Chapter 29, Art History, 1900-1945

Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker

-German Expressionist -studied at the Union of Berlin Women Artists and had no formal association with any Expressionist group -Kollwitz explored a range of issues from the overtly political—she was passionate about the plight of workers—to the deeply personal

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

-Giacomo Balla -The Futurists' interest in motion and in the Cubist fragmentation of form is evident in Balla's painting of a passing dog and its owner. Simultaneity of views was central to the Futurist program

Women with the Hat

-Henry Matisse -depicted his wife, Amélie, in a rather conventional manner compositionally, but the seemingly arbitrary colors immediately startle the viewer, as does the sketchiness of the forms. The entire image—the woman's face, clothes, hat, and background—consists of patches and splotches of color juxtaposed in ways that sometimes produce jarring contrast -He and the other Fauve painters used color not to imitate nature but to produce a reaction in the viewer

Synthetic cubism

-In 1912, Cubism entered a new phase that art historians have dubbed Synthetic Cubism . In this later Cubist style, instead of deconstructing forms, artists constructed paintings and drawings from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials. The work marking the point of departure for this new style was Picasso's Still Life with Chair-Caning, widely regarded as the first modernist collage

Fernand Léger

-Inspired by this "machine aesthetic", or the purists style -sought to capture the dynamism of modern life on canvas. Léger's solution to the problem differed markedly from Delaunay's -not a Purist himself, devised an effective compromise of tastes, bringing together meticulous Cubist analysis of form with Purism's broad simplification and machinelike finish of the design components -Tubular shapes were Léger's preferred motifs because they were suggestive of machined parts, such as pistons and cylinders. Léger's works have the sharp precision of the machine, whose beauty and quality he was one of the first artists to appreciate

George Grosz

-New Objectivity artist, Grosz observed the onset of World War I with horrified fascination that soon turned to anger and frustration

Three Musicians

-Picasso -Musicians and musical instruments frequently appeared in Braque's and Picasso's Cubist paintings and sculptures -paintings feature brighter colors (albeit against a dark background). Unlike Picasso's earlier Analytic Cubist paintings, in which he broke up objects into their component parts seen from different angles, the Synthetic Cubist Three Musicians presents forms built up from their parts, or, more precisely, from their planes, because the parts are two-dimensional shapes -Its brightly colored, interlocking shapes resemble a jigsaw puzzle. The painting may portray Picasso as Harlequin with two friends

Orphism and the Machine Aesthetic: Robert Delauney

-Robert Delaunay Picasso's and Braque's contemporary, worked toward a kind of color Cubism. Apollinaire gave the name Orphism to Delaunay's version of Cubism, after Orpheus, the mythical Greek musician -Delaunay's own name for his art was Simultanéisme

Henri Matisse

-The dominant Fauve artist -believed that color could play a primary role in conveying meaning, and consequently focused his efforts on developing this notion

Aleksander Archipenko

-Ukrainian sculptor worked in Paris and ended his career in the United States, similarly explored the Cubist notion of spatial ambiguity and the relationship between solid forms and space

Cubism and Anarchism

-Although most discussions of Cubism focus on the formal innovations of Picasso and Braque, it is important to note that contemporary critics also viewed the revolutionary nature of Cubism in sociopolitical terms. Many considered Cubism's challenge to artistic convention and tradition a subversive attack on 20th-century society -Many considered Cubism's challenge to artistic convention and tradition a subversive attack on 20th-century society. In fact, many modernist artists and writers of the period did ally themselves with various anarchist groups whose social critiques and utopian visions appealed to progressive thinkers. It was, therefore, not difficult to see radical art, such as Cubism, as having political ramifications. The French press consistently equated Cubism's disdain for tradition with anarchism and revolution. Picasso himself, however, never viewed Cubism as a protest movement

The Turning Road, L'Estaque

-André Derain -used vibrant red, orange, and yellow hues to express the energy he perceived in the landscape. The bold juxtaposition of vivid colors—Derain referred to them as "deliberate disharmonies"—reflects his study of Gauguin's canvases, as does the flattened perspective of the winding road interwoven with the trees -The jarring combination of colors in The Turning Road and other Fauve paintings is precisely what generated the hostility directed at these avant-garde painters when they first presented their work to the public at the Salon d'Automne of 1905

Max Beckmann

-Another major German artist who enlisted in the German army and initially rationalized the Great War -He believed that a better society would emerge from the chaos that the armed conflict unleashed, but over time the massive loss of life and widespread destruction disillusioned him. Soon Beckmann's work began to emphasize the horrors of war and of a society that he regarded as descending into madness

Freud and Jung

-Dada paralleled the views of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Jung (1875-1961) -In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that unconscious and inner drives (of which people are largely unaware) control human behavior. Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist who developed Freud's theories further, believed that the unconscious is composed of two facets, one personal and one collective -According to Jung, the collective unconscious accounts for the development of myths, religions, and philosophies

Night

- Max Beckmann -His disturbing view of wartime Germany is evident -depicts a cramped room invaded by three intruders. A bound woman, apparently raped, is splayed across the foreground of the painting. At the left, one of the intruders hangs her husband, while another one twists his left arm out of its socket. An unidentified woman cowers in the background. On the far right, the third intruder prepares to flee with the child -Beckmann's treatment of forms and space in Night matched his view of the brutality of early-20th-century society. Objects seem dislocated and contorted, and the space appears buckled and illogical -Although this image does not depict a war scene, the wrenching brutality pervading the home is a searing comment on society's condition

Woman Combing Her Hair

-Aleksander Archipenko -in place of the head, a void with a shape of its own -space penetrates the figure's continuous mass and is a defined form equal in importance to the mass of the bronze. It is not simply the negative counterpart to the volume as it is in traditional statues. Archipenko's Woman shows the same fluid intersecting planes seen in Cubist painting, and the relation of the planes to each other is similarly complex

Dada(movement)

-Although the Futurists celebrated World War I—the "Great War"—and the changes they hoped it would effect, the mass destruction and chaos that the conflict unleashed horrified other artists. Humanity had never before witnessed such wholesale slaughter on so grand a scale over such an extended period. More than nine million soldiers died in four years. Millions more sustained grievous wounds in great battles -The new technology of armaments, bred of the age of steel, made the Great War a "war of the guns." In the face of massed artillery hurling millions of tons of high explosives and gas shells and in the sheets of fire from thousands of machine guns in armored vehicles of the kind celebrated in Severini's Armored Train attack was suicidal -Warfare became a frustrating stalemate of soldiers holed up in trenches stretching from the English Channel almost to Switzerland. The mud, filth, and blood of the trenches; the pounding and shattering of incessant shell fire; and the terrible deaths and mutilations were psychologically devastating for a generation brought up with the doctrine of progress and a belief in the fundamental values of civilization -The introduction of poison gas in 1915 added to the horror of humankind's inhumanity. The negotiated formal end of hostilities finally arrived in 1919, but peace could not erase the scars of a global conflict -The Dadaists believed that Enlightenment reasoning had been responsible for the insane spectacle of collective homicide and global destruction that was the Great War, and they concluded that the only route to salvation was through political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. Although Dada began independently in New York and Zurich, it also took root in Paris, Berlin, and Cologne, among other cities

