Week 3 Lecture, 20th Century

History of 20th Century ArtWeek 3

1911-1919

1911 – Cubism: Closing the Curtain on the Window to the World

• In the late 19th century, artists (Cezanne et al) begin to dismantle illusionistic space

• Cezanne’s interest in the geometric foundations of forms will influence Cubism

• Picasso & Braque begin to experiment with this in 1911

Unknown, Ideal City with a fountain and statues of the virtues, 1500

Cezanne, Bibemus Quarry, 1895

“It [Cézanne's impact] was more than an influence, it was an invitation. Cézanne was the first to have broken away from erudite, mechanized perspective…” - Georges Braque, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism

passage

The Process of Looking: Kahnweiler’s Account

• Cubism tried to unify the pictorial object by reconciling opposites, the depicted volumes of real objects and the flatness and shape of the canvas (Analytical Cubism)

• Heighten the continuity of the canvas plane

• Banished color so that they could emphasize shading (gray or tonal scale)

• This created the lowest possible relief to heighten the recognition of depicted volume on a flat surface

• To reduce painting to its essential elements—“autonomy and logic of the picture object”

• Looking from multiple perspectives (composite) vs. one single (fixed) perspective

Pablo Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910

Georges Braque

• Possibly originated from Braque’s memories of a Portuguese musician from Marseilles

• Reduced color palette- ochers and umbers, silver, copper

• Shallow planes set parallel to the picture surface (“as though a roller had pressed out the volume of the bodies” – Art Since 1900)

• No consistent light source

• Slight modeling through tints & shadows

• Shapes also indicated by edges of form

• As seen from multiple perspectives

• Integration of text emphasizes flattened space (recalls posters hanging in dance halls & cafes)

Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911

Pictures as Puzzles

• Synthetic Cubism• First introduced by Braque (using

same material, oilcloth)• Addition of actual collaged objects

(rope & oilcloth) achieves total flattening of space

• Some recognizable objects (knife, lemon, napkin, glass, pipe)

• “JOU” refers either to the French word for game or newspaper (“journal”)

• Chair caning indicates glass tabletop (as if looking through)

• Shape of canvas reinforces tabletop shape (and resembles ship’s port hole)

• Tension between suggested depth (tactile) and flatness (visual)

• Overturns (or makes transparent?)

traditional still life painting

Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912

ChardinStill Life with Pipe

and Jug1737

1912 – Cubist collage invented

• Amidst interaction among different artistic processes, rise of pop culture and social unrest

• A visual play of figure-ground reversal

• A break with the iconic system of representation

• Uses arbitrary “symbolic” so that images depicted don’t necessarily look like their objects

• Corresponding newspaper clippings used to suggest two very different figurative elements (wood grain of violin & airy background)

• What was once definite, fixed knowledge has become entirely arbitrary—“a revolution in Western representation”

vs. DOG

Icon

Symbol

Picasso, Violin, 1912, drawing/collage

Two Interpretive Approaches to Picasso’s Collages

High Meets Low Art

• Reflection of the intersection of elite and mass cultural practices

• Introduces mass-produced, ephemeral materials (newspaper, etc)

• Blurs line between “fine art” and other artistic practices

• Set in working class café where poor would read news they can’t afford to buy Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze, 1912

As Political Statement

• Newspaper clippings refer to Balkan War 1912• On right are battlefield reports, on left, accounts of an antiwar protest in Paris• Represents aftermath of a discussion about the war among workers?• Fragmented form of collage suggests dismantled ideologies

1914 – The Lessons of Cubism: Tatlin & Duchamp Find the Found Object

• Tatlin’s Constructions & Duchamp’s Readymades transform Cubist collage

• Both anticipate a new world of mass-produced commodities made possible by industrialization

• Tatlin involved in Cubo-Futurist avant-garde; went to Paris in 1914, saw Picasso’s constructions, and begins to make his own

