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THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERNIST ART
THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY
TEXT PAGES 960–1029
1. A number of scientists, psychlogists, writers and politicians were instrumental in
changing our view of the world from the Enlightenment belief in a mechanistic
universe o the belief that reason and knowledge would lead to progress and the
moral impovement of humanity. Match the individual on the left with the brief
description of their work on the right.
__2___ Max Planck
1. Wrote Interpretation of Dreams
__3___ Charles Darwin
2. Developed Quantum theory
__6___ Albert Einstein
3.Theory that survival of the fittest was basis of
evolution
__1___ Sigmund Freud
4. Advocated collective unconscious
__4___ Carl Jung
5. Lead Bolshevik revolution
__5___ V. I. Lenin
6. Described matter as another form of energy
__8___ Karl Marx
7. Philosopher who held that god is dead
__7___ Friedrich Nietzsche 8. Champion of working classes, wrote Das Capital
2. How have the discoveries of modern science affected our view of reality?
The major scientists shattered the existing faith in the objective reality of matter, and
in so doing, paved the way for a new model of the universe.
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3. Give the approximate dates for the folowing significant twentieth-century events
that influenced art as well as the rest of society:
World War I:
1914–1918
Russian Revolution:
1917
The Great Depression: 1930s
World War II: 1939–1945
4. List two general directions taken by avant guarde artists in response to the turmoil:
a. They criticized political and social institutions.
b.Others withdrew from society and concentrated their attention on art as a unique
activity, separate from society at large.
EXPRESSIONISM IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
1. What is meant by the term “Expressionism”?
Art that is the result of the artist’s unique inner or personal vision and often has an
emotional dimension.
2. List three movements classified as expressionist:
a. Fauvism
b. German Expressionism/Die Brücke
c. German Expressionism/Der Blaue Reiter
3. In what year was the exhibition held in which the name "Fauve" was coined?
1905
What did it mean?
“Wild beasts,” referring to the shockingly bright colors.
4. Name two Fauve painters.
a.Henri Matisse
b. André Derain
Describe the characteristics that Fauve paintings have in common.
Color was liberated from its descriptive function and used for both expressive
and structural ends. Color was most responsible for pictorial coherence and the
primary conveyor of meaning. They combined outward expressionism, in the
form of a bold release of internal feelings through wild color and powerful, even
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brutal, brushwork, and inward expressionism, awakening the viewer’s emotions
by these devices.
5. Name two artists who belonged to Die Brücke (The Bridge).
a.Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
b. Emil Nolde
Why did they select the name Die Brücke? What did it signify?
Die Brücke signifies from the concept of the artists paving the way for a more
perfect age by bridging the old and the new. It means “The Bridge.”
Name three sources for their art.
a. German medieval art
b. architecture
c. graphic arts
6. What beliefs were shared by members of the Blue Rider (Der Blau Reiter)
group?
Der Blaue Reiter means “The Blue Rider”; the founders shared an interest in blue
and horses.
Name two artists who belonged to this group.
a.Vassily Kandinsky
b. Franz Marc
7. Who was Gertrude Stein and what was her significance for the avant-garde of Paris?
Gertrude Stein was a writer, specializing in experimental writing, who lived in
Paris with her brother Leo. They hosted avant-garde salons with international
guests. She was an art patron of Picasso, Gauguin, Cézanne, Renoir, and Braque.
She and Leo were collectors and facilitators of interaction among the avant-garde.
Who painted a famous portrait of her?
Picasso.
8. Identify three probable sources of the dislocation of form seen in Picasso's
Demoiselles d'Avignon (FIG. 33-9).
a. Cézanne’s treatment of form and space.
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b. Ancient Iberian sculptures.
c. African sculpture.
9. Name two Cubist painters.
a. Georges Braque
b. Robert Delaunay
10. What idea did the Cubists adopt from Cézanne?
The analysis of form.
11. What is the basis of Cubist pictorial space, and how does it differ from
Renaissance perspective?
