Cubism• Cubism - One of the most influential art

movements (1907-1914) of the twentieth century, Cubism was begun by

• Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) in 1907. They were greatly inspired by

• - African sculpture,

• - by painters Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and

• -by the Fauves.

Fishing BoatsGeorges Braque

In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone."

In a nutshell: SHATTERING FORM

The Castle at la Roche-GuyonGeorges Braque

• While artists associated with Europe were following the expressionist tendencies, Two Artists were reducing the role of color to a minimum to concentrate on the problem of representing form in space.

Le Portugais (The Emigrant), 1911-1912Georges Braque

• Picasso and Braque started working together in 1909, and by 1910 their styles became so intertwined that it became virtually identical.

• For a time they ceased

signing their works.

Self Portraits

The three musiciansPicasso

From 1901 to 1904, Picasso split time between Paris and Barcelona. For reasons historians don't fully understand, he painted predominantly in blue during these years, producing works like The Old Guitarist. After

1904, when Picasso decided to stay in Paris, this "Blue Period" came to a close. It was followed by a "Rose Period," filled with (you guessed it) red hues--including those in Boy with a Pipe, which sold for more than $100

million in 2004.

The Old Guitarist. Boy with a Pipe

Les Demoiselles d'AvignonBy 1907, the bloom was off the Rose Period, and Picasso's art was taking a decidedly modern turn. That year, his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with its African motifs and fractured spaces, was too striking even for the Parisian avant-garde. Picasso kept the painting under wraps for several years, though many now consider it a masterpiece.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon)

• a large oil painting of 1907 by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) which portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Avinyó street in Barcelona. All of the

figures depicted are physically jarring, none conventionally feminine, all slightly menacing, and each is rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two of the women are rendered with African mask-like faces, giving them a savage and mysterious aura. In his adaption of

Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favour of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. The work is one of Picasso's most famous, and is widely considered to be a seminal work in the early development of both Cubism and modern art. It is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, having been acquired by the

museum in 1939.

Guernica

Guernica is a town in north Spain. Guernica was devastated by German air bombardment in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. This tour helped bring the Spanish civil war to the world's attention.

Francisco de Goya (Period:ROCOCO)

The Third of May 1808

This painting is the first of its kind: The first true anti war painting.

Flashback

DADA1916

1914

World War 1

Soldiers with their heads full of gallant ideas about battles rushed headlong into the most horrible deaths imaginable. Science and technology in which the world had put its faith showed its dark side-trench warfare, poison gas, bombardment by air, machine guns, tanks, submarines etc. The ideal of the progress was shown to be pretty hollow, and ten million people lost their lives in one of the bloodiest wars in history.

In 1916, a group of artists waiting out war in Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, banded together as a protest art movement called DADA.This movement was picked up in America. Later German(Hannah Hoch) and French artists also joined this movement (Francis Picabia)

Dada became synonymous with ANTI

DADA was a big NO

DADA was a big YES

Anti art, Anti middle class society, anti politicians, anti good manners, anti business as

usual, anti all that had brought about he war

Anti art, Anti middle class society, anti politicians, anti good manners, anti business as

usual, anti all that had brought about he war

Yes to Creativity, to life, to spontaneity, to silliness

Yes to Creativity, to life, to spontaneity, to silliness

FountainMarcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, white glazed ceramic plumbing fixture and painted signature, readymade porcelain urinal on its back. The urinal, purchased from "Mott Works" company in New York and signed "R. Mutt," was submitted to the jury-free 1917 Independents exhibition but was suppressed by the hanging committee. This is a photograph of either the second version of 1951 or the third of 1964.

DADADada artists produced works which were

nihilistic( belief that nothing is worthwhile) or

reflected a cynical attitude toward social values, and, at the same time, irrational — absurd and playful, emotive and intuitive. Less a style than a zeitgeist (ideas and spirit of time),

Dadaists typically produced art objects in unconventional forms produced by unconventional methods. Several artists employed the chance results of accident as a means of production, for instance.

