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Art of the 20th Century to 1950

20th-century art and what it became known as — modern art — really began with modernism in the late 19th century.

Nineteenth-century movements of Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau and Symbolism led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke ("The Bridge") in Germany.

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The Art of the Fauves

Henri Matisse, Self-Portrait, 1906Oil on canvas, 21 5/8 x 18 1/8 in.,

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for "the wild beasts"), a loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain.

The paintings of the Fauves were characterized by seemingly wild brush work and strident colors, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction

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33-1 Henri Matisse, Woman with the Hat, 1905, oil on canvas, 3’ x 2’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Matisse is about color, the luminosity of color.

(Matisse wrote) “…we rejected imitative colors, and that with pure colors we obtained stronger reactions …”

Color became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyor of meaning.

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Matisse, Madame Matisse (The Green Line), 1905, oil on canvas, 16” x 13”, State Art Museum, Copenhagen.

Figure 33-2 HENRI MATISSE, Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908–1909. Oil on canvas, approx. 5’ 11” x 8’ 1”. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1906, oil on canvas, 6” x 10’, Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania

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Matisse. The Dance, 1910, oil on canvas 8‘ x 13‘, Hermitage, St. Petersburg

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Figure 33-3 ANDRÉ DERAIN, The Dance, 1906. Oil on canvas, 6’ 7/8” x 6’ 10 1/4”. Fridart Foundation, London.

The Fauves: Andre Derain

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André Derain, Mountains at Collioure, 1905, National Gallery of Art, Washington, John Hay Whitney Collection

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Derain, London Bridge.1906. Oil on canvas, 26 x 39" (66 x 99.1 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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The German ExpressionistsDie BrückeDie Brücke

Violent juxtapositions of color

Wrenching distortions of forms

Ragged outline

Agitated brushstrokes

A reaction to the dehumanization of industrial, urban society

Der Blaue Reiter Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) :They believed in the promotion of modern art; the connection between visual art and music; the spiritual and symbolic associations of colour; and a spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting. Members were interested in European medieval art and primitivism, as well as the contemporary, non-figurative art scene in France.

Die Brücke (The Bridge) was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905.

Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. The seminal group had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and the creation of expressionism.

Die Brücke is sometimes compared to the Fauves. Both movements shared interests in primitivist art. Both shared an interest in the expressing of extreme emotion through high-keyed color that was very often non-naturalistic. Both movements employed a drawing technique that was crude, and both groups shared an antipathy to complete abstraction. The Die Brücke artists' emotionally agitated paintings of city streets and sexually charged events transpiring in country settings make their French counterparts, the Fauves, seem tame by comparison. 11

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33-4 Ernesr Kirchner, Street, Dresden, 1908, oil on canvas, 5’ x 7’, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Die Brücke (Bridge) School: Kirchner and Nolde

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Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913, oil on canvas, 48” x 38”, Museum of Modern Art, New York

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Kirchner, Girl with a Japanese Umbrella, 1909, oil on canvas, 37” x 32”, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany

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Figure 33-5 EMIL NOLDE, Saint Mary of Egypt among Sinners, 1912. Left panel of a triptych, oil on canvas, approx. 2’ 10” x 3’ 3”. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

16Nolde, Dance around the Golden Calf, 1910,Oil on canvas. 88 x 105.5 cm, Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich  

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Figure 33-6 VASSILY KANDINSKY, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912. Oil on canvas, 3’ 7 7/8” x 5’ 3 7/8”. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (gift of Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1937).

Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) School: Kandinsky and Marc

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Kandinsky, Improvisation # 28 (1912)

Movement toward abstraction; representational objects are suggested rather than depicted.

Strongly articulated use of black lines

Colors seem to shade around line forms

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Kandinsky, Improvisation # 30 (War Theme) , 1913, oil on canvas, 43” x 43”, Art Institute of Chicago

20Kandinsky, Improvisation # 30 (War Theme) , 1913, oil on canvas, 43” x 43”, Art Institute of Chicago

This is a spiritual painting, not foretelling the coming great war. Kandinsky’s theme here is the destructive prelude to the Second Coming of Christ.

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Kandinsky, Panel for Edwin R. Campbell, # 1, 1914, oil on canvas, 64” x 32”, Museum of Modern Art, New York

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Franz Marc, The Little Yellow Horses, 1912, oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart,Germany

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Marc, The Large Blue Horses, 1911, oil on canvas, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

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Figure 33-7 FRANZ MARC, Fate of the Animals, 1913. Oil on canvas, 6’ 4 3/4” x 8’ 9 1/2”. Kunstmuseum, Basel.

