Study Note | 20th Century European Art History - Part 2, Harvard 2024

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

2/27 Dada

Context: WW1: Culmination of enlightenment rationality itself
Assassination → series of European countries declaring war on each other bc of interlocking alliances
Dada: a critique of the war (politically motivated) / critique of the rationality of the war itself

• Began as a performance art
• Artists gathering around and performing at Cabaret Voltaire
  • Multimedia/ multidisciplinary movement
  • In the Cabaret tradition
  • Short story/ vignette structure without clear plot
• critical of the status quo

Zurich: 1916 Wartime Switzerland - known for neutrality

• Where artists flee
• Dada born out of WW1
• Immediate aftermath of the war as key context for Dada
• Post-war artists dispersed to
  • Berlin
  • Hanover
  • Cologne
  • New York
  • Paris: pivoted to surrealism

Zurich Dada

Janco Cabaret Voltaire 1919

• Harassing of the audience, collective playfulness
• Emphasis on mysticism: anti-rational mode
• (A different strand of primitivism)

The Dada Manifesto

• A challenge of meaning itself
• Linguistic irrationality
• “To be a Dadaist is perhaps to be more of a businessman, more of a politician than an artist – or to be an artist only by accident to be a Dadaist is to be turned and tossed by events, to resist petrifaction”
• The meaning of being an artist is defined by constant innovation and disruption

Dancing w a mask by Marcel Janco 1916-1917

• The cultural other as a sight of irrationality
• Primitivism of the Dada group
• Interest in the spiritual and anti rational

Marcel Janco Portrait of Tristan Tzara 1919

Hugo Ball Karawane 1916

• Sound poetry
• Different version of the arbitrary relationship between words and meanings
• Performance at Carbaret Voltaire
• Reading this poem aloud → facilitated an irational experience that he felt himself going into a spiritual trance

Hans Arp Untitled (Collage w Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance) 1916-1917

• Dada collage, early format
• Grey: the ground
• White and blues: figures
• Grid: trace of the arist’s hand
• Composition not based on aesthetic choices but chance that is irrational
• Key idea: chance as a way of getting around composition/ aesthetic judgement (something that they were frustrated w during post war period)
• Different from the constructivism mode: bourgeois aesthetic judgement → composition
• Whereas Dada: the arbitrary/ absence of logic → composition
• Noncompositionality

Taeuber-Arp &Hans Arp Duo Collage 1918

• Move away from the gestural trace from the work above; eliminated the traces of the artists hand and we don’t know whose hand is it bc there are two artists
• Supposedly chance based: placement of the grid
• Response to the war, embrace of radical negativity
• Non objective, geometric abstraction

Sophie Taeuber-Arp Dada Head 1920

• The zurich groups interest in dolls
• Abstraction of the human head in Fafa

Personnages (Figures) 1926
Vertical-horizontal composition 1917

• She also made textiles
• Mode of making that was more accessible for female artists
• Feminine craft tradition translated into an abstract vocabulary

Hans Arp Enak’s Tears 1917

• Abstraction that is coming out of the Dada mindset
• Doesnt have any visual relationship to politics
• Biomorphic

Berlin Dada

• Interest in irrationality persists in Berlin
• More visible political position
• Working in an immediate post War context – Weimar Republic
• Artists are definitively leftists: critiqing Weimar culture from the position of a communist/ socialist
• Dada performances in Berlin: more aggressive
  • First International Dada Fair Berlin 1920
• Treaty of Versailles: made Germany take all of the blame and pay reparations
  • Affected Germany’s economy → rampant inflation + morale
  • Created a chaotic interwar time
  • A period of both rising fascism and sexual freedom and cultural activity (German’s version of the roaring twenties)
  • Physically reshaped a lot of people
    • the first technologized war: veterans injured
    • Veterans: a standin for the German psyche and the fragmented body
    • Idea of shell shock (PTSD) → Cultural phenomenon
      • Physical appearance → psychological wounds

Hannah Hoch Cut w the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany 1919-20

• Purposefully advertising the way it was made
• Fragmentation + Disoreinting scale: representative of political choas
• Photomontage: collage of existing images
  • VS. Papier Collé: mass produced materials
  • Photomontage is less about the material
  • Instead of exerting materials to create an image that references the materials, Images themselves are being exerted to talk about what they picture
  • Refers to the existence of a magazine or a newspaper
  • No one coherent figure, parts of machines, scenes of the metropolis, text, german military leaders and political leaders
• Kitchen knife: role of women in society (feminism?)
  • domesticity as an undermined social value
  • Women depicted as the catalyst of the instability of Weimar culture
  • Transformation of women’s access to public life
• Dada propaganda
• Proliferation + juxtaposition: different from the seamless approach of John Heartfield

Bourgeois Wedding Couple 1919

• Interest in contemporary culture and gender dynamics
• Playing w gender roles
• Head of a baby on a woman’s body

The Beautiful Girl 1919-1920

• BMW → technology, elements of machines
• Different representations of female body part
  • Feminime hairstyle
  • Modern bathing swimsut
• Machine as a leg: modern machine + modern women
• Both are products that are being advertised

George Grosz Daum Marries 1920

• Incorporates the two classic figures of Weimar society: the automaton and the sex worker

John Heartfield The Meaning of the Hitler Salute 1932

• Indicates transition, another aesthetic of photomontage
  • This has a clear message/ thesis, no fragmentation
• Not apparent photomontage
• Even w a disorienting scale, it has a sense of sameness
• Manipulation of an image that has a seamless appearance
• Anti capitalist critique of Hitler
  • Indicating hitler as a standin of big capitalism
• Made right before Hitler becomes Chancelor

The Dada Economy

• Schwitters: used economic vocab to describe his work
• Principles of aesthetic are evaluation and deformation

