MODERNISM

IN ARTS

CLASSE 5B

Prof. A. Le Piane

Prof. D. Mauri

In the first half of the 20th century, in the period between

1910 and 1920, there was a proliferation of international

art movements, ranging from Italy to the Soviet Union,

though the two main centres were Paris and London.

POST-IMPRESSIONISM• The term was coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry when in

1910 he organized in London the first great exhibition of modern Frenchpainters, titled «Manet and the Post-Impressionists».

• Post-Impressionists derived from the Impressionist Movement: theycontinued using vivid colours, often thick application of paint and real-lifesubject matter, but they were more inclined to emphasize geometric formsand to use unnatural or arbitrary colours.

• Its most famous representatives are Van Gogh, Gauguin, Redon, Seuratand Toulouse-Lautrec.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)

• Vincent Van Gogh was a post-impressionist Dutch painter whose work, notable for

its beauty, emotion and color, highly influenced 20th century art.

• He struggled with mental illness and remained poor and unknown throughout his

life. Van Gogh died in France on 29th July 1890, at the age of 37, from a self-

inflicted gunshot wound.

• He began to draw as a child and he continued to draw throughout the years that led

up to his decision to become an artist.

• He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-

known works during the last two years of his life.

• In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks,

consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors,

drawings, sketches and prints.

• His work included self portraits, landscapes, still lifes, portraits

as well as paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.

• In 1885 he painted his first major work, entitled The Potato

Eaters. His palette at the time consisted mainly of somber earth

tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that

distinguished his later work.

• In 1886 he moved to Paris and discovered the French

Impressionists. Later he moved to the south of France and was

influenced by the strong sunlight that he found there.

• His work grew brighter in color and he developed his unique

style that became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.

View of Arles with Irises, 1888

• Cubism took Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to extremes, breaking the

subject into pieces and then recomposing it geometrically.

• In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled 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.

• Pablo Picasso is its most important representative.

CUBISM

• Cubism was a very important avant-garde art movement which started in 1910 to 1914 in

France. Cubism was first started by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

• Cubism is a style of art which aims to show all of the possible viewpoints of an object all at

once. It is called Cubism because the items represented in the artworks look like they are made

out of cubes and other geometrical shapes.

• Analytical Cubism is the first type of cubism. Most analytical Cubists painted and drew in

monochrome (only one colour) so that the person who was looking at the painting did not pay

attention to colours, but only to the shapes and the forms that were being shown.

• This was changed in 1912 when Picasso first started painting with colours and using collages.

He glued together different cut-up pieces of paper to make his artwork. This new form of

Cubism was called Synthetic Cubism. Picasso invented collage because he was tired of the way

he was making his art and wanted to try out something new. Picasso's Synthetic Cubism period

was from 1912 to 1919 and he created over 20,000 pictures.

• It is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

• In this work, Picasso makes a radical departure from

traditional European painting, since he abandons

perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plan.

• The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a

brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avinyó Street) in Barcelona.

Each figure is depicted with angular and disjointed body

shapes. Three figures on the left exhibit facial features in the

Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the

right are shown with African mask-like features.

• The racial primitivism evoked in these masks is typical of

the early 20th century European artists who were

discovering African, Oceanic and Native American art.

Artists such as Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso were inspired

by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those cultures.

Around 1906, Picasso, Matisse, Derain and other artists in

Paris had acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian

sculpture, African art and tribal masks.

PABLO PICASSO

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

GEORGES BRAQUE

Houses at l’Estaque, 1908

• Braque's paintings of 1908-1913 reflected hisnew interest in geometry and multipleperspective.

• He conducted an intense study of the effects oflight and perspective and the technical meansthat painters use to represent these effects.

• In 1907 Braque began to work closely withPablo Picasso who had been developing asimilar proto-Cubist style of painting.

• In his village scenes, for example, Braquefrequently reduced an architectural structure to ageometric form approximating a cube, yetrendered its shading so that it looked both flatand three-dimensional by fragmenting the image.

• He showed this innovative technique in thepainting Houses at l'Estaque.

GEORGES BRAQUE

Fruit Dish and Glass, 1912

• The Cubist painter Georges Braque, inspired by

Pablo Picasso's collage method, invented the papier

collé technique and first used it in his 1912 work,

Fruit Dish and Glass.

• Braque continued to use this technique in works such

as Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe and Glass.

• Papier collé (pasted paper or paper cut outs) is a type of

collage and collaging technique in which paper is

adhered to a flat mount.

• The difference between collage and papier collé is

that the latter refers exclusively to the use of paper,

while the former may incorporate other two-

dimension (non-paper) components.

• Since the term papier collé is not commonly used,

this type of work is often simply called collage.

• Modern technological developments and innovations were reflected in the arts.

• The Futurist Movement originated in Italy in the early 20th century and celebrated

the triumph of the “modern” over the “ancient”.

• Its founder was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

• He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo

Balla and Gino Severini.

• They wanted to abolish past artistic conventions to give expression to something

radically new.

FUTURISM

FUTURISM

F. T. MARINETTIZang tumb , 1914

F. T. MARINETTIOtto anime in una bomba, 1919

• In 1916, during the war, Tristan Tzara in Switzerland founded Dadaism,

the most radical of the modernist movements.

• Tzara denied progress, knowledge, morality and family values and cultivated

destructiveness, randomness and incoherence (the very name “Dada” was a

random combination of letters).

• In France the movement involved artists like Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp

and Francis Picabia.

• The movement lasted until the mid-1920s, when it evolved into Surrealism.

DADA

• Cabaret Voltaire was the name of a nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland.

• It was founded by Hugo Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings on

February 1, 1916 as a cabaret for artistic and political purposes.

• It was a meeting place for young artists and writers whose aim was to

create a centre for artistic entertainment.

• Other founding members were Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan

Tzara and Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp.

• Events at the cabaret proved pivotal in the founding of the anarchic art

movement known as Dada.

• Though the Cabaret was to be the birthplace of the Dadaist movement,

it featured artists from every sector of the avant-garde, including the Italian

Futurist Marinetti. The Cabaret exhibited radically experimental artists,

such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, Sophie Taeuber-

Arp, and Max Ernst.

• On July 28, 1916, Ball read out the Dada Manifesto. In June, Ball had also

published a journal with the same name. It featured work from artists such

as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and had a cover designed by Arp.

WWI, Cabaret Voltaire & the beginnings of Dada

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEBnxWQct24

Hugo Ball performing at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916

SURREALISM• Surrealist artists painted illogical scenes with photographic precision, created

strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques

that allowed the unconscious to express itself.

• Its most famous representative was Salvador Dalì.

Surrealism

SALVADOR DALÌDream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening

(1944)