• Dada was more of an attitude than a coherent movement

L.H.O.O.Q1919Marcel Duchamp

Among the notable artists of this movement:

Jean ArpTristan Tzara

Francis PicabiaMarcel Duchamp was the most

prominent artist of this movement

Literally, the word dada means several things in several languages: it's French for "hobbyhorse" and Slavic for "yes yes." Some authorities say that the name Dada is a nonsensical word chosen at random from a dictionary.

This movement was never very stable and eventually melded into Surrealism in 1924

Many artists associated with this movement later became associated with Surrealism. Many other movements have been influenced by Dada, including Pop Art.

Bicycle Wheel Marcel Duchamp

‘Ready-mades’

• The Dadaist with its most lasting impact on American Art in the 20th century was Marcel Duchamp, whose ‘ready-mades’ probed the border between art and life. A ready made is a work of art that the artist has not made but designated. The Bottle Dryer is Duchamp’s strangest ready made. This work is a signed replica of 1964. It is a replica because Duchamp never intended for his ready made to be permanent. His project was to find an object- with no aesthetic interest- and exhibit it as art. After the exhibition it was returned to life. After the exhibition in 1914 the Bottle Dryer went back to the store.

Ready made

• "Ready made" is the most controversial artistic concept of the history of art. It is art desecration with inerasable consequences for the future artists and art world itself.

• Marcel Duchamp:

• ‘There is one thing that I want to clear. The choice of these "ready-made" was not dictated by aesthetic reasons. This choice settles on a reaction of visual indifference and simultaneously a total absence of good or bad taste... in reality a complete anesthesia.’

Bottle DryerMarcel DuchampThe Bottle Dryer looks strangely menacing like a dress with protective spikes.

• Picabia delighted in the similarities between human and machines, and he created paintings that looked like diagrams.

L’enfant Carburetor (The Child Carburateur)Francis Picabia 1919

Madame Picabia, 1958Francis Picabia

In this work, a female bust cut from a fashion magazine is adorned with nuts, bolts, and gears, and her eyes are masked with spinning wheels. The title refers to the French artist Francis Picabia, whose portraits often incorporate machine parts.

The Handsome Pork Butcher

Rejecting grandiose settings and noble poses, this work was originally composed of household paint and sewing ephemera. Later Picabia substantially reworked the painting, creating a more complex image by superimposing a female face onto the original male portrait and replacing the variety of collage elements with just combs. Painted towards the end of his association with the Dada movement, this work demonstrates Picabia’s ability to combine artistic innovation with social satire.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, EvenMarcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [aka Large Glass] 1915-1923, oil and other media, 9 feet 1 1/4 inches x 5 feet 9 inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art. It took eleven years to bring this work to what Duchamp called a state of "final incompletion." Only when it was accidentally cracked in 1926 did Duchamp announce that it was "finished."

'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse', 1920 Man Ray

'Cloth- wrapped, compressed, nonutilitarian, has played an early and important role in the twentieth century art concepts. Dadaist Man Ray wrapped an 'enigma', 'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse', 1920. Christo some forty years later wrapped a building; 'The Museum of Modern Art Packaged', 1968. In the early 60's Claes Oldenbury had introduced cloth (muslin) as a basic material for his art forms- 'Wrinkled, torn and creased surfaces, rippled edges, expressing the physical sensations, visual perceptions and poetic associations that the object arouses in the viewer are assumed to be relative entirely to his own experience.

Observatory Time - The Lovers, Man Ray, 1934

Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor, George Grosz 1919

George Grosz (born, Georg Ehrenfried Gross) (American, born Germany, 1893-1959), Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor, 1919, oil, crayon, papers and five buttons sewn on canvas, 49 x 39.5 cm, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris.

Cabaret Voltaire. A club founded in Zurich in February 1916 by the German poet, musician, and theatrical producer Hugo Ball (1886–1927); it was one of the chief breeding grounds of the Dada movement.

