylistic traits
in their art. Precisionism developed in the 1920’s out of a fascination with the
machine’s precision and importance in modern life. The French Dada and Cubist
artist Francis Picabia noted: “Since machinery is the soul of the modern world, and
since the genius attains its highest expression in America, why is it not reasonable to
believe that in America the art of the future will flower more brilliantly.”
Precisionism, however, expanded beyond the exploration of machine imagery. Many
artists associated with the group gravitated toward the flat, sharply delineated planes of
Synthetic Cubism as the appropriate vehicle for their imagery by adding to the clarity and
precision of their work. Precisionism came to be characterized by a merging of a
familiar native style in American architecture and artifacts with a modernist
vocabulary derived largely from Synthetic Cubism.
Charles Demuth (1883-1935) spent the years 1912-1914 in Paris experiencing the avantgarde first hand. Demuth’s work incorporated imagery of the industrial sites near his
native Lancaster, Pennsylvania with the spatial discontinuities characteristic of Cubism.
In, My Egypt, Demuth depicted the grain elevators of John W. Eshelman and Sons, by
reducing them to simple geometric forms. While the grain elevators are instantly
recognizable, the painting is disrupted by the “beams” of transparent planes and the
diagonal force lines that threaten to destabilize the image and that correspond to Cubist
fragmentation of space.
The meaning of the piece remains unclear. On one hand Demuth may have been
suggesting a favorable comparison between the storing of grain in the elevators in his
native Pennsylvania and the storing of grain in Egypt prior to the seven years of famine,
as recorded in the story of Joseph at the end of Genesis. On the other hand it could be
cynically read as a negative comment on the limitations of American culture.
The work of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), like that off many artists, changed
stylistically through the years. During the 1920’s she was associated with the
Precisionists. O’Keeffe came to New York in 1918 from the tiny town of Canyon, Texas.
She was overwhelmed and excited about city life and its pace. While in New York she
met Stieglitz. He became one of her staunchest supporters and eventually her husband.
Stieglitz’s fascination with the machine age and O’Keeffe’s interest in the pace of city
life were captured in her paintings. New York, Night, depicts the soaring skyscrapers
that dominate the city. She reduced her images to flat planes, punctuated with small
rectangular windows that add light and energy to the darkness of the buildings and night.
O’Keeffe is best known for her paints of cow skulls and flowers. In these works she
stripped her subjects to their purist forms and colors to heighten their expressive power.
O’Keeffe simplified the forms almost to complete abstraction.
European Art in the Wake of World War I
Americans explored modernistic artistic endeavors unhindered because World War I was
fought on European soil. The European geopolitical terrain, and the national, as well as,
individual psyches were devastated. After the war many European artists were drawn to
the expressionist style, both to express and deal with the trauma of world war.
Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) grew directly out of the war experiences of a
group of German artists. All of the artists in the group, at some point, had served in the
German military. These military experiences greatly influenced their world views and
informed their art. The label, coined in 1923 by museum director G. F. Hartlaub,
captured the aim of the group, which was to present a clear-eyed, direct, and honest
image of the war and its effects.
George Grosz (1893-1958), was associated with Dada, but soon was linked to Neue
Sachlichkeit, because of the harsh and bitter tone of his work. Grosz produced many
drawings and paintings that were caustic indictments of the military. One of these works
is Fit for Active Service. In these works he depicts military officers as heartless or
incompetent. This drawing may be based on Grosz’s personal experiences. On the verge
of a nervous breakdown in 1917, He was sent to a sanatorium where doctors examined
him and declared him “fit for service.” None of the other military doctors or officers
seems to dispute the evaluation. The spectacles on the skeleton are similar to the ones
worn by Grosz.
Max Beckman (1884-1950) enlisted in the German army and rationalized the war. He
believed the chaos would lead to a better society, but his views changed and he was
greatly disillusioned by the mass destruction of the war. His work began to emphasize
the horrors of war and of a society he saw descending into madness. His disturbing view
of society is seen in Night. Night depicts a cramped room three intruders have forcibly
entered. A bound woman, apparently raped is splayed across the foreground. Her
husband appears on the left being hanged and tortured by one of the intruders. To the
right a third intruder prepares to carry off a child, while a woman cowers in the
background.
While the image does not depict war, it does depict the wrenching brutality and violence
that Beckman believed permeated society. Beckman used himself, wife, and daughter as
models for the tortured figures. The stilted angularity of the figures and the roughness of
the painted surface contribute to the paintings savageness. How does Beckman handle
space and form to add to the atmosphere of the picture? He dislocates and contorts
objects while creating a collapsed and illogical space. Beckman distorts adds the imagery
in order to heighten the emotional impact.
Otto Dix (1891-1959) thought war was terrible but also could have redeeming value. It
allowed one to experience the “Depths of Life” as Friedrich Nietzsche put it. As war
progressed, Dix lost faith in the potential improvement of society and started depicting
the terrible consequences of war. His imagery was very direct. In Der Krieg (The
War), Dix captures the devastation of war. On the left soldiers are marching off leaving
the destruction they caused in the center and right panels. Mangled bodies riddled with
bullet holes fill the apocalyptic landscape. A ghostly soldier drags a comrade off in the
right panel. At the bottom are soldiers that are asleep or dead. Dix felt compelled to lay
bare the realities of his time.
Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) expressed pity for the poor in her drawings and prints.
Printmaking, especially the woodcut, was very popular among the German
Expressionists. Kollwitz created a powerful work of maternal loss, in her etching
Women with a Dead Child. Derived from the Christian tradition of Mary grieving for
Christ, Kollwitz replaced reverence and grace with animalistic passion, as the mother
ferociously grabs the body of her dead child. This work had an ironic quality to it in that
Kollwitz’s son served as the model for the dead child and that he would later be killed at
age 21 in World War I. The primal nature of the image keeps with German Expressionist
aims.
The war also affected Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881-1919). While his works were often
quiet in mood, they displayed a powerful psychological quality. In Seated Youth,
Lehmbruck used elongated proportions, slumped shoulders, and hands that hang
uselessly, impart an undertone of anguish and despair to a classical type figure. The
figure communicates by pose and gesture alone. Lehmbruck captured the post war
attitude in Europe and seemed to depict his increasing depression. Lehmbruck
committed suicide in 1919.
Ernst Barlach (1870-1938) created War Monument for the cathedral in his hometown
of Gustrow in 1927. Barlach usually sculpted powerful figures in wood that were dressed
in flowing robes and were portrayed in strong simple poses that embodied deep human
emotions and combined sharp smoothly planed forms. War Monument is a haunting
human figure made in bronze. The floating figure is suspended above a tomb inscribed
with the dates 1914-1918, and later added 1939-1945. The figure suggests a dying soul
at the moment when it is about to awaken to everlasting life – the theme of death and
transfiguration. So powerful was this sculpture that the Nazis had it melted down for
Ammunition in 1937. Luckily a friend hid another version by Barlach and a new cast
was made from it for the cathedral.