Hugo Ball
Believed that the art market sold out and that they were no different from other market participants
Hyperinflation

How does Dada reflect capitalism rather than oppose it?
Dada's anti-moralism began to directly reflect capitalist nihilism. Capitalist nihilism, however, is the valorisation process of capital value swallowing, progressively, all (cultural, normative, moral) values that are not capitalist yet. The avant-gardes' 'brave' move against morals, in this sense, was as “untimely” as Nietzsche's same move a few decades earlier. The only thing left to do after this delving into cynicism was to follow a cosmologically conceived naïve anarchism for which the end of self-determination equals the end of domination, since subjectivity is nothing but a disciplining function, and conscience nothing but a fatherly super-ego. Of course, such 'anarchism' must pretend that no societal infrastructure would be left after one withdrew from one's conscious, conscientious, responsive autonomy – as if desire or fantasy were somehow 'outside' of (consumerist!) society. Without a doubt, today's art world is dominated by this cynical version of “anarchism”, and its hegemony mimics capital's valorising devalorisation – or capitalist nihilism.

3/5 Marcel Duchamp

• Relate to Dada + salon cubism

Nude Descending a Staircase no.2 1912
The Passage from Virgin to Bride 1912
The Bridge 1912
The Chocolate Grinders 1913-1914
“based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste….”

Readymades

• Everyday, mass-produced
• Abt painting
• The art is not the intuitive decorative expression but it’s THE idea
• Conceptualism
• Using pictures to engage w text – a linguistic dimension
• Using text to re signify objects as artworks
• Paintings have lost their historical significance and have already become on one hand conceptual and on another, mechanical execution
• The comb 1916: punning of comb in french/ painting in french
  • Kant: aesthetic judgment
• After Duchamp, the question is not is this good art; the Q is is it art in the first place (good and bad doesn't matter)
• Duchamp is only an okay painter so he’s finding the third option by turning the whole thing on its head
• Dadaist engagement w chance, filtered through readymades

Fountain 1917

Tu m’ 1918

• Stoppages
• Shadows of readymades
• Swatches of colors representing the mass produced
• Physically incorporated the readymade: the bottle brush sticking out of the canvas generating its own shadow outside the work
• A physical rip in the painting reattached w safety pins
• Didnt paint the hand himself, hired a billboard painter painted the hand
• Register of his own departure from painting in the form of a painting
• By using all these different registers
  • Naturalism
  • Physical object
  • Abstract form
• Duchamp’s own thinking abt his self referientiality, his career

Box in a valise

• Elements of descending staircase, stoppages
• Traveling

L.H.O.O.Q. 1930
L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved 1965 – a postcard
Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, Photography by Man ray 1920-1921

• Photographic gender performance
• What history thinks drag is
• Performing drage w gender as a staged photograph
• Interest in eroticism
• Rrose Selavy: The double R - one of the r eroticism

Man Ray Gift, 1921

• Another artist version of the readymade
• Instead of ironing, you’re shredding the clothes
• An inversion of usage

Duchamp Etant Donnes 1946-66

• Peer through holes on a door to see Tableau
• Animatic eroticism
• Nastiness

3/7 Brancusi & Sculptural Abstraction

• Kinetics (from 3D to 4D - time)
• Abstraction vs figuration
• Direct carving vs casting
  • Originality vs repetition
  • “Primitive” vs modern

Painting is more important than sculptures in the art tradition

Cubism and sculptures

Picasso
Archipenko Medrum II 1913

• Incorporation of a plane in the background
• Geometricizing mode of abstraction
• Relationship to primitivism

Duchamp Villon Horse 1914
Moholy-Nagy Light Prop for an electric stage 1922-30

• Not about form but about the light conditions motorized 3D constructions
• Different reflective material
• Interested in light as a medium
• Movement

Calder’s Mobiles Lobster Trap and Fish Tail 1939

• After his visit to Mondrian’s studios turns to abstraction and kenetics sculpture
• Legacy of his mode in a new context
• Suggestive relationship to representation
• Early works were moterized and realized it was unnecessary
• Experience of the sculpture becomes time
• Mobiles vary in scale
• Possibility of duration of sculpture

Gerome Pygmalion & Galatea 1890

• Pygmalion a sculptor fell in love w his own sculpture Galatea and wishes she would turn into life (Ovid Metamorphosis)
  • Goal of sculpture: to create something so convincingly beautiful that it seems real that marble seems to become flesh
  • Since Renaissance, that’s been how we see sculpture
  • Development in sculpture is slower than that of paintings
• Gerome Known for orientalism in painting

Mid 19C. Comes modernization in sculpture
Rodin The Walking Man 1900

• Challenging the idea that sculpture is primarily illusionism
• Include traces of the artist’s process in his work; A lack of smooth finish
• Psychological expressiveness
• Repetition of the same form — self-referential
• Known for his skillful marble sculpture before 1898
• His monument to Balzac 1898 broke the Renaissance tradition
• Incorporation of assembly line object

Cambile Claudel Waltz 1900
The Age of Maturity 1902

• Collaborator of Rodin
• Interest in capturing movement
• Original modeling of material persists in the finished product

Medardo Rosso

• Calls himself an impressionist
• Primarily uses wax
• Figure seems to emerge out of an undifferentiated matter
• Combining different modes
• anti-Rodin

Maillol The Mediterranean 1902-05

• Post Rodin but also in dialogue w Cubism through simplification of volume
• Interested in large themes of psychological reflection

Matisse The Serpentine 1909

• Formative encounter w Rodin as well
• But turns away from that approach
• Clear relationship between sculpture and painting

Brancusi Torment 1907

• Combination of Rosso and Rodin mode
• Figure of a child, a portrait
• Simplify his forms
• Tilted head is one of thost motifs that persist
• Move away from illusionism
• Anthropmorphic remains his reference point

