Arts 105 Week 7

Constantin Brancusi. Sleep. 1908 / Constantin Brancusi. Sleeping Muse I. 1909-11 / Constantin Brancusi. Newborn [I]. 1915

A sequence of Brancusi's early work shows his radical, yet gradual, break with the past. Sleep (fig. 22.16) of 1908 appears similar to Rodin's romantic naturalism. With Sleeping Muse I (fig. 22.17) in 1911, Brancusi simplified the subject as he moved from naturalism to abstraction. Newborn [I] (fig. 22.18) of 1915 is stripped to essentials. Brancusi said, "Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things."4

Umberto Boccioni. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913

An abstract sculpture of a striding figure climaxed a series of Umberto Boccioni's drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Boccioni insisted that sculpture should be released from its usual confining outer surfaces in order to open up and fuse the work with the space surrounding it. In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (fig. 22.27), muscular forms seem to leap outward in flamelike bursts of energy. During this period the human experience of motion, time, and space was transformed by the development of the automobile, the airplane, and the movies. Futurist imagery reflects this exciting period of change.

Hector Guimard. Lobby of Castel Beranger. Paris. 1897-98

An early leader in this trend was French designer Hector Guimard. In 1897, he designed the first Parisian Art Nouveau house, Castel Beranger. Guimard designed not only the exterior of this building, but also its wallpaper, door handles, carpets, and light fixtures. The lobby (fig. 21.34) strongly exploits the motif of organic growth as abstracted plant forms populate layered compartments on the walls before climbing up onto the ceiling. The novelty of this style is not in its coverage of the available space; it is rather in the fact that this scheme makes no reference to past styles.

Pablo Picasso. Guernica. 1937

Appalled by this brutality against the people of his native country, Picasso responded by creating the mural-size painting Guernica (fig. 23.19). Although this work stems from a specific incident, it is a statement of protest against the brutality of all war. Guernica covers a huge canvas more than 25 feet long. It is painted mostly in the somber blacks, whites, and grays of newspapers before the days of color printing. A large triangle embedded under the smaller shapes holds the whole scene of chaotic destruction together as a unified composition. Guernica combines Cubism's intellectual restructuring of form with the emotional intensity of earlier forms of Expressionism and Abstract Surrealism. In dream symbolism, a horse often represents a dreamer's creativity. Here the horse is speared and is dying in anguish. Beneath the horse's feet a soldier lies in pieces; near his broken sword a faint flower suggests hope. Above, a woman reaches out from an open window, an oil lamp in hand. Near the old-fashioned lamp and above the horse's head is an eyelike shape with an electric light bulb at the center: Jagged rays of light radiate out from the bottom edge. Sometimes an eye representing the eye of God was painted on the ceiling of medieval churches. The juxtaposition between old and new sources of illumination could be a metaphor relating to enlightenment.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. German Pavilion. International Exposition, Barcelona. 1929

Architect and designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was one of the most influential figures associated with the Bauhaus and the International Style. For the Barcelona World's Fair in 1929, he designed the German Pavilion in marble, glass, and steel (fig. 23.18). Mies designed the pavilion with flowing spaces so that the visitor never feels "boxed in." An attached rectangular pool on the left reflects the elegant design on the water's surface. In 1938, Mies emigrated to the United States. There, his ideas and works potently influenced the post-World War II development of the skyscraper.

Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage. 1907

As Picasso and Braque took the steps that led to Cubism, Alfred Stieglitz was turning photography into an artform. When Picasso saw Stieglitz's photograph The Steerage (fig. 22.21), he said, "This photographer is working in the same spirit as I am."6 By that he meant that Stieglitz had a similar eye for abstract composition. Stieglitz saw the complex scene as an array of interacting forces of light, shade, shape, and directional force. Aboard a ship headed for Europe, he saw the composition of this photograph as "a round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railings made of circular chains, white suspenders crossing on the back of a man on the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape.... I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that, the feeling I had about life."7 He rushed to his cabin to get his camera, and he made the photograph he considered his best.

Vincent van Gogh. Japonaiserie: Flowering Plum Tree. 1887

As did other artists of the period, van Gogh developed a new sense of design from studying Japanese prints, as we see in Japonaiserie: Flowering Plum Tree (fig. 21.27). Van Gogh owned many Japanese prints, and he frequently praised them in letters. He created the composition of this work by tracing a print by Hiroshige.

Paul Gauguin. Mahana no Atua (Day of the God). 1894

At the age of 43, Gauguin tried to break completely with European civilization by going to Tahiti, leaving behind his wife and their five children. In Mahana no Atua (Day of the God; fig. 21.31), he summarized the results of several years of painting. At the top center of this beach scene is a god figure from a book about Southeast Asia (not Tahiti). The women at the left bring offerings as the two on the right dance. In the foreground, three other women sit or lie on the edge of the sea, but the colors of this body of water are nothing like reality; rather, Gauguin here used colors as "the language of dreams," as he put it.10 Where we might expect to see the statue reflected, we get a mysterious ooze of organic shapes in acidic hues. The seated figure just above stares back at us with a mysterious look.

René Magritte. The Lovers. 1928

Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte used an illogical form of realism to engage the viewer in mind-teasing mystery and playful humor. The Lovers (fig. 23.5) depicts a couple in an impossible kiss. If we imagine ourselves in that scene, we get the jolt that the Surrealists wanted to induce. (Perhaps his best-known work is La Trahison des Images; see fig. 1.10.)

Vera Mukhina. Monument to the Proletariat and Agriculture. 1937

Between the world wars, a socially and politically committed form of art called social realism became common in many countries. This style took many forms, but they all include a retreat from the radical innovations of modern art and a desire to communicate more readily with the public about social causes and issues. In Nazi Germany and in Communist Russia, this style became an officially sponsored "norm" for art, which artists could ignore only if they did not care to have a successful career. A good example of Russian social realism is Vera Mukhina's Monument to the Proletariat and Agriculture (fig. 23.20). Her huge statue, which depicts a male factory worker and a female farm worker in stainless steel 78 feet high, was first exhibited at the Paris International Exposition of 1937. The work expresses the Communist vision of the Soviet state, where rural and urban workers would happily unite in a choreographed dance of praise to the regime. It still stands in Moscow, celebrating the system that came crashing down in 1991 with the fall of the Communist regime.

Cycladic II. Naxos, Greece. 2700-2300 BCE

Brancusi's journey toward abstraction was also a journey back to a pre-Classical style of carving. Ancient sculpture from the Cyclades (islands of the Aegean Sea) has a distinctive, highly abstract elegance similar to Brancusi's, as the Cycladic II head (fig. 22.19) shows. Just as the Cubists studied African sculpture, Brancusi spent time sketching works in the ancient Mediterranean section of the Louvre. Brancusi gradually eliminated the surface embellishments that had dominated European sculpture since the Gothic period, instead creating shapes that were recognizable but simplified. He achieved expressive strength by carefully abstracting and reducing forms to their essence. As a result his sculpture invites contemplation.