They dissected life’s continuous optical spread into its many constituent features,
which they then recomposed, by a new logic of design into a coherent artistic
object. They rejected naturalistic depictions.
12. What is Orphism and who was its founder?
Orphism was named after Orpheus, Greek god with magical powers of musicmaking, by Guillaume Apollinaire who believed art, like music, was divorced from
representation of the visible world. Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Delaunay
founded Orphism.
13. How does Synthetic Cubism differ from Analytic Cubism?
Synthetic Cubism no longer relied on a decipherable relation to the visible world.
Artists constructed paintings and drawings from objects and shapes cut from paper
or other materials to represent a subject.
14. What is a collage?
Collage comes from the French word coller, “to stick.” A collage is a composition of
bits of objects, such as newspaper or cloth, glued to a surface.
15. Name three sculptors whose abstracted froms derive from the experiments of the
Cubists:
a. Jacques Lipchitz
b. Aleksandr Archipenko
c. Julio González.
16. What new material and technique did Julio Gonzalez contribute to modern
sculpture?
Welded iron and bronze.
17. How did Fernand Léger modify Cubist practices?
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Purism, founded by Le Corbusier, opposed Synthetic Cubism on the grounds that it
was out of touch with the machine age. Léger compromised Cubist analysis of form
with the Purist’s broad simplification and machinelike finish of the design
components.
18. What were the Futurists trying to express in their art?
The Futurists were concerned with a well-defined sociopolitical agenda, advocating
revolution, both in society and in art. They aimed to usher in a new, more
enlightened era.
19. Name two Futurist painters:
a. Giacomo Balla
b. Gino Severini
Name one Futurist sculptor: Umberto Boccioni
CHALLENGING ARTISTIC CONVENTIONS
1. How did the attitude of the Dadaists toward war differ from that of the Futurists:
The Dadaists were revolted at the butchery of the World War. They 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. The Futurists believed war had a cleansing action. They
depicted war in a sanitized way.
2. What was the original purpose of the Dada movement?
It initially formed as a reaction to the horror and disgust about the war.
Although short-lived, Dadaism had important consequences for later art. What were
they?
They unlocked new avenues for creative invention, thereby fostering a more
serious examination of the basic premises of art than had prior movements.
3. Name four artists connected with the Dada movement.
a. Jean (Hans) Arp
c. Hannah Höch
b. Marcel Duchamp
d. Kurt Schwitters
4. How did Jean Arp utilize chance in his work?
For one collage, he took sheets of paper, tore them into roughly shaped squares,
haphazardly dropped them onto a sheet of paper on the floor, and glued them
down. Chance helped Arp preserve a certain mysterious vitality in his work.
5. What is a readymade?
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Mass-produced common objects (found objects) the artist selects and sometimes
“rectifies” by modifying their substance or combining them with another object.
Who developed them?
Marcel Duchamp.
6. Describe a "photomontage''
Many images pasted together into one image, a technique used in early German art
postcards.
Who developed the technique?
The Berlin Dadaists, particularly Hannah Höch.
7. What did Schwitters mean by the term merz?
He used the term as a generic title for a whole series of collaged images; it derives
from the word “kommerzbank” (commerce bank), which appeared in one of his
collages.
TRANSATLANTIC ARTISTIC DIALOGUES
1. Who were the Eight and what type of painting did they do?
Eight American artists who gravitated into the circle of the influential and
evangelical artist and teacher Robert Henri. They eventually became the Ashcan
School. They produced images depicting the rapidly changing urban landscape of
New York City.
2. Where and when was the Armory show held and what was its significance?
Early 1913, in the armory of the New York National Guard’s 69th Regiment. It was
one of the major vehicles for disseminating information about European artistic
developments in the United States. The show contained more than sixteen hundred
works by American and European artists.
3. Name an influenctial work that was exhibited at the Armory show which
particularly shocked the public: Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp.
What was so upsetting about it?
Critics in general found the show to be “pathological,” and one critic described the
Futurist-Cubist style painting as “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
4. Who was the founder of the Photo-Secession group and Gallery 291? Alfred Steiglitz.
What type of photography did he practice?“Straight, unmanipulated”
photographs.
5. The American photographer who was interested in photographic abstraction was:
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Edward Weston.
6. In what way did the work of Man Ray express the ideas of Dada?
He incorporated found objects into many of his works. He used chance and the
dislocation of ordinary things to surprise viewers, as well as humor.
7. Name two American artists who were influenced by Cubism:
a. Marsden Hartley
b.
Stuart Davis
8. What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The flowering of art and literature in Harlem in the 1920s. It was a manifestation of
the desire of African Americans to promote their cultural accomplishments, to
cultivate pride among their fellow African Americans, and to spread racial
tolerance across the United States.
9. List two traits shared by the so-called Precisionists, one thematic, one stylistic:
a. Thematic: a fascination with the machine’s precision and importance in modern
life.
b. Stylistic: Tended towards Synthetic Cubism’s flat, sharply delineated planes.
Name two artists who are considered Precisonists:
a. Charles Demuth
b. Georgia O’Keeffe
10. Although the artist Georgia O’Keeffe was first associated with the Precisionists in
New York, she is best known for her work in New Mexico.
Two of her favorite subjects were cow skulls and flowers.
Describe her style:
She strips the subjects to their purest forms and colors to heighten their expressive
power, reducing details to a symphony of basic colors, shapes, textures, and vital
rhythms, almost to the point of complete abstraction.
EUROPEAN ART IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR I
1. What was the purpose of Neue Sachlichkeit artists?
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All of the artists served at some point in the German army and thus had firsthand
involvement with the military, which deeply informed their worldview and their
art.
List three artists associated with the movement:
a.George Grosz
b. Max Beckmann
c. Otto Dix
2. For what type of subject is George Grosz most famous?
Caustic indictments of the military.
3. List three adjectives that describe the style of Max Beckmann:
a. Violent
b.
Angular
c. Rough paint surface
4. What mood did Otto Dix create in his War Triptych (FIG. 33-40)?
Devastating and horrific.
What stylistic characteristics help to create the mood?
Eerie lighting, dark colors, and direct portrayal of violence.
5. In what medium did Käthe Kollwitz do most of her work?
Printmaking, including woodcut, lithography, and etching.
What social class did she most often depict?
The poor.
6. List two German Expressionist sculptors.
a. Wilhelm Lehmbruck
b.
Ernst Barlach
7. According to Andre Breton, what was the purpose of the Surrealist movement?
“The future resolution of the states of dream and reality, in appearance so
contradictory, in a sort of absolute reality, or surreality.”
8. Who was the major practitioner of the style known as pittura metafisica?
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Giorgio de Chirico.
Describe the mood created with works like the one shown in FIG. 33-44:
Clear and simple, but sinister, strange, and ominous. Incongruous elements
punctuate the scene’s solitude.
9. Name three painters connected with the Surrealist movement, and note what makes
their work distinct.
a. Max Ernst
He began as an Expressionist, but after serving in the War became a Surrealist.
He used found objects and the element of chance in his work; he used a
technique called frottage, by combining the patterns achieved by rubbing a
crayon or another medium across a sheet of paper placed over a surface with a
strong textural pattern; and he also made collages.
b. Salvador Dalí
He explored his psyche and dreams in his work, including a deeply erotic
dimension, and painted in a precisionist manner, making the world of his
paintings as convincingly real as the most naturalistically rendered landscape
based from nature.
c. René Magritte
His works achieve their power by subverting the viewer’s expectations based on
logic and common sense, the conscious and the rational.
10. What materials did Oppenheim combine in Object represented on FIG. 33-48?
Fur and a teacup and saucer.
11. What type of subject matter did Frida Kahlo prefer?
The details of her life as symbols for the psychological pain of human existence.
12. List two techniques used by Surrealist artists to free their creative processes.
a. Dalí used his paranoiac-critical approach to encourage the free play of
association as he worked.
b. Automatism: the creation of art without conscious control and various types of
planned “accidents” to provoke reactions closely related to subconscious
experience.
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13. Many artists share the surrealist interest in fanasy, even though they were not
formally associated with the group. However, Andre referred to one of them as
“the most Surrealist of us all.” To whom did he refer? Joan Miró.
14. Who said "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible?" Paul Klee.
What did this artist mean by that statement?
Klee thought of painting as similar to music in expressiveness and in its ability to
touch its viewer’s spirit through a studied use of color, form, and line, the formal
elements of painting.
15. List three styles that Marc Chagall synthesized in his work.
a. expressionism
b. Cubism
c. Fauvism
What type of subject matter did he draw upon?
Themes from his childhood and memories from his homeland.
NEW ART FOR A NEW SOCIETY – UTOPIAN IDEALS
1. What did Malevich believe to be the supreme reality?
Pure feeling, which attaches to no object.
What type of forms did he use to express that reality?
Abstract, nonobjective forms—shapes not related to objects in the visible world.
2. An outstanding representative of the Constructivist movement was:
Naum Gabo.
Why did he call himself a "Constructivist"?
Because he built up his sculptures piece by piece in space, instead of carving or
modeling them in the traditional way.
3. List three new materials used by Naum Gabo.
a. Celluloid
b. Nylon
c. Lucite
4. What did Vladimir Tatlin believe was the purpose of art?
To design a better environment for human beings and to create useful new
products for society.
5. What basic colors and forms characterize Mondrian's mature work?
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Red, blue, yellow, black, white, and gray; two primary directions (horizontal and
vertical), in the form of rectangles and straight lines.
What did they symbolize for him?
Universal beauty and expression. He considered primary colors to be the purest
colors and therefore the perfect tools to help an artist construct a harmonious
composition.
6. Who designed the Schröder House (FIG. 33-56)?
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld.
What style does it reflect?
De Stijl.
7. What was the Bauhaus?
A German school of architecture and design, formerly named the Weimar School of
Arts and Crafts, and later called the Staatliche Bauhaus (State School of Building).
Who founded it?
Walter Gropius.
Name three artists who taught there.
a. Vassily Kandinsky
b.
Paul Klee
c.
László Moholy-Nagy
8. What did Moholy-Nagy mean by "vision in motion"?
He believed society was heading toward a kinetic, time-spatial existence, with
relativity of motion and its measurement: in short, the character of the modern age.
9. Who created a series called Homage to the Square, and what issues did the series
explore?
Josef Albers. The series explored the relativity of the perception of colors.
10. Summarize Gropius’ design principles that were incorporated into the Bauhaus?
a. A decidedly positive attitude to the living environment of vehicles and machines.
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b. The organic shaping of things in accordance with their own current laws,
avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy.
c. Restriction of basic forms and colors to what is typical and universally intelligible.
d. Simplicity in complexity, economy in the use of space, materials, time, and
money.
10. Name a designer and a craftsman who taught at the Bauhaus noting the type of
work done by each:
a. Marcel Breuer: furniture.
b. Gunta Stölzl: weaving.
11. List three characteristics of Mies van der Rohe's architectural style that are found in
International Style architecture.
a. The weblike delicacy of the lines.
b. Radiance.
c. The illusion of movement created by reflection and by light changes seen
through it.
What did Mies van der Rohe mean by “less is more”?
That a “skin and bones,” minimal approach to architecture created pure, Modern
architectural works.
12. Why was the Bauhause closed and who closed it?
The Nazis occupied the Bauhaus in 1933 and closed it as an example of “degenerate
art,” the practitioners of which the Nazis persecuted.
What effect did its closure have on the spread of Bauhaus design principles?