Surrealism and Fantasy Art
The initial intensity and popularity of Dada lasted only a short time. By 1924, with the
publication of the First Surrealist Manifesto, most of the artists associated with Dada
joined the Surrealist movement and its determined exploration of the ways to express in
art the psyche and the world of dreams and the unconscious. Inspired impart by the
psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the nature of dreams. They viewed
dreams as occurring at the level connecting all human consciousness and as
constituting the arena in which people could move beyond their environments
constricting forces to reengage with the deeper selves society had long suppressed.
Thus, the Surrealist’s dominant motivation was to bring the aspects of outer and
inner reality together into a single position, in much the same way life’s seemingly
unrelated fragments combine in the vivid world of dreams. The projection in visible
form of this new conception required new techniques of pictorial construction.
Surrealism developed along two lines. Some artists gravitated toward an interest in
biomorphic (life forms) Surrealism. In biomorphic Surrealism, automatism –
dictation of thought without control of the mind – predominated. Biomorphic
Surrealists such as Joan Miro produced largely abstract compositions, although the
imagery sometimes suggests organisms or natural forms. Naturalistic Surrealists, in
contrast, presented recognizable scenes that seem to have metamorphosed into a dream or
nightmare image. The artists Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte are most associated with
this.
Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978) was an Italian painted that produced ambiguous works
that foreshadowed Surrealism. His work is part of a movement called Pittura Metafisica,
or Metaphysical Painting. De Chirico found hidden reality revealed through strange
juxtapositions, such as those seen on late autumn afternoons in the city of Turin, when
the long shadows of the setting sun transformed vast open squares and silent monuments
into “the most metaphysical of Italian towns.” Melancholy and Mystery of a Street
depicts a square and palace in Renaissance Italy that projects a sinister foreboding. Few
incongruous elements punctuate the scenes solitude – a small girl with a hoop, the empty
trailer, and an ominous shadow of a man. The eerie strangeness of De Chirico greatly
influenced other artists out side Italy, including the Dadaists and later Surrealists.
Max Ernst (1891-1976) was an originally a Dada artist who became an early adherent to
Surrealism. Ernst often used found objects in his work. He also used a process called
frottage - a process of rubbing a crayon or other medium across paper placed over
surfaces with a strong and evocative texture pattern to combine patterns. He combined
fragments of images he had cut to create hallucinatory collage.
Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale displays a private dream that
challenged the post-Renaissance idea that a painting should resemble a window looking
into a “real” scene rendered illusionistically three-dimensional using mathematical
perspective. In this painting, Ernst painted the landscape, distant city, and the bird in
conventional fashion. The three sketchy figures belong to the dream world. The three
dimensional gate and building break out of the picture plane to overlap the frame.
The finished work is ambiguous in imagery and meaning. The viewer struggles to
understand the meaning of the title as it relates to the image. Surrealists, Dadaists and
Metaphysical artists often used this “mind blowing” contradiction. The impact of
Surrealist works begins with the viewer’s sudden awareness of the incongruity and
absurdity of what is pictured.
Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was a Spanish Surrealist painter who explored his psyche and
dreams in his paintings, sculptures, jewelry, and designs for furniture and movies.
Influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud and others, Dali developed what he called
the “paranoiac-critical method” to assist his creative process.
In his painting he aimed “to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the
most imperialistic fury of precision… in order that the world of imagination and of
concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident… as that of the exterior world
of phenomenal reality.”
The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931, is a haunting allegory of empty space
where time has ended. An eerie, never setting sun illuminates a barren landscape. An
amorphous creature draped with a limp watch sleeps in the foreground. Another watch
hangs from the branch of a dead tree that springs unexpectedly from a blocky form. A
third watch hangs over the blocky form. Beside it lies an ant covered time piece resting
face down. Dali rendered every with complete precision striving to make the world of his
paintings as convincingly real as the most meticulously rendered landscape based on an
actual scene from nature.
Rene Magritte (1898-1967) was a Belgian painter, who also expressed the Surrealist
vision. His works administer disruptive shocks because they subvert the viewer’s
expectations, based on logic and common sense. Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images
presents a meticulously rendered trompe l’oeil depiction of a pipe. The wording below
the pipe, however, states “this is not a pipe.” The discrepancy between image and
caption clearly challenges the assumptions underlying the reading of visual art.
This painting wreaks havoc on the viewer’s reliance on the conscious and the
rational.
The Surrealists were also enamored with sculpture, whose concrete tangibility made their
art all the more disquieting. Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) created Object (Le
Dejeuner en fourrure), translated as “Luncheon in Fur.” This fur-lined tea cup was
inspired by a conversation he had with Picasso. After admiring a bracelet Oppenheim
had made from a piece of brass covered with fur, Picasso noted that anything might be
covered with fur. When her tea became cold, Oppenheim responded to Picasso’s
comment by ordering a little more fur, and the sculpture had its beginning. The work
takes on an anthropomorphic quality, animated by the quirky combination of the fur with
a functional human object. Visitors to the Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1937 selected Object as the quintessential Surrealist symbol.
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a German-Mexican painter, who was married to Mexican
muralist Diego Rivera. She used the details of her life as powerful symbols for the
psychological pain of human existence. Kahlo has often been considered a Surrealist due
to her psychic and autobiographical issues she dealt with in her art, though she distanced
herself from the connection. Kahlo began painting seriously after an accident in her
youth left her with lifelong pain. Her life was a constant battle of survival against illness
and stormy personal relationships. The Two Fridas, is one of few large scale canvas’
Kahlo ever produced, is typical of her self portraits. Kahlo has painted too different sides
of her personality that are linked by the clasped hands and a thin artery that stretches
between her exposed hearts. One end of the artery ends in surgical forceps and the other
end in a portrait of her husband Diego Rivera, as a child.
The painting also has political connotations. Kahlo was committed to her Mexican
heritage and was deeply nationalistic. She joined the Communist party in 1920 and
participated in public political protests. The struggle of Mexico to achieve a national
identity appears in the figures attire. On the right she is dressed in the traditional garb of
the indigenous culture of the Zapotec. The Frida on the left is dressed in a European style
white lace dress, representing imperialist forces. The heart was an important symbol of
the Aztecs, whom the Mexican nationalists idealized as the last independent rulers of an
indigenous political unit. The Two Frida’s represents both Kahlo’s personal struggles
and the struggles of her homeland.
Joan Miro (1893-1983) was a Surrealist Spanish artist who tried to create art without
conscious control and used various types of planned “accidents” to provoke reactions
closely related to subconscious experience. This approach was called automatism.
While Miro resisted association with Surrealism, many considered him the most
Surrealist. His work contained an element of fantasy and hallucination. Surrealist poets
in Paris introduced Miro to the idea of using chance to create art. Painting is an example
of Miro’s painting method. He began the painting by making a scattered collage
composition with assembled fragments cut from a catalog for machinery. The shapes in
the collage become motifs the Miro freely reshaped to create black silhouettes – solid or
in outline, with dramatic accents of white and vermillion. The shapes seem to float in an
immaterial background.
Miro, describing his process said, “Rather than setting out to paint something, I begin
painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush.
The form becomes a sign for a women or a bird as I work… The first stage is free,
unconscious… The second stage is carefully calculated.” Even Miro could not fully
explain his pictures. They are in the truest sense, spontaneous and intuitive expressions
of the little understood, submerged unconscious part of life.
Paul Klee (1879-1940) also pursed the unconscious though he shunned formal
association with Dada and Surrealist artists. Klee sought clues to humanities deeper
nature in primitive shapes and symbols. Like Jung, Klee seems to have accepted the
existence of a collective unconscious that reveals itself in archaic signs and patterns.
He believed that this was evident in the art of so-called “primitive” cultures. Klee
was the son of and himself an accomplished violinist. Klee thought of painting as similar
to music in its expressiveness and in its ability to touch its viewer’s spirit through a
studied use of color, form, and line. Klee said “Art does not reproduce the visible;
rather it makes… The formal elements of graphic arts are dot, line plane, and space
– the last three charged with energy of various kinds… Formally we used to
represent things visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have
liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things… By including
the concepts of good and evil, a moral sphere is created… Art is a simile of
Creation.”
To penetrate the reality behind visible things, Klee studied nature avidly, taking special
interest in analyzing processes of growth and change. He coded these studies in
diagrammatic form in notebooks, and the knowledge he gained in this way became so
much a part of his consciousness that it influenced his “psychic improvisation” he used to
create art. His work was rooted in nature filtered through his mind. Upon starting an
image, he would allow the pencil or brush to lead him until an image emerged, to which
he would then respond to complete the idea.
Twittering Machine is based on the tangible world that is far from illusionistic. The
imagery has been simplified, almost child like, imbuing the work with a poetic lyricism.
The impact of Klee’s work is enhanced by its small size, requiring the viewer to draw
near to decipher the forms and enter Klee’s mysterious dream world. The crank-driven
machine adds a whimsical quality. Perhaps no other artist of the 20th century matched
Klee’s subtlety as he deftly created a world of ambiguity and understatement that draws
each viewer to a unique interpretation of the work.
New Art for a New Society – Utopian Ideals
While many artists wallowed in the pessimism of the times, other artists promoted
utopian ideals, believing staunchly in art’s ability to contribute to improving society and
all humankind. These efforts often surfaced in times of political upheaval, illustrating the
link between political revolution and revolution in art. Among the utopian art
movements of this time period were, Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia, De
Stijl in Holland, and the Bauhaus in Germany.
Suprematism and Constructivism
Although Russia was far from Paris, Russians had a long history of cultural contact and
interaction with the West. Wealthy Russians, such as Ivan Morozov and Sergei
Shchukin, amassed extensive collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist
painting. By the mid-1910s, Shchukin had acquired 37 Matisse paintings and 51 Picasso.
Because of their access to collections such as these, Russian artists were well informed
on 20th century artistic developments. Among the artists who pursued the avant-garde
direction Cubism introduced was the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935).
Malevich developed an abstract style to convey his belief that the supreme reality in
the world is pure feeling, which attaches to no object. Thus his belief called for new,
nonobjective forms in art – shapes not related to objects in the visible world.
Malevich had worked in all the avant-garde styles before deciding none we suited to
express the subject he found most important – “pure feeling.” He christened the new art
approach Suprematism, explaining, “Under Suprematism I understand the
supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual
phenomena of the objective world are in themselves, meaningless; the significant
thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called
forth… The Suprematist does not observe and does not touch he feels.”
The basic form of this new objective art was the square. Combined with its relatives, the
straight line and the rectangle, the square soon filled his paintings. In his work,
Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, the brightly colored shapes float within a
white space and are placed in dynamic relationship to each other. Malevich believed that
all people would understand his work because of the universality of symbols, and the
pure language of shape and color. Having formulated this approach, Malevich welcomed
the Russian Revolution, which broke out in 1917, as a political act that would wipe out
past traditions and begin a new culture. After the Revolution, avant-garde art was
heralded for a short time. Post Revolution leaders decided the new society needed a more
“practical” art that they believe could be more understandable to a wide public. They
promoted a “realistic” illusionistic art. They felt that such art would teach citizens about
their new government. Malevich was horrified. Disappointed and unappreciated by his
own country Malevich eventually gravitated toward mathematical theory, geometry, and
logical fields in his pursuit of pure abstraction.
Naum Gabo (1890-1977) was a Russian born sculptor who believed that art to express
the new reality would spring from sources separate from the everyday world. The new
reality for Gabo was the space-time world described by early 20th century scientists.
Gabo wrote in Realistic Manifesto, “Space and time are the only forms on which life
is built and hence art must be constructed.” Later he explained: “We are realists
bound to earthly matters… The shapes we are creating are not abstract, they are
absolute. They are released from an already existent thing in nature and their
content lies in themselves… It is impossible to comprehend the content of an
absolute shape by reason alone. Are emotions are the real manifestation of this
content.”
Gabo was associated with a group of Russian sculptors known as the Constructivists.
The name Constructivism may have come from the title of some relief sculptures that
were created by Vladimir Tatlin. Gabo called himself a Constructivist because he
constructed his sculptures piece by piece, rather than by more traditional methods,
modeling or carving. This method freed the Constructivists to work with “volume of
mass and volume of space” as “two different materials” for creating compositions
filled with the “kinetic rhythms” humans perceive as “real time.”
To indicate the volumes of mass and space more clearly in his sculpture, Gabo used some
of the new synthetic plastic materials, including celluloid, nylon, and Lucite, to create
constructions whose space seems to flow through as well as around the transparent
materials. In Column, the depth of the sculpture is visible, because the columns circular
mass is opened up so the viewer can experience the volume of space it occupies. Two
transparent planes extend through its diameter crossing at right angles at the center of the
implied cylindrical column shape. The opaque colored planes at the base and the inclined
open ring set up counter rhythms to the crossed upright planes, They establish the sense
of dynamic kinetic movement that Gabo always sought to express an essential part of
reality.
A new art movement emerged following the Russian Revolution whose members devoted
their talents to designing a better environment for humans. This movement was called
Productivism.
Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) was a gifted leader in the movement. He was influenced
by Cubism’s formal analysis, Futurism’s dynamism, and the rhythmic compositions of
traditional Russian icon painting. His abstract relief constructions were built with every
kind of material – to lay the basis for what he called the “culture of materials.”
The Revolution had been a signal to Tatlin and other avant-garde artists in Russia that the
old order was ending. In utopian fashion, they were determined to make play a
significant role in creating a new world, one that would fully use the power of
industrialization to benefit the people. Initially many artists believed that nonobjective
art was ideal for the new society, because it was free from past symbolism. Russian
avant-garde artists worked together designing public festivals and demonstrations, as well
as plays and exhibitions to educate the public about their new government and the
possibilities of the future. The Russian Futurist-Constructivist poet Vladimir
Mayakovsky proclaimed their new goal: “We do not need a dead mausoleum of art
where dead works are worshiped, but a living factory of the human spirit – in
streets, in tramways, in the factories, workshops, and worker’s homes.”
These artists reorganized the art schools to form new educational programs.
Despite this unified effort, a split developed among avant-garde members. On one side
were artists such as Malevich, Gabo, and Kandinsky (who had returned to Russia in
1914), and other artists who believed that art was an expression of humanities spiritual
nature. On the other side where the Productivists, like Tatlin and others who felt that
artists must direct art toward creating useful products for the new society. After the
Revolution, Tatlin abandoned abstract art for functional art by designing such products as
an efficient stove, and functional workers clothing.
