Modern Art pt. 2

Spoon Woman

Alberto Giacometti 1925 Surrealism After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and the École d'Arts et Métiers in Geneva, Alberto Giacometti traveled throughout Italy and finally settled in Paris in 1923. Two years later, despite his formal training in drawing and painting, he began to focus solely on sculpture. During these early years, he forged a path based on a variety of influences, including the formal simplicity of Constantin Brâncusi's sculpture, aspects of Cubism, and the totemic quality of African art. Spoon Woman was inspired by a type of anthropomorphic spoon carved by the Dan people of West Africa; such works were exhibited frequently in Paris during the 1920s and were the subject of great fascination for artists, including Giacometti. Drawing on the frontality and cultural significance of these implements, he presented his female figure as a symbol of fertility. Topped by a set of simple blocks to suggest her torso and head, the woman's wide, curving womb is represented by the concave section of the spoon. Giacometti's interest in female totems extended beyond the art of the Dan; in the 1920s he studied and sketched prehistoric female figures—symbols of fertility and mystery—that were in the collections of many museums.

Suspended Ball

Alberto Giacometti 1930-31 Surrealism Although works like Gazing Head caught the attention of the Surrealists, it was Suspended Ball, first exhibited at Galerie Pierre in 1930, that prompted André Breton to invite Giacometti to join the group. The sculpture's white globular form - at once floating freely and trapped in a cage - and the enigmatic segment below it, all evinced the dream-like and erotic qualities that the Surrealists adored. In fact, following the 1930 group exhibition, Salvador Dalí contributed an article on Surrealist objects for Breton's periodical, inspired by Suspended Ball. Despite this association with Breton's group, critics have also associated the sculpture with the ideas of Breton's rival, Georges Bataille. It has been argued that the elements in the sculpture are deliberately enigmatic, since while they seem to suggest a sexual act, it is unclear which element is male and which female. This confusion of categories has been said to encapsulate Bataille's notion of informe, or formlessness.

The Scream

Edvard Munch 1893 post-impressionism (proto-expressionism/symbolism) Munch defined how we see our own age - wracked with anxiety and uncertainty. Essentially The Scream is autobiographical, an expressionistic construction based on Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through nature while on a walk, after his two companions, seen in the background, had left him. Fitting the fact that the sound must have been heard at a time when his mind was in an abnormal state, Munch renders it in a style which if pushed to extremes can destroy human integrity. As previously noted, the flowing curves of art nouveau represent a subjective linear fusion imposed upon nature, whereby the multiplicity of particulars is unified into a totality of organic suggestion with feminine overtones. But man is part of nature, and absorption into such a totality liquidates the individual. Beginning at this time Munch included art nouveau elements in many pictures but usually only in a limited or modified way. Here, however, in depicting his own morbid experience, he has let go, and allowed the foreground figure to become distorted by the subjectivized flow of nature; the scream could be interpreted as expressing the agony of the obliteration of human personality by this unifying force. Significantly, although it was Munch himself who underwent the experience depicted, the protagonist bears no resemblance to him or anyone else. The creature in the foreground has been depersonalized and crushed into sexlessness or, if anything, stamped with a trace of the femininity of the world that has come close to assimilating it.

The dance of life

Edvard Munch 1901 post-impressionism (proto-expressionism/symbolism) A distinction can be drawn between those of Munch's imaginative works that are directly symbolic, like Jealousy, and those like the present picture that are illustrations of a metaphor. The latter may be more difficult to interpret. Life is not in fact a dance and metaphor is too vague to give much indication of what is intended. The picture, however, appears to be a more complex and personalized version of Woman in Three Stages, with an innocent woman in white on the left, a sensual woman dancing with the man, and an anguished woman in black on the right. All three resemble Tulla Larsen; the girls dancing in the background may also represent her. The man in the foreground appears to be Munch. It is possible to construct a reasonable explanation of the scene if we remember that at times Munch used the depth of the picture space as a time scale, moving from the distant past in the far background up to the present in the foreground adjacent to the picture plane. Applying this principle here, the initial impulse for life's dance comes from the sun with its phallic column of light crossing the sea. In front of this, far away on the beach stands a solitary girl, waiting for a sex partner. At about the same distance but now on the greensward a group of men appear to contend for the girl's favor - a point where jealousy arise.

