Modern Art

China we've never been to America before and it you know it was taught in a very rigid kind of way and I remember after class he asked me well doctor Lewis what day did modernists begin and being like what the heck are you kidding me but no it was literally he thought you could just have a beginning point that was very precisely recordable and a finishing point or something too that's not really the way humans work there's a lot of overlap there OK so let's turn our attention to this world modern the modern is historical period now where we get a lot of the ideas that we're still using we'll talk about those little bit more later and we're going to see that there's a shift in emphasis and the professional world of art which is generally what we study now I happen to be really interested in Elkhart and what we sometimes call outsider arms but that's not so much in history books that's sort of like a separate category of research and study and there there are specialists in folk art and are definitely specialist in in out so-called outsider art and outsider art often just showing galleries so it's part of the post modern way of thinking but not so much the modern way of thinking so if we think about modernity it comes from this French poet and critic named Sharon Blair spelled like Charles in English chavalier VAUDELAIRE Blair well there was famous for chiefly as a poet and sometime wrote this epic poem called the fluid mouth change the flowers of evil the flowers of evil and he coined the term romanticism and modern modernity modernity with an E on the end of it with an accent over the modernity to describe the world that he was living in and as a critic he started doing reviews of the annual salon salon exhibition were put on by the French government countries all over Europe and even America we had these salon system by then and he made a big point in fact I'll put a poster reading on D2L for you just the just the next track and he he made a point of showing how when he went to the exhibition that even he said everybody's painting better and better but it's the same thing the same thing all the time and he was bored with that everything had to be Greek or Roman subject matter ohh maybe an Egyptian theme they're there but had to be historical or or it had to be religious or it had to be about royalty something like that and he he realized that that was kind of just not where we were not as people that something had happened by the middle of the 19th century we had a change in the social order and instead of just the people of the very top determining what our thought to be that now we had a new audience that artists were coming from the middle class the French called the bourgeoisie to be bourgeois middle class upper middle class and he said look he's looking around and he's seen all these shopkeepers and lawyers and drug store owners and train operators all these sort of new people who didn't exist 30 years earlier and said you know what you people have you are really the people who have the power now you know the class you're determining where we are so maybe our artist ought to pay attention to you instead of that OK so he started writing about what was going on in the art world and cursing up around the same time we started having some artists who became interested in what we used to call genre painting scenes of everyday life but the difference was it was a scene of their lives a kind of life that had not existed before not in very large numbers maybe a middle class all the way back to even out the same the Middle Ages but they were very tiny part of the population most people were poor most people a very tiny percentage of the people own most of everything else and that's probably still true in our time but really the middle class is there so that's part of our modern experience is most of us are within or just above or just below middle class that's individual occupation or income your social status and the way you think about the world you live in so well there is saying we need to get rid of just to focus on ancient renaissance Greek and Roman art and start paying more attention to now so when you think about modernism 1st the two words the new and the now a new not the old and the past but the new and the now now though there didn't mean that you had to not ignore the past and he didn't mean that at all he said just give us a break from it it doesn't have to be everything it doesn't have to be Greek and