Mountains at Collioure

-André Derain -succeeded in capturing the vast panorama of the Mediterranean mountains, olive groves, and sky seen from a high vantage point. The painting owes much not only to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscapes but also to Derain's close study of the works of Vincent van Gogh whose influence is evident in the Fauve painter's use of short, energetic brushstrokes of vivid color and the alternation of staccato strokes of green with exposed white canvas in the foreground -no mere synthesis of earlier styles, however. Derain went further than either van Gogh or Gauguin in liberating color from its traditional role of imitating the appearance of nature -no mere synthesis of earlier styles, however. Derain went further than either van Gogh or Gauguin in liberating color from its traditional role of imitating the appearance of nature

Egon Schiele

-Austrian artist, no German Expressionists connection -produced more than 3,000 paintings and drawings. The bulk of them are nude figure studies of men and women in gouache and watercolor on paper, including approximately a hundred self-portraits exemplifying early-20th-century Expressionist painters' intense interest in emotional state. As a teenager, Schiele watched the slow, painful deterioration of his father, who contracted syphilis and died when Egon was 15. The experience had a profound impact on the artist, who ever after associated sex with physical and emotional pain and death

Le Corbusier

-Best known today as one of the most important modernist architects -also a painter. In 1918, he founded a movement called Purism, which opposed Synthetic Cubism on the grounds that it was becoming merely an esoteric art out of touch with the machine age -Purists maintained that machinery's clean functional lines and the pure forms of its parts should direct artists' experiments in design, whether in painting, architecture, or industrially produced objects

Vassily Kandinsky

-Born in Russia,moved to Munich in 1896 and soon developed a spontaneous expressive style. Indeed, Kandinsky was one of the first artists to reject representation and explore abstraction as the "subject" of his paintings, as in Improvisation 28 -Kandinsky believed, must express their innermost feelings by orchestrating color, form, line, and space, much as composers create music out of notes, which do not mimic the sounds of nature

Sculpture

-Cubism not only opened new avenues for representing form on two-dimensional surfaces but also inspired new approaches to sculpture

Die Brücke(group)

-Fie Brücke, the first group of German Expressionists, gathered in Dresden in 1905 under the leadership of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -The group members thought of themselves as paving the way for a more perfect age by bridging the old age and the new, hence their name -Kirchner's early studies in architecture, painting, and the graphic arts had instilled in him a deep admiration for German medieval art. Like the British artists associated with the Arts and Crafts movement Die Brücke artists modeled themselves on medieval craft guilds whose members lived together and practiced all the arts equally -Die Brücke artists lamented the state of German society at the opening of the 20th century. Kirchner, in particular, focused much of his attention on the detrimental effects of industrialization, such as the alienation of individuals in cities, which he felt fostered a mechanized and impersonal society. The tensions leading to World War I further intensified the discomfort and anxiety of the German Expressionists

Analytical cubism

-For many years, Picasso showed Les Demoiselles only to other painters. One of the first to see it was Georges Braque a Fauve painter who found it so challenging that he began to rethink his own painting style -Using the painting's revolutionary elements as a point of departure, together Braque and Picasso introduced Cubism around 1908. The Cubists rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world -The new style received its name after Matisse described some of Braque's work to the critic Louis Vauxcelles as having been painted "with little cubes." In his review, Vauxcelles described the new paintings as "cubic oddities." -Most art historians refer to the first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Picasso and Braque, as Analytic Cubism , because in essence it is a painterly analysis of the structure of form with the goal of achieving the kind of total view

Fate of the Animals

-Franz Marc -represents the culmination of Marc's efforts to create, in a sense, an iconography of color. Painted in 1913, when the horrific tension of impending warfare had pervaded society, the animals appear trapped in a forest amid falling trees, some apocalyptic event destroying both the forest and the animals inhabiting it -distorted the entire scene and, influenced by the work of the French Cubists -cheerful ones—are absent, and the colors of severity and brutality dominate the work. On the back of the canvas, Marc wrote: "All being is flaming suffering." -discovered just how well his painting portended war's anguish and tragedy when he ended up at the front the following year

Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, and more

-Futurist artist, artist who wrote Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto

Self-Portrait with an Amber Necklace

-Paula Modersohn-Becker -presented herself nude as a primitive fertility goddess, holding in each hand a small flower painted to resemble nipples -exhibits the "great simplicity of form" that, with Cézanne as her model, she sought in her art, but her debt to Gauguin's portrayals of Tahitian women is even stronger -the shapes of the left hand and left ear and the masklike modeling of the face—imbues the figure with a quality suggestive of a bygone era

Marcel Duchamp

-Perhaps the most influential Dadaist -a Frenchman who became the central artist of New York Dada but was also active in Paris. In 1916, he exhibited his first "readymade" sculptures, which were mass-produced common objects—"found objects" the artist selected and sometimes "rectified" by modifying their substance or combining them with another object. The creation of readymades, Duchamp insisted, was free from any consideration of either good or bad taste, qualities shaped by a society that he and other Dada artists found aesthetically bankrupt

Champs de Mars(The Red Tower)

-Robert Delaunay -one of his many depictions of the eiffel tower -Eiffel's tower ambiguously rises and collapses because Delaunay broke it into a kaleidoscopic array of colored pieces, which variously leap forward or pull back according to the relative hues and values of the broken shapes -color plays a major role in Delaunay's Orphic compositions -The painting has been interpreted as a commentary on the collapse of society due to WWI

Photomontage

-Dada spread throughout much of western Europe, arriving as early as 1917 in Berlin, where it soon took on an activist political edge, partially in response to the economic, social, and political chaos in that city in the years at the end of and immediately after World War I. The Berlin Dadaists developed to a new intensity a technique that had been used in private and popular arts long before the 20th century to create a composition by pasting together pieces of paper. A few years earlier, the Cubists had named the process collage. The Berliners christened their version of the technique photomontage -the parts of a Dada collage consisted almost entirely of "found" details, such as pieces of magazine photographs, usually combined into deliberately antilogical compositions. Collage lent itself well to the Dada desire to use chance when creating art

Suprematism and Constructivism

-Dada was a movement born of pessimism and cynicism. However, not all early-20th-century artists reacted to the profound turmoil of the times by retreating from society. Some promoted utopian ideals, believing staunchly in art's ability to contribute to improving society -These efforts often surfaced in the face of significant political upheaval, as was the case with Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia

Dada(movement) continued

-Dada was more a mind-set or attitude than a single identifiable style -an element of absurdity is a cornerstone of Dada—reflected in the movement's very name. the Dadaists chose the word at random by sticking a knife into a French-German dictionary. Dada is French for a child's hobby horse. The word satisfied the Dadaists' desire for something nonsensical -The Dadaists' pessimism and disgust surfaced in their disdain for convention and tradition. These artists made a concerted and sustained attempt to undermine cherished notions and assumptions about art. Because of this iconoclastic dimension, art historians often describe Dada as a destructive enterprise -A Dadaist described the movement, "Like everything in life, Dada is useless, everything happens in a completely idiotic way. . . . We are incapable of treating seriously any subject whatsoever, let alone this subject: ourselves." -Although war-weary cynicism and pessimism inspired the Dadaists, what they developed was phenomenally influential and powerful. By attacking convention and logic, the Dada artists unlocked new avenues for creative invention, thereby fostering a more serious examination of the basic premises of art than prior movements had -Some works were satirical while others presented strong commentary on the era of World War

Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing

-Egon Schiele -characteristic example of his mature work. He stands frontally, staring at himself in the large mirror he kept in his studio. There is no background. The edges of the paper sever his lower legs and right elbow. In some portraits, Schiele portrayed himself with amputated limbs, and his body is always that of a malnourished man whose muscles show through transparent flesh. The pose is awkward, twisted, and pained -It is hard to imagine a nude body breaking more sharply with the classical tradition of heroic male nudity. Schiele's self-portrait is that of a martyr who has suffered both physically and psychologically.Schiele's unhappy life ended when he contracted the Spanish flu in 1918. He was only 28 years old

War Monument

-Ernst Barlach -for the cathedral in his hometown of Güstrow in 1927. Working often in wood, Barlach sculpted single figures usually dressed in flowing robes and portrayed in strong, simple poses embodying deep human emotions and experiences, such as grief, vigilance, or self-comfort. Barlach's works combine sharp, smoothly planed forms with intense expression -The cast-bronze hovering figure of his War Monument is one of the most poignant memorials of World War I. Unlike traditional war memorials depicting heroic military figures, often engaged in battle, the hauntingly symbolic figure that Barlach created speaks to the experience of all caught in the conflict of war. The floating human form, suspended above a tomb inscribed with the dates 1914-1918 (and later also 1939-1945), suggests a dying soul at the moment when it is about to awaken to everlasting life—the theme of death and transfiguration -So powerful was this sculpture that the Nazis had it removed from the cathedral in 1937 and melted down for ammunition. Luckily, a friend hid another version Barlach had made. A Protestant parish in Cologne purchased it, and bronze workers made a new cast of the figure for the Güstrow cathedral

Street, Dresden

-Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -provides a glimpse into the frenzied urban activity of a bustling early-20th-century German city. Rather than offering the distant, panoramic urban view of the Impressionists Kirchner's street scene is jarring and dissonant in both composition and color, conveying the disquieting and alienating character of Dresden in the early 20th century -The women in the foreground loom large, approaching somewhat menacingly. The steep perspective of the street, which threatens to push the women directly into the viewer's space, increases their confrontational nature. Harshly rendered, the women's features make them appear ghoulish, and the garish, clashing colors—juxtapositions of bright orange, emerald green, chartreuse, and pink—add to the expressive impact of the image -Kirchner's perspective distortions, disquieting figures, and color choices reflect the influence of the work of Edvard Munch, who made similar expressive use of formal elements in The Scream

The City

-Fernand Léger -Preeminently a painter of modern urban life, Léger incorporated it into works -effects of modern posters and billboard advertisements, the harsh flashing of electric lights, and the noise of traffic -early work incorporating the aesthetic of Synthetic Cubism -he depicted the mechanical commotion of urban life, including the robotic movements of mechanized people

Ballet Mécanique (Mechanical Ballet)

-Fernand Léger -contrasted inanimate objects such as functioning machines with humans in dancelike variations

Three Women

-Fernand Léger -women are nude, are probably residents of a brothel. At the moment, they have no customers and are taking a meal -Léger's women engage the viewer's eyes directly, but although they are undressed, they lack any trace of sensuality. Léger treated their bodies not as unified and flexible organisms but as assemblages of cylinders, cones, and globes—machine-made parts, not human flesh, muscle, and bone. Their heads are virtually identical—repeated patterns of line and color, not individual human faces

Fit for Active Service

-George Grosz -produced numerous drawing commenting on German society and WW1 -depicted army officers as heartless or incompetent. This example may relate to Grosz's personal experience. On the verge of a nervous breakdown in 1917, he was sent to a sanatorium, where doctors examined him and, much to his horror, declared him "fit for service." In this biting and sarcastic drawing, an army doctor proclaims the skeleton before him "fit for service." -

The Eclipse of the Sun

-George Grosz -takes its name from the large red German coin at the upper left blocking the sun and signifying that capitalism has brought darkness to the world. Also at the top are burning buildings. At the lower right are a skull and bones. Filling the rest of the canvas are the agents of this destruction seated at a table -The painting is also a commentary on the gullibility of the public, personified here as a donkey who eats newspapers—that is, as a mindless creature who swallows the propagandistic lies promoted by the government- and business-friendly press

The Portuguese

-Georges Braque -a characteristic Analytic Cubist painting. The subject is a Portuguese musician whom the artist recalled seeing years earlier in a bar in Marseilles. Braque deconstructed the man and his instrument and placed the resulting forms in dynamic interaction with the space around them -Unlike the Fauves and German Expressionists, who used vibrant colors, the Cubists chose subdued hues—here solely brown tones—in order to focus attention on form -Braque carried his analysis so far that the viewer must work diligently to discover clues to the subject. The large intersecting planes suggest the forms of a man and a guitar. Smaller shapes interpenetrate and hover in the large planes -light and shadow reveals his departure from conventional artistic practice. Light and dark passages suggest both chiaroscuro modeling and transparent planes that enable the viewer to see through one level to another. -The stenciled letters and numbers that Braque included add to the painting's complexity. Letters and numbers are flat shapes, but as elements of a Cubist painting such as The Portuguese, they enable the painter to play with the viewer's perception of two- and three-dimensional space -

Armored Train

-Gino Severini -encapsulates the Futurist program—politically as well as artistically. Severini depicted a high-tech armored train with its rivets glistening and a huge booming cannon protruding from the top -Submerged in the bowels of the train, soldiers in a row point guns at an unseen target. In Cubist fashion, Severini depicted all of the elements of the painting, from the soldiers to the smoke emanating from the cannon, broken into facets and planes, suggesting action and movement -reflects both the Futurists' passion for speed and the "whirling life of steel" and their faith in the cleansing action of war. Not only are the colors predominantly light and bright, but death and destruction—the tragic consequences of war—are absent from Severini's painting. This sanitized depiction of armed conflict contrasts sharply with Francisco Goya's The Third of May, 1808 which also depicts a uniform row of anonymous soldiers in the act of shooting. Goya, however, graphically presented the dead and those about to be shot, and the dark tones he used cast a dramatic and sobering pall

Song of Love

-Giorgio de Chirico -a dreamlike scene set in the deserted piazza of an Italian town. A huge marble head—a fragment of the famous Greco-Roman Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican—is suspended in midair above a large green ball. To the right is a gigantic red glove nailed to a wall -The buildings and the three over-life-size objects cast shadows that direct the viewer's eye to the left and to a locomotive puffing smoke—a favorite Futurist motif, here shown in slow motion and incongruously placed near the central square. The choice of the term metaphysical to describe de Chirico's paintings suggests that these images transcend their physical appearances -De Chirico's Metaphysical Painting movement was a precursor of Surrealism