A press announcement on 2 February read: ‘Cabaret Voltaire. Under this name a group of young artists and writers has been formed with the object of becoming a centre for artistic entertainment. The Cabaret Voltaire will be run on the principle of daily meetings where visiting artists will perform their music and poetry. The young artists of Zurich are invited to bring along their ideas and contributions.’

It opened on 5 March. Among the leading figures were the singer Emmy Hennings (later Ball's wife), the poets Tristan Tzara and Richard

Hülsenbeck, and the artists Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, and Hans Richter. The Cabaret Voltaire was, in Richter's words,

‘an overnight sensation',

but it was forced to close early in 1917 because of ‘the complaints of respectable citizens outraged by the nightly excesses'. After the closure Ball and Tzara rented a gallery, opened in March 1917 as the Galerie Dada, to which they transferred their activities.

Cabaret Voltaire was the name of the first Dada publication—a pamphlet edited by Ball issued on 15 June 1916.

Compose an ActivityTake 10 minutesSet Performance date and venue

"Dada Knows everything. Dada spits on everything. Dada says "knowthing," Dada has no fixed ideas. Dada does not catch flies. Dada is bitterness laughing at everything that has been accomplished, sanctified....Dada is never right... No more painters, no more writers, no more religions, no more royalists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more politics, no more airplanes, no more urinals...Like everything in life, Dada is useless, everything happens in a completely idiotic way...We are incapable of treating seriously any subject whatsoever, let alone this subject: ourlselves."

Futurism1909

Began in Italy

• It quickly spread to France, Germany, Russia and the Americas, appealing to all for something more vigorous and robust, something in

keeping with the Machine Age.

• Speed, noise, machines, transportation, communication, information...and all the transient impressions of life in the modern city intoxicated the futurists.

• They loathed the cult of the past.

Futurism was a celebration of the machine age, glorifying war and favoring the growth of fascism. Futurist painting and sculpture were especially concerned with expressing movement and the dynamics of natural and man-made forms.

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) Giacomo Balla

Futurism was presented as a modernist movement celebrating the technological, future era. The car, the plane, the industrial town and the likes were representing the motion in modern life and the technological triumph of man over nature.

Futurism was inspired by the development of Cubism and went beyond its techniques.

The Futurist painters made the rhythm of their repetitions of lines.

Inspired by some photographic experiments, they were breaking motion into small sequences, and using the

wide range of angles within a given time-frame all aimed to incorporate the dimension of time within the picture. Brilliant colors and flowing brush strokes also additionally were creating the illusion of movement.

Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism,

Constructivism and Surrealism.Methodology

The Hand of the Violinist (1912)Balla

Swifts, Paths of Movement and Dynamic Sequences (1913)Balla

Giacomo Balla

Plastic Construction of Noise and Speed (1915)Polymer ConstructionBalla

Shape Noise Motorcyclist (1915) Balla

Flight of the SparrowsBalla

Study for the painting

Umberto BoccioniUnique Forms of Continuity in Space

Boccioni, who sought to infuse art with

dynamism and energy, exclaimed, "Let us fling open the figure and let it incorporate within itself whatever may surround it." The contours of this marching figure appear to be carved by the forces of wind and speed as it forges ahead. While its wind–swept silhouette is evocative of an ancient statue, the polished metal alludes to the sleek modern machinery beloved by Boccioni and other Futurist artists.

Horizontal Constructions

Dynamism of a Soccer Player

Boccioni

A strada entra nella casa, (The street enters the house) 1911

Bocc

ioni

Carlo Carra

Leaving the TheatreCarlo Carrà1909

Omaggio a Betuda Futurista1915

Interventionist Demonstration, 1914Tempera and collage on cardboard, 38.5 x 30 cm about 15x12 inches

Carra is clearly following the cubist painterly style in this collage poem the composition moves outward from center in concentric circles and with a number of rays or lines of force moving out from this center giving an impression of an explosion of a loud noise or sound. The words as well emanate from this same center for the most part helping to emphasize the feeling of expansion from a center. The several dark, blackish zones in the center also give an effective sense of spatial depth - a deep void - from which the 'sound' is coming and the space gradually flattening out toward the edges. This sort of visual 'poem' would later develop

into what became known as concrete poetry.