Sleep Muse 1908-1910

• Separating head
• Making the same object repetitively with different materials
• Arbitrarily resting on one side

Prometheus 1911

• Add the neck to the head
• Less symmetrical than the previous one
• Have a clear ground
• Simplifying form but still suggests human anatomy
• Interested in suggesting form (features on the face)
• Interest in finish, high level of shine
• High polish bronze — labor intensive

New Born 1915

• Interested in the expressive capacities of the materials themselves (polishing bronze)
• Arrive at the key theme around 1910-1923 and sticks w them in a way that is like Mondrian
• Internal seriality of his work
• Not interested in the factory like production of Rodin
• Pure abstraction

Beginning of the world 1924

• Wood carivings – interest in primitivism
• interested in folk culture
• The union of the folk nd the African model through the universal language of abstraction
• Generalized abstract vocabulary related to anthropomorphism
• Highly polished plate — reflection
• Introduced Status of the pedestal
• Pedestal is no longer separate from the work as it has been in sculpture tradition
• Juxtaposition of materials and the three diff elements are all a work

Mademoiselle pogany 1912, 1919

• Closer relationship to portraiture
• Hungarian girl who just arrived in Paris
• Primitivism

The Kiss 1907, 1916

• Using the reference of other sculptural models as influence to the type of abstraction that he is doing
• But this is about the rock that he is using, the material specificity of the block
• The form continues to have that rectangular shape
• Primitivism
• Moving away from illusionism, the stone remains a stone

Prodigal Son 1914
Adam & Eve 1921

• inverting/ subverting the hierarchy of art work and pedastal
• Challenging the primacy of media of marble and bronze in the academic tradition and instead use wood

Maiastra 1910

• Column in the shape of a women, not an independent sculpture, used to support
• Roman roots of this type of carving

Bird 1912

• Bird as a key motif in his work

Bird in Space 1923
Bird in Space marble version photography 1932

• Interest in timeliness itself and authenticity
• Relationship to Duchamp
  • The abstract circles back to the machine made – Princess X 1915
  • Readymade

Endless Column 1937

• Large scale monumental sculpture
• The pedestal overtakes the sculpture
• Becomes the unit that is repeated
• Serial unit then becomes the sculpture
• Doesnt need to have anything resting on top
• Think of his sculpture as autonomous, universal, timeless and doesnt exist alongside paintings
• The most influential 20C sculptor

Gauguin Be In Love and You Will be Happy 1889

• Direct carving as more authentic

3/19 Return to Order

Figuration after abstraction

• Why does figuration in the 20s represent a problem?
  • Modernism is arriving at pure abstraction
• What are the politics of figuration vs abstraction in the 20s and 30s?
  • Theres a relationship between war and figuration
  • Figuration + abstraction: a historical referencing happening (interested in renaissance naturalism/ nature of representation)
  • Precise naturalistic portrature is what the artists are interested in
  • Whole figure haunted by machine
• Is figuration after abstraction a reactionary anti-modernism? A populist move? A cynical rejection of utopianism? Something else?
  • If modernism was abt formalism, thinking about the nature of painting and fragmented bodies, at this moment we have a set of different concerns
  • Is abstraction esoteric and inaccesible or is it a challenge to the idea that art can be easily instrumentalized by the fascist regime bc its not didactic
• What attitudes towards abstraction/modernism are indicated by this work in this moment
• do / can specific aesthetics or styles have inherent politics?

Multiple contexts

1. Realism as official style (government sponsored)
   1. Socialist realism
   2. Nazi visual culture
   3. Italian art under mussolini
2. Realism associated w populism and progressive politics
   1. Social realism: associated w leftist politics
      1. American social realists a lot of them are a part of the communist party
      2. Not a state mandated style, coming from artists who have a certain political belief (unlike socialist realism)
   2. Mexican mural movement
3. Artists who had been making more abstrac work return to figuration, movement away from fragmentation of figures
   1. France (Picasso, Purism)
   2. Germany (Neue Sachlichkeit)
      1. Hitler aware of the power of art

Dada vs Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity)
A return to wholeness
Poetic, logical tenant

Otto Dix The Skat Players 1920
Dr. Mayer-Hermann 1926

• Machine feel quality
• Belly + the head: Man and machine are the same shape
• Happening not through a visual abstraction but through naturalism

• Abstraction represents an anxiety abt the world

Christian Schad Self Portrait 1927

• Vs Self Portrait w model by Kirchner; Expressionism: expression of an interior quality
• See through shirt, a second skin?
• Everything becomes an outer surface
• Interiority is canceld in favor of exteriority
• But it’s a strange texture and adornments
• No connection between the figures
• They are in the same room but thats it
• If theres eroticism it’s a cold eroticism
• Capturing cynicism through aesthetic coolness
• Unempathetic naturalism
• Interest in surface appearance that is lending itself to naturalism

Jan Van Eyck Arnolfini Portrait 1434

• Convex mirror: convex reflection of what’s in the front of the painting
• Nature of representation: Distortion + illusion
• We see this circling back in the 20s

Picasso Olga in Armchair 1918

• Armchair looks like a flat plane
• Immediate recognition that we don’t expect from picasso
• Picasso showed the work in 1919 → important because Picasso conceivecd it as a finished painting even tho there’s a whole lot of canvas left bare and scribbles in the back
• Shadow is abstract; cast onto nothing
• Radically unfinished quality → this idea of finish vs unfinish → emphasis that we are looking at a painting
• Dramatic contradiction within the work that we saw Picasso previously working up to progressively
• A new type of shock
• References Inge: Emphasis on texture and porcelain quality of the skin