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany

-Hannah Höch -arranged an eclectic mixture of cutout photos in seemingly haphazard fashion, is her best work. The title refers to the story that the name "Dada" resulted from thrusting a knife into a dictionary -Photographs of some of Höch's fellow Dadaists appear among images of Marx and Lenin, and the artist juxtaposed herself with a map of Europe showing the progress of women's right to vote -Close inspection reveals that the work is the result of the artist's careful selection and placement of the photographs rather than a work resulting from chance -A photograph of her head appears in the lower right corner, juxtaposed with a map of Europe showing which countries had granted women the right to vote—a commentary on the power that both women and Dada had to destabilize society

Harmony in Red

-Henri Matisse -"What I am after, above all, is expression. . . . Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive:the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter's command to express his feelings - chief function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible. . . . My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on sensitivity, on felt experiences. . . . I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation" -subject is the interior of a comfortable, prosperous household with a maid placing fruit and wine on the table, but Matisse's canvas is radically different from traditional paintings of domestic interiors -depicted objects in simplified and schematized fashion and flattened out the forms. For example, Matisse eliminated the front edge of the table, rendering the table, with its identical patterning, as flat as the wall behind it. The window at the upper left could also be a painting on the wall, further flattening the space. Everywhere, the colors contrast richly and intensely -Matisse's process of overpainting reveals the importance of color for striking the right chord in the viewer. Initially, this work was predominantly green. Then Matisse repainted it blue, but blue also did not seem appropriate to him. Not until he repainted the canvas red did Matisse feel that he had found the right color for the "harmony" he wished to compose

Le Bonheur de Vivre(The Joy of Life)

-Henry Matisse -Matisse's sole entry in the 1906 Independents' Salon -painting was larger than any Matisse had painted before and rivaled in size academic canvases portraying historical, mythological, and religious themes. In fact, despite the radical use of color, which unleashed such intense criticism in 1905, Matisse's choice of subject was firmly in the grand tradition of European painting since the Renaissance, with roots in classical antiquity -is a bacchanal featuring reclining and dancing nudes in a lush landscape. Those figures, however, are patterns of line and color, not fully rounded bodies -Le Bonheur de Vivre is a celebration of the sensual joy of human existence. nudes form a great pyramid in an opening in a wooded glen. In the foreground and in the middle ground at the right are flute players, and at the center is a circle of six dancing figures. Music and dance (traditional elements in scenes of Bacchic revelry), lovemaking, sunbathing, and other sensual pleasures are essential ingredients of life in Matisse's Arcadia -Intense hues of pink, green, and yellow fill the canvas. Thick, sinuous outlines inject a strong rhythm into the composition, complementing the musical theme. The figures vary greatly in scale. In violation of the rules of Renaissance perspective, the flute player and the pair of lovers in the foreground are not of the same size, nor are the figures in the middle ground -The "irrational" perspective, the large areas of unmodulated color, and the near-total absence of shading in the figures are consistent with the modernist premise that a painting is a colored surface, not a window onto a three-dimensional world -Inspired Picasso

Fauvism

-In 1905, at the third Salon d'Automne (Autumn Salon) in Paris, a group of young painters exhibited canvases so simplified in design and so shockingly bright in color that a startled critic, Louis Vauxcelles -described the artists as Fauves ("wild beasts"). The Fauves were totally independent of the French Academy and the "official" Salon -Their aim was to develop an art having the directness of Impressionism but employing intense color juxtapositions for expressive ends. Building on the legacy of artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, the Fauves went even further in liberating color from its descriptive function and exploring the effects that different colors have on emotions -The Fauves produced portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and nudes of spontaneity and verve, with rich surface textures, lively linear patterns, and, above all, bold colors. In an effort to release internal feelings, they employed startling contrasts of vermilion and emerald green and of cerulean blue and vivid orange held together by sweeping brushstrokes and bold patterns -The Fauve painters never officially organized, and within five years, most of the artists had departed from a strict adherence to Fauve principles and developed their own more personal styles. During its brief existence, however, Fauvism made a significant contribution to the direction of art by demonstrating color's structural, expressive, and aesthetic capabilities

Russian Revolution

-In 1917, as a result of widespread dissatisfaction with the regime of Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917), Russian workers staged a general strike in protest, and the tsar abdicated in March. In late 1917, the Bolsheviks, a faction of Russian Social Democrats that promoted violent revolution, wrested control of the country from the ruling provisional government -Once in power, their leader, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), nationalized the land and turned it over to the local rural soviets (councils of workers' and soldiers' deputies). After prolonged civil war, the Communists, as they now called themselves, succeeded in retaining control of Russia and taking over an assortment of satellite countries in Eastern Europe. This new state adopted the official name Union of Soviet Socialist Republics(USSR) in 1923. Lasted until 1991 -Malevich, who held influential teaching posts in Vitebsk and Petrograd from 1919 to 1927, viewed the revolution as an opportunity to wipe out past traditions and begin a new culture. He believed that his art could play a major role in that effort because of its universal accessibility -But, after a short period during which the new regime tolerated avant-garde art, the political leaders of the Soviet Union decided that their new communist society needed a more "practical" art. Soviet authorities promoted a "realistic," illusionistic art that they thought a wide public could understand and that they hoped would teach citizens about their new government. This horrified Malevic

Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)(movement)

-In Germany, the Great War gave rise to an artistic movement called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) -All of the artists associated with Neue Sachlichkeit served, at some point, in the German army, and their military experiences deeply influenced their worldviews and informed their art. "New Objectivity" captures the group's aim—to present a clear-eyed, direct, and honest image of the world, especially the war and its catastrophic effects

Science and Art in the Early 20th Century

-In the early 20th century, radical new ways of thinking emerged in both science and art, forcing people to revise how they understood the world. In particular, the values and ideals that were the legacy of the Enlightenment began to yield to new perspectives -countered assumptions about progress and reason with ideas challenging traditional notions about the physical universe, the structure of society, and human nature. Modernist artists fully participated in this reassessment and formulated innovative theoretical bases for their work. Accordingly, much early-20th-century European art is a rejection of traditional definitions both of art and of the universe -Fundamental to the Enlightenment was faith in science. Because of its basis in observable fact, science provided a mechanistic conception of the universe, which reassured a populace that was finding traditional religions less certain. As promoted in the classic physics of Isaac Newton the universe was a huge machine consisting of time, space, and matter. In the early 20th century, many scientists challenged this model of the universe in what amounted to a second scientific and technological revolution.scientists shattered the existing faith in objective reality and, in so doing, paved the way for a new model of the universe -Planck's quantum theory (1900) raised questions about the emission of atomic energy. In his 1905 paper Einstein carried Planck's work further by introducing his theory of relativity. He argued that space and time are not absolute. Rather, Einstein explained, time and space are relative to the observer and linked in what he called a four-dimensional space-time continuum. -Rutherford's and Bohr's exploration of atomic structure between 1906 and 1913 contributed to this new perception of matter -these scientific discoveries constituted abstractio