The composition was inspired by Carrà's sighting of leaflets dropped from an airplane as they fluttered down over the Piazza del Duomo.

Carra

Portrait of the Poet Marinetti 1910, Carlo Carrà

   Futurism came into being with the appearance of a manifesto published by the poet Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro. It was the very first manifesto of this kind.

Carra

Other artists

Rene MagritteGino Severini

Surrealism

Surrealism or surrealist art - A twentieth century avant-garde art movement that originated in the nihilistic ideas of the Dadaist and French literary figures, especially those of its founder, French writer André Breton (1896-1966). At first a Dadaist he opened a studio for "surrealist research.“

Influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud (German, 1856-1939) and Hegel (German Philosopher), the images found in surrealist works are as confusing and startling as those of dreams.

Surrealist works can have a realistic, though irrational style, precisely describing dreamlike fantasies

Les Mariés de la Tour EiffelMarc Chagall, 1938.

The Surreal Mind The influences of Freud and Hegel

PsychoanalysisDream

InterpretationsAutomatic Writing Refusal of the

concrete manifestation of

reality.

The philosophy of mind begins with the consideration of the individual, or subjective, mind. It is soon perceived, however, that individual, or subjective, mind is only the first stage, the in-itself stage, of mind. The next stage is objective mind, or mind objectified in law,

morality, and the State. This is mind in the condition of out-of-itself. There follows the condition of absolute mind, the state in which mind rises above all the limitations of nature and instituitions, and is subjected to itself alone in art, religion, and philosophy. For the essence of mind is freedom and its development must consist in breaking away from the restrictions imposed on it in it otherness by nature and human institutions.

Marc Chagall was a Russian-born Jew whose deep faith displayed itself repeatedly throughout his body of work. In addition to Old Testament themes, Russian village life was a common favorite subject. His dreamy, vividly-colored, often playful pieces caused him to be associated with the Surrealists (a charge he vigorously denied).

Besides painting, Chagall's huge output included book illustration, set and costume design, murals, lithography and a number of truly amazing stained glass windows.

A Cubist, Fauvist, Expressionist and Surrealist he refused to be associated with any movement.

The Promenade

Marc Chagall

The Fiddler, 1912Three Candles

I and the village

BirthdayMarc Chagall

Paris through the windowSelf Portrait with seven fingers

"Study for Over Vitebsk"

Abraham and the Three Angels Marc Chagall

A flamboyant painter and sometime writer, sculptor and

experimental film-maker, Salvador Dali was probably the greatest Surrealist artist, using bizarre dream imagery to create unforgettable and unmistakable landscapes of his inner world. His most famous work is The Persistence Of Memory.

Dalí was a versatile artist. Some of his more popular works are sculptures and other objects, and he is also noted for his contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other areas.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.

Salvador Dali

Dalí was a colorful and imposing presence in his ever-present long cape, walking stick, haughty

expression, and upturned waxed mustache."Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí."

The Persistence of MemorySalvador Dali

Salvador Dali

Leda AtomicusDali

.

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)

Dali

Dali

He believed in the "greater reality" of man's subconscious over his reason

The Temptation of St.AnthonySalvador Dali

The feeling of Becoming

The Sacrament of the Last Supper

Dal

i

Soft Self Portrait with fried Bacon

Magritte was born on November 21, 1898, in the town of Lessines, Belgium. He was a Surrealist who used out of place and out of proportion imagery to provoke thought.

His accessible and vivid Surrealism caught on in the 1960s and his works (or variations on them) were popularized as album covers for such artists as Jeff Beck, Jackson Browne and Styx.

. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images. His intended goal for his work was to challenge observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality and force viewers to become hypersensitive to their surroundings.

Rene Magritte

The Treachery of Images

Rene Magritte

The Lovers

Time Transfixed

Red Model

Magritte used the same approach in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these "Ceci n'est pas" works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself.

The Son of Man,1964

The Listening Room

Les Pommes Masquées

"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean?' It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."

About the painting The Son of Man, 1964 Magritte said, Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well ...

Magritte

The Magritte Museum in Brussels

Frida KahloFrida Kahlo de Rivera (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954; was a Mexican painter. Perhaps best known for her self-portraits, Kahlo's work is remembered for its "pain and passion", and its intense, vibrant colors. Her work has been celebrated in Mexico as emblematic of national and indigenous tradition, and by feminists for its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.

Kahlo had a stormy but passionate marriage with the prominent Mexican artist Diego Rivera. She suffered lifelong health problems, many of which stemmed from a traffic accident in her teenage years. These issues are reflected in her works, more than half of which are self-portraits of one sort or another. Kahlo suggested, "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best."

Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird,

Did not belong to the surrealist group but painted like one.

The Two Fridas

The Broken Column

Kahlo

Diego On My Mind

Kahlo

Kahlo

Tree of Hope, Stand Fast

Without Hope

The Henry Ford Hospital

Self Portrait with Cropped Hair

KahloThe Wounded Deer

What the Water Gave Me

Constructivism and

Suprematism 1915-1940’s

Constructivism 1915 to the 1940’s

• It was a movement created by the Russian avant-garde, but quickly spread to the rest of the continent.

• Constructivist art is committed to complete abstraction with a devotion to modernity,

• where themes are often geometric, experimental and rarely emotional.

• Objective forms carrying universal meaning were far more suitable to the movement than subjective or individualistic forms

• Constructivist themes are also quite minimal, where the artwork is broken down to its most basic elements.

The principles of constructivism theory are derived from three main movements that evolved in the early part of the 20th century:-Suprematism in Russia,

-De Stijl (Neo Plasticism) in Holland and the

--Bauhaus in Germany.

Key artists: Vladimir Tatlin, Kasimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Vavara Stepanova, Vasily Kandinsky, Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, El Lissitzky.

Monument to the Third International, Vladimir Tatlin, 1929

• In 1913-14 Vladimir Tatlin made and exhibited several relief constructions using industrial materials.

• Tatlin used the term Constructivism to describe these works.

"Black Square and Red Square" 1915Kasimir Malevich,

Before Constructivism became a form of art, Malevich was founding its predecessor, Suprematism.

Malevich did not care if his work represented reality or not. Desiring only

"to free art from the burden of the object,“ he used geometric shapes in order to

produce a rich aesthetic feeling. Malevich thought that the purest art forms were squares, as shown in his painting, "Black Square and Red Square". The work is visually pleasing, yet represents nothing concrete. His ideas were passed on to pupils such as Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, who formed the next major group of Russian artists, the Constructivists.

Rodchenko, Russian photographer and Graphic Designer 1925

El Lissitzky.

Kasimir Malevich, : Suprematist Compositions

Malevich

White on White

In the early twentieth century, Suprematism represented a leap into a totally non-representational, non-painterly, tarantella-like dynamic.

Basic geometric shapes, isolated or in groups, were being energized, propelled into an optimistic ideal soaring from lower left to upper right, the vector alone suggesting time.

The limits of perception and understanding are being questioned.

Vector: a quantity that has both direction and magnitude, e.g. force or velocity

Tarantella: Italian Dance

Kazimir Malevich, Square, Study for the décore of Victory Over the Sun, Act 2, Scene 5, 1913Pencil on paper

Liubov Popova: Painterly Architectonics

Black Rectangle Blue TriangleKassimer Malevich

Malevich: Cow and Violin (oil on wood, 1913)

• Malevich believed that cubism failed because the viewer could not succeed in bringing the fractured images into a visual unity and so the depicted object became incomprehensible. As a result, he said, the logical conclusion was that logic must be abandoned. Depicting a subject should be replaced by the depiction of a variety of pictorial units (by which he meant planes of color) in an asymmetric unity.

• In this work, Malevich juxtaposed a violin, presented in the language of synthetic cubism, against a realistic violin and a realistic cow. Malevich wrote of this work that "the above picture represents a moment of struggle through the confrontation of two forms: that of the cow and that of the violin in a cubist construction. Logic has always placed a barrier against new subconscious movements. ”

• The 'Alogical' movement has been created to free it [logic and art] from preconceptions."

Kazimir Malevich. Peasant Woman with Buckets and a Child.

1912

peasant woman,1930

Peasant woman with buckets, 1912

Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (Red Square), 1915Malevich

Malevich's use of the term "alogic" related to Russian futurist poetry, called "zaum," which concerned the goal of freeing words from constraints imposed by the need to mean something.  Both the idea of the zaum and Malevich's alogic were influenced by Uspensky's

ideas about transcending three-dimensional reality.  As Uspensky had written, three-dimensional reality is governed by logic.  Therefore, in order to reach higher realities, one had to abandon logic, and art was the path for doing this.  

• It is the precursor to the twentieth century movement and style known

as Minimilism, minimal art, reductivism, and rejective art. This movement stresses the idea of reducing a work of art to the minimum number of colors, values, shapes, lines and textures. No attempt is made to represent or symbolize any other object or experience.

6 chance divisions of 4 black and white squares from odd and even numbers generated by Pi

François Morellet (French)

BauhausGerman Movement

1919-1930

Bauhaus

• Bauhaus - A very influential German school of art and design. Underlying the Bauhaus aesthetic was a fervent utopianism, based upon ideals of simplified forms and unadorned functionalism, and a belief that the machine economy could deliver elegantly designed items for the masses, using techniques and materials employed especially in industrial fabrication and manufacture — steel, concrete, chrome, glass, etc. All students took a preliminary course before moving on to specialist workshops, including carpentry, weaving, pottery, stagecraft, graphic arts, and graphic design.

• It was founded in 1919, and closed by the Nazis in 1933.

• Once the school was closed, many Bauhaus teachers emigrated to the U.S.A.

• Kandinsky is certainly an "odd duck"- to look at his paintings is often to wonder what exactly he was trying to do. They seem quite simple, with lines and shapes in various colors, often with heavy use of the primary colors (red, yellow, blue). They also seem mildly erratic, completely abstract, and lacking in solid form. Kandinsky attempted to answer the "What is he doing?" question with Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and ended up writing a classic piece on painting theory. To put it quite simply, Kandinsky was painting music (or attempting to). He wanted to dissolve the distinctions between music and painting, and was attempting to do so through the use of color and line. He felt that music was the only art form that truly expressed the soul, and wanted to achieve this in painting.

Wassily Kandinsky

Vassily KandinskyConcerning the Spiritual in Art

• Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician, once said Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul. The concept that color and musical harmony are linked has a long history, intriguing scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton. Kandinsky used color in a highly theoretical way associating tone with timbre (the sound's character), hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound. He even claimed that when he saw color he heard music.

Composition VIIIVassily Kandinsky

http://www.google.com.pk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.groningermuseum.nl/uploads/Foto%25201.%2520Vasili%2520Kandinsky,%2520Horseman,%2520St.%2520George,%25201914-15.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.groningermuseum.nl/index.php%3Fid%3D3751&usg=__f6qPzJuQqX6Dl_m14JMUhggMVEk=&h=1194&w=1770&sz=469&hl=en&start=17&zoom=1&tbnid=s-VygsN0NHY3ZM:&tbnh=101&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkandinsky%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1020%26bih%3D541%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1&itbs=1&ei=xJf4TI-uFcilcJ3D-bUD

In the GrayVassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944),

The Twittering Machine Paul Klee

Paul Klee

Paul Klee

Growth Paul Klee

De Stijl

De Stijl -An art movement

advocating pure abstraction and simplicity — form reduced to the rectangle and other geometric shapes,

and color to the primary colors, along with black and white.

Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944) was the group's leading figure. Another member, painter Theo van Doesberg (Dutch, 1883-1931) Their work exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus and the International Style.

Piet Mondrian

Theo Van Doesburg