Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head (Spirit of the Age,) 1920mixed media (tape measure, ruler, wallet, watch, tin cup, etc)

History of 20th

Century Art1920 - 1929

1920: “Art is Dead!” - Dada Fair held in Berlin

• Dada Berlin formed as attack on bourgeois German society

• Politically mobilized & aligned with the Communist party which was found in Germany in 1919

• Shared distaste for earlier 20th century avant-garde movements (Expressionism & spirituality, Cubism’s emphasis on aesthetics, Futurism & typography) , though influenced by them

• Revolutionized exhibition practice by having a fair (“a parody of the display of commodities”)

• Photomontage emerges as a major strategy to deconstruct the image & dismantle Weimar consumer culture (driven by commodity images and advertizing)

Hoch andHaussman

Dummy with a pig’s headdressed as German officer

Hannah Hoch

• The “It Girl” of a circle of male artists in Berlin Dada

• Demonstrates major tenets of Berlin Dada (anti-aesthetic, illogical, non-hierarchical, politically driven and left wing)

• Images clipped and collaged together with no apparent formal logic

• Grotesque juxtapositions, distortions of scale

• To disrupt and make illegible mass-produced images & texts (magazines, etc)

• Inventory of major German figures (Einstein, Friedrich Ebert, Kathe Kollwitz (a German Expressionist artist), Marx, Lenin) with Dada sayings written throughout (“Dada is not an art trend”)

• Major Berlin Dadaists in lower right quadrant, including Hoch above map of European countries where women can vote Hannah Hoch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife through

the Beer Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919

“..from an iconically rendered narrative to a purely structural deployment of textual material” – Art Since 1900

Cubist Collage vs. Dada Photomontage

Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze, 1912 Hannah Hoch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife through the Beer Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919

Heartfield, The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks

for Big Gifts. Motto: Millions Stand Behind Me!, from AIZ, No. 26, 1932

John Heartfield – A New Logic of Photomontage

• Also a Berlin Dadaist• Anglicized his German name to protest

German nationalism and anti-British sentiment during WWI

• Designer for AIZ (widely circulated Communist publication); images protested against emerging fascist movements (particularly in Germany before Hitler elected Chancellor)

• Developed more direct, aesthetically cohesive photomontage technique through airbrushing (vs. chaotic early photomontage)

• As “communicative action” (toward just democracies and seeking emancipation from authoritative political systems)

• To appeal to working class, to mobilize • Anonymous “fat cat” behind him, mocking

the Nazi salute as a plea for cash (Nazism funded by big business to defeat a Communist proletarian revolution) Heartfield, The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks

for Big Gifts. Motto: Millions Stand Behind Me!, from AIZ, No. 26, 1932

Gustav Klutsis, Let us Fulfill the Plan of the Great Projects 1930, lithograph poster

• Photomontage for Russian voting poster

• Reads “Fulfilled plan, Great work”

• Hand represents the collective/mass subject

• Emphasis on the worker and laborer in Communist Russia and their political participation in the electoral process

• Socialist propaganda in wake of October 1917 Russian Revolution and overthrow of the monarchy

Dada in Film

Entr’acte1924

By Rene Clair

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnXdYxvBHf8

1923 – The Bauhaus holds first publicexhibition in Weimar Germany• Like Berlin Dada, the Bauhaus begin with

the Weimar Republic in 1919 and ended with it, in 1933 when Hitler shut it down

• Inspired by Arts & Crafts movement around turn of the century (creative collab. between art & industry)

• To unite fine & applied arts (gesamtkunstwerk)

• Socialist and humanitarian organization; championed the worker

• Walter Gropius its first director• Viewed the Gothic cathedral as a precedent

and metaphor• To rebuild the world after it had been

destroyed by war?

Together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity, and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith. – Gropius, Bauhaus manifesto, 1919

Ruins of Cathedral ofSt. Quentin, France, 1918

Lyonel FeiningerCathedral of the Future1919, woodcut

Kurt SchwittersMerzbau: The Cathedral of

Erotic Misery1923-

Hannover, Germany

"Becoming absorbed in art is like going to church."

Bauhaus – 1919 - 1922

• Focused on fundamentals of materials (natural) and arts & crafts

• Two parts to curriculum: 1) instruction in craft workshops, led by “workshop masters” (sculpture, carpentry, metal, pottery, weaving, etc); 2) instruction in artistic “form problems,” led by “form masters,” (Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Itten)

• Early Form Masters (e.g. Itten, who taught Vorkers course) examined the mystical qualities of natural forms, the psychology of color, and used Old Master works as models Johannes Itten, The Beginning, 1916

Paul KleeAngelus Novus

1920

Bauhaus – 1923 on – From Medievalist to Industrialist

• Laszlo Maholy-Nagy takes over Vorkers course; school transformed into a Constructivist model which embraced new media and industrial technologies

• Maholy-Nagy self-taught, made photomontages and kinetic metal constructions with made-to-order parts

• To align art & industry; goal of functional, inexpensive, and beautifully designed products

• Made manifest in move to industrial city of Dessau where transformed to an “institute of design”

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus (exterior), 1925-26

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVnF9A3azSA&feature=related

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Marianne Brandt, Kandem table lamp for Korting & Mathiesen, 1928

IKEA Forsa lampMies van der Rohe, 860-880 Lakeshore Drive, 1948-51, Chicago

1924 – Andre Breton publishes first issue of La Revolution Surrealiste

• Longest lasting artistic revolution in the 20th century, from 1920s-60s

• To invest everything in ordinary outer life with poetry of the inner life, to make the ordinary extraordinary

• Engaged in a study of how the unconscious mind could be used to affect reality

• Founded Bureau of Surrealist Research in 1924; manifesto issued same year

Surrealism proposes a gathering of the greatest possible number of experimental elements, for a purpose that cannot yet be perceived. All those who have the means to contribute…are urgently requested to come forward: let them shine the light on the genesis of invention, or propose a new system of psychic investigation or freely criticize morality or simply entrust us with their most curious dreams. – Bureau statement to press

Man Ray, Waking Dream Séance, 1924

The Circle of Influence

• Movement self-consciously rooted in history (art, literature, etc); Raphael & Dostoevsky pictured above

• Also looked to non-traditional art forms (popular imagery, art of the insane – Hans Prinzhorn published Artistry of the Mentally Ill in 1922)

• Indebted to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and in exploring subconscious desires, however immoral, and the landscape of the mind

• Games and techniques for accessing the subconscious (automatism, frottage, fumage, etc)

Poe is Surrealist in adventure.

Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality.

Rimbaud is Surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere.

Mallarmé is Surrealist when he is confiding.

Jarry is Surrealist in absinthe.

Nouveau is Surrealist in the kiss.

-From Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924

Max Ernst, A Friends’ Reunion, 1922

Giorgio de Chirico The Child’s Brain1914, oil on canvas

Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale1924

 "First contact with hallucination. Measles. Fear of death and the annihilating powers. A fever-vision provoked by an imitation mahogany pane opposite his head, the grooves of the wood taking successfully the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird's head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on. Certainly little Max took pleasure in being afraid of these visions, and later delivered himself voluntarily to provoke hallucinations of the same kind in looking obstinately at wood panels, clouds, wallpapers, unplastered walls, and so on." - Ernst in his diaries

Surrealist Automatism

• Ernst called this “collage painting” most important contribution to surrealism

• Recalls fever-vision or hallucination of a bird in wood grain next to childhood bed while sick as a child

• Recalls death of younger sister when Ernst was 6yrs. old

• Nightingale represents ominous presence (death) or hope?

• Faceless man (abducting child?) reaches for doorknob attached to frame (where does it lead?)

• Miro’s work shows a biomorphic automatism

• Suggests organic forms (people kissing) but introduces decorative abstraction

Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale1924

Joan Miro, The Kiss, 1924

Surrealism , Objective Chance & Doubling: The “Marvelous”

• Introduced in Breton’s autobiographical novels, here L’amour fou (Mad Love)

• Breton discovered this in a Parisian flea market (found object)

• Recognized it as a fulfillment of an automatic idea he was thinking of cendrier Cendrillon (Cinderella ashtray) & a poem he had written 10 yrs. earlier (a premonition?)

• The spoon infinitely redoubles itself (spoon is a slipper with a slipper for a heel and so on)

• Represents “objective chance” that triggers a desire or something already subconsciously known to the person who discovers it (to Breton, this desire was for love)

• Discovery of the object is a fulfillment of that desire

• Could be read as a metaphor for a woman (the shoe, the spoon as womb)

“…beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” – Lautreamont, 19th century

Breton, Slipper-Spoon, 1934

The Hundred HeadlessWoman

Max Ernst, Elephant Celebes (detail), 1921

Man Ray, Untitled (published in “La Revolution

Surrealiste”), 1924 Rene Magritte, Le Viol, 1934

Hans Bellmer, La Poupee, ca. 1935

How do representations of the female form fulfill surrealist aims?

Doubling & redoubling – anextension of the fated sign in “objective chance” & related to Freud’s compulsion to repeat driven by unconscious drives. The doubled image expresses that desire. Photographic tricks like the double negative are well-suited for these ideas.

“The uncanny” – doll or automaton as ghost of the living body (a double)

Rene Magritte & doubling

Rene Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933oil on canvas

• Belgian painter and commercial artist

• Often combines images with text

• Examines arbitrary nature of words as signs (“language game”)

• Illusory nature of images & language

• Simulacrum (Foucault)

• What is the real landscape? Is it all a series of images with no origin?

George Grosz, Pillars of Society, 1926

1925 – New Objectivity in Weimar Germany

• First exhibition of these new “magical realists” in 1925

• Organized by Hartlaub, the curator, who observed a return to figuration

• Signals end of German Expressionism & Dada• Reflects political turmoil, social disorganization

and disillusionment in early years of Weimar Republic

• Chronicled rise of fascism & corrupt ruling class in Germany (Grosz)

• Captured thriving artist bohemian society (Schad)

• Hartlaub recognized a tension between old world classicism (Ingrismus - seen in Picasso’s work) and Verismus (realism) in the above artists’ works

• Here all members of military, church and state are corrupt & grotesquely rendered

• Borrow from Dadaist collage aesthetic combined with painterly objectivity

George Grosz, Pillars of Society, 1926

I drew and painted from a spirit of contradiction, and attempted in my work to convince the world that this world is ugly, sick and mendacious’ - Grosz, 1924

Nazi officerw/ apocalypticscene comingfrom head

Politician with steaming pile of feces

Priest blessingthe army

Beckmann, Night, 1918-19

Max Beckmann

• Scene of ruthless torture at end of WWI

• Expressionist angularity & compressed space adds to sense of aggression and violence

• German revolutionary on far right revealing/concealing scene

• Grosz & Beckmann both German soldiers in WWI; later turned against war

• Would later be dubbed a Degenerate Artist & forced to flee (first to Amsterdam, then St. Louis)

• Portraiture significant to New Objectivity (subjectivity and individualism)

Beckmann, Night, 1918-19

BeckmannSelf-Portraitin Tuxedo1927

New Objectivity Portraiture – Christian Schad and Otto Dix

What we are showing is that art is still there…it is alive despite a cultural situation that seems hostile to the essence of art as other epochs have rarely been…thus artists disillusioned, sobered, often resigned to the point of cynicism having nearly given up on themselves after a moment of unbounded, nearly apocalyptic hope….have begun to ponder what is most immediate, certain, and durable: truth and craft. – Hartlaub, exhibition statement

Christian Schad, Self-Portrait, 1927

Schad, Agosta "the Winged One" and Rasha "the Black Dove”, 1929

Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926

Dix: 'I must paint you! I simply must! … You are representative of an entire epoch!'Von Harden: 'So, you want to paint my lacklustre eyes, my ornate ears, my long nose, my thin lips; you want to paint my long hands, my short legs, my big feet—things which can only scare people off and delight no-one?'Dix: 'You have brilliantly characterized yourself, and all that will lead to a portrait representative of an epoch concerned not with the outward beauty of a woman but rather with her psychological condition.'

1927 - Meanwhile, Across the Atlantic…

• American artists inspired by “machine aesthetic”, particularly Charles Sheeler & Ford Motors

• Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opens in 1929 to showcase modernist art in Europe

• Traced lineage to Post-Impressionism (Cezanne, etc) & Cubism

• Alfred Barr hired as first director; school in radical European modernism (DeStijl, Bauhaus, etc)

• MoMA’s exhibitions became the standard for modern art museums (focus on painting & sculpture, isolating the works on pristine white walls)

Diagram of modern art movements 1890-1935, 1935

Precisionism

• Seems to support Duchamp’s statement that America’s greatest works are “her plumbing and her bridges”

• NYC as beacon of new industrial age• Celebration of American industry (Five panels from L to R: The Port, The White Way I

(Manhattan avenues), The Prow (skyscrapers), The White Way II (Broadway), The Bridge (Brooklyn Bridge)

• Formatted as altarpiece to suggest industry as new religion?• Combines Cubist and Futurist aesthetics

Joseph Stella, Voice of the City: New York Interpreted, 1920-22, 7+ ft. tall

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930

Charles Sheeler

• Received commission to photograph River Rouge Plant for Ford Motors outside of Detroit

• 23 buildings and 93 miles of track

• Made series of photos, then paintings inspired by them

• Completed 32 official photos, 9 of which published in magazines including Vanity Fair

• One had caption “an American altar of the God-Objective of Mass Production”

• Portrays industry as divinely ordained and in harmony with nature

• Anonymously controlled model of efficiency

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930

man nearly absent

Smoke merges with clouds

Plant reflected in river

The Course of Empire

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1835 Yves Marchand, Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit, 2010

Georgia O’Keeffe

• O’Keeffe would begin working in this Precisionist fashion when living in NYC

• Abandoned it when left for American Southwest

• Applied modernist formal concerns (abstraction, reduction, cropping) to organic naturalism

• Inspired by modernist photography (Strand, etc)

• Feminizes the masculine Precisionist view of the city?

Alfred Stieglitz Georgia O’Keeffe1918

Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Iris III, 1926