Final Exam - Modern Art

Isamu Noguchi, Kouros, 1945, marble, 117" high

A five-month apprenticeship in 1927 with the renowned Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi led Noguchi to his own abstract sculptural language. Kouros betrays Noguchi's preoccupation in the mid-1940s with organic patterns and shapes rendered on a monumental scale. A great feat of imagination and engineering, it comprises eight interlocking pieces of pink Georgian marble, secured by a perfect balance in weight and two strategically placed pins. This precariousness evokes Noguchi's uncertainty about the state of the world after World War II, which he characterized as "the encroaching void." The title refers to a type of ancient Greek sculpture showing lone standing male figures, often striding forward into space. His specific point of reference was a famed example in The Met collection. Noguchi's Kouros is carved from pink marble and is over nine feet tall. Its name comes from the ancient Greek word for boy. The shapes in the sculpture are called "biomorphic" because they look like they could be bones or other body parts. Compare Kouros to the Peplos Kore. Probably ancient Greek sculpture inspired Noguchi. But he also said he got his ideas for this kind of sculpture from Japanese art and flower arrangements. Isamu Noguchi was born in California to a Japanese father and an American mother, but he spent most of his childhood in Japan. He moved back to the United States when he was fourteen with his mother and sister, and began to study art. When he was twenty-two, Noguchi worked as a part-time studio assistant to the famous sculptor, Constantin Brancusi, who taught him how to carve simple, organic shapes in stone.

Theo van Doesburg, Counter Composition XIII, 1925-1926, oil on canvas, 19⅝" x 19⅝

About 1924 Theo van Doesburg rebelled against Piet Mondrian's programmatic insistence on the restriction of line to vertical and horizontal orientations, and produced his first Counter-Composition. The direction consequently taken by Neo-Plasticism was designated "Elementarism" by van Doesburg, who described its method of construction as "based on the neutralization of positive and negative directions by the diagonal and, as far as color is concerned, by the dissonant. Equilibrated relations are not an ultimate result."¹ Mondrian considered this redefinition of Neo-Plasticism heretical; he was soon to resign from the De Stijl group. This canvas upholds the Neo-Plastic dictum of "peripheric" composition. The focus is decentralized and there are no empty, inactive areas. The geometric planes are emphasized equally, related by contrasts of color, scale, and direction. One's eyes follow the trajectories of isosceles triangles and stray beyond the canvas to complete mentally the larger triangles sliced off by its edges. The placement of the vertical axis to the left of center and the barely off-square proportions of the support create a sense of shifting balance. Theo van Doesburg, one of the founders and luminaries of the Dutch avant-garde group De Stijl ("The Style") and a colleague of Piet Mondrian, propelled the development of abstract painting and non-representational art. He saw abstraction as art's apotheosis. Van Doesburg's work is similar to many of his contemporaries who worked within the styles of constructivism, suprematism, and the Bauhaus school; all drew inspiration from Euclidean formalism, primary colors, political radicalism, and the free exchange between design, architecture, and fine art. He later gradually shifted away from painterly abstraction, a change evident in works such as the gouache Sans titre (1925-26). The artist produced hard-edge paintings as early as World War I, but also made lyrical, gestural paintings as late as the mid-1920s. Van Doesburg's beliefs about abstraction caused conflicts with fellow artists, leading him to compete with the Bauhaus school and fight with Mondrian. He died at the age of 47, while the development of non-representational painting was still in its infancy, but his influence remained profound.

Mark Rothko, White, Yellow and Red on Yellow, 1953, oil on canvas, 91" x 71"

Abstract Expressionism, the style of painting that achieved prominence in the 1950s, encompasses two very different sensibilities. One, exemplified by the work of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, is characterized by energetic brushwork and rhythmic, dynamic compositions; the other, contemplative in tone and made up of subtle color harmonies, relatively static compositions, and simple forms, is embodied by the paintings of Mark Rothko.By 1950 Rothko developed the compositional format that he was to use, with refinements and variations, for the rest of his life. In these completely abstract works, color and shape replace traditional narrative content and figurative imagery. Two or three horizontal bars of varying size and color dominate the large, primarily vertical canvases, and they appear to hover on the picture surface. This effect is produced in part by the "halo" created around the horizontal bands as they overlap the background color. It is also enhanced by the translucency of the paint, which was so diluted that it actually saturated and stained the fibers of the canvas. Although Rothko minimized the tactile nature of the medium, these paintings still retain a painterly quality in their subtle brushwork and in the ragged edges of the forms.In Rothko's oeuvre color varies greatly, and it evokes a full range of emotions. The primary hues of red and yellow that make up No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow) are bright and joyous, while other works are composed of dark, brooding maroons, blues, and greens. In the two years before his suicide in 1970, the artist produced a large series of dark paintings, the majority of which were executed on paper with acrylics. Made up of opaque, monochromatic grays, browns, and blacks, these works are generally simpler in structure and eliminated the floating effect that previously enlivened paintings like No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow). Rothko's signature compositions after 1950, and for the rest of his career, consisted of three or four horizontal bands of color. Works like No. 13 (White, Red, on Yellow) epitomized what he said was "the simple expression of the complex thought." The simplification of means and structure was not a formal exercise, but a vehicle through which to experience powerful, unverbalized emotion and revelation. Rothko's forms are reduced, but they are not geometric. Edges and boundaries are soft, frayed, feathered - merging imperceptibly as one ethereal field of color transitions into another, producing an effect that is almost halo-like. Luminosity is achieved with translucent veils of diluted pigment, sometimes applied with rags and sponges rather than brushes. In some areas, the paint is scumbled; in other places, it acts as a stain, saturating the canvas fibers. Using various types of wet media and varying the thickness of his paint layers, he sometimes changed the orientation of his pictures in the studio, depending on how their colors harmonized. Indeed, in No. 13 (White, Red, on Yellow), some drips travel upward, indicating that Rothko worked on this picture upside down for a period of time. In Rothko's work, the large scale of his paintings envelops the viewer, thereby creating a palpable and intimate experience. "Historically," he said, "the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however... is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human."

Theo van Doesburg, Composition VIII (The Cow), 1916-1917, oil on canvas, 14¾" x 25"

Acting on his mission to inform people of the tenets of De Stijl, van Doesburg abstracted the image of a grazing cow, beginning by creating figurative studies, and gradually changing the image until the cow became a carefully coordinated arrangement of colorful rectangles and squares. Van Doesburg used this composition, as well as his preliminary studies, in a treatise on De Stijl that he distributed for educational purposes. This painting is part of the artist's early foray into De Stijl, and demonstrates his passion for the burgeoning movement. This painting literally demonstrates the meaning of "abstracted" or "to abstract" in that it simplifies and reduces the thing depicted, transforming it into basic geometric structural components. A contrast between Dancers and Composition VIII (The Cow) demonstrates the change in his abstraction before and after creating De Stijl.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Apparition, 1959, oil on Masonite, 48" x 48"

Albers was a professor at the Bauhaus before leaving his native Germany in 1933 for the United States, where he taught at Yale University and Black Mountain College, among other art schools. As a teacher, his influence in this country was enormous and can be detected in the works of a diverse range of artists, including Peter Halley, Donald Judd, and Robert Rauschenberg. Impossibles (1931) dates from Albers's years at the Bauhaus and represents his experiments with nontraditional materials and techniques. The mechanical means of producing such glass pieces allowed him to achieve the discipline and detachment that he considered necessary to create nonrepresentational forms. Like other artists of his generation, Albers moved from a figurative style of picture making to geometrically based abstraction. Homage to the Square: Apparition, painted in 1959, is a disarmingly simple work, composed of four superimposed squares of oil color applied with a palette knife directly from the tube onto a white, primed Masonite panel. It is part of a series that Albers began in 1950 and that occupied him for 25 years. The series is defined by an unmitigating adherence to one pictorial formula: the square. The optical effects Albers created—shimmering color contrasts and the illusion of receding and advancing planes—were meant not so much to deceive the eye as to challenge the viewer's faculties of visual reception. This shift in emphasis from perception willed by the artist to reception engineered by the viewer is the philosophical root of the Homage to the Square series. Albers tried to teach the mechanics of vision and show even the uninformed viewer how to see. He was always proud that many nonart students took his classes at Yale. The Homage to the Square series is also distinguished by the carefully recorded inscriptions of technical details on the back of each panel. This codification of the making of the painting, along with the reductively systematic application of colors, anticipated much of the art of the mid-1960s, when painting was stripped of the transcendental, and (in the case of Conceptual art) the paint was often left out altogether.

Jean Hélion, Equilibrium, 1933-1934, oil on canvas, 38⅜" x 51⅝"

Between 1932 and 1935 Jean Hélion created a series of paintings exploring states of visual equilibrium. Among the earliest of these is Equilibrium (Collection Mr. and Mrs. Roy Friedman, Chicago), a simple composition of 1932 in which two curved rectangular shapes are held in balance by two slightly curved lines. In his working journal Hélion recorded the following observations about this work: "In searching for the effect of space and movement on the elements, that is to say in constructing a work in movement, rather in creating equilibrium out of movement, my images have become more pliant. . . . To establish relations between surfaces as complex as those which are defined by curves, it is necessary to arrange nuances." Following this initial experimentation, Hélion composed several variations on the theme of equilibrium. Generally he worked with drawings and oil studies before reaching the formal solutions of his large canvases. His concern in the present work is to establish a balance between the blocky, simple, essentially rectangular mass on the right with the more complex, more colorful, and varied forms on the left. The construction on the left, which is composed of overlapping and interpenetrating curves, bars, and lines, is not continuous. Careful inspection reveals that the unit of four elements in the upper left corner (the red, gray, and black bars and the green shape) does not touch the forms immediately below it. A similarly strategic use of discontinuous forms occurs in other works in the Equilibrium series. In the present painting the subtly disconnected arrangement contributes to the sense of movement and dispersion of the left side of the composition. The multiple hues used at the left also generate visual complexity. The horizontal curves on the left all point to the central white void, which is embraced by the more rigidly horizontal dark blue and light green arms of the stable construction on the right. Vibrant red and orange bars unite the edges of the composition with central forms and bind together right and left halves. A state of visual balance is thus achieved without resorting to the purely rectilinear, often programmatic formulations of the De Stijl artists who had influenced Hélion. The Equilibrium series, embodying ideas of suspension and tension of two-dimensional forms, inspired Alexander Calder, who was contemporaneously developing his wind-driven mobiles.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Oval Hanging Spatial Construction, No. 12, 1921, varnished plywood, partially painted with aluminum paint, and wire, 24" x 33" x 19"

Composed of ovals that nest and intersect, Spatial Construction no. 12 hangs suspended, moving slowly with any current of air. The ovals were measured out on a single flat sheet of plywood, precisely cut, then rotated within each other to make a three-dimensional object. The resulting form suggests a chart of planetary orbits, a cosmic structure. In companion pieces, Rodchenko applied the same principle and method to other basic geometric shapes, such as the square, but those works no longer survive. Rodchenko's interest in mathematical systems reflects the scientific bent of the Russian Constructivists, artists who aspired to create a radically new, radically rational art for the society that came into being with the Russian Revolution. Spatial Construction no. 12 is a stage in Rodchenko's progress away from conventional painting and toward an art taking place in space—ultimately, an art of social involvement. The work has no clear top or bottom, and no base to rest on. It is virtually weightless, with suspension and movement replacing mass. In short, it was designed to be everything traditional sculpture was not—to reimagine art from ground zero. The artist later reflected, "We created a new understanding of beauty, and enlarged the concept of art."

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Grid No. 9: Checkerboard with Light Colors, 1919, oil on canvas, 36⅞" x 41¾"

Composition with Grids: Checkerboard Composition with Light Colors was created in 1919 on an 86 x 106 cm canvas.[1] Mondrian used oil as his medium for this work. The canvas is divided into a geometric grid system with 16 x 16 cm individual rectangular units. Thin black horizontal and vertical intersecting lines separating the individual units from adjacent ones create the grid. It can be seen that if the piece is split down the center vertically, creating two separate rectangles, that it is reminiscent of Golden Section. His palette choice are the recognizable primary colors consisting of yellow, blue, red, white, and gray; however one difference that can be noted in this painting is that the intensity of the colors are lesser than other paintings and the value is very light. The piece has an overall hazy feeling that it elicits, along with a brighter and lighter colors; it induces a sense of life and movement. Mondrian painted the units in patterns of colors that are constantly creating new formations and invite the viewer to create their own experience through variations of personal grouping patters.[2] This artwork is one of the earliest examples of the de Stijl style. It is also one of the first in which Mondrian uses intersecting horizontal and vertical lines explicitly to create a canvas. Mondrian wrote, "Once we realize that equilibrated relationships in society signify what is just, then we shall realize that in art, likewise, the demands of life press forward when the spirit of age is ready."[3] Although there is no distinct balanced pattern to this painting, when it is viewed it manages to evoke a sense of harmony and equilibrium. Mondrian denies ever using the Golden Section, which was considered an expression of the universal harmony through a system of proportions, even though this piece resembles this pattern almost equivocally.[4] John Milner notes "Mondrian's mathematics were still mystical, and that movement relied upon proportion, as well as the kinetics of colour and position."[5] The canvas would not have the perceived movement and flow that is does had it not been for the patterns and groupings in which Mondrian placed the color on the canvas. There is no distinctive figure within this work of art and nothing truly stands out, but instead this piece is comprised of many smaller elements that work together to create a whole piece of art that can be experience in a personal way by the viewer. This serves as a successful example of one of the foundations of this de Stijl movement. As mentioned earlier, Mondrian's palette in this painting is not of his usual intense, vivid, and pure primary hues, but instead lighter variations. Composition with Grids: Checkerboard Composition with Light Colors, can be thought of as a reflection or "reconstruction of a morning or afternoon sky."[6] Even though this painting is quite systematic and ordered, it still has the ability to elicit a feeling of natural living. This was Mondrian's way of successfully deconstructing nature into a series of mathematically arranged rectangular units. It was not until 1919, the year in which this piece was created, that Mondrian came to the fulfillment of his ideals and how to express them artistically and dynamically. Although his style will go through many variations and Mondrian attempts numerous ways to express his ideals, this painting is one of the first in which his beliefs and thoughts were concrete in a way in which they could be expressed. His modular grid was established and this sets the basis for his future compositions. This painting serves as a tangible foundation on which Mondrian can build and expand his theories, standards, and principles onto his canvas .

