Modernism

MODERNISM

Modern

• relates to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past

• characterized by or using the most up-to-date techniques, or equipment

• denoting the form of language that is currently used, as opposed to any earlier form

• denoting a current or recent style or trend in art, archticture, or other cultural activity marked by a significant departure from traditional styles and values

Modern etymology

Latin 'modo' (just now)

Modernism

• began to be used in the late 16th century, delineating the period off medieval and ancient times
• movement in scoiety and culture that sought to reflect the experience and values of industrial life

Raymond Williams

• wrote about modernism as a retrospective title in his book, When Was Modernism?

Modernism as a retrospective title

• only given after the fact
• artist could be innovating, might occasionally use the word 'modern', but not consider themselves modernists

Modernism as a time of divisions

• across political inclinations, artistic movements, both between and within them

Modernism's canonization after WWII

• now relegates these ideas into the recesses of the past and eventually absorbed into a capitalist market

Industrial Revolution

• played a huge role in art and culture towards the 19th century
• massive societal shift from farming communities into large scale productions

What did the Industrial Revolution introduce?

• factories, concept of working days (hours, minutes), development of new technologies, exploitation of natural resources

First Locomotives

• factories once powered by water moved into steam

Working Conditions of the Industrial Revolution

• increasingly dangerous
• concepts of work safety were not yet standardized
• child labor still employed
• brutal deaths occurred mostly with children
• further demand for slave labor in the colonies producing raw materials (sugar, tobacco, coffee, palm oil)

19TH CENTURY: REALISM

Promotion of Neoclassicism

• phenomenon of the art school and art academies

Art Schools

• these schools taught artists that their work needs to be 'instructive, morally uplifting, refined, inspired by the classical tradition, a good reflection of the national culture, and above all, about beauty

Art schools brewed the desire to?

• art schools brewed the desire to create works that spoke to their modern era, not just reflect on the past

Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

• Paris, est. 1648

Royal Academy of Art

• London, est. 1768
• patterned after Paris

Hierarchy in painting

1. History painting
2. Portraiture
3. Genre painting
4. Landscapes
5. Still life

History painting

• highbrow subjects from classical traditions

Portraiture

• capturing likeness

Genre painting

-everyday life

Landscapes

• rural or urban topography

Still life

• explore color and texture

Highest type of painting in the hierarchy

History painting

Lowest type of painting in the hierarchy

Still life

Features of the hierarchy

• most had moralizing undertones
• size also reflected the hierarchies

A Burial at Ornans

• large-scale work, which was often reserved for history painting realism
• depictions of an ordinary funeral (his great-uncle) with ordinary figures, grave digger is central to the piece
• members of the church are seen, but they are not given more importance over the people in this painting
• Christ is depicted as a sculpture, an object in use, firmly planting this painting in the real and modern world
• people in mourning, not in any idealized position or appearance
• highlighting the agency of each person, a sense of introspection

Gustave Courbet

• main realism proponents in France
• believed that artists should be creating work of their time

Painting according to Gustave Courbet

• essentially a concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things
• completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects
  • object which is abstract, not physical, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting

Rue Transnonain, Honore Daumier

• depiction of the aftermath of a brutal massacre involving soldiers protecting silk workers in Lyon
• surprise attack, still wearing bed clothes
• captured the brutality of the event with a child under the figure

L'Association Mensuelle Lithographique

• a monthly publication of caricatures that published the Rue Transnonain

Le Dejeuner sur L'herbe, Edouard Manet

• originally titled Le Bain (The Bath)
• rejected by the official Salon (Royal Academy in Paris), instead exhibited at the Salon des Refusees
• features figures that are clearly modern
• nude woman is recognizable (Manet's model, not a nymph or figure in mythology), as well as the 2 male characters (Manet's relatives)

Salon des Refusees

• Exhibition of Refused Works

Manet's relatives

• Manet's relatives as models created a sense of discomfort in the viewer

Strange rendering in Le Dejeuner sur L'herbe

• figure in the back seems to be olarge for her distance to the foreground, nude woman appears to have flat 'studio lighting'
• loose brushstrokes, atypical style that would not be approved by the academies = forwarding artistic choices rather than that was prescribed

