The Development of Modernist Art
ART OF THE
EARLY 20TH CENTURY
TEXT PAGES
960-1029
1. A number of scientists, psychologists, writers and politicians were instrumental in changing our view of the world from the Enlightenment belief in a mechanistic universe of the belief that reason and knowledge would lead to progress and the moral impovement of humanity. Match the individual on the left with the brief description of their work on the right.
2 Max Plank 1. Wrote Interpretation of Dreams
3 Charles Darwin 2. Developed Quantom theory
6 Albert Einstein 3. Theory that survival of the fittest was basis of evolution
1 Sigmund Freud 4. Advocated collective unconscious
4 Carl Jung 5. Lead Bolshevik revolution
5 V. I. Lenin 6. Described matter as another form of energy
8 Karal Mark 7. Philosopher who held that god is dead
7 Fredrick Nietzche 8. Champion of working classes, wrote Das Capital
2.
How have the discoveries of modern science affected our view of reality?
The major scientists shattered the
existing faith in the objective reality of matter, and in so doing, paved the
way for a new model of the universe.
3. Give the approximate
dates for the folowing significant twentieth-century events that influenced
art as well as the rest of society:
World War I: 1914–1918
Russian
Revolution: 1917
The
Great Depression: 1930s
World
War II: 1939–1945
4.
List two general directions
taken by avant guarde artists in response to the turmoil:
a. They criticized political and social institutions.
b. Others withdrew from society and concentrated their attention on art
as a unique activity, separate from society at large.
EXPRESSIONISM IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
1.
What is meant by the term “Expressionism”?
Art that is the result of the
artist’s unique inner or personal vision and often has an emotional dimension.
2.
List three movements classified as expressionist:
a. Fauvism
b. German Expressionism/Die Brücke
c. German Expressionism/Der Blaue Reiter
3.
In what year was the exhibition held in which
the name "Fauve" was coined?
1905
What did it mean?
“Wild beasts,” referring to the shockingly bright
colors.
4.
Name two Fauve painters.
a. Henri Matisse b.
André Derain
Describe the characteristics that Fauve
paintings have in common.
Color was
liberated from its descriptive function and used for both expressive and
structural ends. Color was most responsible for pictorial coherence and the
primary conveyor of meaning. They combined outward expressionism, in the form
of a bold release of internal feelings through wild color and powerful, even
brutal, brushwork, and inward expressionism, awakening the viewer’s emotions by
these devices.
5.
Name two artists who belonged to Die
Brücke (The Bridge).
a. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner b. Emil Nolde
Why did they select the name Die Brücke? What did it
signify?
Die Brücke signifies from the
concept of the artists paving the
way for a more perfect age by bridging the old and the new. It means “The
Bridge.”
Name
three sources for their art.
a. German
medieval art
b. architecture
c. graphic arts
6.
What beliefs were shared by members of the Blue Rider (Der
Blau Reiter) group?
Der Blaue Reiter means “The
Blue Rider”; the founders shared an interest in blue and horses.
Name two artists who belonged to this
group.
a. Vassily
Kandinsky b.
Franz Marc
7.
Who was Gertrude Stein and what was her significance for the avant-garde of
Paris?
Gertrude Stein was a writer, specializing in experimental writing, who lived in Paris with her brother Leo. They hosted avant-garde salons with
international guests. She was an art patron of Picasso, Gauguin, Cézanne,
Renoir, and Braque. She and Leo were
collectors and facilitators of interaction among the avant-garde.
Who painted a famous portrait of her?
Picasso.
8.
Identify three probable sources of the dislocation of form seen in Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (FIG.
33-9).
a. Cézanne’s
treatment of form and space.
b. Ancient Iberian sculptures.
c. African sculpture.
9.
Name two Cubist painters.
a. Georges Braque b. Robert Delaunay
10.
What idea did the Cubists adopt from Cézanne?
The analysis
of form.
11.
What is the basis of Cubist pictorial space, and how does it differ from
Renaissance perspective?
They
dissected life’s continuous optical spread into its many constituent features,
which they then recomposed, by a new logic of design into a coherent artistic
object. They rejected naturalistic depictions.
12.
What is Orphism and who was its founder?
Orphism was named after
Orpheus, Greek god with magical powers of music-making, by Guillaume
Apollinaire who believed art, like music, was divorced from representation of
the visible world. Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Delaunay founded Orphism.