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Pure Red Painting, Pure Yellow Painting, Pure Blue Painting, 1921, 3 painting in horizontal sequence, each painting is oil on canvas, each painting is 24⅝" x 20¼"

Distilling the art of painting into the primary colors from which all others can be made, the triptych realized a key imperative of modernist art: to pursue formal investigation to its logical end. In the eyes of Rodchenko and his fellow Constructivists this sweeping gesture had political as well as artistic significance, for his renunciation of painting put into action the words of his colleague Nikolai Tarabukin: "Current social circumstances dictate new forms of art." Having enacted the death of the old forms, Rodchenko embarked on an adventurous quest for new ones. This painting soon became what some would call his most famous. He is quoted writing, "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. Basic Colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation." Somewhat distancing himself from aspects of art that he had previously been so encapsulated by, though it is clear to see the influence that some of his abstract Art Nouveau background and his intrigue into Suprematism might have had. Rodchenko reinterprets the iconic art form of the Western tradition - the triptych - which was traditionally reserved for the representation of religious scenes. The piece reflects Rodchenko's interest in Malevich throughout these years, but instead of pursuing Malevich's spiritualism, he stressed the physical, material properties of painting - in this case, color. Rodchenko regarded these pictures as his final statement on painting. In the eyes of Rodchenko and his fellow Constructivists this sweeping gesture had political as well as artistic significance. His renunciation of painting put into action the words of his colleague Nikolai Tarabukin: "Current social circumstances dictate new forms of art." Having enacted the death of the old forms, Rodchenko embarked on an adventurous quest for new ones.

Arthur Dove, Sunrise I, 1936, tempera on canvas, 25" x 35"

Dove did a long series of paintings of sunrises that have a metaphysical character. He was trying to render the essence of the sun's energy and its power in the natural world. The rings in his paintings of sunrises represent light and warmth that emanate from the core of the sun to replace darkness and coldness. swelling sun slightly left of the center of the painting commands the viewers attention "It applied to all objects in nature, flowers, trees, people, apples, cows. These all have their certain condition of light, which establishes them to the eye, to each other, and to the understanding." expressive color and line

El Lissitsky, Proun 99, 1923, oil on wood, 51" x 39"

El Lissitzky was a designer, typographer, architect, and photographer affiliated with the Soviet Constructivist and Suprematist movements. He studied and worked as an architect and engineer in Germany and Russia before receiving an invitation from Marc Chagall in 1919 to teach at the Vitebsk School of Art in Belarus. There he encountered painter Kasimir Malevich, the recent founder of the Suprematist movement, which strove to create a style of purely non-objective painting comprised of a language of geometric forms. In 1920 Lissitzky coined the term "Proun"—an acronym for the Russian words meaning "project for the affirmation of the new"—to refer to a series of abstract works that combined the Suprematist lexicon of geometric, monochromatic forms with tools of architectural rendering. In Proun 99, the large composite object that dominates the upper left quadrant could either be a cube or a recessed meeting of three planes. The gridded triangle at the bottom appears to create a sense of depth, yet the elements above it seem to exist in their own, gravity-less space. Through constructing a complex dimensional space that hovers between the coherent and the impossible, Lissitzky strives to evoke utopia—literally "no place"—and to achieve the task of inventing a new art for a post-revolutionary Soviet society.

Piet Mondrian, Composition II with Red and Blue, 1929, oil on canvas, 15⅞" x 12⅝", Museum of Modern Art, New York City

For centuries, European painters had attempted to render three-dimensional forms in believable spaces-creating convincing illusions of reality. For example, Woman with a Water Jug by Johannes Vermeer. In contrast, Mondrian and other modernists wanted to move painting beyond naturalistic depiction to focus instead on the material properties of paint and its unique ability to express ideas abstractly using formal elements such as line and color. Around 1930 Mondrian's art attained a highpoint of purity and sobriety, for which the groundwork had been prepared in the paintings of the previous years, the 1929 Composition, for example. Actually, the Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930 is a variation on the picture of the preceding year, at least in so far as the linear framework is concerned. But for that very reason the subtle differences in the work - such as the subdivision of the left strip of the painting into three unequal rectangles, one of which is the blue square - are all the more remarkable. They show that there can never be any question in Mondrian of a preconceived pattern for a composition, but that every work arises out of cautious and painstaking association with the elements of painting, which must be resolved anew in every work. Especially noteworthy in this work is the large red square in the upper right corner which, like the white square in the painting of the previous year, is bounded by only two lines within the painting and thus has a tendency to grow further, in rhythmic expansion, beyond the edge of the canvas. The large area of a brilliant primary red gives this work a strong accent in the major mode. This quality is all the more striking in a canvas dating from 1929, since in the same year Mondrian also produced paintings of an extreme sobriety, such as the two compositions with black lines, one of which is reproduced above. There, he avoided the use of color completely; the contrasts of the lines, whose thickness also varies, determines the character and balance of the composition.

Mark Rothko, Rust on Blue / No. 61, 1953, oil on canvas, 9'6" x 7'7"

In Rust and Blue (1953), Rothko uses layered color to enrich the hues in the painting and to lend it a quality that the artist described as that of "inner light." Titian's Noli me tangere takes a similar approach to color in order to lend a rich luminosity to the surface, one which will complement the work's religious subject matter. Now applied in thin washes (often composed of both oil and egg-based media), Rothko's color achieved a new luminosity. The artist's technique appears simple, but on close examination is richly varied in its range of effects. At times, paint can be seen running upward across the surface; this is because Rothko often inverted a picture while working on it, sometimes changing the final orientation at a late stage. The work was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961. In common with Rothko's other works from this period, No 61 consists of large expanses of colour delineated by uneven, hazy shades. This painting by Mark Rothko dates from 1953, and features the signature contemporary style of this artist, with 'colour fields' of rust and blue. The artist would use the term 'inner light' to describe his approach to colour within his abstract paintings. There was a careful consideration around the rectangles within his pieces, as well as the combination of tones that went into each iteration. Those new to his work would perhaps not understand this straight away. His intention was for us to feel the painting all around us, which takes time and energy from the viewer - a simple, quick browse of his work would not generally get the feeling that he was attempting to create. It is hard to tell from the image featured here, but No. 61 (Rust and Blue) from 1953 actually features multiple layers of oils which served to add a luminous effect to the key parts of the composition. As different as it may appear to traditional art, some academics have actually drawn comparisons with the work of Titian, and specifically his painting titled Noli me tangere, from 1514, which also used a similar technique of layering paint for a rich finish.

Alexander Calder, Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, 1939, painted steel wire and sheets of aluminum, 8'6" x 9'6"

Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, a mobile by American artist Alexander Calder, is located at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, New York, United States. It is one of Calder's earliest hanging mobiles and "the first to reveal the basic characteristics of the genre that launched his enormous international reputation and popularity. The sculpture suggests the movement of underwater life.[3] Calder became a leading exponent of kinetic art, combining his engineering training with his studies of art in New York and Paris. According to a review in the New York Sun, "There, he became enthralled with the biomorphic surrealism of Joan Miró as well as the powerful choreography of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham."[4] After experimenting with motorized sculptures, Calder began creating works that moved and floated when touched or exposed to air currents. Calder composed motion with works like Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, "harnessing the performative potential of the mechanical sciences."[4] Turning in its place, the mobile evokes the soft undulations of the ocean floor. The colors and forms of the sculpture further this evocation of marine life, creating figural allusions to its namesake - a lobster and a fish tail. Its motion, sensitive to even the softest blow, resembles the response of the sea to a crossing boat, the activation of the sculpture's forms echoing the rhythmic stirring of gentle ocean waves. The ability to shape and follow the movements of the mobile is especially delightful for the viewer, rousing a childlike fascination as one watches its frame shake and wiggle. Enhancing the interaction between the sculpture and the individual, Calder separates his works from the truly 'grounded' practices of traditional sculpture, continuing his interest in the play between natural and mechanical movement.

Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956, Oil on canvas, 6' 8" X 8' 4"

Mahoning, a monumental armature of bold black enamel strokes laid against a white background, seems to be a record of Franz Kline's spontaneous gestures; its ragged brushwork and slashes of pigment suggest the free movement of the brush across the canvas. Despite this appearance of immediacy, however, the painting—like many of Kline's abstractions—was deliberately planned. He based it on a small, preliminary drawing made on the page of a telephone book that was projected onto the canvas. Atypically, Kline incorporated collage elements that seem to reference the drawing into Mahoning, affixing sheets of paper to the canvas under layers of black paint. The composition's strong internal structure plays against the frame of the canvas, with powerful diagonals that seem to break through the edges of the image. Although Kline's paintings are not meant to represent landscapes, he titled a number of them, including this one, after towns near Wilkes-Barre, in the Pennsylvania coal country of his childhood. What started out as a career in illustration soon became a pioneering vision in Abstract Expressionism after Franz Kline saw enlarged images of his work on a Bell-Opticon opaque projector at Willem de Kooning's studio. Elaine de Kooning recalled this event as happening in either 1948 or 1949. Elaine would credit Kline's introduction to the projector as causing a "total instantaneous conversion to abstraction" by Kline and a complete change in his style in painting from figurative or semi-abstract work to full abstraction. What makes Kline's black and white works so special is that they don't just consist of, some even call them violent, aggressive, black brushstrokes on white canvases. The two elements are essential to each other's existence. Rather than focusing on the white areas as the "negative space", he painted them in alternating order with equal consideration. Kline would judiciously create small scale studies for each of his final paintings on canvas. He would often paint them on post card-sized pieces of newspaper, working and re-working each gesture to achieve perfect balance. Then, once the composition was finished Kline projected it onto a large canvas and repeated the process, with all its intensity.

Theo van Doesburg, Counter-Composition in Dissonance 16, 1925, oil on canvas, 39⅜" x 70⅞"

Neoplasticism Germany Van Doesburg felt that abstraction's unique value was its ability to achieve social order and universal harmony with its precise, orderly geometry and vibrant, contrasting colors. He also felt that his reductive method had spiritually and morally uplifting qualities. This geometrically abstract painting is the most famous work in van Doesburg's Counter-Compositions series. It consists of rectangles outlined in black and tilted at 45-degree angles relative to the edges of the canvas. The shapes are smoothly filled in with different tones of red, blue, yellow, gray, and white. By tilting the rectangles in an abrupt but consistent way and shifting tones slightly, van Doesburg attempted to create a more dynamic and complex balance of abstract forms than that usually expected in De Stijl, which is best known from the works of Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian, Pier and Ocean No. 5: Sea and Starry Sky, 1915, charcoal and gouache on paper, 34⅝ x 44"

Pier and Ocean marks a definitive step in Mondrian's path toward pure abstraction. Here he has eliminated diagonal and curved lines as well as color; the only true reference to nature is found within the title and the horizontal lines that allude to the horizon and the verticals that evoke the pilings of the pier. The rhythms created by the alternating lines and their varying lengths presages Mondrian's mature dynamic, depicting an asymmetrical balance as well as the pulse of the ocean waves. Reviewing this work, Theo van Doesburg wrote: "Spiritually, this work is more important than the others. It conveys the impression of peace; the stillness of the soul." Mondrian had begun to translate what he saw as the underlying ordered patterns of nature into a pure abstract language.

Kurt Schwitters, Merz 31B / Radiating World, 1920, oil paint on collage made of torn and cut paper with printed text and paint, ink, graphite and crayon on board, 37½" x 26¾"

Radiating World (Merzbild 31B) may well be an icon of the dada movement that flourished in Hannover around 1920 chiefly through the efforts of Kurt Schwitters. Not only does the collage declare its dada content through fragmentation, enigma, and inclusion of the printed word, but the very reason for its having been created can be considered a manifesto of the artist's beliefs. Schwitters, who began his career as an expressionist painter and poet, turned to the Zurich dada movement around 1918. He responded to the irrationality, irony, and chance of dada, recognizing it as a revolutionary symbol of a postwar world shattered beyond reason and meaning. He coined the nonsense-word Merz to set his own work apart because his creative impulse was at odds with the iconoclasm advocated by the members if Berlin dada. In 1924 he felt compelled to state: "I am not a Dadaist," and yet he called dada a fancy game, an amusement. Seen in this light, he was a Dadaist, but one who foresaw that its old form (he called it Dáda) had served to eradicate expressionism, whereas the new form ("Dada") would serve constructivism and abstraction. As he abandoned expressionism, Schwitters turned from painting to collage, perhaps in response to Picasso, Braque, and Gris, or following the lead of the Italian futurists, who were frequently exhibited at Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin and had incorporated newsprint into their collages. In stark contrast to his performances, where he chanted poems before shocked audiences, the making of a collage was a meditative, introverted activity for Schwitters. Radiating World (Merzbild 31B) may be the last in a series of large early collages.