Roman all the time so I think this is something about the way we think today we do get bored we get bored with the same thing all the time partly because we've got more time to think people who lived in the 18th century worked 6 1/2 days a week and have time to be bored they just didn't you know you had stuff to do OHP thankfully we do have time on our hands to to get bored and maybe figure out ways to build that time in a meaningful way so the new emphasis and note that we're new what does the word new mean OK So what it implies that whatever we're dealing with wasn't there a little while ago a little while ago so this new arch or a new audience the bourgeoisie this middle class we got new stuff for you so we're going to see that the stuff that they're painting the stuff that they're carving the designs of the buildings and although there's a bit of historicism there it's gonna look different so the look of things is gonna change with a new awareness about living in the now yeah there you go and it's and it's showing will be coming up as we see on the screen so with this idea of the new and now or modernism the notion contemporaneity to the of your own time bolaris saying you know what we need to pay attention to the world we live in and he writes about and I'll probably even a little extract or something you wrote later on so a new a new kind of style in reaction to what the salon artists were doing all that historical stuff what he calls modern body painting schemes of the new middle class world and then relating to that is looking at the world itself nature both the natural order of things like the barbizon painters going out in the woods or the new urban teams that didn't exist before Paris in the 1850s was still largely in medieval city there were a lot of streets that were about that yeah you could get your meal in a bag on one side but not both sides if someone else going the other direction all that got torn down in the late 1860s early 70s and you you had a modern city built by a man named Baron houseman and houseman invented the Blvd. Blvd. Blvd. It's a wide St. There's something special though about what an actual Blvd. not just wider it has meridians in what a Meridian is it's the thing that divides the lengths so the new Paris you have these streets come out like spokes from a wheel and they were big and there was strips of land in the middle of it where you had benches and trees probably a squirrel with you and your your transport which was still poor strong typically in the 60s and 70s seventeen 60s and 70s but man you could breathe and there would be something called pavement which you know I call the sidewalk and we don't have any of those anecdotes but the sidewalks were huge so you have these other wonderful thing he's called cafes Starbucks before Starbucks so the idea was you could I'm on the street and watch people go by but you didn't really do it before when you had the narrow streets which by the way people who are living on both sides would dump their garbage and they're what could be called night soil into the street do have an umbrella you're walking down on those narrow alleyways and it's stunning to high heaven but these new broad boulevards also had summers so we had not only big streets but clean streets obviously the time OK so the world was changing was becoming more urban and people were becoming for being you are BAE city slippers and that's the words so the middle class was new and their attitude was changing their attitude was changing the change tends to change faster in the city than it does in the country you got more interaction with people from different parts of your country and often from the world and port cities tend to be the most i would say rapidly change because you're getting in people from more and more parts of the world so the world was getting bigger so modern life is an emphasis on contemporary living in this newly created environment that was the school's place in the world that was true for music too a lot of jazz musicians in America garlands Chicago pass believe it or not Paris so modern life is bringing this new attention to right now and then now is gracing the new so let's think about these conditions what makes this possible but I like to call these conditions of modernity I didn't come up with this idea but I think it it suits it very well so here's what we've got this new new concepts of digital reality So what does that mean and and why where why we have:

1.      new concepts of physical reality and the 19th and 20th century what what changed our way of thinking about the world within what was that said that their whole cities are different and these are various OK they're actual city is different right now she's very different from ancient cities although there were some ancient cities that had plumbing ohh right but not quite that they didn't right it wasn't for the middle class right yeah OK so we can take that back to the late 18th century what we what we call the age of enlightenment and different ways of thinking about philosophy and science trust and science but by the middle of the 19th century that trusted science led to something else inventions so the modern sewer is concept think of things like toilets go familiar with how grand and glorious the Palace of Versailles is no toilets and i wouldn't want to go to one of those parties you know not with a little help.

·        Photography

·        Telescope

·        Helped due to the industrial revolution

·        Early 19^th Century, technology helped from making a 2 week trip to 2 hours. How does it make us think about the world?

·        More responsibility of the world around us

2.      New concepts of artistic traditions

·        Atomic Bomb

·        We understand the world a different way

·        Salan System

·        They pick the pieces that are like their own, discourages creativity

·        The Pre De Rome was the prize

·        Discourages optimism

·        More freedom to do what you want to do

·        Ancient of social change

3.      Development of Avangard change

·        Bohemia= someone from bohemia

·        They didn’t follow social behaviors

·        Risk takers

·        Youth culture

·        Willing to test the status quo

·        Older people did become risk takers

·        Younger people tend to push the boundaries

·        Avangard= the cutting edge

·        People who were driving change

·        Made radical sacrifices

4.      Changes in expressing form and content

·        Form= technique to structure things

·        Changing the look

·        Content= Merger of subject and form

·        Specific thing

·        Renewed content

·        Abstraction

·        The essence of modernism is CHANGE

·        Were constantly changing

·        Instantaneity= living in the moment

·        Modern attitude of living, they were focusing on the afterlife

·        There is not a premium on modernity today

Typical American to to list you know to to use the first thing that pops in your head and you talk about honor and art I think a lot of Americans would say Jackson Pollock he's sort of the quintessential modern we sometimes in our history called abstract expressionism hi modernism not because they were smoking but because it's sort of a pinnacle like the high renaissance were all the big ideas kind of come together the 1940s seemed to be such time OK and Pollock represents that total abstraction total non objectivity but he didn't invent any of that it was already there but he did was he kind of pulled it all together and train it changed the way we thought about it again remember expressing form and content Pollock is it was this this painting on the floor he's stepping into the canvas stepping out he's in a way he kind of dancing his way through the painting sounds kinda weird Rembrandt how did Rembrandt paint against an easel it was always vertical and sometimes when he had tiny details yet do something all them all stick maybe we still have these out the most if you rest your wrist you paint it with your fingers like this you can really precise clean lines the bladder and stuff around slashed it poured it dripped it sometimes you know what one of the jokes when they call me Jack the dripper doing kind of what you were doing but you know what you should amazing very complex pictures that have an extraordinary count of depth to them but no real subject although they often gave them names like out of rhythm you know maybe sick invokes the colors of motion of a windy day in the fall it should have looked like on me well I could ramble of the barriers Greenbrier going going going to see in the winter so this idea of moving away from the notion of the painting is canvas that is your final product to begin thinking of it is really more so to the evidence of what the painter did but the real artist now not the object but the person who made it movement of the body sort of way of thinking about what art is there is an late 1940s early 50s but for our purposes because most we're not gonna deal much with American artists because there's a separate class in American art bargain purchase the quintessential name and modernism to meet unquestionably it's political also to their establishment a lot of great modernism payments pending of course the cost saving his name and where else Harris there's this till the center of the universe in the early 20th century we came from Barcelona and this is the kind of painting that he did at the age of 15 15 yeah I hate it I actually studied art before it became an artist and I can draw pretty well but remember we talked about that's the first thing that teenager will tell you I'm bored because I got bored with this you know what do you know it's it's just what you were expected to do in the Academy in the 19th century and that was done in 189596 at winter for his parents were professional artists so he arrived as far as the academic system was concerned as a teenager he ends up making stuff like this this is modern this I think we might call traditional it happened in the late late 19th century so historically it's in the modern era but we wouldn't really describe it as modern in context or presentation as well as more of a baroque feel to it and a modern feel and maybe a neoclassical feel late 18 so again as a young man and Casa is willing to take a lot of risks including changing painting from being painting to being collage a mixture of painting and prefabricated materials and replacing the whole concept of the an imitation Guild ohh free put an actual throw instead so we're changing our expressive form and really rethinking what the content is with our skill aperture took a few other 20th century modernist here people around the turn of the century because I wanna I wanna kind of kick back that idea that modernism is simply about becoming more abstract although that's that's an element that drives a lot of it it's only one element of of the picture so it doesn't mean we give up the human