Wassily Kandinsky. Composition IV. 1911

By 1910, Kandinsky overturned one of the most important rules of Western art. He made the shift to totally nonrepresentational imagery in order to concentrate on the expressive potential of pure form, freed from the need to depict anything. A person of mystical inclinations, he hoped to create art only in response to what he called "inner necessity," or the emotional stirrings of the soul, rather than in response to what he saw in the world. He said that art should transcend physical reality and speak directly to the emotions of viewers without intervening subject matter. He sought a language of visual form comparable to the sound language we experience in music. The rhythms, melodies, and harmonies of music please or displease us because of the way they affect us. To exploit this relationship between painting and music, Kandinsky often gave his paintings musical titles, such as Composition IV (fig. 22.7). Here we see colors and shapes that only vaguely correspond to things in the world. Rather, the artist painted out of inner necessity to make visible his personal mood at that time. Just as a composer uses harmony and melody, Kandinsky used color and form to (as he put it) "set the soul vibrating."

Antoni Gaudí. Casa Milà, Barcelona. 1906-12

Castel Beranger is a town house, which limited the scope for invention in the structure of the building. But when the Milà family presented Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí with a vacant lot in Barcelona in 1906, he took Art Nouveau ideas into the framework of the design (fig. 21.35). Gaudí used limestone carved into wildly curving blocks for the façade; behind it is a network of steel posts and undulating, flexed beams that support the building. This metal skeleton affords ample space for window openings, which the architect shaped organically. The upper utility floor is similarly sculptural but with fewer openings, below chimneys in fanciful shapes. The Casa Milà overall resembles a weatherworn natural cliff; the locals call it La Pedrera, or The Quarry. The Art Nouveau style soon spread across Europe and the United States, where it also influenced graphic design and product design.

Edgar Degas. The Ballet Class. c.1879-80

Conventional European compositions placed subjects within a central zone. Degas, however, used surprising, lifelike compositions and effects that often cut figures at the edge. The tipped-up ground planes and bold asymmetry found in Japanese prints inspired Degas to create paintings filled with intriguing visual tensions, such as those in The Ballet Class (fig. 21.20), in which two diagonal groups of figures appear on opposite sides of an empty center. Degas depicted ballet classes in ways that showed their unglamorous character. Often, as here, he was able to turn his ability to the task of defining human character and mood. The painting builds from the quiet, uninterested woman in the foreground, up to the right, then across to the cluster of dancing girls, following the implied sightline of the ballet master.

Hannah Höch. The Multi‐Millionaire. 1923

Dadaists expanded on the Cubist idea of collage with photomontage, in which parts of photographs are combined in thought-provoking ways. In The Multi-Millionaire (fig. 23.3), by Dadaist Hannah Höch, industrial-age man stands as a fractured giant among the things he has produced. At the time she created this work, the artist was attacked for lacking originality, because she merely combined already existing things. But now we see how her unorthodox methods of composition can yield a powerful statement.

Still from Spellbound. 1945

Dalí's urge for fame led him to Hollywood, where he collaborated with director Alfred Hitchcock by creating a dream sequence for the movie Spellbound (fig. 23.10) in 1945. In true paranoid fashion, normal things become something else: A shadowy figure lurks behind a chimney that becomes tree roots, observed from above by a stone outcrop that assumes the shape of a human head.

Georges Braque. The Portuguese. 1911

During the phase of Analytical Cubism (1910 to 1911), Picasso, Braque, and others analyzed their subjects from various angles, then painted abstract, geometric references to these views. This is how we see, after all: by building up a mental image through brief, focused glances at a subject rather than a long, centered look. Because mental concepts of familiar objects are based on experiences of seeing many sides, the artists aimed to show objects as the mind, rather than the eye, perceives them. Braque's The Portuguese (fig. 22.13) is a portrait of a man sitting at a café table strumming a guitar. The subject is broken down into facets and recombined with the background. Figure and ground thus collapse into a shallow and jagged pictorial space.

Georgia O′Keeffe. Evening Star No. VI. 1917

Following the exhibition of art by the European pioneers, Stieglitz began to show work by the first American modernists, including Georgia O'Keeffe (see Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Art and Lives Intertwined on p. 406). Her work from the time of World War I was innovative, consisting mostly of loosely brushed abstractions based on nature. In 1917, while teaching in the Texas Panhandle, she took frequent walks in the lonely, windswept prairie. Finding its emptiness immensely stimulating, she made a series of expressive abstract watercolors titled Evening Star (fig. 22.22), based on her sightings of the planet Venus in the darkening sky. Venus is the small unpainted circle that the yellow orb encloses, and this empty spot seems to radiate ever wider sweeps of rich, saturated color. The grandiosity of the Texas landscape inspired O'Keeffe; she wrote to a friend, "It is absurd how much I love this country."8

Fernand Léger. The City. 1919

French artist Fernand Léger brought new shapes and a more dynamic style to Cubism. In his large painting The City (fig. 23.12), he crushed jagged shapes together, collapsing space in a composition reminiscent of a Cubist portrait or still life. The forms in his paintings look machine-made, rounded and tubular; this is in keeping with the urban bustle that is the work's subject.

Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. 1912

French artist Marcel Duchamp, working independently of the Futurists, brought the dimension of motion to Cubism. His Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (fig. 22.28) was influenced by stroboscopic photography, in which sequential camera images show movement by freezing successive instants (see fig. 10.2). Through sequential, diagonally placed, abstract references to the figure, the painting presents the movement of a body through space, seen all at once, in a single rhythmic progression. Our sense of gravity intensifies the overall feeling of motion. When the painting was displayed at the Armory Show in New York in 1913, it caused cries of dismay and was seen as an exercise in madness. The painting, once described as "an explosion in a shingle factory,"12 has remained an inspiration to artists who use rhythmic repetition to express motion.

Paul Gauguin. The Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel). 1888

French artist Paul Gauguin was highly critical of the materialism of industrial society. He experienced that business world firsthand during the several years that he worked as a stockbroker to support his family, painting on the weekends. He exhibited occasionally with the Impressionists, but he longed to escape what he called the European struggle for money. This attitude led Gauguin to admire the honest life of the Brittany peasants of western France. In 1888, he completed The Vision After the Sermon (fig. 21.30), the first major work in his new, expressive version of Post-Impressionism. The large, carefully designed painting shows Jacob and the angel as they appear to a group of Brittany peasants in a vision inspired by the sermon in their village church. The symbolic representation of unquestioning faith is an image that originated in Gauguin's mind rather than in his eye. With it, Gauguin took a major step toward personal expression. In order to avoid what he considered the distraction of implied deep space, he tipped up the simplified background plane and painted it an intense vermilion. The entire composition is divided diagonally by the trunk of the apple tree, in the manner of Japanese prints. Shapes have been reduced to flat curvilinear areas outlined in black, with shadows minimized or eliminated.

Piet Mondrian. Tableau 3, with Orange‐Red, Yellow, Black, Blue, and Gray. 1921

From 1917 until his death in 1944, Mondrian was the leading spokesperson for an art reflecting universal order. In his mind these universal elements were straight lines, the three primary colors, and rectangular shapes. He reduced painting to four elements: line, shape, color, and space. His painting Tableau 3 (fig. 23.16) exemplifies his nonrepresentational work. Mondrian hoped that the rhythms and forms of his works paralleled those of nature itself, which he viewed as rational and orderly.

