Study Note | 20th Century European Art History - Part 1, Harvard 2024

Written & Organized by 悦子yuezi
Issue Date: 2024/09/06

1/16 Post-Impressionism

Impressionism
developed in France in the 19C. century and is based on the practice of painting out of doors and spontaneously 'on the spot' rather than in a studio from sketches

• Produced an unfinished look in paintings
• Reflected fleeting moments
• Painted scenes that looked fuzzy and unrefined
• Used short, quick brush strokes
• Key artists: Monet, Degas, Pissarro
  • Monet: uses natural pastel hue
• Motivation: create the impression of a moment (idea comes from realism), focuses on lighting

Post Impressionism

• Artists move further away from academic naturalism (towards abstraction)
• Strong influence non-European art and culture (Japanese prints, Primitivism)
• Key Artists: Gauguin, Van Gogh
  • Expressive color
  • Painting as subjective expression: how art can evoke emotions
  • Painting as escape from anxieties of modern life
• Cezanne, Seurat
  • Geometric stability
  • Attention to form and structure
  • Seurat: manipulates color, develops pointillism

Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888

• Post impressionism
• Color: white and red/ impasto red dramatic
• Theosophy
• Breton women, dressed in distinctive regional costume, have just listened to a sermon based on a passage from the Bible
• Background: divided by diagonal tree trunk
• Gauguin First religious picture, wanted to give it to a church
• Churches denied lol

1/18 Modernism & The female Nude: Picasso's Les demoiselles d' Avigonon

Context:
1907
How the painting represents the relationship between the female nude and modernism
History of western art and the Renaissance
Immediate context in which Picasso made this painting
General reception of the painting

Picasso:

• Known as the inventor of cubism

• Known for Guernica (anti-war painting in 1937)

• Picasso skilled at naturalism, creating an image that looks lifelike

• An opportunity to think about abstraction

• Abstraction is about deconstruction of representation

• A result of specific set of choices

Within the western tradition, long history of images/ sculpture of nude figures
At the center of Greek art was the male nude (Michelangelo’s David; Antonio’s Perseus)

• Male figure - heroic
• The accurate depiction of male nude - highest level of artist achievement

In contrast, female nude:

• Nude image of female had an erotic function
• William Hogarth, Marriagea la Mode: curtain drawn over a female nude bc it’s so overly erotic
• Titles like: sleeping venus; Rokeby Venus; the Toilette of Venus (god of love) -> a mythological pretext for her nudity
• Distort female body to show more nudity
• Emerged in the context of italian renaissance that insisted upon the gap of the functions of male and female nudity

Edouard Manuet - broke the historical tradition

• Olympia, 1863 (referencing Venus of Urbino) - first modernist painting
  • Depicts the modern life
  • Declares the surface of painting, acknowledges the existence of the canvas
  • Frankness of her stare suggests a transactional relationship btw viewers of the painting and her
  • Flowers brought to her by a woman who’s her servant (African descent) from her next client
• A hinge btw the history of reclining female nude and its modern iteration
• Deliberately updates the figure, no longer a mythological figure of Venus but explicitly a modern sex worker
• The way in which he compressed the space (compared to Venus of Urbino) - darkness → shallow background, brightness of white presses forward
  • Establishes a precedent of avant garde shock that happens through the female nude

Paul Gauguin, Copy of Manuet’s Olympia 1891

• A deliberate conversation

• Modernism is worked through the body of female nude

  Sex workers/ women, an emblem of modernism “The New Woman”

• The beautiful girl 1919

• Street, berlin, 1913

Paul Cezanne, The large bathers, 1906

• He challenges the fundamental assumptions of naturalism
• Ex: this work depicts the real world but also presents itself as a painting through
  • The breaking open of form (the distortion of tree branches; the relationship between the trunk and the sky)

Matisse paints Bonheur de vive (in conversation w the painting above)

• Abstraction
• Emptying out of form
• Emphasis on outline
• Discrete scenes: idealized and pastoral
• Trying to create a modern, classical grandeur
• Pleasing to look at

Gertrude Stein: hangs up this painting, seen by Picasso
Picasso was in the process of painting the portrait of Gertrude Stein, saw Matisse’s painting as a challenge and came up w Les Demoiselles d Avignon

• The painting of Gertrude Stein reflects his interest in form

Les Demoiselles d Avignon (Symbolic of Picasso’s misogyny and racism)
No pastoral setting, no bright colors
everything is angular
Red light district in Barcelona (Spanish sex workers)
Shallow space → compression achieved through a lack of background detail; a tangled of bodies; disproportion of faces
stylistic dysjunction (multiple styles happening in one painting)

• Faces resemble → Dan mask; Baule mask → signifies Africaness/ a monstrosity

Flatness of figures
Presence of a reclining figure (second on the left)

• Makes more sense if she were to be lying down
• Rendering her hinged up at the viewers
• Further compresses the space, a furthering of abstraction
• What does that achieve?
  • The figure becomes confrontational
  • Gazes are multiplied (compared to Olympia), extending the dialogue
  • Olympia confronts the everyday male viewer w his own practices of sexuality and how that’s comodified
  • Whereas Picasso is aiming to further the shock factor, to further highlight to the male viewers the banality of the everyday life; updates a classic genre, intentionally
    • Through the extension of flattening, the multiplication of gazes
• Figure on the very left
  • Holding open a curtain for viewers to survey her body

Nowhere for the eyes to go, attention gets thrown back to the foreground
(white and black are used to render volume, which the painting lacks)
The fruit at the bottom of the canvas