A Road in Louveciennes, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

• broke off from the state-sanctioned art exhibitions to pursue different ways of artmaking
• saw importance in landscape painting
• paintings are characterized by their sketchy renderings full of light
• attention to atmosphere
• plein-air
• influenced by Japanese painting

plein-air

• painting that highlighted the transient and fleeting

La Grenouillere, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

• citylife and middle-clas leisure interested the Impressionists

Societe Anonyme des Artistes

• established by young artists Claude Monet and Edgar Degas

19TH CENTURY: POST-IMPRESSIONISM

Felix Feneon

• He noticed after Impressionism, artists departed from the movement

Georges Seurat

• main proponent of Post-Impressionism

Optical mixing

• lacing of pigments beside each other

Colors of the skin

• pink and orange, but also blues, maroons, and greens

Night Cafe, Vincent Van Gogh

• cafe where Van Gogh would drink in the evenings
• place for night prowlers

Michel Chevreul's theories on color

• Van Gogh was influenced by this as colors interact with each other in a way that influences its appearance

Basket of Apples, Paul Cezanne

• rare signed painting
• first work in 20 years to be shown to the public in an exhibition in Paris

20TH CENTURY

World War I

• began with the assassination of Austro-Hungrarian archduke Franz Ferdinand

avant-garde

• new and usual or experimental ideas
• originally a French military term coming from advance guard

20TH CENTURY: DADAISM

Dadaism

• anti-art movement
• time of war and destruction
• international movement that traveled from Zurich to Berlin, New York, and Paris

20TH CENTURY: SUPREMATISM

Suprematism

• avant garde movement that emerged during WWI that sought to find new forms to depict reality

Realism in terms of?

• abstraction
• reality beyond what we usually experience

Kazimir Malevich

• pioneer of abstraction
• rejected the idea that realism in painting is representational to the world around us

What is real?

• the use and focus of formal elements, geometry, color is real in itself
• ability of artists to communicate a reality beyond materiality
• pure feeling and pure form

Black Square, Kazmir Malevich

• radical in its non-representation
• a time in Russia where Tsarist government is losing its power, society still heavily connected to the Orthodox church
• typically hung in the upper corner of the room, where Russian Orthodox icons are typically placed

20TH CENTURY: CONSTRUCTIVISM

1917 February Revolution

• monarchy was overthrown in favor of a provisional government, and Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia after his exile

1917 October Revolution

• Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Lenin, overthrew the government in favor of a socialist government

1922

• Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established

Establishment of Soviet Union

• avant garde had a historical responsibility: giving form to a state for the proletariat
• constructivists instead focused on material, which reflected the industrialization happening in Russia
• challenged Suprematism and Malevich, contending that they reflecetd bourgeois ideas

Monument to the Third International in Moscow, Vladimir Tatlin

• emblematic of utopian aspirations of the communist leas of Russia
• envisioned as a 20ft (6m) wooden sculpture but was never constructed
• part of a large-scale program that sought to replace all tsarist movements
• utilitarian, housing different offices and the top would be a radio station

Faktura

• literally translating to "texture" = textural structure of a work of art and the manner by which is constructed
• material world > spiritual concerns

Graphic design

• reflected optimism around industrializatoin and the building of the Soviet Union, focus on clarity and agitprop (agitation propaganda) to reach broad publics

Advertising

• way to engage with building a Soviet economy
• simple colors, font for emphasis
• white diagonal lines are prevented from hitting the globe by an enormous shoe

USSR in red as a focus of the world

Charles Kramer and Kim Grant

"Not only will buying rubber overshoes keep your feet dry, it will help to maintain Soviet dominance in the world"

20TH CENTURY: BAUHAUS

Bauhaus

house of building

• emerged as a school of architecture and interior design in Weimar later Dessau, Germany
• became the foundation of modern art schools, highlighting interdisciplinarity (mixing of design, architecture, performance, visual arts, craft, technology)
• can be read as a hopeful envisioning of a certain type of future after the events of WWI
• took inspiration from the medieval practice of craftsmen in the service of building cathedrals
• each person had a specific task to build towards a common aesthetic, social, metaphysical, philosophical, and spiritual project
• championing clean, rational, and formal principles as a foundation for all design in part as a palliative to the devastating effects of war

Walter Gropius

• founder of Bauhaus

Manifesto

• common during this time as a means to outline their ideas, cultural programs and political agendas

Bauhaus manifesto

• sought to abolish the distinction between artist and craftperson

mobilize all arts and crafts towards the creation environments

to foster links between the school and local manufacturers

Triadic Ballet (Das Triadische Ballet)

• explores the relationships of the human body and abstract space
• three dancers and three acts
• by Oskar Schlemmer