Modernism and the Visual Arts Flashcards

Flashcards covering the key vocabulary and concepts from the lecture on Modernism and the Visual Arts.

Vortex

A whirling, spiraling mass of fluid or air, especially a whirlpool or whirlwind; Implies catastrophe and asserts a reality that is menacing, disturbing, and ominous.

Fauvism (1900-1910)

A group of French artists (Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Andre Derain etc.) known for their use of bold, non-naturalistic colors applied directly from the tube.

Fauvism Major Contribution

Radically separates colour from its descriptive, representational purpose, allowing it to exist on the canvas as an independent element, representing the artist’s subjective vision and a state of mind.

Cubism

Breaks up the picture into a series of planes viewed from different vantage viewpoints with an utter disregard for tradition and conventional standards of Renaissance perspective.

Cubist Painters Approach

Dislocation and fragmentation of form to render the essence of objects rather than copying nature.

Analytic Cubism

Also called ‘hermetic’; reduced to a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks.

Synthetic Cubism

Colour reappears (bright, flashy), size scales are not realistic; real objects are introduced in the artworks (e.g., ‘papier collé’ coloured paper, ‘collage’ other objects).

Futurism

An Italian art movement led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that attacked traditions and attempted to find a new beauty in technology, industry, and the modern machine.

Luigi Russolo – Dynamism of a Car

Fragmenting the appearance of motion de-constructing it into new entities that are then rearranged into a new interpretation

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson - The Arrival

Energetic with vibrant and bold colours and geometric shapes and intersecting lines; shows energy, movement and menace

English Cubism (Cubo-Futurism) or Vorticism

An avant-garde response to French Cubism and Italian Futurism using geometric, abstract imagery.

Vorticism

Founded by Wyndham Lewis, artists observe the kinetic energy of modern society from a fixed vantage point and explode in sharp angles and planes.

Wyndham Lewis – A Battery Shelled

Shows the German shelling of a British artillery.

Lewis represents the soldiers

Showed British soldiers as “insect-like, scuttling for cover” and the German soldiers are given “naturalistic” facial expressions conveying a sense of disengagement and indifference to the chaos before them.

Surrealism

An artistic and literary movement founded in Paris in the 1920s by André Breton to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.

Salvador Dali - The Persistence of Memory

Though set in a realistically-rendered landscape, features bizarre subject matter evocative of a dream or the product of induced hallucination

Paul Nash - We are Making the New World c.1918

Depicts the aftermath of the battle of Passchendaele; showed the ghastly destruction of war through landscapes of shattered trees with the sun rising above blood-red clouds; the whole landscape is a body

Modernism

Modernism was characterized by the deliberate departure from tradition and the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the arts of the early and mid-twentieth century.

Fauvism =

French current (1900-1910); = wild beasts; strikingly colorful works combined with traditional paintings; They don’t use colors to paint reality, but to paint their thoughts, feelings etc. It is the first art movement towards modernism. They do not use the three-dimensional space, they would rather paint flat areas.

Cubism =

splits from the rules of the Renaissance, and is represented in paintings as subjects are split into numerous pieces. Cubism breaks into ANALYTIC CUBISM and SYNTHETIC CUBISM.

Futurism =

characterized by the new technology, such as cars, the Proletariat cult, industry. The Futurists contradicted traditionalism and criticized it

Surrealism =

founded in 1920s by Andre Breton; by its existence it describes dreams or surrealistic experiences; found both in art and literature; surrealism was influenced by the psychoanalyses of Sigmund Freud, who thought that dreams are the projections of the unconscious mind.