• Putting viewers at the table, engaging with and confronting the women directly

Understood as a formal innovation that led to Cubism

Primitivism in 20th C.: Western writers conceive the cultural other as an authenticity, as a sight of other than themselves, rather than reflecting about the differences

Ringgold, Picasso’s Studio

• Picasso becomes a side character in the story of modernism

1/23 Post-Impressionism (Continue)

Divisionism: reflecting on the division of plane into infinite dots
Pointillism

• Two directions that artists go to engage w colors (differentiation vs synthesis)

Georges Seurat

Interested in scientific approach to color, to bringing stability and classical quality to impressionism
And thinking about class in the contemporary context

• Bathers at Asnieres 1884
  • Working class leisure
  • Lower class status
  • Context: Pastoral, mythological settings of traditional bather paintings
• Sunday Afternoon 1884
  • Middle class leisure
  • Mature style → more dotted
• Le chahut 1889
  • Performance as a social context, not an image of performance isolated from its context Create opportunities for a rich patterning of colors → stability of subject, contradicts the content
  • Stability vs. movement (classism, solemnity)
• Parade de cirque 1887
  • Bourgeois, leisure, at night

Influential figure for the development of cubism, not totally post impressionist bc approach looks very different from impressionist
Breaking open closed form

• Still Life w Basket of apples 1893
  • Stuffy genre → still life
  • Creating a scene w multiple diff perspectives
  • Edge of table doesn’t line up, the corners don’t match
  • Thick application of paint for napkin: Creating a sense of structure, of folds
  • Overall composition: disorienting
    • Trying to paint in a way that reflect the way our eyes engage w paintings → not linear, not single point perspective; our eyes wander around
    • Breaking the standard criteria of composition since Renaissance which is the idea of a unified image (→ painting has to present one thing from one view) - Deconstruction of tradition
    • Representation vs reality: how painting constructs representation
    • Interested in the materiality of color; Brush strokes: constructing forms w paint
• Mont sainte Victoire 1885
  • Disintegration of form
  • Lack of outline: truck of tree vs un outlined zone next to it
  • Recession of space, tree established a sense of distance
• Mont Sainte Victoire 1902
  • Repeated patches of color - pixelated - sit on the surface of the canvas
  • Stacked up vertically, no sense of space
  • Bleeding of forms - breaking open of form itself; form isn’t a coherent thing, designated by outlines or not; Key principle that Cezanne is challenging
  • Analysis of representation through the materiality of painting
• The Large Bathers 1906
• Bathers 1894-1905
  • Drawing on a tradition of scenes of bathers
    • idealized natural setting, mythological context (Diana and Callisto 1635; Pastoral Symphony 1510)
    • Bathing: pretext for nudity
  • Cezanne and Seurat continue the tradition
    • Interest in using new techniques to engage traditional subjects

Impressionists: Momentarily experience w naturalism
Post impressionist: artist capture their own experience in a subjective way

• Everyone is motivated by the desire to access truth, to make a painting that feels true and real, whether its through personal temperament or objective perspective
• Idea of Expressionism is emerging

Chronology of Matisse & Fauvism

Salon d’Automne, 1905

• Key moment of Fauvism
  • Short lived movement, influential, head figure: Matisse
  • Matisse + Picasso
  • Two different approach to modernism: Matisse - Characterized by his use of color; Picasso - Interested in form

Paul Signac: advocate for divisionist technique, for neo impressionism

• Golde Juan 1896: Experimenting w non naturalistic color
• Matisse studied with Signac

Luxe calm et Volupte 1904 (compared w Island of la Grande Jatte) - Pre Fauvist work

• Both reflects neo impressionism and deviates from it
• Devisionist technique: dots bigger and elongated; Seurat would never paint in dashes
• Attention between form and color
• No relationship betweenn lifelike depiction and the color; color no longer a vessel for naturalism
• Complementary colors
• Scene of bathers, mosaic quality, sense of flatness
• Interested in classical theme but also including his own recurring model

The Green Line 1905 - Fauvist work

• Contrast of colors; rich variety of colors;
• different types of application of paint: Flat patchiness vs thick impasto (inconsistency)

Human figures: a divorce between the image from its need to represent the actual person (trace back to Van Gogh)

• Fauvism: First avant garde movement in Paris
  • Etymology: beast in French
  • Shocking to Parisian viewers bc it was abstract in colors

Woman w a Hat 1905

• Self Portrait w Bandaged ear 1889

Open Window Collioure 1905

• Zones of flat colors and thick impasto strokes
• Arbitrary colors
• Spatial ambiguity, compression of space
• Sail boats in the background but applied w thickest impasto strokes, coming toward viewers
• Guiding principle for Matisse
  • Surface tension: a richness and vibrancy of surface through color

Bonheur de vivre (Joy of Life) 1905

• No coherent perspective
• Flat planes of colors
• Moving away from the scientific approach to color (neo impressionism)
• Embracing a more expressive mode of color (harmonious color scheme)
• Pastoral scene; water in the background; classical motif
• Units of scenes within the painting, each existing independently
• Encourages the eye to wander around, circumnavigate the different elements
• Thick outlines for two women in the center; echos the tree trunk; pattern of sinuous lines
• Color creating a rich dense surface

Blue Nude 1907

• Reclining female nude, response to Picasso’s Les demoiselles d' Avigonon
• Distortion of form - exaggeration of anatomy
  • How does it characterize the differences between the two artists?
  • Matisse
    • Gaze is looking down, negate the confrontational dynamic or rechannel it
    • Pastoral, natural setting, not located as precisely as Picasso’s painting
  • Picasso
    • Figures more confrontation
    • Barcelona red street setting
• Referencing the colonial/ racial other in the title without mapping another form in the painting

