1.00 Artistically, the twentieth century can be seen as a continuation and intensification of the proliferation of styles, viewpoints, and techniques that began in the nineteenth century. Innovations in science and technology have had a major impact on the arts in recent times. Architecturally, there are new materials (steel and reiforced concrete, to name only two), new functions (from shopping malls to sports stadia), and new approaches (a major tendency in 20th century architecture is toward simplification of form and an "honest" use of materials). Sculptors and painters, also have explored new concepts. Many of them paralleled scientific investigations into the atom (the basic building block of matter) by focusing on abstract and non-objective subject matter treated in a mathematical and logical way (Analytical Cubism, Neo-Plasticism, Suprematism, Constructivism). Others reacted to the incredible power of modern weaponry, reacting to the apalling loss of life in World War I with nihilism (Dada), or responding to warfare's destruction of past traditions with applause (Futurism). Advances in psychology (concerning the subconscious, the importance of dreams, and the irrational) are reflected in Surrealism and Expressionism.
2.00 Many of this century's styles have their roots in the era of Post-Impressionism. Fauvism, a French style of bold colors, slashing brushwork, and expressive content, derives directly from the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. The Fauves, like Henri Matisse, largely were a hedonistic, pleasure-loving group who desired to capture on canvas their exhuberant embracing of life. While sharing the German Expressionist emphasis on emotion, they were considerably more positive in outlook than the Germans. Matisse's Pastoral (Slide 1) is a hurriedly-painted, spontaneous piece with nude figures in an idyllic landscape. To Matisse, everything in a painting (the lines, shapes, colors, and composition) was expressive. Many of the artist's works rely on Van Gogh's use of bold complementary color combinations (colors such as orange and blue that are opposite each other on the color wheel) and impasto, and couple them with Gauguin's use of strong curving lines and solid, flat areas of pigment. The Green Stripe (Slide 2), a rather uncomplementary, mask-like image of Mme. Matisse, is a case in point. Incidentally, this piece shows the influence of African art, a source also apparent in Cubist work of the same time.
3.00 In The Dessert, the major influence on Matisse is Gauguin. Linear arabesques meander over intensely colored, flat surfaces creating a vibrant, cheerful mood. The overall decorative effect is reminiscent of some of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings. In his simplifications, Matisse is trying to achieve "that condensation of sensations that constitutes a painting."
4.00 The Decorative Nude on a Ornamental Background is yet another demonstration of Matisse's propensity for pleasurable subject matter treated in an exhuberant and non-reflective manner. What Matisse ultimately constructs is a pure kind of painting whose sole purpose is to delight the eye. It is, in short, "art for art's sake."
5.00 Two other Frenchmen participated actively in the formulation of Fauvism ("Wild Beastism"): Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Derain, after a brief attraction to Neo-Impressionism, painted a series of vibrant paintings of English subject matter. There is no doubt that the gloriously colored 19th century paintings of Turner had an impact on Derain during this year of 1905. London Bridge (Slide 5) and Setting Sun (Slide 6) are painted in "colors charged like dynamite." Like Matisse, Derain uses explosive, arbitrary colors and distorted forms to envision his excitement about life. It is Derain's reaction to a scene that he hopes to capture, not it's actual appearance to the eye.
6.00 Setting Sun is especially indebted to Joseph Turner's glowing 19th century paintings of England. See the caption for Slide 5 for further information.
7.00 Of all the Fauves, Vlaminck was the one who physically and psychologically best fits the "Wild Beast" label. A professional cyclist born of cafe-musician parents, Vlaminck was an exhuberant, lusty sort of fellow. He adored the vigorous, heavy impastos of Van Gogh and proclaimed that his goal was to "paint from my heart and my loins," without bothering with style. The Gardener is a typical Vlaminck, with its raw, raucous use of color, and thick globular patches of pigment on the surface.
8.00 The last Fauve, Rouault, stands apart from the others. While sharing the other men's interest in strong color and expressive, spontaneous brushwork, Rouault's paintings have an introspective and melancholy mood. A deeply religious man, Rouault depicted this world as a "veil of tears" in which man suffers to achieve redemption. Many of his paintings are overtly religious, such as this Head of Christ. The drips and splashes of other Fauve painters become, in Rouault's hands, metaphors for the blood and tears of the Savior. You will notice in this painting, as well as in The Old King (Slide 9), that Rouault's thick black lines and burning colors create an illusion similar to stained glass. In fact, the artist had received training in stained glass as a young man and, in his mature paintings, Rouault beautifully fuses the qualities of that medium with spiritual content.
9.00 This is The Old King by Georges Rouault. For further information about the style of Georges Rouault, see the caption of Slide 8.
10.00 Rouault's vision of the world as "a dunghill of depravity" and suffering led him to explore themes not usually associated with the Christian point of view. Nude in a Mirror is a devastatingly honest view of a nude prostitute arranging her hair. While the prostitute's face is a hard, unfeeling mask in the foreground, Rouault's more distant, reflected image of her face reveals a pathetic woman who elicits our sympathy and compassion. As Rouault described his own work, it is "a stifled sob, a cry in the night."
11.00 The sometimes depressing character of Rouault's imagery becomes absolutly bleak in the paintings of a group of Scandinavian and German painters called the Expressionists. The Expressionists began their paintings with their own fears, anxieties, and obsessions then sought subject matter through which they could express themselves. The earliest of the group, Edvard Munch, was a Norwegian painter tormented by the issue of death and dying (he lost his mother and favorite sister when he was still a child), an ambivalent view of women (attractive seductresses and vampire-like leeches), paranoia (he hated crowds), and alcoholism. Karl Johann Street, with its Van Gogh derived plunging perspective and sweeping lines of Gauguin, is a supremely unnerving painting. The pasty-faced ghouls in the foreground are as frightening to us, as they advance into our space, as they must have been to Munch. Munch was truly gifted in making tangible his intangible, disturbed feelings.
12.00 Munch's The Scream also borrows the radically receding perspective we first saw in Van Gogh's Night Cafe. Here, standing alone on a bridge, is the psychological self-portrait of the painter. In the distance are his friends who have "abandoned him." Munch shows himself at the moment when "the sun turned blood red" and he felt a "scream throughout nature." Like many of the artist's works, this one is based on his remembrance of an actual experience. Those events in Munch's life that most gripped him became the obsessive themes of his career; The Scream was repeated in several different painted and printed versions. It is a work that, as Kenneth Clark says, "assaults the senses" of the viewer.
13.00 Ernst Kirchner is a German Expressionist painter who proclaimed his admiration of Van Gogh, Munch, tribal art and Gothic carvings. He formed a group of artists known as Die Brücke (The Bridge), that was to be a gathering of "all the revolutionary and surging" forces. His style in The Street of 1907 involves grating, unharmonious colors, smeared surfaces, and distorted forms. Coupled with the references to impending violence (notice the little girl is about to be run down by the tram) and lechery (take a look at the interplay between the men on the far right and the women just to the right of center), this work creates a totally nauseating impact! It also suggests the unstable psyche of its maker: Kirchner committed suicide in 1938, after seeking refuge from Nazi Germany in Switzerland.
14.00 Beckmann's version of German Expressionism is somewhat more controlled than Kirchner's. A self-trained painter, Beckmann developed a somewhat brutal manner to describe his innermost emotions. When he became profoundly affected by the Nazi horrors occurring in his native country, he created The Departure Triptych. The painting is a metaphor for Beckmann's awareness of the suffering surrounding him (left panel), his inability to block that suffering out of his mind (right panel) , and his own escape from the horrors (central panel). Beckmann took refuge during World War II, first in the Netherlands and then in the United States.
15.00 Expressionism, with its emphasis on a metaphorical use of line, shape, color, and forms to convey emotion, ultimately became abstract. Two of the "big names" of Abstract Expressionism are Wassily Kandinsky (a Russian) and Jackson Pollock (an American). Kandinsky spent much of his mature career in Germany, where he produced paintings like Improvisation Number 30, The Cannon. Believing that colors could be used like the keys of a piano, Kandinsky creates images that play on our senses like that most abstract of arts, music. Here the "subject" is seemingly the conversion of matter into explosive energy. It is not coincidence that the painting was done about the time of World War I.