Joseph Mallord William Turner. The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. 1834

Goya's painting deals with events that took place only six years before the artist took up the brush; a preoccupation with current events (rather than a mythological past) is an important characteristic of the Romantic movement. When the British Houses of Parliament burned in a disastrous fire one night in 1834, Joseph Mallord William Turner witnessed the event and made several sketches that soon became paintings. His work The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (fig. 21.5) typifies the Romantic movement in several ways. The brushwork is loose and expressive, as if Turner created the painting in a storm of passion. The colors are bright and vivid. Although the work depicts an event that happened only a few months before, the artist introduced distortions and exaggerations. According to contemporary reports, the flames did not leap up into the night as the artist shows them. Moreover, the Thames River has a curve that would partially block the view; Turner "straightened" the river to afford a wide horizon. Turner made these departures from factual accuracy in order to convey the feeling of the event, as a British national symbol burned. This emphasis on feeling over fact is Romantic. Turner's loose painting style influenced the later Impressionist movement, but there are important differences between them, as we shall see.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. At the Moulin Rouge. 1893-95

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted the gaslit interiors of Parisian nightclubs and brothels. His quick, long strokes of color define a world of sordid gaiety. Toulouse-Lautrec was influenced by Degas, but he plunged more deeply into nightlife. In At the Moulin Rouge (fig. 21.32), he used unusual angles, cropped images (such as the face on the right), and expressive, unnatural color to heighten feelings about the people and the world he painted. His paintings, drawings, and prints of Parisian nightlife influenced twentieth-century Expressionist painters, just as his posters influenced graphic designers (see fig. 8.17).

Timothy O'Sullivan. Iceberg Canyon, Colorado River, Looking Above. 1871

If we transfer those operations to a small covered wagon in the trackless Western wilderness, we get a sense of the practical challenges of early landscape photography, as executed by Timothy O'Sullivan and others. Between 1867 and 1874, O'Sullivan traveled with several mapping expeditions that explored the more barren regions of the West. His stark and austere photographs show careful compositional balance, high resolution for that time, and well-crafted contrasts of light and dark. The "sitter" in this photo (fig. 21.9) is unknown—O'Sullivan himself was behind the camera—but he is perfectly positioned in this lunar-looking, rocky region. The publication in books of photos such as this helped Americans to learn about their new territories, and exposed alert viewers to the eye of an artist.

Pablo Picasso. Violin, Fruit and Wineglass. 1913

In 1912, Picasso and Braque modified Analytical Cubism with color, textured and patterned surfaces, and the use of cutout shapes. The resulting style came to be called Synthetic Cubism. Artists used pieces of newspaper, sheet music, wallpaper, and similar items, not represented but actually presented in a new way. The newspaper in Violin, Fruit and Wineglass (fig. 22.14) is part of a real Paris newspaper. The shapes that in earlier naturalistic, representational paintings would have been "background" have been made equal in importance to foreground shapes. Picasso chose traditional still-life objects; but rather than paint the fruit, he cut out and pasted printed images of fruit. Such compositions, called papier collé in French, or pasted paper, became known as collage in English. Analytical Cubism involved taking apart, or breaking down, the subject into its various aspects; Synthetic Cubism was a process of building up or combining bits and pieces of material.

Eugène Delacroix. The Death of Sardanapalus. 1827

In France, the leading Romantic painter was Eugène Delacroix. His painting The Death of Sardanapalus (fig. 21.8) is based on the life of a literary character, an ancient Assyrian king who may or may not have existed. In the play Sardanapalus by Lord Byron, the title character leads a decadent and wasteful life, and ends it in a hopeless military situation, surrounded by enemies. Rather than surrender, he takes poison and orders all his favorite possessions brought before him and destroyed in an orgy of violence. Delacroix composed this writhing work along a diagonal and lit it using strong chiaroscuro in a way that recalls certain Baroque paintings (see fig. 17.23). His brushwork is loose and open, or painterly, not at all like the cool precision of Neoclassicism. Delacroix used all these devices in order to enhance the viewer's emotional response to a horrifying, if imagined, event. The Romantic painters in general stressed strong viewer involvement, use of color in painterly strokes, and dramatic movement, in contrast to the detached rationality and clear idealism of the Neoclassicists.

Edvard Munch. The Scream. 1893

In The Scream (fig. 21.33), Munch takes the viewer far from the pleasures of Impressionism and extends considerably van Gogh's expressive vision. In this powerful image of anxiety, the dominant figure is caught in isolation, fear, and loneliness. Despair reverberates in continuous linear rhythms. Munch's image has been called the soul-cry of the age.

Vincent van Gogh. The Sower. 1888

In The Sower (fig. 21.28) the Japanese influence led van Gogh to adopt bold, simplified shapes and flat areas of color. The wide band of a tree trunk cuts diagonally across the composition; its strength balances the sun and its energy coming toward us with the movement of the sower.

Marcel Duchamp. L.H.O.O.Q. Paris. 1919

In a purposeful slap at traditional standards of beauty, Duchamp bought a picture postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and drew a mustache and beard on her face. He signed the work with his own name and titled it L.H.O.O.Q. (fig. 23.1). The title is a vulgar pun, comprehensible to those who can read the letters aloud quickly in French. Roughly translated into English it means, "She's hot in the tail." By showing outrageous irreverence toward a deeply treasured painting, Duchamp tried to shake people out of their unthinking acceptance of dominant values.

Gustave Courbet. The Stone Breakers. 1849

In the 1850s, French painter Gustave Courbet revived Realism with new vigor by employing a direct, painterly technique for the portrayal of the dignity of ordinary things and common life. In doing so he laid the foundation for a rediscovery of the extraordinary visual qualities of everyday experience. The Stone Breakers (fig. 21.11) shows Courbet's rejection of Romantic and Neoclassical formulas. His subject is neither historical nor allegorical, neither religious nor heroic. The men breaking stones are ordinary road workers, presented almost life-size. Courbet did not idealize the work of breaking stones or dramatize the struggle for existence; he simply said, "Look at this." Courbet's detractors were sure that he was causing artistic and moral decline by painting what they considered unpleasant and trivial subjects on a grand scale. They accused him of raising "a cult of ugliness" against cherished academic concepts of Beauty and the Ideal. He reportedly replied to his critics, "Show me an angel, and I'll paint one."2 Conservative critics and most of the public saw Realism as nothing less than the enemy of art, and many believed that photography was the source and the sponsor of this disaster. When The Stone Breakers was exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1850, it was attacked as inartistic, crude, and socialistic. The latter charge actually had some validity: Courbet was in fact a lifelong radical who espoused anarchist philosophies. He believed that most governments were oppressive institutions that served only the wealthy, and that average people could better meet their needs by banding together in voluntary associations for such functions as public works, banking, and policing. Beginning in 1855, Courbet practiced what he preached and set up his own exhibitions.