Paul Klee, Crystal Gradations, 1921, watercolor on paper, 9⅝" x 12⅜"

Reflections on Klee's creative activity during Bauhaus period must first take into consideration mutual dependence, and the close relationship in his theoretical ideas and his artistic activity, the watercolours Crystal Gradations, painted in 1921 and 1923, were clearly the result of his methodical experiment with the theory of colour, Nevertheless, Klee's fundamental principle that the artist does not try 'to put the naked law into the actual but that the laws should only be underneath so that flowers may grow from them' is manifestly led by this work. In the handling of mixed colours the painter works with layers and calculates every step according to its peculiar mixture: the tone values are mixed to exact proportions in pots.The colour movement is measured by glazing, in which the gradations are added with layers of transparent watercolours on a field divided into stripes. Sometimes a stripe is reserved. Every layer of colour has to dry before the next one can be applied. This method is the base of Klee's black watercolours of 1908.Between 1921 and 1923 a series of watercolours, demonstrating the glazing method, appear in which the artist, to use his own words 'tried out the partial colour actions we have been discussing one after another. Klee kept exact records in his catalogue of works of the colour he used as a starting-point for the gradations.Crystal Gradation is an example of a first group of works in 'Chiaroscuro painting weighted with colour.' By mutual shifting, by box-structures and overlapping, diminutive forms, increasing and diminishing, are arranged in a dynamic play of relations to which the light/dark gradation gives the appearance of spatial movement between background and foreground. The forms stand out illuminated in stages on a dark ground, so that the grey tones, moving from the black to the white polarity are weighted with colour. The light red and turquoise green colour-effect of Crystal Gradation reminds one of smoky quartz.

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-1951, oil on canvas, 8' x 17'9"

The Latin title Vir Heroicus Sublimis can be translated "Man, heroic and sublime." Newman once asked, "If we are living in a time without a legend that can be called sublime, how can we be creating sublime art?" This painting, his largest at the time, is one response. Newman wanted the viewer to stand close to this work, and he likened the experience to a human encounter: "It's no different, really, from meeting another person. One has a reaction to the person physically. Also, there's a metaphysical thing, and if a meeting of people is meaningful, it affects both their lives." Barnett Newman's work is considered part of the body of paintings created by Abstract Expressionists. While his artwork contains many elements which are typical of this area, it is also unique in several ways. Newman's painting, Vir Heroicus Sublimis is just one of many examples of his break from Abstract Expressionist traditions. Vir Heroicus Sublimis features bold red colour. His use of bright shades like this is typical of the artist, who choose to make a statement with his choice of vivid paints, invading the thoughts of viewers with striking hues. His canvas is seemingly separated into sections with vertical lines in various shades. These lines are thin and yet, they dilute the impact that would otherwise be had by the brilliant red. Leaping Forward In Abstraction The style seen in Vir Heroicus Sublimis was developed as a response to what Newman thought people in society needed at that time. What was to come in this painting was heralded in Onement I. Newman saw Onement I as a leap forward in his work. It includes the main full incarnation of what he later called a zip. His zip is a vertical band of colour. Those same bands of colour are evident in Vir Heroicus Sublimis. The Latin title of the painting means "man, courageous and eminent". The work endeavours to inspire a response from those viewing it with its staggering scale. It was Newman's biggest canvas at the time and positively emanated colour. Newman's work, for this reason, also falls under the subset of chromatic reflection.

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, 1930, oil on canvas, 20" x 20

The canvas is small and uses only the simplest of colors: red, blue, yellow, white and black. The composition is similarly reduced to the simplest of rectilinear forms, squares and rectangles defined by vertical and horizontal lines. One would hardly suspect that we are seeing the artist's determination to depict the underlying structure of reality. neo-plasticism Mondrian believed his abstraction could serve as a universal pictorial language representing the dynamic, evolutionary forces that govern nature and human experience. In fact, he believed that abstraction provides a truer picture of reality than illusionistic depictions of objects in the visible world. Perhaps this is why Mondrian characterized his style as "abstract real" painting. His use of the term "composition" (the organization of forms on the canvas) signals his experimentation with abstract arrangements. combined his development of an abstract style with his interest in philosophy, spirituality, and his belief that the evolution of abstraction was a sign of humanity's progress. Mondrian's painting may also reflect his association with the Theosophical Society, Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow demonstrates his commitment to relational opposites, asymmetry, and pure planes of color. Mondrian composed this painting as a harmony of contrasts that signify both balance and the tension of dynamic forces. Mondrian viewed his black lines not as outlines but as planes of pigment in their own right; an idea seen in the horizontal black plane on the lower right of the painting that stops just short of the canvas edge (see image above). Mondrian eradicates the entire notion of illusionistic depth predicated on a figure in front of a background. He achieves a harmonious tension by his asymmetrical placement of primary colors that balance the blocks of white paint. Notice how the large red square at the upper right, which might otherwise dominate the composition, is balanced by the small blue square at the bottom left. Mondrian used varying shades of blacks and whites, some of which are subtly lighter or darker. Seen up close, this variety of values and textures create a surprising harmony of contrasts. Even the visible traces of the artist's brushwork counter what might otherwise be a rigid geometric composition and balance the artist's desire for a universal truth with the intimately personal experience of the artist.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Oval with Color Planes I, 1914, oil on canvas, 42⅜" x 31⅜

The geometry of this composition, made two years after Mondrian moved from Holland to Paris, is directly based on sketches of partially demolished buildings, with exposed floors, chimneys, and patches of wallpaper. Mondrian believed that horizontal and vertical lines, such as those he used here, expressed an underlying, universal order. Composition in Oval with Colour Planes 1 is one of Piet Mondrian's lesser known works, but it is nonetheless equally representative of the deep held philosophical beliefs he so consistently sought to demonstrate in his work The piece shows Mondrian's beliefs about the fundamental unity of nature and of the universe through his stunning semi defined combinations of geometric patterns. The piece is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Piet Mondrian created Composition in Oval with Colour Planes 1 in 1914, two years into his first spell living in Paris. At this time Mondrian was undergoing a radical change to not only artwork, but his lifestyle as a whole. He was moving on from the traditional, safe impressionistic approach imprinted upon him by his family in Holland, and evolving into a new, unprecedented abstract approach. Mondrian went so far as to remove a letter 'a' from his original Dutch name 'Mondriaan', making a statement of intent surrounding his newfound calling. Mondrian's deep rooted philosophy is represented in this painting by the use of vertical and horizontal lines, showing how different individual parts can click together to form a larger whole. This composition also reflects Mondrian's personal transitional period of the time, with the structures in the painting based on demolished buildings from Paris. In the painting there are visible structures resembling wallpaper, chimneys and exposed floors. This shows Mondrian's inspiration of his new surroundings, but is again very cleverly representative of his theory of neoplasticism. The universe, for Mondrian, is very much like a building in that it is the sum of unique individual parts, parts which naturally and harmoniously come together to form the world we see before us. Composition in Oval with Colour Planes 1 is a snapshot of an intriguing phase in Mondrian's life, but shows a demonstration of the artistic and philosophical principles which continued to guide him throughout his entire career.

Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1913, oil on canvas, 47¼" x 29¾"

This is an early example of the geometric mode of painting that Mondrian called Neo-Plasticism. The abstract two-dimensional nature of these compositions formed a new universal aesthetic language that was popularized through the magazine De Stijl. The avant-garde movement known by the same name held the promise of constructing a postwar world with a common point of visual reference, a way of abolishing artistic and even social hierarchies. Here, Mondrian uses thick black lines to divide the canvas into eleven different rectangles, some of which are painted in primary shades of red and blue. He created lighter hues by mixing primary colors with white. Over time, Mondrian ceased diluting his palette altogether in favor of pure primary colors.

Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914, oil on canvas, 68¼" x 41⅜"

This monumental painting is the centerpiece of a series that evokes the dynamism, pageantry, and danger of life in Berlin during World War I. The painting's collagelike appearance, dramatic color, and emotional brushwork attest to Hartley's skillful synthesis of Cubism and German Expressionism. Hartley's composition is an abstract portrait of Karl von Freyburg, a Prussian lieutenant whom the artist loved and who died in the war. Von Freyburg is portrayed symbolically with the initials, "K.v.F."; his regiment number, 4; his age at death, 24; and the Iron Cross that he received posthumously. Portrait of a German Officer is also a commemorative image of von Freyburg, who had died in October 1914, an early casualty of World War I. It is a surprisingly large canvas—about the height of a human being. Hartley has filled the composition with the pomp and pageantry of the military. Von Freyburg's initials, "Kv.F," are included in the lower left of the painting (left). The red number four on a dark blue field (below) refers to von Freyburg's military regiment, and the yellow "24" refers to his age at the time of his death. The letter "E" appears twice in the composition: the red, curvilinear E on a gold background in the middle of the painting (right) is a battalion marker that refers to the Bayerische Eisenbahn, the name of von Freyburg's railroad battalion. A second cursive E on what looks to be an epaulette in the lower right could refer to either Hartley's birth name, Edmund, or Queen Elisabeth of Greece, the royal patron of von Freyburg's regiment. The silver star connecting to a serpentine line near the yellow 24 is a boot spur, referring to von Freyburg's position as a cavalry officer (above). Finally, the stylized cross with white trim (see image at top of page) is a German Iron Cross—a medal awarded to soldiers who demonstrated exceptional valor. Von Freyburg earned this medal shortly before his death. If we imagine this vertical canvas as an analog to a human figure, this decoration might be understood as being worn on the chest, suspended from a red and white striped ribbon. Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer (detail), 1914, oil on canvas, 173.4 x 105.1 cm (Alfred Stieglitz Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) Hartley's painting is also more than a portrait of an individual: it expresses the rising German nationalism that he witnessed while living in Berlin. The diagonal blue and white checkerboard pattern (left) is a reference to the flag of Bavaria, and so too are the pair of blue and white stripes on the right side of the image. The red, white, and black stripes on the bottom third of the canvas represent a Kriegsschiffgösch or German naval war flag, turned upside-down. This flag typically had a black cross in the middle of it, but Hartley omitted this element so as to bring compositional importance to the medal in the upper part of the painting. Beneath the German flag are the standards of two of Germany's enemies: the red and white St. George's Cross of England, and the black, yellow, and red tricolor of Belgium.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Density and Weight, 1919, oil on canvas, 48⅛" x 28¾"

Until 1920, Rodchenko mostly created paintings and graphic works, many of which he created using a stencil, compass, and ruler. He created this canvas also not without drawing tools. Most likely, despite the explanatory name, the viewer will not be able to recognize the similarity between certain objects. In general, «non-objective» paintings of Rodchenko appeared not without the influence of Malewicz's Suprematist ideas. However, as a creator of the series «Black on Black» that he began working on two years earlier and continued by this painting, Rodchenko was an artist, and not just a "painting engineer".

Bart van der Leck, Geometric Composition No. 2, 1917, oil on canvas, 37" x 39⅜"

Van der Leck began to paint completely abstract compositions after meeting Piet Mondrian in 1916. The following year, he became a co-founder of De Stijl, the Dutch magazine that promoted a highly geometric abstract art linked to spiritual and utopian ideas. However, he soon fell out with Mondrian and the other De Stijl artists, and began to include figurative elements in his work once more. Leaving time at the factory, the moment when a large group of workers departs the factory and pours into the street, is a theme that fascinates Van der Leck. He makes several paintings and drawings with this theme, from fairly realistic to almost abstract. Increasing degree of abstraction He made this version during the period when he was part of the artist's group De Stijl. By using narrow and broad surfaces in black and the primary colours of red, yellow and blue against a white background, he achieves an increasing degree of abstraction. However, Van der Leck had no wish to let go of reality altogether. And for that reason he eventually left De Stijl. Later he remarked on that as follows: 'For me, painting has always been the representative of ordinary life, I was never too keen on the so-called abstraction'. Recognizable The architecture of the factory is still recognizable in the tight horizontal and vertical elements at the top of this painting: specifically the windows and a chimney. The smaller, staggered blocks in the middle depict the crowd moving forward and the horizontal stripes below them represent the street.