16.00 Pollock, thanks to the efforts of the gallery owner and promoter Peggy Guggenheim, became a household word in the United States during the 1940s. His dribbles of paint (straight out a house paint can) and his spattered splotches gave him the nickname, "Jack the Dripper." Although paintings like Autumn Rhythm are subject-less and appear simple to imitate, we should credit Pollock with a couple of pluses. The first is that Pollock has succeeded in creating images which emphasize process and not finished products. Like many 20th century artists, Pollock was trying to work from his subconscious, rather than his logical mind; his technique here emphasizes spontaneous gesture, not pre-meditated planning. To Pollock, his approach of working the canvas as it lay on the floor was analogous to that of Navajo sand painters who become a part of their paintings by walking around and through their artwork. The second positive is that Pollock, like most great artists, has managed to "painted himself." Pollock was a tormented soul, an alcoholic at the age of 16, a shy man who felt "like an oyster without its shell," and a violent and asocial man when drunk. In his tangles of black lines and interlaced forms, he embodies his personal turmoil. Pollock was killed in an automobile when he was in his early forties. Many suspect it was a suicide.
17.00 The final Expressionist in this review is Willem de Kooning, a Dutch painter who emigrated to the United States and became one of the mainstays of New York Expressionism. His wildly erratic and uncomplementary series of paintings of women, such as Woman I, demonstrate the continuity of Expressionism from its beginnings in Munch's work. The Expressionists, as a rule, depict women in an unfavorable light and frequently make them the butt of repressed violent emotions. De Kooning is no exception. This sloppy, slovenly female is a top-heavy spoof of a "sex goddess." De Kooning says he got the idea for his women from the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf, a small fertility figure of protuberant breasts and buttocks (and no face).
18.00 The Fauve and Expressionist painters derived their primary inspiration from the emotion-packed and brilliantly colored creations of Van Gogh and Gauguin. A second major group, the Cubists, found their guide in another Post-Impressionist, Paul Cézanne. Cézanne had experimented early on with new forms of perspective and with small slabs of color. His aim was to "construct" a new type of painting that proclaimed a reality parallel, not identical, to nature. Taking their cue from Cézanne, and mingling his influence with that of African art (with its geometricized shapes and forms), the atomic theory (with its idea that matter is made up of small building blocks, the atoms) and the scientific method (with its insistance on observing a phenomenon from multiple perspectives), Picasso and Braque created one of the most influential movements of the century. The Spaniard, Picasso, came to Cubism via a series of early styles, including the Blue Period seen in The Tragedy. This enigmatic, melancholy work reflects the youthful, nearly starving, early years of the artist in Paris.
19.00 In 1907, Picasso painted The Demoiselles d'Avignon, a radical work that shocked everyone, including Picasso's good friend Georges Braque. Picasso spoke of it as "an exorcism;" Braque said it was as if someone had swallowed gas and was "spitting out flames." Despite its violent distortions and raw colors, art historians now acclaim the Demoiselles as the first Cubist painting. Here, for the first time, Picasso had put together the essential features that were to mark the Cubist style. He combines differing viewpoints of the key figures; he creates the figural motifs and the background from large, geometric facets of color; he so disrupts the natural forms of his subject that we are forced to recognize the flat, two-dimensional essence of painting as a medium. All Cubist works henceforward display the tension seen here between the painted three-dimensional illusions (of figures and objects) and the actual flat plane of the canvas.
20.00 By 1908, Picasso had refined the revolutionary ideas presented in the Demoiselles d'Avignon into a much more controlled variant of the Cubist style. Called Analytical Cubism, this variant focused on formal interplays and de-emphasized color. The Portrait of Vollard is done in an almost monochromatic technique. What interested Picasso here was the small, interpenetrating, semi-transparent facets that simultaneously comprise and decompose the figure of Vollard. These facets have become the painted equivalents of atoms; they are the taking apart or "analysis" of the form into its component parts.
21.00 After several years of focusing exclusively on formal, non-emotional analytical works, Picasso transformed the Cubist idiom into a new style, Synthetic Cubism. This type of Cubism has color and emotion. Slide 21 (The Three Musicians) looks as though it is composed of swaths of colored cloth that have been cut into large jagged pieces and assembled, or "synthesized," to form three curiously flat figures. The eerie emotion of the painting is created by these faceless, angular figures and by the oddly dismembered dog (whose forepaws can be seen in the lower left portion of the work). Bright patches of color and angular, sharp shapes convey a jerky, stacatto rhythm.
22.00 Picasso was likely the most versatile, multi-faceted painter of this century. Having passed through his Blue Period, Rose Period, and Analytical Cubist and Synthetic Cubist phases, this master continued to explore new avenues of expression. In the 1930s, Picasso painted THE great political statement of 20th century art, Guernica. Utilizing the breakup of form and sharp angular shapes of Cubism, Picasso cries out against a brutal bombing attack of a Basque village in northern Spain. Nazi bombers dropped their cargoes on Guernica on market day, when the streets were filled with women and children. Picasso's became the world's outrage. Screaming women, a disembowled horse, a dead child in its mother's arms are abstracted, flashed images that meet our horrified eyes. Dramatic black-white contrasts of value and the twisted forms of human anatomy intensify the emotionality of a scene that is dismayingly unhumane. The unfeeling "scientist" of Analytical Cubism reveals himself here as a genius of intense emotional expression.
23.00 When Picasso was doing his early experiments with Cubism, he was working side by side with another great innovator, the Frenchman Georges Braque. The two artists often joked that they were like mountain climbers tied together or like the Wright brothers, exploring new dimensions. Here we have Braque's expression of Analytical Cubism, The Portuguese. The nearly monochromatic color scheme (like Picasso's) is present, as are the semi-transparent, interpenetrating facets of color, and the relatively emotionless play with form. Braque has even emphasized the tension between the two-dimensional picture plane and the three-dimensional illusion (of a man playing a guitar) by placing stenciled letters in the upper right corner of the painting. This device, also used by Picasso on occasion, focuses attention on the planar nature of the canvas' surface; it's like a flat piece of paper on which to write.
24.00 Braque's and Picasso's Cubism influenced numerous other artists during the course of the twentieth century. Leger merged the Cubist geometrical treatment of form with a love of modern, industrial-made products. His Grande Dejeuner (or Three Women) regularizes the forms of his sitters to the point that they look mass-produced. His colors also derive from mass-produced industrial objects; they are the colors of shiny automobiles! Leger was one of several early 20th century painters who optimistically embraced modern technology and glorified it in their work. Leger went crazy with enthusiasm when he visited the United States and saw dazzling automobile showrooms and modern plumbing fixtures!
25.00 In Italy, the Futurists gave Cubist fragmentation and multiple viewpoints a new twist. The Futurists, admirers of modern weapons of war and motion ("Speed is our God" was a key phrase in the Futurist Manifesto), made their subjects appear to move around them. This is the opposite of the Cubist approach where the artist is moving around the object. Balla's Dynamism of a Dog Walking on a Leash is a humorous evocation of the pitter-pat of a little dog's feet as it tries valiantly to keep up with its master! The humor is not a typical aspect of Futurism, however. Most Futurists preferred "modern" subjects which proclaimed their break with past tradition.
26.00 Boccioni's Dynamism of a Cyclist is a more characteristic Futurist idolization of modern machines and speed. As Marinetti proclaimed in the Futurist Manifesto, "a roaring automobile is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace." Boccioni seems to have felt even a bicycle was superior to that great Greek Hellenistic sculpture.
27.00 In the Netherlands, Piet Mondrian invented one of the most radically simplified styles of our era, Neo-Plasticism. Having passed through an Analytical Cubist phase, Mondrian dedicated himself to developing a painted counterpart to the essence of the universe. The universe, he believed, was a spiritual rather than material entity, based on an equilibrium of opposing forces. To convey its essence, without resorting to material representation, Mondrian used pure geometric shapes, the three primary colors (red, blue, yellow), the ultimate values (black and white), and the essential contrast of line (horizontal and vertical). Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow is one of numerous delicately balanced creations of this artist obsessed with pure abstraction.
28.00 It hardly seems possible but another artist, Malevich, actually outdid Mondrian in the quest for pure, geometric painting. Malevich's style, Suprematism, was based on his desire to create images "from a virgin alphabet with no reference to reality." This painter saw Suprematism as the proclamation of supremacy of feeling; his Suprematist Composition: White on White expressed the "feeling of non-objectivity, the feeling of nothingness." The incredible thing about White on White is that it was done, not in the 1980s or 1990s when we have come to expect such things, but in the year 1918!