• Tatlin’s work departs from Duchamp in his interest in “truth to materials,” which will become Russian Constructivism

Vladimir TatlinSelection of Materials: IronStucco, Glass, Asphalt1914

Man RayMarcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy1920-21

Rrose Selavy Precision Oculist

Marcel Duchamp

• Prankster, provocateur, the consummate iconoclast

• Dabbled in various styles (Cubo-Futurism)

• Grew tired of “retinal art” because it privileged sight over mind

• Disliked standards of artistic taste & bourgeois control of the arts

• Work became series of questions about the nature of art, a “self-critique” or intellectual game

Playing Chess, Pasadena Museum of Art, 1963

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Eadweard MuybridgeDescending Stairs and Turning Around1884-85

Art After Painting?

• For Duchamp, painting had become inadequate and boring

• A newly industrialized world demanded a new art

• Art & utility/usefulness• Also intrigued by indifference in art• Inspired by Picabia, Roussel and

their interest in art as form of negation and word play

• Q: How does an artist represent this new culture of commodities in his/her work?

Painting is over. Who’d do better than this propeller? Tell me, could you do that? – Duchamp to Brancusi, Leger @Salon de la Locomotion Aerienne, 1912

A: The Readymade

The Alhambra. Sears Modern Homes Mail Order Catalog, 1920-25

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHp1zbW_IE8

The Readymade : appropriated product positioned as art….”He CHOSE it!”

“Can one make works that are not works of art?” - Duchamp

Traditional Art

• Materials (painting, bronze/marble sculpture)• Made by single artist, attributed to that artist, expressive of that artist’s style & ideas (subjective)• One-of-a-kind• Non-utilitarian (not useful)• Decorative or of aesthetic value

Readymade

• Industrial materials • Anonymous creator (objective)• Mass-produced • Utilitarian or useful (once was)• Expressive of artist’s indifference (no aesthetic value?)

Thomas Struth, Art Institue of Chicago, IL, Chicago, 1990

Duchamp, Fountain 1917

readymade (porcelain)

1915 - Kazimir Malevich shows his Suprematist canvases at the “0.10” exhibition in Petrograd

• Malevich aligned with formalist writers and poets in Moscow

• Structuralist language experiments (“made strange” through nonsense words and neologisms) influenced his imagery

• Experimented with various styles, particularly Synthetic Cubism

• This first exhibition of Suprematist works sought the “zero of painting” or the core of the pictorial

• Flat & delimited/deducted

• Not purely geometric (skewed)

• Bright color differs from Cubism

Kazimir Malevich, “0.10” Exhibition, Petrograd, 1915

Malevich, Red Square (Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions)

1915

ground

figure

The “Zero of Painting”

• Political climate in Russia (the October Revolution and anarchist revolt w/ which Malevich was sympathetic), made it difficult for him to justify his work as a painter

• “Zero” of painting becomes almost nonexistent in the white on white paintings, some of which were hung on ceilings

• Co-founder of school where he develops architectural ideas

• Returns to figurative painting in 1930s. Why?

• Fear of persecution; avant-garde too radical & anarchist

http://vimeo.com/6789494

Art by Yasmina Reza, Open Door Repertory Co.

Malevich, Suprematist Painting (White on White), 1918

MalevichSelf-Portrait

1933

dada

DADADADA

Dada signified nothing, it is nothing, nothing nothing-Francis Picabia, 1915

Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17

Class Activity

“If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases [it] creates a new image of the unit of length.” –Duchamp

Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14

1916 – “A Farce of Nothingness”: Dada in Zurich

• In response to WWI (Switzerland was neutral, a refuge for anti-war artists and bohemians)

• International movement (Zurich, NYC, Paris, Berlin) in keeping with anti-nationalist spirit

• No set practice or leader

• Shared love of play, chance, absurdity, farce & radical experimentation

• Involved in poetry, performance & ephemeral art making (many Dada works no longer exist)