Three Musicians 1921
Women at the Spring 1921

• Continue to deconstruct representation (in the way that others have been framing it)
• Stylistic dysjunction between the works that he’s making at the same time
• Return of figuration as an opportunity to think about the Nature of historical reference as well as naturalism and abstraction as two styles
• Let’s deflate what we thought abstraction meant; that it was just a new thing when we were thinking about representation (very different from Mondrian who was very committed to abstraction)
• Not to dismiss the idea that Picasso is informed by the political context

Picabia Barcelona 1924

• He has no loyalty to any style
• Salon cubism → Dada (only he and Duchamp made that jump)
• Engaged w representation in a playful mode
• Overlapping of types of forms and types of representation within one work

The Fig Leaf 1922

• Making a classical figure but also with overexaggeration
• Joking about nudity and classcism

Malevich Girls in the Field 1928

• This looks more like before what he arrived at suprematicism
• Salon cubist style; interest in peasentary
• Backdating his work

Self Portrait 1933

• Renaissance reference
• The ways in which our encounters w these figures is itself filtered through our previous knowledge of the artists’ abstract work

Corbusier Still Life 1920

• Purism → attempt to organize and make classical cubism rather than being a latent quality

Schad Sonja 1928

• A lot of portraiture within the movement (return to order)
• A return to natrualism and a return to the human body, the physical appearance
• Weimar personalities

Schadograph 1918

• Abstract photographs

Rivera Head Study 1901

• Trained in classical painting
• Academic study

El Puente de San Martin, Toledo 1913

• Encounters Cubism

The Flower Carrier 1935

• Naturalism filtered through Cubism
• Abstraction indebted mode even tho this is not about the trauma of the body etc
• Figuration as populists

Mexican Mural Movement

Rivera detail of The History of Mexico, Palacio Nacional de Mexico 1929-35

• Artists commissioned to paint murals in this style
• Want to communicate with illiterate peasantry so Cubism cant work
• Desire to speak to/ celebrate the experience of rural indigenous farmer
• One of the three main artists associated w the Mexican Mural Movement

Kollwitz The Mothers from War 1921
Memorial Sheet of Karl Liebkneecht 1919

• Anti war sentiment
• Figuration in service of anti-war politics

Social Realism

• Desire to celebrate workers
• Leftists politics
• American regionalism

Shahn Unemployment

• Mural sponsored by new deal programs in the US that are themselves inspired by the Mexican

Wood American Gothics

Socialist Realism (diff from social realism!!!)

• State sponsored art in soviet

Deineka Building New Factories 1925

• Emphasis on the worker, labor
• Emphasis on heroic figures associated w the bolsheviks history
  • Particularly Lenin
  • Allegorical post modern figure that represents the idealist moment of the revolution
  • Used by Stalin

Isaak Brodsky The People’s Commissar for Defense, Marshal of the Soviet Union 1937

• Portrait of russian military leader
• Iddlyic scene in nature, no sense of him as a military leader
• Both portrait + lanscape photo
• Revival of the royal portrait
• Idealized lanscape + photograph (painting painted based on photos)
• Existence of photography as a form of reproducing images, return to pre-photographic moment
• Important person doing everyday task situated in a heroic context
• Quietitude intended to be heroic

Lenin in Smolny 1930

• Extremely precise naturalism, almost like photo realism
• Stalin’s favorite
• A revival of the 19th C. academic style
• A group of Russian artists that went by the name of the Wanderers

Nazi visual culture

• Nazi call themselves: The national socialists
• Ideologically opposed to the Soviet State even tho they both came to be totalitarian

Adolf Zieglar The four elements (fire, water and earth, air) before 1937

• Hitler’s fav artist
• Nude figures: white blonde ladies
• Classical renaissance tradition of naturalism informed by academic naturalism
• Allegorical figures
• Women stand in for the different elements
• Wheat echos the blood and soil, german land emphasis of the nazi ideology
• The German peasant as being the true German
• Art should be more refined therefore it’s operating in an allegorical mode instead of just depicting peasants
• Emphasis on physical integrity – women as potential maternal figures, belonging to nature
• Propaganda
• The Nazi presenting themselves as the inheriter of the classical tradition
• Should art like this be taken down??

Degenerate Art Exhibition 1937

• Racialized ideology of the Nazis
• Emphasis on expressionism
• Reference to Dada
• Book burnings part of this campaign
• Bring attention to culture that is opposing the nazi ideology
• Politicizing of style rather than designation based on political differences
• Abstraction is politicized in a new and intense way
• To be making abstract art is to be making political art in this context, even if ur work wasnt originally motivated by politics

Interantional Exihibition in Paris 1937

• Eiffel Tower + the soviet and German pavilion → temporary structure
• Cultural and political battle
• Classcism

Italian Art

• Murals in Italy

Sironi Italy Among the Arts and Sciences 1935
Montamarini Apotheosis of Fascism (detail) 1942

• Neo classicsm used for its clear communicative power
• Ex: the oath of the Horatii 1784; Jefferson Rotunda UVA

Troost Haus der Kunst

• Nazi Neoclassicism

Spanish Pavilion

• More modernist vocabulary

Picasso Guernica 1937

• Responding to The bombing of civilians in Guernica
• Not a classical vocabulary, but Cubism + his version of Surrealism
• Clear statement of anti war sentiment
• Outraged by the bombing
• Classcism means something very different in 1937
• Informed by the WW1 context
• Returned to fragmented modernism

3/28 The Bauhaus

Blossfeldt 1900 Acanthus Mollis

• Perspectives of photography: Close up, fragmentation of a larger thing
• Scientific rationality → began w photography in the 19C
• Combination of photography as a artistic practice; embracing the scientific and the technological

Renger-Patzsch Snake Head 1925

• Interested in the texture/ fundamental aspects of the form
• Photographs facilitate a realism
• Photography as an extension of the eye
• Essence of object through close analysis

