Art History Final Exam

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55

"One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag," Johns has said of this work, "and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it." Those materials included three canvases that he mounted on plywood, strips of newspaper, and encaustic paint—a mixture of pigment and molten wax that has formed a surface of lumps and smears. The newspaper scraps visible beneath the stripes and forty-eight stars lend this icon historical specificity. The American flag is something "the mind already knows," Johns has said, but its execution complicates the representation and invites close inspection. A critic of the time encapsulated this painting's ambivalence, asking, "Is this a flag or a painting?" ohns has said that the idea to paint this first American flag came to him in a dream. Although he began the work using enamel house paint, he soon turned to his variant of the ancient medium of encaustic wherein wax, not oil, binds pigment. He did this because he wanted a medium that dries very quickly yet keeps the brushstrokes distinct. The fast-drying medium enabled him to apply individual strokes with great textural variation, while allowing some of the underlying areas of collage to show through, dimly, enticing the viewer to look closely. As John Cage wrote of Johns' craftsmanship: "Looking closely helps, though the paint is applied so sensually there is the danger of falling in love." This sense of "other levels" is critical to Jasper Johns' method of operation. If he does not create an images, but uses ready-made designs, images, and lettering, what does his work consist of? Painting a flag triggered many related ideas: Using the design of the American flag took care of a great deal for me because I didn't have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets - things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels." We have a clue in further elaboration: he considers the flags and targets similar because "they're both things which are seen and not looked at, not examined, and they both have clearly defined areas which could be measured and transferred to canvas." There are two ideas here: first, the notion of an image which is seen and not seen, because of its familiarity. And second, the idea of an image which can be precisely measured and put onto canvas - an object identified by its fixed proportions. An accurately reproduced flag is familiar, and therefore "not looked at." But by painting the image in encaustic, with its heavily worked, encrusted surface, Johns' flag image becomes familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and therefore draws our notice. It also provokes more abstract considerations. Once concerns the idea of painting a flag. In the 1950s that act seemed to many observers an absurdity: an American flag might be many things, but it was certainly not art. Yet Johns presented a carefully worked, elegantly executed painting. Such a painting was surely art - or was it? That became a problem for the viewer, alone. Johns is gone; he has already made the painting, he has already presented the problem. The viewer is left to resolve it as best he can.

Franz Marc, Yellow Cow, 1911

During the early years of the twentieth century, a back-to-nature movement swept Germany. Artists' collectives and nudist colonies sprung up in agricultural areas in the conviction that a return to the land would rejuvenate what was perceived to be an increasingly secularized, materialistic society. A seminarian and philosophy student turned artist, Franz Marc found this nature-oriented quest for spiritual redemption inspiring. His vision of nature was pantheistic; he believed that animals possessed a certain godliness that men had long since lost. "People with their lack of piety, especially men, never touched my true feelings," he wrote in 1915. "But animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me." By 1907 he devoted himself almost exclusively to the representation of animals in nature. To complement this imagery, through which he expressed his spiritual ideals, Marc developed a theory of color Symbolism. His efforts to evoke metaphysical realms through specific color combinations and contrasts were similar to those of Vasily Kandinsky, with whom, in 1911, he founded the Blue Rider, a loose confederation of artists devoted to the expression of inner states. For Marc, different hues evoked gender stereotypes: yellow, a "gentle, cheerful and sensual" color, symbolized femininity, while blue, representing the "spiritual and intellectual," symbolized masculinity. Marc's color theories and biography have been used by art historian Mark Rosenthal to interpret Yellow Cow. The frolicking yellow cow, as a symbol of the female principle, may be a veiled depiction of Maria Franck, whom Marc married in 1911. Extending this reading, Rosenthal sees the triangular blue mountains in the background as Marc's abstract self-portrait, thereby making this painting into a private wedding picture. Not all of Marc's paintings of animals are so sanguine, however. He often depicted innocent creatures in ominous scenes. Painted in 1913, The Unfortunate Land of Tyrol reflects the desolation caused by the Balkan Wars and their anticipation of pan-European battle; an Austro-Hungarian border sign included in the lower-left portion of the canvas indicates the vulnerability of this province. The cemetery and emaciated horses portend doom, but Marc's faith in the ultimate goodness of nature and the regenerative potential of war prevails: the rainbow and bird with outstretched wings reflect a promise of redemption through struggle.

Franz Marc, Animal Destinies (The Trees Show Their Rings, The Animals Their Veins), 1914

Fate of the Animals is a painting by Franz Marc created in 1913. It is oil on canvas. This work contrasts most of Marc's other works by presenting animals in a brutal way rather than depicting them in a peaceful manner. Marc's strong ties with animals as his subjects remains uncertain, but it is predicted to stem from his childhood dog.[1]:226 Fate of the Animals remains one of Marc's most famous pieces and displays Der Blaue Reiter style that he co-founded with Wassily Kandinsky. The painting currently resides in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland. The last third of the painting was damaged in a warehouse fire in 1916 after Marc's death and was later restored by one of his close friends, Paul Klee.[2] Klee restored the painting using old photographs. He added a brownish tint to the paint creating an obvious variation from the rest of the painting. Scholars have yet to figure out his decision to paint with a brown tint. Many opinions on the subject have been given, although none have been proved. aim to reach nirvana through expression of art alone. turned to mystic philosophers/inner necessity for inspiration Title and subject[edit] The title of the work is known as Fate of the Animals in English. This stems from the German name Tierschicksale which literally translates to animal destinies. Paul Klee is also known for suggesting an alternate title: The trees show their rings, the animals their veins. This is from the evident tree rings present as well as the green horse on the right whose veins you can see on its body. On the back of the canvas is believed to be the subtitle of the painting, which translates to "And all being is flaming suffering." Fate of the Animals's title derives from the chaotic scene depicted. There are animals scattered throughout the canvas in what is referred to as a post apocalyptic setting. The scene depicts a forest that is being destroyed by the flames that are evident all around. The painting consists of a blue deer in the middle of the canvas, two boars on the left side, two horses, above the boars, and four unidentified figures on the right. The four unidentified animals are believed to be either deer, foxes, or wolves. Most scholars believe that the animals are deer based on Marc's older works where he depicts them with the same colors and physical attributes.[3]:270 It is a premonition to WWI that Marc experienced living in Germany. The brutality of the animals lives at the depicted moment reflected what the oncoming war would be doing to the people of the world. The destruction, the chaos, and the sadness that the viewer sees sums up the evident outcome the future war would bring.[4][additional citation needed] Techniques[edit] The painting contains only diagonal lines. The lack of horizontal and vertical lines throughout the painting along with the deep colors, create tension. This tension further highlights the chaos and violence of the animals lives. These diagonals are emphasized in three primary ways: composition order, diagonal posture of the animals, and "the animal's position in conformity with the diagonals."[1]:226 The diagonals also help with the narration by acting as fire sparks scattering across the canvas. Marc's paintings had a reoccurring theme of colors that represented certain things.[5]:969 Blue would represent males and the severity and spirituality that they held. Yellow would depict females and their sensual and gentle side. Red would represent matter and the heaviness and brutality it held. Franz Marc makes use of these colors in Fate of the Animals to further his ongoing theme of colors. The blue deer in the middle is a male that holds a lot of spirituality. Some scholars believe that the blue deer is seen as a sacrifice, whose color and up-looking posture further prove.[3]:270 Narration[edit] A forest fire is shown with many animals in the chaos. The scene starts at the top left corner where there are three main sparks present. These sparks of fire are coming from an unknown source and will begin to ignite more of the fire and most of the animals. Under the horse there are many diagonals painted red. This is the first of the sparks to ignite the ground under the horses. The horse on the left has a face of agony and is crying out. The horse on the right is more accepting of his fate of oncoming death and looks away from the fire. The next spark to hit is the tan line that is right across the blue deers neck. It misses the blue deer and heads towards the boars in the bottom left of the painting. The boars are accepting their evident death from the flame. The boars are turned away from the flame coming straight towards them and they both have a sad face of acceptance. The last main spark to hit is the larger red diagonal that is behind the blue deer. Again this spark misses the deer and lands to ignite the ground behind him. The main large diagonals going across the canvas from the top middle to the bottom right is a tree. This tree is falling on the deer and his dramatic posture with his head up. It is another acceptance of fate for the animals. The four animals on the right are the only animals that are completely safe from any harm. There are no sparks heading towards them and no trees about to fall on them. There is no certainty as to why these animals were chosen as the only beings safe from the harm of the destructive forest.[3]:271 Marc's depiction of animals[edit] Along with Marc's reoccurring themes of colors, he would also depict animals in the same manners. Deers were a very sacred animal to Marc. He usually painted them, like most of his animals, in a very peaceful manner. His works such as Grazing Horses IV (The Red Horses), The Yellow Cow, and Dog Lying in Snow depict animals in a peaceful setting. Fate of the Animals provides a contrast to his normal depiction of animals, in which he puts his beloved animals in a scene of destruction. The only animal to not remain consistent throughout Marc's works was horses. They ranged anywhere from sacred, aspiring, to human-like and everywhere in between.[6]:34 This could explain why the only animal that shows its veins is one of the horses.

Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947

Full Fathom Five is one of Pollock's first "drip" paintings. While its top layers consist of poured lines of black and shiny silver house paint, a large part of the paint's crust was applied by brush and palette knife; the result is a labyrinthine web that reveals an instantaneous unity between multiple crisscrossing and planar forms with no contours. An assortment of detritus, from cigarette butts to coins and a key, are enfolded by the paint. Though many of these items are obscured, they contribute to the painting's dense surface and churning sensation. The title, suggested by Pollock's neighbor, quotes from Shakespeare's The Tempest, 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."

Maurice de Vlaminck, Restaurant de la Machine à Bougival [Restaurant "La Machine" at Bougival], c. 1905

It was in 1900, after meeting Derain, that Maurice de Vlaminck decided to become a full-time painter. Landscapes, particularly the Seine around Paris, were one of his favourite subjects. Here it is the village of Bougival and more particularly the restaurant "La Machine" which he has chosen as a motif. To paint the buildings, Vlaminck has moved off the path just after a bend in the road. Although he has chosen a compositional model dear to the Impressionists, he has framed it much more closely. The colour and brushstrokes also contribute to a very individual kind of construction which has something of the work of Vincent van Gogh. He has used dynamic brushstrokes which structure the forms and the thick paint favoured by the Dutch master. The strokes change according to the effect he was trying for - rounded in the coloured areas in the foreground, longer in the tree and ductile in the buildings. It was also after his observation of Van Gogh's work that Vlaminck's palette lightened until it became a burst of pure colours straight from the tube. Exhibited in 1905 at the third Salon d'Automne, The Restaurant "The Machine" at Bougival stood alongside the works of artists who were soon to be dubbed "Fauves" by the critic Louis Vauxelles.

Jean Dubuffet, Corps de dame— Pièce de boucherie [Woman's Body—Butcher's Slab], 1950

Jean Dubuffet, Corps de dame-piece de boucherie (woman's body--Butcher's slab) 1950 -Victim -fear/death in face. -totally numb from trauma of both world wars. -Interested in art of children and mentally insane. -Looks like cave painting -stick figure element. -primitive subject matter---body/flesh/desire/lust/rage. very visceral and anti-intellectual.