Frank Lloyd Wright. Robie House. Chicago, Illinois. 1909

In the Robie House (fig. 22.25) of 1909, a striking cantilevered roof reaches out and unifies a fluid design of asymmetrically interconnected spaces. To get a feeling of how far ahead of his time Wright was, imagine the incongruity of a new 1909 automobile that could have been parked in front of the Robie House the year it was completed. Wright's designs were soon published in Europe, and influenced the course of modern architecture there.

Angelica Kauffmann (1740-1807). Design. 1778-80

In the works of the Neoclassicist Angelica Kauffmann, who overcame such obstacles, we see a different vision of woman's abilities. Born in Switzerland and trained by her father, Kauffmann spent six years in Italy before settling in London in 1768. She was elected a full member of the British Royal Academy two years later, the last woman to be so honored until the 1920s. The Academy members commissioned her to create four oval paintings on the theme of the four basic skills of art, to decorate the ceiling of its home gallery. One of these is Design (fig. 21.2). As in the other three works of this series (Invention, Composition, and Color), the person practicing the skill is a woman. Seated between two Roman columns, she sketches a plaster cast of a Hellenistic torso. Academy painters regarded such sketching after antique statues as a key part of any artist's training. The title of the work is a translation of disegno, the Italian word for drawing.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Street, Berlin. 1913

Kirchner's early paintings employed the flat color areas of Fauvism; by 1913, he had developed a style that incorporated the angularities of Cubism (see pp. 398-402). In Street, Berlin (fig. 22.4), elongated figures are crowded together. Repeated diagonal lines create an urban atmosphere charged with energy. Dissonant colors, chopped-out shapes, and rough, almost crude brushwork heighten the emotional impact.

Claude Monet. La Gare Saint-Lazare (St. Lazare Station). 1877

Landscape and ordinary scenes painted outdoors in varied atmospheric conditions, seasons, and times of day were among the main subjects of these artists. For example, in 1877 Claude Monet took his easel to the St.-Lazare railroad station in Paris and painted a series of works in the train shed, among them La Gare Saint-Lazare (fig. 21.17). Rather than focus on the human drama of arrival and departure, he was fascinated by the play of light amid the steam of the locomotives and the clouds glimpsed through the glass roof above its cast-iron support. He made a series of paintings there under the constantly shifting conditions, creating them almost as quickly as traditional artists might make sketches.

Paul Cézanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1902-4

Landscape was one of Cézanne's main interests. In Mont Sainte-Victoire (fig. 21.26), we can see how he flattened space, yet gave an impression of air and depth with some atmospheric perspective and the use of warm (advancing) and cool (receding) colors. The dark edge lines around the distant mountain help to counter the illusion of depth. Cézanne simplified the houses and trees into patches of color that suggest almost geometric planes and masses. This entire composition uses color and brushstroke to orchestrate nature to a degree that was unprecedented in Western art at the time. His rhythm of parallel brushstrokes and his concept of a geometric substructure in nature offered a new range of possibilities to later artists.

Fernand Léger. Ballet Mécanique. 1924

Léger soon took Cubist composition into film when he made Ballet Mécanique (fig. 23.13), a 17-minute cinematic collage in which churning machines alternate with a swinging pendulum, a smiling woman, and shifting geometric shapes. Sometimes these forms are distorted with a kaleidoscopic mirror, which mashes them up and flattens them in the manner of a Cubist still life. Léger intended the film to have a score by the American George Antheil, but practicalities prevented this. Antheil composed an unforgettably riotous work for 17 player pianos, percussion, and a siren, but because it ran twice as long as the film, the two could not be synchronized. Léger's film follows no obvious logic, but it seems to argue that machines and humans are about equally rhythmic if not equally graceful.

Edouard Manet. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). 1863

Manet's painting Luncheon on the Grass (fig. 21.16) scandalized French critics and the public—because of the way it was painted as well as the subject matter. Manet painted the female figure without shading, employed flat patches of color throughout the painting, and left bare canvas in some places. He concentrated on the interplay among the elements of form that make up the composition: light shapes against dark, cool colors accented by warm colors, directional forces, and active balance. Manet's concern with visual issues over content or storytelling was revolutionary. The juxtaposition of a female nude with males dressed in clothing of the time shocked viewers, but such a combination was not new. Nude and clothed figures were combined in landscape paintings going back to the Renaissance and even Roman compositions that depicted ancient myths or stories from the Bible. However, in Manet's painting, there is no allegory, no history, no mythology, and not even a significant title to suggest morally redeeming values. Manet based his composition (but not his meaning) on the figures in an engraving of a Renaissance drawing by Raphael, who in turn had been influenced by Roman relief sculpture.

Thomas Cole. The Oxbow. 1836

Many Romantic artists also painted the landscape, finding there a reflection of their own emotional state. Romantic landscape painting flourished especially in the United States, where Thomas Cole founded the Hudson River School in the 1830s. Like Turner, Cole began with on-site oil and pencil sketches, then made his large paintings in his studio. The broad, panoramic view, carefully rendered details, and light-filled atmosphere of paintings such as The Oxbow (fig. 21.6) became the inspiration for American landscape painting for several generations. (See also Asher Brown Durand's Kindred Spirits, fig. 3.24).

André Derain. London Bridge. 1906

Matisse had befriended fellow Fauve member André Derain while the two were still in art school. In Derain's London Bridge (fig. 22.3), brilliant, invented color is balanced by some use of traditional composition and perspective. Derain spoke of intentionally using discordant color. His use of strong color in this painting probably does not appear disharmonious today, an indication of changing tastes. Note also the pure touches of yellow, blue, and green in the lower left; these are expanded versions of the pointillist dots of Georges Seurat (see fig. 21.25).

Henri Matisse. Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life). 1905

Matisse's painting Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life; fig. 22.2) is a more radical Fauvist work that shows the artist's degree of enthusiasm. Pure hues vibrate across the surface; lines, largely freed from descriptive roles, align with simplified shapes to provide a lively rhythm in the composition. The seemingly careless depiction of the figures is based on Matisse's knowledge of human anatomy and drawing. The intentionally direct, childlike quality of the form serves to heighten the joyful content. Matisse defined his aim: "What I am after, above all, is expression."2

Diego Rivera. The Liberation of the Peon. 1931

Mexican social realism took the form of mural paintings that embodied the ideals of the revolution of 1910-17, when a popular uprising overthrew a long-entrenched dictatorship. The Mexican government in 1921 embarked on a program to pay artists an hourly wage to decorate public buildings with murals that spoke to the people about their long history and recent revolution. Inspired by the murals of the Italian Renaissance and by pre-Columbian wall paintings of ancient Mexican cultures, the muralists envisioned a national art that would glorify the traditional Mexican heritage and promote the new post-revolutionary government. Diego Rivera's fresco The Liberation of the Peon (fig. 23.21) is a good example that deals with a common event of the revolution: The landlord's house burns in the background, while revolutionary soldiers untie the peon from a stake and cover his naked body, which is scarred by repeated lashings. This work is a variation of a large painting on a wall of the Ministry of Education in Mexico City. Both Diego Rivera and fellow muralist José Clemente Orozco visited the United States, where they influenced American art.