13. How does
Synthetic Cubism differ from Analytic Cubism?
Synthetic Cubism no longer
relied on a decipherable relation to the visible world. Artists constructed
paintings and drawings from objects and shapes cut from paper or other
materials to represent a subject.
14.
What is a
collage?
Collage comes from the French
word coller, “to stick.” A collage is a
composition of bits of objects, such as newspaper or cloth, glued to a surface.
15.
Name three sculptors whose abstracted froms derive from the experiments of the
Cubists:
a. Jacques
Lipchitz b. Aleksandr
Archipenko c. Julio González.
16.
What new material and technique did Julio Gonzalez contribute to modern sculpture?
Welded iron
and bronze.
17.
How did Fernand Léger modify Cubist practices?
Purism,
founded by Le Corbusier, opposed Synthetic Cubism on the grounds that it was
out of touch with the machine age. Léger compromised Cubist analysis of form
with the Purist’s broad simplification and machinelike finish of the design
components.
18.
What were the Futurists trying to express in their art?
The Futurists were concerned
with a well-defined sociopolitical agenda, advocating revolution, both in
society and in art. They aimed to usher in a new, more enlightened era.
19.
Name two Futurist painters:
a. Giacomo Balla b. Gino Severini
Name one Futurist sculptor: Umberto
Boccioni
CHALLENGING ARTISTIC CONVENTIONS
1.
How did the attitude of the Dadaists toward war differ from that of the Futurists:
The
Dadaists were revolted at the butchery of the World War. They believed reason
and logic had been responsible for the unmitigated disaster of world war, and
they concluded that the only route to salvation was through political anarchy,
the irrational, and the intuitive. The Futurists believed war had a cleansing
action. They depicted war in a sanitized way.
2.
What was the original purpose of the Dada movement?
It
initially formed as a reaction to the horror and disgust about the war.
Although short‑lived,
Dadaism had important consequences for later art. What were they?
They unlocked new avenues for creative
invention, thereby fostering a more serious examination of the basic premises
of art than had prior movements.
3.
Name four artists connected with the Dada movement.
a. Jean (Hans)
Arp b. Marcel Duchamp
c. Hannah Höch d. Kurt Schwitters
4.
How did Jean Arp utilize chance in his work?
For one
collage, he took sheets of paper, tore them into roughly shaped squares, haphazardly
dropped them onto a sheet of paper on the floor, and glued them down. Chance
helped Arp preserve a certain mysterious vitality in his work.
5.
What is a readymade?
Mass-produced common objects (found
objects) the artist selects and sometimes “rectifies” by modifying their
substance or combining them with another object.
Who developed them?
Marcel
Duchamp.
6.
Describe
a "photomontage''
Many
images pasted together into one image, a technique used in early German art
postcards.
Who developed the technique?
The
Berlin Dadaists, particularly Hannah Höch.
7.
What
did Schwitters mean by the term merz?
He
used the term as a generic title for a whole series of collaged images; it
derives from the word “kommerzbank” (commerce bank), which appeared in one of
his collages.
TRANSATLANTIC ARTISTIC DIALOGUES
1.
Who
were the Eight and what type of painting did they do?
Eight
American artists who gravitated into the circle of the influential and
evangelical artist and teacher Robert Henri. They eventually became the Ashcan
School. They produced images depicting the rapidly changing urban landscape of
New York City.
2.
Where and when was the Armory show held and what was its significance?
Early
1913, in the armory of the New York National Guard’s 69th
Regiment. It was one of the major
vehicles for disseminating information about European artistic developments in
the United States. The show contained more than sixteen hundred works by
American and European artists.
3.
Name an influenctial work that was exhibited at the Armory show which
particularly shocked the public: Nude
Descending a Staircase by
Marcel Duchamp.
What was so upsetting about it?
Critics
in general found the show to be “pathological,” and one critic described the
Futurist-Cubist style painting as “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
4.
Who was the founder of the Photo‑Secession group and Gallery 291? Alfred Steiglitz.
What
type of photography did he practice?“Straight, unmanipulated” photographs.
5.
The American photographer who was interested in photographic abstraction was:
Edward
Weston.
6.
In what way did the work of Man Ray express the ideas of Dada?