Jean Dubuffet, Archetypes, 1945

Jean Dubuffet was born on July 31, 1901, in Le Havre, France. He attended art classes in his youth and in 1918 moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, which he left after six months. During this time, Dubuffet met Raoul Dufy, Max Jacob, Fernand Léger, and Suzanne Valadon and became fascinated with Hans Prinzhorn's book on psychopathic art. He traveled to Italy in 1923 and South America in 1924. Then Dubuffet gave up painting for about ten years, working as an industrial draftsman and later in the family wine business. He committed himself to becoming an artist in 1942. Dubuffet's first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie René Drouin, Paris, in 1944; the Pierre Matisse Gallery gave him his first solo show in New York in 1947. During the 1940s, the artist associated with André Breton, Georges Limbour, Jean Paulhan, and Charles Ratton, and his style and subject matter owed a debt to Paul Klee. From 1945, he collected Art Brut, spontaneous, direct works by untutored individuals, such as the mentally ill and children. He additionally founded the organization Compagnie de l'Art Brut (1948-51) together with writers, critics, and dealers from Dada and Surrealist circles. For the first public Art Brut exhibition at Galerie René Drouin in 1949, Dubuffet published a manifesto in which he proclaimed the style's superiority over officially recognized art. From 1951 to 1952, Dubuffet lived in New York. He then returned to Paris, where a retrospective of his work took place at the Cercle Volney in 1954. His first museum retrospective occurred in 1957 at the Schlo Morsbroich (now Museum Morsbroich), Leverkusen, West Germany. Dubuffet exhibitions were subsequently held at the Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris (1960-61); Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Art Institute of Chicago (1962); Palazzo Grassi, Venice (1964); Tate Gallery, London, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1966); and Guggenheim Museum (1966-67). A collection of Dubuffet's writings, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants (Prospectus and all subsequent texts), was published in 1967, the same year he started his architectural structures. Soon thereafter, he began numerous commissions for monumental outdoor sculptures. In 1971, he produced his first theater props, the "practicables." A Dubuffet retrospective was presented at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna; and Joseph-Haubrichkunsthalle, Cologne (1980-81). In 1981, the Guggenheim Museum observed the artist's 80th birthday with an exhibition. He was also the subject of a major retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou (2001). Dubuffet died on May 12, 1985, in Paris.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Composition Z-VIII, 1924

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian: [ˈlaːsloː ˈmoholinɒɟ];[1] July 20, 1895 - November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. Moholy-Nagy was born László Weisz in Bácsborsód to a Jewish-Hungarian family.[2] His cousin was the conductor Sir Georg Solti. He attended Gymnasium (academic high school) in the city of Szeged. He changed his German-Jewish surname to the Magyar surname of his mother's Christian lawyer friend Nagy, who supported the family and helped raise Moholy-Nagy and his brothers when their Jewish father, Lipót Weisz left the family. Later, he added "Moholy" ("from Mohol") to his surname, after the name of the Hungarian town Mohol in which he grew up. One part of his boyhood was spent in a Hungarian Ada town, in the family home near Mohol. In 1918 he formally converted to the Hungarian Reformed Church (Calvinist); his godfather was his Roman Catholic university friend, the art critic Ivan Hevesy. Immediately before and during World War I he studied law in Budapest and served in the war, where he sustained a serious injury. In Budapest, on leave and during convalescence, Moholy-Nagy became involved first with the journal Jelenkor ("The Present Age"), edited by Hevesy, and then with the "Activist" circle around Lajos Kassák's journal Ma ("Today"). After his discharge from the Austro-Hungarian army in October 1918, he attended the private art school of the Hungarian Fauve artist Róbert Berény. He was a supporter of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, declared early in 1919, though he assumed no official role in it. After the defeat of the Communist regime in August, he withdrew to Szeged. An exhibition of his work was held there, before he left for Vienna around November 1919. He left for Berlin early in 1920. At the Bauhaus[edit] In 1923, Moholy-Nagy replaced Johannes Itten as the instructor of the foundation course at the Bauhaus. This effectively marked the end of the school's expressionistic leanings and moved it closer towards its original aims as a school of design and industrial integration.[3] The Bauhaus became known for the versatility of its artists, and Moholy-Nagy was no exception. Throughout his career, he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and industrial design. One of his main focuses was photography. He coined the term "the New Vision" for his belief that photography could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. His theory of art and teaching is summed up in the book The New Vision, from Material to Architecture. He experimented with the photographic process of exposing light sensitive paper with objects overlain on top of it, called photogram. While studying at the Bauhaus, Moholy's teaching in diverse media — including painting, sculpture, photography, photomontage and metal — had a profound influence on a number of his students, including Marianne Brandt.

Robert Rauschenberg, Factum I/II 1957

Robert Rauschenberg's enthusiasm for popular culture and, with his contemporary Jasper Johns, his rejection of the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. A prolific innovator of techniques and mediums, he used unconventional art materials ranging from dirt and house paint to umbrellas and car tires. In the early 1950s, Rauschenberg was already gaining a reputation as the art world's enfant terrible with works such as Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), for which he requested a drawing (as well as permission) from Willem de Kooning, and proceeded to rub away the image until only ghostly marks remained on the paper. By 1954, Rauschenberg completed his first three-dimensional collage paintings—he called them Combines—in which he incorporated discarded materials and mundane objects to explore the intersection of art and life. "I think a picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world," he said. In 1964 he became the first American to win the International Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale. The 1/4 Mile or Two Furlong Piece (1981-98), a cumulative artwork, embodies his spirit of eclecticism, comprising a retrospective overview of his many discrete periods, including painting, fabric collage, sculptural components made from cardboard and scrap metal, as well as a variety of image transfer and printing methods.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937

Probably Picasso's most famous work, Guernica is certainly the his most powerful political statement, painted as an immediate reaction to the Nazi's devastating casual bombing practice on the Basque town of Guernica during Spanish Civil War. Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. This tour helped bring the Spanish Civil War to the world's attention. This work is seen as an amalgmation of pastoral and epic styles. The discarding of color intensifis the drama, producing a reportage quality as in a photographic record. Guernica is blue, black and white, 3.5 metre (11 ft) tall and 7.8 metre (25.6 ft) wide, a mural-size canvas painted in oil. This painting can be seen in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. Interpretations of Guernica vary widely and contradict one another. This extends, for example, to the mural's two dominant elements: the bull and the horse. Art historian Patricia Failing said, "The bull and the horse are important characters in Spanish culture. Picasso himself certainly used these characters to play many different roles over time. This has made the task of interpreting the specific meaning of the bull and the horse very tough. Their relationship is a kind of ballet that was conceived in a variety of ways throughout Picasso's career." Some critics warn against trusting the polital message in Guernica. For instance the rampaging bull, a major motif of destruction here, has previouse figured, whether as a bull or Minotaur, as Picasso' ego. However, in this instance the bull probably represents the onslaught of Fascism. Picasso said it meant brutality and darkness, presumably reminiscent of his prophetic. He also stated that the horse represented the people of Guernica.

Walter Gropius (architect), Bauhaus, Dessau Building, 1925

See Bauhaus ISM page.

Georges Braque, Le Portugais (L'émigrant) [The Portuguese (The Emigrant)], 1911-12

Somebody playing guitar, wearing some kind of jacket with buttons, guitar hole with strings, smiling mouth with teeth, wearing a funny hat (singer in a cabaret), Dock on the right upper part of painting--he's by the sea, reflections of water, "Bal" written in corner Le Portugais marks an interesting point in the development of Braque's paintings. In the top right hand corner, he stenciled the letters "D BAL" and under them, roman numerals. Although he had included numbers and letters into a still life in 1910, they were a representational element of the painting. In this piece, the letters and numbers are a purely compositional addition. Braque's intentions at adding the letters are many, but mostly they are added to make the viewer aware of the canvas itself. In representational paintings, the canvas is there only as a surface to hold whatever image the painter desires. By adding numbers, out of context elements, and surface textures, the viewer becomes aware of the fact that the canvas can also hold outside elements, making the surface of the painting just as important as what is put on top of it.

Maria Bri-Bein, Female Telegraph Operators, 1933

The great generation of women artists of the Russian avant-garde, including Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, Aleksandra Ekster, Varvara Stepanova and Liubov Popova, is by now relatively well known, as is its largely gender egalitarian, or at least gender neutral, abstract imagery. But we know much less about women artists of the 1930s under Stalin. Work from this decade is most often simply dismissed as "Socialist Realism" or "propaganda art", yet many worked in modernist figurative styles, and saw themselves as every bit as revolutionary as the previous generation. Like their Constructivist forebears Stepanova and Popova, they continued to produce exhilarating images of emancipated Soviet women well into the 1930s, until the state ideology of woman reverted to a more traditional, feminine and maternal model of limited equality. Although Maria Bri-Bein had previously worked in a more angular, modernist style reminiscent of Popova and Stepanova, this poster depicts the woman in gently rounded forms, the belted pink sweater emphasising her bosom and hips. She demonstrates her equality by voting at the ballot box (in itself an arguable model of political action in the Soviet context), but otherwise - with her downcast head and bouquet of flowers - she represents a traditional model of demure and fecund femininity. She is closer in style to the anti-revolutionary "white" feminine form of Stepanova's poster. How did this profound shift come about? Maria Bri-Bein was assigned almost exclusively women's topics for her posters, but she similarly avoided the stereotypically feminine themes of everyday life, producing instead, in the early 1930s, a striking body of images of steely, uniformed women capably performing various challenging tasks. Her 1934 poster "Woman worker and woman collective farm worker, master the technology of the sanitary defense of the USSR! Strengthen sanitary aviation!" presents a dashing female pilot in black leather and goggles, consulting with an equally square-jawed colleague as they prepare for a long-distance medical flight. Behind them, a group of women collective farmers and workers (one easily identifiable by her jumpsuit and wrench, as in the Zernova poster) is being instructed on the intricacies of the plane's technology by a uniformed woman with an arm badge. Not only Bri-Bein's feminist subject matter (fantastical as it no doubt was), but also her schematic, flattened visual language, have strong affinities with Kulagina and Zernova - even though she was a member of AKhR, a more conservative artistic group that favoured traditional realism. Even in her paintings, such as Female Telegraph Operators (1933), we see some of the modernist tendencies of her posters - the geometric blocking of space and almost purist depiction of technological gadgetry, as well as the loving attention to buttons, collars and straps on uniforms and the motif of women working together intimately. In fact, the gorgeously over-the-top butchness of the women in the aviation poster make them ripe for reclamation today as lesbian icons, whether or not (and most likely not) that was part of Bri-Bein's original intention.

Juan Gris, Breakfast, 1914

The papier collé, invented by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in 1912, found a rich and complex expression in the 1914 works of Gris. In conception, his papiers collés are closer to paintings than are the sparely drawn compositions of his forerunners; unlike them Gris covers the whole surface with pasted papers and paint. In works such as Breakfast, Gris's use of printed papers is more literal than theirs: the wood-grained fragments usually follow some of the contours of a table and are therefore integral to the composition; and his perspectival cues are relatively legible and precise. His superimposed drawings of domestic objects, fragmented yet softly modeled and most often seen from above, combine to create a more representational pictorial composition than those of Braque and Picasso. Despite these observations, Breakfast is full of troubling contradictions. The striped wallpaper background spills across the table; certain objects (a glass on the left, a bottle in the upper right) appear as ghostly presences; the coffeepot is disjointed; the tobacco packet is painted and drawn in photographically realistic trompe l'oeil, but its label is real. Thus, while aspects of domestic comfort are captured in this image, Gris also raises many subjective and objective questions about how reality is perceived. Cubism became international movement. Made with collage. Bits of paper glued onto canvas. Letters in bottom of painting "Journale" and "Gris" (could be signature or reference to the French word for gray) What's with the use of letters in cubist painting? Emphasizes flatness of painting. Lettering is automatically non-illusionistic. Letters are right on the surface. Card at top with ribbon is referencing American pictorial language.

Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921

The three musicians and dog conjure a bygone period of bohemian life, enjoyed here by Picasso in the guise of a Harlequin flanked by two figures who may represent poet-friends of the artist: Guillaume Apollinaire, who had recently died, and Max Jacob. The patterned flatness of the work is derived from cut-and-pasted paper, and stands in stark contrast to the sculptural monumentality of Picasso's Three Women at the Spring, also painted in the summer of 1921.

Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, c. 1912

"Der Blaue Reiter" comes from figure St. George, imagery of four horsemen of the apocalypse. Journal was profusely illustrated by Kandinsky and Franz Marc and included a collection of artistic ideas from many cultures and mediums (See below) "the epic of great Spirituality" Der Blaue Reiter was formed in 1911 in Munich as a loose association of painters led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. They shared an interest in abstracted forms and prismatic colors, which, they felt, had spiritual values that could counteract the corruption and materialism of their age. The flattened perspective and reductive forms of woodcut helped put the artists, especially Kandinsky, on the path toward abstraction in their painting. The name Blaue Reiter ("blue rider") refers to a key motif in Kandinsky's work: the horse and rider, which was for him a symbol for moving beyond realistic representation. The horse was also a prominent subject in Marc's work, which centered on animals as symbols of rebirth. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a group of artists united in rejection of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and Gabriele Münter. They considered that the principles of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, a group Kandinsky had founded in 1909, had become too strict and traditional. Der Blaue Reiter was a movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke which was founded in 1905.

Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!, 1963

'Whaam!' is based on an image from 'All American Men of War' published by DC comics in 1962. Throughout the 1960s, Lichtenstein frequently drew on commercial art sources such as comic images or advertisements, attracted by the way highly emotional subject matter could be depicted using detached techniques. Transferring this to a painting context, Lichtenstein could present powerfully charged scenes in an impersonal manner, leaving the viewer to decipher meanings for themselves. Although he was careful to retain the character of his source, Lichtenstein also explored the formal qualities of commercial imagery and techniques. In these works as in 'Whaam!', he adapted and developed the original composition to produce an intensely stylised painting.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

-flatness, cubism, fragments, shards -"First cubist painting" huge physically and huge in its significance. -Multi-ethnic masks--from parisian natural history museum. How do you access primitive and fearful world? -Prostitutes, objectified, fractured bodies, female nude of classical art history. -What does this say about the state of the female body? Commodified, numb, masks with personality--exoticism. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. It depicts five naked women with figures composed of flat, splintered planes and faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards; a fiercely pointed slice of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the composition teeters on an impossibly upturned tabletop. These strategies would be significant in Picasso's subsequent development of Cubism, charted in this gallery with a selection of the increasingly fragmented compositions he created in this period. Picasso unveiled the monumental painting in his Paris studio after months of revision. The Avignon of the work's title is a reference to a street in Barcelona famed for its brothel. In Picasso's preparatory studies for the work, the figure at the left was a man, but the artist eliminated this anecdotal detail in the final painting.

Max Pechstein, Killing of the Banquet Roast, from the periodical Der Sturm, vol. 2, no. 93 (January, 1912)

African art was an inspiration for Max Pechstein and his fellow Expressionist artists. This scene of a male hunting with a bow and arrow as two females look on from beneath a flowering tree was copied from a bronze plate made in the east African country of Benin. To capture the flatness of the plate, Pechstein made the a woodcut print by roughly gouging the wood block, using only thick lines, and distilling the scene into basic forms to create a sculptural effect. The title, Killing of the Banquet Roast, suggests this hunt anticipates a banquet feast—often a formal affair honoring someone or something.

Joseph Maria Olbrich, Vienna Secession Building, 1897

Along with painters and sculptors, there were several prominent architects who became associated with The Vienna Secession. During this time, architects focused on bringing purer geometric forms into the designs of their buildings. The three main architects of this movement were Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Otto Wagner. Secessionist architects often decorated the surface of their buildings with linear ornamentation in a form commonly called whiplash or eel style, although Wagner's buildings tended towards greater simplicity and he has been regarded[1] as a pioneer of modernism. In 1898, the group's exhibition house was built in the vicinity of Karlsplatz. Designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, the exhibition building soon became known simply as "the Secession" (die Sezession). This building became an icon of the movement. The secession building displayed art from several other influential artists such as Max Klinger, Eugène Grasset, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Arnold Bocklin. Otto Wagner's Majolika Haus in Vienna (c. 1898) is a significant example of the Austrian use of line. Other significant works of Otto Wagner include The Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station in Vienna (1900), and The Austrian Postal Savings Bank or Österreichische Postsparkasse in Vienna (1904-1906). Wagner's way of modifying Art Nouveau decoration in a classical manner did not find favour with some of his pupils who broke away to form the Secessionists. One was Josef Hoffmann who left to form the Wiener Werkstätte. A good example of his work is the Stoclet Palace in Brussels (1905). The Secession coin

Rene Magritte, Personal Values, 1952

Although he is often grouped with Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy, Magritte took a somewhat different approach to painting. Rather than creating fantasy imagery, he evoked the strangeness and ambiguity latent in reality. "I don't paint visions," he once said. "To the best of my capability, by painterly means, I describe objects — and the mutual relationship of objects — in such a way that none of our habitual concepts or feelings is necessarily linked with them." Here, the artist presents a room filled with familiar things, but he gives human proportions to these formerly unassuming props of everyday life, creating a sense of disorientation and incongruity. Inside and out are inverted by his rendering of a skyscape on the interior walls of the room. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, the normal, strange; Magritte creates a paradoxical world that is, in his own words, "a defiance of common sense." When he first saw this painting, Magritte's dealer, Alexander Iolas, was violently upset by it. Tellingly, the artist replied, "In my picture, the comb (and the other objects as well) has specifically lost its 'social character,' it has become an object of useless luxury, which may, as you say, leave the spectator feeling helpless or even make him ill. Well, this is proof of the effectiveness of the picture."

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (New Angel), 1920

Angelus Novus is mono print or oil transfer method invented by and executed by Paul Klee in 1920. It is now in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In his ninth thesis in the essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin, who owned the print for many years, describes: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.[1] Otto Karl Werckmeister has commented that Benjamin's interpretation of the angel has led to it becoming "an icon of the left".[2] The name and concept of the angel has inspired works by other artists and musicians.[3][4]

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930

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 1 930, 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.

Fernand Léger, The Smokers, 1911-12

Art historian and critic Michel Seuphor proclaimed that 1912 was "perhaps the most beautiful date in the whole history of painting in France." That year marked the culmination of Analytic Cubism in the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as well as the maturation of Fernand Léger's idiosyncratic Cubist style, as manifested in his lively painting The Smokers. All three artists were inspired by Paul Cézanne in their quest for a means by which to accurately describe three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional canvas. By breaking the represented figures or items into series of splintered planes and rendering them against—or within—a similarly faceted background, they created an entirely integrated space in which field and object interpenetrate one another. Of the three painters, Léger developed a vocabulary of more precisely delineated forms—his fragmented units are larger, arcs predominate, and color prevails. In both The Smokers and Nude Model in the Studio the curving, overlapping planes describe the corporeal forms of each painting's subject while articulating an allover, rhythmically patterned surface. The resulting oscillation between volumetric body and dynamic space owes as much to Futurist aesthetics as to Analytic Cubism. By 1913 Léger had pushed his abstracting grammar to its logical extreme in a series of nonobjective paintings entitled Contrast of Forms. Premised on the visual disparity between discrete geometric volumes, the series presents assorted calibrations of cylindrical, cubic, and planar units. As variations on a theme, each composition of alternating solids and voids offers a different play of light and shadow. The Guggenheim's canvas Contrast of Forms accentuates the linear armature and abbreviated modeling of the shifting geometric shapes. With these thoroughly abstract images, Léger's explorations of the Cubist idiom approached those of Robert Delaunay, whose Simultaneous Windows and brilliantly colored circular motifs of 1913 neared complete detachment from empirical reality. For Léger, however, this foray into total nonobjectivity was only temporary, as he would soon revive his penchant for figurative subjects. Adds more color to style. Figures seen among smoke, village in background

Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, 1956

Artwork description & Analysis: Hamilton's 1956 collage was a seminal piece for the evolution of Pop art and is often cited as the very first work of Pop art. Created for the exhibition This is Tomorrow at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, Hamilton's image was used both in the catalogue for the exhibition and on posters advertising it. The collage presents viewers with an updated Adam and Eve (a body-builder and a burlesque dancer) surrounded by all the conveniences modern life provided, including a vacuum cleaner, canned ham, and television. Constructed using a variety of cutouts from magazine advertisements, Hamilton created a domestic interior scene that both lauded consumerism and critiqued the decadence that was emblematic of the American post-war economic boom years.

Eduardo Paolozzi, I was a Rich Man's Plaything, 1947

Artwork description & Analysis: Paolozzi, a Scottish sculptor and artist, was a key member of the British post-war avant-garde. His collage I Was a Rich Man's Plaything proved an important foundational work for the Pop art movement, combining pop culture documents like a pulp fiction novel cover, a Coca-Cola advertisement, and a military recruitment advertisement. The work exemplifies the slightly darker tone of British Pop art, which reflected more upon the gap between the glamour and affluence present in American popular culture and the economic and political hardship of British reality. As a member of the loosely associated Independent Group, Paolozzi emphasized the impact of technology and mass culture on high art. His use of collage demonstrates the influence of Surrealist and Dadaist photomontage, which Paolozzi implemented to recreate the barrage of mass media images experienced in everyday life.

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962

Artwork description & Analysis: Warhol's iconic series of Campbell's Soup Cans paintings were never meant to be celebrated for their form or compositional style, like that of the abstractionists. What made these works significant was Warhol's co-opting of universally recognizable imagery, such as a Campbell's soup can, Mickey Mouse, or the face of Marilyn Monroe, and depicting it as a mass-produced item, but within a fine art context. In that sense, Warhol wasn't just emphasizing popular imagery, but rather providing commentary on how people have come to perceive these things in modern times: as commodities to be bought and sold, identifiable as such with one glance. This early series was hand-painted, but Warhol switched to screenprinting shortly afterwards, favoring the mechanical technique for his mass culture imagery. 100 canvases of campbell's soup cans made up his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and put Warhol on the art world map almost immediately, forever changing the face and content of modern art.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, 1908 (reworked 1919)

At the time he made this painting, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was living in Dresden, a large city in southeast Germany. In a letter to fellow painter Erich Heckel, he wrote of the Dresden crowds, "Completely strange faces pop up as interesting points through the crowd. I am carried along with the current, lacking will. To move becomes an unacceptable effort." Kirchner heightened the colors of this city scene, depicting the figures with masklike faces and vacant eyes in order to capture the excitement and psychological alienation wrought by modernization." The crowded city street—here, Dresden's fashionable and wealthy Königstrasse (King Street)—was a frequent subject for artists in the German Expressionist collective Die Brücke (The Bridge), which Kirchner helped found in 1905. Artists associated with Die Brücke sought an authenticity of expression that its members felt had been lost with the innovations of modern life.

Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist, 1913.

Between 1912 and 1914 Goncharova was involved in a number of avant-garde activities. In 1913, for example, she took part in theatrical performances alongside Vladimir Mayakovsky and even acted in a movie. Along with other members of the Russian futurist group, she also produced illustrations for experimental book publications. Like her fellow artists Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), Lyubov Popova (1889-1924) and Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), she was aware of Cubism in Paris and introduced Cubist techniques into her work. This can be seen in the canvas entitled The Laundry (1912) in which Goncharova uses the multiple viewpoint of the Cubist still life while simultaneously introducing fragments of words to suggest the subject of the painting and to emphasize the flatness of the canvas. She was also familiar with Italian Futurism. Goncharova and her Russian colleagues referred to their work as "Cubofuturist", in order to distinguish it from its Parisian sources. A well-known example of her Futurist work is The Cyclist (1912-13). Natalia Goncharova, The Cyclist, 1913 Russian influenced by futurism

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast 1931).