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919-1920, reconstruction of the lost model, made in 1992-1993, Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, Germany

Vladimir Tatlin was, with Kazimir Malevich, widely considered the most important figure of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1910s and 20s. The visionary Monument to the Third International was his most famous work. Commissioned to create a monument to the Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Tatlin conceived of his building as the headquarters for the Third International - the world organization of the Communist party founded in 1919 and intended to spread global revolution. In doing so, he created not a memorial to the past, but a structure intended to bring a utopian future into being. Tatlin's radical proposal was for a towering structure of steel and glass with the unprecedented height of 400 meters (1,300 feet) - a third taller than the Eiffel Tower. His design for the Monument to the Third International is anchored by an enormous, diagonally thrusting girder around which two spiraling forms wind upwards. Further emphasizing the radical nature of his plan, Tatlin envisioned four tiers of glass-walled chambers that would rotate at different speeds within his dynamic steel frame. Lowest is a cylinder that would house the legislature and revolve once a year; above it is a slanted pyramid designed to hold the government's executive branch that would rotate once a month. Third highest is a smaller cylinder that turned once a day and would house the press bureau; this in turn is surmounted by a hemisphere that would rotate hourly and was conceived to contain a radio station and an apparatus for projecting slogans into the sky. Tatlin's tower on view at 432 Park Avenue Tatlin's tower inspired the Soviet critic Viktor Shklovsky to proclaim: "The monument is made of iron, glass, and revolution." A pinnacle of visionary modernist design, the Monument to the Third International would never be built, existing only in the form of wooden models that Tatlin and his students constructed and exhibited in public. Over the course of the 1920s, these models were lost.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Red Canna, c. 1923, oil on canvas, 36" x 29⅞"

With Red Canna, Georgia O'keeffe continued the tendency to distill abstract patterns from natural sources, but now vastly enlarging the fragment of the blossom to fill the thirty-six-inch canvas. The enlargement of motif coincided with her Bing Trees and magnified leaves, also begun in 1924, and, like the latter, her large flowers were drawn from close-up study of natural forms. The restrained brushwork is typical of O'Keeffe's handling of oils, creating peculiarly smoothed shapes and subtle spatial ambiguities in her graded passages from intense tones to pearly whites. As the shapes swell and taper across the plane, they pulse with color and energy, suggesting the artist's continuing fascination with themes of natural vitality, translated to the microcosm of the blossom. Despite the apparent dissimilarity in subject, the floral enlargements provided and analogue to the forces of nature O'Keeffe had previously examined and are thematically related to her abstractions, her Texas skycaps, and her Lake George panoramas. After Stieglitz passed away in 1946, O'Keeffe moved to Abiquiu, New Mexico, where she designed an expansive adobe house with a walled garden that included fruit trees, vegetables, and herbs, as well as flowers (she planted bulbs of black irises but they never bloomed.). She painted poppies, hollyhocks and copper roses but her greater interest lay in painting the golden landscape and her mysterious patio door. When O'Keeffe died in 1986, she had been unable to paint for more than a decade due to macular degeneration.Flowers, however, remain the subject of her best-known and most desirable paintings. Red Canna is one of Georgia O'Keeffe's masterpieces, which was painted in the year 1924. This painting depicts a red canna flower, which is one of the many flowers O'Keeffe painted in her brilliant artistic career. One of the things that her flower paintings have in common is the fact that they are magnified so as to make one appreciate the beauty that a tiny flower has, and which very often most people tend to overlook. Artistic Techniques This oil painting is composed of abstract patterns derived from natural sources and depicted by means of restrained brushwork, which is typical for Georgia O'Keeffe. The colors are so beautifully chosen and they complement each other in a unique way. They are vivid and bright, and evoke energy and natural vitality. The intense red and orange hues subtly change into pearly whites, and this is one of the main features that make this painting really wonderful. Noted for her sensual abstractions of flowers and southwestern motifs, O'Keeffe is one of the most recognized twentieth-century American artists. Raised in a family that stressed education of women, O'Keeffe attended the Art Institute of Chicago before going to New York to study at the Art Students League. After working as a commercial artist, she accepted a teaching position at Columbia College in South Carolina. In 1916 her paintings came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, whose gallery was a venue for European and American avant-garde art, featuring artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley. Stieglitz's gallery hosted O'Keeffe's first solo show, and he became her most vigorous promoter until his death in 1946. O'Keeffe and Stieglitz married in 1924. "Red Canna" is among the earliest of her enlarged, abstracted flower paintings and, despite its small size, demonstrates her interest in imbuing natural phenomena with monumental impact. O'Keeffe loved gardening and was often inspired by a specific flower that she then painted in a consistent color through a series of a dozen or more paintings. In these extreme close-ups she established a new kind of modern still life with no references to atmospheric effects or realistic details, reflecting her statement,"I paint because color is significant."

Arthur Dove, Abstraction No. 2, 1910-1911, oil on paper on wood, 8½" x 10½"

breakthrough in achieving total abstraction in his paintings concurrent with abstraction of Franz Marc, Dealunay, etc work became notorious when exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz NY gallery inspired by forms, processes, and events in nature (landscapes, flowers, plants, trees, animals and birds, weather phenomena) concern with nature in paintings paralleled his enjoyment and study of nature in the rest of his life was a naturalist on the lookout for scenes to paint - intricate details of nature were important to him Dove the artist and Dove the naturalist were inextricable and explains his approach to abstraction sketchy painting richly, diversely colored made in years before WWI dominated by a bright yellow, triangular shape outlined in black and punctuated with large black spots blotchy areas of blue and violet, loosely painted areas of red, pink ,dark green, brown and blue yellow form is meant to suggest the wings of a butterfly and evoke its light weight, rapid movements and vibrant colors strokes of brown refer to small branches the butterfly has perched on it other various colors suggest flowers, leaves and plants purpose was not to illustrate these natural forms but to create abstract imagery from observing them - they were a point of inspriation and point of departure from the physical tangible world

Constantin Brancusi, Torso of a Young Man, 1917, brass, 25" high, Cleveland Museum of Art

cylinder which, towards its bottom, splits into two shorter cylinders. Only in the most abstract sense can it be taken as representing a human form. And yet, at the same time, its suggestions are unmistakable. With three simple geometric shapes, Constantin Brancusi has successfully evoked a torso and pelvis. What seems like a meaningless shape at the top has, by the time it reaches its bottom, achieved a form that conjures up all manner of connotations within the viewer's imagination. It is a piece that challenges the viewer, that asks us to examine how our minds work. The pelvic suggestions of the shape have obvious taboo connotations - and yet, at the same time, what we are looking at is ultimately an abstract shape; any connotations we draw from it are those which we bring to the sculpture ourselves. This effect taps into Constantin Brancusi's main legacy as a sculptor: he demonstrated once and for all that sculpture does not need to be straightforwardly representational to have a profound effect on its audience. Hoping to reveal the "true sense of things," Brancusi mused, "What can sculpture do without?" This sculpture reduces the human form to a timeless, universal essence. The smooth, highly polished brass surface was unusual at a time when most metal sculptures were cast in dull bronze. Not only does the reflective surface unify the parts into one continuous form, but it also dematerializes the sculpture's mass, transforming the figure into a spiritual lightness. Brancusi made three versions of this sculpture: a wood version (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and two in brass (this museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden).

Constantin Brancusi, Princess X, 1915, bronze, 24¼" x 16" x 8¾", Musee Georges Pompidou, Paris

depicting the Princess Marie Bonaparte, a psychoanalyst in her own right and great supporter of Freud. polished bronze atop a limestone block part of the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. originally part of a "notorious scandal" when the Salon des Indépendants removed Princess X from display for its apparent obscene content, after some objected to the sculpture's phallic resemblance. Brâncuși was reportedly shocked and declared the incident a misunderstanding; he had created Princess X to evoke feminine desire and vanity. Brâncuși insisted the sculpture had been his rendition of Marie Bonaparte and discussed the comparison of the bronze figure to the princess. He described his detestation of Marie, as a "vain woman." He claimed she went as far as placing a hand mirror on the table at mealtimes, so she could gaze upon herself. The sculpture's C-like form reveals a woman looking over and gazing down, as if looking into an object. The large anchors of the sculpture resemble the "beautiful bust" which she possessed. Without knowing the context, to a viewer Princess X could look like an erect penis. The princess as seen shown to the right, Brâncuși allows to gaze upon herself in an eternal loop locked in the bronze sculpture. distinctive kind of modernity and timelessness simple form of a woman Constantin Brâncuși's abstracted, unadorned sculptures and innovative material techniques widely influenced modernist sculpture, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. The artist created graceful, simple structures that frequently resembled biomorphic forms. He often used direct carving methods and rejected the more conventional modes that his one-time boss, Auguste Rodin, embraced. The forms and folklore of Cycladic, African, and Romanian cultures served as major inspirations. Throughout Brâncuși's oeuvre, recurring sculptural motifs include spare human heads and phallic columns. abstract interpretation of the female form. Viewed with the feminine in mind, other observers might see a woman's bust and neck leading up toward her head, which is craning down to gaze at her own reflection in a mirror, as represented by the sculpture's highly polished surface. Throughout his career as a sculptor, Brancusi would be frequently misunderstood in his efforts to create art that adhered to his philosophy of interpreting "the idea, the essence of things" as opposed to literal appearance.

Morgan Russell, Synchromy to Light No. 2 / Synchromy in Blue Violet, 1913, oil on canvas, 13" x 9⅝

experiment in color and form was aware of the avant-garde movements cubism, orphism and futurism moved from New York to settle in Paris and turned his attention from sculpture to painting rhythmic use of color similar to musical composition which he termed synchronism interested in color theory three-dimensional forms of figural sculpture exhibited his paintings first in Europe and then in New York abandoned his style by the 1930s his work suggested to contemporaries the possibilities of a new style of abstract painting that emphasized color Synchromism is based on the premise that colour and sound are similar phenomena such as vibrations. The idea is that colours in a painting can be orchestrated in a similar way that a composer arranges notes in a piece of music.

Constantin Brancusi, Newborn, 1915, marble, 8" x 6" x 8"

sleek, smooth sculpture by —a shimmering ovoid form seemingly floating in space considered the most important sculptor of the 20th century polishing the pieces meticulously for several days to achieve a glow that indicates infinite permanence in the surrounding space "What my work is aiming at is, above all, realism: I pursue the inner, hidden reality, the very essence of objects in their own intrinsic fundamental nature; this is my only deep preoccupation." There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things. simplified his forms to the extreme, to depict that essence, stripped of all ornamentation or distracting outer appearance. His works were typically smooth, and often highly polished; he used basic shapes, often ovoid. something emerging, from a womb, a chrysalis, an egg, something that is already perfectly formed yet at the same time full of potential and possibilities, something unknowing and unknowable, fragile yet surprisingly robust, infinitely precious, brand shiny new, pristine, unblemished. I wasn't conscious of these thoughts when I chose the object to focus on, but in contemplating it, it seems to encompass all of these things quite perfectly. The crack and the sliced-off end of the sculpture (an ovoid, like the womb and the egg) give us a glimpse inside, and there is a little nodule, perhaps like a tiny foot emerging. The curving central ridge of the Newborn echoes that of the wooden Head of a Child, but the mouth is much more radically stylized: the ovoid is sharply sliced off into a flat oval plane. Only a small curl of marble remains at the bottom to suggest a chin. The oversized opening indicates a baby's wide-open mouth emitting a noisy wail, thus lending affectionate wit to the elegant form. With it's evocation of either an egg or a cell, Newborn is a metaphor for birth as well as a portrayal of an infant's head. The theme also points to the newborn quality of Brancusi's art and this particularly bold sculpture. The sculptor's obsession with the moment of origin reveals his aspirations toward originality, perhaps the preeminent claim to merit among the modernist vanguard. The serial motifs that characterize Brancusi's work prove his originality by testing it: the seeming repetitiveness of his sculptures only demonstrates more compellingly the individual distinction of each. When looking at this work one immediately recognizes through scale the similarities between it and the fertility sculptures of the Paleolithic period, such as the Woman of Willendorf. However, through the angularity and simplicity of its form one might recognize this sculpture as being closely related to early Cycladic art, such as the Harpist (latter part of the 3 rd millennium BCE). Brancusi's The Newborn holds the "elemental power" of these works of Cycladic sculpture, but his work does not hold power in this relationship alone. The Newborn was carved from a single, small piece of marble into an ovoid form. A large relief has been carved out of the lower portion of this object with a small chip remaining, which functions somewhat as a chin for the figure. A raised triangular shaped form has been carved from the upper portion of what could be considered the mouth of the figure, moving up towards the upper portion of the sculpture. There are no eyes or any other features to this form that would distinguish it as a figure of a child's head. Still, minus these other distinguishing features we recognize this form as one of a screaming child. What I believe is important about this work, and important about Brancusi's work in general, is that it is not a portrait of a child, but a form that evokes the qualities of an infant. This quality is further reinforced by Brancusi's decision to display this sculpture low to the viewer's gaze in order to assist us in the reading, as I addressed later. The Newborn, was highly innovative for its time and introduced the world to a new form of sculpture. Brancusi's forms looked to the past for inspiration for their pure simplicity and looked to the future where they have inspired sculptors of the later 20th century. Brancusi stated, "What my work is aiming at is, above all, realism: I pursue the inner, hidden reality, the very essence of objects in their own intrinsic fundamental nature; this is my only deep preoccupation". Brancusi does capture this realism, though not in a representational sense. He does capture the essence of these figurative ideas though a relationship with his abstract forms. Brancusi gave us a minimalist and abstract view of sculpture at a time when most sculpture was still figurative.

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1925, bronze, 54" high

streamlined form stripped of individualizing features communicates the notion of flight itself rather than describing the appearance of a particular bird. beveled top of the tapering form, a slanted edge accelerating the upward movement of the whole As was customary in Brancusi's work, the brass is smoothed and polished to the point where the materiality of the sculpture is dissolved in its reflective luminosity. Brancusi's spiritual aspirations, his longing for transcendence of the material world and its constraints concentrated on the animals' movement, rather than their physical attributes eliminated wings and feathers, elongated the swell of the body, and reduced the head and beak to a slanted oval plane Balanced on a slender conical footing, the figure's upward thrust appears unfettered. This sculpture is part of a series that includes seven marble sculptures and nine bronze casts. lightly off-balance, with a very high center of gravity Bird in Space looks like nothing we would recognize as a bird. The simplicity of the abstract shape conveys what is truly real for the artist: the essence of the thing, rather than its external appearance. The pristine shine of the polished bronze atop the smooth black marble makes the sculpture practically disappear, as the surface reflects back the rest of the room. Brancusi explored the theme of the soaring bird in more than thirty marble and bronze versions over the course of four decades.

Arthur Dove, Nature Symbolized No. 2: Wind on Hills, 1911-1912, pastel on paper, 18" x 21½

work became notorious when exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz NY gallery inspired by forms, processes, and events in nature (landscapes, flowers, plants, trees, animals and birds, weather phenomena) concern with nature in paintings paralleled his enjoyment and study of nature in the rest of his life was a naturalist on the lookout for scenes to paint - intricate details of nature were important to him Dove the artist and Dove the naturalist were inextricable and explains his approach to abstraction represents swift and wholesome wind refreshing folds nad sturdy leaps into repetitions of its force a wind pattern linear theme in which the eye follows the same kind of curve over and over again In the age of machines and materialism, Dove's work instead concentrated on nature as an something to experience, rather than a commodity to own. He stressed the interconnection of humans and the environment, and painted emotionally charged and brilliantly colored scenes of natural wonder. Dove was attracted to the timelessness of nature, which he interpreted into a modern abstract vocabulary of color, shape, line, and scale Rather than try faithfully reproducing elements of nature, Dove stove as a painter to capture its spiritual aspects, bringing attention to those movements and lifecycles beyond the human eye. The heart of Dove's artistic philosophy was the articulation of "essences" that would transmit this sense of the spiritual in nature. These "essences" were biomorphic shapes that represented different kinds of energy or organic evolution, suggesting an inner principle of inherent reality. In this work, curvilinear forms and shades of green relate a sense of growth and also, movements in nature, evoking the sensation of greenery being rustled by the wind. His early abstractions, especially the large pastel paintings on linen such as this work, are part of his effort to capture these transitory effects.

El Lissitsky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1920, lithograph, 19⅜" x 27¼"

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge is one of Lissitzky's earliest attempts at propagandistic art. He produced this and other politically charged work in support of the Red Army shortly after the Bolsheviks had waged their revolution of 1917. The lithograph shows a huge red triangle that pierces into a white circle, which creates the center of attention. The red wedge symbolized the revolutionaries, who were penetrating and killing the anti-Communist White Army. The white background depicts a bright future. El Lissitzky used his signature color combination of red, white and black, which reinforces the message indicated by the work's title. Also, the shapes have their symbolic significance. According to El Lissitzky and his friends, the art before 1917 was "old-fashioned" compared to new art movements called Constructivism. And this poster is a great example of this movement. Futuristic, containing new tools, new style and artists was all about moving forward. The main goal of this art was to spring Russia into the future. Constructivism was more than art - it was a philosophy originated in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin but the term was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. As a positive term in Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Constructivism as theory and practice was derived largely from a series of debates at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow, from 1920-22. After deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky, for his 'mysticism', The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Aleksei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would develop a definition of Constructivism as: "the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of an object, and tektonika, its spatial presence." Constructivism was about an entirely new approach to making objects, one which sought to abolish the traditional artistic concern with composition, and replace it with 'construction.' The movement called for a careful technical analysis of modern materials, and it was hoped that this investigation would eventually yield ideas that could be put to use in mass production, serving the ends of a modern, Communist society. But, the Russian Constructivism was in decline by the mid-1920s, partly a victim of the Bolshevik regime's increasing hostility to avant-garde art. But it would continue to be an inspiration for artists in the West, sustaining a movement called International Constructivism which flourished in Germany in the 1920s, and whose legacy endured into the 1950s. It also influenced major trends such as the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Its influence was widespread, with major effects upon architecture, sculpture, graphic design, industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music.

László Moholy-Nagy, Yellow Circle, 1921, oil on canvas, 53⅛" x 45"

constructivism

Constantin Brancusi, Newborn, 1920, bronze, 8" x 6" x 8"

"What my work is aiming at is, above all, realism: I pursue the inner, hidden reality, the very essence of objects in their own intrinsic fundamental nature; this is my only deep preoccupation." There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things. simplified his forms to the extreme, to depict that essence, stripped of all ornamentation or distracting outer appearance. His works were typically smooth, and often highly polished; he used basic shapes, often ovoid. something emerging, from a womb, a chrysalis, an egg, something that is already perfectly formed yet at the same time full of potential and possibilities, something unknowing and unknowable, fragile yet surprisingly robust, infinitely precious, brand shiny new, pristine, unblemished. I wasn't conscious of these thoughts when I chose the object to focus on, but in contemplating it, it seems to encompass all of these things quite perfectly. The crack and the sliced-off end of the sculpture (an ovoid, like the womb and the egg) give us a glimpse inside, and there is a little nodule, perhaps like a tiny foot emerging. The curving central ridge of the Newborn echoes that of the wooden Head of a Child, but the mouth is much more radically stylized: the ovoid is sharply sliced off into a flat oval plane. Only a small curl of marble remains at the bottom to suggest a chin. The oversized opening indicates a baby's wide-open mouth emitting a noisy wail, thus lending affectionate wit to the elegant form. With it's evocation of either an egg or a cell, Newborn is a metaphor for birth as well as a portrayal of an infant's head. The theme also points to the newborn quality of Brancusi's art and this particularly bold sculpture. The sculptor's obsession with the moment of origin reveals his aspirations toward originality, perhaps the preeminent claim to merit among the modernist vanguard. The serial motifs that characterize Brancusi's work prove his originality by testing it: the seeming repetitiveness of his sculptures only demonstrates more compellingly the individual distinction of each. The Newborn, was highly innovative for its time and introduced the world to a new form of sculpture. Brancusi's forms looked to the past for inspiration for their pure simplicity and looked to the future where they have inspired sculptors of the later 20th century. Brancusi stated, "What my work is aiming at is, above all, realism: I pursue the inner, hidden reality, the very essence of objects in their own intrinsic fundamental nature; this is my only deep preoccupation". Brancusi does capture this realism, though not in a representational sense. He does capture the essence of these figurative ideas though a relationship with his abstract forms. Brancusi gave us a minimalist and abstract view of sculpture at a time when most sculpture was still figurative.

Vladimir Tatlin, Counter-Relief, 1914-1915, iron, copper, wood, and rope, 28" x 47"

A pivotal figure in Constructivism, painter and architect Vladimir Tatlin combines architecture with sculptural form. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, Tatlin sought to create new art forms using modern technologies and industrial materials. During a visit to Pablo Picasso's studio in 1913, he was influenced to create three-dimensional collages of metal and wood after seeing Picasso's experimentation with collage. Tatlin is most famous for his work Monument to the Third International (1919-1920), also known as Tatlin's Tower. Envisioned as the headquarters for the organization Third International, the unrealized building was and is considered a symbol of utopian design. Had it been seen to fruition, it would have been the most important demonstration of Vladimir Lenin's "Monumental Propaganda" initiative aimed at spreading communist ideas throughout the world. Like many artists in the Constructivist movement, Tatlin used simple geometric forms and humble materials to create art that served the masses. Tatlin's work is in the collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the State Russian Museum, and the State Tretyakov Gallery. Corner Counter-Relief (with Cables) was first exhibited during the Last futuristic paintings exhibition "0.10" in Petrograd in 1915. This abstract volumetric and spatial composition was supposed to be perceived as a continuation and development of the Nonobjectivity idea. The same idea was previously expressed by Tatlin in his "painted reliefs" based on the combination of contrasting textures (paper, glass, plaster, wood, and tin). The novelty of the Corner Counter-Relief lied in the artist's desire to abandon the traditional "painting plane" and to bring nonobjective constructions into space formed by two inclined panes. They were used not only for the hanging of the composition, but also to create an abstract background emphasizing its volume. It was also important for the artist to show all abilities of the materials used by him. In this work they represent opposed yet inseparable notions - flexibility and rigidness, freedom and tension, movement and calmness. An important element in Tatlin's strategy to dissociate his Counter-reliefs from traditional painting and sculpture was to erect them in the corner of a room. This was a place where a religious icon would be traditionally displayed in a pious Russian household; hence Tatlin suggests that modernity and experiment should be Russia's new gods. The idea is something that may have come from the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912), a volume by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, in which he calls on sculptors, "Let's split open our figures and place the environment inside them." Corner Counter-relief evokes the dynamism of modernity, with the various intersecting lines overlapping and moving in different directions to create rhythm and tension. The way that the object spans the corner changes the space of the room and establishes a unique relationship to the surrounding environment. The diagonal wires are evocative of a musical instrument and were perhaps inspired by Tatlin's experience as a musical instrument maker.

Piet Mondrian, Lozenge Composition with Red, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue, c. 1924-1925, oil on canvas, 56" x 56

Although Piet Mondrian's abstractions may seem far removed from nature, his basic vision was rooted in landscape, especially the flat geography of his native Holland. Beginning with his early naturalistic landscapes, he reduced natural forms to their simplest linear and colored equivalents to suggest their unity and order. Eventually he eliminated such forms altogether, developing a pure visual language of verticals, horizontals, and primary colors that he believed expressed universal forces. In Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray Mondrian rotated a square canvas to create a dynamic relationship between the rectilinear composition and the diagonal lines of the edges of the canvas. Deceptively simple, his works are the result of constant adjustment to achieve absolute balance and harmony, and they reveal an exacting attention to the subtle relations between lines, shapes, and colors. The artist hoped that his paintings would point the way to a utopian future. This goal was first formulated in Holland around 1916-17 by Mondrian and a small group of like-minded artists and architects who collectively referred to their aesthetic as De Stijl (The Style). Their ideas have been extraordinarily influential for all aspects of modern design, from architecture and fashion to household objects. Piet Mondrian intended his abstract or so-called "neo-plastic" paintings to express his fundamentally spiritual notion that universal harmonies preside in nature. The horizontal and vertical elements of his compositions, assiduously calibrated to produce a balanced asymmetry, represented forces of opposition that parallel the dynamic equilibrium at work in the natural world. By 1921 Mondrian had distilled his compositions into black lines that intersect at right angles, defining rectangles painted only in white or gray and the three primary colors. In 1918 the artist turned one of these square canvases 45 degrees to rest "on point," doing so without rotating the linear elements within the composition. Approximately three years later he merged that format with the elemental color scheme of his mature works to produce this monumental painting, the earliest of the neo-plastic diamond or lozenge compositions. Repainted around 1925, when the black lines were thickened, this picture relates to several other works of the 1920s, where color is restricted to the periphery. Mondrian said the diamond compositions were about cutting, and indeed the sense of cropping here is emphatic. Forms are incomplete, sliced by the edge of the canvas, thus implying a pictorial continuum that extends beyond the physical boundary of the painting. In the 1920s, Mondrian began to create the definitive abstract paintings for which he is best known. He limited his palette to white, black, gray, and the three primary colors, with the composition constructed from thick, black horizontal and vertical lines that delineated the outlines of the various rectangles of color or reserve. The simplification of the pictorial elements was essential for Mondrian's creation of a new abstract art, distinct from Cubism and Futurism. The assorted blocks of color and lines of differing width create rhythms that ebb and flow across the surface of the canvas, echoing the varied rhythm of modern life. The composition is asymmetrical, as in all of his mature paintings, with one large dominant block of color, here red, balanced by distribution of the smaller blocks of yellow, blue gray, and white around it. This style has been quoted by many artists and designers in all aspects of culture since the 1920s.

Stanton Macdonald Wright, Conception Synchromy, 1914, oil on canvas, 36" x 30⅛

American modern artist co-founder of synchromism moved to Paris with his wife to immerse himself in European art and to study placed a great emphasis on juxtapositions and reverberations of color seeking to free their art form from a literal description of the world and believing that painting was a practice akin to music that should be divorced from representational associations claim that the Synchromists had merely borrowed the principles of color abstraction from Orphism, a point vehemently disputed "I strive to divest my art of all anecdote and illustration and to purify it to the point where the emotions of the spectator will be wholly aesthetic, as when listening to good music....I cast aside as nugatory all natural representation in my art. However, I still adhered to the fundamental laws of compsiition (placements and displacements of mass, as in the human body in movement) and created my pictures by means of color-form, which, by its organization in three dimensions, resulted in rhythm."

Francis Picabia, I See Again in Memory, My Dear Udnie, 1913-1914, oil on canvas, 98½" x 78¼"

Around 1914 Picabia began to pilfer words and phrases from the encyclopedic Petit Larousse dictionary for use in his own works. He based this painting's title on a line from Virgil's Aeneid from that source—"Dying, he saw again in memory his dear Argos"—substituting "Udnie," a name of Picabia's own invention. The artist associated the name with his memories of French dancer Stacia Napierkowska rehearsing onboard during his transatlantic journey to New York in 1913. "Udnie" is also an anagram of the last name of French musicologist Jean d'Udine, whose theory of synesthesia (published in 1910) linked painting with music and dance through the concept of rhythm. In this large painting, rhythm is intimated via a series of repeated, interpenetrating pistons and orifices, fusing the mechanical with the biological. The work illustrates Picabia's predilection for machines, which intensified during his 1913 visit to New York. As one reviewer noted that year, "Picabia . . . admits to having put all former things behind him and to having grasped the genius of American machinery as the new medium through which his art may be expressed." The painting's conflation of mechanized movements with erotic bodily forms, along with its half-stolen title, exemplifies the irreverent approach that made Picabia a central figure in the Dada movement during the World War I years. cubism Currently, the entire top floor of the MoMA is dedicated to the works of art created by an artist of the 20th century, Francis Picabia. Picabia is a fascinating artist whose style throughout his many years of painting ranges from Impressionism to photo-realism to cubism to Dadaism to abstraction. As you walk from room to room on the 6th floor of the MoMA, you pass through different displays of each of his styles of painting. One of my favorite styles was his abstraction paintings. Particularly, the I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie painting attached to this post. As I read the sign next to the painting, which states its name and a little background information, I learned that there was a story behind this painting. The painting was inspired by a professional Polish dancer that Picabia met abroad a ship on his way to New York. She brought him about to watch her performances in NY, which were so highly provocative at the time that she had gotten arrested. Leaving such an impression on him, he composed several paintings inspired by this woman for nearly two years after. This abstract painting shows some greyish and brown tones with light yellow and pinkish-red tones and figures in the center representing the woman. There also seems to be almost like a figure on the bottom left grasping the "woman." Maybe the figure representing Picabia? This painting is not only fascinating, but relates to our consistent class theme of human connection. Through this painting, Picabia is creating a visual of the feelings, sensations, and connection he felt towards this promiscuous woman.

