Western Art through the AgesPart 3

Expressionism Surrealism

Cubism Abstract Expressionism

19th & 20th Centuries

…with music byClaude Debussey

Dmitri ShostakovichSergei Rachmaninoff

Igor Stravinskyet.al.

Expressionism

• Indebted to Freud

• Art tries to penetrate the façade of bourgeois superficiality and probe the psyche—that which lurks beneath an individual’s calm and artificial posture

Expressionism--values

• Subliminal anxiety

• Dissonance in color and perspective

• Pictorial violence—manifest* and latent**– *Manifest (adj) readily perceived by the eye or

the understanding; evident; obvious; plain– **Latent (adj) present or potential but not visible,

apparent, or realized

                                                       

                                                                     

Edvard Munch

The Scream

1893

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Street Scene with a Cocotte in Red

1914

Oskar Kokoschka, The Tempest, 1914

Max Beckmann

The Night

1918-1919

Vincent van Gogh

Self Portrait

1898

Surrealism

• Also indebted to Freud

• Explores the dream world, a world without logic, reason, or meaning

• Fascination with mystery, the strange encounters between objects, and incongruity

• Subjects are often indecipherable in their strangeness

• The beautiful is the quality of chance association

Surrealism--values

• The dream sequence

• Illogic

• Fantasy

Giorgio de Chirico

The Vexations of the Thinker

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory

Max Ernst

Two Children are Menaced by a Nightingale

Joan Miró, Dog Barking at the Moon

Marc Chagall

Self-portrait with Seven Fingers

1913

Cubism

• No single point of view

• No continuity or simultaneity of image contour

• All possible views to top, sides, front, and back

• Picture becomes a multifaceted view of objects with angular, interlocking planes

Cubism--values

• A new way of seeing

• A view of the world as a mosaic of multiple relationships

• Reality as interaction

Pablo Picasso

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

1905?

Pablo Picasso, Paysage Mediterraneen

Georges Braque, The Table

Abstract Expressionism

• Nonrepresentational art

• No climaxes

• Flattened-out planes; and values

• The real appearance of forms in nature is subordinated to an aesthetic concept of form composed of shapes, lines and colors

Abstract Expressionism--values

• Personal and subjective interpretation

• “you see what you want to…”

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure 1977

Alberto Giacometti

Man Pointing

1947

(Bronze sculpture)

Mark Rothko

Ochre on Red

1954

Jackson Pollock, Stenographic Figure, 1942