Joan Miró. Object. 1936

Miró took Surrealism into the third dimension in works such as Object (fig. 23.7). Like a Surrealist movie, it is a union of seemingly random visual material. However, the themes that it broaches touch on our deep fears, such as death (the stuffed parrot and the orange fish), dismemberment (the stuffed silk stocking in the paper shoe), and disorientation (the map). The artist hoped that these irrational juxtapositions would jolt viewers out of their normal modes of thinking and open them to fresh possibilities.

Joan Miró. Woman Haunted by the Passage of the Bird‐Dragonfly Omen of Bad News. 1938

Miró′s evocative paintings often depict imaginary creatures. He made them by scribbling or doodling on the canvas and then examining the results to see what the shapes suggested. The bold, organic shapes in Woman Haunted by the Passage of the Bird-Dragonfly Omen of Bad News (fig. 23.6) are typical of his mature work. The wild, tormented quality, however, is unusual for Miró and reflects his reaction to the times. Miró pointed out that this painting was done at the time of the Munich crisis, in which Hitler was allowed to take over part of Czechoslovakia, a prelude to World War II. Even though there is a sense of terror here, Miró′s underlying playful optimism is apparent. He loved the art of children so much that he tried to paint like a child.

Claude Monet. Impression: Sunrise. 1872

Monet and his colleagues were dubbed Impressionists by a critic who objected to the sketchy quality of their paintings. The term arose from one of Monet's versions of Impression: Sunrise (fig. 21.18). Although the critic's label was intended to be derogatory, the artists adopted the term as a fitting description of their work. Monet had seen the extremely fluid paintings of Turner (see fig. 21.5), but he used Turner's techniques in a more objective and less emotional manner.

Nadar (Félix Tournachon). Sarah Bernhardt. 1855

Nadar recognized that photography was primarily a mechanical process, and that the photographer had to be intelligent and creative in order to make significant works of art with a camera. The most notable artists, writers, and intellectuals of Paris went to him to have their portraits made. His photograph of French actress Sarah Bernhardt (fig. 21.10) is an evolutionary link between Romantic painted portraits and today's celebrity photography. Through pose, drapery, and finely adjusted lighting, Nadar captured an expressive likeness. Another pioneer portrait photographer was Julia Margaret Cameron, who began photographing at age 48 and created an impassioned body of work (see fig. 9.5). As both a tool and a way of seeing, photography influenced Realism, the next major stylistic development.

Georgia O'Keeffe. The Radiator Building—Night, New York. 1927

O'Keefe's new environment and Stieglitz's urban-focused photography caused her to shift her painting style toward tighter brushwork and city subjects. We see this in The Radiator Building—Night, New York (fig. 22.23). She portrayed the skyscraper as an awesome presence, looming upward from the low vantage point. The steam rising at the right hints at her previous style. At the center left she painted Stieglitz's name in bright red neon; an invention because his gallery had no such sign. The Radiator Building had opened in 1924, and its nocturnal illumination made it "one of the sights of the city," according to a leading architectural magazine.9

Aleksandr Rodchenko. View of The Workers′ Club. Reconstruction exhibited at the International Exposition of Modern Decorativeand Industrial Arts, Paris. 1925

One of Popova's Constructivist colleagues was Aleksandr Rodchenko, one of the century's most innovative multimedia artists. He began as a painter, working with compasses and ruler in true Constructivist fashion. Soon he renounced painting in favor of more useful arts: He designed posters for public display, as he also worked on furniture, photography, and stage sets. He created The Workers' Club (fig. 23.15) as a training ground for the new Soviet mind. Rodchenko envisioned every aspect of this installation to educate workers in the new historical dynamic that would lead to a future classless society. The chairs, shelves, and desks are all made of simple, mass-produced parts, and they are designed to facilitate sitting upright.

Jacques-Louis David. The Oath of the Horatii. 1784

One of the artists who led the way to revolutions in both art and politics was painter Jacques-Louis David. Believing that the arts should serve a beneficial social purpose in a time of social and governmental reform, he rejected what he saw as the frivolous immorality of the aristocratic Rococo style. When he painted The Oath of the Horatii (fig. 21.1), David pioneered an austere style called Neoclassicism. The term refers to the emulation of Classical Greek and Roman art; much of the subject matter in Neoclassical art was Roman because Rome represented a republican, or non-hereditary, government.

Max Ernst. The Horde. 1927

One of the first converts to the movement was the former Dadaist Max Ernst, who had fought in the war and was still haunted by its nightmares. To allow freer play to fantasy, he laid his canvases over textured surfaces such as asphalt pavement, and rubbed the canvas with pencils and crayons. In this way he could be surprised by the patterns that emerged for fertilization in his paintings. This technique is called frottage, the French word for "rubbing." In the 1927 work The Horde (fig. 23.4), we see a gaggle of silhouetted monsters tumbling over one another in a violent scene. The artist's combat experience in World War I most likely influenced the chaotic nature of this work.

Mary Cassatt. Young Mother Sewing. 1900

Painting modern women in their own situations became Cassatt's specialty. We see this with The Boating Party (see fig. 21.21), and also with Young Mother Sewing (fig. 21.23). This painting shows the mother and child theme that became Cassatt's dominant subject in later life. Her paintings are not sentimental, nor do they idealize motherhood. No one seems to be posing; rather, she approached the subject in a down-to-earth fashion. For the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, she painted a mural titled Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science. Unfortunately, it does not survive. After about 1911 she painted less frequently because of declining health.

Paula Modersohn-Becker. Self-Portrait with an Amber Necklace. 1906

Paula Modersohn-Becker developed an Expressionist language apart from the organized groups. Trips to Paris in 1903 and 1905 exposed her to the art of Cézanne and Gauguin, and she combined their influences in self-revealing paintings such as Self-Portrait with an Amber Necklace (fig. 22.5). She reduced the curves of her head to flat regions, and used color for expressive rather than representational purposes. The oversized eyes seem to tell us something, but they remain mysterious.

Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Young Ladies of Avignon). 1907

Picasso absorbed influences quickly, keeping only what he needed to achieve his objectives. His breakthrough painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Young Ladies of Avignon; fig. 22.8), shows a radical departure from traditional composition. In Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the fractured, angular figures intermingle with the sharp triangular shapes of the background, activating the entire picture surface. This reconstruction of image and ground, with its fractured triangulation of forms and its merging of figure and ground, was the turning point. With this painting, Picasso shattered the measured regularity of Renaissance perspective. Doing away with vanishing points, uniform lighting, and academic figure drawing, he overturned some important traditions of Western art. Les Demoiselles thus set the stage and provided the impetus for the development of Cubism. Although some art historians decry this work's negative depiction of women, viewers are challenged by the painting's hacked-out shapes and overall intensity.

Reliquary Figure. Gabon. Kota peoples, 19th-20th centuries / Mask. Ivory Coast

Picasso created a new vocabulary of form influenced by Cézanne's faceted reconstructions of nature, and by the inventive abstraction and power he admired in African sculpture such as the Kota reliquary figure (fig. 22.9) and the mask from Ivory Coast (fig. 22.10). While the meanings and uses of African sculpture held little interest for him, their form revitalized his art.

Pablo Picasso. Guitar. 1914

Picasso extended the Cubist revolution to sculpture when he assembled his Guitar (fig. 22.15) from pieces of sheet metal; the flat pieces in this work overlap in a way similar to a Cubist painting. This work began a dominant trend toward sculptural construction: Before Guitar, most sculpture was carved or modeled. Since Guitar, a great deal of contemporary sculpture has been constructed.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Le Moulin de la Galette (The Pancake Mill). 1876

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Le Moulin de la Galette (The Pancake Mill; fig. 21.19) depicts a popular Impressionist theme: contemporary middle-class people enjoying outdoor leisure activities. The young men and women depicted are conversing, sipping wine, and generally enjoying the moment at the popular outdoor café that served up pancakes and dance music with equal liberality. The Industrial Revolution had created an urban middle class with leisure, respect for the new technology, and a taste for fashion, and the Impressionists chronicled their lives. Renoir was more interested in the human drama than Monet—we sense the mood of some of the people in this work—but he was also very interested in how the light, filtered by the leaves of the trees, hits the bodies and clothing in the crowd.

Le Corbusier. Villa Savoye, Poissy, France. 1929‐31

Probably the best-known International Style house is the Villa Savoye in the western suburbs of Paris (fig. 23.17). This modern classic was designed by Le Corbusier as a country house for the Savoye family; they placed few restrictions on the architect. Steel stilts bear the weight of the building, permitting an open plan with ample windows. The location of the stilts follows the architect's Domino Construction System (see fig. 14.19). The ground floor is devoted mostly to garage space, with a small entry hall. The living areas on the two upper floors include outdoor terraces joined by ramps and spiral staircases. Le Corbusier included space for all the latest domestic appliances (such as a trash compactor) because he thought a house should be a "machine for living in." The house has all the characteristics of the International Style: It plainly shows its structure, it uses modern materials—concrete, glass, and steel—and it lacks decoration.

Rosa Bonheur. The Horse Fair. 1853-55

Realism of a more popular sort was practiced by Rosa Bonheur, who specialized in painting rural scenes with animals. In The Horse Fair (fig. 21.12), she captured the surging energy of a group of horses offered for sale, some of them untamed. Many scholars believe that the riding figure in the blue-green coat near the center of the picture is a portrait of the artist wearing men's clothing.

Robert S. Duncanson. Blue Hole, Little Miami River. 1851

Robert S. Duncanson was one of the first African-American artists to earn an international reputation. As the son of a Scots-Canadian father and an African-American mother, he may have had an easier time gaining recognition as an artist than those who did not straddle the color line. Prior to settling in Cincinnati, he studied in Italy, France, and England, and he was heavily influenced by European Romanticism. With Blue Hole, Little Miami River (fig. 21.7), Duncanson reached artistic maturity. He modified the precise realism of the Hudson River School with an original, poetic softening. He orchestrated light, color, and detail to create an intimate and engaging reverie of a person in nature.

Auguste Rodin. The Thinker. c.1910

Rodin's best-known work, The Thinker (fig. 21.24), shows his expressive style to good advantage. He wrote that at first he was inspired by a figure of the medieval poet Dante, but he rejected the idea of a thin, ascetic figure: Guided by my first inspiration I conceived another thinker, a naked man, seated upon a rock, his feet drawn under him, his fist against his teeth, he dreams. The fertile thought slowly elaborates itself within his brain. He is no longer dreamer, he is creator. In The Thinker, Rodin projected the universal artist/poet as creator, judge, and witness, brooding over the human condition. Rodin combined a superb knowledge of anatomy with modeling skill to create the fluid, tactile quality of hand-shaped clay. He restored sculpture as a vehicle for personal expression after it had lapsed into mere decoration and heroic monuments.

Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying. 1915

Russian artists took Cubism in a more abstract direction. A leader there was Kazimir Malevich, who branded his style Suprematism. His painting Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (fig. 23.11) shows in its title that the artist was familiar with Futurism: Its subject is a speeding modern airplane. Yet Malevich so simplified the Cubist pictorial language that we are left with a succession of flat, irregular rectangles against a pure background. Malevich believed that shapes and colors in a painting always communicate, no matter what the subject of the work. Ideally, he thought, art should not need subject matter. This is why he named his movement Suprematism, because he wanted to focus on the supremacy of shape and color in art over representation or narrative. He shared some points of view with his fellow Russian Wassily Kandinsky, whom he knew. But while Kandinsky (who worked in Germany) painted brash, expressive works (see fig. 22.6), Malevich's constant urge to simplify makes him a more radical painter.

Georges Seurat. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. 1884-86

Seurat's large painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (fig. 21.25) has the subject matter, light, and color qualities of Impressionism, but this is not a painting of a fleeting moment; it is a carefully constructed composition of lasting impact. Seurat set out to systematize the optical color mixing of Impressionism and to create a more solid, formal organization with simplified shapes. He called his method divisionism, but it is more popularly known as pointillism. With it, Seurat tried to develop and apply a "scientific" technique. He arrived at his method by studying the principles of color optics that were being formulated at the time. Through the application of tiny dots of color, Seurat achieved a vibrant surface based on optical color mixture. Seurat preceded A Sunday on La Grande Jatte with more than 50 drawn and painted preliminary studies in which he explored the horizontal and vertical relationships, the character of each shape, and the patterns of light, shade, and color. The final painting shows the total control that Seurat sought through the application of his method. The frozen formality of the figures seems surprising, considering the casual nature of the subject matter; yet it is precisely this calm, formal grandeur that gives the painting its strength and enduring appeal.

Sonia Delaunay-Terk. Le Bal Bullier. 1913

Sonia Delaunay-Terk expressed motion in her paintings through color contrasts. Her large work Le Bal Bullier (fig. 22.29) is an interpretation of couples moving about on the floor of one of Paris's leading nightclubs of the time. We see Cubist influence in the work, as it is composed of flat shapes that overlap in shallow space. But the added push and pull of contrasting color contributes both depth and motion to the composition. Stretching a canvas 12 feet across proved difficult, so the artist used mattress ticking. Delaunay-Terk was an early crusader for the integration of modern art into everyday things. Even as she painted, she made book bindings, embroideries, textiles, and fashions that included ideas from the latest modern art movements. In 1922, she started her own clothing design studio, where she specialized in what she called Simultaneous Dresses (see fig. 5.6). Not for many years would such ideas take hold in the mass market.

Francisco Goya. The Third of May, 1808. 1814

Spanish artist Francisco Goya was a groundbreaking Romantic painter and printmaker. A contemporary of David, he was aware of the French Revolution, and he personally experienced some of the worst aspects of the ensuing Napoleonic era, when French armies invaded Spain and much of the rest of Europe. Goya at first welcomed Napoleon's invading army because his sympathies lay with the French Revolution and its democratic values. But he soon discovered that the occupying army was destroying rather than defending the Revolution's best ideals. Napoleon's troops occupied Madrid in 1808; on May 2, a riot broke out against the French in the central square. Officers fired from a nearby hill, and the cavalry was ordered to cut down the crowds. The following night firing squads were set up to shoot anyone suspected of causing the disturbance. Later, Goya vividly and bitterly depicted these brutalities in his powerful indictment of organized murder, The Third of May, 1808 (fig. 21.4). The Third of May is enormous, yet so well-conceived in every detail that it delivers its message instantly. A structured pattern of light and dark areas organizes the scene, giving it impact and underscoring its meaning. Mechanical uniformity marks the faceless firing squad, in contrast to the ragged group that is the target. From the soldiers' dark shapes, we are led by the light and the lines of the rifles to the central figure in white. The focal point is this man, raising his arms in a gesture of helpless defiance. This work is more than a mere reconstruction of history; it is a universal protest against the brutality of tyrannical governments.

Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931

Spanish painter Salvador Dalí made his nightmares into his principal subjects, which he re-created in a highly illusionistic fashion based on academic techniques. The Persistence of Memory (fig. 23.8) evokes the eerie quality of some dreams. Mechanical time wilts in a deserted landscape of infinite space. A blasted miniature tree grows out of the tabletop as ants crawl over a watch. The warped, headlike image in the foreground may be the last remnant of a vanished humanity; the artist called it a self-portrait. Dalí called his approach the paranoiac-critical method. This means that he cultivated a paranoid state of mind in which the sufferer confuses everyday perception with hallucinations of threat or danger. Something seen (such as a pocket watch) becomes repulsive or bizarre (by melting; see fig. 23.8). Such irrational moments received realistic treatment in his highly polished painting style. In an essay Dalí proclaimed a wish to "systematize confusion and thus help to discredit completely the world of reality."4 Such beliefs harmonized well with the Surrealist manifesto, which announced the hope of fusing logic and illogic, reason and unreason.

Alfred Stieglitz. Equivalents. 1927

Stieglitz, meanwhile, had begun taking an interest in the sky himself. In 1925, he began a lengthy series of nearly abstract photographs that he titled Equivalents (fig. 22.24). In these works, he sought to express an inner feeling through the arrangement and lighting alone. In this work the darkness and diagonal orientation of the clouds reinforces the off-balance composition with the moon in the corner. He hoped that the mysterious and haunted mood of this work came only from its design elements rather than from its subject. The work's aerial subject, off-balance quality, and degree of abstraction parallel O'Keefe's Evening Star No. VI (see fig. 22.22).

Salvador Dalí with one of his pieces used for a benefit for refugee artists in California, 1941

Surrealist art was supposed to be distasteful and challenging, but Dalí noticed that the public loved his provocations. His wife, Gala éluard, took up the task of manager, coordinating his appearances and overseeing sales of his work. He set up his own pavilion in the 1939 World's Fair in New York, a hallucinated, walk-in version of the Renaissance painting Birth of Venus by Botticelli. In 1941, he staged a benefit banquet in California for war refugees, decorating the hall with fancifully clothed mannequins (fig. 23.9). Guests were asked to attend dressed as their worst nightmares.

Man Ray. Cadeau (Gift). c.1958

The American artist Man Ray, a friend of Duchamp, was a leader of Dada in the United States. His Dada works include paintings, photographs, and assembled objects. In 1921, he visited a housewares shop and purchased a clothes iron, a box of tacks, and a tube of glue. After gluing a row of tacks to the smooth surface of the iron, he titled his assemblage Gift (fig. 23.2), thus creating a useless and dangerous object.

Mary Cassatt. The Boating Party. 1893-94

The American painter Mary Cassatt was another Impressionist who was influenced by Japanese prints, as well as by the casual compositions of late nineteenth-century do-it-yourself photography. Many of her prints (see The Letter, fig. 8.12) and paintings, such as The Boating Party (fig. 21.21), show the influence of the strong, flat shapes and sweeping curves of Japanese woodblock prints (see fig. 18.32). The Boating Party also shows subtle feminist content. The difference in clothing styles between the woman and the man indicates that she has hired him to take her and the child out for a boat ride. This was an unusually assertive thing for a woman to do for herself in those days, and the glances between all three persons in the painting show some of the social tension that would have accompanied this event. The work is typical of Cassatt in its focus on the world of women and their concerns (see Mary Cassatt: American Impressionist, opposite).

Wassily Kandinsky. Blue Mountain (Der Blaue Berg). 1908-9

The Blue Rider group was led by Kandinsky, who lived in Munich between 1908 and 1914. In contrast to other German Expressionists, Kandinsky hoped to lead viewers toward spiritual rejuvenation through introspection. In Blue Mountain (fig. 22.6), he created what he called a choir of colors, influenced by the vivid, freely expressive color of the Fauves. Kandinsky's paintings evolved steadily away from straightforward representation. In Blue Mountain, subject matter is secondary to the powerful effect of the visual elements released from merely descriptive roles. Influenced by the vivid expressive color of the Fauves, Kandinsky uses colors that are heightened to a peak of intensity; the horsemen riding across seem more dreamlike than real.

Giacomo Balla. Abstract Speed—The Car Has Passed. 1913

The Futurists translated the speed of modern life into works that captured the dynamic energy of the new century. Giacomo Balla intended his work Abstract Speed—The Car Has Passed (fig. 22.26) to depict the rushing air and dynamic feeling of a vehicle passing. We do not know exactly which type of automobile Balla was observing, but the fastest racing cars in 1913 reached speeds of 100 miles per hour, faster than both trains and airplanes at the time.

Thomas Jefferson. Monticello. Charlottesville, Virginia. 1793-1806

The Neoclassical spirit also infected architecture. After the American statesman-architect Thomas Jefferson spent five years in Europe as minister to France (1784-89), he redesigned his home, Monticello (fig. 21.3), in accordance with Classical ideals. Monticello is based on Andrea Palladio's Renaissance reinterpretation of Roman country-style houses (see fig. 17.16). The Roman portico, topped by a dome, makes the entire design reminiscent of the Pantheon (see fig. 16.11) by way of contemporary French Neoclassical architecture.

Jean-Léon GérÔme. Pygmalion and Galatea. c.1860 / Thomas Eakins. William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River. 1876-77

The Realist paintings of American artist Thomas Eakins are remarkable for their humanity and insight into the everyday world. A comparison of the paintings of Eakins and those of his teacher, Jean-Léon GérÔme, shows the contrast between Realism and officially sanctioned academic art. Both Pygmalion and Galatea (fig. 21.13) by GérÔme and William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure (fig. 21.14) take up the theme of the sculptor and his model; GérÔme created his painting based on classical and academic teachings, choosing a story from mythology, idealizing the figures, and painting it in a controlled fashion. GérÔme placed the woman, Galatea, on a pedestal, both literally and figuratively. The Greek myth of Pygmalion tells of a sculptor who carved a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with it. Pygmalion prayed to Aphrodite, goddess of love, who responded by making the figure come to life. The sentimental approach (note the cupid at right), smooth finish, and mild eroticism are typical of academic art. In contrast, Eakins presented a Realist view of the sculptor's trade, as he showed respect for the beauty of the ordinary human being. The somewhat lumpy model stands holding a dictionary as the carver works at the left, and the chaperone tends to her knitting. The painting style is also far looser, especially in the background. Eakins's insistence on painting people the way they actually look led him to escape the bondage of stylization imposed by the rules of the Academy; it also led to shock and rejection by the public and much of the art world. Eakins selected this subject because William Rush was the first American artist to use nude models, bringing controversy on himself in the 1820s, much as Eakins did 50 years later. Eakins himself lost his position as director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts because he allowed women students to see a live nude model.