El Lissitzky, Proun 19D, 1922 (?), gesso, oil, paper and cardboard on plywood, 38⅜" x 38¼"

Between 1919 and 1927 El Lissitzky produced a large body of paintings, prints, and drawings that he referred to by the word Proun (pronounced pro-oon), an acronym for "project for the affirmation of the new" in Russian. Lissitzky's style reflects his training as an architect in Germany before World War I as well as the inspiration of Kazimir Malevich, a fellow teacher at the Vitebsk art school. Lissitzky's radical reconception of space and material is a metaphor for and visualization of the fundamental transformations in society that he thought would result from the Russian Revolution.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Music: Pink and Blue II, 1919, oil on canvas, 35½ x 29"

For many vanguard artists in the early twentieth century, music offered a model for expressing nonverbal emotional states and sensations. Georgia O'Keeffe was fascinated with what she called "the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye," but her references to music in the titles of her paintings derived equally from her belief that visual art, like music, could convey powerful emotions independent of representational subject matter. In Music—Pink and Blue II, the swelling, undulating forms imply a connection between the visual and the aural, while also suggesting the rhythms and harmonies that O'Keeffe perceived in nature. Though long celebrated as an important figure in 20th century modern art, Georgia O'Keeffe created a significant body of abstract work that was largely overlooked. Early in her career O'Keeffe withdrew from painting abstracts because her critics, she claimed, misread her works, interpreting them as psychological expressions of her sexuality. Instead, O'Keeffe intended her abstract work to be the very personal expression of the intangible, her feelings and esthetic about the natural world. Though even as she moved toward representational depictions of desert flowers and Southwestern scenery for which she is best known, abstraction was her guiding principle.The oil painting, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 (1918) was painted during O'Keeffe's early exploration of abstraction.Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, was completed as O'Keeffe was transitioning from teaching in Texas to her career-launching life in New York. In 1915, O'Keeffe was introduced into the New York art scene when a friend shared a series of her highly abstract drawings with Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz exhibited ten of her drawings in a group show at his gallery, 291, which helped O'Keeffe gain recognition in the abstract expressionist movement. "I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way-things that I had no words for." saw music as the closet analogy to the mode of artistic expression she developed Georgia O'Keeffe's lush, symbolic paintings of flowers and the American Southwest are some of the most instantly recognizable works of the 20th century. The late artist imbued all her landscapes and close-up depictions of nature with a sense of mythological power. Skulls and pastel petals fill her scenes, though her pared-down compositions could also veer towards abstraction. O'Keeffe was born in Wisconsin and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she briefly lived with her photographer husband Alfred Stieglitz—and painted cityscapes—before permanently moving to New Mexico in 1949. This setting dominated her later canvases.

Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947. Oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, matches, etc., 50⅞" x 30⅛

Full Fathom Five is one of Pollock's earliest "drip" paintings. While its lacelike top layers consist of poured skeins of house paint, Pollock built up the underlayer using a brush and palette knife. A close look reveals an assortment of objects embedded in the surface, including cigarette butts, nails, thumbtacks, buttons, coins, and a key. Though many of these items are obscured by paint, they contribute to the work's dense and encrusted appearance. The title, suggested by a neighbor, comes from Shakespeare's play The Tempest, in which the character Ariel describes a death by shipwreck: "Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes." Full Fathom Five is one of the earliest masterpieces of Pollock's drip technique. The actual origins and initial development of this technique have never been fully explained, except by reading back from fuller photographic evidence produced about 1950, two or three years after this work was painted. Like other practical breakthroughs in twentieth-century painting, 'creative accident' seems likely to have played an important part, as Pollock probed and tested methods of paint application which promote the continuousness of line rather than the broken lines inevitable in the constant reloadings and readjustments of conventional brushwork. His solution was to pour from a can of domestic paint along a stick resting inside the container, so that a constant 'beam' of pigment came into contact with the canvas (which he left unstretched on the studio floor). The character of the line was determined by certain physical and material variables that could be combined in almost infinite permutations: the viscosity of the paint (controlled by thinning and dilution); the angle and hence speed of the pouring; and the dynamics of Pollock's bodily gestures, his sweep and rhythm, especially in the wrist, arm and shoulder. 'Like a seismograph', noted writer Wemer Haftmann 'the painting recorded the energies and states of the man who drew it.' In addition, Pollock would flick, splatter, and dab subsidiary colors on to the dominant linear configuration.The title, suggested by Pollock's neighbor, quotes from The Tempest by William Shakespeare, wherein Ariel describes a death by shipwreck: "Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes."Pollock has embedded nails, tacks, buttons, keys, coins, a torn cigarette, matches, and paint-tube tops into the surface - witnesses of the accidental nature of the 'painting' process and of the legitimacy of the trouser-pocket paraphernalia - as three-dimensional textural agents to amplify the signifying potential of the image. These alien materials, however, are subordinate to the overall design. They are, interestingly, almost invisible in normal reproductions of the painting; suffocated by the overwhelming presence of paint their function is analogous to the smears and touches of color, providing resistance and difference in the optical pattern.

Willem de Kooning, Palisade, 1957, oil on canvas

In 1926, de Kooning immigrated to the United States, where he achieved fame as one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism. Around 1950 he reintroduced figurative elements into his paintings, executed in his characteristically violent but virtuoso style: landscapes and challenging, monumental female nudes. Sometimes the two motifs fuse. After all, landscapes can have a corporeal quality, as in this impression of the cliffs lining the Hudson River, west of Manhattan.

Joan Mirό, The Birth of the World, 1925, oil on canvas, 8'3" x 6'6¾

In 1920, Miró experienced what he called the transformative "jolt" of his first trip to Paris, where he was introduced to avant-garde society and began absorbing the influences of other emerging painters and writers. That led to his first show in Paris in 1921 at the Galerie La Licorne. "Virtually no one came to it, Miró later recalled, and there were no sales," says Anne Umland, the curator who organised MoMA's exhibition, Joan Miró: Birth of the World. Deflated, the artist returned home to his native Catalonia and resolved to reinvent himself. Critical to Miró's osmosis over the next four years were his encounters with Surrealist poets and painters on subsequent trips to Paris, including the movement's co-founder André Breton. Absorbing their fascination with dreams, fantasy and the unconscious, he began churning out a new body of work. The Birth of the World marks a turning point for the artist, introducing a working method divided into two distinct phases. Working spontaneously and giving rein to his unconscious, Miró variously dribbles, brushes and splashes paint onto the surface of an unevenly primed canvas, where it soaks in to varying degrees. Yet his next stage of painting is more calculated: relying on notebooks in which he sketched semiconscious surreal motifs, the artist paints pictographs atop the ground in a more meticulous calligraphic fashion. That mix of painterly spontaneity and calligraphic deliberation would persist in the artist's work in subsequent decades, as museum visitors can attest by comparing works in the show. Joan Miró said that The Birth of the World depicts "a sort of genesis"—the amorphous beginnings of life. To make this work, Miró poured, brushed, and flung paint on an unevenly primed canvas so that the paint soaked in some areas and rested on top in others. Atop this relatively uncontrolled application of paint, he added lines and shapes he had previously planned in studies. The bird or kite, shooting star, balloon, and figure with white head may all seem somehow familiar, yet their association is illogical. Describing his method, Miró said, "Rather than setting out to paint something I began painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush.... The first stage is free, unconscious. But, he continued, "The second stage is carefully calculated." 1The Birth of the World reflects this blend of spontaneity and deliberation. Joan Miró's The Birth of the World is dark, somber and hard to decipher. It depicts a textured, paint splattered, shadowy realm that is only interrupted by the thin yellow line and the red circle of a balloon. Throughout this piece we see several other abstract forms and geometrical shapes, such as a black triangle, a white circle and other markings.

Kurt Schwitters, Revolving, 1919, wood, metal, cord, cardboard, wool, wire, leather and oil on canvas, 48⅜" x 35"

In Revolving, the cord, hoops, wire mesh, and small objects tacked to the painterly canvas replace depicted lines and forms. Schwitters's use of fragments reflects a society shattered by World War I. "Out of parsimony I took whatever I found . . . because we were now an impoverished country," he wrote in 1919. "New things had to be made out of the fragments." This work reflects Schwitters's self-proclaimed "love for the wheel," and its title refers to a poem by the artist from the same year, in which he wrote, "Worlds turn the new machine to thee. To thee. Though, thine the new machine space." Kurt Schwitters is known for his use of raw and unique materials in the composition of a collage. His piece, called "Revolving" is one of his earliest forms of this style. This piece was the beginning of a huge shift in Schitter's work that originally consisted of very conservative painting. Schwitter lived through the World War, and he would often use the scraps and discarded material he found on the street and would arrange them to create his artwork. "Revolving" is a great example of this. He took pride in the concept of taking something destructive and making it into something he considered beautiful. The process of collecting garbage or strap material and calling it art was unordinary, especially in the times in which he lived. In this piece of work created in 1919, he uses scrap wood, cord, cardboard, wool, leather and wire mesh and oil on canvas. He used these collections of found materials to form lines and shapes that ultimately look like clocks or revolving discs. This work demonstrates a significant shift in Schwitters' early artistic practice from primarily conservative figurative painting to abstract collage. After World War I, Schwitters began to collect broken and discarded materials he found on the streets and arrange them into works of art. Born from the rubble left by the war, these works emphasize the fact that art can be made from destruction; that urban detritus could be made into something beautiful. In Revolving, found items are organized to form lines and shapes to which he adds bits of yellow and blue paint for shading. He creates a geometrically harmonious work by finding a careful balance between the physical roughness of the found materials and the smooth shapes they form. The concept that attaching small objects (not to mention - garbage) to the surface of the canvas could be considered art was radical. Yet Schwitters was convinced that the act of taking broken fragments and unifying them into a whole demonstrated art's potential to remake and reimagine a fractured world. Additionally, it enabled him to reject conventional illusionism, the rendering of objects as they appear, something he associated with trickery and even hypocrisy in light of the crumbling socio-economic situation in Germany following World War I. You also see touches of paint that add extra details and shading to the image. I think his use of earth tone colors still holds a strong theme of raw and natural material but it all comes together to construct one piece. This image combines the hard times of the War with the strength in unity. It;s ironic that this art wasn't accepted during this time period because it was an innovative way to turn something dark into something beautiful or useful. You can find this piece in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "Any desire to produce natural forms limits the force and consistency of working out and expression" - Kurt Schwitters

Jean (Hans) Arp, Enak's Tears / Terrestrial Forms, 1917, painted wood, 34" x 23⅛" x 2⅜:

In polychrome wood reliefs such as this, Arp was the first to utilize "biomorphic" forms suggesting kidney and amoeba-like shapes to establish a new, counter-Cubist form-language. These organic shapes soon came to represent the most credible alternative to Cubist and Constructivist geometry and inspired artists of the next three decades, from Miró to Gorky. The work Enak's Tears, also known as Terrestrial Forms, is an early Dada work by Hans Arp. The wood relief sculpture is composed of two cut pieces of wood laid on top of each other. Before entering into a detailed analysis of this work it is important to note that "Dada Means Nothing."[1] This quote, pulled from the Dadaist Manifesto 1918, is a summation of the motives of Dada. It is not a movement that is attempting to push a new ideology, but rather is focused on the failure of the past and the current disillusionment of man. Dada is heavily tied to World War I and is very much a reaction to the sense of loss and disconnect that gripped Europe in the years after.[2] Dadaism instead focused on the extraordinary and absurd, especially the seemingly foolishly abstract, as a means of communicating the way they viewed the world now was.[3] This piece is an example of an attempt to come to terms with the new fragmented sense of reality. The back piece, which uses the curvature of its lines to give the since of fluid and melting motion, is painted in three separate cool colors, blue, orange and light red. These three colors meet along distinct curved lines, but never mix or overlap. By doing this Arp divides the flowing background into three zones, which due to the irregular shape of the background are not geometrically equal. Here Arp shows a theme that runs throughout Dada art and that is the idea of the tragedy of the just passed war. The war was fought over nations attempting to gain land and divide their surroundings, without allowing any mixture. The flows of the lines in this sculpture show the Dadaist view of the futility of such attempts. The top piece of the sculpture is composed of wood cut to resemble a line endlessly weaving and coiling upon itself, with a small white circle in the bottom right. The line, which is an earthy, brown covers more than half of the work as it makes one closed loop; and a second that is prevented from closing by the white circle that rests at its end. When the alternate name for this sculpture is examined the idea of the brown being the form of the earth work trenches, which World War I was famous for, is seen. The brown of the sculpture, much like the trenches themselves, wind in and endless loop that seems to move only in a circle before ending in a tear. The white circle, or tear from the first title, is a symbol of the pain and devastation caused by the war on all its many victims. The war not only scared the earth with endless trenches it also scared nations as it divided people and distanced them from one another. The war also divided, more than just nations, the individual psyche of people. Soldiers returning from combat would be unable to re assimilate, and many were so badly wounded they could be little more than beggars who were ghosts of their former selves.[4] The tear, along with the cool, deep colors combine to show not only the physical pain of these wounded, but also the national pain at the loss of life and the destruction the old that brought no new utopia. This work is first and foremost, extremely abstract. There are no clearly defined shapes, as everything from the flowing shape of the background to the imperfect circle, everything in the sculpture seems to be a melting of shape. There are no forms that immediately depict images of the war, people, or any type of concrete form that can be easily distinguished. Even the name "Enak" is an example of abstraction as it is an unclear reference to anything specific, and instead is common German name. It takes the Dada ideas of nothingness and extreme distortion to create a work of art that attempts to match the disconnected and distorted world around it. On first glance this sculpture looks like little more than a poorly decorated piece of wood, however it is exactly this sense of nothingness that gives the work its meaning as a Dada social commentary.

