art 107 final study guide
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Laughing Mannequins, ca. 1932.
Alvarez Bravo was a Mexican born self-taught photographer who kept the company of other Mexican artists like Diego Rivera, David Siquieros, and Jose Orozco. He was introduced to the American photographers, Edward Weston and Paul Strand. Here a group of mannequins all with the same woman's face was found by the artist in a market and this photo documents the happy occurrence or accident.
Köllwitz, Lamentation: In Memory of Ernst Barlach (Grief), 1938.
An example of her relief sculpture made in homage to her friend and fellow artist, Ernst Barlach, who, like Köllwitz created works that focused on social injustices.
Otto Dix, The Skat Players - Card Playing War Invalids, 1920.
Born of working class parents, Otto Dix was a proletariat by upbringing as well as by politics. Like Grosz, he had combat experience and it made him very anti-militaristic. His paintings are often horrific descriptions of war and are rooted in the German Gothic tradition of Matthias Grünewald. This work is unrelenting in showing the plight of wounded veterans, albeit realistic in the sense that this was the reality of many soldiers who came back from the war, there is a sense of elevated macabre as well.
Kandinsky, Several Circles, No. 323, 1926.
Circles were prominent shapes in Kandinsky's work throughout the 1920s. He revered the circle as a "link with the cosmic" and a form that "points most clearly to the fourth dimension."
Salvador Dalí, Great Masturbator, 1929.
Dalí painted his dreams in perfect perspective. There's a very real quality to his images, yet we can tell that they are dreams. This particular work is extremely biographical and is derived directly from Freudian theories on sexuality.
De Stijl beginning of clarity
De Stijl (the Style) was developed to be a scientifically based, universal language of the senses that would transcend the political divisions in war-torn Europe for artists working in Holland during and after WWI. Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian were the key figures in this group and led to the creation of the journal also called De Stijl, devoted to the art and theory of the group published from 1917-1928. De Stijl professes clarity, certainty and order by using the straight line, rectangle and cube and by limiting the color palette to primary colors and black and white.
Alberto Giacometti, Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932.
Giacometti was a Swiss artist who was affected by Italian Futurism before he moved into a more Surrealist oeuvre. Here is a bronze sculpture much like the painting of the Seated Bather by Picasso. Sexual violence is represented here by the splayed forms of a dismembered body
Käthe Köllwitz, Mother with Dead Child, 1903.
Käthe Köllwitz was not part of any group, but had a lot of experience in dealing with difficult subject matter. She often traveled with her husband who was a doctor who took care of the poor, often women and children left alone after WWI. Her prints are emotionally powerful and haunting, much like a 20th century Goya.
Edward Steichen, Balzac, The Silhouette - 4 a.m., 1908.
Late in the summer of 1908 Rodin moved the plaster of his sculpture of the French writer Honoré de Balzac out of his studio and into the open air so that Steichen, who disliked its chalky aspect in the daylight, could photograph it by the light of the moon. Waiting through several exposures as long as an hour each, Steichen made this exposure at 4:00 A.M., when the moonlight transformed the plaster into a monumental silhouette against the brooding nocturnal landscape. Steichen recalled that when he presented his finished pigment prints some weeks later, an elated Rodin exclaimed, "You will make the world understand my Balzac through your pictures. They are like Christ walking on the desert." Stieglitz reproduced this image along with nine of Rodin's drawings in "Camera Work" in July 1911.
Man Ray, Violin d'Ingres, 1924.
Man Ray would often impose other forms on the human form as the human form is an inspiration and allusion to other things. The altered photograph was based on this painting by Ingres. Ingres, Bather of Valpinçon, 1808.
John Marin, Lower Manhattan (Composition Derived from Top of Woolworth Building), 1922.
Marin studied at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Art Students League before spending the years 1905-1911 in Europe, mostly in Paris. He was particularly affected by Cubism. This work captures the dynamic energy of the city, its skyscrapers and crowds.
Max Ernst, Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924.
Max Ernst came out of Dada creating collages and assemblage (three-dimensional collage). This assemblage is combined with painting. It's an illogical, nightmarish scene where girls are frightened by a tiny bird. The title came before the work (Ernst would often create a work before having a pre-conceived idea), but it's not an attempt to illustrate the title.
Piet Mondrian, Apple Tree, Pointillist Version, 1908-09.
Mondrian was trained in Amsterdam as a landscape painter until 1904. He discovered Symbolism and for a brief time painted in that manner. By 1908, he discovered the modernist tendencies of the Fauves and Neo-Impressionists as well as the Cubists. His work became more linear and geometric in the years following 1912.
Meret Oppenheim, Object (Luncheon in Fur), 1936.
Oppenheim was a female artist who was introduced to the Surrealist group through the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Here she is bringing together opposite items, fur and a teacup, saucer, and spoon as a challenge to traditional domesticity. It's a shocking kind of juxtaposition - think about drinking from this! The idea may have stemmed out of a conversation she had with Picasso where he declared, "Anything can be covered in fur!"
Moholy-Nagy, Untitled (looking down from the Radio Tower, Berlin), ca. 1928.
