Fifteen: April 6 and April 11
Nonobjective Painting
Abstract art, nonfigurative art, nonobjective art, and nonrepresentational art are loosely related terms. They are similar, but perhaps not of identical meaning. Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art.
Artist: Giorgio de Chirico Piece: Mystery and Melancholy of a Street Medium: Oil on Canvas Year: 1914
Arriving in Paris at virtually the same moment as Chagall was the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). While studying in Munich from 1905 to 1909, de Chirico was heavily influenced by German Symbolist artists, the Theosophy of Schopenhauer, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who described life as a "foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed." He moved to Italy in 1909, settling in Florence in 1910, where, influenced by the strong southern light of Italy and the arcades of the Piazza Santa Croce, he made the first of his "Metaphysical Town Squares," images of an empty piazza formed by austere buildings rendered as bold simple forms and carefully delineated by strong line. His compositions and use of space became increasingly complex after his arrival in Paris in 1911, as seen in his 1914 Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (fig. 27.26), made after his permanent return to Italy in 1914. His reliance on strong diagonal lines, such as the receding buildings and shadows, and his use of unstable disjointed space make his works vaguely echo Cubism. And yet de Chirico's pictures are stylistically conventional, even suggesting stage sets. Unlike his Futurist compatriots, de Chirico idolized rather than rejected the Classical past, although he subverted its austere authority by evoking a Romantic melancholy, using ominous shadows, intense light, and skewed perspective to create an unsettling eeriness. In Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, railroad tracks, darkened windows and arches, the empty van, and the girl with the hoop seem to be symbols, but de Chirico provides no clues about their meaning, insisting none existed. Instead, the painting offers a dreamscape, one with a poetic mood and wide open to interpretation. De Chirico called his work "Metaphysical Painting," revealing the reality underlying the appearance of things. As we shall see in the next chapter, his psychologically provocative poetic reveries would serve as a springboard for representational Surrealism in the coming decade.
Artist: Picasso Piece: Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass Medium: Pasted Paper, Gouache, and Charcoal Year: 1912
Collage completely changed the way in which Braque and Picasso made their images. Instead of breaking down or abstracting an object into essential forms, the artists now synthetically constructed it by building it up or arranging it out of cut pieces of paper, hence the name Synthetic Cubism. Constructing the image out of large, flat shapes meant that they could introduce into Cubism a variety of textures and colors, as seen in Picasso's Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass (fig. 27.7) of 1912. Because music is abstract, like their art, it became a favorite theme for the Cubists, who wished to establish parallels between the two art forms. Picasso built his composition on a background of real wallpaper that, like the imitation chair caning used earlier, serves as a visual pun on illusion and reality. Picasso puns with solid forms and intangible space as well. The guitar sound-hole, an element that should be negative space but appears as a solid circle of paper, contrasts with the wine glass in the Analytic Cubist drawing, which should be three-dimensional and solid but instead consists of lines on a flat piece of off-white paper that has more physical presence than the drawn glass. Picasso even tells us he is punning, for he has cropped the newspaper collage at the bottom to read "LE JOU," a shortening of Le Journal, or "newspaper," which in French sounds like the verb jouer, meaning "to play." The headline for the article is "La Bataille s'est engagé," which translates as "The Battle Has Started," and refers to the violent war then raging in the Balkans, with Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro fighting for independence against the Ottoman Empire (see map 27.1). Picasso uses the announcement to signal the friendly rivalry between himself and Braque. Possibly, he is subtly contrasting the sensual pleasure of his still life and its implied comfortable bourgeois lifestyle with the horrendous suffering of the Balkan conflict, in effect commenting on French or middle-class indifference to the tragedy occurring to the east.
Artist: Lyubov Popova Piece: The Traveler Medium: Oil on Canvas Year: 1915
In Moscow, Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, two of the greatest collectors of contemporary art, made available to Russian artists their extraordinary holdings of works by Matisse and Picasso, among other vanguard artists. In response to these works and to growing ties with the western European avant-garde, Russian artists began to explore Cubism and other approaches to abstraction. In 1910, a group of Russian artists formed an avant-garde art association called the Jack of Diamonds to support exhibitions of experimental work. Two years later, a splinter group, The Donkey's Tail, emerged. The latter especially was modeled on the Futurists. These groups embraced the modern, emphasizing the machine and industry, both critical to bringing Russia into the twentieth century. One of the outstanding painters in this avant-garde circle was Lyubov Popova (1889-1924), who studied in Paris in 1912 and in Italy in 1914, experiencing first hand the latest developments in Cubism and Futurism. These influences are reflected in The Traveler (fig. 27.22) of 1915. In this depiction of a woman wearing a yellow necklace and holding a green umbrella, Popova combines the fracturing of Cubism with the energy and movement of Futurism.
