Modern Art: 20th century
Group 9
Victorio Bote
Ian Magtibay
Maria Carmela Tacub
Modern Art: Early 20th Century
Fauvism
What is Fauvism
-Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for “the wild beasts”), a short-lived and loose group
of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong
colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism.
- While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as
such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement
were Henri Matisse and André Derain.
-They saw color as autonoumous, a subject in and of itself, not merely and adjunct to nature.
Their vigorious brushwork and emphatic line grew out of their desire for a direct form of
expresson, unencumbered by theory.
-Their artwork were also inspired by the discovery of ethnographic works of art from Africa,
Polynesia, and other ancient cultures.
Kinds of artwork they produce?
-Despite the aggressiveness of their method, however, their subject matter centered on traditional
nudes, still lifes and landscapes.
Paintings that were produced this era?
show the presentation of paintings of Henri Matisse and Andre Derain.
Little backrgound with the painters
Andre Derain- One of the founders of the Fauvist movement (1880-1954).
-As a Fauvist, he usualy use forceful contasts of primary colors and the delineation of forms by
blocks of thickly applied pigment speak of something new.
*Delineation: [dih-lin-ee-ey-shuhn] a chart or diagram; sketch; rough draft.
-Nineteenth-century artists emphasized natural light and created their shadows from color
compnonets meanwhile, Derain and Fauvists evoked light in their canvases solely with color
contrast.
Henri Matisse- The other founder of the Fauvist momvement (1869-1954).
-He bought Fauvism to the forefront of critical recognition. Yet Matisse was one of the major
Fauvist artists whose reputation exceeded that of the movement.
-His early paintings revealed a strong and traditional compositional structure, which he gleaned
from his first mentor, Adolphe William Bougeureau.
Expressionism
-Expressionism was a cultural movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in
Germany at the start of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world in an utterly
subjective perspective, radically distorting it for emotional effect, to evoke moods or ideas.
-Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of “being alive” and emotional experience
rather than physical reality.
-Is the distortion of nature, as opposed to the imitation of nature. n order to achieve a desired
emotional effect or representation of inner feelings.
The three other movements under expressionism:
-Die Brucke (The bridge)
-Was founded in Dresden, Germany at the same time that Fauvism was afoot in France.
-The artists who founded this movement chose the name of Die Brucke because, in theory, they
saw their movement as bridging a number of disparate styles.
*Disparate: distinct in kind; essentially different; dissimilar: disparate ideas.
-Like Fauvism, Die Brucke was short-lived because of the lact of cohesion among its proponents.
But stilll, Die Brucke artists showed some common interests in techniques and subject matter
that ranged from boldly colored landscapes and cityscapes to horrific and violent portraits.
-Their emotional upheaval, may in part, have reflected the mayhem of World War I.
*Upheaval: strong or violent change or disturbance, as in a society
Die Brücke is sometimes compared to the Fauves. Both movements shared interests
in primitivism art. Both shared an interest in the expressing of extreme emotion through highkeyed color that was very often non-naturalistic. Both movements employed a drawing technique
that was crude, and both groups shared an antipathy to complete abstraction. The Die Brücke
artists’ emotionally agitated paintings of city streets and sexually charged events transpiring in
country settings make their French counterparts, the Fauves, seem tame by comparison
Famous painters that lived in this movement:
-Emil Nolde: The supreme colorist if the Expressionist movement (1867-1956). He joined Die
Brucke a year after it was founded. He was also well known for his graphics. He used
idiosyncratic, splintered characteristics of the wood-cut: a medium that had not been in vogue for
centuries-to created ravagedm nasklike portraits of pain and suffering.
*Idiosyncratic: a characteristic, habit, mannerism, or the like, that is peculiar to an individual.
*his true name is Emil Hansen.
-Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)
-The Blue Rider artists-who took their group name from a painting of that title by Wassily
Kandinsky, a major proponent-depended less heavily on content to communicate feelings and
evoke an amotional response from the viewer.
-Their works focused more on the contrastts and combinations of abstract forms and pure colors.
In fact, the work of Der Blaue Reiter artitst, at times, is completely without subject and can be
disecribed as nonobjective, or abstract.
-Its art sought to free itself from the shackles of obesrvable reality.
Famous painters that lived in this movement:
-Wassily Kandinsky: One of the founders of Der Blaue Reiter was Wassily Kandinsky
(189=66-1944), a Russian artist who left a career in law to become an influential abstract painter
and art theorist. Hw further analyzed the relationship between art and music in this study. For
him, color, line and shape were subjects themselves.
-Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity)
-The New Objectivity (in German: ”Neue Sachlichkeit”) was an art movement that arose in
Germany in the early 1920s as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to, expressionism. The
movement essentially ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the
Nazis to power. The term is applied to works of pictorial art, literature, music, and architecture.
-As the World War I ended and the Second World War was coming, artists such as Max
Beckmann (1884-1950), reacted to the horrors and senselessness of wartime suffering with an art
that commented bitterly on the bureucracy and military with ghastly visions of human torture.
Cubism
-The history of art is colored by the tensions of stylistic polarities within given eras, particularly
the polarity of an intellectual versus an emotional approach to painting.
-Cubism is an offspring of Cezanne’s geometrization of nature and his abandonment of scientific
perspective, his rendering of multiple views, and his emphasis on the two dimensional canvas
surfaces.
-The second major art movement of the twentieth century, Cubism, can trace its heritage to
Neoclassicism and the analytical and intellectual work of Cezanne.
*Vignette:
Notable painters:
Pablo Picasso: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios
Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
-Was born in Spain, the son of an art teacher. He quickly mastered the illusionist techniques of
the realistic Academy style.
*Illusionist:
Interpretation of his paintings:
The Old Guitarist
-a contorted white-haired man sits hunched over a guitar, consumed by the tones that emanate
from what appears to be his nly possession.
-The eyes are sunken in the skeletal head, and the bones and tendons of his hungry from protrude
showing the ordinariness of poverty.
-The monochromatic blue palette creates an unrelenting somber mood. Tones of blue eerily echo
the ghostlike features of the guitarist.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
-This startling, innovative work, still primarily pink in tone, depicts five women from
Barcelona’s red-light district. They line up for selection by a possible suitor, who stands, as it
were in the positing of spectator.
Analytic Cubism
-Instead of presenting an object from a single view, assumed to have been the complete view, the
Cubists, like Cezanne, realized that our visual comprehension of objects consists of many views
that we perceive almost at once.
-To Cubists, the most basic reality involved consolidating optical vignettes instead of
reproducing fixed images with photographic accuracy.
Famous painters:
Georges Braque
-The early work of Georges Braque (1882-1963) graduated from Impressionism to Fauvism to
more structural composition based on Cezanne.
-He met Picasso in 1907, and from then until 1914 the artists worked together toward the same
artistic goal.
His famous painting:
The Portuguese
-There are few concrete solved in the background: dropped eyelids, a mustache, the circular
opening of a stringed instrument. The multifaceted, abstracted form appears to shift position in
before our eyes, stimulating the time lapse that would occur in the visual assimilation of multiple
views.
Synthetic Cubism
-Picasso and Braque did not stop with inclusion of precisely printed words and numbers in their
works. They began to add characters cut from newspapers and magazines, other ieces of paper,
and found objects such as labels from wine bottles, calling cards, theater tickets even swatches of
wallpaper and bits of rope.
-These items were pasted directly onto the canvas in a technique Picasso and Braque called
papier colle also known as collage.
-The use of collage marked the beginning of the synthetic phase of cubism.
Famous synthetic paintings:
The Bottle of Suze
-In this work, newspaper clippings and opaque pieces of paper function as the shifting planes that
hover around the aperitif label and define the bottle and glass. These planes are held together by
a sparse linear structure much in the manner of analytic Cubist works.
-In contrast to Analytic Cubism, however, the emphasis is on the form of the object and on
constructing instead of disintegrating that form. Color reentered the compositions, and much
emphasis was places on texture, design and movement.
Cubist Sculpture
-Cubism was born as a two-dimensional art form.
-Cubist artists attempted to render on canvas the manifold aspects of their subjects as if they
were walking around three-dimensional forms and recording every angle.
-Because cubist artists were trying to communicate all the visual information available about a
particular form, they were handicapped, so to speak, by the two-dimensional surface.
-The medium of sculpture was more natural to cubism, because a viewer could actually walk
around a figure to assimilate its many facets.
Famous painters:
Alexander Archipenko
-One of the innovations in Cubist sculpture was the three-dimensional interpenetration of Cubist
planes, as implied in Lipchitz’s relief.
His famous painting:
Walking woman
-What is new here are the open spaces of the torso and head, now as much a part of the whole as
the solid forms of composition. Although there is a good degree of abstract simplification in the
figure, the overall impression of the forms prompts recognition of the humanity and the subject.
Futurism
-Futurism was introduced angrily by Marinetti in 1909 manifesto that called for an art of
“violence, energy, and boldness” free from the “tyranny of harmony and good taste.” In theory,
Futurist painting and sculpture were to glorify the life of today, “unceasingly and violently
transformed by victorious science.” In practice, many of the works owed much to Cubism.