figure it doesn't mean we give up the landscape doesn't mean we have to give up still life or anything that has connection with reality what it means is rethinking how we do that how we express it in modern terms so even when we think about the past it doesn't necessarily mean we reject it lock stock and barrel I'll never do a Greek or Roman subject again no those were still considered perfectly valid or viable but not the only option and often even when we did refer to in antiquity we reinvented so if we look at say Gustav Klimt portrait of Adele bloch Bauer I look at the way she's painted and I see very strong elements of Byzantine art from the from the 13th century and Egyptian art from antiquity it's there that no one would ever think that this was something found in the Egyptian town because it's modern it's very clearly modern the structures especially the geometric elements here and those eyes looking at you they look maybe a little bit like Egyptian the eyes of the divinity but they also look an awful lot like smooth muscle cells seen under a microscope so it's rethinking the past and using a kind of contemporary vocabulary if you will to make it new again remember modernism is the new and the now even when we're looking at the we can look at the past but we have to make it new you can't just copy it you can't constantly simply sample things without giving into context if you sample you're putting it in a new context you've changed it in the process it's no longer what it was before so you've reinvented it made it modern so that was a possibility so God portrait an elbow power here markets have been around for quite a while and he came into the room and our our modern quote UN quote modern way of thinking about portraiture gates to the 15th century Italian renaissance and the northern renaissance about the same time before that portraiture was basically emperors and popes things like that and it was really not very realistic by and large because those people were thought to be superhuman you didn't want them to be limited by their physical appearance you wanted them to be larger than life figures but we look at clamps here he's not really painting like a renaissance artist the 15th 16th or broke ours have 17 or 18 so dream in the 19th century there's something very different about this woman it's still a portrait but it's not a portrait painter of the Renaissance tradition what makes this difference think about that for a second I'm sure you've seen a few work and some money way not to say that appearance isn't weird because it is but then you just basically she's not in the center OK #1 when you think about a renaissance portrait your eye comes to the center the main figures can be in or very near the center the group portrait the more important people we generally speaking tend to be in the middle of the lesser lesser behaviors like parents and children the parents would be towards the middle usually and the children kind of fan out from that OK you gotta a coronation of an emperor and they're gonna be kind of in the middle or your eyes can be directed very close to the note whereas here she's not in the middle and where is her head way up towards the top a renaissance painting her head would be here right here here it's like where do you sort of your eyes pushed off into the canvas so it's a radically different way that it it doesn't seem so radical to us why because we've had modern parts since then but at the time this was seen and I think you even said it strange it's still a little but but it would have been very strange when it was new very strange to most people so and look at the color of her of her base she got this sort of pancake white makeup overdose the Rouge polyps are kind of over painted and the eyebrow so she has a a painted face which again makes her sort of artificial which was an idea that was out there in the 1890s and 19 teens about being unreal rather than real and so it's an elegant woman sophisticated lady from Vienna she wanted to have that appearance of being something not exactly predictable to be kind of idealized to prove it so we want to think about you know modern artists have a lot of freedom to do what they want but remember if you're doing a party you're doing some on Commission you also have to remember the person that's commissioned it has to say in it too and that's still true of a lesser and now artists have a lot more bargaining power determining what they do today and and they they used to have OK now also with female figure but very different kind of image this is a pretty scary picture in my mind of 80 so it seems to be about possession of physical and maybe a spiritual mean this this seems to be kind of a monstrous figure here it's almost the rape scene in some ways but it's not so much a physical rape it's a psychological 1 so this we call this style expressionistic so we're dealing with intensity emotional content and we're using the imagery to hype up that feeling of being emotionally snapped there's something kind of painful about looking at this so art isn't always about being beautiful or elegant or graceful like she is definitely all of those things but maybe about being vulnerable being afraid being compromised and being used in some way and so it's it's a different way of confronting maybe the the less savory aspects of reality because they're there too and this is something else that I think is really important about modern art it's willing to go there it's going to go there sometimes if you're if you just refuse to acknowledge that there's bad stuff going on nothing changes but if you bring it out in the open you know we kind of have to confront it a little bit more when we see it you can't pretend it's not happening so that's something else I'm it's really important to understand about modernism but we tend to think that modernism is a rejection of people that you know the artist sort of living in their ivory tower like an academic but I think it's it is true that our should trying to they're trying to touch into their Infinity and deeper way and and and a less predictable way than might have been in earlier March or at least art that have been around long enough that they'd be comfortable OK alright So what are my favorite artists of the modern era and again we skipped over a lot of 19th century stuff we will focus mostly on the first half really the first third of the 20th century but we'll spend a good deal of time in the 19th century the beginning couple of weeks and then we'll we'll probably make it to about 