László Moholy-Nagy, A II (Construction A II), 1924, oil and graphite on canvas, 45⅝" x 53⅝"

Moholy-Nagy painted A II (Construction A II) soon after joining the faculty of the Bauhaus school of art and design in Weimar, Germany. As if constructed around a mathematical formula, the canvas is composed of two similar bodies of seemingly intersecting planes and circles with a smaller structure hovering below a larger one, both crossing through a white plane. Varying in degrees of perceived transparency and color intensity, these shapes appear to overlap, forming an architectural construction in space. Devoted to experimentation and new media throughout his artistic career, László Moholy-Nagy worked in a staggering array of disciplines including film, typography, sculpture, photography, painting, writing, and graphic and stage design. He was a pivotal member of the Bauhaus school, where he authored two influential design books and promoted the integration of art and technology. Moholy-Nagy's aesthetic output always embraced innovation; the artist made cameraless photographs called "photograms" and used industrial materials throughout his painting and sculpture practices in order to examine the use of light, transparency, space, and motion in art. His teachings at the Bauhaus have influenced generations of artists and designers. Moholy-Nagy has been the subject of exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions. His work has sold for seven figures on the secondary market.

Piet Mondrian, Composition C, 1920, oil on canvas, 23¾" x 24"

Mondrian used a simple visual language in his work. This composition is a clear example of his technique. It consists of horizontal and vertical lines in black, with planes of white. It also features the three primary colours, from which all other colours are made by mixing. Through the structure and order of the elements, Mondrian was suggesting an idealised view of society. Each individual element contributes to the overall composition of the work. This was intended to symbolise the relationship between the individual and the collective. Mondrian began working around the very beginning of the 20th century, and his work appears to have been influenced by the Impressionism, and the bold use of colour employed by fauvist painters like Henri Matisse and Gauguin. Prior to the First World War, Mondrian's work was still fairly representational, but it already showed hints of the abstraction for which he would become best known. But it was the outbreak of war which seemed to change Mondrian's work forever. And Composition C (No. III) is a good example of how he responded to the political and social consequences of the war through his work.Mondrian's arrival in London in 1938 confirmed the capital as a center for the avant-garde. In 1936 he had shown this and other works in Abstract & Concrete, London's first international exhibition of abstract art.Mondrian's non-figurative paintings - planes of primary color with black and white - convey what he described as a 'dynamic equilibrium', which he hoped would work on the individual spirit and have wider social implications.

Naum Gabo, Linear Construction in Space, No. 1 (Variation), c. 1942, Lucite and nylon thread, 25" x 25" x 10"

Naum Gabo became a leading exponent of Constructivism—which viewed space as a continuum rather than a monolithic volume—after returning to Russia following the Revolution of 1917. Born Naum Neemia Pevsner and younger brother of artist Antoine Pevsner, he had originally trained to be an engineer. While traveling in Europe, he studied building techniques and observed emerging modernist currents, both inspiring him to become a sculptor. In 1920, five years after he created and signed his first construction as "Gabo," he and Pevsner published in Moscow the "Realisticheskii manifest" ("Realistic Manifesto"), which articulated their theories on Constructivism and solidified Gabo's role as a pioneer of modern sculpture. Gabo considered Column (ca. 1923), of which several versions exist, to be significant to his artistic development. For him, the work represented the height of his "search for an image which would fuse the sculptural element with the architectural element into one unit." Originally intended as a maquette for a monument that was never built, it was made after Gabo had immigrated to Germany. Rather than carving it out of a single block, he built Column up into space by means of a rational geometric vocabulary. The result is a virtually symmetrical sculpture composed of transparent and intersecting vertical planes, exposing the work's axial center. Linear Construction in Space No. 1 (ca. 1945-46) further emphasizes Gabo's predilection for modern building supplies, as opposed to traditional ones like marble, clay, or bronze. The rigid Perspex frame with stretched nylon filaments, a design that characterizes Gabo's later spherical works, again creates the illusion of continuous depth. This work too exists in several reconstructions executed after the initial template, like the version now at the Guggenheim Museum. Gabo's duplication of forms and insistence on everyday materials is akin to the methodical processes of industrial production. Ultimately, utopian ideals underscore Gabo's Constructivist works. Rejecting the past and freeing art from the imitation of nature, he believed that his sculptures helped build "more perfected social and spiritual life." His plastic sculptures are not just literally transparent in surface quality. In dematerializing mass and surface, he also meant to provide a conduit to a "new reality"—a universal reality. Strongly influenced by fellow artist Vasily Kandinsky, who promoted the spiritual nature of art making, Gabo aimed to produce objects that "appeal more to our minds and our feelings than to our crude physical senses."

Piet Mondrian, Composition in White, Black and Red, 1936, oil on canvas, 40⅛" x 41"

One of the more minimalist of his abstract work, Composition in White Black and Red arrived in 1936 It is believed that at this stage in his career Mondrian was starting to experiment with multiple lines together in his abstract work. Previously, it would be single lines, with single blocks of colour as seen in Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue from 1930. Mondrian here chooses to dissect larger squares with closer lines to contrast against previous works, whilst there is less use of colour. The black lines, which Mondrian saw as blocks of colour in their own right, are brought further to the foreground because of his reduction in size of the coloured sections of red and black. These are positioned right on the edge of the canvas. A closer eye on this painting will reveal the artist's brushstrokes and also the way in which there is some contrast in colour, even in the seemingly rigid areas of white. Piet Mondrian is famous for his abstract geometric paintings and his contributions to the De Stijl movement in the early 20th century. The painter developed a pared-down aesthetic schema that featured squares and rectangles of only black, white, and primary colors, all separated by strictly straight lines. Mondrian developed his unique style in accordance with the ideas of fellow De Stijl founder Theo Van Doesburg: It embraced spirituality and harmony and pushed painting beyond representation, into a realm of pure form and material. Mondrian's work proved to be enormously influential in the development of 20th-century styles and movements such as color field painting, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, and his paintings belong in the collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Fondation Beyeler, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, among others. His work has sold for eight figures on the secondary market. Piet Mondrian's abstract language employed thick black lines and small rectangles of primary colors. He achieved compositional harmony through subtle asymmetry. In Composition of Red and White: Nom 1/Composition No. 4 with red and blue one horizontal line does not behave like the others; peripheral lines open up and reframe the composition; and blocks of unbounded color appear at the edges. Having moved to New York City from London in 1940, Mondrian responded to the energy of American urban life by adding these improvisational elements to an earlier version of the painting.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Composition No. 80: Black on Black, 1918, oil on canvas, 32¼" x 31¼"

Rodchenko made the Black on Black series, of which this work is part, in direct response to the White on White paintings that Kazimir Malevich had made earlier in 1918. With this gesture Rodchenko directly challenged the more established artist and the fundamental principles of Suprematism: if for Malevich the white in his paintings connoted the infinite expanse of the ideal, Rodchenko used black, in a variety of textures and finishes, to ground painting in its physical properties, bringing attention to the material quality of its surface. In contrast to the tilting plane of White on White , the arcing forms of Rochenko's canvas suggest dynamic motion.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Composition of Circles and Overlapping Forms, 1930, oil and metallic flakes on canvas, 19½" x 25¼"

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a key figure in many of the important movements of the pre-World War II art scene in Europe, and was one of the most active figures around the Café Voltaire in Zurich. She dedicated her career to breaking down static, artificial boundaries between genres and forms, and celebrating the creative energy such liberation released. Her creations attempted to destabilize traditional norms in art and society, and question fixed notions of gender, class, and nationality. For Taeuber-Arp, art was both something political and something to be integrated into everyday life. She later embraced the principles of Constructivism, and became one of its most important practitioners outside of Russia. Taeuber-Arp's artworks, whether a marionette, a dancer's movement, or a textile pattern, presented the possibility of crafting a more beautiful world from the elements of the present one. Taeuber-Arp was one of the signers of the Dada Manifesto and remained dedicated to the ideas of Dada throughout her career. She applied Dada to a wide range of forms, fully embracing the utopian impulses and promises of the movement to radically transform society by transforming human perception with radicalized aesthetics. Taeuber-Arp desired to break down the boundaries between applied and fine arts. She translated principles from one genre into another, creating beautiful and groundbreaking hybrids. For example, her work with Theo Van Doesburg in the Café de L'Aubette brought principles of applied textile design into the creation of architectural space and decor. She also explored the relationship between fine art and performance - working with dance, movement and masks. She sought to bring the ideas of Dada and Abstraction to dance and puppetry, contrasting the restriction and freedom of movement and pose, while the masks and costumes highlighted the split between dancer and the dance. The overlapping hard-edged geometric forms emphasize Taueber-Arp's allegiance with the Circle and Square (Cercle et Carre) group of artists, founded the same year as this painting. Circle and Square artists favored geometric abstraction over the contemporary Surrealist movement. In the image, Taeuber-Arp pursued inventive design that played form and color off each other to create tension, but at the same time integrated opposites to reflect an absolute harmony. This composition displays the aspiring purity of the Constructivist mode that sought the absolute and the non-human through geometric forms. The complex interplay of basic colors balances a series of oppositional composition choices: black and white, circle and square, red and blue. Far from static, however, these forms hover and interact in a dynamic equilibrium. This painting shows how Taeuber-Arp worked in the traditional art mediums as well as less traditional mediums, and how she translated compositional principles such as the vertical-horizontal application of the grid in applied arts to painting.

Sophie Tauber Arp, Rythmes Libres / Free Rhythms, 1919, gouache and watercolor on vellum, 14¾" x 10⅞"

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a key figure in many of the important movements of the pre-World War II art scene in Europe, and was one of the most active figures around the Café Voltaire in Zurich. She dedicated her career to breaking down static, artificial boundaries between genres and forms, and celebrating the creative energy such liberation released. Her creations attempted to destabilize traditional norms in art and society, and question fixed notions of gender, class, and nationality. For Taeuber-Arp, art was both something political and something to be integrated into everyday life. She later embraced the principles of Constructivism, and became one of its most important practitioners outside of Russia. Taeuber-Arp's artworks, whether a marionette, a dancer's movement, or a textile pattern, presented the possibility of crafting a more beautiful world from the elements of the present one. Taeuber-Arp was one of the signers of the Dada Manifesto and remained dedicated to the ideas of Dada throughout her career. She applied Dada to a wide range of forms, fully embracing the utopian impulses and promises of the movement to radically transform society by transforming human perception with radicalized aesthetics. Taeuber-Arp desired to break down the boundaries between applied and fine arts. She translated principles from one genre into another, creating beautiful and groundbreaking hybrids. For example, her work with Theo Van Doesburg in the Café de L'Aubette brought principles of applied textile design into the creation of architectural space and decor. She also explored the relationship between fine art and performance - working with dance, movement and masks. She sought to bring the ideas of Dada and Abstraction to dance and puppetry, contrasting the restriction and freedom of movement and pose, while the masks and costumes highlighted the split between dancer and the dance. Throughout the years of Dada Zurich, Sophie Taeuber, as a Swiss native an exceptional figure in the international Dada circle, walked the line between arts and crafts and artistic avant-garde. For Taeuber, applied art was what set the pace for her abstract formal inventions in free art. In the broad range of Dadaist events and publications, however, she appeared, somewhat reductively tagged, as an "artisan," as well as an important dancer on the Dada stage. Her day job as a teacher of textile Design at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts, which she held from 1916 to 1929, meant both a vocation and a burden to her. Her teaching duties and commissioned textile work took up much of her time and energy, and in a letter to Hans Arp she asked herself, "if there isn't anything better to do to bide one's time until death than toiling to make some money ... and also doing beadwork, which is beautiful and all, but unreasonably laborious, because it is just fancy and doesn't invent anything new, which is what makes the great difference between us." At the same time, Taeuber created an avant-gardist oeuvre, which, however, she only saw as studies for her applied art. A certain reservation which she had against the "cheese brains in Zurich," as she still noted in the 1920s, may also have contributed to the temporary isolation of these works. She first exhibited "handicrafted" puppets and Dada heads in the exhibition of the artists' association "Das Neue Leben" (The New Life) in 1919. Pictures of them were printed in Der Zeltweg; they are the only ones published in a Dada journal.

Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1951-1952, oil on canvas, 75⅞" x 58"

The result of a protracted period of labor that involved the creation and destruction of many other possible versions, Woman, I appears to be suspended in a state of arrested development. The effect was deliberate: throughout his career, de Kooning prized experimentation, editing, and testing. To this end, he employed a range of techniques, from cutting, masking, and collaging to scraping, wiping, and blotting. Although he also produced individual sketches, the real sketching happened on his canvases. Yet this alone does not account for the unfinished quality of his finished painting. De Kooning's purposefully fluid, undisciplined brushwork and his tendency to disregard contour lines produce a visual chaos that suggests incompletion, whether spatial, physical, or technical. "I refrain from finishing," the artist said in 1958. He elaborated in 1960: "I was never interested . . . [in] how to make a good painting. . . . I didn't want to pin it down at all."