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The Art of Pablo Picasso

 

 

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Picasso, (Blue Period) The Old Guitarist, 1903, oil on panel, Art Institute of Chicago

The Blue Period is the period between 1900 and 1904 when Picasso painted essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. These somber works, inspired by Spain but mostly painted in Paris, are now some of his most popular works, although he had difficulty selling them at the time.

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Picasso, The Blind Man's Meal, 1903,Oil on canvas; 37 1/2 x 37 1/4 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Picasso, (Rose Period) Harlequin on a Red Armchair, 1905, ink / watercolor, 32” x 24”

 

The Rose Period signifies the time when the style of Picasso's painting used cheerful orange and pink colors in contrast to the cool, somber tones of the previous Blue Period. It lasted from 1904 to 1906. Harlequins, circus performers and clowns appear frequently in the Rose Period and will populate Picasso's paintings at various stages through the rest of his long career. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso.The Rose Period has been considered French influenced, while the Blue Period more Spanish influenced, although both styles emerged while Picasso was living in Paris.

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Picasso, (Rose Period) Family of Saltimbanques, 1905, oil on canvas, 84” x 90”, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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Figure 33-8 PABLO PICASSO, Gertrude Stein, 1906–1907. Oil on canvas, 3’ 3 3/8” x 2’ 8”. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1947).

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Ivory belt mask of a Queen Mother, from Benin, Nigeria, mid-16th century. Ivory and iron, 9 3/8” high.

African Influences

Head of a King, from Ife, 13th Century, brass, height: 11.5 inches

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Picasso, Self-Portrait, 1906, 36” x 28”, Philadelphia Museum of Art

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Cubism :

Avant-garde art movement pioneered by George Braque and Pablo Picasso, joined by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le dFauconnier, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris (Montmartre, Montparnasse and Puteaux) during the 1910s and extending through the 1920s. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.

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Figure 33-9 PABLO PICASSO, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, June–July 1907. Oil on canvas, 8’ x 7’ 8”. Museum of Modern Art, New York (acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest).

“ a tension between representation and abstraction.”

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Picasso, Dance of the Veils, 1907, oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm, Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

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Analytic Cubism

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Picasso, Portrait of Amboise Vollard, 1910, oil on canvas, 36” x 26”, Pushkin Museum, Moscow

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Figure 33-10 GEORGES BRAQUE, The Portuguese, 1911. Oil on canvas, 3’ 10 1/8” x 2’ 8”. Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kunstmuseum, Basel (gift of Raoul La Roche, 1952).

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Figure 33-11 ROBERT DELAUNAY, Champs de Mars or The Red Tower, 1911. Oil on canvas, 5’ 3” x 4’ 3”. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

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Synthetic Cubism

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Figure 33-12 PABLO PICASSO, Still Life with Chair-Caning, 1912. Oil and oilcloth on canvas, 10 5/8” x 1’ 1 3/4”. Musée Picasso, Paris.

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Figure 33-13 GEORGES BRAQUE, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe and Glass, 1913. Charcoal and various papers pasted on paper, 1’ 6 7/8” x 2’ 1 1/4”. Private collection, New York.

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Figure 33-14 PABLO PICASSO, Maquette for Guitar, 1912. Cardboard, string, and wire (restored), 25 1/4” x 13” x 7 1/2”. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Cubist Sculpture

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Figure 33-15 JACQUES LIPCHITZ, Bather, 1917. Bronze, 2’ 10 3/4” x 1’ 1 1/4” x 1’ 1”. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (gift of the Friends of Art). Copyright © Estate of Jacques Lipchitz/Licensed by VAGA, New York/Marlborough Gallery, NY.

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Figure 33-16 ALEKSANDR ARCHIPENKO, Woman Combing Her Hair, 1915. Bronze, approx. 1’ 1 3/4” high. Museum of Modern Art, New York (bequest of Lillie P. Bliss).

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Figure 33-17 JULIO GONZÁLEZ, Woman Combing Her Hair, ca. 1930–1933. Iron, 4’ 9” high. Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

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Futurism

Artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city. The Futurists practised in every

medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Key figures of the movement include the Italians MarinettiBoccioni, Severini,etc.

Important works include its seminal piece of the literature, Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism, as well as Boccioni's sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and Balla's painting, Abstract Speed + Sound (pictured). Futurism influenced art movements such as Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree, Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism.

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Figure 33-19 GIACOMO BALLA, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912. Oil on canvas, 2’ 11 3/8” x 3’ 7 1/4”. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (bequest of A. Conger Goodyear, gift of George F. Goodyear, 1964).

