Chapter Fourteen
The Modernist
World
The Arts in an Age of Global Confrontation
The Challenge to Cultural Identity
• At the last decade of the nineteenth century, Western nations sought
to expand their influence and reap new economic and political power
in far-distant lands
• As a result of this process of imperial expansion, by the dawn of the
twentieth century the tradition and sense of centeredness that had
defined indigenous cultures for centuries was threatened or in the
process of being destroyed
• Native Americans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, and Africans faced
fundamental challenges to their cultural identities
The Fate of the Native Americans
• From 1790 to 1860, the population of nonnative-born Americans
increased from 4 million to 31 million, with nearly half of them
moving to territory west of the Atlantic coast states
• In the “Go West, young man” movement, the settlers almost entirely
ignored and disparaged the Native American culture
• The ultimate fate of tribes was inextricably linked to the fate of the
buffalo. Over 4 million buffalo were killed by hunters seeking hides,
meat for railroad construction gangs, or for sport by tourists
George Catlin, Big Bend on the Missouri River,
1,900 Miles Above St. Louis
Oil on canvas 29"  24", 1832
The lone Indian contemplates the vast landscape, symbolic of a vanishing people and wilderness.
China and India
• While not posing a threat to the actual existence of China and India,
Western nations sought to dominate them through aggressive
military and economic policies aimed at transferring wealth to their
own countries and limiting their sovereignty
• The European taste for chinoiserie created a bustling import
economy in China in the eighteenth century, but more important to
the Westerners than the Chinese wares was the opium, which the
British East India Company grew in India and sold in large quantities
to the Chinese
• In India, the British East India Company crippled the economy by
undercutting Indian manufacturer. By the late nineteenth to early
twentieth centuries, nearly 1.5 million Indians sold themselves into
indentured servitude
The Opening of Japan
• When American Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay on
July 8, 1853, Japan had been closed to the West for 250 years
• The newly-opened Japanese goal became to modernize along Western
lines but to maintain their sovereignty as well as their ancient cultural
traditions
• Export of traditional Japanese woodblock printing was a vital part of
Japan’s economic boom. Woodblock prints (ukiyo-e, or pictures of the
floating world) were mass produced and thus affordable
• Probably the most famous series of Japanese prints is Thirty-Six Views
of Mount Fuji, by Katsushika Hokusai
Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave
from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
Color woodblock print, 10-1/8"  14¼", ca. 1823-1839
Africa
• The scramble for control of the African continent began with the
opening of the Suez Canal in 1869
• Beyond Africa’s key strategic location, its vast land areas and untapped
natural resources proved an irresistible lure for European nations.
Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy all began to expand previous
colonies in Africa or to acquire new ones
• To those who desired to validate imperialism and the colonial regimes
it fostered in Africa and Asia, social Darwinism explained the supposed
social and cultural evolution that elevated Europe above all other
nations and races
The Rise of Modernism
• Even as the European states vied for power around the world, the
very traditions that these states embodied were being challenged by
new discoveries in science and revolutionary new approaches to art
• The automobile, the airplane, motion pictures, assembly-line
technology, even quantum physics, all radically changed human
understanding of the world
• A group of painters—the Post-Impressionists, which includes Paul
Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Georges Seurat—saw themselves as
inventing the future of painting. They sought to capture something
transcendent in their act of vision, something that captured the
essence of their subject
Georges Seurat
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
Oil on canvas, 5’ 11¾" by 10’ 1¼", 1884
• Seurat’s masterpiece makes
use of tiny dots of color
(pointilles) in a carefully
controlled, scientific
application
• Seurat tried systematically to
incorporate new optical
theories and the science of
color from Chevreul’s
Principles of Harmony and
Contrast of Colors and Rood’s
Modern Chromatics
Symbolic Color: Van Gogh
• Color in Dutch painter’s Vincent van Gogh’s paintings becomes
symbolic, charged with feelings
• Profoundly committed to discovering a universal harmony in which all
aspects of life were united through art, van Gogh found Seurat’s
emphasis on contrasting colors appealing
• Van Gogh used much larger, thicker strokes of color, a technique
known as impasto. This heavy impasto was not admired in van Gogh’s
lifetime
• In paintings like Portrait of Patience Escalier, he understood that he
was actively abandoning Impressionism
Vincent van Gogh,
Portrait of Patience Escalier
Oil on canvas, 27-1/8"  22", August 1889
Paul Cézanne
• Paul Cézanne also explored color, but his interest was in how color
could structure space
• The tension between spatial perspective and surface flatness would
become a focus of twentieth-century modern painting
• Like the Impressionists, Cézanne painted out-of-doors, the only of the
Post-Impressionists to do so. Like Monet, he painted the same subject
repeatedly, particularly Mont Sainte-Victoire in Aix-en-Provence, which
in the last decade of his life became something of an obsession
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
Oil on canvas, 27½" by 35¼", 1902-1904
Paul Gauguin
• The desire for solitude that permitted introspection took frustrated
businessman and father of five children Paul Gauguin to the island of
Tahiti
• He believed that a primitive lifestyle would permit entry into the primal
powers of the mind
• Mahana no atua (Day of the God) is based on an idealized recollection
of his escape to Tahiti. As in van Gogh’s work, color is freed of its
representational function to become an almost pure expression of the
artist’s feelings
Paul Gauguin,
Mahana no atua (Day of the God)
Oil on canvas, 26-5/8” 35-5/8”, 1894
Pablo Picasso
• At the center of the new spirit of art, the revolt against the Romantic
and the attempt to create, not merely seek, truth was Spanish-born
artist Pablo Picasso
• With Picasso’s work, painting changed from a literal to a conceptual
art
• Both the subject matter of Demoiselles d’Avignon and Picasso’s
ambiguous treatment of space were unsettling to his viewers
• Picasso, influenced by Gauguin, gave the two right-hand figures
masklike faces, with associations of the primitive, the exotic, the
magical
Pablo Picasso,
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Oil on canvas, 95-1/8"  91-1/8", 1907
Cubism
• Cubism resulted from the active
collaboration of Picasso and
Georges Braque influenced
greatly by Cézanne
• They decomposed their subjects
into faceted planes, so that they
seem to emerge down the
middle of the canvas from some
angular maze, as in Violin and
Palette
• Cubism challenged the viewer
with ideas of illusion and reality
Georges Braque,
Violin and Palette
Oil on canvas, 36-1/8"  16-7/8",
Autumn 1909
"The Birth of Cubism"
Video will play automatically.
From Picasso and his Time (length: 3:04). Item #4096
Futurism
• Futurism, proclaimed in the
Founding and Manifesto of
Futurism, written by Filippo
Marinetti and published in
1909, called for a new art
• Futurists included Marinetti,
Giacomo Balla, Umberto
Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi
Russolo, and Gino Severini
• They used the fractured idiom
of Cubism to represent what
they considered modernism’s
defining characteristics—
technology, violence, and
above all, speed
Fauvism
• Led by Henri Matisse, the
Fauves (“Wild Beasts”)
used color unnaturally
and symbolically, in the
tradition of van Gogh and
Gauguin and the
Symbolists
• Whereas Picasso’s
Demoiselles seem static,
Matisse’s dancers are
active, moving as if to an
unheard music
Expressionism
•
German Expressionism combined
an interest in color’s emotional
potential with the exploration of
primitive, sexual energy
•
The psychological explorations of
Expressionism are exemplified in
the works of Russian émigré Wassily
Kandinsky
•
Yellow for Kandinsky was the
female principle, green represents
the social middle class, and black
was the equivalent to dance
The Great War and Its Impact
• The trench warfare of World War I claimed unprecedented
casualties—around 10 million dead and somewhere around twice
that many wounded
• New tactics and weapons, particularly mustard gas, caused horrific
deaths and psychological torment for thousands, including many
members of the artistic community
• American novelist Ernest Hemingway served as a Red Cross
ambulance driver on the Italian front. On his first day of duty, he
was required to pick up the remains of female workers who were
blown to pieces when the ammunition factory at which they worked
was blown up
War Poems
• The poetry of Wilfred Owen, killed in combat just a week before the
armistice was signed in 1918, caused a sensation when it first
appeared in 1920 because of his horrifying depictions of the war’s
victims
• William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot display war’s impact in their poetry,
but not in the direct manner of Owen
• Yeats and Eliot present, poetically, a world in which the old order is
overturned, revealing a pitiless, nightmarish world, devoid of emotion,
but not quite devoid of hope
Dada
• As defined by the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, “DADA DOES NOT
MEAN ANYTHING”
• Since life itself seemed meaningless due to the Great War, Dada was
an expression of the hollowness felt by multiple artists
• Dada came into being at the Cabaret Voltaire in neutral Switzerland in
1916, by intellectuals and artists escaping the war
• Such works, in their willful denial of the artist’s aesthetic sensibilities,
were considered by many as “anti-art”
Jean Arp, Collage Made
According to the Laws of Chance
Painted paper, 15-7/8"  12-5/8", 1916
• Arp had been so frustrated with
his painting, which seemed to
him burdened by conventional
technique, that he had torn it
apart
• When he looked at the random
arrangement of fallen pieces,
they seemed to him more
truthful than anything he had
created before
Russia: Art and Revolution
• In February 1917, Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, abdicated the
throne. In October of that year, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin assumed power.
Lenin was a radical utopian idealist, envisioning a socialist state in
which all worked together to achieve their common goals
• Kasimir Malevich applied modernist geometric forms to Russian folk
themes, a style he called Cubo-Futurism
• Soon he felt compelled to abandon even those traditions, creating
nonobjective works he called Suprematism, defining it as “the
supremacy of . . . feeling in . . . art”
Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting,
Black Rectangle, Blue Triangle
Oil on canvas, 26-1/8"  22½", 1915
• Malevich’s “feeling” refers to
the revelation of an absolute
truth discovered through the
most minimal means
• If the viewer stares for a
moment at the line where the
triangle crosses from white to
black, a subtle vibration occurs,
and the two parts of the
triangle appear to be at
different depths
The Battleship Potemkin
• Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein believed that montage, the art of
building a cinematic composition using shots that acquire meaning in
relation to other shots, could be used in film to create tension, which
would lead to heightened perception and understanding
• He planned a series of seven films showing events leading up to the
Bolshevik revolution, and intended through them to evoke audience
identification with the revolution’s aims
• The most renowned and successful of these was his Battleship
Potemkin. The film, especially the famous “Odessa Steps Sequence,” is
a virtual manifesto of montage; it tore at the hearts of audiences and
won respect for the regime around the world
“Odessa Steps Sequence”
Sigmund Freud
• Freud theorized that most neurotic behavior was the result of
repressed sexual drives and traumas
• As a physician specializing in emotional disorders and in association
with the University of Vienna, Freud opened the subject of human
sexuality to public discussion
• According to Freud, human personality is organized by the competing
drives of the id (the seat of all instinctive desire), the ego (the
mediator between the id’s destructive impulses and the requirements
of social life), and the superego (the “conscience,” the psyche’s moral
base)
Surrealism
• André Breton, author of the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, spoke to the
influence of Freud’s theories on writers and artists. He had trained as
a doctor and had used Freud’s technique of free association when
treating shell-shock victims in World War I
• Breton adopted the term “surrealism” to refer to the workings of the
unconscious mind. Initially a literary movement, it spread into visual
arts as well
• The juxtaposition of elements that would not conventionally occupy
the same space is a fundamental device of Surrealist art
Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror
Oil on canvas, 64"  51¼", 1932
• Picasso’s Surrealism would assert
itself in a series of monstrous
bone-like figures that alternated
with sensuous portraits of his
mistress
• The theme of the complexity of
the self, with its conscious and
unconscious sides, is explored
here
Salvador Dali, Lugubrious Game
Oil and collage on card, 17½"  12", 1929
• The Surrealist sense of selfalienation is central to the work
of Spanish artist Salvador Dali
• He did not hesitate to confront
the “lugubrious”—or mournful
and gloomy side—of sexuality
• When he created, he followed a
“paranoiac critical method,” a
brand of self-hypnosis that he
claimed allowed him to
hallucinate freely
Salvador Dali,
The Persistence of Memory
Oil on canvas, 9½"  13", 1931
• Dali called his Surrealist images
“new and menacing”
• This is a self-portrait of the
sleeping Dali, who lies slug-like
draped beneath the coverlet of
time
• Ants, which are a symbol of
death, crawl over a watchcase
Literary Experimentation
• The rise of the stream-of-consciousness novel in the early twentieth
century can be attributed to two related factors: it provided authors
a means of portraying directly the psychological makeup of their
protagonists, and it enabled writers to emphasize the subjectivity of
their characters’ points of view
• The most influential stream-of-consciousness novel of the era was
Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses
• Other important stream-of-consciousness novels include Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,
and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury