20 C artists - modern artists (some of em anyway!)

I am not going to try and put everybody I read about in here!  Just some of the more well known/interesting to me....

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
Spanish - came to Paris from Barcalona at the age of 19 at which point he had already mastered academic arts.  Said to be first modern artist with Demoiselles d'Avignon feted as first modern artwork.  Total departure from Western conventions - influenced by non-Western sculptures and visual arts e.g African, Aboriginal Australian etc.  Created Cubism with Braque.  Created first non traditional sculptures - using materials such as cardboard, found objects, bits of stuff stuck together.  Invented collage method with Braque.  Anarchic and experimental.  His thoughts on abstract art - "There is no such thing as abstract art, you must always start with something."

Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954)
Used simplified forms with flat areas of colour - part of the Fauve movement.  Called for art to express emotional responses with spontaneity and vividness.  Worked slowly and methodically making small adjustments until the relationships of colour and shape were what he felt was complete.  Observant and introvert watching his own reactions to what he was doing.

Kathe Kollwitz (1867 - 1945)
German female artist - painter, printmaker and sculptor.  'Might be called a pioneer expressionist but fiercely independent and outside any group'  Considered herself a realist - thought provoking and emphatic images.  One son killed in WW1 other in WW2 - worked on sculptures of grieving parents as a memorial to son killed in WW1 for many years, destroying first that she created.

Vassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)
Russian - in Munich from 1896 - 1914 plus long stays in Paris and Italy (then off to US).  Highly educated gave up Uni professorship to be an artist.  He experienced music in colour - synaesthesia.  He approached abstraction cautiously and saw the possibilities when he didn't recognise one of his own works when he saw it upside down - felt it had become just colour and shape.

Franz Marc (1880 - 1916)
Killed in WW1 . Starting to approach Kandinsky's levels of abstraction prior to death.  Loved animals and his works dominated by this.  I really like Fighting Forms - his most abstract work.

Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944)
Founder of De Stijl movement.  Knew the Cubists well but took more spiritual path.  Very abstract, based on natural objects e.g. trees.
 

Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968)
Younger brother of sculptor Duchamp Villon.  Ironic, witty, penetrating a born anarchist.  Had a dynamic futuristic vision of Cubism.  A Dadaist - his ready mades totally rejected accepted artistic rules.  Took objects and made into art just by the act of him having chosen them e.g urinal, bike wheel on a stand.

Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967) American painter - not associated with any movement.  Precisionist - close observation of his local down town neighbourhood.  Paintings of America post Depression.

Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954)
Mexican.  She was welcomed into the Surrelaist movement by Breton when he saw her work but she remained defiently outside it.  Surrealism was still very sexist at the time - e.g. Breton wrote about the problem of women and got the Surrealists together to discuss female sexuality but without inviting any females.  She painted her own reality - loads of self portraits exploring her body, sexuality and cultural identity.  She lived in chronic ill health due to an accident when she was young. 

Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989)
Spanish - most well known of Surrealists.  Tried to capture the hallucinatory clarity of his dreams called them 'hand painted dream photographs'  Went beyond ideas of most Surrealists - suggesting paranoiac and active advance of the mind - said only difference between himself and a madman was he wasn't mad!  Freudian symbolism very evident in his work e.g. phallic noses, fetishistic hair.


Rene Magritte ( 1898 - 1967)
Belgian - used Freudian imagery.  Disruptive, challenged assumptions about art.  Gave his works striking titles with ambiguous of no connection to the subject.

Joan Miro (1893 - 1983)
Spanish.  Breton considered him to be 'the most surrealist of us all'  Developed ability to let his subconscious create semi abstract forms.  Started painting then let instinct take over to create image.

Reading and DVD Unit 13

This unit looks at the visual arts from around 1900 to the outbreak of WWII.  It looks at modern art and the many movements and changes that occurred to the art world in this period.  There were a huge number of changes and the traditional art world was turned on it's head with artists trying to get away as much as possible for the academies and to create art from anything and everything.  Modern artists went against all naturalism and realism and the first truly abstract Western works were produced in this period.  I found I hadn't really realised how early modern art was being produced with hugely revolutionary and interesting works being created between 1900 and 1910.  Many of the movements were formed from ideologies and political ideas.

Freud's ideas of the subconscious greatly influenced artists of the time and this alongside a new interest in non Western art such as African sculptures and paintings led to a totally new way of looking breaking away from all previous conventions.