The Bauhaus artists who fled Nazi Germany disseminated, many winding up in the
United Sates.
13. What did the Nazis consider to be “degenerate art”?
Anything Hitler considered more modern or avant-garde than the nineteenthcentury realistic genre; he defined “degenerate art” as any works that “insult
German feeling or destroy or confuse natural form, or simply reveal an absence of
adequate manual and artistic skill.”
14. Who defined a house as a "machine for living"?
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Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier).
15. How does Courbusier’s Villa Savoye (FIG. 33-64) differ from Wright's houses (FIGS.
33-66 to 33-68)?
The Villa Savoye sits conspicuously within its site, dominating it, whereas Wright’s
buildings aim to interact spatially and organically with their surroundings. Robie
House hugs the ground, while Villa Savoye seems to float on thin column supports.
Villa Savoye used several colors on the exterior such as cream and rose-and-blue
windows, while Wright’s houses have facades of brick that make them seem more
organic than the machine-inspired Le Corbusier house.
16. List four stylistic characteristics of the Art Deco style:
a. streamlined
b. elongated symmetry
c. simple flat shapes alternate with shallow volumes in hard patterns
d. aerodynamic forms
Name one building that illustrates the style:
The Chrysler Building, William van Alen, New York City.
EMPHASIZING THE ORGANIC
1. How was Frank Lloyd Wright's concern for "organic" form reflected in his buildings?
Wright saw it as serving free individuals who have the right to move within a
“free” space, envisioned as a non-symmetrical design interacting spatially with its
natural surroundings. He sought to develop an organic unity of planning,
structure, materials, and site, incorporating the principle of continuity.
List two houses he designed:
a. Robie House
b. Kaufmann House (Fallingwater)
2. What type of form did Brancusi believe was "the most real"?
Not the external form, but instead the essence of things.
3. What do the sculpture of Brancusi and Barbara Hepworth's have in common?
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The form of “Oval Sculpture” is basic and universal, smooth and curving, as is
“Bird in Space.” Both Brancusi and Hepworth were interested in exploring the
emotional chords that sculptors could strike in viewers.
4. List three characteristics of the sculpture of Henry Moore.
a. Organic forms.
b. There is an active relationship between material and sculptor.
c. Interplays mass and void.
What was the most recurrent theme in his work?
The reclining female figure.
What apparently originally inspired it?
A photograph of a Chac Mool figure from pre-Columbian Mexico.
5. What is a mobile?
A series of balanced structures hanging from rods, wires, and plates. Air currents
set the parts moving to create a constantly shifting dance in space.
ART AS POLITICAL STATEMENT IN THE 1930s
1. What event inspired Picasso's Guernica (FIG. 33-73)?
The destruction by bombing of the town of Guernica by Nazis acting on behalf of
dictator Francisco Franco.
What symbols did Picasso use to refer to the event, and how did he emphasize its
horror?
He depicted no specific images of Nazi bombs or planes, but used more general
symbols. He used a slain warrior clutching a broken sword, a gored horse, a
shrieking woman cradling her dead child, a burning building, and a bull. The
figures are anguished, fragmented, and have dislocated anatomical features to
emphasize the horror.
2. What is the political significance of Vera Mukhina’s sculpture shown on FIG. 33-74?
It glorifies the communal labor of the Soviet people, relying on realism to represent
exemplars of Soviet citizenry.
3. What was the WPA, and what was its effect on the arts?
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The Works Progress Administration was a program to relieve widespread
unemployment during the Great Depression. Under the WPA, activities of the
Federal Art Project paid artists, writers, and theater people a regular wage in
exchange for work in their professions.
4. The American woman photographer whose work brought the nation’s attention to
the plight of the rural poor was: Dorothea Lange.
5. What is the dominant mood of Hopper's Nighthawks (FIG. 33-76)?
The pervasive loneliness of modern humans.
6. What was the favorite subject of Jacob Lawrence?
The culture and history of African Americans.
7. Name two American artists who were associated with the Regionalist School:
a. Grant Wood
b. Thomas Hart Benton
What type of subjects did they paint?
Rural scenes and regional history, respectively.
8. What was the theme of much of Orozco's work?
The indigenous history and culture of Mexico before Europeans arrived.
In what medium did he do most of his work?
Murals.
9. Why did Diego Rivera want to work in a simple, easily accessible style?
He was a Marxist and committed to developing an art that served the people’s
needs.
List three aspects of that style:
a. Large murals.
b. Complex, decorative and animated.
c. The figures consist of simple monumental shapes and areas of bold color.
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EMIGRES AND EXILES: ENERGIZING AMERICAN ART AT MID CENTURY
Name twelve European artists who came to America because of the political chaos of
Europe during World War II:
a.
Walter Gropius
b.
Lázló Moholy-Nagy
c.
Josef Albers
d.
Marcel Breuer
e.
Mies van der Rohe
f.
Max Beckmann
g.
Max Ernst
h.
Salvador Dalí
i.
Andre Breton
j.
Fernand Léger
k.
l.
Jacques Lipchitz George Grosz
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Compare the use of mass, space, and decorative detail in the Villa Rotonda (FIG. 2256), Blenheim (FIG. 24-75), Chiswick House (FIG. 28-27), the Villa Savoye (FIG. 3364), and the Kaufmann House (FIG. 33-68). Which do you like best? Why?
2. Relate Maurice Denis's statement that "a picture before being a war horse, a nude
woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a plane surface covered with colors
assembled in a certain order" to the early twentieth-century paintings you have
studied. How does his view differ from the traditional one regarding the meaning
and purpose of a painting? Which artists do you think would agree with Maurice
Denis? Why?
3. In what ways does the work of Kollwitz (FIG. 33-41), Barlach (FIG. 33-43), Dix (FIG.
33-40), and Beckmann (FIG. 33-39), relate to eachother? Do you think there are any
consistent “German” characteristics?
4. Discuss Picasso’s statement “I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them,” How
does the Cubist conception of space differ from that held during the Renaissance?
5. Concern with social issues is apparent in the work of many twentieth century artists,
including Mukhina (FIG. 33-74), Lawrence (FIG. 33-77), Beckmann (FIG. 33-39),
Kollwitz (FIG. 33-41), Lange (FIG. 33-75), Orozco (FIG. 33-80), Tatlin (FIG. 33-54),
and Barlach (FIG. 33-43). Identify the issue that was addressed in each work and the
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stylistic means the artist used to express that concern. Which do you think is most
effective?
6. Compare Brancusi's Bird in Space (FIG. 33-69) with Gabo's Column (FIG. 33-53). In
what ways are the forms similar, and in what ways are they different? How does
each artist explain the techniques and goals of his art?
7. Discuss the role of chance in both the Dada and Surrealist movements. What
connection do you see between the Dada movement and art movements today?
8. Discuss the aesthetic that developed at the Bauhaus, selecting five images done by
Bauhaus faculty to illustrate your discussion. What effects of their influence do you
see in contemporary life?
LOOKING CAREFULLY, DESCRIBING AND ANALYZING
Look carefully at two 20th century depictions of war, one by Otto Dix, shown on FIG.
33-40, the other by Picasso on FIG. 33-73, and write at least one page analyzing and
comparing them. Use the following terms: size and scale: form and composition;
material and technique; line and color; mass and volume, picture plane and distortion.
Here are some questions that might help you with your analysis, but do not be limited
by them.
First look at the shape, size and scale of each image. In what way to these relate to
earlier images? Which image seems to be most traditional? What type of composition
does each use? Examine each of the panels in the Dix image and describe what you see
in each. Describe each of the figures in the Picasso and note how they are related to each
other. How does each artist handle space and the picture plane? What war is each
depicting? What distortions does each artist use to express the horror of the events?
Which do you think is most effective?
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