“New Vision”
Moholy-Nagy Eiffel Tower 1925

• Possibility of photography as an improvement of the eye
• Interest in New views of the city; machine
• Approach: new vision → how might photography facilitate a new perception (historical contingent)
• Active agent of creating a new mode of perception
• Condition us to encounter the city in a new way
• Relates to what Rodchenko is doing
• Changing the peasants perception faculties- bird eye view

Scandinavia 1930

• Strange cropped views of machinery
• Presence of human figure incorporated into the machinery
• Technological perspective
• Thinking about light as a media

Light-Space Modulator 1922-30

• Kinetic structure that facilitate different arrangement of light
• Light perception as primary interest – and interest in abstraction

Telephone pictures 1923

• Three of them in different dimensions
• Embrace of industrial manufacturing to produce any kind of art (phoned a factory and have them produce it for him)
• Outsourcing of the fabrication of the object
• Link to the readymade

People of the Twentieth Century
August Sander Gentleman Farmer and Wife 1924
Secretary at West German Radio, Cologne 1931

• Try to photograph different types of people – bound to fail on a certain level
• People are organized by their occupation; no names
• Artistic interest in portraiture + scientific bent of photography in the 19C
• Photography offers the possibility of systematic knowledge of everyday life
• Capturing what German society is like at the moment
• Different characters of Weimar life

Andre Malraux w photographic plates for Museum without Walls 1950

• Photography facilitating objective knowledge

Weegee The Critic 1943 + Arbus 1966

• Both Influenced by Sander
• Social observation

Krull Self Portrait with Ikarette 1925
Jacobi Head of a Dancer 1929

• Photography is more accessible for women artists as cameras become more portable and more affordable
• Machine optimism: camera as a positive prosthesis that extends vision
• Women comdified by the machine or enhanced?
• Autonomous woman w a cigarette – the new women

The Bauhaus: discrete educational design institution

Bau: building; haus: house
Within building we have a combination of all the different disciplines
Shut down in 1943
Timeline

• Weimar 1919-24
• Dessau 1925-32
• Berlin 1932-33

Directions:

• Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Other key figures:

• Oskar Schlemmer, Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Mariannne Brandt, Gunta Stolzl, Josef Albers, Anni Albers

Key Ideas:

• Curriculum combines theory & practice
• Uniting of fine and applied arts (new Gesamtkunstwerk meaning total work of art)
• Creative arts in industrial world
• Pedagogical and aesthetic shift from preindustrial era

Precedents:

• English arts and crafts movement
  • William Morris interest in the revival of medival art
• Art Nouveau

Influence:

• Rejection of contemporary 19C architecture; how its understood as recombining styles that has been done – derivatives of the classical past
• Escapacism: Return to handcraft and nature

Adolf Loos Villa Muller 1928

• Important influence for the Bauhaus
• Radical Diminishing exterior ornamentation
• Material visual interest; use of marble rather than applied ornament that is randomly classical
• However, difference is not interest in total design

Deutsche Werkbund (another important influence)
Behrens AEG Turbine Factory 1908
Gropius & Meyer Gagus shoe Factory 1911

• Not hiding what the structure of the building is behind a false facade
• Clear visibility of steel and glass
• Influence by Factory design in America, embracing it more aesthetically

Feininger Cathedral of the Future woodcut 1919

• Total design
• Monumental architecture
• Site of Gesamtkunstwerk
• Style: Expressionism + looking back to the medival
• The bauhaus is thinking abt modernity but is looking at the models of the medival
• Describes its relationship between students and teachers - A medival model
  • teachers: workshop
  • Students: apprentices

1919-1923 aesthetic shift: different relationship to industry

• Embrace of geometric rationalism
• Constructive aestheticism
• Reasons for shift:
  • 1923: school is struggling financially; thinking about how to align w the industry more closely
  • Key figures came and went and created the shift

Gropius Bauhaus 1925

• Advertise with the structure of the building
• Glass curtain wall – major feature of modern architecture
• Using steel, reinforced concrete and glass - all structural decorative component
• Interior: student apartments + auditorium
• Very minimal design

Bauhaus curriculum

• Basic course “Vorkors” developed by Johannes Itten who’s interested in spirituality
• Basis for most arts department in America
• Vorkurs projects
  • Mirkin Contrast study in various materials 1920
    • What are the material properties of different things

Muche Haus am Horn 1923

• Radical minimal ornament
• Economy of the sue of space

Bauhaus Design

Approach to design: rationality, formalism, functionalism
What is the minimum of a chair? How to emphasize its properties?

Marcel Breuer Armchair 1922

• Vs. African Chair 1920
• Shift away from applied colors (expressionist mode) to material properties of wood
• Influence of de stijl
• Most known for his Tubular steel
  • Club Chair “Wassily chair” 1927
  • Chair (model B33) 1927
  • Etc.

Marianne Brandt

• Woman!
• Creating designs that are about simplifying as much as possible and keeping whats useful
  • Bedside Table Lamp 1928
  • Teapots 1924
    • Advertise the properties of the materials
    • Silver, ebony
    • Simplified geometric forms can be industrially produced
  • Ceiling Lamp 1925

Bauhaus textiles

Albers

Kandisnky at the Bauhaus 1921-33
Composition VIII 1923
Yellow, Red, Blue 1925

• Spiritually informed experessionism → systematic way of approaching color

Joost Schmidt
Herbert Bayer

Bauhaus Theater

Oskar Schlemmer

• Speaking in tongue as an abstract performance
• Embracing geometric mode – second stage of the Bauhaus