MOVEMENTS
PRE WW1

Successionists in late 1890s artists and architects in Vienna who broke away from the establishment and were anti academic.  Influenced by African arts, wanted to rid selves of civilised restraints.  Artists in this movement included Klimt - themes of subconsious, evil, death, love and sexuality.  Shela - sexuality and brutally direct images - very intense.  

Fauve - (Wild Beasts) shortlived movement in early part of century.  Linked to expressionism - naive art.  Artists used bold colours, round handling and anti naturalistic.  There are clashing colours and deliberate disharmonies - supposed to be expressive of the artists emotional reaction to the subject.

Cubism - as defined by Braque and Picasso (but they didn't exhibit or take part in Cubist exhibitions etc) Both representational and anti naturalistic at the same time.  Not abstract but not looking like the thing it represents!  Typically flat surfaces meeting at sharp angles (faceting).  Light used arbitarally not realistically.  Differing viewpoints used within same picture and of same object - think Picasso faces!

Futurism - An ideology more than just a movement.  Launched in Milan by poet Emilio Filipo Tommaso Marrietti in 1908.  Futurist manifesto published in Paris in 1909 - international impact.  Rather violent, leader felt that war was the 'sole hygiene of the world' - ideas to obliterate the past, burn the museums, drain the canals of Venice - wanted to replace with a new society, poetry and art based on dynamic sensations.  Boccioni was responsible for the Futurist manifesto of painting - says should represent the total experience not the impression.  A big emphasis on intuition.  Rejection of stable compositions, the action of the subject may already of passed by (?!) Proposed use of non trad materials.  Futurism ends in 1916 - short lived but huge impact and influence on Western art.

FROM WW1
De Stijl - Dutch movement - means The Style.  Founded in Amsterdam by painters Mondrian and Doesburg and architect Pieter Oud.  They felt that the ultimate goal of Cubism should be abstraction and that they should follow this through.  They had the ideas of purity, harmony and sobriety and felt these should make for a perfectly balanced society and individuals.

Dada - a state of mind rather than literary or artistic movement.  Anarchic, nihilistic and disruptive - against all establishment values, traditional ideas of good taste, against everything.  "The true Dadaist is against Dadaism"
Examples Duchamp's ready mades - just stuff that he decides to exhibit and thus becomes art.

Surrealism - Successors to Dada.  Close links with political revolutionarys - denounced bourgeois values.  As disruptive as Dadaists but not so spontaneously archaic.  Surrealist Manifesto published by Andre Breton in 1924 (in Paris) - emancipation from all restraints- to explore the world of psychic experience of Freud dream theory.  Dream and reality into absolute reality - Surreality.  Breton suggested 2 methods to subconscious - through dreams or autonism - trying to get away from the control of reason.  Many Surrealist were former Dadaists. Encompassed poetry, literary and visual arts.  Writers did automatic writing method. 

Constructivists - Russian movement.  Interested in function over aesthetic appeal and materials as appropriate to the needs of society.  Women working alongside men as equals.  Ideas for furniture, ceramics etc design.  Artists mission to express revolutionary prole aspirations and enhance physical and intellectual conditions.   Also architectural designs.  Many couldn't be realised due to lack of materials.  Short lived as Lenin's New Economic Policy put an end to it. 

Bauhaus - (House of Building) German design school.  Launched in 1919 by Gropius combining the School of Art and Crafts with the School of Fine Art.  Aims to rethink all aspects of what is needed for a new society - believed could bring about social change through creation of new visual environments.  Guidelines for 20th C design - architecture, furniture, ceramics, visual art everything necessary for life - no distinction between structural and decorative arts.  Took Constructivist ideas of simple functionality and used modern methods of manufacture - mass production and industrialisation.  However was felt to be elitist.  Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chair still in production 90 years later. 

TO DO - Unit 13 - end of September

Right then back to work!!!!

• Read Chapter 19 - Art from 1900 to 1919
• Read Chapter 20 - Between the two world wars
• Watch DVD episode 15 Between Genius and the Abyss
• Watch DVD episode 16 Between Utopia and Crisis
• Write up notes on reading and DVDs
• Write up about the artists of the period
• Annotate - a work by major European artist e.g. Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Klee or Beckman
• Collect images - 6 unexpected e.g fake by Elmir de Horty, unusual for the artist, little known artist
• Complete Project 13 - ground plan and works of art