Boccioni, who sought to infuse art with dynamism and energy, exclaimed, "Let us fling open the figure and let it incorporate within itself whatever may surround it." The contours of this marching figure appear to be carved by the forces of wind and speed as it forges ahead. While its wind-swept silhouette is evocative of an ancient statue, the polished metal alludes to the sleek modern machinery beloved by Boccioni and other Futurist artists.

Bram van Velde, Composition, 1961

Bram (Abraham Gerardus) van Velde (19 October 1895 in Zoeterwoude, near Leiden, Netherlands - 28 December 1981 in Grimaud, near Arles, France) was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction. He is often seen as member of the School of Paris but his work resides somewhere between expressionism and surrealism, and evolved in the 1960s into an expressive abstract art. His paintings from the 1950s are similar to the contemporary work of Matisse, Picasso and the abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. He was championed by a number of French-speaking writers, including Samuel Beckett and the poet André du Bouchet.

Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946

Created in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Painting is an olique but damning image of an anonymous public figure. Half-obscured by an umbrella, he is dressed in a dark formal suit—the unofficial uniform of British politicians of the day—punctuated by an incongruously bright yellow boutonnière. But his deathly complexion and toothy grimace suggest a deep brutality beneath his proper exterior. The sense of menace is accentuated by glaring colors and the cow carcasses suspended in a cruciform behind him, a motif drawn from Bacon's childhood fascination with butcher shops, but also a possible reference to Old Master treatments of the same subject.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition 8, 1923

During the spring of 1929, Solomon and Irene Guggenheim accompanied Hilla Rebay, an artist who would later become the first director of the Guggenheim Museum, on a European tour. Introduced to Kandinsky in the artist's studio in Dessau, Germany, Guggenheim purchased Composition 8, the first of more than 150 works by the artist to enter the collection. Kandinsky regarded Composition 8 as the high point of his postwar achievement. In 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."

Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950

Excavation, Willem de Kooning's largest painting up to 1950, exemplifies the artist's innovative style of expressive brushwork and distinctive organization of space into loose, sliding planes with open contours. According to de Kooning, his point of departure was an image of women working in a rice field from Bitter Rice, a 1949 Italian Neorealist film. The mobile structure of hooked, calligraphic lines defines anatomical parts—bird and fish shapes, human noses, eyes, teeth, necks, and jaws—revealing the particular tension between abstraction and figuration that is inherent in de Kooning's work. Aptly titled, the composition reflects his technically masterful painting process: an intensive building up of the surface and scraping down of its paint layers, often for months, until the desired effect was achieved.

Wols, Painting, 1946

Following the outbreak of World War II, Wols, a German expatriate, was imprisoned in the South of France for over a year. Deprived of his camera—his preferred artistic tool—he began making drawings and watercolors, practices that he continued after his release and also expanded to include painting and printmaking. The hallucinatory, imagined worlds he depicted were frequently produced for literary collaborations with existentialist writers and poets, including Jean-Paul Sartre and René de Solier, whose prose seems a fitting match for Wols's anxious, compulsive line work.

Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing, 1947

Frail yet erect, a man gestures with his left arm and points with his right. We have no idea what he points to, or why. Anonymous and alone, he is also almost a skeleton. For the Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in fact, Giacometti's sculpture was "always halfway between nothingness and being." Such sculptures were full of meaning to Sartre, who said of them, "At first glance we seem to be up against the fleshless martyrs of Buchenwald. But a moment later we have a quite different conception: these fine and slender natures rise up to heaven. We seem to have come across a group of Ascensions." In the years leading up to World War II, Giacometti abandoned his earlier Surrealism. Dissatisfied with the resource of imagination, he returned to the resource of vision, focusing on the human figure and working from live models. Under his eyes, however, these models seem virtually to have dissolved. Working in clay (the preparation to casting in bronze), Giacometti scraped away the body's musculature, so that the flesh seems eaten off by a terrible surrounding emptiness, or to register the air around it as a hostile pressure. Recording the touch of the artist's fingers, the surface of Man Pointing is as rough as if charred or corroded. At the same time, the figure dominates its space, even from a distance.

Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905.

From late 1904 to the beginning of 1906, Picasso's work centered on a single theme: the saltimbanque, or itinerant circus performer. The theme of the circus and the circus performer had a long tradition in art and in literature, and had become especially prominent in French art of the late nineteenth century. A more immediate inspiration for Picasso came from performances of the Cirque Médrano, a circus that the artist attended frequently near his residence and studio in Montmartre. Circus performers were regarded as social outsiders, poor but independent. As such, they provided a telling symbol for the alienation of avant-garde artists such as Picasso. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Family of Saltimbanques serves as an autobiographical statement, a covert group portrait of Picasso and his circle. Picasso reworked the Family of Saltimbanques several times, adding figures and altering the composition. The figures occupy a desolate landscape and although Picasso has knit them together in a carefully balanced composition, each figure is psychologically isolated from the others, and from the viewer. In his rose, or circus period, Picasso moved away from the extreme pathos of his earlier blue period, but in the Family of Saltimbanques, the masterpiece of the circus period, a mood of introspection and sad contemplation prevails.

Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror, 1932

Girl Before a Mirror shows Picasso's young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of his favorite subjects in the early 1930s. Her white-haloed profile, rendered in a smooth lavender pink, appears serene. But it merges with a more roughly painted, frontal view of her face—a crescent, like the moon, yet intensely yellow, like the sun, and "made up" with a gilding of rouge, lipstick, and green eye-shadow. Perhaps the painting suggests both Walter's day-self and her night-self, both her tranquillity and her vitality, but also the transition from an innocent girl to a worldly woman aware of her own sexuality. It is also a complex variant on the traditional Vanity—the image of a woman confronting her mortality in a mirror, which reflects her as a death's head. On the right, the mirror reflection suggests a supernatural x-ray of the girl's soul, her future, her fate. Her face is darkened, her eyes are round and hollow, and her intensely feminine body is twisted and contorted. She seems older and more anxious. The girl reaches out to the reflection, as if trying to unite her different "selves." The diamond-patterned wallpaper recalls the costume of the Harlequin, the comic character from the commedia dell'arte with whom Picasso often identified himself—here a silent witness to the girl's psychic and physical transformations.

Giacomo Balla, Girl Running on a Balcony, 1912.

Girl Running on Balcony is a 1912 painting completed by Giacomo Balla, one of the forerunners of the Italian movement called Futurism. The piece indicates the artist's growing interests in creative nuances which would later formally be realized as part of the Futurist movement. The artist was influenced heavily by northern Italians' use of divisionism and the French's better known pointillism. Created with oil on canvas just on the brink of World War I, the Futurist movement is embodied by a dark optimism for a future of speed, turbulence, chaos, and new beginnings. Most of Giacaomo Balla's pieces allude to the wonder of dynamic movement, and this painting is no exception. The oil painting is currently housed at the Museo del Novecento in Milan. -"micro-cubist" style

Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock at Work in his Studio, Contact Sheet, 1950

Hans Namuth was not initially interested in the work of Jackson Pollock, but was convinced by his teacher Alexey Brodovitch that Pollock was an important painter.[1] In July 1950, Namuth approached Pollock and asked to photograph the artist working in his studio. Pollock agreed, encouraged by his wife, Lee Krasner, who was aware of the importance of media coverage.[1] The resulting images helped to demystify Pollock's famous "drip" technique of painting, revealing it to be a deliberative process rather than a random splashing of paint.[4] They "helped transform Pollock from a talented, cranky loner into the first media-driven superstar of American contemporary art, the jeans-clad, chain-smoking poster boy of abstract expressionism," according to acclaimed culture critic Ferdinand Protzman.[5] Not satisfied with black and white stills, Namuth wanted to create a color film that managed to focus on Pollock and his painting at the same time, partially because he found more interest in Pollock's image than in his art.[6] His solution was to have Pollock paint on a large sheet of glass as Namuth filmed from underneath the work.[4][7] As Namuth could not afford professional lighting, the film was shot outside Pollock's Long Island home.[7] This documentary (co-produced with Paul Falkenberg) is considered one of the most influential for artists.[8] In November 1950, Namuth and Pollock's relationship came to an abrupt conclusion. After coming in from the cold-weather shoot of the glass painting, Pollock, who had been treated in the 1930s for alcoholism,[7] poured himself a tumbler of bourbon whiskey after supposedly having been sober for two years.[6] An argument between Namuth and Pollock ensued with each calling the other a "phony", culminating in Pollock overturning a table of food and dinnerware in front of several guests.[6] From then on, Pollock reverted to a more figure-oriented style of painting, leading some to say that Namuth's sessions robbed Pollock of his rawness and made Pollock come to feel disingenuous about doing things for the camera that he had originally done spontaneously.[6] Art critic Jonathan Jones suggests that by filming Pollock, Namuth "broke the myth of trance" and by framing Pollock's work in the larger surrounding landscape, destroyed Pollock's view that his paintings were boundless.[7] Jeffrey Potter, a close friend of Pollock's, described Namuth as commanding, frequently telling Pollock when to start and stop painting.[9] According to Potter, Pollock "felt what was happening was phony."[7] Namuth himself describes Pollock as being "very nervous and very self-conscious" of the filming at the time, but less so when Pollock discussed it in a later interview.[2] During his time with Pollock, Hans Namuth had created two films and captured more than 500 photographs of the artist.[4] These photos were first published in 1951 in Portfolio, a journal edited by Alexey Brodovitch and Franz Zachary.[6] After the death of Pollock in 1956, Namuth's photos grew in popularity and were often used in articles about the painter in place of Pollock's artwork itself.[6] Art historian Barbara Rose states that the photographs changed art by focusing on the creation of art rather than the final product alone.[6] Younger artists such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris were able not only to view Pollock's paintings, but, with Namuth's images, to see Pollock in the act of painting, giving rise to the popularity of Process Art.[6] These photos have also allowed art historians to dissect the details of Pollock's method. For example, art historian Pepe Karmel found that Pollock's painting in Namuth's first black-and-white film began with several careful drippings forming two humanoid figures and a wolf before being covered beneath several layers of paint.[6]

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, c.1944

In 1944, one of the most devastating years of World War II, Francis Bacon painted Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. With this horrific triptych depicting vaguely anthropomorphic creatures writhing in anguish, Bacon established his reputation as one of England's foremost figurative painters and a ruthless chronicler of the human condition. During the ensuing years, certain disturbing subjects recurred in Bacon's oeuvre: disembodied, almost faceless portraits; mangled bodies resembling animal carcasses; images of screaming figures; and idiosyncratic versions of the Crucifixion. One of the most frequently represented subjects in Western art, the Crucifixion has come to symbolize far more than the historical and religious event itself. Rendered in modern times by artists such as Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Barnett Newman, this theme bespeaks human suffering on a universal scale while also addressing individual pain. The Crucifixion appeared in Bacon's work as early as 1933. Even though he was an avowedly irreligious man, Bacon viewed the Crucifixion as a "magnificent armature" from which to suspend "all types of feeling and sensation." It provided the artist with a predetermined format on which to inscribe his own interpretive renderings, allowing him to evade narrative content—he disdained painting as illustration—and to concentrate, instead, on emotional and perceptual evocation. His persistent use of the triptych format (also traditionally associated with religious painting) furthered the narrative disjunction in the works through the physical separation of the elements that comprise them. That Bacon saw a connection between the brutality of slaughterhouses and the Crucifixion is particularly evident in the Guggenheim's paintings. The crucified figure slithering down the cross in the right panel, a form derived from the sinuous body of Christ in Cimabue's renowned 13th-century Crucifixion, is splayed open like the butchered carcass of an animal. Slabs of meat in the left panel corroborate this reading. Bacon believed that animals in slaughterhouses suspect their ultimate fate. Seeing a parallel current in the human experience—as symbolized by the Crucifixion in that it represents the inevitability of death—he has explained, "we are meat, we are potential carcasses." The bulbous, bloodied man lying on the divan in the center further expresses this notion by embodying human mortality.