Slat Dance 1927
Dance in Space Bauhaus stage demonstration 1927

• Expanding the Bauhaus interest in the Gesamtkunstwerk
• Theorizing space; thinking about the stage/ the room without the fourth wall
• Bauhaus first institution to think about performance
• Diagram of space; reconcile tension
• Geometricizing in connection to performance and the human body
• Challenging the idea w/in theater tradition that space is subordinate to the human figure; flipping the hierarchy
• Reconfiguring of human in terms of space

Das Triadische Ballett, Figureplan 1924

• In three parts

• For three dancers

• 12 parts within

• 18 costumes

• Emphasis on visual transformation of the human body

• Not talking about classical ballet but ballet as a movement outside the context of theater

• Movements as geometric arrangement of figures in space

• Connection to cubism, geometricizing body and space

• Playful costumes → circus

  • Thinking about theater history: how to take the stock characters that have different interactions w each other and bring them to a machine context

• Human figure in relation to the idea of a puppet – mechanized body

• Focused on rational machine, mechanical abstraction compared to Hugo Ball

• Taking the idea of the black act to a kind of African american experience

• Referring to the Triadische ballett through the costumes

• But also having her dancers perform a voguing vocabulary

• Forges a connection between contemporary dance mode with historical avant garde

Hausmann Spriti of the Age: Mechanical Head 1919

• Dada Berlin
• The automoton – automation of the body
• Less obviously mechanical

Hannah Hoch w doll 1921

• The doll is both a new automaton, and something that is evoking childhood → primitivism of the doll
• Doll → allegorical
• Describing the experience of becoming modern; feeling like ur being controlled by the external world, becoming a commodity
• Nostalgia baked in – not totally pessimistic

4/2 Surrealism

• Offshoot of Paris Dada activity

• Has a broader reach – due to literary magazines
• Andre Breton “Surrealist manifesto” 1924
  • Thinks of himself as the one who gets to decide who gets to be a Surrealist
  • A literary figure, first thought of surrealism as a literary movement
  • Definition of Surrealism: psychic automatism in its pure state by which one proposes to express the actual functioning of thought
    • Capturing a way of life, not a new set of formal innovations but rather new revolutionary proposition
    • Rejecting reason itself and rational control of thought in favor of quirks of thought and the unconscious
    • Desire to reconfigure life itself
    • In art: visualize the unconscious
• Psychology: mental illness
• Goal: to cure mental illness
• Surrealists understand mental illness as a means of being liberated from social norms
• Not intersted in the psychotherapy but experiences that facilitate mental liberation
• Making space for the abnormal in reality and undermining what normality is

Surrealism and psychoanalysis

• Illustrative relationship between Surrealism and Freud’s theories
• Fuse unconscious and conscious realism into new surreality
  • Societal scale (political stakes)
  • Visualizing unconscious
• Freudian model of unconscious as creative source: reservoir of energies and images/ motics; a lot of it has to do w childhood experiences
  • Sexuality and erotic desire (heterosexual pair)
  • Violence
  • Dreams
  • Fetishism: one object being able to consolidate sexual psycho energy
  • Castration anxiety
  • Uncanny: the idea of encountering something that has both a sense of familiarity and strangeness
    • Surrealists interested in producing uncanny by making familiar things strange
  • Psychological automatism

Artistic influences

• Symbolism
  • Moreau The Apparition 1876
    • Escapism, mysticism, imagery of women and violence
• Naive art
  • Rousseau The Dream 1910
    • Self taught artists → greater authenticity; not formalist
    • Depicting dream worlds; strange uncanny style; juxtaposition of figures
• Metaphysical Art
  • De Chirico The Song of Love 1914
    • Strange spaces, distortion of scale

Key Surrealist Visual Strategies

• Automatism
• Biomorphic forms
• Magical or subversive realism
• Collage
• Part-object
• Self-portraiture

Automitism

Ray Recording a waking dream seance session 1924

• Interested in literally transcribing dreams
• Women as a medium; spiritual viechle → the typist
• Women as a medium as well as imagery
• Moving your hands so quickly that you can’t control what you draw

Andre Masson Battle of Fishes 1927

• Represents automitism
  • Strong connection to chance
  • What the work looks like is not planned ahead, it just happens
  • Different from the dada mode of chance which was irrationality not as an expression of any truer thing but for the sake of challenging bourgeois composition, for the sake of irrationality itself
  • Here chance means having the unconscious expressing itself
• Psychological idea of psychic automitism
  • Some kind of utterance that wasn’t consciously planned
  • Outburst of the unconscious
• Gestural marks that are unplanned; then add stuff to it to make it more obvious what he’s drawing
  • Gestural automitism
• Multimedia: oil, pastel, poured glue with sand

Max Ernst The Fugitive from Natural history 1926

• Strange animals

The Horde 1927

• Monstrous figures

  Both works:

• Multiple visual strategies

• Two examples of automatic strategies: frottage& grattage (meaning rubbing)

• Frottage: Creating images of strange otherworldly things

• Grattage: similar technique developed for oil painting

Dominguez Untitled 1936

• Decalcomania
• Inky watercolor material stripped onto paper and pressed with a second piece of paper and you peel it off, the arbitrary marks left behind are what you have
• You can also add stuff and create an image
• Inventing new modes to access the unconscious

Biomorphic forms

Hans Arp Woman 1927

• Evocative imagery
• Sense of abstraction + sense of body = biomorphic
• Viewers interpret what the hole, the waves mean

Miro The Birth of the world 1925

• Echo between geometry and imagery of birth

The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) 1923-24

• Abstract, quasi evocative forms
• Modernist painting in a surrealist mode
• surface tension
• Organic, semi anatomical structures

Relief Construction 1930

• Lines and squiggles translate to a physical relief sculpture
• Plakes of wood, nails → evocative organic forms