karl johan's gate

Edward Munch 1892 post-impressionism (proto-expressionist/symbolism) The 'cropping' techniques of Degas, Japanese prints, and photography, provide Munch with a method of intimating threat and unease, as the vacant, pitiless gazes of the bourgeois strollers bear down on the viewer. The mood of nocturnal catalepsy comes from Munch's experience as he waited for a mistress to meet him: 'She greeted him with a soft smile and walked on ... Everything became so empty and he felt so alone ... People who passed by looked so strange and awkward and he felt as if they looked at him, stared at him, all these faces pale in the evening light.' Compared with The Scream, however, this work is still more symbolist than expressionist - the raw power of the latter hidden under the great beauty of the blue night sky and the glowing lamps, a velvet surface disguising the terror. The single figure moving against the flow and walking in the middle of the street, evokes Munch's own situation as a 'bohemian' and radical artist, hounded by the middle-class authorities in the stifling parochialism of Christiania, in contrast with the larger world of Berlin, Paris and beyond for which he was yearning. Munch's mastery of symbolism, however, ensures that these personal interpretations do not intrude on the vision of universal anguish and every individual's fear of the mindless crowd.

proun composition

El Lissitzky 1922-24 Constructivism -mechanical looking -different layers and transparency -indicating death and dimension

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Georges Seurat 1884-86 Neo- Impressionism Seurat labored extensively over A Sunday on The Great Jatte-1884, reworking the original and the first sketches and the sketches (the Art Institute has one such sketch and two drawings). With what resembles scientific precision, the artist tackled the issues of color, light, and form. Inspired by research in optical and color theory, he juxtaposed tiny dabs of colors that, through optical blending, form a single, he believed, more brilliantly luminous hue. To make the experience of the painting even more intense, he surrounded the canvas with a frame of painted dashes and dots, which he, in turn, with a pure white wood frame, similar to the one with which the painting is exhibited today. The very immobility of the figures and the shadows they cast makes them forever silent and enigmatic. Like all great master-pieces, La Grande Jatte continue to fascinate and elude.

Le Bonheurde Vivre

Henri Matisse 1905-06 Fauvism During his Fauve years Matisse often painted landscapes in the south of France during the summer and worked up ideas developed there into larger compositions upon his return to Paris. Joy of Live, the second of his important imaginary compositions, is typical of these. He used a landscape he had painted in Collioure to provide the setting for the idyll, but it is also influenced by ideas drawn from Watteau, Poussin, Japanese woodcuts, Persian miniatures, and 19th century Orientalist images of harems. The scene is made up of independent motifs arranged to form a complete composition. The massive painting and its shocking colors received mixed reviews at the Salon des Indépendants. Critics noted its new style - broad fields of color and linear figures, a clear rejection of Paul Signac's celebrated Pointillism. - Arcadia- non religious paradise Joy of Life is a large-scale painting (nearly 6 feet in height, 8 feet in width), depicting an Arcadian landscape filled with brilliantly colored forest, meadow, sea, and sky and populated by nude figures both at rest and in motion. As with the earlier Fauve canvases, color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas, not the realities of nature. The references are many, but in form and date, Bonheur de Vivre is closest to Cézanne's last great image of bathers.

Birth of the World

Joan Miro 1925 Surrealism 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. - background is soiled -could be early creatures -"red" balloon meaning for kids if they have it, they lose it. Can be traumatic experience for the child.

white on white

Kasmir Malevich Supermatism 1918 Malevich described his aesthetic theory, known as Suprematism, as "the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts." He viewed the Russian Revolution as having paved the way for a new society in which materialism would eventually lead to spiritual freedom. This austere painting counts among the most radical paintings of its day, yet it is not impersonal; the trace of the artist's hand is visible in the texture of the paint and the subtle variations of white. The imprecise outlines of the asymmetrical square generate a feeling of infinite space rather than definite borders.

Nude descending the staircase

Marcel Duchamp 1912 DADA Duchamp's painting captured widespread attention for its unconventional rendition of the nude. He positioned the figure—its upright stance reiterated by the vertical orientation of the canvas—in a descending diagonal from upper left to lower right. A tangle of shattered geometric shapes suggest the stairs in the lower left corner of the composition while rows of receding stairs at the upper left and right frame the strangely multiplying female form as she descends. But what a descent! The figure recalls the whirling of a robot promenading down a set of stairs as if in some sort of futurist movie, or perhaps a magic lantern show—a popular form of image projection in the years before the development of cinema.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even

Marcel Duchamp 1915-23 DADA -painted on glass -whateveris behind it can be part of the canvas as well -accident of the shipping is finally"finished" the entire composition is shattered, but it rests sandwiched between two pieces of glass, set in a metal frame with a wooden base. The top rectangle of glass is known as the Bride's Domain; the bottom piece is the Bachelors' Apparatus. It consists of many geometric shapes melding together to create large mechanical objects, which seem to almost pop out from the glass and ever-changing background. The Bride is a mechanical, almost insectile, group of monochrome shaded geometric forms located along the left-hand side of the glass. She is connected to her halo, a cloudy form stretching across the top. Its curvilinear outline and grey shading are starkly offset by the three undulating squares of unpainted glass evenly spaced over the central part of the composition. The Bride's solid, main rectangular form branches out into slender, tentacle-like projections. These include an inverted funnel capped by a half-moon shape, a series of shapes resembling a skull with two misplaced ears, and a long, proboscis-like extension stretching down almost as far as the horizon line between her domain and that of the bachelors. Her top-located domain is almost completely monochrome, with a wash of beige comparable to the cool colors of a cloudy sky.

Bicycle wheel

Marcel Duchamp, 1913, Dada "what is art"? DADA - taking to things together - white stool, black bicycle -stool is stationary, bicycle moves -the play of light and shadow -"you dont have to craft it yourself"

Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale

Max Ernst 1924 Surrealism Max Ernst said that a "fevervision" he had experienced when he was sick with measles as a child inspired him to compose the haunting scene that unfolds in Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. Merging collage and painting, he affixed a wooden gate, parts of a toy house, and a knob to a dreamlike painted landscape. A blue sky dominates the composition, and in it a small nightingale hovers above two young girls. One girl moves toward the nightingale, brandishing a large knife. The other lies on the verdant grass in a faint. To the right of this unfolding drama, a man steps lightly across the roof of the house. He holds a child in one arm and reaches out the other to the knob protruding at the edge of the picture, as if it will lead him to some escape from this scene. As Ernst recalled, speaking in the third-person, his "fevervision" was "provoked by an imitation-mahogany panel opposite his bed, the grooves of the wood taking successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird's head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on." A poem he wrote shortly before making this work begins, "At nightfall, at the outskirts of the village, two children are threatened by a nightingale." The painting features what would come to be identified as the defining preoccupations of Surrealism, a movement in which Ernst was a central figure: dreams and the unconscious; sexuality (as represented, for example, by the girl's phallic knife); and incongruous juxtapositions.

Europe After the Rain

Max Ernst 1940-42 Surrealism Medium of war, Max Ernst. Europe After the Rain remains his pullulating masterpiece, in which emotional desolation, physical exhaustion, and fears of the destructive power of total warfare combine - after the rain of fire, the biblical deluge, and the reign of terror. The title dates back to an earlier painting sculpted from plaster and oil (and painted on plywood) to create an imaginary relief map of a remodeled Europe completed in 1933, the year Hitler took power. - Delcalcomania- the process of transferring designs from prepared paper onto glass or porcelain.

The black clock

Paul Cezanne 1870 post impressionism decisions made stroke by stroke - was already part of Cezanne's nature. Much in his later still lifes - their composition and serious mood - may be found in this canvas. It is astonishing to see how the young Cezanne is able to combine the finesse of tones separated by tiny intervals of brightness and hue with bold contrasts in the large areas and lines. The shell is the most richly colored and organic-looking object of all and stands out against the severity of the neighboring lines. There is a baroque exuberance in its upper edge, and we see its influence in the scalloped vertical band behind it and in the contrasted zigzag mouth of the glass vase as well as in the billowing rumpled cloth at the right.

Self portrait with halo

Paul Gauguin 1889 symbolism/post impressionism Synthetism - not by the eye of what we see, but beyond that appearance At the time, Gauguin's likeness was described by friends as an "unkind character sketch"- a caricature. Today, it is the subject of intense analysis. Some see the artist casting himself in the role of Satan, others as Christ. What are we to make of the imagery - the apples that precipitate man's fall from grace; the halo over Gauguin's disembodied head; the snake that is both tempter of Eve and the embodiment of knowledge; the bold division into vivid yellow and red, evocative of both hellfire and the heat of creation? Perhaps it is most likely that Gauguin is revealing his conception of the artist as hero, and - almost to challenge his colleagues - of himself, particularly, as a kind of magus, a master who knows that he possesses the power of magic by virtue of talent and genius.

Day of the God

Paul Gauguin 1892 symbolism/post impressionism Paul Gauguin began to paint in his late 20s. A restless man, he traveled and worked in the French regions of Brittany and Provence as well as South and Central Americas. In 1891, he moved to the French colony of Tahiti in search of "ecstasy, calm, and art." He spent all but two of the remaining years of his life in the South Seas. When he returned to France in 1893, he spent most of his time in Paris promoting his work and writing and illustrating Noa Noa, a fictionalized account of his Tahitian experience. Day of the God (Mahana No Atua), one of the very few paintings Gauguin completed during this period, is closely related to his literary project. Tahitian landscape by the sea, the composition is divided into three horizontal bands. At the top, islanders perform a ritual near a towering sculpture. Like many figures in Gauguin's Tahitian images, the monumental sculpture was derived not from local religion but from photographs of carved reliefs adorning the Buddhist temple complex at Borobudur (Java). In the middle band, three symmetrically arranged figures are placed against a field of pink earth in poses that may signify birth, life, and death. The woman in the center, formally linked to the sculpture at the top, is similar in appearance to other depictions of Tahitian females who Gauguin used to suggest the Christian figure of Eve in paradise. The lower portion of the composition evokes brilliant, contrasting hues reflected in the water. Gauguin's Post-Impressionist style, defined by a decreasing tendency to depict real objects and the expressive use of flat, curving shapes of vibrant color, influenced many abstract painters of the early 20th century.

Gertude Stein

Picasso 1906 cubism The famous writer and expatriate Gertrude Stein was among the first Americans to respond enthusiastically to European avant-garde art. She held weekly salons in her Paris apartment populated by European and American artists and writers. For Picasso, Stein's early patronage and friendship was critical to his success. He painted this portrait of her between 1905 and 1906 at the end of his so-called "Rose Period." He reduces her body to simple masses—a foreshadowing of his adoption of Cubism—and portrays her face like a mask with heavy lidded eyes, reflecting his recent encounter with Iberian sculpture.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Picasso 1907 cubism - problematic painting -puzzling/bothersome features -2 middle has stylized eyes -2 others wore african mask -final figure in the left are egyptian models -3 different ways of cultures -not exhibited until 1916 In this adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. This proto-Cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both Cubism and Modern art.

Broadway Boogie Woogie

Piet Mondrian 1942-43 DE STIJL ( the style) Here, the horizontal and vertical lines of the painting are actually composed of rectangles and squares of red, blue, yellow, and white and gray. And they're navigating you across the canvas much like streets would in a cityscape, or much like dancers would across a dance floor. You have a feeling here, too, of music, I think; you have a feeling of the way that a canvas, which is obviously an inanimate thing, could possibly feel as if it were animated. This is strikingly different from the quite ascetic and sober earlier Mondrian. And it's quite a remarkable thing because Mondrian had come to New York during World War II, as an exile from Europe, had to begin a whole new life as an older man, and adapted to New York City with such enthusiasm and such alacrity. He developed a passionate enthusiasm for boogie-woogie, for American jazz. He also was a great dancer, loved going out and dancing to live bands at places around midtown Manhattan.

The False mirror

Rene Magritte 1928 Surrealism Le Faux Miroir presents an enormous lashless eye with a luminous cloud-swept blue sky filling the iris and an opaque, dead-black disc for a pupil. The allusive title, provided by the Belgian Surrealist writer Paul Nougé, seems to insinuate limits to the authority of optical vision: a mirror provides a mechanical reflection, but the eye is selective and subjective. Magritte's single eye functions on multiple enigmatic levels: the viewer both looks through it, as through a window, and is looked at by it, thus seeing and being seen simultaneously. The Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who owned the work from 1933 to 1936, recognized this compelling duality when he memorably described Le Faux Miroir as a painting that "sees as much as it itself is seen."

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans

Salvador Dali 1936 Surrealism Gruesome, bizarre, and excruciatingly meticulous in technique, Salvador Dalí's paintings rank among the most compelling portrayals of the unconscious mind. In this work, the artist turned his attention to the impending Spanish Civil War, which began in July 1936 and would turn his native country into a bloody battleground. Dalí described this convulsively arresting picture as "a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation." The desecration of the human body was a great preoccupation of the Surrealists in general, and of Dalí in particular. Here, the figure's ecstatic grimace, taut neck muscles, and petrifying fingers and toes create a vision of disgusting fascination

composition VIII

Vasily Kandinsky 1923 Constructivism Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposely, to cause vibrations in the soul. n this work circles, triangles, and linear elements create a surface of interacting geometric forms. The importance of circles in this painting foreshadows the dominant role they would play in many subsequent works. Kandinsky evolved an abstract style that reflected the utopian artistic experiments of the Russian avant-garde. The emphasis on geometric forms, promoted by artists such as Kazimir Malevich, sought to establish a universal aesthetic language. Although Kandinsky adopted some of the geometric aspects of Suprematism and Constructivism, his belief in the expressive content of abstract forms alienated him from his Russian colleagues. Kandinsky's work synthesized Russian avant-garde art with a lyrical abstraction that includes dynamic compositional elements, resembling mountains, sun, and atmosphere that still refer to the landscape. This conflict led him to return to Germany. In 1922 Kandinsky joined the faculty of the Bauhaus where he discovered a more sympathetic environment. He taught there until 1933, when the Nazi government closed the Bauhaus and confiscated 57 of Kandinsky's works in its purge of "degenerate art."

The Brothel (night Cafe)

Vincent Van Gogh 1888 post-Impressionism (proto-expressionist) Van Gogh often visited brothels and disreputable drinking establishments. The desolate setting of the Café de la Gare served as an inspiration for Van Gogh who wrote of the painting to his brother, Theo: In my picture of the "Night Café" I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur. The subject matter conveys a sense of loneliness and desperation. Color almost blinding. Figure near the table that looks disturbed. light id striking, having an aura of strokes. The back of the cafe looks like and oven, stepping into flames of hell.

Starry Night

Vincent Van Gogh 1889 post impressionism ( proto-expressionist) "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big," wrote van Gogh to his brother Theo, describing his inspiration for one of his best-known paintings, The Starry Night (1889).3 The window to which he refers was in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where he sought respite from his emotional suffering while continuing to make art. The Starry Night is based on van Gogh's direct observations as well as his imagination, memories, and emotions. The steeple of the church, for example, resembles those common in his native Holland, not in France. The whirling forms in the sky, on the other hand, match published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae.

Model for Monument to the Third International

Vladimir Tatlin 1919-1920 Construtivism After Russian Revolution,Tatlin was charged with implmenting the bolshevik leader vladmir Ilyich Lenin's plan for "monumental Propaganda" a campaign to remove monuments reflecting the tsarist period from Soviet streets and to replace them with new ones informed by the ideas of the incoming regime. It was for the organisation of the communist parties. 1300 ft, dynamic centripetal spirals aimed the north star rotate once a year, once a month

Moulin de la Galette

henri de toulouse- lautrec 1889 post- impressionism With this painting of the dance hall known as the Moulin de la Galette, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec established his reputation as the painter-chronicler of the entertainments of Montmartre. In this well-known image, Lautrec employed the wood barrier as a metaphorical divide between the frenzied action of the dance hall, seen as a blur in the background, and the stillness of the bored and waiting women (accompanied by a proprietary male) in the foreground. He used turpentine to thin his paint and applied it in loose washes, a technique known as peinture à l'essence. The result is a seemingly unfinished look that suggests both the immediacy of the artist's observations and the dinginess of his subject.

at the moulin rouge

henri de toulouse- lautrec 1892 post-impressionism Because of childhood injuries that left his legs crippled, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec often felt left out of the aristocratic world into which he had been born and lived at times on the margins of society. He frequented the Moulin Rouge, a famous Parisian nightclub named for the red windmill on its roof. In this painting of the club, he depicted many of his friends and favorite entertainers. In the background, La Goulue, the Moulin Rouge's reigning dance star, adjusts her red hair while the dwarfish Toulouse-Lautrec and his tall cousin, Gabriel Tapié de Céléyran, walk toward the left. The glum assembly of characters seated around the table includes writer Edouard Dujardin, entertainer La Macarona, photographer Paul Sescau, winemaker Maurice Guibert, and another redhead, perhaps entertainer Jane Avril. The woman with the green face illuminated by artificial light is May Milton, another popular dancer of the day.