Photographs like this are reminiscent of the photographic work of Aleksandr Rodchenko in the Soviet Union. Moholy-Nagy was interested in the abstract quality of this angle looking down from a height.
Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43
The ultimate goal was to express a visual unity through an "equivalence of opposites."
Mondrian, Color Planes in Oval, 1913-14.
This painting is based on a drawings of Parisian building façades. There is a sense of the architectural in Mondrian's mature work.
The goals that Gropius had for the Bauhaus were:
1)to have a positive attitude towards the living environment of vehicles and machines, 2)to shape and express things organically in accordance with their own current laws, avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy, 3)to restrict basic forms and colors to what is typically and universally intelligible, 4)to find simplicity in complexity, economy in the use of space, materials, time, and money. He wanted to train artists, architects, and designers to accept and anticipate 20th century needs.
Alfred Stieglitz, Winter - Fifth Avenue, 1893.
291 Gallery: Photographer Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, it was the first to promote modern art in America. The journal Camera Work was dedicated to the cause of modernism. His gallery was the central meeting place for the New York City modernists. Stieglitz lived in Berlin before coming to America and believed that photography was a fine art and promoted Pictorialism, an aesthetic movement in which photographers did not like or use the sharp focus of documentary photography. It was a forerunner of straight photography (basically meaning he did not resort to the darkroom to alter his photographs). He established the Photo-Secession group in 1902 to further his goals.
allover painting
A canvas covered in paint from edge to edge and from corner to corner, in which each area of the composition is given equal attention and significance.
André Kertész, Distortion No. 40, 1933.
A pioneer for modern photojournalism, in his personal work, he liked using different optical devices like a fun house mirror to create images like this.
Benday
A process that involves the use of various dot pattern screens to produce shading effects.
Miró, Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926.
A strange dreamlike landscape with recognizable figures where the ladder symbolizes transcendence and a bridge to another realm.
Lewis W. Hine, Child in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908.
A young girl of no more than twelve or thirteen years of age stands poised between a window and a cotton loom that seems to extend infinitely into the distance behind her. Almost metaphorically, her hair appears to be cropped short on the side that faces the loom, while a long braided ponytail faces the window as if its growth has been nourished by the sunlight. Her own cotton dress is wrinkled and shabby, the soft, faded stripes of her garment contrasting with the tautly pulled threads running through the machine at which she labors.Lewis Hine's photographs of poor children in deplorable working conditions, made while on assignment from the National Child Labor Committee, were instrumental in the passage of child labor laws in the United States.
Dalí, Sacrament of the Last Supper, 1955.
After WWII, Dalí's paintings were based on Roman Catholicism, modern science and Spanish nationalism - Dali sided with the Fascist leader, Francisco Franco, ultimately severing all ties with the Communist Surrealist group. This is done in absolute perspective, but very different from Leonardo da Vinci's work.
Ernst, Europe after the Rain, 1940-42.
After becoming a full participant in the Surrealist movement, Ernst did rubbings called frottage and the forms that emerged from these rubbings could be related to landscape or other real objects. Like in Dada, the element of chance played a large role as to what would be created from a random rubbing.
George Grosz, Fit for Active Service (The Faith Healers), 1916-17.
After enduring service in WWI, George Grosz offers an insiders view of autocracy and corruption. He joined with John Heartfield in publications of their political views full of scathing political satire, which got them thrown into prison occasionally. In this cartoon, a fat military doctor is pronouncing this desiccated cadaver as fit for duty in the army. No doubt in Grosz's experience he had seen people sent to fight the war who were in no condition to do so.
Josef Albers, City, 1928.
Albers was trained at the Bauhaus and was appointed to the faculty in 1923. He taught a foundation course, a furniture design course, and was the head of the glass workshop. He stayed on at the Bauhaus until it closed in 1933 and moved to the United States where he worked at Black Mountain College in North Carolina until 1949, then at Yale University from 1950-60. He had an enormous impact on American artists, architects and designers, especially Minimalists, Formalists, and Op-artists. He had an interest in light and color within geometric formats. Albers invented a technique where he would sandblast the surface, paint thin layers of opaque glass, and baked it in a kiln for a hard, radiant surface. It has the look of International Style buildings in a skyline.
Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919.
Another example of Duchamp's deliberately anti-art readymades is a postcard reproducing one of the world's most famous and revered works of art, Leonardo'sMona Lisa, adorned with a mustache and goatee. Not only did Duchamp deface what is commonly regarded as a work of transcendent technical skill with a bit of crude graffiti, he violated gender norms as well by adding facial hair to a woman's portrait. Beneath the image is more Duchampian wordplay: the initials L.H.O.O.Q., which read aloud in French sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul" — "she's got a hot ass."
Jean Arp, Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17.
Arp experimented with art, and chance played a large role into what he did. Arp dropped pieces of paper onto another piece of paper and where they landed is where he glued them down. Dada
Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932.
At the same time, Picasso painted some very beautiful and lyrical paintings of women. This painting was inspired by an affair with Marie-Therese Walter, and she would become a part of Picasso's images for years to come
Hans Bellmer, La Poupée (Doll), 1935.