Woman Combing Her Hair(González)

-Jacques González -reduced his figure to an interplay of curves, lines, and planes—virtually a complete abstraction without any vestiges of traditional representational art. Although González's sculpture received only limited exposure during his lifetime, his work greatly influenced later abstract artists working in welded metal

Bather

-Jacques Lipchitz -broke the continuous form of the human body into cubic volumes and planes. The interlocking and gracefully intersecting irregular facets and curves recall the paintings of Picasso and Braque and represent a parallel analysis of dynamic form in space

Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance

-Jean Arp -The operations of chance were for Dadaists a crucial part of this kind of improvisation -In this collage, Arp dropped torn paper squares onto a sheet of paper and then glued them where they fell. His reliance on chance in composing images reinforced the anarchy inherent in Dada

Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying

-Kazimir Malevich -the brightly colored shapes float against and within a white space in dynamic relationship to one another. Malevich believed that all peoples would easily understand his new art because of the universality of its symbols. It used the pure language of shape and color, to which everyone could respond intuitively

Merz 19

-Kurt Schwitters -Although his collages are abstract arrangements, they resonate with the meaning of the fragmented found objects they contain. The recycled elements of Schwitters's collages, like Duchamp's readymades, acquire changed meanings through their new uses and locations. Elevating objects that are essentially trash to the status of high art certainly fits within the parameters of the Dada program and parallels the absurdist dimension of much of Dada art

Woman with Dead Child

-Käthe Kollwitz -The theme of the mother mourning over her dead child comes from images of the Pietà, in Christian art, but Kollwitz transformed it into a powerful universal statement of maternal loss and grief -replaced the reverence and grace pervading most depictions of Mary holding the dead Christ with an animalistic passion. The grieving mother ferociously grips the body of her dead child. The primal nature of the undeniably powerful image is in keeping with the aims of the Expressionists

Avant-Garde

-Like other members of society, artists felt deeply the effects of the political and economic disruptions of the early 20th century. As the old social orders collapsed and new ones, from Communism to corporate capitalism, took their places, artists searched for new definitions of and uses for art in a changed world -This relentless questioning of the status quo gave rise to the notion of an artistic avant-garde . The term, which means "front guard," derives from 19th-century French military usage. Politicians who deemed themselves visionary and forward thinking subsequently adopted the term. It then migrated to the art world in the 1880s, when artists and critics used it to refer to the Realists, Impressionists, and Post-Impressionists—artists who were ahead of their time and who transgressed the limits of established art forms. Today, art historians generally use the term to describe more narrowly the modernist art movements of the opening decades of the 20th century

Architectonic Painting

-Lyubov Popova -are closely related to but easily distinguishable from both Cubism and Suprematism. Her compositions have the density of Cubist paintings but are more colorful and completely abstract. The shapes Popova employed are more varied than the squares and rectangles favored by Malevich -Using primary and secondary colors—warm reds and oranges dominate—and combining mostly angular with a few curved shapes, Popova produced a dynamic composition of overlapping planes that seem to be in constant motion, animating the canvas surface with an energy that reflects Popova's admiration for Futurism

The Large Glass

-Marcel Duchamp -Among the most visually and conceptually challenging of Duchamp's works is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even(often called the large glass) -Begun in 1915 and abandoned by Duchamp as unfinished in 1923, The Large Glass is a simultaneously playful and serious examination of humans as machines. Consisting of oil paint, wire, and lead foil sandwiched between two large glass panels, the artwork presents an array of images, some apparently mechanical, others diagrammatic, and yet others seemingly abstract in nature -The top half of The Large Glass represents "the bride," whom Duchamp has depicted as "basically a motor" fueled by "love gasoline." By contrast, the bachelors appear as uniformed male figures in the lower half of the composition. They too move mechanically. Duchamp provided his own whimsical but insightful reflections on desire and sexuality -In true Dadaist fashion, chance completed the work. During the transportation of The Large Glass from an exhibition in 1927, the glass panes shattered. Rather than replace the broken glass, Duchamp painstakingly pieced together the glass fragments. After encasing the reconstructed work, broken panes and all, between two heavier panes of glass, Duchamp declared the work completed "by chance." -In Duchamp's approach to art and life, each act was individual and unique. For example, every person's choice of found objects would be different. This philosophy of utter freedom for artists was fundamental to the history of art in the 20th century—in America as well as Europe

L.H.O.O.Q.

-Marcel Duchamp -Dada artists took delight in word play, intentional nonsense, and humor of all kinds, but their art was a deadly serious critique of modern civilization, which had plunged the world into the catastrophic global conflict of World War I. they also questioned values -in 1919 Duchamp purchased a small color photographic reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Using an ordinary pencil, Duchamp irreverently added a mustache to Mona Lisa's upper lip and a goatee to her chin—plus a label consisting of five letters, L.H.O.O.Q. -Pronounced as a single word, l'hooq is meaningless, but if a French speaker reads the letters individually, they form a sentence: Elle a chaud au cul—in English translation, "She has a hot ass." This kind of biting assault on an icon of Western culture exemplifies Dadaism and Duchamp's lifelong love of linguistic and visual puns in art

Fountain

-Marcel Duchamp -Perhaps his most outrageous readymade, a porcelain urinal presented on its back, signed "R. Mutt" and dated 1917 -The "artist's signature" was, in fact, a witty pseudonym derived from two names—the J. L. Mott Iron Works, a manufacturer of plumbing and other utilitarian items, and Mutt, the taller man of the then-popular comic-strip duo Mutt and Jeff -With this gesture, Duchamp set in motion philosophical debates about what constitutes art that continue today. It is hard to imagine a more direct challenge to artistic conventions than Dada works such as Fountain

Column

-Naum Gabo -Gabo's Constructivist sculptures rely on the relationship of mass and space to suggest the nature of space-time. Space seems to flow through as well as around the transparent materials he used

Futurism fall

-Once World War I broke out, the Futurist group began to disintegrate, largely because so many of them felt compelled (given the Futurist support for the war) to join the Italian army. Some of them, including Umberto Boccioni, died in the war

Kazimir Malevich

-One Russian artist who contributed significantly to the avant-garde nature of early-20th-century art -developed an abstract style to convey his belief that the supreme reality in the world is "pure feeling," which attaches to no object. Thus this belief called for new, nonobjective forms in art—shapes not related to objects in the visible world -christened his new artistic approach Suprematism, explaining: "Under Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth." -The basic form of Malevich's new Suprematist nonobjective art was the square. Combined with straight lines and rectangles, squares soon filled his paintings

Hannah Höch

-One of the Berlin Dadaists who perfected the photomontage technique, works advanced the absurd illogic of Dada by creating chaotic, contradictory, and satiric compositions

Gertrude and Leo Stein and the Avant-Garde

-One of the many unexpected developments in the history of art is that two Americans, Gertrude and Leo, provided a hospitable environment in their Paris home for artists, writers, musicians, collectors, and critics to socialize and discuss progressive art and ideas -Born in Pennsylvania, the Stein siblings moved to 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris in 1903. Gertrude's experimental writing stimulated her interest in the latest developments in the arts. Conversely, the avant-garde ideas discussed in her home influenced Gertrude's unique poetry, plays, and other works. She is perhaps best known for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), a unique memoir written in the persona of her lover and longtime companion -interest in the exciting and invigorating debates taking place in avant-garde circles led them to welcome visitors to their Saturday salons, which included lectures, thoughtful discussions, and spirited arguments. Often, these gatherings lasted until dawn and included not only their French friends but also visiting Americans, Britons, Swedes, Germans, Hungarians, Spaniards, Poles, and Russians -Gertrude developed an especially close relationship with Picasso, who painted her portrait

Jacques Lipchitz

-One of the most successful sculptors to adapt into three dimensions -Born in Latvia, Lipchitz resided for many years in France and the United States. He worked out his ideas for many of his sculptures in clay before creating them in bronze or in stone

Jean Arp

-One prominent Dada artist whose works illustrate Richter's element of chance -pioneered the use of chance in composing his images. Tiring of the look of the Cubist-related collages he was making, Arp took several sheets of paper, tore them into roughly shaped squares, haphazardly dropped them onto a sheet of paper on the floor, and glued them into the resulting arrangement. The rectilinearity of the shapes guaranteed a somewhat regular design (which Arp no doubt enhanced by adjusting the random arrangement into a quasi-grid) -chance had introduced an imbalance that seemed to Arp to restore to his work a special mysterious vitality that he wanted to preserve

Der Krieg (The War)

-Otto Dix -tripytch -vividly captures the panoramic devastation that war inflicts, both on the terrain and on humans. In the left panel, armed and uniformed soldiers march off into the distance. Dix graphically displayed the horrific results in the center and right panels, where mangled bodies, many riddled with bullet holes, are scattered throughout the eerily lit apocalyptic landscape -As if to emphasize the intensely personal nature of this scene, the artist painted himself into the right panel as the ghostly but determined soldier who drags a comrade to safety. In the bottom panel, in a coffinlike bunker, lie sleeping—or perhaps dead—soldiers. Significantly, Dix chose to present this sequence of images in the format of an altarpiece, and the work recalls triptychs

Still life with Chair-Caning

-Pablo Picasso -In this seminal work, Picasso placed a piece of oilcloth and brushstrokes on top of a photolithographed pattern of a cane chair seat pasted to the canvas. Framed with rope, this collage challenges the viewer's understanding of reality. The photographically replicated chair caning seems so "real" that the viewer expects the holes to break any brushstrokes laid on it. But the chair caning, although optically suggestive of the real, is only an illusion -extended the visual play by making the letter U escape from the space of the accompanying J and O and partially covering it with a cylindrical shape that pushes across its left side. The letters JOU, which appear in many Cubist paintings, formed part of the masthead of the daily French newspapers ( journaux ) often found among the objects represented. Picasso and Braque especially delighted in the punning references to jouer and jouir —the French verbs meaning play and enjoy

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon)

-Pablo Picasso -opened the door to a radically new method of representing forms in space -Instead of depicting the figures as continuous volumes, he fractured their shapes and interwove them with the equally jagged planes representing drapery and empty space. Indeed, the space, so entwined with the bodies, is virtually illegible -Picasso's radical break with traditional Western norms of pictorial representation was inspired in part by ancient Iberian sculptures—his sources for the features of the three young women at the left -The striated features of the distorted heads of the two young Avignon Street prostitutes at the right grew directly from Picasso's increasing fascination with African artworks, which he studied and collected -It set the stage for many other artistic revolutions in the 20th century

Gertrude Stein

-Pablo Picasso -By 1906, Picasso was searching restlessly for new ways to depict form. He found clues in the ancient Iberian sculpture of his homeland, which prompted him to return to an unfinished portrait he had been preparing for Gertrude Stein his friend and patron -On resuming work, Picasso painted Stein's head as a simplified planar form, incorporating aspects derived from Iberian stone heads. Although the disparity between the style of the face and the rest of the figure is striking, together they provide an insightful portrait of a forceful, confident woman. More important, Picasso had discovered a new approach to the representation of the human form

Family of Saltimbanques

-Pablo Picasso -represents a troupe of circus performers who do not communicate with one another. The painting is probably Picasso's commentary on the loneliness of the creative artist -many preliminary studies and several rearrangements of the composition in successive layers of paint on the canvas. The final version represents a troupe of saltimbanques—traveling circus performers, acrobats, and clowns—male and female, adults and children, in a barren landscape -Picasso was a frequent visitor to the Médrano Circus in Montmartre, but he always portrayed the saltimbanques apart from their audiences, in private moments, usually at rest -To underscore his self-identification with the saltimbanques, Picasso used his own features for Harlequin

Hans Richter

-Particularly interested in the exploration of the unconscious that Freud advocated, the Dada artists believed that art was a powerfully practical means of self-revelation and healing, and that the images arising out of the subconscious mind had a truth of their own, independent of conventional vision -A Dada filmmaker, Hans Richter (1888-1976), summarized the attitude of the Dadaists: "Possessed, as we were, of the ability to entrust ourselves to "chance," to our conscious as well as our unconscious minds, we became a sort of public secret society. . . . We laughed at everything. . . . But laughter was only the expression of our new discoveries, not their essence and not their purpose. Pandemonium, destruction, anarchy, anti-everything of the World War? How could Dada have been anything but destructive, aggressive, insolent, on principle and with gusto?"

Guitar

-Picasso -Like his Cubist paintings, this sculpture operates at the intersection of two- and three-dimensionality. Picasso took the form of a guitar and explored its volume using only flat pieces of cardboard -By presenting what is essentially a cutaway view of a guitar, Picasso enabled the viewer to examine both surface and interior space, both mass and void. This, of course, was completely in keeping with the Cubist program. Some scholars have suggested that Picasso derived the cylindrical form that serves as the sound hole on the guitar from the eyes on masks from the Ivory Coast of Africa -Here, however, Picasso seems to have transformed the anatomical features of African masks into a part of a musical instrument—dramatic evidence of his unique, innovative artistic vision

Guernica

-Picasso -Picasso continued to experiment with different artistic styles and media right up until his death in 1973. Celebrated primarily for his brilliant formal innovations, in the late 1930s Picasso became openly involved in political issues as he watched his homeland descend into civil war. The result was Guernica -At the time, Picasso declared: "[P]ainting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy" -artist got the opportunity to use his craft as a weapon in January 1937 when the Spanish Republican government-in-exile in Paris asked Picasso to produce a major work for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition that summer -He did not formally accept the invitation, however, until he received word that Guernica, the capital of the Basque region (an area in southern France and northern Spain populated by Basque speakers), had been almost totally destroyed in an air raid on April 26, 1937. Nazi pilots acting on behalf of the rebel general Francisco Franco bombed the city at the busiest hour of a market day, killing or wounding many of Guernica's 7,000 citizens as well as leveling buildings. The event jolted Picasso into action -Picasso used Cubist techniques, especially the fragmentation of objects and dislocation of anatomical features, to expressive effect in this condemnation of the Nazi bombing of the Basque capital -Despite the painting's title, Picasso made no specific reference to the event in Guernica. The imagery includes no bombs and no German planes. It is a universal outcry of human grief and a condemnation of all wars -To emphasize the scene's severity and starkness, Picasso reduced his palette to black, white, and shades of gray

Pablo Picasso

-Picasso had mastered all aspects of late-19th-century Realist technique by the time he entered the Barcelona Academy of Fine Art in the late 1890s. His restless mind and limitless energy led him to experiment with a wide range of visual expression, first in Spain and then in Paris, where he settled in 1904. Perhaps the most prolific artist in history, Picasso explored virtually every artistic medium during his lengthy career, but remained a traditional artist in making careful preparatory studies for each major work. Nonetheless, Picasso exemplified modernism in his enduring quest for innovation, which resulted in sudden shifts from one style to another -his work had evolved from Spanish painting's sober Realism through an Impressionistic phase to the so-called Blue Period (1901-1904), when, in a melancholy state of mind, he used primarily blue colors to depict worn, pathetic, and alienated figures. In 1904, Picasso's palette changed to lighter and brighter colors during his Rose (or Pink) Period

Homage to Blériot

-Robert Delaunay -became convinced that the best solution to the problem of representing the rhythms of modern life was to build on the Cubist breakthroughs of Picasso and Braque and enrich their approach to representation through the use of color harmonies and dissonances. used color to create spatial effects and kaleidoscopic movement solely through color contrast -in 1914, he immortalized the engineer, inventor, and aviator Louis Blériot in one of his boldest Orphic canvases. Homage to Blériot, a mostly abstract composition that retains representational elements. The painting celebrates Blériot's unprecedented achievement of flying 22 miles across the English Channel in a monoplane of his own design -One of Blériot's planes appears at the upper right of Delaunay's painting, above another triumph of French engineering, the Eiffel Tower -The swirling shapes and bold colors convey explosive energy Inspired Futurists and German Expressionists, artists found in his art a means for intensifying expression by suggesting violent motion through shape and color

Naum Gabo

-Russian-born sculptor, also wanted to create an innovative art to express a new reality, and like Malevich, he believed that art should spring from sources separate from the everyday world -Gabo was one of the Russian sculptors known as Constructivists, called himself a Constructivist partly because he built up his sculptures piece by piece in space, instead of carving or modeling them in the traditional way

Cubism

-The Expressionist departure from any strict adherence to illusionism in art further added to most deliberately into the realm of abstraction, by Pablo Picasso

Primitivism and Colonialism

-The art of Africa, Oceania, and the native peoples of the Americas was a major source of inspiration for many early-20th-century modernist artists. Art historians have traditionally referred to the incorporation of stylistic elements from these non-Western cultures as primitivism . Unfortunately, primitive and non-Western are adjectives that imply the superiority of Western civilization and Western art. However, many modernist artists admired the artworks of these cultures precisely because they embodied different stylistic preferences and standards -Artist like Picasso and Matisse became enthusiastic collectors of "primitive art." Picasso included in his collection ancient Iberian as well as non-European pieces. -In 1882, the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (now the Musée du quai Branly) in Paris opened its doors to the public. The Musée Permanent des Colonies (now the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie) in Paris also provided the public with a wide array of objects—weapons, tools, basketwork, headdresses—from colonial territories, as did the Musée Africain in Marseilles -The formation of these collections was a by-product of the frenzied imperialist expansion central to the geopolitical dynamics of the 19th century and much of the 20th century. Most of the Western powers maintained colonies as sources of raw materials, as manufacturing markets, and as territorial acquisitions largely in the service of developing international capitalism -Europeans and Americans often perceived the cultures they colonized as "primitive" and referred to many of the non-Western artifacts displayed in museums as "artificial curiosities" or "fetish objects." Indeed, the exhibition of these objects collected during expeditions to the colonies served to reinforce the "need" for a colonial presence

Surrealism(movement)

-The exuberantly aggressive momentum of the Dada movement that emerged during World War I lasted for only a short time. By 1924, with André Breton's publication in France of the First Surrealist Manifesto, most of the artists associated with Dada had joined the Surrealism movement -determined to explore ways to express in art the world of dreams and the unconscious. Not surprisingly, the Surrealists incorporated many of the Dadaists' improvisational techniques. They believed that these methods were important for engaging the elements of fantasy and activating the unconscious forces deep within every human being -the Surrealists' dominant motivation was to bring the aspects of outer and inner "reality" together into a single position, in much the same way that life's seemingly unrelated fragments combine in the vivid world of dreams. The projection in visible form of this new conception required new techniques of pictorial construction -Surrealism developed along two lines. In Naturalistic Surrealism, artists presented recognizable scenes that seem to have metamorphosed into a dream or nightmare image. The artists Salvador Dalí and René Magritte were the most famous practitioners of this variant of Surrealism -By contrast, some artists gravitated toward an interest in Biomorphic Surrealism. In Biomorphic ("life forms") Surrealism, automatism —the creation of art without conscious control—predominated. Biomorphic Surrealists such as Joan Miró produced largely abstract compositions, although their imagery sometimes suggests organisms or natural forms

Global upheaval and Artistic revolution

-The first half of the 20th century was a period of significant upheaval worldwide. Between 1900 and 1945, the major industrial powers fought two global wars -Communism, Fascism, and Nazism began. many countries also faced the Great Depression -These decades were also a time of radical change in the arts when painters and sculptors challenged some of the most basic assumptions about the purpose of art and what form an artwork should take. Throughout history, artistic revolution has often accompanied political, social, scientific, and economic upheaval, but never before had the new directions that artists explored been as pronounced or as long lasting as those born during the early to mid-1900s

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

-Umberto Boccioni -Boccioni's Futurist manifesto for sculpture advocated abolishing the selfcontained statue. This running figure's body is so expanded that it almost disappears behind the blur of its movement -he argued that traditional sculpture was "a monstrous anachronism" -"Let's . . . proclaim the absolute and complete abolition of finite lines and the contained statue. Let's split open our figures and place the environment inside them. We declare that the environment must form part of the plastic whole"

Improvisation 28

-Vassily Kandinsky -adopted musical metaphors as titles for his paintings in an effort to deflect figural association with his works -Kandinsky's elimination of recognizable forms from his canvases grew in part from his interest in theosophy (a religious and philosophical belief system incorporating a wide range of tenets from, among other sources, Buddhism and mysticism) and the occult, but it also reflected his interest in the latest advances in science -true intellectual, widely read in philosophy, religion, history, and the other arts, especially music, Kandinsky was also one of the few early modernist artists to read with some comprehension the new scientific theories of the era which convinced him that material objects had no real substance, thereby shattering his belief in a world of tangible things -In his Improvisation series, Kandinsky sought to convey feelings solely by color juxtapositions, intersecting lines, and implied spatial relationships. Ultimately, Kandinsky saw these abstractions as evolving blueprints for a more enlightened and liberated society emphasizing spirituality -Made of many different lines and colors within and around it, shaded to different degrees