Famous painter:
Umberto Boccioni
-Boccioni, whose forte was sculpture, sought to convey the elusive surging energy that blurs an
image in motion, leaving but an echo of its passage. Although it retains an overall figural
sillhouette, the sculpture is devoid of any representational details.
-An oft-repeated work in Futurist credo is dynamism, defined as the theory that force or energy
is the basic principle of all phenomena.
Fantasy and Dada
-Fantastic Art has traditionally been largely confined to painting and illustration, but since the
1970s has increasingly been found also in photography.
-Fantastic art explores fantasy, space fantasy (a sub-genre of sci-fi that incorporates subjects of
alien mythology and/or alien religion), imagination, the dream state, the grotesque, visions and
the uncanny, as well as the so-called Goth art.
-Being an inheritant genre of Victorian Symbolism, the modern Fantastic Art often shares its
choice of themes such as mythology, occultism and mysticism, or lore and folklore, and
generally seeks to depict the inner life (nature of soul and spirit).
Famous painters:
Paul Klee
-was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a Swiss and a
Germanpainter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that
included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.
Famous painting:
The twittering machine
-Offers a humorous contraption composed of four fantastic birds balanced precariously on a wire
attached to a crank. The viewer who is motivated to piece together the possible function of this
apparatus might assume that tuning the crank would result in the twittering suggested by the title.
Giorgio de Chirico
- Giorgio de Chirico
-was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Greek-Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a
Genovese mother and a Sicilian father.
-
He founded the scuola metafisica art movement. His surname is traditionally written De
Chirico (capitalized De) when it stands alone.
-His subjects are often derived from dreams, in which ordinary objects are found in extraordinary
situations.
His famous painting:
-A young girl, seemingly unaware of the dark tall shadow beyond her, skips at play with stick
and hoop. What is she doing there? Wh is she alone? Who is the source of the shadow? Is it a
male or a female? What is the spear-like form by the figure? We quickly perceive doom.
Dada
-The name Dada was supposedly chosen at random from a dictionary. The non-sense term
describes nonsense art-art that is meaningless, absurd, and un-predictable. Although it is
questionable whether this catchy label was in truth derived at random, the element of chance was
indeed important to the Dada art form.
-Yet however meaningless of unpredictable the poets and artists intended their products to be, in
reality, they were not. In an era dominated by the doctrine of psychoanalysis, the choice of even
nonsensical words spoke something at least of the poet.
Famous painters:
Marcel Duchamp
-was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the
Dadaist and Surrealist movements.
- A playful man, Duchamp challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art
marketing, not so much by writing, but through subversive actions such as dubbing a urinal art
and naming it Fountain.
Famous paintings:
Fountain
- The most prominent example of Duchamp’s association with Dada was his submission of
Fountain, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. Artworks in the
Independent Artists shows were not selected by jury, and all pieces submitted were displayed.
However, the show committee insisted that Fountain was not art, and rejected it from the show.
This caused an uproar amongst the Dadaists, and led Duchamp to resign from the board of the
Independent Artists.
-Along with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp published a Dada magazine in
New York, entitled The Blind Man, which included art, literature, humor and commentary.
-When he returned to Paris after World War I, Duchamp did not participate in the Dada group.
Surrealism
-Began as a literary movement after World Wat I. Both literary groups engaged in automatic
writing, in which the mind was to be purged of purposeful thought and a series of free
associations were then to be expressed with the pen.
-Words were not meant to denote their literal meanings but to symbolize the often seething
contents of the unconscious mind.
-Eventually, the Surrealist writers broke from the Dadaists, believing that the earlier movement
was becoming too academic.
Famous painters:
Salvador Dali
-One of the few “household names” in the history of art belongs to a leading Surrealist figure, the
Spaniard Salvador Dali.
Famous painting:
The persistence of memory
-In a barren landscape of incongruous forms, time, as all else, has expired. A watch is left
crawling with insects like scavengers over carrion; three other watches hang limp and useless
over a rectangular block, a dead tree, and a lifeless, amorphous creature that bears a curious
resemblance to Dali.
-A haunting sense of reality threatens the line between perception and imagination.
-Reality beyond reality.
Joan Miro
-Joan Miro sought to eliminate all thought from their minds and then trace their brushes the
surface of their canvas.
Famous painting
Painting
-In this work, Miro applied Breton’s principles of psychic automatism in an aesthetically
pleasing, decorative manner.
Architecture
The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact
that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the
first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a ‘total’ work of
art in which all arts, including architecture would eventually be brought together.