Artist: Boccioni Piece: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space Medium: Bronze Year: 1913
In States of Mind I: Farewells, we sense not only the dematerialization of the train and figures through time and movement, in part created by Boccioni's application of Divisionism, but also the simultaneous presence of space as something plastic and as vital as form. Swirling throughout the chaotic image is also an emotional energy—a sense of painful separation and disappearance—which the title reveals as a theme of the work. This "plastic dynamism," or the fusing of object and space, is evident in Boccioni's sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (fig. 27.21) of 1913. The pointed forms trailing off legs and torso capture the direction of the energy, as if the displaced space were itself worn like a mantle.
Artist: Henri Matisse Piece: Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life) Medium: Oil on Canvas Year: 1905-06
In other words, Matisse sought to use color in an abstract way that was beautiful, peaceful, serene, and sensuous. We can see Matisse beginning to move out of Fauvism in his 1905-06 painting Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life). This work shows the influence not only of Derain's curvilinear patterning but also of first-hand experience with Gauguin's paintings; Gauguin's estate was being stored in Collioure, and Matisse visited the collection twice. The color in Le Bonheur remains intense and nonrealistic, but now it is contained in graceful arabesques. Matisse's most innovative move here is to dispense with logical space and scale while increasing the abstraction. No matter how abstract and flat Derain's and Matisse's Fauvist pictures of just a year earlier are, they still project a rational progression of space. Now, in Matisse's work, that space is gone, as two enormous reclining nudes in the middle ground are as large as, if not larger than, the pipe player and kissing couple in the foreground. Figures dissolve into one another and trees into sky and hills, so that it is nearly impossible to tell which sits in front of which. Reality gives way to a joyous abstract orchestration of colored lines and planes, which takes its hedonistic cue from the Classical idylls of ritual, dance, and music making of Puvis de Chavannes (see fig. 26.5). The pipes, garlands, shepherd, and sense of Graeco-Roman nudity evoke an archaic Classical world, the same world conjured by such French painters as Poussin and Claude (see figs. 21.7 and 21.8). Because of the intensity of its color, Le Bonheur is generally labeled a Fauvist picture. By 1907, however, Matisse's palette, while still colorful, was subdued, becoming sensuous and serene rather than joyfully riotous.
Artist: Georges Braque Piece: The Portuguese Medium: Oil on Canvas Year: 1911
It may seem incredible that Les Demoiselles owes anything to the methodical, highly structured paintings of Cézanne, but Picasso had carefully studied Cézanne's late work and found in his abstract treatment of volume and space the basic units from which to derive the faceted shapes of what became Analytic Cubism. Picasso did not arrive at this style on his own, however, and even seemed creatively stalled after Les Demoiselles. To help him move beyond this point, the emotional Spaniard needed an interlocutor, a rational steadying force, someone with whom he could discuss his ideas and experiment. This intellectual partner was the French artist Georges Braque (1882-1963), who conveniently lived around the corner from him in Montmartre. From 1908 to 1910, the two fed off each other, their styles developing from representational pictures of fractured forms and space, as seen in Les Demoiselles, to shimmering evanescent mirages of abstract lines and brushwork, as found in Braque's 1911 painting The Portuguese (fig. 27.6). Picasso and Braque were so intertwined during this period that their styles began to merge by 1910. The Portuguese is a classic example of the Analytic Cubism that had emerged in 1910. Gone is the emotional terror and chaos of Les Demoiselles. Braque arranged a grid of lines following the shape of the canvas and an orderly geometric pattern of diagonal lines and curves, all recalling Cézanne's vision of a tightly structured world. Despite being abstract, however, these shapes also function as signs or hieroglyphs. The circle at the lower center is the sound-hole of a guitar, and the horizontal lines are the strings, although Braque used the same sign to indicate fingers, a confounding or visual punning of objects that is characteristic of Cubism and a declaration that art is a signing system, like language. The stenciled letters and numbers come from a poster that probably read "Grand Bal" and listed the price of admission (10 francs 40 centimes). The lines and shadows suggest arms, shoulders, and the frontal or three-quarter pose of a figure that tapers toward the head. In the upper right, we see lines that suggest rope and a pier. By providing these subtle visual clues, Braque prompts the viewer to recognize that the painting shows a guitar player, in a Marseille bar, with a view of the docks through a window. As with Les Demsoiselles, we find a conventional subject—a genre scene—presented in a radical new artistic language. The light that floods the picture and falls on individual facets seems real or naturalistic but fails to create coherent space and volume. Ultimately everything is in a state of flux without absolutes, including a single interpretation of reality. The only reality is the pictorial world of line and paint, which Braque is telling us is as much a language as the hieroglyphic signs that he has embedded in his image. In a 1909 review of Braque's earlier work, Louis Vauxcelles, who had named Fauvism, labeled the paintings "Cubism," influenced by Matisse's description of earlier Cubist works as appearing to be made of little cubes. The word was then applied to the analytic experiments of Braque and Picasso.
Artist: Kazimir Malevich Piece: Suprematist Painting: Airplane Flying Medium: Oil on Canvas Year: 1915
Malevich's abstract language included different geometric shapes and colors. In Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (fig. 27.24), also painted in 1915, he used red, yellow, and blue shapes in addition to black to create a sensation of movement and floating. Color, size, and shape produce a unique rhythm against the white ground. From one composition to the next, Malevich altered the rhythm by changing these formal characteristics. Although the title includes the word "airplane" and suggests an infatuation with technology, the image itself relates to the experience of air travel and the new relationship to the universe brought about by this mode of transportation. Unfortunately, reproductions of Malevich's paintings almost never show their organic quality. The shapes in Airplane Flying may appear to be hard-edged, geometric, and machine-made, but in person one can see that their boundaries waver ever so slightly and there is a sense of a human hand applying paint to canvas. Malevich's paintings contain the same human presence, even if not as overtly stated, that is evident in the work of Kandinsky. And like Kandinsky, Malevich, through his white ground which evokes infinity, suggests a connection with the universe.
Artist: Pablo Picasso Piece: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) Medium: Oil on Canvas Year: 1907
The second major style to emerge in the new century was Cubism, largely under the leadership of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Cubism was not just an innovative style that sparked new ways of thinking about the look of art. It was also important because it introduced new ways of thinking about the purpose of art, which happened when its subject matter became not so much the still lifes and portraits that were embedded within Cubist abstraction but rather an analysis of the very language of painting. Picasso was the first to push the limits of the abstraction observed in the work of Cézanne, Derain, and Matisse. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was born in the Spanish town of Malaga, on the Mediterranean coast, where he began his artwork under the direction of his father, who was a painter. At age 15, he moved to Barcelona and continued his training at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. He was soon a major figure in Barcelona's art community, working primarily in a Symbolist style. After roughly four years of shuttling back and forth between Barcelona and Paris and leading a desperate, abject existence, he settled permanently in Paris, moving into a run-down building nicknamed the bateau-lavoir ("laundry boat") in bohemian Montmartre, the rural hill overlooking the city. The neighborhood was a center for the impoverished cultural avant-garde, and Picasso quickly became part of the group's inner circle, which also included writers Max Jacob (1876-1944) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880- 1918). In 1907, Picasso shocked even his closest companions when he unveiled in his studio Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) (fig. 27.5). The painting's style departed sharply from Picasso's previous work. To his contemporaries, this large, frightening picture seemed to come out of nowhere. Of course, the painting did not emerge from an aesthetic vacuum. Among Picasso's sources were the great French history paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the canvas he chose for the work is uncharacteristically large, consistent with the dimensions of a painting destined for the traditional Salon. And the nude was a classic academic subject. An antithetical and more immediate influence was the avant-garde work of Matisse, with whom Picasso maintained a friendly rivalry until the older artist's death in 1954. In the case of Les Demoiselles, he was responding to the spatial ambiguity of Matisse's Le Bonheur de Vivre, which Picasso felt compelled to upstage. These sources were not immediately apparent to visitors to Picasso's studio, and Les Demoiselles initially outraged Matisse and everyone else. But once understood, it provided inspiration for untold artists for decades to come. The title of the painting refers to the "red-light" district in Barcelona. Early studies show a sailor in a brothel, seated before a table with a plate of fruit and surrounded by prostitutes. In the final painting, the sailor is gone, but the theme remains, for we, the viewers, become the sailor seated at the table in front of the fruit, an age-old symbol of lust. Coming through the brothel curtains and staring directly at us are perhaps five of the most savage, confrontational nudes ever painted. Thematically, then, the picture began as a typical Symbolist painting about male lust and castrating women, a continuation of the femme fatale theme prevalent in late nineteenth-century art and literature, as well as a reflection of Picasso's personal sexual conflict with women and his intense fear of venereal disease.
Artist: Vasily Kandinsky Piece: Sketch I for "Composition VII" Medium: Oil on Canvas Year: 1913
While Kandinsky advocated abstract art by 1910, it was not until 1911 that his own work became entirely nonobjective. In 1910, he began a series of ten paintings called "Compositions." The first works were abstract but still readable, with objects reduced to simple childlike forms vaguely recognizable as figures, trees, horses, mountains, or churches, for example. (A rider on a horse, often blue, occasionally appears, the horse and rider motif being common in Kandinsky's oeuvre and often interpreted as a reference to the artist himself and his idol St. George, the Christian dragonslayer, and their parallel quest to bring a new spirituality into the world. As is apparent, the motif became the group's name.) In these 1910 paintings, forms are often reduced to flat color and encased in a dark line, the deeply saturated color and line resembling the spiritual stained glass of churches. The total abstraction that appeared in 1911 can be seen in his 1913 painting Sketch I for "Composition VII" (fig. 27.14). This was one of numerous preliminary studies for a large final version that retains some of the same compositional elements but has a different palette. While Kandinsky's hues still have the deep resonance of stained glass, the recognizable motifs of the earlier works are gone, yielding to an abstract play of color and painted line and form. The image may appear apocalyptic and chaotic, but these dynamic qualities are meant to capture the universal spiritual forces as the artist himself felt them. Despite the total abstraction, the image still feels like landscape—it has a horizontal spread we associate with the genre, and there is still a feeling of recession due to overlapping forms. But this "landscape" can be read as cosmic as much as earthly, and it is so abstract it can even be interpreted as microcosmic as well (portraying a microscopic view of nature). Which is precisely Kandinsky's point since it is a picture of ubiquitous abstract mystical powers as the artist himself felt or experienced them.
Artist: Marcel Duchamp Piece: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 Medium: Oil and Canvas Year: 1912
Working in Paris in the 1910s, Duchamp quickly digested Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Toward 1911, he took on Cubism, as seen in Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (fig. 27.27), which he attempted to exhibit at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants. The hanging jury, which included some of his friends and even his two brothers, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, found the painting neither serious nor Cubist enough, so Duchamp withdrew it. The work began as an illustration for a poem that described a figure ascending a stairway to the stars. Ever the iconoclast, Duchamp portrayed a nude figure, mechanical-looking and grandly descending a staircase, as he described it, "More majestic you know, the way it's done in music halls." Duchamp was fascinated by Marey's chronophotographs, which inspired the sequential movement of his "nude." Because one needs to know the title to understand that the figure is unclothed, Duchamp underscores the way in which words become an integral part of an artwork, going so far as to paint the title on the front of the work. With this gesture, Duchamp makes an important move in his exploration of the essence of art. A title, which defines a work, circumscribes its meaning, and also serves as a tool for remembering the work, fulfilling a role as important as the artwork itself. Here, then, Duchamp makes plain the inseparability not only of artwork and title, but of visual and linguistic experience.
Collage
a piece of art made by sticking various different materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric onto a backing. the art of making collages. a combination or collection of various things.
Artist: Umberto Boccioni Piece: States of Mind: The Farewells Medium: Oil and Canvas Year: 1911
nitially following Marinetti's lead, the Futurists were activists. By the end of 1911, however, they had become disenchanted with Marinetti's politics and instead chose to concentrate on art. More important, they turned from Neo-Impressionism to Cubism in their search for aesthetic direction. Their interest in Cubism, however, departed from the concerns of Braque and Picasso because the Futurists wanted to convey motion, dynamic energy, and social progress. After visiting Paris and seeing Cubist works in 1911, Boccioni painted States of Mind I: Farewells (fig. 27.20). Embedded in a fractured world of Cubist facets is an eruption of steam, sound, moving objects, and psychic energy. The white curving lines over the locomotive reflect Mach's lines of thrust, whereas the repetition of the vaguely rendered green-tinted embracing couple is inspired by Muybridge's motion sequences. Boccioni is championing not just modern technology, as represented by the train, electric railroad signals, and trussed steel towers, but the perpetual movement of all objects and energy. In a May 1911 lecture in Rome, he proclaimed that painting had to capture the energy in all matter, energy in perpetual motion that dissolves the object while fusing it with surrounding space, an effect he called "plastic dynamism." In States of Mind I: Farewells, we sense not only the dematerialization of the train and figures through time and movement, in part created by Boccioni's application of Divisionism, but also the simultaneous presence of space as something plastic and as vital as form. Swirling throughout the chaotic image is also an emotional energy—a sense of painful separation and disappearance—which the title reveals as a theme of the work. This "plastic dynamism," or the fusing of object and space, is evident in Boccioni's sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (fig. 27.21) of 1913. The pointed forms trailing off legs and torso capture the direction of the energy, as if the displaced space were itself worn like a mantle.