Kurt Schwitters

-also inspired by Cubist collage. The elements in his collages were, however, the cast-off junk of modern society, which Schwitters retrieved from trash bins. He pasted and nailed the refuse together in works

Pablo Picasso

-artist whose importance to the history of art is uncontested -boundless talent and an inquisitive intellect that led him to make groundbreaking contributions to Western pictorial art

Braque's Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass

-both Picasso and Braque continued to explore the medium of collage -Braque's Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass is a type of collage called papier collé ("pasted paper") in which the artist glues assorted paper shapes to a drawing or painting. In Braque's papier collé, charcoal lines and shadows provide clues to the Cubist multiple views of various surfaces and objects. -The paper imprinted with wood grain and moldings provides an illusion whose concreteness contrasts with the lightly rendered objects on the right. Five pieces of paper overlap each other in the center of the composition to create a layering of flat planes that both echo the space that the lines suggest and establish the flatness of the work's surface -This Cubist collage of glued paper is a visual game to be deciphered. The pipe in the foreground, for example, seems to lie on the newspaper, but it is a cutout revealing the canvas surface -Like all collage, the papier collé technique was modern in its medium—mass-produced materials never before found in high art—and modern in the way that the artist embedded the art's "message" in the imagery and in the nature of these everyday materials

Demoiselles d'Avignon

-carried his new approach to the representation of human form much further. Although Picasso's painting has affinities with many European paintings of nude women, Demoiselles stands apart from the Western pictorial tradition. -It also breaks sharply from the norm in the representation of nude women as threatening rather than as passive figures on display for the pleasure of male viewers. Picasso's rethinking of the premises of Western art was largely inspired by his fascination with "primitive" art

Franz Marc

-cofounder of Der Blaue Reiter, grew increasingly pessimistic about the state of humanity, especially as World War I loomed on the horizon. His perception of human beings as deeply flawed prompted him to turn to the animal world for his subjects -focused on color and developed a system of correspondences between specific colors and feelings or ideas

Paula Modersohn-Becker

-died tragically in 1907 when she was only 31 years old, abruptly terminating a promising artistic career. Usually labeled a German Expressionist but lacking any formal association or strong stylistic affiliation with any Expressionist group, she sold only three paintings during her lifetime -In 1900, during her first of several trips to Paris, she met Otto Modersohn a landscape painter who was a cofounder of an artists' colony. They married the next year, but Modersohn-Becker was never satisfied with the Worpswede artists' romantic idealization of peasant life and rejection of the latest artistic movements in Europe's large cities. She especially admired the paintings of Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne, and their influence is evident in Self-Portrait with an Amber Necklace

Wilhelm Lehmbruck

-horrors of World War I deeply affected many artists, among them Wilhelm Lehmbruck, whose figurative sculptures exude a quiet mood but still possess a compelling emotional sensibility

German Expressionism

-immediacy and boldness of the Fauve images appealed to many artists, including two groups of painters in Germany who called themselves Die Brücke (the Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider). Together, they produced dramatic and often emotional canvases that art historians classify under the general heading German Expressionism -although color plays a prominent role in German painting of the early 20th century, the "expressiveness" of many of the German images is due as much to the Expressionists' wrenching distortions of form, ragged outlines, and agitated brushstrokes

Seated Youth

-incorporate the expressive qualities that Lehmbruck much admired in the work of other sculptors of his time -poignant elongation of human proportions, the slumped shoulders, and the hands hanging uselessly all impart an undertone of anguish to the figure. Lehmbruck's nude youth communicates by pose and gesture alone -distortions Lehmbruck introduced announce a new freedom in interpreting the human figure. For Lehmbruck, as for Rodin, the human figure could express every human condition and emotion -quiet, contemplative nature of this sculpture serves both as a personal expression of the sculptor's increasing depression and as a powerful characterization of the general sensibility in Europe in the wake of the Great War.the original title of Seated Youth was The Friend. Lehmbruck created the work in grief over his many friends who lost their lives in battle. After the artist's tragic suicide in 1919, officials placed this sculpture as a memorial in the soldiers' cemetery in Lehmbruck's native city of Duisburg

Lyubov Popova

-joined Malevich's Suprematist movement in 1916. Popova's most notable works are the series of canvases she named "architectonic paintings" -daughter of a wealthy textile merchant and art collector, was born in the little village of Ivanovske, near Moscow. Beginning when she was 20, however, Popova traveled widely in Europe, first to other Russian cities, where she became enamored with Byzantine icon painting and the Early Renaissance especially impressed her -In 1912, Popova worked in the Moscow studio of Vladimir Tatlin and then traveled to Paris and Italy where she encountered Cubism and Futurism. These movements became the primary stylistic influences for her later work

Julio González

-other notable sculptors of the early 20th century -González was a friend of Picasso who shared his interest in the artistic possibilities of new materials and new methods borrowed from both industrial technology and traditional metalworking -Born into a family of metalworkers in Barcelona, González helped Picasso construct a number of welded sculptures. This contact with Picasso in turn enabled González to refine his own sculptural vocabulary

André Derain

-painter friend of Matisse -Although Derain also produced many figure studies, at Collioure he frequently painted pure landscapes in the open air, as did the Impressionists before him

Futurism

-pursued many of the ideas that the Cubists and Purists explored. Equally important to the Futurists, however, was their well-defined sociopolitical agenda -in 1909, Futurism began as a literary movement, but soon encompassed the visual arts, cinema, theater, music, and architecture. Indignant over the political and cultural decline of Italy, the Futurists published numerous manifestos in which they aggressively advocated revolution, both in society and in art -In their quest to launch Italian society toward a glorious future, the Futurists championed war as a means of washing away the stagnant past. Indeed, they saw war as a cleansing agent. Marinetti declared: "We will glorify war—the only true hygiene of the world." -Futurists agitated for the destruction of museums, libraries, and similar repositories of accumulated culture, which they described as mausoleums. They also called for radical innovation in the arts. Of particular interest to the Futurists were the speed and dynamism of modern technology -Marinetti insisted that a racing "automobile adorned with great pipes like serpents with explosive breath . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace" a reference to the Greek statue -Appropriately, Futurist art often focused on motion in time and space, incorporating the Cubist discoveries derived from the analysis of form

Der Blaue Reiter(group)

-second major German Expressionist group, formed in Munich in 1911. The two founding members, Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, whimsically selected this name because of their mutual interest in the color blue and horses -Like Die Brücke, this group produced paintings that captured their feelings in visual form while also eliciting intense emotional responses from viewers

Otto Dix

-third artist most closely associated with new Objectivity -Like Grosz and Beckmann, Dix initially tried to find redeeming value in the apocalyptic event: "The war was a horrible thing, but there was something tremendous about it, too. . . . You have to have seen human beings in this unleashed state to know what human nature is. . . . I need to experience all the depths of life for myself, that's why I go out, and that's why I volunteered." -As the war progressed, however, Dix's faith in the potential improvement of society faded, and he began to produce unflinchingly direct and provocative artworks