Theo van Doesburg, Simultaneous Counter Composition, 1929-1930, oil on canvas, 19¾" x 19⅝

Theo van Doesburg's Simultaneous Counter-Composition was introduced in 1930. Through the use of only rectangles and simple colors, van Doesburg is painting in his newly developed style named De Stijl which exemplifies the abstract style. Part of the De Stijl style is the use of only simple shapes and colors which is clearly seen in Simultaneous Counter-Composition. V an Doesburg focuses on breaking down the images to their simplest forms in order to represent them in their purest form. The De Stijl movement was focused on reducing art down to purist form by using only primary colors and simple shapes such as squares. Van Doesburg believed by reducing paintings down to this pure abstraction level the true meaning of the object could be seen. The breaking down of an image to its simplest form can be seen in all of van Doesburg's De Stijl paintings and architecture including Simultaneous Counter-Composition. By removing the complex colors and curves from a painting, De Stijl represents an image in its most basic and pure form. The lines and shapes in this painting appear to have been carefully traced to ensure the correct dimensions were achieved. The colors used (black, blue, red, white, and yellow) indicate the De Stijl method of using only the primary colors. The use of only primary colors removes the complexity of using an infinite number of other colors to represent an image. By removing the ability to recognize an image based on color, van Doesburg forces the viewer to see the image in its most basic form. The blue, red, and yellow colors have a degree of intensity that gives the squares an eye-catching effect. The black square is placed in the top right corner with a majority of the square cut off to prevent too much black from overtaking the color. Also, the colored squares are connected with a black line placed at a right angle which falls into place with the squared theme of the piece. By simplifying the colors, van Doesburg is able to construct a purely geometric piece of simplicity which exemplifies the style of the De Stijl movement. Simultaneous Counter-Composition focuses on the balance of the squares. All of the colored shapes are cut-off squares and even the canvas itself is a square. By using squares, van Doesburg promotes the purely geometric form of painting. The yellow and blue squares lie parallel to one another while the red square lies slightly offset from the others. All of the squares are connected through the use of right angle which creates a clear square over a majority of the piece. Van Doesburg uses squares because it represents the purest of the geometric shapes due to its symmetry and equivalence of sides. Through the use of multiple squares arranged over a square canvas, van Doesburg simplifies his piece down to the basic shapes and colors to promote "harmony and order...[with] pure abstraction and simplicity."[1] Theo van Doesburg did an extraordinary amount of work into Simultaneous Counter-Composition compared to his past works around that time period. As Denker states in his Art Journal, "Van Doesburg was often a downright sloppy painter and a lazy draughtsman."[2] Van Doesburg had been focusing on architecture during the 1920s and had not produced many in-depth paintings in quite some time. Also, van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian had had an argument over the use of diagonals in De Stijl causing them to go their separate ways. Denker goes on to point out that, "...Simultaneous Counter-Composition['s]...richly colored planes, perfectly placed black lines, small scale, and square format indicate more than one look at Mondrian's work of the same year..."[3] Simultaneous Counter-Composition does include diagonal lines, but the balance of the squares and their colors indicates Mondrian's influence on van Doesburg.

Arthur Dove, Fog Horns, 1929, oil on canvas, 18" x 26

There is a visceral, experiential aspect to viewing this work by Dove, which interprets the sound of foghorns in the mist. As the sounds echo, they become more diffuse in color and form, yet pulsate within the viewer's mind and body. Dove recasts an aural experience into one that is visual. Here, the haunting sound of a foghorn is evoked by three overlapping concentric rings of paint, growing in lightening tones of pink emanating outward from a dark center. Dove explored the psychological state of synesthesia, a condition in which sounds could be experienced and portrayed as colors or shapes, making the work descriptive, yet abstract. What he achieved was a lyrical distillation of form, color, and line that poetically celebrates a deep attunement with nature and its forces. Rather than the long and rich tradition of representational images of nature, Dove has eschewed the unessential to release its spiritual aspects and place the viewer in immediate contact with natural forms, removing himself as the intermediary. Yet the painting "does not depict the fog horn apparatus or the seascape as much as it represents the interpenetration of deeply echoing sound into air and land as all become shape and color in the painting," said Milteer. "It is about a sensory experience. As Dove described it, he wished to weave disparate parts in a scene 'into a sequence of formations rather than to form an arrangement of facts.' Arthur Dove (1889-1946) was an American painter who was one of the earliest nonobjective artists. Dove's art reflects his belief that color and form are instruments with which to express the essence beneath the physical exterior of things; his shapes are typically amorphous, his colors muted. In his wonderful "Foghorns" (1929), for example, he used size-graduated shapes and gradations of hue to visually express the sound of foghorns. Despite their nonobjective character, his paintings often suggest the undulating qualities of landscape and the forms of nature. Dove had a profound influence on Georgia O'Keeffe. From the start of her career, O'Keeffe credited a reproduction of a Dove pastel as her introduction to modernism. Dove's use of sensual, abstract forms to evoke the flowing rhythms and patterns of nature had already put him at the forefront of the American modernist movement by the time O'Keeffe entered the scene around 1916. Dove had been featured at the renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery "291″ in 1912, and O'Keeffe's work was first shown there in 1916. O'Keeffe seriously considered giving up painting entirely early on in her career. Although she was an award winning art student--she wasn't particularly interested in painting those subjects for which she was lauded. She also didn't want to paint in the manner of one her most famous teachers--William Merritt Chase--but at the same time didn't want to follow the paths of the European modernists. Seeing Dove's work helped O'Keeffe to find her own visual voice. When she was in her 70s, O'Keeffe recalled that, "It was Arthur Dove who affected my start, who helped me to find something of my own." By all means, explore the paintings of Arthur Dove. It will be well worth the journey.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Black Iris No. 3, 1926, oil on canvas, 36" x 30"

This monumental flower painting is one of O'Keeffe's early masterpieces. Enlarging the petals far beyond lifesize proportions, she forces the viewer to observe the small details that might otherwise be overlooked. When paintings from this group were first shown in 1924, even Alfred Stieglitz, her husband and dealer, was shocked by their audacity. Black Iris, sometimes called Black Iris III,[1] is a 1926 oil painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.[2] Art historian Linda Nochlin interpreted Black Iris as a morphological metaphor for female genitalia.[3][4] O'Keeffe rejected such interpretations in a 1939 text accompanying an exhibition of her work by writing: "Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don't."[5] She attempted to do away with sexualized readings of her work by adding a lot of detail.[6] It was first exhibited at the Intimate Gallery, New York from January 11-February 27, 1927, where it was catalogued as DARK IRIS NO. 3.[7] Unlike her previous shows, this show was largely devoid of the colourful paintings for which she had received critical acclaim.[8] Lewis Mumford commented: "Yesterday O'Keeffe's exhibition opened ... the show is strong: one long, loud blast of sex, sex in youth, sex in adolescence, sex in maturity, sex as gaudy as "Ten Nights in a Whorehouse," and sex as pure as the vigils of the vestal virgins, sex bulging, sex tumescent, sex deflated. After this description you'd better not visit the show: inevitably you'll be a little disappointed. For perhaps only half the sex is on the walls; the rest is probably in me."[9] The painting remained in the collection of the artist from 1926 to 1969. It was on extended loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1949 to 1969, when it was donated as part of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[2] The title changed in 1991 from Black Iris III to Black Iris.[10] O'Keeffe uses a variety of colors in order to create Black Iris, although her focus is on darker shades. She implements black, purple, and maroon to detail the center and lower petals of the iris, while using pink, gray, and white when detailing the upper petals of the flower. O'Keeffe blends outwardly in order to soften the outer edges of the painting. With the use of white and other bright colors, she is able to bring light into the image, despite the lack of a light source. O'Keeffe was intent on light and its importance in presenting the organic beauty of her subjects. Her art demonstrates her belief in the inner vitalism of nature and her association of this force with light.[failed verification][12] The iris is a familiar image in Western art, frequently used in Christian iconography; its swordlike leaves were especially employed as a symbol for Mary's suffering, a pictorial metaphor which might also have been familiar to O'Keeffe from her Catholic upbringing and her parochial schooling. O'Keeffe's famous irises were an important preoccupation for many years; she favored the black iris, which she could only find at certain New York florists for about two weeks each spring. Unlike Impressionist's flower painting, such as Irises by Vincent van Gogh, O'Keeffe's enlargements and abstractions derived from the flower have often been explained in gynecological terms, almost clinical in their precision. Such explications, once the province of Freudian critics, have more recently been repeated in feminist interpretations of the flower. Linda Nochlin, for example, read Black Iris as a "morphological metaphor" for female genitalia, insisting that the connection is "immediate", "concrete", and "that the two meanings are almost interchangeable." In this merger of botany and anatomy, Nochlin found reflection of "the unity of the feminine and the natural order", a concept which enjoyed great vogue early in the last century. O'Keeffe rejected the notion of her flowers as sexual metaphors - this is something she feels is created by the viewer who applies his own associations to the works, not hers. O'Keefe maintains:

Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist (No. 1, 1950), 1950, oil, enamel paint, etc. on canvas, 7'3" x 9'11"

embodies the artistic breakthrough Pollock reached between 1947 and 1950. It was painted in an old barn-turned-studio next to a small house on the East End of Long Island, where Pollock lived and worked from 1945 on. The property led directly to Accabonac Creek, where eelgrass marshes and gorgeous, watery light were a source of inspiration for him. Pollock's method was based on his earlier experiments with dripping and splattering paint on ceramic, glass, and canvas on an easel. Now, he laid a large canvas on the floor of his studio barn, nearly covering the space. Using house paint, he dripped, poured, and flung pigment from loaded brushes and sticks while walking around it. He said that this was his way of being "in" his work, acting as a medium in the creative process. For Pollock, who admired the sand painting of the American Indians, summoning webs of color to his canvases and making them balanced, complete, and lyrical, was almost an act of ritual. Like an ancient cave painter, he "signed" Lavender Mist in the upper left and right corners with his handprints. Though the work contains no lavender, the webs of black, white, russet, orange, silver, and stone blue industrial paints in Lavender Mist radiate a mauve glow that inspired Greenberg, Pollock's stalwart champion, to suggest the descriptive title, which Pollock accepted. Pollock's canvases from this decisive phase of his career are considered to have transformed the experience of looking "at" a work of art into one of being immersed, upright, in its fullness. His mastery of chance, intuition, and control brought abstract expressionism to a new level.

Arthur Dove, Movement No. 1, 1911-1912, pastel on canvas mounted on board, 21⅜" x 18"

distilled from natural motifs something real itself that does not remind anyone else of any other thing and that does not have to be explained no stranger to European art, spent 15 months in France where he'd shown his work In the age of machines and materialism, Dove's work instead concentrated on nature as an something to experience, rather than a commodity to own. He stressed the interconnection of humans and the environment, and painted emotionally charged and brilliantly colored scenes of natural wonder. Dove was a central member of Alfred Stieglitz's group who were the first moderns in American art. The collective broke away from representational and narrative art, created works that were innovative and often abstract in terms of their style, color, composition, and forms. created a number of inventive works of art that used stylized, abstract forms at a remarkably early date in American art; he is considered the first American artist to have created such purely nonrepresentational imagery influenced by Cubism, by the Expressionist work of Vasily Kandinsky, and by the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who stressed the importance of a mystical, rather than analytical, understanding of the world. Bergson proposed the existence of an "élan vital," a spirit or energy that constantly animates all living things in their fight for existence. This idea appealed to Dove, who himself was fascinated with natural cycles of growth and renewal and sought to make those universal harmonies visible in his work. He was also frequently inspired by the parallel between the visual arts and music essential forms with expressive color and line His first-hand experience of the ocean tides, weather patterns, and seasonal cycles also informed these works, as did his quest for a symbolic color effect that he called "a condition of light." As he described the latter idea in an autobiographical essay (published in Samuel M. Kootz, Modern American Painters, 1930), "It applied to all objects in nature, flowers, trees, people, apples, cows. These all have their certain condition of light, which establishes them to the eye, to each other, and to the understanding." During the 1920s, his experiments with various subjects and materials also resulted in a series of collages, several abstract portraits, and still lifes of domestic objects and agricultural machinery (49.70.36). After 291 closed in 1917, he continued to exhibit his work at Stieglitz's later galleries, the Intimate Gallery (1925-29) and An American Place (1929-46). Through Stieglitz, Dove also established a productive relationship with the patron and collector Duncan Phillips.

Morgan Russell, Synchromy in Orange: To Form, 1913-1914, oil on canvas, 11'3" x 10'2

experiment in color and form was aware of the avant-garde movements cubism, orphism and futurism moved from New York to settle in Paris and turned his attention from sculpture to painting rhythmic use of color similar to musical composition which he termed Synchromism interested in color theory three-dimensional forms of figural sculpture exhibited his paintings first in Europe and then in New York abandoned his style by the 1930s his work suggested to contemporaries the possibilities of a new style of abstract painting that emphasized color Synchromism is based on the premise that colour and sound are similar phenomena such as vibrations. The idea is that colours in a painting can be orchestrated in a similar way that a composer arranges notes in a piece of music. In this painting, Russell models the rhythm of space through the juxtaposition of saturated colors, which form bands that buckle and fold over a monumental surface, spilling onto the painted frame. "I always felt the need to impose on color the same violent twists and spirals that Rubens and Michelangelo imposed on the human body," Russell wrote about his abstraction in 1912. Based in Paris since 1909, Russell made this painting for the Salon des Indépendants where it was exhibited in the spring of 1914 with a full title: Synchromie en orange: la création de l'homme conçue comme le résultat d'une force génératrice naturelle (Synchromy in Orange: the creation of man conceived as a result of a natural generative force). This painting's ambitious scale, unique in Russell's oeuvre, was undoubtedly a response to the succession of large abstract pictures shown at the Parisian salons over the previous two years by artists such as Kupka, Picabia, Leger and Delaunay. This large canvas, about eleven feet square, with a frame painted by the artist that both contains the painting and lets the painting spill into the space around it, has been described as Russell's greatest work. The planes of saturated colors that curve and fold have a remarkable density and three-dimensional effect. The green and red triangles on the upper left seem to buckle with intensity, weighing on the yellow, green, and white irregular geometric shapes in the center. A dynamic stacking of various planes creates a sense of unfurling while being simultaneously energetically contained.Russell used his sculptural study of Michelangelo's the Dying Slave as the foundation for this work, as he evolved his abstract composition. As he said, "I always felt the need to impose on color the same violent twists and spirals that Rubens and Michelangelo imposed on the human body." When shown at the Salon des Indépendants, the work was titled Synchromie en orange: la création de l'homme conçue comme le résultat d'une force génératrice naturelle (Synchromy in Orange: the creation of man conceived as a result of a natural generative force). The artist meant the work to be a tour de force of the Syncrhomist style as well as a response to the large abstract Orphist paintings of the Delaunays and Franz Kupka.