Rene Magritte, Attempting the Impossible, 1928

In Attempting the Impossible, Magritte shows himself painting a naked woman into thin air. Women and strong colors dominate many of his early works. In 1925, Magritte abandoned his experiments with abstraction and decided "only to paint objects with all their visible details". By displaying objects in strange situations he could "challenge the real world". Paradox and contrast became a recurring motif in Magritte's work. Two separate concepts are brought together and hybridized, taking certain pieces of each to create a new concept. In The Empire of Lights, 1954, a night landscape shines under a day lit sky. Magritte was fond of illusions and problems of visual perception. How do you see things, and can you trust what you see? He used the symbols of windows, eyes, curtains, and pictures within pictures to explore these questions. Whereas his contemporary Salvador Dali painted hallucinatory dreamscapes of the mind, Magritte was content to stay within the reality of the visibly world. He places before us ordinary objects from our everyday lives and gave them new meaning - he forces us look at them from a new, slightly tilted, perspective. Magritte altered the viewer to the process of seeing.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gestapo Informer, Dessau, Germany, 1945

In Dessau, at a camp of displaced persons waiting for repatriation, a Gestapo informer who had pretended to be a refugee is discovered and exposed by a camp inmate. Cartier-Bresson draws the audience right into the middle of that anguished circle of the formerly wronged and the abused. The judge's dazed aplomb was contrasted with the denouncer's rage, the informer's resignation, while faces of anguish and anger framed the picture in a modern day Greek chorus. Henri Cartier-Bresson, himself once a German prisoner-of-war, took the photo between 21 April and 2 July 1945, between the American occupation of the city and the arrival of their Russian replacements. He was working with the Americans on a film for the Information Service about the home-coming of French prisoners of war, he recalled: "It was a film by prisoners about prisoners. The scene played itself out before my eyes as my cameraman was filming it. I had my photography camera in my hand and released the shutter. The scene was not staged. Oddly, this picture doesn't turn up in the film." (Meanwhile, back in the US, arrangements for a posthumous Cartier-Bresson retrospective was underway, editors believing that he had died in the POW camp). The picture did not appear in the film because Cartier-Bresson's fingers were indeed faster than the rolling film — a testament to his eerily ability to predict an impending "Decisive Moment".

Vladimir Tatlin, The Bottle: A Painterly Relief, 1914

In his bottle relief of 1913, Tatlin already laid some of the groundwork for the later constructivist movement. He explores the physical nature of a bottle: the materials and forms that make a bottle. It's hard to see in the photograph but the description below tells you what the original materials were: -left side--a tin plate with wire mesh--meant to convey the ambiguity of volume in glass--it contains space, occupies space, and is invisible -center--rolled sheet of polished metal, the form chosen emphasizes the reflective properties of the material -right: a piece of wallpaper, seems to be the most explicit reference to the influence of Picasso's collages. A more important influence for Tatlin was the Russian icon because of the way the old icons incorporated other materials into the surface of the painting. Tatlin's interest in exploiting the textural qualities of materials is the basis for the constructivist concept of faktura. Tatlin's next step is to engage real space. Although Boccioni had said let us break open the sculpture and enclose the environment in it, he had still created an ideal space, a conceptual space, in his Development of a Bottle in Space. Tatlin does precisely the opposite--his corner reliefs are organized explicitly in relationship to the two walls that support the work. The corner reliefs insist on their continuity with the real world.

Jackson Pollock, The She-Wolf, 1943

In the early 1940s Pollock, like many of his peers, explored primeval or mythological themes in his work. The wolf in this painting may allude to the animal that suckled the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, in the myth of the city's birth. But "She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it," Pollock said in 1944. In an attitude typical of his generation, he added, "Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it." The She-Wolf was featured in Pollock's first solo exhibition, at Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1943. MoMA acquired the painting the following year, making it the first work by Pollock to enter a museum collection.

Alberto Giacometti, City Square, 1948

In the late 1940s Alberto Giacometti produced attenuated thin figures not only of the life-size height of Standing Woman, but also on the miniature scale of the figures who inhabit his Piazza of 1947-48. Four men stride across a wide plaza, each moving toward the center, yet none apparently directed toward an encounter with one another. A single woman, whose stiff posture recalls Standing Woman, stands isolated and motionless near the center. The featureless figures exist independently within their haphazardly grouped unity, their multiple, nonconverging paths suggesting individual ambitions and absorptions. The flat bronze slab on which the figures stand serves both as base and as the plaza setting. Such a tabular format first appears in The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932-33, a highly theatrical work of Giacometti's Surrealist period. Giacometti began placing individual figures on large bases as early as 1942, but only in 1948, in Three Men Walking, did a group of attenuated figures appear on a thin square bronze base that also suggests a city square. Giacometti's scene derives from modern urban experience. He states: "In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, then they approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity. . . . It's the totality of this life that I want to reproduce in everything I do. . . ."¹ There are five different casts of this work, and a somewhat larger version with the figures placed in slightly different positions exists in five casts as well. In all of these sculptures, an eye-level examination of the work alters the scale of miniaturization first perceived by the viewer. The vastness of the empty piazza and the anonymity of the figures are revealed by such closeup scrutiny.

Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913.

In this work a soccer player dematerializes into a luminous and flickering atmosphere, save for his firmly sculpted calf, at center. Here Boccioni offered a demonstration of a principle he articulated in his 1910 text "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting": "To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere . . . movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies." With stippled brushwork and kaleidoscopic color, the painting communicates the spirited energy of a youthful athlete

Guy Debord, Guide Psychogeographique de Paris, 1957

Involvement with the Letterists[edit] Debord joined the Letterist International when he was 19. The Letterists were led dictatorially by Isidore Isou until a widely agreed upon schism ended Isou's authority. This schism gave rise to several factions of Letterists, one of which was decidedly led by Debord upon Gil Wolman's unequivocal recommendation.[3] In the 1960s, Debord led the Situationist International group, which influenced the Paris Uprising of 1968. Some consider his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) to be a catalyst for the uprising.[4] Founding of the Situationist International[edit] In 1957, the Lettrist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association gathered in Alba, Italy, to found the Situationist International, with Debord having been the leading representative of the Lettrist delegation. Initially made up of a number of well known artists such as Asger Jorn and Pinot Gallizio, the early days of the SI were heavily focused on the formulation of a critique of art, which would serve as a foundation for the group's future entrance into further political critiques. The SI was known for a number of its interventions in the art world, which included one raid against an international art conference in Belgium during 1960 that included a large pamphlet drop and significant media coverage, all of which culminated in the arrest of various situationists and sympathizers associated with the scandal. In addition to this action, the SI endeavored to formulate industrial painting, or, painting prepared en masse with the intent of defaming the original value largely associated with the art of the period. In the course of these actions, Debord was heavily involved in the planning and logistical work associated with preparing these interventions, as well as the work for Internationale Situationniste associated with theoretical defense of the Situationist International's actions.[5] Political phase of the Situationist International[edit] In the early 1960s Debord began to direct the SI toward an end of its artistic phase, eventually excluding members such as Jorn, Gallizio, Troche, and Constant - the bulk of the "artistic" wing of the SI - by 1965. Having established the situationist critique of art as a social and political critique, one not to be carried out in traditional artistic activities, the SI began, due in part to Debord's contributions, to pursue a more concise theoretical critique of capitalist society. With Debord's 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle, and excerpts from the group's journal, Internationale Situationniste, the Situationists began to formulate their theory of the spectacle, which explained the nature of late capitalism's historical decay. In Debord's terms, situationists defined the spectacle as an assemblage of social relations transmitted via the imagery of class power, and as a period of capitalist development wherein "all that was once lived has moved into representation".[citation needed] With this theory, Debord and the SI would go on to play an influential role in the revolts of May 1968 in France, with many of the protesters drawing their slogans from Situationist tracts penned or influenced by Debord.[6][7]

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913

Kandinsky's "Composition VII" is justly considered to be the apex of his artwork before the First Word War. More than 30 sketches made in watercolors and oil paints precede this painting, and they can serve as "documentary" proof of this work creation. Surprisingly that after the painter had finished his long preliminary work, the composition itself was created for 4 days only. This can be proved by photographs taken between the 25th and the 28th of November 1913. The main theme, which is an oval form intersected by an irregular rectangle, is perceived like the center surrounded by the vortex of colors and forms. By means of records and some works examination art historians defined that the "Composition VII" is a combination of several themes namely Resurrection, the Judgment Day, the Flood and the Garden of Eden. Such combination is expressed as a symbiosis of pure painting.

Gustav Klimt, Pallas Athene, 1901

Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the Wiener Sezession (Vienna Secession) in 1897 and of the group's periodical, Ver Sacrum ("Sacred Spring"). He remained with the Secession until 1908. The goals of the group were to provide exhibitions for unconventional young artists, to bring the works of the best foreign artists to Vienna, and to publish its own magazine to showcase the work of members.[9] The group declared no manifesto and did not set out to encourage any particular style—Naturalists, Realists, and Symbolists all coexisted. The government supported their efforts and gave them a lease on public land to erect an exhibition hall. The group's symbol was Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of just causes, wisdom, and the arts—of whom Klimt painted his radical version in 1898. Gustav Klimt's use of Classical myth iconography is directly derivative of antiquity in his many images of Athena. Perhaps the outstanding image of this goddess since Classical antiquity, however, is his Pallas Athene of 1898. She is a very different persona from his famous femmes fatales whose sexuality is overwhelming, for example his Judith (1901) and Danae (1907-8). Here it is Athena's divinity which Klimt finds more interesting, rather than her sexuality, which is not surprising given the gender ambiguities she demonstrated in Greek antiquity. Perhaps Klimt implies that power is a catalyst to sexual instincts, as history has long suggested that power is one of the most important sexual stimuli in human behavior and that the desire for power is strongly connected to sexual desire. In any case, this somewhat asexual Greek goddess becomes Klimt's most powerful female in his art.

Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Football Player, Color Masses of the Fourth Dimension, 1915

Last week, the Art Institute made one of the most significant acquisitions in its history: Kazimir Malevich's Painterly Realism of a Football Player--Color Masses in the 4th Dimension. This masterpiece is the first work of Russian Suprematism to enter the museum's collection and bridges one of the few gaps in the museum's extremely strong holdings of European modern art, characterized by works like Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte--1884 and Henri Matisse's Bathers by a River. With this acquisition, the Art Institute becomes only the second public institution in the United States to feature a Suprematist painting by Malevich in its collection. There are many pioneers of abstraction, but Malevich (1879-1935) is one of the most significant and rigorous, doing the most to push art to non-objective abstraction through his Suprematist movement. Having worked previously in a style related to cubism and futurism, it was not until 1915, the year of Painterly Realism of a Football Player, that Malevich brought his abstraction to its fully realized form. Painterly Realism of a Football Player was one of a group of revolutionary works that Malevich created in secrecy for one of the most seminal exhibitions of the modern moment, 0.10 (Zero-Ten): The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting in Moscow in 1915. For that exhibition, Malevich created paintings that completely eradicated all references to the recognizable world and focused instead on the inherent relationships of geometric shapes of various colors that seem to float against their white backgrounds. Considered at the time a pure and fundamental embodiment of painting itself (the "zero" in the Zero-Ten exhibition), Painterly Realism of a Football Player offered a radical formal vocabulary for art. Influenced greatly by developments in the understanding of space-time physics and the notion of the fourth dimension, Malevich referenced the natural world in his title (the football player) but also dispelled it on the canvas to present bold lines and planes freed from the weight of the third dimension. Malevich later even gave up the last vestige of the art of representation by disposing with traditional ideas of the "top" and "bottom" in his canvases; historical documentation reveals that in the four instances that the artist showed Painterly Realism of a Football Player during his lifetime, it was shown in two different orientations: with the circle at the bottom (as seen above) and with the circle at the top.

Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral (Kathedral) for Progam of the State Bauhaus in Weimar, 1919

Lyonel Feininger studied drawing at the vocational school in Hamburg in 1887. One year later, he was accepted at the Königliche Akademie der Künste (royal academy of art) in Berlin where he attended painting classes taught by Ernst Hancke. In 1891, he continued his studies at a private art school. Between 1892 and 1909, he travelled extensively to Paris, Rome, London and elsewhere. At the same he published caricatures in various magazines such as "Narrenschiff" and "Lustige Blätter". In addition, he was represented at exhibitions such as the "Große Berliner Kunstausstellung" (great Berlin art exhibition) of 1904, and in 1909, he became a member of the Berlin Secession. In 1907, Feininger turned to painting and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in Paris in 1911. He was invited by Franz Marc to exhibit some of his works for the first time at the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (first German autumn salon) at Herwarth Walden's gallery Der Sturm in 1913. In 1919, he became a member of the work council for art and pursued Walter Gropius to Weimar. Walter Gropius appointed him as one of the first masters at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar in May 1919, where he served as master of form in the printing workshop from 1919 to 1925. His woodcut Cathedral was used to illustrate the cover of the Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919. In 1921, a folder with 12 woodcuts by Feininger was the first publication to be printed at the Bauhaus Weimar. In 1924, he joined with Alexej Jawlensky, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky to form the exhibition collective "Die Blauen Vier" (The Blue Four). During his Bauhaus period, works by Lyonel Feininger, father of Bauhaus students Andreas and Theodore Lux Feininger, were shown in many exhibitions, for instance at the Kronprinzenpalais (Crown Prince palace) in Berlin in 1928 and in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1929. In 1937, Feininger emigrated to the USA and taught at Mills College in Oakland, California, and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Many exhibitions of his work took place in the USA, such as the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art New York in 1944.

Andre Masson, Ariadne's Thread, 1938

Masson's work is full of archetypal content; the ingenious complexity of his mental processes, his randomness of composition, and his non-formalistic paintings suggest to a younger generation that he is saying something else (to use one of Rilke's favorite words, unsäglich, something extreme and unsayable - or even unpaintable). Picture-making as a neat Gestalt package was dissolved as art served revelation. Surrealism, essentially literary and psychological rather than plastic and formalistic, was hyperbolically ready to trust its effects to the morbid shocks of repugnant objects in an attempt to endow the absurd complexity of our world and our psyche. Masson invented new labyrinths to search for new Minotaurs without regard for the dependability of Ariadne or her thread. Whether he encountered the Minotaur, or was transfixed by the torso of light or found his way out of the maze, this did not concern him; he contemplated the experience of the journey. He would not slay the Minotaur but interrogate it for revelation; he would portray the line of Ariadne's thread wherever it led as he drew each beholder into the vital unstable center of his energy. Masson's art is a means of knowing; the intricate passages of his thought are so flowing as to leave the door open for others to find their way to the essential center. The highest achievement of man, he seems to say, is a program of discontent; and within the blight of our dislocated sensibilities Masson's Surrealism was a form of wisdom and courage.

Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, 1904.

Matisse made this painting in the south of France, in the town of Saint-Tropez, while vacationing with family and friends. The forms in the painting—the figures, tree, bush, sea and sky—are created from spots of color, jabs of the brush that build up the picture. Matisse favored discrete strokes of color that emphasized the painted surface rather than a realistic scene. He also used a palette of pure, high-pitched primary colors (blue, green, yellow, and orange) to render the landscape, and then outlined the figures in blue. The painting takes its title, which means "Richness, calm, and pleasure," from a line by the 19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire, and it shares the poem's subject: escape to an imaginary, tranquil refuge. Matisse said, "What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter."1 Matisse wasn't interested in conflict or politics. This is an early painting by Matisse, and yet the idea of balance and serenity found here would remain a consistent theme in his work throughout the next 50 years.

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 1: Lozenge With Four Lines, 1930

Mondrian was a member of the Dutch De Stijl movement from its inception in 1917. By the early 1920s, in line with De Stijl practice, he restricted his compositions to predominantly off-white grounds divided by black horizontal and vertical lines that often framed subsidiary blocks of individual primary colors. Tableau 2, a representative example of this period, demonstrates the artist's rejection of mimesis, which he considered a reprehensibly deceptive imitation of reality. In 1918 Mondrian created his first "losangique" paintings, such as the later Composition No. 1: Lozenge with Four Lines, by tilting a square canvas 45 degrees. Most of these diamond-shaped works were created in 1925 and 1926 following his break with the De Stijl group over Theo van Doesburg's introduction of the diagonal. Mondrian felt that in so doing van Doesburg had betrayed the movement's fundamental principles, thus forfeiting the static immutability achieved through stable verticals and horizontals. Mondrian asserted, however, that his own rotated canvases maintained the desired equilibrium of the grid, while the 45-degree turn allowed for longer lines. Art historian Rosalind Krauss identifies the grid as "a structure that has remained emblematic of modernist ambition." She notes in these paintings by Mondrian, whose work has become synonymous with the grid, two signal opposing generative tendencies. Composition No. 1: Lozenge with Four Lines, in which the lines intersect just beyond the picture plane (suggesting that the work is taken from a larger whole), exemplifies a centrifugal disposition of the grid; Tableau 2, whose lines stop short of the picture's edges (implying that it is a self-contained unit), evinces a centripetal tendency. Krauss argues that these dual and conflicting readings of the grid embody the central conflict of Mondrian's—and indeed of Modernism's—ambition: to represent properties of materials or perception while also responding to a higher, spiritual call. "The grid's mythic power," Krauss asserts, "is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)."

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-3

Mondrian, who had escaped to New York from Europe after the outbreak of World War II, delighted in the city's architecture. He was also fascinated by American jazz, particularly boogie-woogie, finding its syncopated beat, irreverent approach to melody, and improvisational aesthetic akin to what he called, in his own work, the "destruction of natural appearance; and construction through continuous opposition of pure means—dynamic rhythm." In this painting, his penultimate, Mondrian replaced the black grid that had long governed his canvases with predominantly yellow lines that intersect at points marked by squares of blue and red. These atomized bands of stuttering chromatic pulses, interrupted by light gray, create paths across the canvas suggesting the city's grid, the movement of traffic, and blinking electric lights, as well as the rhythms of jazz.

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1920

Monument to the Third International, also sometimes known simply as Tatlin's Tower, is his most famous work, as well as the most important spur to the formation of the Constructivist movement. The Tower, which was never fully realized, was intended to act as a fully functional conference space and propaganda center for the Communist Third International. Its steel spiral frame was to stand at 1,300 feet, making it the tallest structure in the world at the time. It was to be taller, more functional - and therefore more beautiful by Constructivist standards - than the Eiffel Tower. There were to be three glass units, a cube, cylinder, and cone, which would provide functional space for meetings and would rotate once per year, month, and day, respectively. For Tatlin, steel and glass were the essential materials of modern construction. They symbolized industry, technology, and the machine age, and the constant motion of the geometrically shaped units embodied the dynamism of modernity. Wood, iron, and glass - Destroyed Monument to the Third International (1920) In 1919 and 1920, Vladimir Tatlin produced sketches and a model for what was projected to be a Monument to the Third International. This utopian design, so typical for the frenzied mood of Russians in the years immediately following the Bolshevik revolution was, in theory, to have been taller than that great symbol of modernity, the Eiffel Tower. Its spiraling structure, however, was to lend the Monument a structural dynamism lacking in Eiffel's more symmetrical (and more stable) design. In theory, the Monument was to house a telegraph office, and other office space, but Tatlin, who was no architect, did not even attempt to work out the engineering problems that would have had to be overcome. Instead, like so many other early Soviet projects of utopian intent, Tatlin's tower (as it came to be called) never went past the planning stages. The model was exhibited--and photographed--in Petrograd in November 1920, at the same time as the mass theatrical action, The Staging of the Winter Palace, was performe

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912

Oval shape of table with actual rope around it. Reproduction of chair caning--print of wax cloth. "JOU" (short for Journale--newspaper) end of a pipe coming through letter U. Cafe table and the newspaper is stacked on the chair. Invoking the world of the Bohemian artist where artists worked in France. Kaleidoscope of objects surrounding artist Beginning in 1908, and continuing through the first few months of 1912, Braque and Picasso co-invent the first phase of Cubism. Since it is dominated by the analysis of form, this first stage is usually referred to as Analytic Cubism. But then during the summer of 1912, Braque leaves Paris to take a holiday in Provence. During his time there, he wanders into a hardware store, and there he finds a roll of oil cloth. Oil cloth is an early version of contact paper, the vinyl adhesive used to line the shelves or drawers in a cupboard. Then, as now, these materials come in a variety of pre-printed patterns. Braque purchased some oil cloth printed with a fake wood grain. That particular pattern drew his attention because he was at work on a Cubist drawing of a guitar, and he was about to render the grain of the wood in pencil. Instead, he cut the oil cloth and pasted a piece of the factory-printed grain pattern right into his drawing. With this collage, Braque changed the direction of art for the next ninety years. Collage As you might expect, Picasso was not far behind Braque. Picasso immediately begins to create collage with oil cloth as well—and adds other elements to the mix (but remember, it was really Braque who introduced collage—he never gets enough credit). So what is the big deal? Oil cloth, collage, wood grain patterns—what does this have to do with art and Cubism? One of the keys to understanding the importance of Cubism, of Picasso and Braque, is to consider their actions and how unusual they were for the time. When Braque, and then Picasso placed industrially-produced objects ("low" commercial culture) into the realm of fine art ("high" culture) they acted as artistic iconoclasts (icon=image/clast=destroyer). Moreover, they questioned the elitism of the art world, which had always dictated the separation of common, everyday experience from the rarefied, contemplative realm of artistic creation. Of equal importance, their work highlighted—and separated—the role of technical skill from art-making. Braque and Picasso introduced a "fake" element on purpose, not to mislead or fool their audience, but rather to force a discussion of art and craft, of high and low, of unique and mass-produced objects. They ask: "Can this object still be art if I don't actually render its forms myself, if the quality of the art is no longer directly tied to my technical skills or level of craftsmanship?" Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, oil on oil-cloth over canvas edged with rope, 29 x 37 cm (Musée Picasso) Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, oil on oil-cloth over canvas edged with rope, 29 x 37 cm (Musée Picasso) Still-Life with Chair Caning Virtually all avant-garde art of the second half of the twentieth century is indebted to this brave renunciation. But that doesn't make this kind of Cubism, often called Synthetic Cubism (piecing together, or synthesis of form), any easier to interpret. At first glance, Picasso's Still-Life with Chair Caning of 1912 might seem a mish-mash of forms instead of clear picture. But we can understand the image—and other like it—by breaking down Cubist pictorial language into parts. Let's start at the upper right: almost at the edge of the canvas (at two o'clock) there is the handle of a knife. Follow it to the left to find the blade. The knife cuts a piece of citrus fruit. You can make out the rind and the segments of the slice at the bottom right corner of the blade. Below the fruit, which is probably a lemon, is the white, scalloped edge of a napkin. To the left of these things and standing vertically in the top center of the canvas (twelve o'clock) is a wine glass. It's hard to see at first, so look carefully. Just at the top edge of the chair caning is the glass's base, above it is the stem (thicker than you might expect), and then the bowl of the glass. It is difficult to find the forms you would expect because Picasso depicts the glass from more than one angle. At eleven o'clock is the famous "JOU," which means "game" in French, but also the first three letters of the French word for newspaper (or more literally, "daily"; journal=daily). In fact, you can make out the bulk of the folded paper quite clearly. Don't be confused by the pipe that lays across the newspaper. Do you see its stem and bowl? Looking Down and Looking Through But there are still big questions: why the chair caning, what is the gray diagonal at the bottom of the glass, and why the rope frame? (Think of a ship's port hole. The port hole reference is an important clue.) Also, why don't the letters sit better on the newspaper? Finally, why is the canvas oval? It has already been determined that this still life is composed of a sliced lemon, a glass, newspaper, and a pipe. Perhaps this is a breakfast setting, with a citron pressé (French lemonade). In any case, these items are arranged upon a glass tabletop. You can see the reflection of the glass. In fact, the glass allows us to see below the table's surface, which is how we see the chair caning—which represents the seat tucked in below the table. Okay, so far so good. But why is the table elliptical in shape? This appears to be a café table, which are round or square but never oval. Yet, when we look at a circular table, we never see it from directly above. Instead, we see it at an angle, and it appears elliptical in shape as we approach the table to sit down. But what about the rope, which was not mass-produced, nor made by Picasso, but rather something made especially for this painting? We can view it as the bumper of a table, as it was used in some cafés, or as the frame of a ship's port hole, which we can look "through," to see the objects represented. The rope's simultaneous horizontal and vertical orientation creates a way for the viewer (us) to read the image in two ways—looking down and looking through/across. Put simply, Picasso wants us to remember that the painting is something different from that which it represents. Or as Gertrude Stein said, "A rose is a rose is a rose."

Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1910

Period: Fauvism/Expressionism (1900-35ish) Peers: Kirchner, Kandinsky, Marc Events: Boxer Rebellion in China, WWI -The painting shows five dancing figures, painted in a strong red, set against a very simplified green landscape and deep blue sky. It reflects Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art, and uses a classic Fauvist color palette: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. The painting is often associated with the "Dance of the Young Girls" from Igor Stravinsky's famous musical work The Rite of Spring. Dance is commonly recognized as "a key point of (Matisse's) career and in the development of modern painting".

Pablo Picasso, Brick Factory at Tortosa, 1909

Picasso Brick Factory, 1909 Structure part of debate (color v. structure) How important is color in this painting? Naturalism (trees) v. cubism In 1909, at the age of 28, his vision was perfect. Staring at the factory in the summer heat during a holiday from his adopted Paris to his native Spain, he made a painting that today hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in Russia. Brick Factory in Tortosa is an experiment in how brutally you can reduce, simplify, solidify and abstract forms and still produce a picture that is not simply recognisable, but profoundly full of life. It is a study in dryness and heat. The factory's buildings and chimney offer Picasso perfect, geometric shapes to play with: like a child with Lego, he can take the elemental structures of what he is looking at and remake them. Planes of grey and orange, fading to white, sketch the volumes, rather than exterior appearance, of big sheds, sloping rooftops, a dark rectangular doorway. This sounds like a mathematical exercise, and in the hands of any other artist (except Picasso's close working partner Georges Braque) it would be. But Picasso's geometric reductionism seems driven by something far more passionate and real than a desire to simplify nature. The triangles and squares are not regular, the forms not logically neat - far from revealing a plain lucid truth beneath appearances, his abstraction reveals a reality that is infinitely hard to describe. Brick Factory in Tortosa is a quiet moment during a revolution. Picasso, together with Braque, is moving rapidly towards the style that is already being nicknamed (in a review of Braque's new paintings in spring 1909) "cubism". The word denotes a way of seeing already manifest in Picasso's brick factory: the systematic transformation of surfaces into planes of colour, their jarring arrangement in rough geometries, the harshness of palette. You can see here, very clearly, how much Picasso and Braque owed to their discovery of Cézanne's landscapes. The brick factory in the heat has the toughness of Cézanne's Provencal rocks - but it has a 20th-century quality that makes it different. Factories had only been acknowledged by 19th-century landscape painters as smokestacks in the distance. Picasso looks the modern world squarely in the eye.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

Salvador Dalí frequently described his paintings as "hand painted dream photographs." He based this seaside landscape on the cliffs in his home region of Catalonia, Spain. The ants and melting clocks are recognizable images that Dalí placed in an unfamiliar context or rendered in an unfamiliar way. The large central creature comprised of a deformed nose and eye was drawn from Dalí's imagination, although it has frequently been interpreted as a self-portrait. Its long eyelashes seem insect-like; what may or may not be a tongue oozes from its nose like a fat snail from its shell. Time is the theme here, from the melting watches to the decay implied by the swarming ants. Mastering what he called "the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling," Dalí painted this work with "the most imperialist fury of precision," but only, he said, "to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality." There is, however, a nod to the real: the distant golden cliffs are those on the coast of Catalonia, Dalí's home.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, 1918

Shocking that this is by Picasso. Relative to cubist pictures, this is extremely realistic. Gives up cubism with Braque for a little while. They fought for cubism and received lots of confusion and criticism. "I can paint like neo-classicists too" Return to structure after the war. Go back to tradition--maybe all these new ideas were partially responsible for the catastrophe that happened (?) Modernism needs to be reigned in a bit. Compare with Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin. Picasso's partnership with Braque ended at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 when Braque was called up to serve in the army. Picasso, as a Spanish citizen, did not have to fight but he was affected by the changed atmosphere in Paris. He was left devastated by the death of his companion, Eva, who succumbed to tuberculosis. The mercurial writer Jean Cocteau revived his spirits when he recruited him to design the decor and costumes of Parade by Serge Diaghilev's celebrated Russian ballet. He worked on the project in Rome and found himself exhilarated by the city and its classic tradition, and by the physical beauty of the dancers. He fell in love with one of them, Olga Koklova. She became his wife in July 1918. Though this portrait has a cursorily finished background, the foreground has meticulous detail, showing off the artist's mastery of conventional techniques, something sometimes forgotten when talking about Picasso's work http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/12/picassos-wife-200712

Francis Bacon, Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953

Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a 1953 painting by the artist Francis Bacon. The work shows a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X painted by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez in 1650. The work is one of a series of over 45 variants of the Velázquez painting which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.[1] The picture was described by Gilles Deleuze as an example of creative re-interpretation of the classical. When asked why he was compelled to revisit the subject so often, Bacon replied that he had nothing against the Popes, that he merely sought "an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve manner."[2] The original Portrait of Innocent X Although Bacon avoided seeing the original, the painting remains the single greatest influence on him; its presence can be seen in many of his best works from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. In Bacon's version of Velázquez's masterpiece, the Pope is shown screaming yet his voice is "silenced" by the enclosing drapes and dark rich colors. The dark colors of the background lend a grotesque and nightmarish tone to the painting.[3] The pleated curtains of the backdrop are rendered transparent and appear to fall through the representation of the Pope's face.[4]

Viking Eggeling, still from Symphonie Diagonale, 1924

Symphonie diagonale, or Diagonal-Symphonie as its German title was, is a 1924 German film directed by Viking Eggeling. The title has also been misspelled Symphonie diaganale in the USA. Eggeling began work on Symphonie diagonale in the summer of 1923. Paper cut-outs and tin foil figures were photographed a frame at a time. Completed in 1924, the film was first shown privately on 5 November. On 3 May 1925 it was presented to the public in Germany. Sixteen days later Eggeling died in Berlin.[1] Plot summary[edit] A tilted figure, consisting largely of right angles at the beginning, grows by accretion, with the addition of short straight lines and curves which sprout from the existing design. The figure vanishes and the process begins again with a new pattern, each cycle lasting one or two seconds. The complete figures are drawn in a vaguely Art Deco style and could be said to resemble any number of things, an ear, a harp, panpipes, a grand piano with trombones, and so on, only highly stylized. The tone is playful and hypnotic.[2]

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922

The "twittering" in the title doubtless refers to the birds, while the "machine" is suggested by the hand crank. The two elements are, literally, a fusing of the natural with the industrial world. Each bird stands with beak open, poised as if to announce the moment when the misty cool blue of night gives way to the pink glow of dawn. The scene evokes an abbreviated pastoral—but the birds are shackled to their perch, which is in turn connected to the hand crank. Upon closer inspection, however, an uneasy sensation of looming menace begins to manifest itself. Composed of a wiry, nervous line, these creatures bear a resemblance to birds only in their beaks and feathered silhouettes; they appear closer to deformations of nature. The hand crank conjures up the idea that this "machine" is a music box, where the birds function as bait to lure victims to the pit over which the machine hovers. We can imagine the fiendish cacophony made by the shrieking birds, their legs drawn thin and taut as they strain against the machine to which they are fused. Klee's art, with its extraordinary technical facility and expressive color, draws comparisons to caricature, children's art, and the automatic drawing technique of the Surrealists. In Twittering Machine, his affinity for the contrasting sensibilities of humor and monstrosity converges with formal elements to create a work as intriguing in its technical composition as it is in its multiplicity of meanings.

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), most often called The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre), is an artwork by Marcel Duchamp over nine feet (2.75 metres) tall, and freestanding. Duchamp worked on the piece from 1915 to 1923, creating two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. It combines chance procedures, plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship. Duchamp's ideas for the Glass began in 1913, and he made numerous notes and studies, as well as preliminary works for the piece. The notes reflect the creation of unique rules of physics, and myth which describes the work. It is at first sight baffling in iconograhy and unclassifiable style. Yet this glass construction is not a discrete whole. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is also the title given to The Green Box notes (1934) as Duchamp intended the Large Glass to be accompanied by a book, in order to prevent purely visual responses to it.[1] The notes describe that his "hilarious picture" is intended to depict the erotic encounter between the "Bride," in the upper panel, and her nine "Bachelors" gathered timidly below in an abundance of mysterious mechanical apparatus in the lower panel.[2] The Large Glass was exhibited in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum before it was broken during transport and carefully repaired by Duchamp. It is now part of the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp sanctioned replicas of The Large Glass, the first in 1961 for an exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and another in 1966 for the Tate Gallery in London.[3][4] The third replica is in Komaba Museum, University of Tokyo.[

Rene Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933

The Human Condition (La condition humaine) generally refers to two similar oil on canvas paintings by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. One was completed in 1933 and is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.[1] The other was completed in 1935 and is part of the Simon Spierer Collection in Geneva, Switzerland.[2] A number of drawings of the same name exist as well, including one at the Cleveland Museum of Art.[3] Relation to other paintings[edit] One of Magritte's most common artistic devices was the use of objects to hide what lies behind them. For example, in The Son of Man (1964) an apple hides the face of a man wearing a bowler hat, and in The Pleasure Principle (1937) a bright flash likewise obscures a face. In The Human Condition, the cover-up appears in the form a painting within a painting. Magritte had this to say of his 1933 work: In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape.[4] Paintings within paintings appear frequently in Magritte works. Euclidean Walks (1955) is a work perhaps most like The Human Condition. It places a canvas in front of a high window depicting the tower of a close building and a street below. In The Fair Captive (1947), there is a beach scene with an easel set up. As in the previous cases it holds a canvas depicting what the viewer might expect to be behind it. This time though, flames from a burning tuba in front of the frame are seen "reflected." The Call of the Peaks (1942) shows a mountain canvas in front of a mountain background which is buffeted on the right by a curtain. The list of similar works can easily be extended to include such paintings as The Key to the Fields (1936), its 1964 reincarnation Evening Falls and the 1942 work The Domain of Arnheim, all of which feature broken windows whose shattered glass pieces on the floor still show the outside world they used to conceal. Another series of pieces which show both strong similarities and strong differences from The Human Condition are the works titled The Alarm Clock. In these works, a painting is placed on an easel in front of a window or on a balcony with a simple landscape in the background. However, the painting does not show what may possibly be behind, but is instead an upside-down basic fruit still life.