Bellmer was a Polish artist who studied in Berlin. The Surrealists liked his sense of sadism through these odd constructions of adolescent female body parts.
George Bellows, Cliff Dwellers, 1913.
Bellows was also one of Henri's students who captured inner city life from tenements to boxing matches. He was very involved with the American Socialists as were many of the Ashcan School painters.
Man Ray, Rayograph, 1922.
Best known for his photographic work, especially these prints he aptly titled "rayographs". They are made without the use of a camera, by simply placing objects on or near sensitized paper and then exposing it to direct light. True to Dadaist form, this was discovered accidentally in the darkroom.
John Heartfield, Adolf the Superman, 1932.
Born of socialist-minded parents and abandoned as a child, John Heartfield studied painting in Munich and Berlin. When war broke out, he worked with the emerging peace movement and changed his Germanic name, Helmut Herzfelde, to John Heartfield in response to the growing anti-British sentiment in Germany. Was a close friend of George Grosz and together they became Communists and used their art to fight growing Fascism. As a photomonteur, Heartfield works did not hide their meaning. Instead his work takes the ideology of Fascism and shows it for what it truly is. Many of his works were published in the German leftwing magazine AIZ or Workers' Illustrated Newspaper.
beginning of american art before wwii Romaine Brooks, Self-Portrait, 1923.
Brooks was the daughter of a wealthy, unbalanced woman estranged from her husband before Romaine's birth, had a miserable and unstable childhood. An insane older brother received mother's love and attention, leaving Romaine scarred from lack of affection and acceptance. Inheritance of the huge family fortune in 1902 granted her independence. She studied in Rome, meeting an avant-garde group of artists, writers, and intellectuals with whom she associated in Capri, Paris, and the French Riviera. Brooks remained aloof from all artistic trends, painting, in her palette of black, white, and grays, haunting portraits of the blessed and the troubled, of socialites and intellectuals. When she painted her own portrait, she revealed her intensely contradictory nature: extreme confidence coupled with fear of vulnerability. Her story and her work reveal much about bohemian life in the early twentieth century. Her Self Portrait depicts a steely figure attired in a riding habit, carrying herself confidently and with elegance. She stares relentlessly at us from beneath the brim of her hat, with eyes that could be either frightened or condemning. Her mouth, corners upturned, either smiles or sneers. The ruins behind her, as ambiguous as her expression, add to the air of uncertainty about where she is and what she is thinking.
Hugo Ball reciting the poem Karawaneat the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. beginning of dada
Dada Ball's performance while reciting one of his sound poems, "Karawane," reflects the iconoclastic spirit of the Cabaret Voltaire. His legs and body encased in blue cardboard tubes, his head surmounted by a white-and-blue "witch doctor's hat," as he called it, and his shoulders covered with a huge, gold-painted cardboard collar that flapped when he moved his arms, he slowly and solemnly recited the poem, which consisted of nonsensical sounds. As was typical of Dada, this performance involved two both critical and playful aims. One goal was to retreat into sounds alone and thus renounce "the language devastated and made impossible by journalism." Another end was simply to amuse his audience by introducing the healthy play of children back into what he considered overly restrained adult lives.
Sophie Taeuber, Rythmes Libres (Free Rhythms), 1919.
Dada Taeuber studied applied art in Munich and Hamburg. In 1915 she met Jean Arp and they married in 1922. Both were involved in the Zürich Dada movement. She designed puppets and sets for Cabaret Voltaire performances, where she also participated as a puppeteer and as a dancer. Taeuber also taught at the Zürich School of Arts and Crafts from 1916 to 1929. From the late 1920s, she lived in Paris and continued experimenting with design. Her skills developed into large-scale interior design when she created a radical interior for a teashop/cafe.
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife..., 1919-20.
Dada traveled to many different places, especially within Germany, the aggressors and hardest hit country in the war. When Dada went to Berlin, the members made it very political.
Arthur Dove, Nature Symbolized No. 2, ca. 1911.
Dove graduated from Cornell University, worked in New York as an illustrator, and went to Paris in 1908 where he saw the work of the Fauves. The influence of both Matisse and Cézanne can be seen in his work. He returned to New York in 1910 and by 1912, he was creating non-representational abstract art. Paint and color became the essence of his imagery as in this work.
Leonora Carrington, Portrait of Max Ernst, 1940.
Ernst identified himself with a bird alter-ego named Loplop. This early painting by Leonora Carrington was completed as a tribute to her relationship with the Surrealist artist Max Ernst. In the foreground, Ernst is shown enshrouded in a strange red cloak and yellow striped stockings holding an opaque, oblong lantern. A white horse, a symbol Carrington frequently included in her paintings as her animal surrogate, is shown poised and frozen in the background, observing Ernst. The two are alone in a frozen and desolate wasteland, a landscape symbolic of the feelings Carrington experienced while living with Ernst in occupied France.
Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, 1927.
Female, lesbian, and Jewish - three dangerous things to be in 1920s Paris - Lucy Schwab changed her name to Claude Cahun because it had an ambiguous quality to it. She challenged the ideas of sexuality and her work celebrated the Surrealist notion of gender-bending. Here she is archetypically female as she poses as a doll/cabaret dancer. Cahun is also critiquing the idea of the fetishized ideal woman.
Naum Gabo, Linear Construction in Space No. 1, 1942-43.
Gabo was a Russian sculptor who fled the Soviet Union when his art was incompatible with the utilitarianism of the new government. He moved to Germany where he lived until 1932. He had similar ideas to Moholy-Nagy. Gabo also taught briefly at the Bauhaus (never an instructor) and taught students about light, space and movement. He believed in the transformative power of art. He moved to Paris after Nazi stormtroopers invaded his studio, then moved to England for 10 years (until 1946) and was active in the circle of artists that included Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Gabo moved to the U.S. and died in 1977. He experimented with glass and plastic as sculpting materials and his innovation was a construction of nylon strings and a plastic called Perspex. It reflects light and has a sense of weightlessness to it. It uses void space. Again, it's a lot like what Picasso did with his Cubist constructions in that the use of space was integral to the sculpture/construction.
Alfred Stieglitz, O'Keeffe Hands and Thimble, 1919.
Georgia O'Keeffe, who became Stieglitz's wife in 1924, was among the progressive American artists whose work he also exhibited at 291. In a search for objective truth and pure form, the innovative photographer took some five hundred photographs of O'Keeffe between 1917 and 1937. The essence of O'Keeffe, he felt, was not confined to her head and face alone; equally expressive were her torso, feet, and especially her hands, as seen here. What resulted is a "composite portrait" of the painter, in which each photograph, revealing her intrinsic nature at a particular moment, can stand alone as an independently expressive form. When these serial images are viewed as a whole, they portray the essence of O'Keeffe's many different "selves."
Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914.
Hartley was born in Maine, moved to Cleveland where he studied art, then moved to New York City, and eventually moved to Europe in 1912. He was most influenced by the German Expressionists. This particular piece captures the militarism and nationalism that seized Germany in the years before WWI. He moved back to New York in 1916.
Cahun, Self-Portrait, 1928.
Here Cahun is showing who she really is and how she was comfortable identifying. The mirrored image also speaks to the symbolism of a duality of self, one that she continually confronted in her work.
Dix, Corpse in Barbed Wire (Flanders) from The War, 1924.
Here in this incredible etching and aquatint print, he presents a decomposing soldier whose body hangs on barbed wire.
Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator), 1922-30.
Hungarian, trained in law, Moholy- Nagy became a painter after being wounded in WWI. He was also an educator and advocate for abstract art, part of the Berlin avant-garde. As an ardent participant at the Bauhaus, he believed in the combination of functional design, Constructivism, architecture and experimental photography. He left the Bauhaus when Gropius resigned and continued to create in all media. He became director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago (now Illinois Institute of Technology). Moholy-Nagy wrote books on the Bauhaus method and wrote about his search as an artist for his place in technology and industry. He had an interest in motion or kinetic sculpture with these kinds of sculptures. His work impacted later artists in the 1960s.
Theo van Doesburg, Card Players, 1916-17.
In December 1916,Theo van Doesburg investigated other artists' works in the second half of 1916. The paintings contained figurative images broken down into separate blocks and strips of color on a white or black background. Van Doesburg on that visit and almost immediately adopted the procedure. Van Doesburg was full of admiration for it but had more difficulty in mastering such a radically abstract approach. Through to May 1917, he continued to construct tightly knit compositions using round or pointed shapes in a more or less Cubist manner. The most finished painting of this type is Card Players and it dates from the spring of 1917 - months after Van Doesburg encountered a new style. The figures in the painting - three seated and one standing - are transformed into arrangements of geometrical shapes but remain intact, rather than dissolving into separate blocks of color dispersed over the background. It was not until the end of that year that Van Doesburg completed the highly abstract version of his card players known as Composition IX, Opus 18: abstract version of Card players.
Dalí, Gala and the Angelus of Millet Immediately Preceding the Arrival of the Conic Anamorphoses, 1933.
In this tiny painting, Salvador Dalí combines two of his obsessions, namely Jean-François Millet's famous Angelus, a copy of which is placed above the doorway, and his wife, Gala, who is in the background smiling. There are many unlikely associations and people in this work. The figure facing Gala bears a resemblance to Vladimir Lenin, while a bust on the ledge of the wall may be André Breton, the poet and leader of the Surrealist movement with which Dalí was associated. Russian writer Maxim Gorky ushers us into the scene from behind the door, wearing a lobster, one of Dalí's favorite props, on his head. This strange and illogical scene is characteristic of Surrealism, in which juxtapositions of unrelated objects and dream imagery are common.
John Sloan, Hairdresser's Window, 1907.
John Sloan was part of a Philadelphia based group called The Eight that formed after the National Academy's rejection of their work in 1907. He was also part of the Ashcan School for his depiction of real American urban life at the first part of the 20th century. In this painting, he was on his way to see fellow artist and mentor, Robert Henri, when he passed by this scene of people looking into a hairdresser's shop. His work was admired by Andy Warhol in the 1960s because Sloan paid attention to the commonplace.
Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 25A (Das Sternenbild) (Stars Picture), 1920. Schwitters, Hannover Merzbau, 1931.
Kurt Schwitters wanted to join the Berlin Dada group, but they turned him down as they felt that he was too bourgeois and not political enough. He went on to found a magazine called Merz, which came from a scrap that he used in one of his collages and it said Kommerzbank. Schwitters used the debris of the inherited culture, the middle-class, in his collages. The artist also created Merz structures from discarded building material - three total: Germany, Norway, and England (didn't get to see its completion as he died).
Lisette Model, Promenade des Anglais, 1934. end of surrealism
Lisette Model began her creative life as a student of music. Through avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg, with whom she studied piano, she became exposed to the Expressionist painters of early twentieth-century Vienna. She never formally studied photography but took it up in the 1930s while living in Paris. An early piece of advice received from a colleague, "Never photograph anything you are not passionately interested in" and it became her motto. Model's images can be categorized as "street photography," a style which developed after the invention of the hand-held camera, which made quick, candid shots possible. Through her own complicated personal history, she found intensely empathetic connections with her disparate subjects.
Marcel Breuer, Armchair, Model B3, Dessau, Germany, 1927-28.
Made of leather and cantilevered steel, the Wassily chair has become one of the world's most enduring and iconic pieces of furniture. Breuer designed the chair at the age of the 23, while still an apprentice at the famed Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Inspired by the Constructivist principles of the De Stijl movement and the frame of a bicycle, the Wassily chair distills the type to its bare essentials, reflecting the Bauhaus' proclivity for functionality and simplicity. Breuer viewed the bicycle as an object that represented the paragon of design, owing in part to the fact that its form had remained largely unchanged since its inception. The tubular steel of the bicycle's handlebars also intrigued Breuer, as it was light, durable, and suitable for mass production (a manufacturer by the name Mannesman had recently perfected a type of seamless steel tubing that was capable of being bent without collapsing). Breuer once mused to a friend regarding the bicycle, "Did you ever see how they make those parts? How they bend those handlebars? You would be interested because they bend those steel tubes like macaroni." Breuer bent the steel components so that they were devoid of any weld points and could thus be chromed piecemeal and assembled. He named the chair after the painter Wassily Kandinsky, a professor at the Bauhaus, who was so enamored by the piece during a visit to Breuer's studio that Breuer fashioned a duplicate for Kandinsky's home. First mass-produced by Thonet, the license for manufacturing the chair was picked up after World War II by the Italian firm Gavina, which was in turn bought out by the American company Knoll in 1968. Knoll retains the design trademark and the chair remains in production today.
Magritte, Madame Récamier, 1949. Jacques Louis David, Madame Récamier, 1800.
Magritte had a wonderful sense of humor as demonstrated by his cheeky reimagining of David's painting in 1949.
Man Ray, Observatory Time - The Lovers, 1936.
Man Ray supported himself by creating fashion photographs for Harper's Bazaar. This photo is a constructed image of Man Ray's painting of the lips of the American photographer and model Lee Miller with a photograph of a different model wearing couture. Both satisfied the image of eroticism so revered by the Surrealists. Man Ray also painted and sculpted, but stated, "I paint what cannot be photographed. I photograph what I do not wish to paint."
André Masson, Battle of Fishes, 1926.
Masson was a Surrealist who would not conform to Breton's control of the group. He broke with the Surrealists in 1929, rejoined in the '30s and broke off again in 1943. He was deeply affected by his experiences in WWI and tapped into the subconscious by means of automatic drawing or what is called automatism. The shapes he came up with were suggestive of an aquatic scene, so he continued with that idea by adding touches of paint and charcoal here and there.
Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927.
Max Beckmann was a well-known academy painter and like Grosz and Dix, spent time serving in the war which later contributed to a nervous breakdown. He did not have the political leanings of the other artists, but responded to the brutality of the war and injustices of the world with the same kind of passion. He fled Germany never to return in 1937 and moved to America where he taught art at Washington University in St. Louis becoming a highly influential teacher.This is one of over 85 self-portraits. It shows the artist as a confident, mature man.
Max Ernst, Celebes, 1921.
Max Ernst was a Dadaist and a Surrealist artist, and he also experimented with collage. It was a way of creating new things of mass media images. He combined them in ways not thought of before. He turned the found images into his own personal language that told him about his own subconscious self. The form of this hideous elephant was inspired by a photograph of a gigantic communal corn bin made of clay, used by people in southern Sudan. It has a machine-like quality to it (kind-of like a giant vacuum cleaner). Notice the influence of Giorgio de Chirico on this work.
Joan Miró, Carnival of the Harlequin, 1924-25.
Miró was a Spanish artist who used biomorphic shapes in his work - much like what we saw with Hans Arp in Dada. this one depicts a party in a room, but is full of fantastical creatures. Unlike other Surrealists (most notably, Salvador Dalí) there is no autobiographical symbolism.
Moholy-Nagy, Untitled, ca. 1940.
Moholy-Nagy was not aware of Man Ray's experiments of cameraless photographs. He called these "photograms" and were exercises in light not chance experiments like Surrealism.
Eugene Atget, Magasin, Avenue Gobelins, 1925.
Photography lent itself very well to Surrealism. Atget was not a Surrealist, but was friends with Man Ray. He was a documentary photographer who was interested in documenting all of Parisian life. The mannequins in Atget's series of shop fronts would fascinate the Surrealists in their sense of the real reflected in the window of the surreal.
Pablo Picasso, Seated Bather, 1930.
Picasso was never a real Surrealist, but being the incredible artist that he was, would adopt a kind of surrealism in his own work, but still making it unmistakably his work. He was attracted to the ideas of the subconscious, violence and eroticism; a monstrous figure of a woman. The figure looks kind of like a praying mantis, a Surrealist favorite because the female devours the male after mating.
Heartfield, Hurrah the Butter is All Gone!, 1935.
Reich official Goering stated: "Iron always makes a country strong, butter and lard only make people fat." Heartfield plays on this quotation and shows a German family under the Nazi regime eating metal guns and machinery instead of butter. The oddity of seeing people devouring metal instead of food is an effective means to Heartfield's end.
Rietveld, Red and Blue Chair, 1917. end of clarity
Rietveld manipulated rectilinear volumes and examined the interaction of vertical and horizontal planes, much as he did in his architecture. Although the chair was originally designed in 1918, its color scheme of primary colors (red, yellow, blue) plus black—so closely associated with the de Stijl group and its most famous theorist and practitioner Piet Mondrian—was applied to it around 1923. Hoping that much of his furniture would eventually be mass-produced rather than handcrafted, Rietveld aimed for simplicity in construction. The pieces of wood that comprise the Red Blue Chair are in the standard lumber sizes readily available at the time. Rietveld believed there was a greater goal for the furniture designer than just physical comfort: the well-being and comfort of the spirit. Rietveld and his colleagues in the de Stijl art and architecture movement sought to create a utopia based on a harmonic human-made order, which they believed could renew Europe after the devastating turmoil of World War I. New forms, in their view, were essential to this rebuilding.
Kay Sage, Danger, Construction Ahead, 1940.
Sage was a wealthy American painter who associated herself with the Surrealists. She and Peggy Guggenheim were responsible for bringing the Surrealists to the United States in the late 1930s to escape WWII. Sage had extensive knowledge of European art as she spent a lot of time in Europe traveling. She married Tanguy and her sensibilities reflect some of the same tendencies present in Tanguy's art, although she had developed her own style prior to meeting Tanguy.
Albers, Homage to the Square: Apparition, 1959. end of bauhaus
Starting in the 1940s, Albers explores the issues of illusion and perception through the relationships of color squares within squares. He would paint and print a number of these compositions in an infinite array of color combinations. The center square in not centered: size of the sides are doubled and size of the top is tripled from the size of the bottom edge. The colors recede and advance due to where they are place in a composition. The green has an illusionistic sense of depth as he painted it to look like a frame.
Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907.
Stieglitz described this photograph as a "study in mathematical lines in a pattern of light and shade" rather than merely a documentary photograph.
Gunta Stötzl, Gobelin tapestry, 1926-1927.
Stötzl was one of the first students to enroll in 1919. She had already received several years of training at the School of Applied Arts in Munich. By 1920 she played a leading role in the workshop. Her textile designs incorporated the most sophisticated design principles and vocabulary articulated by the avant-garde painting masters. Stötzl's complex color scheme, use of abstract pattern and shape sows the complexity and beauty of which her finest works are capable. Despite her brilliance, the number of students steadily decreased in the 1920s. This may be partially due to the emphasis on industrial textile design and the inability of some women to perceive themselves as integrated into a world of industry. Stölzl accepted the responsibilities of designing textiles for practical industrial production for all classes in society. This attitude of the Bauhaus was akin to the Russian Constructivists in its utopian ideals.
Yves Tanguy, Mama, Papa is Wounded!, 1927.
Tanguy was entirely self-taught, and primarily inspired by Giorgio de Chirico. He started out painting in a naïve manner, but was taken in by the Surrealist group. He also used abstracted shapes, but placed them into desolate dreamlike or nightmare-like landscapes. Note the large hairy pole in the foreground... Freudian symbolism?
Vasily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923
Ten years had passed since his last "composition" (number 7). You can see the impact of avant-garde Russian art. Like Klee, Kandinsky worked at the Bauhaus. He taught a course called "Theory of Form" and headed the workshop of mural painting (superior to easel painting). He came to value form over color as a vehicle for expression. As such, his paintings became much more formal and objective (influence of Suprematism and Constructivism, as well as Bauhaus ideals). However, he still held on to spiritual ideals in his forms.
Man Ray, Gift, 1921.
The American DadaistMan Ray created an assisted readymade by welding a row of tacks to the bottom of a flatiron, an early form of clothes-press that was heated directly on a stove rather than by electricity. The result is worse than useless; it is actively counter-productive. An object intended to help keep clothes neat would instead reduce them to tatters. The title suggests a further assault on polite convention; as a gift, this iron would be very mean-spirited.
Heartfield, Little German Christmas Tree, 1934
The German at the top translates to: "O Christmas tree in German soil, how crooked are your branches."
Walter Gropius, Shop Block, the Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 1925-1926.
The Shop Block wing of the Bauhaus school housed a printing shop, work areas, and dye works facility. The skeleton is constructed out of reinforced concrete and the entire structure is sheathed in glass, creating a streamlined and light effect. It was purposefully made with large areas of free-flowing space. The design for this school reflects Gropius's goal to harmonize art and industry as well as design and production. It also reflects Gropius's belief in spatial organization that encourages interaction and sharing of ideas. Gropius became the director of the Bauhaus school in 1919, before the school was forced to move to Dessau.He encouraged the elimination of those boundaries that traditionally separated architecture from art and art from crafts. The Bauhaus philosophy had its roots in utopian principles, much like the De Stijl movement. Gropius's ideals and visions for the Bauhaus reveals the undercurrent of socialism present in Germany at the time. In 1933, Hitler closed the Bauhaus down. Even though it lasted for just 14 years, it had a huge impact and influence on other art schools and art forms everywhere.
Jean Arp, Fleur Manteau (Hammer Flower),1916.
The artist develops a vocabulary of organic shapes called biomorphism. He used the term formes terrestres "earthly forms" to describe the kinds of constructed reliefs he created like this. He was definitely an inspiration to other artists in the Surrealist movement.
Marcel Duchamp
The most well-known Dada artist, he called his anti-art readymades which are found objects that were placed in a gallery setting were suddenly they become art. The concept of what makes art "Art" (capital A) overshadowed the uniqueness of the art object as art. When he lived in New York, his ideas were supported by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (really helped to get avant-garde works to America). he started out as a painter. You saw his work Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 a few weeks ago. Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of a Broken Arm, 1915. Southern Californians! It's a snow shovel.
Mondrian, Tableau No. II, with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921-25.
The new reality for Mondrian was the presence of the painting itself, no illusion of nature or of the artist's emotions. The principles in Mondrian's art include: balance of unequal opposites, achieved through the right angle, and use of primary colors, plus black and white.
Van Doesburg, Composition IX (Card Players), 1917.
The piece does not follow the same style of van Doesburg's later De Stijl pieces because it was released towards the beginning of the De Stijl movement before a definitive style had been defined.Composition IXonly incorporates the non-colors of black, white, and grey with small amounts of blue indicating the somberness of the scene. There are predominately rectangles, but there are also unusual shapes, such as various six-sided objects, which are uncharacteristic for De Stijl paintings. Overall,Composition IXis a building block piece for van Doesburg because it incorporates some of the new De Stijl style while retaining some of the older abstraction style.
Magritte, Son of Man, 1964.
Think about the title and the symbolism of the apple in front of the man's face. Magritte was known for wearing suits and a bowler hat, even while painting. He did not reject bourgeois ideas unlike the rest of the Surrealist group. He also was Belgian so was more of an adjacent Surrealist to the main Parisian group.
Picasso, Bull's Head, 1943.
This is a kind of sculpture that attests to Picasso's talent for taking items and putting them together in a way that is surprising and unusual. It's very similar to the Duchampian readymade.
Klee, Death and Fire, 1940.
This is one of his last works. It's a simple linear drawing on burlap. It's one of an image of isolation, destruction and pending death. Klee died in 1940, but his impact in the art world lived on in the United States.
Köllwitz, Female Nude with Green Shawl Seen from Behind, 1903.
This is one of the more unusual works by Köllwitz as it demonstrates her knowledge of color printmaking techniques and classical subject matter.
Beckmann, Departure, 1932-33. end of dada
This is one of the nine triptychs Beckmann created. In this work, you have two panels that are about suffering, torture, and agony. The center panel is about freedom and hope. Beckmann did write about what this painting meant, but he did not have an iconography that viewers could use to unlock the meanings of a painting. Each viewer could and can see something entirely different from the artist's meaning or from anyone else's.
Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, 1936.
This painting perfectly summarizes Carrington's skewed perception of reality and exploration of her own femininity. The artist has painted herself posed in the foreground on a blue armchair, wearing androgynous riding clothes, facing outward to the viewer. She extends her hand toward a female hyena, and the hyena imitates Carrington's posture and gesture, just as the artist's wild mane of hair echoes the coloring of the hyena's coat. She frequently used the hyena as a surrogate for herself in her art and writing; she was apparently drawn to this animal's rebellious spirit and its ambiguous sexual characteristics. In the window in the background, a white horse (which may also symbolize the artist herself) gallops freely in a forest. A white rocking horse in a similar position appears to float on the wall behind the artist's head, a nod to the fairytales of the artist's early childhood. Carrington had been raised in an aristocratic household in the English countryside and often fought against the rigidity of her education and upbringing. This painting, with its doublings, its transformations, and its contrast between restriction and liberation, seems to allude to her dramatic break with her family at the time of her romance with Max Ernst. The distorted perspective, enigmatic narrative, and autobiographical symbolism of this painting demonstrate the artist's attempt to reimagine her own reality.
Paul Klee, In the Current Six Thresholds, 1929.
This was made during his time at the Bauhaus. More organic than geometric, the bands keep dividing from right to left. Klee was involved with Der Blaue Reiter until he went into the army in 1914. In 1920, he was invited to join the Bauhaus faculty where he taught from 1921-31. As a teacher he developed his own theories and methods on painting and published a book in 1925 called Pedagogical Sketchbook. His work is always rooted in nature - not non-representational. He was affected by Constructivism, but his work remained intuitive and poetic. Klee was interested in how geometric shapes and the process of how each shape can transform into another shape; color was energy and emotion. Klee was interested not in the end product, but in the creative process where he would draw like a child (sort of like automatic drawing) and then he would go back and consciously finish the emerging work.
Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1951 (third version after a 1913 original).
ThoughBicycle Wheelpredates Duchamp's use of the word "readymade"—a term he coined after moving from Paris to New York in 1915—it is the earliest example of this class of groundbreaking artworks. Like most of Duchamp's existing readymades, MoMA'sBicycle Wheel is a later version of an earlier creation. What mattered to Duchamp was the transmission of a readymade's concept, not its exact physical appearance. Bicycle Wheeldistinguishes itself from all of the artist's subsequent readymades by virtue of its central object's implicit movement, a quality Duchamp appreciated for its calming effects. "To see that wheel turning," he once remarked, "was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio."
Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1939.
Unlike any of the artists discussed, Moore did not work in a Constructivist manner. He was more of a traditionalist in that he carved and modeled his work out of stone, plaster and wood. Moore's work is always grounded in nature, more specifically, in the human form. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 1921-25 and was influenced by Classical, pre-Classical, African and Pre-Columbian art. He began sculpting the recurrent "Reclining Figure" in 1929; Inspired by a chacmool, a pre-Columbian stone sculpture of a reclining warrior - see the next slide. His theory on the truth of materials is one that stone should look like stone, or in this case, wood should look like wood, not flesh. This work is six feet in length and more abstracted than some of his figures with the incorporation of void space.
Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy.
When the American photographer Man Ray moved to Paris, he was greeted by his friend and artistic compatriot Marcel Duchamp, who introduced him to members of the Dada circle of writers and artists. The two men had collaborated in a number of creative endeavors in New York, including the creation of a female alter-ego for Duchamp named Rrose Sélavy (a pun on the French pronunciationEros, c'est la vie"Sex, that's life"). Man Ray photographed Duchamp several times as Rrose Sélavy.
Pictorialism
a school of photography that employed soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, darkroom manipulation, and innovative printing processes to try to match the aesthetic effects of painting and printmaking
readymade
an everyday object presented as a work of art
photogram
an image made by placing objects on photosensitive paper and exposing them to light to produce a silhouette
Dada
artistic movement in which artists rejected tradition and produced works that often shocked their viewers •Founded in 1916 by artists and writers living in Zurich, Switzerland, which was neutral during the war. •Meetings were held at the Cabaret Voltaire •Through their performances, poetry and visual forms of art they professed their utter horror of what WWI had done to Europe •They believed that logic and reason were responsible for the war and its end result and they also questioned art and aesthetics of the middle-class; felt that bourgeois art didn't have a place in the world as it was •The artists created anti-art with no stylistic similarities whatsoever •Dada means child's rocking horse or hobby horse and was supposedly chosen at random by flipping through a dictionary
Happening
impromptu art actions, initiated and planned by an artist, the outcome of which is not known in advance
impasto
painting that applies the pigment thickly so that brush or palette knife marks are visible
automatism
the avoidance of conscious intention in producing works of art, especially by using mechanical techniques or subconscious associations.
decalomania
was very popular in France, and then in England in the 19th Century. It is the process of transferring images from specially prepared paper to the surface of canvas, glass, or metal. Today, the term, decal, is typically used for a decorative or advertising stickers
beginning of hauhaus
•Abstraction played a second role in the modern art scene to Surrealism and to a renewed interest in classicism. •Abstract artists often had to create other forms of art to survive. •Post-WWI saw a migration of people across borders; in essence, people moved wherever they could find a place to live and a living to be had. •Russian artists migrated west after 1921 when more realistic forms of art were demanded of artists. •In Paris, abstract art groups were formed and the Bauhaus was founded in Germany; futile utopianism of all of these artists - Kandinsky, Gabo, Mondrian, Gropius, Le Courbusier, etc.
beginning of surrealism
•Founded by poet Andre Breton in 1924; started as a literary movement as Breton writing the bulk of the theory in manifestoes •Based the movement on the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, especially those on dreams and sexuality •Believed that Surrealism was an escape from bourgeois life to a more real state that combined reality and dreams •Thought art should come straight from the subconscious mind: called automatism; also liked art created by chance and liked to play games: one in particular called the Exquisite Corpse: a group of people either writing a poem or drawing a picture, but each person can't see what the other person wrote or draw resulting in unusual combination of images or words •No unifying style within Surrealism; artists worked in their own ways as each person's subconscious was different from another's