He
incorporated found objects into many of his works. He used chance and the
dislocation of ordinary things to surprise viewers, as well as humor.
7.
Name two American artists who were influenced by Cubism:
a. Marsden Hartley b. Stuart
Davis
8.
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The
flowering of art and literature in Harlem in the 1920s. It was a manifestation
of the desire of African Americans to promote their cultural accomplishments,
to cultivate pride among their fellow African Americans, and to spread racial
tolerance across the United States.
9.
List two traits shared by the so-called Precisionists, one thematic, one
stylistic:
a.
Thematic: a fascination with the machine’s
precision and importance in modern life.
b. Stylistic: Tended
towards Synthetic Cubism’s flat, sharply delineated planes.
Name two artists who are considered
Precisonists:
a. Charles Demuth b. Georgia O’Keeffe
10.
Although the artist
Georgia O’Keeffe was
first associated with the Precisionists in New York, she is best known for her work in New Mexico.
Two of her favorite subjects were cow skulls and flowers.
Describe her style:
She
strips the subjects to their purest forms and colors to heighten their
expressive power, reducing details to a symphony of basic colors, shapes,
textures, and vital rhythms, almost to the point of complete abstraction.
EUROPEAN ART IN THE WAKE OF WORLD
WAR I
1.
What
was the purpose of Neue Sachlichkeit
artists?
All
of the artists served at some point in the German army and thus had firsthand
involvement with the military, which deeply informed their worldview and their
art.
List three artists associated with the
movement:
a. George Grosz b. Max Beckmann c. Otto Dix
2.
For what type of subject is George Grosz most famous?
Caustic
indictments of the military.
3.
List three adjectives that describe the style of Max Beckmann:
a. Violent b. Angular c. Rough paint surface
4.
What mood did Otto Dix create in his War
Triptych (FIG. 33-40)?
Devastating
and horrific.
What stylistic characteristics help to
create the mood?
Eerie
lighting, dark colors, and direct portrayal of violence.
5.
In what medium did Käthe Kollwitz do most of her work?
Printmaking,
including woodcut, lithography, and etching.
What
social class did she most often depict?
The
poor.
6.
List two German Expressionist sculptors.
a. Wilhelm Lehmbruck b. Ernst
Barlach
7.
According to Andre Breton, what was the purpose of the Surrealist movement?
“The
future resolution of the states of dream and reality, in appearance so
contradictory, in a sort of absolute reality, or surreality.”
8.
Who was the major practitioner of the style known as pittura metafisica?
Giorgio
de Chirico.
Describe
the mood created with works like the one shown in FIG. 33-44:
Clear
and simple, but sinister, strange, and ominous. Incongruous elements punctuate
the scene’s solitude.
9.
Name three painters connected with the Surrealist movement, and note what makes
their work distinct.
a. Max Ernst
He
began as an Expressionist, but after serving in the War became a Surrealist. He
used found objects and the element of chance in his work; he used a technique
called frottage, by combining the patterns achieved by rubbing a crayon or
another medium across a sheet of paper placed over a surface with a strong
textural pattern; and he also made collages.
b. Salvador Dalí
He
explored his psyche and dreams in his work, including a deeply erotic
dimension, and painted in a precisionist manner, making the world of his
paintings as convincingly real as the most naturalistically rendered landscape
based from nature.
c. René Magritte
His
works achieve their power by subverting the viewer’s expectations based on
logic and common sense, the conscious and the rational.
10.
What materials did Oppenheim combine in Object
represented on FIG. 33-48?
Fur
and a teacup and saucer.
11.
What type of subject matter did Frida Kahlo prefer?
The
details of her life as symbols for the psychological pain of human existence.
12.
List two techniques used by Surrealist artists to free their creative
processes.
a. Dalí used his paranoiac-critical approach to encourage the
free play of association as he worked.
b. Automatism: the creation of art without conscious control and
various types of planned “accidents” to provoke reactions closely related to
subconscious experience.
13.
Many artists share the surrealist interest in fanasy, even though they were not
formally associated with the group.
However, Andre referred to one of them as “the most Surrealist of us
all.” To whom did he refer? Joan Miró.
14.
Who said "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible?" Paul Klee.
What did this artist mean by that
statement?
Klee
thought of painting as similar to music in expressiveness and in its ability to
touch its viewer’s spirit through a studied use of color, form, and line, the
formal elements of painting.
15.
List three styles that Marc Chagall synthesized in his work.
a. expressionism b. Cubism c. Fauvism
What type of subject matter did he draw
upon?
Themes from his childhood and memories from his homeland.
NEW ART FOR A NEW SOCIETY – UTOPIAN
IDEALS
1.
What did Malevich believe to be the supreme reality?
Pure
feeling, which attaches to no object.
What type of forms did he use to express
that reality?
Abstract,
nonobjective forms—shapes not related to objects in the visible world.
2. An outstanding representative of the
Constructivist movement was:
Naum
Gabo.
Why
did he call himself a "Constructivist"?
Because
he built up his sculptures piece by piece in space, instead of carving or modeling
them in the traditional way.
3.
List three new materials used by Naum Gabo.
a. Celluloid b. Nylon c. Lucite
4.
What did Vladimir Tatlin believe was the purpose of art?
To
design a better environment for human beings and to create useful new products
for society.
5.
What basic colors and forms characterize Mondrian's mature work?
Red, blue, yellow, black, white, and gray; two primary directions
(horizontal and vertical), in the form of rectangles and straight lines.
What
did they symbolize for him?
Universal
beauty and expression. He considered primary colors to be the purest colors and
therefore the perfect tools to help an artist construct a harmonious
composition.
6.
Who designed the Schröder House (FIG. 33-56)?
Gerrit
Thomas Rietveld.
What style does it reflect?
De
Stijl.
7.
What was the Bauhaus?
A
German school of architecture and design, formerly named the Weimar School of
Arts and Crafts, and later called the Staatliche Bauhaus (State School of
Building).
Who founded it?
Walter
Gropius.
Name
three artists who taught there.
a. Vassily Kandinsky b. Paul Klee c. László
Moholy-Nagy
8.
What did Moholy‑Nagy mean by "vision in motion"?
He
believed society was heading toward a kinetic, time-spatial existence, with
relativity of motion and its measurement: in short, the character of the modern
age.
9.
Who created a series called Homage to the
Square, and what issues did the series explore?
Josef Albers. The series explored the relativity of the
perception of colors.
10.
Summarize Gropius’ design principles that were incorporated into the Bauhaus?
a. A decidedly positive attitude to the living environment of
vehicles and machines.
b. The organic shaping of things in accordance with their own
current laws, avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy.
c. Restriction of basic forms and colors to what is typical and
universally intelligible.
d. Simplicity in complexity, economy in the use of space,
materials, time, and money.
10.
Name a designer and a craftsman who taught at the Bauhaus noting the type of
work done by each:
a. Marcel
Breuer: furniture.
b. Gunta
Stölzl: weaving.
11.
List three characteristics of Mies van der Rohe's architectural style that are
found in International Style architecture.
a. The
weblike delicacy of the lines.
b. Radiance.
c. The illusion of
movement created by reflection and by light changes seen through it.
What did Mies van der Rohe mean by “less
is more”?
That
a “skin and bones,” minimal approach to architecture created pure, Modern
architectural works.
12.
Why was
the Bauhause closed and who closed it?
The
Nazis occupied the Bauhaus in 1933 and closed it as an example of “degenerate
art,” the practitioners of which the Nazis persecuted.
What effect did its closure have on the
spread of Bauhaus design principles?
The
Bauhaus artists who fled Nazi Germany disseminated, many winding up in the
United Sates.
13.
What did the Nazis consider to be “degenerate art”?
Anything
Hitler considered more modern or avant-garde than the nineteenth-century
realistic genre; he defined “degenerate art” as any works that “insult German
feeling or destroy or confuse natural form, or simply reveal an absence of
adequate manual and artistic skill.”
14.
Who defined a house as a "machine for living"?
Charles
Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier).
15.
How does Courbusier’s Villa Savoye (FIG. 33-64) differ from Wright's houses
(FIGS. 33-66 to 33-68)?
The
Villa Savoye sits conspicuously within its site, dominating it, whereas Wright’s
buildings aim to interact spatially and organically with their surroundings.
Robie House hugs the ground, while Villa Savoye seems to float on thin column
supports. Villa Savoye used several colors on the exterior such as cream and
rose-and-blue windows, while Wright’s houses have facades of brick that make
them seem more organic than the machine-inspired Le Corbusier house.
16.
List four stylistic characteristics of the Art Deco style:
a. streamlined
b. elongated symmetry
c. simple flat shapes alternate with shallow volumes in hard
patterns
d. aerodynamic forms
Name one building that illustrates the
style:
The
Chrysler Building, William van Alen, New York City.
EMPHASIZING THE ORGANIC
1.
How was Frank Lloyd Wright's concern for "organic" form reflected in
his buildings?
Wright
saw it as serving free individuals who have the right to move within a “free”
space, envisioned as a non-symmetrical design interacting spatially with its
natural surroundings. He sought to develop an organic unity of planning,
structure, materials, and site, incorporating the principle of continuity.
List
two houses he designed:
a. Robie House b. Kaufmann House (Fallingwater)
2.
What type of form did Brancusi believe was "the most real"?
Not
the external form, but instead the essence of things.
3.
What do the sculpture of Brancusi and Barbara Hepworth's have in common?
The
form of “Oval Sculpture” is basic and universal, smooth and curving, as is
“Bird in Space.” Both Brancusi and
Hepworth were interested in exploring the emotional chords that sculptors could
strike in viewers.
4.
List three characteristics of the sculpture of Henry Moore.
a. Organic forms.
b. There is an active relationship between material and
sculptor.
c. Interplays mass and
void.
What was the most recurrent theme in his
work?
The
reclining female figure.
What apparently originally inspired it?
A
photograph of a Chac Mool figure from pre-Columbian Mexico.
5.
What is a mobile?
A
series of balanced structures hanging from rods, wires, and plates. Air
currents set the parts moving to create a constantly shifting dance in space.
ART AS POLITICAL STATEMENT IN THE 1930s
1.
What event inspired Picasso's Guernica (FIG.
33-73)?
The
destruction by bombing of the town of Guernica by Nazis acting on behalf
of dictator Francisco Franco.
What
symbols did Picasso use to refer to the event, and how did he emphasize its
horror?
He
depicted no specific images of Nazi bombs or planes, but used more general
symbols. He used a slain warrior clutching a broken sword, a gored horse, a
shrieking woman cradling her dead child, a burning building, and a bull. The
figures are anguished, fragmented, and have dislocated anatomical features to
emphasize the horror.
2.
What is the political significance of Vera Mukhina’s sculpture shown on FIG. 33-74?
It
glorifies the communal labor of the Soviet people, relying on realism to
represent exemplars of Soviet citizenry.
3.
What was the WPA,
and what was its effect on the arts?
The
Works Progress Administration was a program to relieve widespread unemployment
during the Great Depression. Under the WPA, activities of the Federal Art
Project paid artists, writers, and theater people a regular wage in exchange
for work in their professions.
4.
The American woman photographer whose work brought the nation’s attention to
the plight of the rural poor was: Dorothea Lange.
5.
What is the dominant mood of Hopper's Nighthawks
(FIG. 33-76)?
The
pervasive loneliness of modern humans.
6.
What was the favorite subject of Jacob Lawrence?
The
culture and history of African Americans.
7.
Name two American
artists who were associated with the Regionalist School:
a. Grant Wood b. Thomas Hart Benton
What type of subjects did they paint?
Rural
scenes and regional history, respectively.
8.
What was the theme of much of Orozco's work?
The
indigenous history and culture of Mexico before Europeans arrived.
In what medium did he do most of his work?
Murals.
9.
Why did Diego Rivera want to work in a simple, easily accessible style?
He
was a Marxist and committed to developing an art that served the people’s
needs.
List three aspects of that style:
a. Large murals.
b. Complex, decorative and animated.
c. The figures consist of
simple monumental shapes and areas of bold color.
EMIGRES
AND EXILES: ENERGIZING AMERICAN ART AT MID CENTURY
Name
twelve European artists who came to America because of the political chaos of
Europe during World War II:
a. b. c. d.
Walter Gropius Lázló Moholy-Nagy Josef Albers
Marcel Breuer
e. f. g. h.
Mies van der Rohe Max Beckmann Max
Ernst Salvador Dalí
i. j. k. l.
Andre Breton Fernand
Léger Jacques Lipchitz George Grosz
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