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Figure 33-20 UMBERTO BOCCIONI, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast 1931). Bronze, 3’ 7 7/8” high x 2’ 10 7/8” x 1’ 3 3/4”. Museum of Modern Art, New York (acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest).

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Figure 33-21 GINO SEVERINI, Armored Train, 1915. Oil on canvas, 3’ 10” x 2’ 10 1/8”. Collection of Richard S. Zeisler, New York.

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Dada: A State of MindDada or Dadaism Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the

European avant-garde in the early 20th century. Many claim Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter but the height of New York Dada was the year before in 1915.

Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artist and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words da, da, meaning yes, yes in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name "Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French-German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'.

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The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and had political affinities with the radical left.

Key figures in the movement included Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Richard Huelsenbeck, Georg Grosz, John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, Kurt Schwitters, and Hans Richter, among others.

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Figure 33-22 JEAN ARP, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916–1917. Torn and pasted paper, 1’ 7 1/8” x 1’ 1 5/8”. Museum of Modern Art, New York (purchase).

Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.

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MARCEL DUCHAMP, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23. Oil, lead, wire, foil, dust, and varnish on glass, 9’ 1 1/2” x 5’ 9 1/8”. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (Katherine S. Dreier Bequest).

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Figure 33-25 HANNAH HÖCH, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–1920. Photomontage, 3’ 9” x 2’ 11 1/2”. Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

Art techniques developed

CollageCollage

The Dadaists imitated the techniques developed during the cubist movement through the pasting of cut pieces of paper items, but extended their art to encompass items such as transportation tickets, maps, plastic wrappers, etc. to portray aspects of life, rather than representing objects viewed as still life.

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Figure 33-26 KURT SCHWITTERS, Merz 19, 1920. Paper collage, approx. 7 1/4” x 5 7/8”. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, (gift of Collection Société Anonyme).

ReadymadeReadymade

Marcel Duchamp began to view the manufactured objects of his collection as objects of art, which he called "readymades". He would add signatures and titles to some, converting them into artwork that he called "readymade aided" or "rectified readymades". Duchamp wrote: "One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the 'readymade.' That sentence, instead of describing the object like a title, was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal. Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called 'readymade aided.'" One such example of Duchamp's readymade works is the urinal that was turned onto its back, signed "R. Mutt", titled "Fountain", and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition that year.

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MARCEL DUCHAMP, Fountain, (second version), 1950 (original version produced 1917). Ready-made glazed sanitary china with black paint, 12” high. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (purchased with proceeds from the sale of deaccessioned works of art).

Marcel Duchamp, Readymade, 1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York

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PhotomontagePhotomontage

The Dadaists – the "monteurs" (mechanics) – used scissors and glue rather than paintbrushes and paints to express their views of modern life through images presented by the media. A variation on the collage technique, photomontage utilized actual or reproductions of real photographs printed in the press. In Cologne, Max Ernst used images from World War I to illustrate messages of the destruction of war.

AssemblageAssemblage

The assemblages were three-The assemblages were three-dimensional variations of the dimensional variations of the collage –the assembly of collage –the assembly of everyday objects to produce everyday objects to produce meaningful or meaningless meaningful or meaningless (relative to the war) pieces of (relative to the war) pieces of work including war objects and work including war objects and trash. Objects were nailed, trash. Objects were nailed, screwed or fastened together in screwed or fastened together in different fashions. Assemblages different fashions. Assemblages could be seen in the round or could be seen in the round or could be hung on a wall.could be hung on a wall.

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Mechanical Head.

Raoul Hausmann,1920

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Figure 33-31 EDWARD WESTON, Nude, 1925. Platinum print. Collection, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

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Figure 33-32 MAN RAY, Cadeau (Gift), ca. 1958 (replica of 1921 original). Painted flatiron with row of 13 tacks with heads glued to the bottom, 6 1/8” high, 3 5/8” wide, 4 1/2” deep. Museum of Modern Art, New York (James Thrall Soby Fund).

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Figure 33-33 MARSDEN HARTLEY, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914. Oil on canvas, 5' 8 1/4” x 3' 5 3/8”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Alfred Stieglitz Collection).

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Figure 33-34 STUART DAVIS, Lucky Strike, 1921. Oil on canvas, 2’ 9 1/4” x 1’ 6”. Museum of Modern Art, New York (gift of The American Tobacco Company, Inc.). Copyright © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

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Figure 33-35 AARON DOUGLAS, Noah’s Ark, ca. 1927. Oil on masonite, 4’ x 3’. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee.