20th C

(15) Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass,

Georges Braque, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass, 1913. Charcoal and various papers pasted on paper, 19 6 7 80 × 29 11 New York. This Cubist collage of glued paper is a visual game to be deciphered. The pipe in the foreground, for example, seems to lie on the newspaper, but it is a cutout reveal-ing the canvas surface

(13) The Portuguese

Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911. Oil on canvas, 39 10 1 80 × 29 80. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel (gift of Raoul La Roche, 1952). The Cubists rejected the pictorial illusionism that had dominated Western art for centuries. here, Braque concentrated on deconstructing form and placing it in dynamic interaction with space

(3) Red Room (Harmony in Red)

Henri Matisse, Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908-1909. Oil on canvas, 59 110 × 89 10. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Matisse believed that painters should choose compositions and colors that express their feelings. here, the table and wall seem to merge because they are the same color and have identical patterning.

(2) Woman with the Hat

Henri Matisse, Woman with the Hat, 1905. Oil on canvas, 29 7 340 × 19 111 (bequest of Elise S. Haas). Matisse's portrayal of his wife, Amélie, features patches and splotches of seemingly arbitrary colors. he and the other Fauve painters used color not to imitate nature but to produce a reaction in the viewer.

26 Fountain

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 (replica, 1950). Glazed sanitary china with black paint, 19 high. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Duchamp's "readymade" sculptures were mass-produced objects that the Dada artist modified. In Fountain, he conferred the status of art on a urinal and forced people to see the object in a new light.

(37) Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale

Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924. Oil on wood with wood construction, 29 3 1 20 × 19 10 1 20 × 4 1 20. Museum of Modern Art, New York. In this early Surrealist painting with an intentionally ambiguous title, Ernst used traditional perspective to represent the setting, but the three sketchily rendered figures belong to a dream world.

1 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907. Oil on canvas, 89 × 79 80. Museum of Modern Art, New York (acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest). Picasso's radical break with traditional Western norms of pictorial repre-sentation was inspired in part by ancient Iberian sculptures—his sources for the fea-tures of the three young women at the left. 29-1b The striated features of the distorted heads of the two young Avignon Street prostitutes at the right grew directly from Picasso's increasing fascination with African artworks, which he studied and collected. 29-1c By breaking the figures of the demoiselles into ambiguous planes, as if the viewer were seeing them from more than one place in space at once, Picasso disrupted the standards of Western art since the Renaissance.

(7) Improvisation 28

Vassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912. Oil on canvas. The theories of Einstein and Rutherford convinced Kandinsky that material objects had no real substance. he was one of the first painters to reject repre-sentation in favor of abstraction in his canvases.