194045 somewhere there in this class so anyway my one of my favorite artists at this time really any historical moment is already notice in ATI SAT but Jesse was a about the same age as Picasso they knew each other they were friends but they were also competitors they had kind of a really competitive spirit and reacting to each other's work quite a bit atish died in the 50s and Picasso really he missed him and he did a whole series of artwork to honor the teachers and that you know complimented his style so I think that says a lot about the camaraderie of competitors it's kind of like in sports you know you respect your opponents there's that that feeling so British was a bit of an anomaly because he was really in his 30s before he became an artist a professional artist that's kind of late do you think that most modernist beginning in around around 20 or 24 somewhere in there if you were a little bit earlier a few a little bit later but he said his 30s well into his 30s before became professionals so that's kind of unusual so I just wanna say it's not impossible you can change you can change the horse midstream once in a while and succeed and he definitely did he still had a pretty long career lived a pretty good pretty good life so this is called the red studio on the left and on the right Icarus which is a collage this is a it's paper cutouts he in his old age he developed arthritis and it became very hard for him to hold the paintbrush you know when you have to hold your basically you got 2 fingers and a thumb here holding your paintbrush for long period of time if you're threading that's painful and if you're seriously arthritic it's really painful but he he discovered that if he used the house painters brush he didn't have to grab it so tight he could use his whole hand and and so he would paint the paper and then he had a huge knife for big handles and scissors and the scissors you're moving your joints which release relieve some of the joint pain by simply by moving it so he was able to keep working when a lot of people were given up he just kept found a different way to do it and that's what I think is the mark of a true artist artist of problem solvers you got a problem the worship connection or or you find out a way to fix it and so even about to give up being an artist because changing what he did and he still makes some Pretty Little stuff I mean this is 1947 when I first saw this image someone asked me what would you think this was you know what looks like about 1972 to me it looks like pop art it really does 1947 it's pretty amazing that he was doing work like this at that point started studio which we'll spend a little bit of time talking about later on this actually started out is the blue studio what happened it went red why and we'll we'll try to see if we can figure out what went on there and one of the readings I will have for you know I'll post readings occasionally not a lot of it but a little bit here and there I'll post on the D2L they'll be on your contents module I'll I'll wrap up with the study guides are the syllabus is there the exams will be posted there and occasional readings and maybe if there's some special assignment I'll put that there too but usually you don't have those kinds of things so there'll be some readings and and his famous notes the painter who's good translation of it I'll put all extracted that and I would encourage you to read it and then you read it a couple of times but it's really it really says a lot about how how we think and I like trying to get the hardest in mind when I look at modern art why why did you end up doing this so how did the Blues figure that out OK but let's think about this as an interior again that's a subject it's a content and it's a content that really if you think about what is his room it's his studio that's a favorite subject for artists going back all the way to the Renaissance so we got 400 years of precedence for this but there's now the studio painting before his time but we'll see what the muffler like this there's something new about it could say he renewed the studio picture there's some things that aren't here that we might expect to see an artist studio one of which is the artist usually in representation of an artist studio had two people at least two people and they are the artist and subjects like come all the artist and the model and it might be a specific person we're paying a portrait or very often because you're classically trained it might be a new figure standing there maybe a group but the artist and the model but you don't either have either wanted here but you do have a lot of art so we'll talk about that when we get to the something else that starts happening in the modern era it's actually kind of predates these works here but I want to kind of give you some 20th century things to look at on the left is to cover the the blue rider Almanac and on the right it's the cover of an exhibition catalog I called in targeted votes ausstellung is exhibition and this is the value book published by the Nazi German government regarding an exhibition of Antarctica means degenerate degenerate art which is the way they build communism because if you're running a fascist state what you want conformity you don't want originality you don't want people to think for themselves you don't want them to look at cultures other than your own so anything that smacked of something not Arian was bad it was deranged it was corrupt and so they put this guy together for an exhibition of modern art which they deliberately put on display in weird ways like hanging pictures Copyright or putting clashing colors together having a portrait stare into a corner of a room basic basic curatorial concept you've never paid portrait of a picture of someone looking at the corner of the room you just don't do that they're looking into the room for and a window or or a doorway or and you the viewer now we're looking into the corner of the room that's considered bad judgment in the art world that they did that deliberately to make it look like the arts bad because it was hung like not to be insulting to junior high students but like a junior high student you know Vegas show with anger show so they went out of their way to attack modernism so this is the other thing I want us to be aware of we take freedom of what we do in chronic and modern art for granted but now he's like that some people spend time in jail because of the artwork they made you couldn't so that they did it actually broke informally contact bold previous