Giacometti Women with Her Throat Cut 1932
Male and Female (The Couple) 1928-29

• Biomorphic connected to motifs of violence and sexuality
• Insect like creatures take on a psychoanalytic component
• His figures often connect to existentialism
• Male as a penetration of the female curve

Oppenheim Red Head, Blue Body 1936

• Suggests bodily connotations of the forms

Tanguy Mama Papa is Woundeed! 1927

• Uses mode of naturalism
• Suggests lifelikeness of abstract forms
• Aquatic quality
• Some forms sit on top of canvas
• Fits w/in magical realism as well: dreamlike narrative + precise naturalistic depiction

Roberto Matta Years of Fear 1941-42

• Sci-fi landscape
• Combination of organic forms and gestural abstraction

Gorky The Liver is the Cock’s Comb 1944

• Gestural automitism
• Figurations
• Post war artistic movement in the US - abstract expressionism

Automatism + Biomorphic forms

• Pollock The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle 1942
• Guardians of the secret 1943

Magical/ subversive Realism

• A mode of figuration/ naturalism, going against the impulse to see the lifelike as reality
• Realism to undo our understanding of what reality is
• Typically involves naturalistic style but often objects dont necessarily go w each other
• Return of naturalistic technique
• Abstraction: formal exploration of line and color

Max Ernst Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale 1924

• Frame as a part of the work
• Assemblage element: knot
• Dreamlike ambiguity
• Depiction of dreamworlds

Salvador Dali The Persistence of Memory 1931

• Naturalism: disturbs our expectations
• The familiar shown in a strange way
• Biomorphic abstraction as well: using naturalism to depict abstract shape
• Inconsistency of shadowing
• Ants on the pocket watch

The Great Masturbator 1929

• Eroticism, Psycho sexual & dreamworlds
• Body and machine
• Disorientation, distortion of scale
• Insect: being a recurring motif → unsettled feeling

The Lugubrious Game 1929

• Play w scale
• The human mind as the starting of subversive elaboration

Luis Buñuel and Dali Un Chien Andalou 1929

• Surrealist Film
• Ants crawling out of a hole in the hand
• Anatomy + insect → repressed unconscious

Dora Maar Pere Ubu 1936

• Strange view of an armadillo

Magritte The Lovers 1928

• Interested in the uncanny

The Murderous Sky 1927

• Gestural background
• Strange repetition: Bird is repeated four times exactly the same
• Ideal experience of the uncanny: seeing something and having a sense of familiarity even tho you’ve never seen it before → the unconscious urge is consolidated in the object

Empire of Light II 1950

• Thinking about the nature of representation
• Representation undermined by the juxtaposition of the blue clouds and nightime streets

The Human Condition I 1934

• Painting a window in which you see the world → linear perspective, naturalism
• Surrealist engage in this belief to undermine it
• → A painting of a painting of a window
• Overlap between curtain and painting
• Is this representation an accurate reflection? We as viewers don’t have access
• Commenting on the assumptions of representation in relation to naturalism
  • We as viewers don’t have information, only representation; yet we choose to trust the representation as truthful when we come across a naturalistic painting

The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) 1929

• A naturalistic image of a pipe
• Text: this is not a pipe
• → it’s a representation of a pipe; an iconic sign that depicts what we think a generic pipe looks like
• → The text “this is not a pipe”
  • “This” refers to both the image and the word pipe
• Iconic + the linguistic → both representation of an object
• Magritte thinking about the arbitrary relationship between iconic linguistic signs and the object without breaking down the form of the object like Cubist artists did
• Troubling the very idea of representation

Remedios Varo The Juggler 1956

• Surrealist scene in Mexico
• Stylistic choice: detailed depiction
• Magician w animals

Gypsy & Harlequin 1947

• Dreamlike

Carrington And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur 1953

• Minotaur: recurring image in Surrealism
• A goat human whos trapped in the center of a labyrinth (metaphor for the human mind)
• A scene that is completely decontextualized so we get to invent what the characters are doing
• Fantasy: narrative mode; Fantastical tableau

Leonor Fini Two women 1939
Guardian of the Black Egg 1955

• (female artist) Affinity for the group but also working independently
• Female figures in strange settings
• Fantasy world building

Dorothea Tanning Little Night Music 1944
On Time Off Time 1948

• Strange architecture
• Erotic context

Kay Sage Tomorrow is Never 1955
In the Third Sleep 1944

• Architectural type of surrealism
• Extending the play w perspective
• Precise naturalism: allowing her to create abstract objects that also give us a sense of recognition

Exquisite Corpse

• A surrealist strategy
• Collision of styles
• A distributed mode of authorship: jointly produced images
• Version of autonomism that also produces figures
• Collective unconscious of the group
• Making collage beast type figures

Collage

“As beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table”

Collage novels
Ernst Quietude from La Femme de 100 Tetes 1929
Une Semaine de Bonte Wolume II: L’Eau 1933-34

• Depiction between dreams and reality
• Figures in his dreams are physically present
• Dreams: Onslaught of images
• Interest in the 19C. (a time period from which he draws inspiration)
• 19C as a ruin of the past
• The idea of the outmoded: conflation of the past
• The architectural ruins

Penrose Ariane 1934
Dons des feminine 1951

• Two women who go on an adventure together
• Queer femininity
• Orientalism

Dali Illumined Pleasures 1929

Object Assemblage
Man Ray Gift 1921

• Iron that shreds ur clothes
• Combination of existing materals

Oppenheim Object 1936

• The uncanny
• Fur + teaset
• Psychological disturbance
• The most famous surrealist object

Glove 1985

• Blood vessles

Das Paar 1936

• Interested in objects that women use

Dali Retrospective Bust of a Woman 1933
Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically 1931

• More things being assembled

Miro Object 1936
Joseph Cornell Untitled 1943
Taglioni’s Jewel Casket 1940

• American artist
• Interested in producing boxes
• Found objects in tableaus behind glass screen
• Psychological register

Found Objects & Images
Ray Photograph of Andre Breton’s “Slipper Spoon” 1934

• Found in flee market
• Spoon: represents woman (knife represents men)
• Physical manifestation of Cinderella ashtray

Oppenheim Beecovered bicycle seat, found photography 1954

• Unconscious is manifested in the object

Brassai Involuntary Sculptures 1933

• Automitism in everyday life

Part Object/ fetish

• Fetish comes from the idea of a sculptural religious practice in Africa
• Suggests theres a power within the object
• Commodity fetishism: the commodity consolidates different relationships of people
• Fetish represents an anxiety
  • Standing in and protecting against fear and an object that represents the fear itself
• Surrealist photographers interested in part object/ fetish objects

Brassai Nuder 1931

• The female body made phallic

Ray Anatomies 1929

• Chin made phallic

Minotaur 1934

• Transformation of the body through cropping and lighting

Boiffard Big Toe 1929

• Intersted in formlessness as a site of the unconscious
• Fragment as an eruption of the unconscious
• Taking something out of the everyday and bringing it into the realm of strange

Renger Patzsch Natterkopf 1925

• Interested in showing reality in a different way
• Aesthetic object
• Aestheticizing nature
• Pointing to texture

Giacometti Invisible Object 1934

• Suggests the apparatus of attitude toward the object

Bourgeois Janus Fleuri 1968

• Part object

Ubac The Secret Gathering 1938

• Exploiting the dynamics of the dark room technology
• Multiple exposure
• Fusing the reality and the unconscious

Ray Solarization 1929

• Over exposure: techniques for conjuring the unconscious through scientific technology

Moholy-Nagy Berlin Radio Tower 1928

• New perspective

Hans Bellmer La Poupee 1935

• Segments rearranged
• Boulbous quality
• Hand colored photograph

Self portraiture

Frida Kahlo The Two Fridas 1939

• Doubled self
• Heart break: bad relationship w husband
• Western attire on the left; indigenous mexican attire on the right
• Having one foot in the west and one foot in mexica

Broken Column 1944

• Magical Realism
• Disturbs our expectations for figuration
• To externalize physical and psychological pain
• Exploring gendered identity

Tanning Birthday 1942

• Lots of portraiture of women and animal
• Animal: Stance for her psychological state; strange energy in her life
• Eccentric outfit

Leonor Fini The Alcove 1941

• She’s very aware of her self presentation
• Photographs by Dora Maar

Cahun Slef-Portrait 1927 + 1928

• Photography as a site of performance
• Different versions of gender expression
• Noone photograph that represents the real version of herself
• They are all masks/ self-presentation
• Gender as a performance

Women and Surrealism
“I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist” – Leonora Carrington

4/11 Postwar Expressionism

• informal/Tachisme/Matiere/Art autre
• CoBrA (netherlands/ Denmark/ Belgium)
• Abstract expressionism (US)
• Key themes: insufficiency o representation, starting anew, nature of existence
• Influence of existentialism (Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir)
• By mid-50s perception of a humanist figuration and international expressionist abstraction (dominance of US avant-garde)

How can art help us redeem humanity
Representation is insufficient to communicate the horrors of the war

Jean Dubuffet “art brut”
Childbirth 1944
Will to Power 1949

• Figureation sitting on the plane, no sense of depth
• Primitivism: Art by children/ ppl who are ill
• Models for new type of art
• Participating in the avant garde tradition of “shock”
• Using imagery/ model of those who are outcast/ as a way of expressing his own discontent w Western culture
• Will to power, name comes from Nietzsche
• Mocking the supposed authority of the powerful and the ideas associated w Facism

Fautrier Oradur-sur-Glane 1945
Head of a Hostage 1944-45

• Made the series while hiding from the war in a psychiatric hospital
• Avoids figuration
• Visual reflection of auditory experience of hearing people getting killed
• Impossibiltiy of picturing horror
• Unsettling visual
• Technique: spreading paste paper glued canvas and using pastel pigmentation to adorn it while it’s drying
• Sickly pastel tone

Giacometti Tall Figure 1948

• His work in the 30s – surrealist mode
• Now emphasis on texture
• The Man is alone; he then make choices within this solitude
• Emphasis on figuration that is still inaccessible
• No matter how close you get to the sculpture it still feels far away
• Isolation of the individual

Three walking Men 1948

• Relation to the collective
• Togetherness not necessarily communal self-determination but shared responsibility
• Experience of existential loneliness despite being in the same space

Wols Bird 1949
It’s all over 1946
Painting 1946

• German living in Paris
• He never assimilated into French society
• Experience of isolation
• Awareness of his own presence in his work
• Gestural abstraction: the gesture itself is expressive
• Uniform mode of applying paint
• Expressionism itself as being authentic
• Gesture mark: expression of artist interiority, his tortured persona
• Context: coming out of surrealist automatism
• Its not abt imagining the unconsioucs but metaphor for existence more broadly/ general model of subjectivity
• Flattening of the plane, emphasis on materiality

Artaud Self-Portrait 1946

• Off shoot of surrealism
• “Theater of Curelty”
• Like Sartre, making sense of the world after war
• Emphasis on direct sensory experience
• The world is in crisis, theater offers an immediacy of experience to access truth
• Theatrical analogy of pure gesture

Abstract Expressionism

Jackson Pollock One 1950

• Gestrual abstraction

Rothko No. 3/No. 13 1949

• Color filled mode

Newman Onement I 1948

• Signature motif
• Analog for the human form

CoBrA: expressionist group based in Copenhagen, Brussels Amsterdam

• Interested in the drawings of children
• Motifs of animal: model for returning to base existence and begin again