Housekeeping

Contact your tutor: gemma.marmalade@beds.ac.ukContact your unit and support coordinator: mo.lea@beds.ac.uk

Please refer to BREO for course outline and informationAll lectures are recorded and available on Breo

Please be prepared with a note book and pen to note take throughout this lecture

ATTENDANCE, PUNCTUALITY, LISTENING, RESPECT AND ENGAGEMENT are all prerequisites of your attendance here.

What to expect today...

• Refresher of essay question

• Where we left off...

• Timeline of History

• Art, design and history between WW1 and WW2

• The arrival of mainstream Modernism

• Set ‘Lecture Questions’ C

• Expectations of lecture 4 next week

Refresher: ESSAY QUESTION

• Essay Question What is Modernism? Choose three examples found in a museum, gallery or book (see list of options) from the period of modernity. Discuss why it is ‘modern’ rather than just ‘a product of its time’.

The Enlightenment to Postmodernism: a chronological tour

War to War experimentation and political influence

AN INTRODUCTION TO MODERNISM

• 1889 World Fair, Paris

• Celebrate the 100th anniversary of Revolution

• Eiffel Tower was an emblem of engineering and technology

• Colossal, a statement, an arrow to the sky

• All art had obeyed some convention

• Perspective was representational to denote realistic vision

• Cubism spearheaded by Picasso and Braque challenged this

• Inspired by Cezanne

• A fundamental argument in how we see

• Three dimensionality

• a staggering and baffling development in art and representation

• Touchstone of Modernism

What is modernism?• Broadly, modernism means modern thought, character and practice.

• Specifically, modernism describes the modernist movement within the arts.

• Modernism rejects tradition, or parodies/appropriates tradition in light of new economic, social and political advances created by the industrialised world.

• Ezra Pound - ‘Make it new!’ 1934

DARK AGES AGE OF REASON ENLIGHTENMENT MODERN ERA

Birth of Christ

Fall of Roman Empire

NapoleonEmperor of the French

reign

476

RENAISSANCE

14001300 1620 1680 1800 1900

TIMELINE

1768

Wright painting

Galileo

Bacon and Descartes

NewtonKant

Reign of Louis XIV

Palace of Versailles

The Sublime and the Beautiful

Lady of Shalott

Sound recording

Light bulbs

Movie Camera

First Flight

E=MC2

POST MODERNISMMODERN ERA

19201900 1940 1980 2000

TIMELINE

1960

Sound recording

Light bulbs

Movie Camera

First Flight

E=MC2

WW1 WW2

Picasso and Braque

?

Picasso and War

3 dimension distortion

inspired by ‘new vision’

painting process

baffling to audiences

multiple meanings

connection to real things

CAMOUFLAGE

Leger and democracyFernand Leger continues the idea of ‘real things’ from Cubism’s experimentation with collage eg. signage, advertising, paper, metal..

Reproduction/mass production - result of mechanistic modern age

Popular Art and ‘the man on the street’

Socialist ideas andcommon democracy bornout of the trenches

FUTURISMO!

Filippo Marinetti and Futurism

Italian poet, wrote the Futurist Manifesto 1909

leaflets, demo’s, spectacle, propaganda

“art can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice...”

Overtones with Fascism, anarchism and political ideas

“we will glorify war - the world’s only hygiene...beautiful ideas worth dying for...”

penchant for fast cars...

Time, Space, Movement and Photography

NOISESPEED

MACHINEMOVEMENTPROCESS

Edweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey

DRIVE

Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Gaston Chevrolet

Modernism saw analysis into thoughts, impulses, behaviour

‘Death Drive’ -Freud

an innate drive towards death and self-destruction...a desire to oppose life

Marcel Duchamp‘Fountain’ - 1917

Exhibition of the Society of Independent

artistsRejected from showing

ScandalousPseudonym - R. Mutt

“Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own

hands or not has no importance. He chose it. He

took an article of life, placed it where its useful significance disappeared under the new title and

point of view and created a new thought for that

object.”

SuffragePolitical activism for rights and votes for womenStarted about 1872No real success until 1905An advocacy of violenceWW1 halted campaigningWestern world saw political equality introduced before WW2

Described as a ‘sex war’ - a rebellion against patriarchy and objectification

Feminist Fashion

BahausArt and

Craft School in Germany

between 1919-1933

famous for its unique approach to design that it

displayed and taught.

Created by Walter Gropius - a total work of art in which all arts and design, including architecture can be brought together.

It closed due to political pressure by the Nazi Regime.

UNIFICATIONmodern

no teaching of history

Cantilever Chair - Mies van der Rohe 1927Wassily Chair - Marcel Breuer - 1925/26

NAZISM

Originally a symbol for luck and goodness, Swastika originates from Sanskrit and used widely in Indian religions

The swastika was adopted by the Nazi Party in 1920 as a symbol of Aryan race and white supremacy.

There is a modernistic element to the symbol - an appropriation of an already used symbol, teaming it with the colours of the old German Empire Flag.

Nazi Ideology: a modern one - fighting against communists of WW1, a new idea of Nationalism, revolutionary ideals, Mein Kampf - Hitler’s manifesto, ethnic cleansing (Marinetti’s ‘hygiene’?), health and exercise

Result - mass death through genocide of jews, blacks, women, homosexuals, ideological dissidentsTheir participation in the axis powers of WW2 1939 -45, 73 Million fatalities, the deadliest conflict in human history.

DEGENERATE ART

1915 /2015

100 years!

Virginia Woolf - “human character changed in 1910” ?Picasso - Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907?

1915 - The Great War (WW1) had begun

24 hour clock in discussionworld divided into time zones

International wire transmissions made communication faster

Time/speed/movement/simultaneityThe successive aspects of the same object

LECTURE QUESTIONS C

• What technological developments happen at the start of the ‘modern age’?

• How did these developments impact art and design?

• Why did artists and designers want to rebel?

• Find one Bauhaus artist/designer/maker, include an example of their work and describe how it is ‘modern’.

Your birthday gift to me is.....!

• To have answered the lecture questions just set

• To have written up/uploaded your notes from this lecture to your journal

• To spend time independently researching modernism and adding it to your journal - REMEMBER your online journal makes 70% of your overall mark

• DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LECTURE NEXT WEEK

• To arrive on time and ready to begin the lecture next week