Dance 1910

• Expanded scene from Bonheur de vivre
• Dance I: sketch
  • Commissioned by a wealthy Russian for his staircase at home
• Simplified color palette
  • Green: land?
  • Blue: sky?
    • No clear indication of the space
• Abstraction of background
• Sense of flatness – achieved through an expansion of scale and a diminishing surface detail
• A sense of continuity, collective moment
• Contrast dance with Music 1910
  • Solitary poses, eerie stillness
  • Overwhelming orange, super saturated

Interior with Eggplants 1911

• Flat planes of color crowded w decorative details, no sense of depth
• A flat patterning - surface tension

Spanish Still Life 1910

The Red Studio 1911

• Tradition of artists painting about their studio
• Defeat our eyes desire to read depth
  • Red flattens the space (like Vision after the Sermon by Gauguin)
  • Lines don’t work to create a coherent senes of space (don’t become narrorwers as they move away from the viewers)
• Line: absence of paint → canvas showing through
• Creating space, represent space without depth while also creating surface tension

After 1911, Matisse engaged w cubism
View of Notre Dame 1914
The Piano Lesson 1916
Dance II
Swimming Pool 1952: Using cutouts, papers and scissors as his primary medium

• Collapses into just the surface (color as shape)

1/25 Cubism

Understand and recognize the differences between synthetic cubism & analytic cubism

Braque & Picasso collaboration (ended by WW1) 1908-1914
Analytic Cubism 1909-1912
Synthetic Cubism 1912-1915
Avant-garde movement based in Paris – significant influence in development of abstraction

• counterpoint to Fauvism – which was about color, but Cubism is about form
• external material incorporated into the painting

Representation: from likeness to signification

• Rejecting the idea of what art is – it doesn’t exist on a surface; it’s not decorative
• Analysis of the nature of representation
  • Representation: Imitation of likeness
  • You can describe something that help viewers conjure their own image (there are non representational mode of painting)
  • From the iconic to the linguistic mode of representation
    • The signifer and the signified (the relationship is arbitrary)

Collage

Picasso

• Move from naturalism to impressionism (date?)
• Blue Period 1902
• Rose Period 1905 (post-impressionism)
• Interest in Iberian sculpture 1905-1906

Matisse – abstract portraiture – both relate and opposite of Picasso

• Achieve abstraction through:
  • Matisse: Happen through non-naturalistic color
  • Picasso: Transformation of form
    • Conceptually more challenging than distortion of color
  • Reintegration the debate between line and color
• Continued use of Iberian mask late 1906
• Culminates in Demoiselles 1907

Braque Houses at L’Estaque 1908

• What gave cubism the name
• Digesting the lessons of Picasso and Cezanne
  • Vs. Mont Sainte Victoire by Cezanne
  • A more limited color palette, a simplification of form
  • No sky, horizon line, creates a feeling of the form spilling forward rather than receding back
  • The shading is not working in the opposite way
    • Typically the light is closer to the audience and the shadow is further away
    • Creating the sense that the volume is concave instead of convex

Picasso Three Women 1908

• Every form is a triangle
• Less cubes than facets
• the different placement of the uniformed units signified the object – gets into the question of signification → triangle in and of itself doesn’t indicate elbows but the placement of them created an elbow
  • Relational model of meaning

Picasso The Reservoir Horta de Ebro 1909
Picasso Houses on the hill horta de Ebro 1909

• Picasso digesting lessons from Cezanne
• Shapes being relational
• Seeing things from multiple perspectives on one plane all at the same time
• Faceting of planes
• Where we start to get into analytical cubism
• Legibility of the structure of the subject starts to vanish over the next year or so

Picasso Girl with a Mandolin 1910

• Geometric rendering of a human body
• Also a rendering of shadow and light, line and plane as themselves arbitrary
• Rather than producing likeness, representation through system of signification

Braque Violin and Palette 1909

• Playing w the same idea
• Multiple perspective: access to the front and the side at the same time
• Structuring of the backgroun such that it occupies the same plane as the object
• Cubism: a lot of musical instrument → reduced to their symbols
• The nail on the top:
  • Supporting the painter’s palette
  • The shadow has a surprising legibility at this stage of Cubism
  • Moment of trompe l’oeil
    • Trick of the eye, convincing illusionism → something as occupying our space
    • Another register of representation
    • The nail could be actually piercing the painting and leaving a shadow on the canvas

Picasso Standing Female Nude 1910

• Not interested in non-representation, or non objective
• Will always remain engaged with representation, at the limit of representation
• Interest of the Three Women repeated but extended
• Lines don’t depict anything, but indicate bodies in the context, shading itself rendered arbitary

Picasso Kahnweiler 1910

• Shimmer of facets
• Vs. Girl w a mandolin
• One figure but there’s repetition of the subject; multiple zones of figuration

Braque The Portuguese 1911

• A man standing on a dock, playing guitar
• He has a lil mustache ahahah so cute!
• Radical reduction of form, of color palette, of shadow and line
• Color and shading don’t designate form but rather cursory outlines do

Picaso Ma Jolie 1911

• Introduction of lettering → pointing us to collage
• Title also a name of a popular song
• Picasso’s most abstract painting
• Reduction of form to intermittent grid w a general triangle format to indicate a body
• Vs. the Red Studio (Fauvism): Achieving flatness through totally different means
  • Matisse: playing w color to create a flat decorative quality
  • Picasso: interested in the nature of representation through arbitrariness

Picasso Still Life w Chair Canning 1912

• Oil cloth pasted onto the canvas
• Outline of a thick rope
• External elements physically incorporated into a painting → Stylistic heterogeneity
• Style: reflecting analytic cubism; introduction to collage
• Physical materiality of a table + things on the table
  • Jou representing newspaper → mass production