Tatlin’s most famous work is his design for Monument to the Third International,
commissioned by the Department of Artistic Work of the People’s Commissariat for
Enlightenment early in 1919 to honor the Russian Revolution. He envisioned a huge
glass and iron building that would have been twice as high as the Empire State Building.
“Tatlin’s Tower” as it became known, was viewed as a model for those committed to
working functioning art. It was to be built in Moscow and serve as a propaganda and
news center for the Soviet people. Within a dynamically tilted cage, three geometrically
shaped chambers would rotate around a central axis at different speeds. The lower
chamber was for lectures and meetings and would revolve once a year. Higher up was a
cone shaped chamber for intended for administration and it would rotate monthly. At the
top was a cubic information center with state of the art communication capabilities,
including message projection on clouds.
Tatlin’s design served as a visual reinforcement of a social and political reality. The
whole complex was designed to be a dynamic communications center for the fast pace of
the new age. The designs reductive quality links it to Suprematist and Constructivist
thinking. The building was never constructed, but existed only in metal and wood
models. The only records of the models are found in a few drawings and photographs.
De Stijl
Utopian ideals were also expressed in Holland. De Stijl was a group of young artists that
formed in 1917. It believed that the end of World War I was the birth of a new age. The
group was co-founded by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Leo Van Doesburg (18831931). They felt this time was a balance between individual and universal values, when
the machine would assure ease of living. They declared, in their first manifesto, “There
is an old and a new consciousness of the age. The old one is directed toward the
individual. The new one is directed toward the universal.”
We must realize that life and art are no longer separate domains. That is why the
“idea” of “art” as an illusion separate from real life must disappear. The word
“Art” no longer means anything to us. In its place we demand the construction of
our environment in accordance with creative laws based on fixed principle. These
laws, following those of economics, mathematics, technique, and sanitation, etc., are
all leading to a new, plastic unity.”
Mondrian felt that his style revealed the underlying eternal structure of existence. This
style was based on a single principle. DeStijl artists reduced their artistic vocabulary to
simple geometric elements. After his initial introduction to abstraction, Mondrian was
attracted to contemporary theological drawings. Mondrian sought to purge his art of
every overt reference to individual objects in the external world. This combination
produced a conception of non-objective design he called “pure plastic art” which he
believed expressed universal reality. “Art is higher than reality and has no direct
relation to reality… To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as
possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual… We find ourselves in
the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have
no value for man.
To express his vision, Mondrian eventually limited his formal vocabulary to the three
primary colors, the three primary values, and the two primary directions (horizontal and
vertical). He concluded that the primary colors and values are the purist colors and
therefore the perfect tools to construct harmonious composition. Composition in Red,
Blue, and Yellow, is one of many paintings Mondrian created locking color planes into a
grid intersecting vertical and horizontal lines. He altered the grid patterns and the size
and placement of the color planes to create an internal cohesion and harmony. Mondrian
worked to maintain a dynamic tension in his paintings from the size and position of lines,
shapes, and colors.
The Bauhaus
The De Stijl group influenced other artists through its simplified geometric style, and its
notion that art and life are one. In Germany, the architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
developed a vision of “total architecture”. This concept influenced generations of
pupils through the school he directed called the Bauhaus. In 1919, Gropius was
appointed director of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. Under Gropius, the school
was renamed Das Staatliche Bauhaus (roughly translated as “State School of
Building”) and was referred to as the Bauhaus.
Gropius’ goal was to train artists, architects, and designers to anticipate 20th century
needs. The extensive curriculum was based on certain principles. The first staunchly
advocated the importance of strong basic design and craftsmanship as fundamental to
good art and architecture. His belief that there was no essential difference between artist
and craftsman, led him to place both a technical instructor and an artist in each
department.
Second, Gropius promoted the unity of art, architecture, and design. To eliminate
traditional boundaries that separated art from architecture, and art from craft, the Bauhaus
offered a wide range of craft type classes in addition to the more standard courses.
Third, Gropius emphasized the need to produce graduates who could design progressive
environments through the knowledge and need of machine age technologies and
materials. This required the artist / craftsman to fully understand industrial and mass
production.
Gropius declared, “Let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which
will emphasize architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will
rise one day toward heaven from the hands of millions of workers like a crystal
symbol of a new faith.” The reference to a unity of workers reveals the undercurrent of
socialism present in Germany at the time.
One Bauhaus teacher who had a lasting legacy on artists was Josef Albers (1888-1976).
He was a German born artist whose greatest contribution to the school was his revision of
the basic design course required of all students. He required a systematic and thorough
investigation of arts formal qualities; what has been termed the elements and principles of
design. Albers investigated arts formal qualities in his own work. In his series, Homage
to the Square, painted after he left the Bauhaus, between 1950 and 1976, encapsulates
the design concepts he developed while at the Bauhaus. The series consists of hundreds
of paintings, most of which were simply color variations on the same composition of
concentric squares. The series reflects Albers belief that art originates in “the
discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect.
Because of their consistency in composition, the works succeed in revealing the
relativity and instability of color perception. Albers varied the hue (color),
saturation (brightness and dullness), and value (lightness or darkness) of each
square in the paintings in the series. As a result, the squares from painting to
painting appear to vary in size (although they remained the same), and the
sensations emanating from the paintings range from clashing dissonance to delicate
serenity. Alber’s demonstration of the reactions of colors to one another “proved that
we see colors almost never unrelated to each other.” Alber’s ideas about design and color
were widely disseminated.
In 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Germany. Gropius designed the building for the
Bauhaus as a sort of architectural manifesto. The building consisted of a workshop and
class areas, a dining room, theatre, gym, a wing with studio apartments, and an enclosed
two story bridge housing administrative offices. Of the major wings, the most dramatic
was the Shop Block. The Nazi’s tore down this building, but the main buildings were
later reconstructed. Three stories tall, the Shop Block housed a printing shop and dye
works facility, in addition to other work areas. The builder’s constructed the skeleton
of reinforced concrete but set these supports way back, sheathing the entire
structure in glass, creating a streamlined and light effect. This designs’ simplicity
followed Gropius’s dictum that architecture should avoid “all romantic
embellishment and whimsy.” Further, he realized the “economy in the use of space”
articulated in his list of principles in his interior layout of the Shop Block, which
consists of large areas of free flowing undivided space. Gropius believed such an
open classroom approach encouraged interaction and the sharing of ideas.
Gropius gave students and teachers the task of designing furniture and light fixtures for
the building in keeping with the comprehensive philosophy of the Bauhaus.
One memorable furniture design to emerge from the Bauhaus was the tubular steel chair
crafted by the Hungarian Marcel Breuer (1902-1981). Breuer was inspired to use
tubular steel while riding his bike and studying his handle bars. In keeping with
Bauhaus aesthetics, his chairs have a simplified, geometric look, and the leather of
cloth supports add to the chairs comfort and functionality. These chairs were also
easily mass produced and thus stand as epitomes of the Bauhaus program.
This reductive, spare geometric aesthetic served many purposes – artistic, practical, and
social. This aesthetic was championed by the Bauhaus and De Stijl. This simplified
artistic vocabulary was accepted because of its association with the avant-garde and
progressive though, and it evoked the machine. It could be easily applied to all art forms,
from stage design, to architecture, and advertising, and therefore was perfect for mass
production.
Fiber Crafts
The universal intelligibility of this aesthetic is seen in a tapestry designed by Gunta
Stolzl (1897-1983), the only women on the staff. While more lively than other Bauhaus
designs, this intricate and colorful work retains the emphasis on geometric patterns and
clear intersection of verticals and horizontals. The weaving department was very popular
at the Bauhaus. In accordance with Bauhaus principles, Stolzl designed weavings for
machine production that established production links with outside businesses.
Less is More
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), took over the Bauhaus in 1928 when Gropius
left, and he moved the school to Berlin. In architecture and furniture, he made such a
clear and elegant statement of the International style, that his work had enormous
influence on modern architecture. Taking as his motto “less is more” and calling his
architecture “skin and bones” he conceived the model for a glass skyscraper building
in 1921 that was shown at the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923. The design received
much publicity. Working with glass provided Mies van der Rohr with new freedom and
expressive possibilities. The bold use of glass sheathing on irregularly shaped towers and
inset supports was, at the time, technically and aesthetically adventurous. The web like
delicacy of lines of the glass, its radiance, and the illusion of movement created by
reflection and by light changes through it, prefigured many of the glass skyscrapers found
in major cities throughout the world.
In 1933, the Nazis took power and closed the Bauhaus school. During its 14 year
existence, the controversial school graduated fewer than 500 students, yet achieved
legendary status and had phenomenal influence in all areas of art and design. Many of
the instructors at the Bauhaus fled Germany and came to the United States greatly
influencing art education and training.
Degenerate Art
The Nazis persecuted avant-garde artists. Hitler had been a young aspiring artist and had
produced works reflecting his view 19th century realistic genre painting was the zenith of
Aryan art development. Hitler, when in power, confiscated more than 16,000 art works
that were considered degenerate and unacceptable. Hitler ordered Goebbels to organize a
massive exhibition of “degenerate art” that was unworthy of Germany. He targeted 20 th
century avant-garde artists to impress upon viewers the general inferiority of the artists
producing this work. The Entartete Kunst or Degenerate Art exhibition opened in
Munich on July 19, 1937, and included more than 650 works by 112 artists. Artists
presented for ridicule, were most of the artists we have seen in this chapter. Despite his
status as a charter member of the Nazi Party, Emil Nolde was singled out for harsh
treatment. More than 27 of his works were in the exhibit and more than 1000 had been
confiscated from museums. The Show was very popular attracting 3 million viewers by
its end.
The International Style
The simple aesthetic developed by Gropius and Mies van der Rohe at the Bauhaus
became known as the International Style (different from the Early Renaissance painting
style), because of its widespread popularity. The purist and staunchest advocate of this
style was the Swiss La Corbusier (1887-1965). He was trained in Paris and Berlin; he
was also a painter but was best known as an influential architect and theorist on modern
architecture. He applied himself to designing a functional living space which he
described as a “machine for living.”
The drawing for his Domino house project shows the skeleton of his ideal dwelling.
Every level can be used. Reinforced concrete slabs serve as both floor and ceiling
supported by steel columns inside the perimeter of the structures interior spaces. The
building is raised above ground on blocks in order to incorporate the space underneath;
the roof is also used. Exterior walls can be suspended from the projecting horizontals.
The walls bear no structural load and the open space is free to be divided where desired.
This drawing illustrates one of the major principles associated with the
International Style - the elimination of weight bearing walls. New structural
systems used materials such as structural steel and reinforced concrete made this
possible.
The scheme allows architects to provide for what Le Corbusier saw as the basic physical
and psychological needs of every human being – sun, space, and vegetation, combined
with controlled temperature, good ventilation, and insulation against harmful and
undesired noise. He believed in basing dwelling designs on human scale, because the
house is humankind’s assertion within nature. This thinking has been strongly influential
in the design of modern office buildings and skyscrapers.
Le Corbusier also used these design principles for single family dwellings. The most
elegant is the Villa Savoye located near Paris. This country house stands out on its site.
A cube of lightly enclosed and deeply penetrated space, the Villa Savoye has only a
partially confined ground floor (containing a three car garage, bedrooms, a bathroom, and
utility rooms). Much of the house’s interior space is open, with thin columns supporting
the main living floor, and the roof garden area. The major living rooms are on the second
floor wrapping around a central open court and lighted by strip windows that run along
the thin exterior walls. From the second floor court, a ramp leads up to a flat roof terrace
and garden protected by a curving windbreak along one side. There is no obvious
designed entrance to the house and no traditional façade. Spaces and masses intermingle
rather than separate. The smooth machine planed surfaces are entirely without
adornment.
Le Corbusier inverted traditional design practice of placing light elements above and
heavy ones below by refusing to enclose the ground story with a masonry wall. This
makes the upper lever appear to hover on slender columns above the ground level. The
exterior originally was a dark green ground floor, cream walls and a rose and blue screen
on the top, reflecting the Purist style of painting of De Stijl.
Art Deco
In theory, new architecture rejected ornament of any kind. Pure form emerged from
functional structure and required no decoration. Yet popular taste still favored
ornamentation, especially in public architecture. A movement in the 1920’s and 1930’s
sought to upgrade industrial design in competition with “fine art.” Proponents
wanted to work new materials into decorative patterns that could be either
machined or handcrafted and that could, to a degree, reflect the simplifying trend in
architecture. A remote descendant of Art Nouveau, this movement became known
as Art Deco. (Like its predecessor, it was an event in the history of industrial
design, not in the history of architecture.) Art Deco had universal applications to
architecture, interiors, furniture, utensils, jewelry, fashions, illustrations, and many
numerous commercial products. Art Deco products have a “streamlined,” elongated
symmetrical aspect; simple flat shapes alternate with shallow volumes in hard
patterns. The concept of streamlining predominated in industrial design circles in the
1930’s and involved the use of organic tapered shapes and forms. Derived from nature,
these simple forms are inherently aerodynamic, making them technologically efficient
and aesthetically pleasing. This streamlined look was integral to Art Deco, which
acquired its name at the famous Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes
(Exposition of Decorative and Modern Industrial Arts), held in Paris in 1925. Art Deco
was a cultural phenomenon and was associated with the flair, flippancy, and elegance of
the Jazz Age, and the gorgeous salons of the great ocean liners that carrying the carefree
rich in the days of the “lost generation.”
Art Deco’s masterpiece is the stainless steel spire of the Chrysler Building in New York
City designed by William van Alen (1882-1954). The building and its spire are
monuments to the fabulous 1920’s when American millionaires and corporations
competed with each other to build the tallest skyscrapers in the biggest cities. The
Chrysler Building serves as a temple of commerce dedicated to the success of American
business, before it’s humbling in the Great Depression.
Emphasizing the Organic
It is impossible for early 20th century artists to ignore the increasingly intrusive expansion
of mechanization and growth of technology. However not all artists embraced these
developments, as had the Futurists. In contrast, many artists attempted to overcome the
predominance of mechanization in society by immersing themselves in the search for the
organic and natural.
Natural Architecture
One of the giants and personalities in the development of early 20th century architecture
was Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). He was born in Wisconsin and attended the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he took some classes before moving to
Chicago, where he joined the firm headed by Louis Sullivan. Wright set out to create
“architecture of democracy.” Early influences where the shapes in a set of wooden
building educational blocks that Wright had as a child, the organic unity of a Japanese
building he saw at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a Jeffersonian
belief in individualism and populism. Always a believer in architecture as “organic” or
“natural,” Wright saw it as serving free individuals who have a right to move around in a
free space, envisioned as a nonsymmetrical design interacting spatially with its natural
surroundings. He sought to develop an organic unity of planning, structure, materials,
and site.
Wright fully expressed these elements and concepts in the Robie House, built in Chicago
between 1907 and 1909. It was called a prairie house because its long sweeping lines
captured the expansiveness of the Midwest’s great flatlands. Abandoning all symmetry,
Wright eliminated a façade, extended the roofs far beyond the walls, and all but
concealed the entrance. He filled the “wandering” plan of the Robie House with
intricately joined spaces (some large and open, and others closed), grouped freely around
a great central fireplace. Wright designed enclosed patios, overhanging roofs, and strip
windows to provide unexpected light and glimpses of the outdoors as viewers move
through the interior space. These elements with the open ground plan create a sense of
space in motion, inside and out. The flow of the interior space matched the exterior
treatment and determined the sharp angular placement of exterior walls. The Robie
House required Wright to constrain the building to the size of the city lot.
The Kaufmann House nicknamed Fallingwater was designed as a weekend retreat at
Bear Run near Pittsburg was not so constrained. Perched on a rocky hillside over a small
waterfall, the blocky masses extend in all four directions. The contrast of textures
enlivens the shapes as does the use of full length strip windows to create a stunning
interweaving of interior and exterior space.
The implied message of Wrights architecture is space, not mass – a space designed to fit
the patron’s life and enclosed and divided as needed. Wright often designed all the
furniture, lighting and other accessories for his houses. Patrons often had to sign in their
contracts that everything would stay as designed. In the 1930’s Wright was able to
pursue another passion of his and design affordable housing for less prosperous clients,
by adapting prairie style ideas into smaller dwellings, less expensive dwellings. These
homes became known as Usonian Houses and were used as templates for suburban
housing developments in the post-World War II housing boom.
Wrights work influenced architects world wide, especially in Holland and Germany. His
ideas about open plans were of revolutionary significance 40 years before his career
ended.
Organic Sculpture
Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), was one of many sculptors seeking to produce works
that emphasized the organic. Often composed of softly curving surfaces and ovoid
forms, his sculptures refer directly or indirectly to the cycle of life. Brancusi sought to
move beyond surface appearances to capture the spirit or essence of the object depicted.
He claimed “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. Bird in Space was clearly not a literal depiction of a bird but is the final
result of a long process. Brancusi started with the image of a bird at rest with its wings
folded at its sides and ended with an abstract columnar form sharply tapered at each end.
Despite the abstraction, the sculpture retains the suggestion of a bird about to soar into
flight. Brancusi also captured the essence of flight. The highly reflective surface does
not allow the viewer’s eye to linger on the sculpture itself, but rather invites the eye to
follow the gleaming reflection on the gentle curve of the surface right off the tip.
Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) developed her own essence of form, combining pristine
shape with a sense of organic vitality. She sought a sculptural idiom that would express
her sense both of nature and landscape and of the person who is in and observes nature.
She explained: The forms which have had special meaning for me since childhood
have been the standing form (which is the translation for me towards the human
being standing in landscape); the two forms (which is the tender relationship of one
living thing besides another); and the closed form, such as the oval, spherical, or
pierced form (sometimes incorporating color) which translates for me the
association and meaning of gesture in the landscape… In all these shapes the
translation of what one feels about man and nature must be conveyed by the
sculptor in terms of mass, inner tension, and rhythm, scale in relation to our human
size, and the quality of surface which speaks through our hands and eyes.
In 1929, Hepworth arrived at a breakthrough that evolved into an enduring and
commanding element in her work from that point on, and that represents her major
contribution to the history of sculpture: the use of the hole or void. Hepworth
introduced the hole or negative space in here sculpture as an abstract element- it doesn’t
represent anything specific – and one that is as integral and important to the sculpture as
its mass. Oval Sculpture is a plaster cast of an earlier wooden sculpture carved in 1943.
Pierced in four places, Oval Sculpture is as much defined by the smooth, curving holes as
by the volume of white plaster. Like all of Hepworth’s mature works, the forms are basic
and universal, expressing a sense of eternity’s timelessness.
Henry Moore (1898-1986) was an English sculptor shared Hepworth’s interest in the
void and Brancusi’s love of nature and knowledge of organic forms. Moore maintained
that every “material had its own individual qualities” and that these qualities could
play a role in the creative process: “It is only when the sculptor works direct, when
there is an active relationship with his material, that the material can take its part in
shaping of an idea.” Accordingly, the forms and lines of Moore’s lead and stone
sculptures emphasize the material’s hardness and solidity, whereas his fluid wood
sculptures draw attention to the wood grain. One major recurring theme in Moore’s
work is the reclining female figure with simplified and massive forms. A tiny
photograph of a Chac Mool pre-Columbian figure from Mexico originally inspired this
motif. Chac Mool figures were usually carved in stone, in semi-circular positions, with
their heads abruptly turned to one side.
Although viewers recognize the human figure in most of Moore’s works, the artist
simplified and abstracted the figure, attempting to express a universal truth beyond the
physical world. He wrote in the 1930s “Because a work does not aim at reproducing
natural appearances, it is not, therefore, an escape from life – but may be a
penetration into reality… My sculpture is becoming less representational, less an
outward visual copy… but only because I believe that in this way I can present the
human psychological content of my work with greatest directness and intensity.”
Reclining Figure, made of elm wood, suggests Surrealist biomorphic forms. But
Moore’s handling of the material presents a recumbent woman whose forms and hollows
suggest nurturing human energy. The form also evokes the contours of the Yorkshire
hills where he was raised. Moore heightened the allusions to landscape and Surrealist
organic forms in his work by underplaying mass and void, based on the qualities of
cavities in nature. This work combines the organic vocabulary central to Moore’s
philosophy – bone shapes, eroded rocks, and geologic formations – to communicate the
human forms fluidity, dynamism and evocative nature.
Alexander Calder (1898-1976), used his thorough knowledge of engineering techniques
to combine nonobjective organic forms and motion to create a new kind of sculpture that
expressed realities innate dynamism.
As a young artist in Paris in the early 1930’s, Calder visited Mondrian’s studio and was
filled with the desire to set the brightly colored rectangular shapes of the Dutch painter’s
compositions in motion. (Marcel Duchamp, intrigued by Calder’s early motorized and
hand cranked examples of moving abstract pieces, named them mobiles.) Calder’s
engineering skills soon helped him fashion a series of balanced structures hanging from
rods, wires, and colored, organically shaped plates, such as his work Untitled, designed
for the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Each non mechanized mobile was
carefully planned so that any air current would set the parts moving. When air currents
activate the sculpture, its patterns suggest clouds, leaves, or waves blown by the wind.
Calder’s forms can be read as either geometric or organic. Geometrically, the lines
suggest circuitry and rigging, and the shapes are derived from circles and ovoid forms.
Organically, the lines suggest nerve axons, and the shapes are reminiscent of cells,
leaves, fins, wings, and other bioforms.
Art as Political Statement in the 1930’s
With the great upheaval the western world experienced during the first half of the 20 th
century compelled many artists to speak out and use their art to make political statements.
Social Realism
In the United States such artists compelled to make political statements with their art
were called the Social Realists. These artists felt the need to focus on the lives of
ordinary people and the injustices often done to them by the structure of an
impersonal society. They were often politically socialist.
Ben Shahn (1898-1969) completed a series of 23 paintings inspired by the trial and
execution of two Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Accused of
killing two men in a hold up in 1920 in South Braintree, Massachusetts, they were
convicted in a trial that many people thought resulted in a grave miscarriage of justice.
Shahn was powerfully affected by the event feeling as if he was “living through another
crucifixion.” Shahn based the series on newspaper photographs of the events. He
devised a style that adapted his knowledge of Synthetic Cubism and his training in
commercial art to an emotionally expressive use of flat, intense color in figural
compositions filled with sharp dry angular forms. The major work of the series was The
Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. The tall narrow painting condenses the narrative I terms
of both time and space. The two executed men lie at the bottom of the composition in
coffins. Presiding over them are three members of the commission chaired by Harvard
University president A. Laurence Lowell, who declared the original trial fair and cleared
the way for the executions to take place. A framed portrait of Judge Webster Thayer,
who handed down the initial sentence, hangs on the wall of a simplified government
building. The stylized distortion of the figures mocks the men in their roles in this event,
and makes it one of Shahn’s most powerful works.
While Picasso focused on his immersion in aesthetic issues, he also maintained a political
commitment throughout his life. He declared: “Painting is not made to decorate
apartments. It is an instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy.”
Picasso was a Spaniard. In January 1937, the Spanish Republican government in exile in
Paris asked Picasso to produce a work for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International
Exhibition that summer. Like the Mexican muralists, artists interested in disseminating
political and social messages with their art realized the importance of placing work in
public arenas. Aware of the opportunity this commission afforded, he accepted it. He
was not very motivated to work on the project until he received word that Guernica,
capital of the Basque area, (an area in Southern France and Northern Spain populated by
Basque speakers), had been almost totally destroyed in an air raid on April 26 by Nazi
bombers acting on behalf of the rebel general Francisco Franco. Not only did the
Germans decimate the city, they attacked at the busiest hour of the market day, killing or
wounding many of the 7000 citizens. This event propelled Picasso into action,
completing the mural sized canvas by the end of June.
Picasso produced this monumental painting condemning the senseless bombing without
specific reference to the event – no bombs, no planes. The collection of images in
Guernica combines to create a visceral outcry of human grief. In the center, along the
lower edge of the painting, lies a slain warrior clutching a broken and useless sword. A
gored horse tramples him and rears back in fright as it dies. On the left a shrieking,
anguished women cradles her dead child. On the far right, a woman on fire runs
screaming from a burning building, while another woman flees mindlessly. In the upper
right corner, a woman, represented only by a head, emerges from the burning building,
thrusting forth a light to illuminate the horror. Overlooking the destruction is a bull,
which according to Picasso, represents “brutality and darkness.”
Picasso’s fragmentation gives visual form to the horror. The distortion and contortion of
human form parallels what happened in the event. To emphasize the scenes severity and
starkness he used a neutral palette.
Picasso refused to allow Guernica to be exhibited in Spain while Franco was the leader,
so it hung in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York after the exhibition
ended. Not until Franco’s death in 1975 did Picasso allow it to be exhibited in Spain. It
was moved in 1981 and now hangs in Madrid.
The Worker and the Collective Farm Worker by Russian artist Vera Mukhina (18891963), was produced in the same year as Guernica and exhibited at the Paris Exhibition.
Mukhina produced a monumental stainless steel sculpture glorifying the communal labor
of the Soviet people. Mukhina relied on realism to represent exemplars of the Soviet
citizenry. Her sculpture mounted upon the top of the Soviet Pavilion depicts a male
factory worker, holding high his tool of his trade, the hammer. Alongside is a female
farm worker, raising her sickle to the sky. The hammer and sickle comes together in an
apex above the figures. The figures replicate their appearance on the Soviet flag thereby
celebrating the Soviet system. The heroic tenor of this sculpture is emphasized by the
solidity of the figures who stride forward with their clothes dramatically blowing behind
them. This realist style was officially sanctioned by the Soviet government and Mukhina
earned a high degree of praise for this sculpture. Russian Citizens hailed the work as a
national symbol for decades.
The Depression and Its Legacy
The Western world was plunged into depression in the 1930’s. In the United States it
started with the stock market crash of October 1929. The Great Depression, as it was
called, dramatically changed the nation. Artists were particularly affected. The limited
art market virtually disappeared, and museums curtailed their purchases and exhibition
schedules. Many artists sough financial support from the Federal government, which
established numerous programs to provide relief, aid recovery, and promote reform.
Among the programs that supported artists were the Treasury Relief Art Project,
founded in 1934 to commission art for federal buildings, and the Works Projects
Administration (WPA), founded in 1935 to relieve widespread unemployment. Under
the WPA, varied art activities of the Federal Art Project paid artists, writers, and theater
people a regular wage in exchange for work in their professions. Another important
program was the Resettlement Administration (RA), better known by its later name, the
Farm Security Administration. The RA oversaw emergency aid programs for farm
families caught in the Depression and provided information to the public about both the
government programs and the plight of the people such programs served.
The RA hired American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), in 1936 sending
her to photograph the dire situation of the rural poor the Great Depression displaced. At
the end of an assignment to document the lives of migratory pea pickers in California,
Lange stopped at a camp in Nipomo and found migrant workers and their families
starving because the crops had frozen in the fields. Among the pictures she made on this
occasion was Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley, which, like American Gothic, has
achieved iconic status. Generations have been moved by the mixture of strength and
worry in the raised hand and careworn face of a young mother holding her baby on her
lap. Two older children cling to her while turning their faces away from the camera. The
response to the publication of this photo in a San Francisco newspaper was powerful.
Within days people rushed food to Nipomo Valley to feed the hungry workers.
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) produced paintings that seemed to reflect the mood of the
Great Depression. Rather than depict historically specific scenes, he created more
generalized theme of overwhelming loneliness and echoing the isolation of modern life in
the United States. Hopper concentrated on scenes of contemporary American life that are
curiously muted, still, and filled with empty spaces. Motion is stopped and time
suspended. Nighthawks depict the darkened streets outside a restaurant. The viewer
glimpses the lighted interior through huge plate glass windows, which lend the inner
space a paradoxical sense of being both a safe refuge and a vulnerable place for the three
customers and the counterman. The seeming indifference of Hopper’s characters toward
one another and the empty spaces around them evoke the pervasive loneliness of modern
humans. Though recalling the realist vision of 19th century artists like Ekins, Hopper
moves toward abstraction in his simplified shapes in order to heighten the mood of the
scene.
Regionalism
Although many American artists were enamored with the city or rapidly developing
technological advances, others chose not to depict these aspects of modern life. The
Regionalists, sometimes referred to as American Scene Painters, turned their attention
to rural life as America’s cultural backbone. One of the Regionalists, Grant Wood
(1891-1942), published an essay titled “Revolt against the City” in 1935. Although the
Regionalists were not formally organized, they were acknowledged by Wood in 1931
when he spoke at a conference. In his address, he announced a new movement
developing in the Midwest, known as Regionalism, which he described as focused on
American subjects and as standing in reaction to “the abstraction of the
modernists” in Europe and New York.
Grant Wood’s paintings focus on rural scenes from Iowa, where he was born and raised.
The work that brought Wood to national prominence was American Gothic, which
became an American icon. The artist depicted a farmer and his spinster daughter
standing in front of a neat house with a small lancet window typically found in Gothic
cathedrals and popular in Midwest home construction. They man and women wear
traditional attire. The dour expression on both gives the painting a severe quality which
Wood enhanced with his meticulous brushwork. When American Gothic was exhibited,
many praised the work, which they perceived as “quaint, humorous, and AMERICAN, in
the words of one critic. Many saw the couple as embodying “strength, dignity, fortitude,
resoluteness, integrity,” and were convinced that Wood had captured the true spirit of
America.
Wood’s Regionalist vision involved more than his subjects, extending to a rejection
of avant-garde styles in favor of a clearly readable, realist style. This style appealed
to many who felt alienated by the increasing presence of abstraction in art. Despite
the accolades this painting received, it was also criticized. Not everyone saw this
painting as a sympathetic portrayal of Midwestern life; some felt in Iowa that it was an
insult. Some viewed it as a political statement – one of staunch nationalism, that some
viewed as problematic because of the results of nationalism in Germany.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was also one of the giants of Regionalism. Benton
focused on the Midwest and Missouri in particular. His father was a US congressman
from Southwestern Missouri, and his great uncle was the famous Missouri Senator
Thomas Hart Benton, for whom he was named. He traveled around the country meeting
and drawing people. These studies were what he made many of his works from. He also
made numerous murals, often reflection historical content. One of his major works is
titled A Social History of State of Missouri painted in 1936. It was painted on all four
walls of the room where the state politicians would meet and work out their deals in the
Missouri State Capital in Jefferson City, Missouri. The mural consists of many images
from Missouri’s true and legendary history, such as, primitive agriculture, horse trading,
a vigilante lynching, and an old fashioned political painting. Other scenes portray the
mining industry, grain elevators, Native Americans, and family life. One segment,
Pioneer Days and Early Settlers, shows a white man using whiskey as a bartering tool
with a Native American. To its right is a scene showing Huck Finn and Jim, characters
from Mark Twain’s famous novel Huckleberry Finn. Further to the right are scenes
documenting the building of Missouri. Part documentary and part imaginative, Benton’s
images include both positive and negative aspects of Missouri’s history. Regionalists
were popularly perceived as dedicated to glorifying Midwestern life but that
understanding distorted their aims. Grant Wood observed, “Your true regionalist is not
a mere eulogist; he may even be a severe critic.” Benton was committed to a visually
accessible style but developed a highly personable aesthetic that included complex
compositions, a fluidity of imagery, and simplified figures depicted with a rubbery
distortion.
John Steuart Curry (1897-1946)
During the Depression of the 1930’s, Regionalist paintings had a popular appeal because
they often projected a reassuring image of America’s heartland. The public saw
Regionalism as a means of coping with the national crisis through a search for cultural
roots. Thus people accepted any implicit nostalgia in Regionalist paintings or
mythologies that the works perpetrated because they served a larger purpose.
Mexican Muralists
Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) was one of a group of Mexican artists determined to
base their art on the indigenous history and culture existing in Mexico before Europeans
arrived. The movement these artists formed was part of the idealistic rethinking of
society that occurred in conjunction with the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and the
lingering political turmoil of the 1920’s. Among the projects these politically motivated
artists undertook were vast mural cycles placed in public buildings to dramatize and
validate the history of Mexico’s native peoples. Orozco worked on one of the first major
cycles painted in 1922. He carried the ideas of this mural revolution to the United States,
completing many commissions for wall paintings between 1927 and 1934. One of his
finest cycles was in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The
college let him choose his subject. Orozco created murals that were a panoramic and
symbolic history of ancient and modern Mexico, from the pre-Columbian ancients to a
bitter satirical critic of modern education, in 14 large panels and 10 smaller ones.
Epic of American Civilization: Hispano-America revolves around the monumental
figure of a heroic Mexican peasant armed to participate in the Mexican Revolution.
Looming on either side are mounds crammed with symbolic figures of his oppressors –
bankers, government soldiers, officials, gangsters, and the rich. Money grubbers pour
hoards of gold at the incorruptible peasant’s feet, while cannons threaten him and a
bemedaled general raises a dagger to stab him in the back.
Orozco’s early training as a maker of political prints and as a newspaper artist had taught
him the rhetorical strength of graphic brevity, which he used here to assure that his
allegory was easily read.
Diego Rivera (1886-1957) achieved great renown for his murals, both in Mexico and the
United States. A staunch Marxist, Rivera was committed to developing an art that served
his people’s needs. Toward that end, he sought to create a national Mexican style
focusing on Mexico’s history and also incorporating a popular generally accessible
aesthetic (in keeping with the Socialist spirit of the Mexican Revolution). Rivera
produced numerous large murals in public buildings, among them a series lining the
staircase of the National Palace in Mexico City. Painted between 1929 and 1935, the
images depict scenes in Mexico City. Ancient Mexico depicts conflicts between the
indigenous people and the Spanish colonizers. Rivera included portraits of important
figures in Mexican history and in particular, the struggle for Mexican independence.
Although complex, decorative, and animated murals retain the legibility of folklore – the
figures consist of simple monumental shapes and areas of bold color.
David Siqueiros
Energizing American Art at Mid – Century
The Armory Show in 1913 in New York City was important for disseminating
information about the developments in European art. Equally significant was the
emigration of European artists from the continent to the United States. Many artists
originally went to London and Paris, but World War forced them to the United States.
Artists and architects from the Bauhaus and other places came here and accepted teaching
positions, providing a way for them to disseminate their ideas.
Museums in the United States were eager to demonstrate their familiarity and connection
with the most progressive movements in European art and mounted exhibitions. One
show in 1938 was at the St. Louis Art Museum and it presented an exhibition of Max
Beckmann’s work. This interest in persecuted artists driven from their homelands also
had political overtones. With the highly charged atmosphere leading up to World War II,
people often perceived support for these German artists and their work as support for
freedom and democracy. When the United States entered the war, German officially
became the enemy, and it was difficult for the art world to promote them. After the war
many of the artists returned to Europe. Their collective presence, while in the United
States, was critical to the development of American art and the Avant-garde in America.
In addition, this vitality in the first half of the 20th century propelled the United States
into an increasingly prominent position in the art world (including the sale, exhibition,
and criticism of art.