Pablo Picasso, The Old Guitarist, 1903-04.

The Old Guitarist is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso created late 1903-early 1904. It depicts an old, blind, haggard man with threadbare clothing weakly hunched over his guitar, playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain. It is currently on display in the Art Institute of Chicago.[1] At the time of The Old Guitarist's creation, Modernism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Symbolism had merged and created an overall movement called Expressionism which greatly influenced Picasso's style. Furthermore, El Greco, Picasso's poor standard of living, and the suicide of a dear friend influenced Picasso's style at the time which came to be known as his Blue Period.[1] Several x-rays, infrared images and examinations by curators revealed three different figures hidden behind the old guitarist.

Max Ernst, The Elephant Celebes, 1921

The central rotund shape in this painting derives from a photograph of a Sudanese corn-bin, which Ernst has transformed into a sinister mechanical monster. Ernst often re-used found images, and either added or removed elements in order to create new realities, all the more disturbing for being drawn from the known world. The work's title comes from a childish German rhyme that begins: 'The elephant from Celebes has sticky, yellow bottom grease¿' The painting's inexplicable juxtapositions, such as the enigmatic headless female figure and the elephant-like creature, suggest the imagery of a dream and the Freudian technique of free association. Giorgio de Chirico was an inspiration for the early Surrealists, and Celebes' palette and spatial construction show his influence.[2] The painting also attempts to apply Dada's collage effects to simulate different materials. Ernst's realistic portrayal of the constituent elements produces a hallucinatory effect that he associated with collage, and was trying to achieve in this painting.[3] Regarding the art of collage, Ernst said, "It is the systematic exploitation of the coincidental or artificially provoked encounter of two of more unrelated realities on an apparently inappropriate plane and the spark of poetry created by the proximity of these realities."[4] The central focus of the painting is a giant mechanical elephant. It is round and has a trunk-like hose protruding from it. The figure's round body was modeled after a photograph in an anthropological journal of a clay corn bin from a southern Sudanese culture, the Konkombwa. Celebes suggests "ritual and totemic sculpture of African origin", evidenced by the totem-like pole at right and the figure's bull horns.[2] The painting uniquely combines found imagery and non-Western visual elements.[2] Ernst's creature has a frilly metallic cuff or collar, and a horned head and tail. The low horizon emphasizes the creature's bulk, and the gesture of the headless mannequin introduces the viewer to the figure. The mannequin wears a surgical glove, a common Surrealist symbol. This nude figure may have a mythological connotation, suggesting the abduction of Europa by Zeus while disguised as a bull.[3] The mostly empty sky contains more incongruities: there are two fish "flying" at left (one writer considers the scene to be underwater[3]). The black shape to the right of the fish looks like an oncoming airplane, and there is a trail of smoke in the right part of the sky. These may be allusions to the "mechanical terror of the war experience" which led to Ernst writing, "On the 1st of August 1914 Max Ernst died. He was resurrected on the 11 November 1918 as a young man who aspired to find the myths of his time."[2] Celebes, then, seems to represent the myth of destruction.[2]

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Spatial Construction no. 9 (Suspended), 1921

The nesting ovals that compose this construction were measured out on a single sheet of aluminum-painted plywood, precisely cut, then rotated and suspended to make a three-dimensional object suggestive of planetary orbits. It was made at a time of both civic turmoil and great possibility in Russia, when Rodchenko and his fellow Constructivist artists sought to apply aesthetic ideals to everyday materials. They hoped their approach to art would help create a new language for the Communist state. Reflecting back on this time, Rodchenko said, "We created a new understanding of beauty, and enlarged the concept of art."

Pablo Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910

The subject of this portrait is Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979), a German-born art dealer, writer, and publisher. Kahnweiler opened an art gallery in Paris in 1907and in 1908 began representing Pablo Picasso, whom he introduced to Georges Braque. Kahnweiler was a great champion of the artists' revolutionary experiment with Cubism and purchased the majority of their paintings between 1908 and 1915. He also wrote an important book, The Rise of Cubism, in 1920, which offered a theoretical framework for the movement. Kahnweiler sat as many as thirty times for this portrait. No longer seeking to create the illusion of true appearances, Picasso broke down and recombined the forms he saw. He described Kahnweiler with a network of shimmering, semitransparent surfaces that merge with the atmosphere around him. Forms are fractured into various planes and faceted shapes and presented from several points of view. Despite the portrait's highly abstract character, however, Picasso added attributes to direct the eye and focus the mind: a wave of hair, the knot of a tie, a watch chain. Out of the flickering passages of brown, gray, black, and white emerges a rather traditional portrait pose of a seated man, his hands clasped in his lap. Picasso's epiphany/transformation--gives up his individualistic talents. Works with Georges Braque Gets rid of color/expression Portraits were "supposed" to show subject visually and give insight into their character. Slicked-back hair, suit with collar (shown by contrast of black and white in middle) hands clasped in lap, watch, "dandily dressed", African mask in upper left, table with some kind of bottle, sense of character but subtle

Gustav Klimt, Exhibition of the Association of Austrian Artists-Secession, 1897

This iconic work holds a unique place in the history of art. As the first President in 1897 of the radical group of artists and artisans comprising the Vienna Secession, Gustav Klimt's poster for the first Secessionist exhibition in Vienna in 1898 reflects the movement's ideology in both form and content. In the upper third of the frame, the poster depicts Ovid's Classical myth of the combat of Theseus and the Minotaur told in his Metamorphoses which relates the victory of the god of war over the monstrous creature. Here, it represents the Secessionists' battle with the traditional Academy and the Society of the House of Artists. With Theseus' triumph, we are to read a sense of the Secessionists' optimism at their struggle against the artistic institutions and their prescriptive views. Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom and war, frames the length of the work and faces the central void of the poster. The linear forms are elaborate and explicitly sensual and exemplify Klimt's intrest in Classical Greek and Byzantine styles. The break from traditional typography is seen here in Klimt's innovative text - decorative yet functional, type sizes vary to highlight key words to relate the message clearly. This poster was printed in two sizes and this is the smaller version. It also exists with a greenish background. This example is the second printing (where the image underneath the trees is no longer visible). No other copies of this exact printing are known to exist.

Viktor Deni, League of Nations, 1921

Viktor Nikolaevich Denisov (Russian: Виктор Николаевич Денисов), best known by the shortened pseudonym Viktor Deni, (8 March 1893 - 3 August 1946)[1] was a Russian satirist, cartoonist and poster artist. Deni was one of the major agitprop poster artists of the Bolshevist period (1917-1921). Born in Moscow in 1893, Denisov later shortened his surname to Deni.[2] Deni moved to St. Petersburg in 1913 where he established himself as a successful caricaturist, his caricatures appearing in a number of illustrated satirical journals.[2] After the October Revolution Deni worked for the Litizdat (the state publishing house),[2] an agency founded in June 1919 to coordinate the various publishing centres on behalf of the Bolsheviks. He produced nearly 50 political posters during the Russian Civil War, including some of his most well known satirical work.[2] He became one of the major agitprop poster artists of the Bolshevist period (1917-1921).[2] Deni subsequently focused on producing newspaper cartoons that addressed foreign policy issues.[2] During the German-Soviet War (World War II), he returned to the medium of the political poster together with several other prominent poster artists of the Civil War such as Mikhail Cheremnykh and Dmitri Moor.[3]

Vladimir Mayakovsky Aleksander Rodchenko Box for Our Industry Caramels from Mossel'prom, 1923

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0910/kiaer/en

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, oil on canvas, c. 1915

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/five-ways-look-Malevich-Black-Square The Black Square, Black Square or Malevich's Black Square is an iconic painting by Kazimir Malevich. The first version was done in 1915. Malevich made four variants of which the last is thought to have been painted during the late 1920s or early 1930s. The Black Square was first shown in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10 in 1915. The work is frequently invoked by critics, historians, curators, and artists as the "zero point of painting", referring to the painting's historical significance and paraphrasing Malevich. A plurality art historians, curators, and critics refer to Black Square as one of the seminal works of modern art, and of abstract art in the Western painterly tradition generally. Malevich declared the square a work of Suprematism, a movement which he proclaimed but which is associated almost exclusively with the work Malevich and his apprentice Lissitzky today. The movement did have a handful of supporters amongst the Russian avant garde but it was dwarfed by its sibling constructivism whose manifesto harmonized better with the ideological sentiments of the revolutionary communist government during the early days of Soviet Union. Suprematism may be understood as a transitional phase in the evolution of Russian art, bridging the evolutionary gap between futurism and constructivism. The larger and more universal leap forward represented by the painting, however, is the break between representational painting and abstract painting—a complex transition with which Black Square has become identified and for which it has become one of the key shorthands, touchstones or symbols.[6] Malevich had made some remarks about his painting. "It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins."[10] "I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting - to non-objective creation."[10] "[Black Square is meant to evoke] the experience of pure non-objectivity in the white emptiness of a liberated nothing."[10]

El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge, 1920

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-lissitzky-el.htm Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge ("Клином красным бей белых!") is a 1919 [1] lithographic Soviet propaganda poster by artist Lazar Markovich Lissitzky better known as El Lissitzky, "the man through whose exertions the new Russian ideas became generally understood in Western Europe".[2] In the poster, the intrusive red wedge symbolises the bolsheviks, who are penetrating and defeating their opponents, the White movement, during the Russian Civil War. It is an example of Constructivism. The image became popular in the West when Lissitzky moved to Germany in 1921. It is considered symbolic of the Russian Civil War in Western publications, although it is virtually unknown in Russia. Modern use[edit] This poster in modern times is considered abstract. A simplified version lacking the smaller details is used by the Peacekeepers in the television series Farscape. English doom metal band Witchfinder General employ the red wedge motif in the artwork accompanying their 1982 EP Soviet Invasion. A similar simplified version (rotated 1/4 turn clockwise) was appropriated by the German post-punk band Mekanik Destruktiw Komandoh (MDK) for their 1983 12" single Berlin, released on the sixth international label. The Australian Trotskyist organization Socialist Alternative incorporates the red wedge in its logo. The German/Austrian Marxist organization Gruppen gegen Kapital und Nation uses a simplified version of the poster as its logo. Franz Ferdinand used the image as inspiration for their single This Fire. The logo and the name was used by a socialist music and arts organisation in the UK, Red Wedge, which campaigned against the Thatcher government in the lead up to the 1987 general election (UK)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self Portrait as a Soldier, 1915

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/early-abstraction/expressionism1/a/kirchner-self-portrait-as-a-soldier -Erasure of boundaries between art and life. Avant-garde ideal. Fragile balance upset by war. Kirchner began to lose his mind. Post-Freudian motifs and symbols. Oedipal complex. "Bridge" members constantly fighting against male figures of authority "Father figures"-->very in line with oedipal theory. -Part of Bridge movement. -Scale of oil on canvas. seen in gallery/exhibition.

Andy Warhol, Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times, 1963

in 1962 Warhol began to cull images of tragic frontpage news stories. He silkscreened this image of a fatal car accident fourteen times. "I tried doing them by hand," he said, "but I find it easier to use a screen. This way, I don't have to work on my objects at all." Warhol's distance from the work's making parallels his diffusion of this gruesome image through repetition and deterioration. About the addition of "a blank canvas, the same background color," Warhol claimed, perhaps ironically, "The two are designed to hang together however the owner wants. . . . It just makes them bigger and mainly makes them cost more."