Picasso Guitar 1912

• Vs. Grebo Mask
  • Eyes protruding; signified through a presence rather than absence
• Similarly, the cylinder stands in for the whole
  • An understanding of the sign
    • A statement of the arbitrariness of sign in a visual medium
    • While the cylinder is represented in an opposite mode, it’s immediately understood by the view
    • Bois: Historicizing the formal structure of the work
    • Semiotic reading: Lines are signs and are relational, just like how letters only come to be words in relation to other letters
      • Semiotics as a mode of formal analysis
    • Meaning comes from the different parts coming together in the work
• Significance: demoiselles uses African elements to produce shock, for their stylistic disjunction; here the eyes are used as a factor of shock

Picasso Guitar and Wineglass 1912

• Integrating mass culture into the painting
• Wallpaper, wood grain, newspaper, sheet music
• Wineglass: analytical cubism; pasted into the collage
  • Picasso thinking about the style that he developed w Braque as another representational mode of depicting something
• Wallpaper is the body of the guitar but also the background
• Poggi: contrasts Cubism w Symbolism – focus more on culture, social history
  • Symbolists: exist in the industrialized culture but are rejecting in its images
    • Interested in pre industrial
  • Poggi argues that Picasso challenges the symbolist version of modernism which rejects the products of industrialization
• Bois: focus more on the cultural other, form and structure, Picasso’s psychology

Braque Fruit Dish and Glass
Papier collé

• Significance of mass culture

Picasso Violin 1912

• Formal exploration of representation
• Another example of Papier collé
• Newspaper arranged vertically so viewers could read
• Wood grain of the surface of the violin as well as the room/ wall exist on the same plane
• Curve indicating the bottom of instrument
• The f hole in the middle indicates that it’s a violin
  • The different sizes of the f holes stand in for the fact that the violin is at an angle

Picasso Au Bon Marché 1913

• A lot of puns

Picasso Glass of Absinthe 1914

• Translate the analytic cubist mode into a sculpture
• A collaging sculpture
• Pointilism as a motif: a scientific way of constructing solidity/ impressionism

Picasso Pipe and musical score 1914

• What does it mean to display a picture
• Wall paper appropriating as a frame
• A real frame and a frame displayed within (shadow)
• Pointilism as a motif again
• Disjuntion of styles

Picasso Portrait of a young girl 1914

• Return of color; color as material
• Patches of both cubism and pointilism

Picasso Harlequin 1915

• Maintenance of spatial ambiguity
• Brown is the background but also a figure
• form : Indicates body parts in relation to others
• Patches of disjuntion of styles continued

Picasso Three Musicians 1921

• Collage is informing an entire painted area
• Synthesizing existing different planes
• Move away from the confrontation w the mass culture
• Reture to the large scale painting; return to order
• WW1: Return to whole figures, naturalism, classism; coexist w abstraction
  • How does one reconcile w that?
    • Picasso likes stylistic disjunction
    • Conversation between works
    • Picasso’s career isn’t a straight line
  • Interest in surrealism

1/30 Cubism II: Reception

Picasso: interested in the fundamental question of representation
How do you represent something without necessarily repeating its appearance
Methods and approaches to Cubism
Cubism representing a linguistic model of representation
Cubism as a kind of conceptual exercise
Importance of Cubism’s influence

• Cubism as simultaneous, multiple perspectives
• Cubism as movement on static surface
• Cubism as geometricizing even purifying of form – machine aesthetic, modern classicism
• Cubism as pointing to abstraction

Juan Gris
Approaching representation through a more playful approach
More accessible than Picasso's painting

The Table 1914
Depicting silverware
Woodgrain wallpaper as a naturalistic tabletop representation: a sight of illusion
Naturalistic type of drawing compared to Picasso and Braque
And objects retain structural integrity

Still Life: The Table 1914
Collage principle
Text: the real and the fake
Thinking about representation as a gap between reality and invention
Invitation to the audience to unlock the image through the key
Cigarette
Cursory sketch of a cigarette

Still Life with Checked Tablecloth 1915
Optical illusion
Interested in different registers of representation

Henri Matisse View of Notre-Dame 1914
Distorted geometric components
Discontinuity
Different shades of purple: schematic rendering of perspective
Greater presence of line; darker

Henri Matisse The Piano Lesson 1916
Head: multiple views
Investigating structure
Alfred H. Barr (First director of MoMa)
“Cubism and Abstract Art” 1936

Salon Cubism

Salon cubists: Interested in participating in the salons 1911
(unlike Picasso and Braque) Produced a lot of writing, speech, and discourse, more eager to provide a reading for their work
More responsible for readings of Cubism

Henri Le Fauconnier Abundance 1910
Geometric simplification of form
Strong relation to Cezanne (the background doesn’t seem very far away; a collapse of depth)

Albert Gleizes The Bathers 1912
Vs. The Large Bathers by Cezanne

• Naturalistic colors
• Forms are abstracted and closed
  • Whereas Cezanne interested in breaking open of form
• Geometricizing nature

Jean Metzinger Le Gouter 1911
Vs Picasso Girl w a Mandolin

• Geometricizing the body
• Multiple perspectives
• More naturalistic than Picasso’s

Kupka, Mme Kupka among Verticals 1910-11

• Injecting abstract colors (not via Fauvism but Cubism’s geometric mode)
• Wow love this work