Henri Matisse. Harmony in Red (The Red Room). 1948

The merest glance at Harmony in Red (fig. 22.1) by Henri Matisse reveals that a new world is dawning in art. The rich maroon of the tablecloth shows a deep-blue vine pattern that also claws its way up the wall. The colors of the fruit are bold and flat. The window with its bright golden edge looks out to a radically simplified, yet intensely colored scene. Matisse was a leader in the early twentieth-century movement known as Fauvism, which expanded on the innovations of the Post-Impressionists.

Lyubov Popova. Painterly Architectonic. 1917

The painter Lyubov Popova pioneered many of these effects in nonrepresentational works that she called Painterly Architectonic (fig. 23.14). Planes intersect in a shallow space that derives from Cubism. Although the work seems to resemble a mechanical contrivance of unknowable function, nothing is pictured here except forms and colors. Popova combined her painting with teaching in workers' schools, and she helped to found the First Working Group of Constructivists in 1921.

Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night. 1889

Van Gogh had a strong desire to share personal feelings and insights. In The Starry Night (fig. 21.29), a view of a town at night became the point of departure for a powerful symbolic image. Hills seem to undulate, echoing tremendous cosmic forces in the sky. The small town nestled into the dark forms of the ground plane suggests the small scale of human life. The church's spire reaches toward the heavens, echoed by the larger, more dynamic upward thrust of the cypress trees in the left foreground. (The evergreen cypress is traditionally planted beside graveyards in Europe as a symbol of eternal life.) All these elements are united by the surging rhythm of lines that express van Gogh's passionate spirit and mystical vision. Many know of van Gogh's bouts of mental illness, but few realize that he did his paintings between seizures, in moments of clarity.

Henry Ossawa Tanner. The Banjo Lesson. 1893

We can see Eakins's influence in the work of his student and friend Henry Ossawa Tanner, who was the best-known African-American painter before the twentieth century. At the age of 13, Tanner watched a landscape painter at work and decided to become an artist. While studying with Eakins at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Tanner changed his subject matter from landscapes to scenes of daily life. In 1891, after an exhibition of his work was largely ignored, Tanner moved to France, where he remained for most of the rest of his life. He found less racial prejudice in Paris than in the United States. His paper "The American Negro in Art," presented at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, voiced the need for dignified portrayals of blacks, and he offered his painting The Banjo Lesson as a model (fig. 21.15). The lively realism of The Banjo Lesson reveals Tanner's considerable insight into the feelings of his subjects, yet he avoids the sentimentality that was common in many late nineteenth-century American paintings. This painting shows the influence of Eakins in its detail and its humanistic content.

Paul Cézanne. Gardanne. 1885-1886 / Georges Braque. Houses at l'Estaque. 1908

While Picasso made the first breakthrough with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Braque did more to develop the vocabulary of Cubism. A comparison of two paintings—Cézanne's Gardanne, completed in 1886 (fig. 22.11) and Braque's Houses at l'Estaque (fig. 22.12), completed in 1908—shows the beginning of the progression from Cézanne's Post-Impressionist style to the new Cubist approach. Houses at l'Estaque provided the occasion for the movement's name: When Matisse saw this painting, he declared it to be nothing but a bunch of little cubes. (His somewhat dismissive attitude indicates the widely varying goals of the Cubists and the Expressionistic Fauves.) From 1908 to 1914, Braque and Picasso were jointly responsible for inventing and developing Cubism. Braque later described their working relationship as resembling mountain climbers roped together. They worked for a time in relatively neutral tones, to explore formal structure without the emotional distractions of color.

Constantin Brancusi. Bird in Space. 1928

With Bird in Space (fig. 22.20), Brancusi used cast bronze to create an elegant, uplifting form. The implied soaring motion of the "bird" embodies the idea of flight. The highly reflective polish Brancusi applied to the bronze surface contributes to the form's weightless quality. Brancusi started working on this visual concept about a decade after the Wright brothers initiated the age of human flight, but long before the world was filled with streamlined consumer goods. Brancusi said, "All my life I have sought the essence of flight."5

Post-Impressionism

a general term applied to various personal styles of painting by French artists (or artists living in France) that developed from about 1885 to 1900 in reaction to what artists saw as the somewhat formless and aloof quality of Impressionist painting; Post-Impressionist painters were concerned with the significance of form, symbols, expressiveness, and psychological intensity

Futurism

a group movement originating in Italy in 1909 that celebrated both natural and mechanical motion and speed

Romanticism

a literary and artistic movement aimed at asserting the validity of subjective experience; characterized by intense emotional excitement, and depictions of powerful forces in nature, exotic lifestyles, danger, suffering, and nostalgia

Synthetic Cubism

a modification of Analytical Cubism with color, textured and patterned surfaces, and the use of cutout shapes

Symbolism

a movement in late nineteenth-century Europe (c.1885-1900) concerned with communication of inner emotional states through forms and colors that may not copy nature directly

Neoclassicism

a revival of Classical Greek and Roman forms in art, music, and literature

Art Nouveau

a style of decorative art and architecture characterized by curving shapes abstracted from nature

Impressionism

a style of painting executed outdoors, aiming to capture the light and mood of a particular moment and the transitory effects of light and color

Fauvism

a style of painting introduced in Paris in the early twentieth century, characterized by areas of bright, contrasting color and simplified shapes

pointillism

a system of painting using tiny dots or "points" of color, developed by French artist Georges Seurat in the 1880s; Seurat systematized the divided brushwork and optical color mixture of the Impressionists and called his technique "divisionism"

collage

a work made by gluing various materials, such as paper scraps, photographs, and cloth, on a flat surface

Cubism

an art style developed in Paris by Picasso and Braque, beginning in 1908 based on the simultaneous presentation of multiple views, disintegration, and geometric reconstructions of subjects in flattened, ambiguous pictorial space

Salon

an official art exhibition in France, judged by members of the official French Academy

optical color mixture

apparent rather than actual color mixture, produced by interspersing brushstrokes or dots of color instead of physically mixing them

academic art

art governed by rules, especially works sanctioned by an official institution, academy, or school

avant-garde

artists who work in an experimental or innovative way, often opposing mainstream standards

painterly

painting characterized by openness of form, in which shapes are defined by loose brushwork in light and dark color areas rather than by outline or contour

Expressionism

refers to individual and group styles originating in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Expressionism

refers to individual and group styles originating in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, characterized by bold execution and free use of distortion and symbolic or invented color

Realism

the mid-nineteenth-century style of Gustave Courbet and others, based on the idea that ordinary people and everyday activities are worthy subjects of art

Analytical Cubism

the style of Cubism developed by Picasso and Braque from 1910 to 1911 in which they analyzed their subjects from various angles, then painted abstract, geometric references to these views