• Name has multiple meanings (Ball: “to Germans it [dada] is an indication of idiotic naivete and of a preoccupation with procreation and the baby carriage.”

http://art.docuwat.ch/videos/?alternative=3&channel_id=17&skip=0&subpage=video&video_id=123

The Shock of the New: The Powers that Be, Robert Hughes, 1980

Restaurant “Meierei,” Zurichlocation of Cabaret Voltaire

1916

Emmy Hennings, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916

Cabaret Voltaire

• Named for the 18th century French satirist, Voltaire, who wrote Candide

• Meant to be a “vaudevillian mockery of ‘the ideals of culture and of art’”

• In performances, spoke in different languages, chanted, made noise with typewriters, drums, laughing, dancing, hiccupping

• Ball gave the last performance dressed up as a “bishop” (in cardboard outfit, colored in blue, scarlet and white) and performed Karawane

• Ball believed Janco’s masks referred to ancient Greek and Japanese theater, they demanded a “tragic-absurd dance” http://www.ubu.com/sound/ball.html

Hugo Ball, “Magical Bishop” costume Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916

1916 – American avant-garde photo receives an advocate in

Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work

• By this time, Stieglitz known in U.S. and Europe, and his Gallery 291 in NYC had mounted exhibitions of Matisse, Picasso, & Picabia’s work

• Also exhibited works by members of his Photo-Secessionist group (founded 1902)

• First championed Pictorialist photography• When introduced to Strand’s work, he gave

him exhibition at 291 and featured him in Camera Work

Francis Picabia, C’est ici Stieglitz, 1915, illustration

Paul Strand, Abstractions, Porch Shadows Connecticut, 1917

•Began to favor more truthful & direct photographic aesthetic as seen in Strand’s cropped abstractions • “Straight Photography”and modernist art shareaesthetic concerns

Pictorialist vs. Straight Photo

Pictorialism• Early photographic movement• Imitated painting (as valid art form) • Often staged or manipulated• Used tricks like soft focus, greased lens,

drawing on negative, etc…

Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, 1858, Albumen print

Straight Photo• Even present in this early work by

Stieglitz• Image has clarity, lacks melodrama• Light through window mimics

photographic process• Three of same photo suggest

mechanical reproduction & serial image

Alfred S

tieglitz, Sun

’s Rays – P

aula, Berlin, 1

889

From the Window to the Frame

Albrecht Durer, from Four Books on HumanProportions, 1528 Piet Mondrian, Composition

No. 10, 1939

1917 – Mondrian discovers abstraction & DeStijl

• Moves to Paris in 1912 to study Cubism

• Extended the Cubist grid to pure abstraction

• Considered the abstract form symbolic of spiritual transcendence

• Distilled recognizable forms to intersecting vertical & horizontal lines (as “immutable” truths)

• The grid destroys hierarchy in the image (order of importance)

• A tension/dialectic of opposites in horizontals and verticals

• This work still doesn’t fulfill his aims because it still upholds the traditional figure-ground composition

Piet M

ondrian, G

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Mondrian, Composition in Line, 1917, oil

Neoplasticism

• Represents his mature style, Neoplasticism

• How does he resolve the figure-ground problem?

• Superimposed planes were eliminated (crossed lines)

• Space divided into various rectangles, some different shades of white, some in color

• The modular grid was developed & determined by the canvas proportions (allover composition)

• Primary colors added to grid

• Non-hierarchical Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Red, BlackBlue and Grey, 1920, oil

DeStijl

• The DeStijl publication had been founded in 1917 by painters and poets sympathetic to Mondrian’s ideas (including Theo van Doesburg)

DeStijl album cover, The White Stripes, 2000

Spatial Color Composition for an Exhibition, Berlin, 1923, DeStijl

• Interested in the application of Neoplasticism to utopian living spaces• To reduce architecture to its most basic forms• Likened to painting because of planar units in each