Robert Delaunay Simultaneous Windows on the City 1912

• Approaching color abstraction via Cubism
• Still cityscape
• Painting both the frame and the canvas
• Commentary on the idea that painting is a window through which you see the world
• Vs. Eiffel Tower 1911
  • Window motif repeated
  • The rectangular forms are traces of buildings
• Cubism as a way of depicting cityscapes
• Cubism points to abstraction that ultimately leads to his signature style

Simultanism

Robert Delaunay Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon 1913

• Neoimpressionist color theory

Sonia Delaunay Electrical Prisms 1914
Blanket 1911

• Craft/ handmaking as an abstract design practice

Simultaneous Dress 1913

• Utopian dimension: move off from canvas and into everyday life

Fernand Leger The City 1919

• Compression of space – a sense of crowdedness
• Multiple perspectives, fleeting encounter
• Pace of modern life
• Fragmented planes of colors/ letters – reference to advertisement, stores, signs, visual language of modernity, a visual overwhelm
• Billboard of humans are more lively than the actual human figures at the bottom
  • Human bodies: Automaton
• A geometric treatment of form – machine aesthetic

Fernand Leger Exit the Ballet Russes 1914

• Fracturing of planes
• Stripey machine aesthetic
• Maintain a sense of geometric volume, not totally about flatness

Francis Picabia, the Procession, Seville 1912

• Relate to Picasso’s Three women
• Landscape pointing to abstraction

I see Again in Memory My Dear Dear Udnie

• Machanical abstraction
• Embracing curves, a style coming out of Cubism geometric forms
• No clear subject, but there are recognizable shapes

mechanomorph: Machine and people

Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase 1912

• Futurist mode/ atomaton suggestive
• Rejection from/ by the salon cubists

Marsden Hartley Portrait of a German Officer 1914

• Cubism: simplification of forms to emblems
• Portrait of an officer without a human presence (uniform)

Purism

Classical version of Cubism

Le Corbusier Still Life 1920

• Solemnity and presence
• No play w form or depth
• Naturalistic version of the scenes
• Crafting a modern classicism
• What’s the essence of form
  • Interested in finding the essence of form through purification
  • Machine classicism expressed through Corbusier’s architecture (Villa Savoye 1929)

Amedee Ozenfant Still Life With Bottles 1922

Cubism and Sculpture
Picasso Guitar 1912
Picasso Glass of Abstinthe 1914

• Geometric abstraction
• Assemblage practice

Cubism as a simplification of form

• Alexander Archipenko Medrano II
  • Has a plane backing, a stage

Geometric version of classcism

• Alexander Archipenko Woman combing her hair
• Jacques Lipchitz Man With a guitar
  • Guitar reduced to its fundamental volume
  • Planes have a volume

Art deco: Cubism adapted to a popularist style

• Signals modernism but fundamentally remains classical

2/1 Expressionism

Worringer: empathy = connection to nature and the organic
Kunstwollen: artistic volition itself; thinking about art as ahistorical

• What artistic mode corresponds to empathy? Representational/ naturalistic art
  • Characterizing all art in two poles
  • Naturalism: content, happy
  • Abstraction: fear, anxiety, neurosis, dread
    • Psychology of art
      • Psychology was emerging as a field during this time too
• What kind of account of our history is he telling? What is the historical basis of style?
  • Psychological history
• Who is the agent of all art ever? What governs the transition?
  • The collective movement of a large group

Simmel: contextualizes it more

• Industrial revolution

• Economic structure of capitalism

• City as the emblem of modernity

• Why abstraction now?

• Why are they interested in primitivism?

Sigmund Freud

• Conscious vs unconscious
• Sexuality is amongst the unconscious

Precedents for Expressionism

Vincent Van Gogh Self Portrait W bandaged Ear
Gauguin Vision after the sermon 1888

• Interested in spirituality

Symbolism
Gustave Moreau The apparition 1876

• The woman who is seductive but threatening
• One of the favorite subjects of symbolists

Maurice Denis Climbing to Calvary 1889

• An escape from modernity through investment in myth-making, mysticism

Fernand Khnopff Caresses 1896

• Using painting to produce a mood, despite its naturalistic style

Art Nouveau

• producing work that doesn't take inspiration from the classical past but rather a kind of separating from the classical past and using nature as inspiration
• Stylized version of nature

Joseph Maria Olbrich Secession Building 1898
Horta Tassel House 1893

• Radically modern and highly decorative

Henry Van de Velde, Tropon Poster, 1899

Vienna Secession
Gustav Klimt Beethoven Frieze 1902

• Capture the feeling and quality of Beethoven’s music rather than illustrating a narrative
• Simplified form, highly decorative

Gesamtkunstwerk: total work of art

Munch The Scream 1893
Extending the ideas of Van Gogh by further emphasizing his idea of art work as psychological state
Depict the intensity of modern life

J.M.W. Turner Slave Ship 1840

• Nature as a vehicle for expressing intense feeling

German Expressionism

Die Brucke (1905-1913): a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden

• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Manifesto 1906
  • A break w tradition
  • Emphasis on youth
  • Orientation to the future
  • Written on print: Reviving a print tradition – a Germanic Northern tradition
• Kirchner Reclining Nude in Front of Mirror 1909
  • Fauvism vibe: non naturalistic color
    • Acidic green, magenta, bright blues, bright yellow
  • Distortion of perspective and space
• Self Portrait w Model 1907
  • Garish
  • Abstraction of form
• Girl w a Japanese Umbrella 1909
  • Thick makeup on the face
• Street, Dresden 1908
  • VS. impressionist painting Paris Street; Rainy Day 1877 by Caillebotte
  • Another pink green combo lol
  • Distortion of forms, claw hand
  • Confronting the audience
  • Psychological experience of the metropolis externalized
• Berlin Street Scenes 1913-14
  • Toning down the colors
  • Forms more jagged
    • Influence of african sculpture model
  • Sex workers, emblematic of modernity, epitome of capitalism
    • Anything can be commodified, even your body
  • Women standing in the crowd of suited men
    • Threatening
• Self Portrait As Soldier 1915
  • damaged version compared to the previous self-portrait
  • Impact of WW1
  • Depicted himself as amputated (he didn’t fight)
  • Metaphorical amputation: points to his psychological state
  • Physical body becomes a metaphor for interior feelings
  • portrait doesn’t have to reflect the actual body
• Erich Heckel Franzi Reclining 1910

Kandinsky

2/6 Futurism

Main element:

• Movement
• Machine
• Praise War
• Link to future, discard past
• No nude
• Urgency
• Manifestos and Provocation
• Experimentation with Materials
• Political and Social Engagement

How to translate dynamic movement and energy to plane:

• Aggressive dynamic
• Shock audience
• Change of pointillism: from creating stable image to creating dynamic image
• Chronophotography: photographing movement=cinema repeatation----still image can also indicate movement

2/13 Russian Avant-Garde

Style Periods:

• Neo-primitivism
• Russian Cubo-Futurism
• Suprematism
• Constructivism

Historical context:

• Russian revolution (Feb-Oct.1917)
  • Feb: oust the Tsarist rule (monarchy)
  • Oct: victory of the Bolsheviks (led by Lenin) – A Communist government
  • Utopian ideal: Communism (collective ownership of the means of production) opposed to capitalism (accumulation of individual wealth)
• Stalin comes to power 1924

What type of aesthetic production (cultural program) is best suited to the new state?

• Art that is appropriate to the radical new state
• Utopian moment in Russian history - a real sense of possibility but no clear path forward

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Classnotes from Avant-Garde:

“Primitivism”

• An aesthetic idealization that emulates the experience of “primitive” forms of life. This “life” is often itself seen as a counterweight to civilization and to modernism
  • As exoticism: recreates colonial stereotypes, presenting the “other”
  • As nostalgia
• Form: the recreation or use of simple forms of representation such as those found in naive or folk art
  • Ex: Henri Rousseau The Dream 1910
    • Have the qualities of a surrealist painting
• Paul Gauguin 1848-1903
  • In between impressionism and expressionism
  • Left Europe in 1891 and leave behind everything “artifical and conventional”
  • Simplicity and harmoney of the people whom he called “savages”
  • What do we do w art that is morally corrupted?

Expressionism and Exoticism

• Influenced by Gaugin and other European artists such as Picasso, exotic art was seen as original and pure in contrast to a decadent and distorted european establishment
• Around 1900 ethnological museums in Europe began to display artifacts from “primitive” peoples

The “Primitive” and the modern

• “The most perfect style in its regularity, the style of the highest abstraction… is characteristic of peoples at their most primitive cultural level” (Worringer)
• Lamprecht believe in a “correspondence between the psyche of primeval cultures and the mental state of the present day”

Authenticity

• Kandinsky linked “spritual in art” w primitive thinking

After the Swim 1912

• Inspired by African sculptures by Cubism and Picasso
• Recalls the Brucke’s fav motif: bathing and dancing “exotic” girls

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Neo Primitivism

• Ambivalence of Russian culture
• Peasants: emblem of Russian identity; the primitive
• The European modernism present in Russian
  • Matisse making murals for Russian patron

Natalia Goncharova Gardening 1908

• Post-impressionist and expressionist modernism
• Primitive subject matter
• Vs. Gaugin Vision after Sermon 1888

Peasants Picking Apples 1911

• Early cubism style
• Depiction of Russian peasant lives
• Vs. Picasso Three Women 1908

Malevich Morning in the Village after Snowstorm 1912-13

• Cubism
• Interest in the peasant life; folk objects

Turn toward future-cubist style
Natalia Goncharova Airplane above the Train 1913
Malevich The Knife-Grinder 1912-13

• Movement is depicted through repetition
• Analytic cubism and futurism

Reservist of the First Division 1914

• Synthetic cubism
• Era of WW1 (reservist)
• Interest in signs
• Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky arrive at Cubism before they go non-objective

Woman before an Advertisement Column 1914

• Planes become independent elements

Suprematism

Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying 1915

• Jumps to Suprematism (which for Mondrian and Kandinsky was a process that they eventually arrived)
• Suprematism elements
  • Plane & color
  • Arrangement of elements:
    • aerial photography as an influence – looking over geometric forms
    • Dynamic movement: overlaps, nonparallel lines (threatens to be overlapped, a momentary standstill)
    • Geometric abstraction
    • Mondrian: Interested in the way eye circulates, he would never have a diagonal line bc it would create a perception of space but for Malevich, movement is the core element of painting

Painterly Realism of a boy with a Knapsack. Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension 1915

• Fourth dimension: time
• Melavich: our relationship to spirituality – A duality
• Pure expression of the subject through a distillation of form – Indicated greater realism of the subject?
• Mystical reading of the subject, distillation not through a formal vocabulary but an imaginative intuition

Black Square, The Last Futurist Exhibition installation 1915

• Interested in finding the essence, they are either culminating or starting a new thing (why we always see vocabularies like the last exhibition or the first)
• Black Square placed in an important spot - where you’d place your Christian icon in a Russian household at the time
• Abstraction & spirituality
• Pinnacle of suprematism – the most simplified form; minimal movement
• Oscillation between your idea and the actuality - how your intellectuality wants it to be sat horizontally and symmetrically but it’s not
  • The Red Square 1915

UNOVIS

• Politics + art: affirmers of the new art
• led by Kazimir Malevich at the Vitebsk Art School in 1919
• Post Revolution: Shifted from solo artists to collective
• The new art could be suprematism

Lissitzky Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge 1919

• Known as the other suprematist
• Political element + Suprematism
  • The red triangle is the Bolsheviks
  • The white: anti-communist group
• Using universal vocab of suprematism to communicate political perspective

Proun 19D, 1920 or 1921

• Mixed media on plywood
• Project of the affirmation of the new
• Three dimensionality
• Illusion without representation

Prounenraum (Proun Room) 1923

• An early example of installation
• Planes of suprematist composition become physical entities in space
• Visually looked like what Tatlin was doing with Constructivism but conceptually they were very different
  • The constructivist felt that this was bourgeois and what we needed in the new era is to cast out the bourgeois tendencies and embrace materiality

Tatlin Corner Counter Relief 1915

• Embodied the idea of “faktura”

• Physical stuff that you can touch
• Express/ exaggerate material properties
• Opposite of Bernini Apollo and Daphne 1622-1625
  • Bernini: Embuing movement in static objects - desire to triumph over the material properties

Deductive structures
Rodchenko Spatial Construction 1920

• Embraces construction not composition

Tricolor Monochrome Triptych 1921

• The end of representation. The end of painting
• “I affirmed: it’s all over. Basic colors. Everyplaine is a plane and there is to be no more representation”
• For the constructivists, this isn’t politically engaged

Doesburg Arithmetic Composition 1929-30

• Rational mathematic choices

Obmokhu exhibition, Moscow 1921

• Constructivist group vs suprematic group
• The differences is political
• constructivist: politically more aligned w the new state than the suprematists
• After the exhibition, Constructivists turned away from abstract sculpture and made work that was more in service of the state

Tatlin Model for the Monument to the Third International 1919

• Model for a building that was never built
• To build a massive modern structure that would have housed the common turn, the arm of the government invested in collaborating w other communist governments
• A monument and a building

Elevation of Monument to the Third International 1919

• 1300 feet tall
• The Diagonal is a reference to the Eiffel tower
• A functional office building that embodies Communism is better than capitalism
  • Putting design to work bc the Effiel tower wasn’t a building

Lissitzky Lenin Tribune 1924
Constructivists turning more to design
Rodchenki Box for “Our Indestry” caramels 1923
Stepanova Designs for Sports Clothing 1923

• Designing new outfits that will abolish class differences and even gender differences
• What will the new aesthetic of this new soceity look like? We get to decide

Rodchenki Lenin workers club 1925

• Workers can also be readers
• Russia was a poor country that was trying to industrialize quickly so this was one of the few designs that were made

Rodchenko Books In All Branches of Knowledge 1924

• Transforming illiterate peasants into readers

At the Telephone 1928
Assembling for a Demonstration 1928

• Political aim: Use Photography to transform way of seeing the peasantry; Training our perception to view things in a modern way
• Photography circulated in the journalistic context as well
• Training the Russian populace to be readers and viewers
• From sculpture to instrumentalized design and propaganda
• Abstraction is still theoretical and applying it to the service of the state

Stepanova the Results of the first Five Year Plane 1932

Soviet Socialist Realism

A return to naturalism
Samokhvalov Sergei Kirov Reviews the Athletic Parade 1935
Brodsky Lenin in Smolny 1930

2/15 De Stijl/ Neoplasticism

Dutch movement meaning “the style”
Artists want to find the universal style
A theory of art, an aesthetic

Cover of De Stijl 1917

• Elementarization: finding the most basic elements of form, of painting
• Motivated by an interest in pure form that also has a relationship to spirituality
• Construction of a harmonious whole

Mondrian Evolution, triptych 1911

• Anthropromorphic theory of style
• Allegory of evolution
• Personification of the three main energies: terrestrials (left), the astrial (right) and the divine in the center

Still Life with Gingerpot I 1911

• Encountering analytic cubism in France

Compoisition N.10 1915

• Plus and minus vocabulary
• Minimal retention of reference

Composition in color 1917

• Completely getting rid of reference
• Reintroducing color

Composition w color planes 5 1517
Composition with color planes and gray lines 1918

• Uniformity of visual effect amongst different colors
• Diluted impure version of his set of elements
• Moderating the intensity so no one color is dominating over the other

Checkerboard composition light colors 1919

• Grid becomes a rigid system that protects against arbitrariness

Neo Plasticism 1920

• Mondrian arrives at his mature style
• Finding harmony between line and color, line and plane, figure and ground
• Indebted to Cubism

Mondrian Composition w Blue Red Yellow and Black 1922
Van Doesburg Composition VIII (The Cow) 1918

• The most elementarized abstraction
• Yellow square standing in for the cow torso
• Green legible as the grass field
• White is another positive form, patterning of the cow

Composition XI 1918
Rhythm of a Russian Dance 1918

• Distilled rhythm of russian dance

Composition XX 1920
Decentralized Composition 1924

• Also arrives at primary colors and rigid grids just like Mondrian
• Every line can be broken down between horizontal and vertical axes
• Consistent commitment to the grid

Simultaneous Counter-Composition 1929–30
Arithmetic Composition 1929–30

• Reintroduces the diagonals
• creates a rift with Mondrian who would never paint it because it’s not elemental enough, diagonals suggest movement
• Mathematical approach to abstraction

Why is this style the most universal and pure (formally and spiritually)?

• Mondrian Tableau 2 1922
• Van Doesburg Composition XX 1920

1. There’s no connection to nature, a model that is totally in the ideal realm
   an ideal that is invented, divorced from nature but can be derived from nature
   Ultimately modeling a utopian theory of life
   Paintings as a microcosm of what the world could be
   Hopefully this ideal circles back and influences nature → architecture
   Paintings are models for the world
   1. Interest in Plato
      1. The earthly realm
      2. The heavenly realm: ideal version of earthly existence
2. A drive to find the zero, the essence of painting, self-contained wholes
   A non-hierarchical model that influences reality

Mondrian New York City 1942
Broadway Boogie Woogie 1942-43

• Never seen colorful lines in his earlier work
• But now we see an interweaving of lines
• They are under or over the verticals
• The overlap of red over yellow or the other way around
• The re-embrace of grids:
  • Inspired by the geography of the city and rhythmic pulses of the city
  • Listening to jazz and influenced by the sound of jazz
    • Translating rhythmic quality of music into paintings
• Further break up of lines into pulsing units

Van Doesburg colored perspective drawing for university concert hall 1926-28

• Orientation to planes and walls → Integration of painting and architecture
• Move from looking at the painting as a self-contained whole to be immersed in the painting bc its a pure non-hierarchical model that could affect the thoughts of the person in the space
• Walls become planes

Contra construction project 1923

• Wall themselves become planes of colors, a three-dimensional character
• Imagined as existing in space
• Leads to his reintroduction of diagonal lines bc hes thinking abt 3 dimensional space

Rietveld Red and Blue Chair 1918

• Chair reduced to its fundamental elements
• Three dimensional modular units of the grid and lines
• Beginning of modern furniture design
• Modular constructed fixed units that you can purchase and put together yourself

Schroder House 1924

• Space is dynamic and flexible according to use (with movable screens)

Wright Robie house 1909

• Important influence for De Stijl
• Redesign interior of homes to pinwell the central hearth
• Falling water
  • A final expression of domestic architecture expressed in Robie house
• Guggeneim museum
• Total design: design both the interior and the exterior
• Utopianism: ur banal existence can b an aesthetic rich experience

YSL Mondrian dresses at the MoMa 1966

• The utopian ideals of the movement no longer hold sway
• Genuine revolutionary energy pre WW2 seems distant
• Repeats at style

Midterm Concept Review:

1886-1905 Post-Impressionism

• reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and color
• sought to bring a more systematic approach to the structure and form of painting
• Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne all shared an interest in making art that went beyond the mere representation of the natural world, focusing instead on expressing more abstract, emotional, and spiritual concepts

Synthetism (subset of Post-impressionism)

• Key figure: Paul Gauguin
  • Particularly his work in Tahiti: synthesized the outward appearance of the subject matter with the artist's feelings about the subject and the aesthetics of the painting itself (does it also fall under primitivism?)
• emphasizes two-dimensional flat patterns, thus rejecting three-dimensional perspective
• Characterized by the use of bold flat forms separated by dark contours
• Using color symbolically rather than realistically

Neoimpressionism (another subset of post-impressionism)

• response to Impressionism: interested in applying scientific research in optics and color theory to create a more harmonious and structured form of art compared to the more spontaneous and subjective approach of the Impressionists
• Key figures: Georges Seurat and Paul Signac
• most famous for its development of Pointillism (or Divisionism), a technique involving the application of paint in small dots of pure color, which are intended to blend in the viewer's eye

1900-1908 Fauvism (transitional stage to Cubism)

• pure, brilliant colour aggressively applied straight from the paint tubes to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas
• Focus on nature (like the Impressionists)
• Key figure: Matisse
  • reject traditional renderings of three-dimensional space and to seek instead a new picture space defined by movement of colour

1908-1929 Cubism

• Key figures: Picasso, Braque
• Emphasized flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane
• rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro
• refuting theories that art should imitate nature

Analytic Cubism (1910-1912)

• While they moved away from naturalistic representation, they are very interested in the idea of representations and different modes of representation
• Breaking down, analysis of form, display the essence of an object (or the complex totality of its subject) from multiple perspectives in a single two-dimensional framework
• Picasso and Braque: simplified their colour schemes to a nearly monochromatic scale (hues of tan, brown, gray, cream, green, or blue were preferred) in order not to distract the viewer from the artist’s primary interest—the structure of form itself
• Semiotics: The relationship between the signifer and the signified
• What is the plane doing? move beyond the surface of the canvas rather than to recede in depth
• representational motifs: letters, musical instruments, glasses etc.

Synthetic Cubism (Post 1912)

• emphasize the combination, or synthesis, of forms in the picture
• Colour assumes a strong role in these works
• Shapes become more decorative
• Trompe l’Oeil!!
  • emphasizes the differences in texture and, at the same time, poses the question of what is reality and what is illusion
• Key figures: Fernand Léger, Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger

Salon Cubism

• Coined to describe the works and the artists of Cubism who exhibited in various Paris Salons
• Interested in the geometricizing of form

1905–1920 Expressionism

• artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person
• Key artists: Van Gogh, Die Brücke, Ludwig Kirchner
• artists used the expressive possibilities of colour and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity

Die Brücke 1905-1913

• played a pivotal role in the development of Expressionism
• Emphasized raw, emotional expression through vivid colors and bold strokes
• founded by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
• Wanted to defy conventions of traditional painting as well as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
• subject matter—the human figure, landscape, portraiture, still life—executed in a simplified style that stressed bold outlines and strong colour planes

Der Blaue Reiter 1911-1914

• expressionistically oriented
• Focused on spiritual and symbolic interpretations of art, with Kandinsky as a leading member
• unlike Die Brücke, their expressionism took the form of lyrical abstraction.
• imbued their art with deep spiritual content
• influenced by the Jugendstil group, Cubism, Futurism, and “naive” folk art