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The Beginnings of Modernism
Modernism is an historical trend of thought that
affirms the power of human beings to create,
improve, and reshape their environment with the aid
of scientific knowledge, technology and practical
experimentation ā€“ i.e, it is both progressive and
optimistic.
Growing out of the Enlightenment and the Industrial
Revolution, it was one the dominant ideologies of the
20thC and continues to underlie and influence
contemporary cultural, social and political practices
around the world.
The term covers many political, cultural and artistic
movements rooted in the changes in Western society
at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth century.
In essence, the modernist movement argued that
the new realities of the industrial and mechanized
age were permanent and desirable.
Looking for Perfection
Broadly, Modernism describes
a series of reforming cultural
movements in art and
architecture, music, literature
and the applied arts which
emerged in the four decades
before 1914.
"Just as the ancients drew
the inspiration for their
arts from the world of
nature...so we should
draw ours from the
mechanized environment
we have created."
ā€”Antonio Sant'Elia
Manifesto of Futurist
Architecture (1914)
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Miss Evelyn Leigh Ralliston, of Teaneck, New Jersey winner of the costume contest at
the first annual Ectomo Halloween Masquerade Ball, 1919
Change is good
Embracing change and the present,
modernism encompasses the works of
thinkers who rebelled against 19thC
academic and historicist traditions.
They believed that the ā€˜traditionalā€™
forms of art, architecture, literature,
religious faith, social organization and
daily life were outdated in the face of
the new economic, social and political
aspects of an emerging fully
industrialized world.
Modern (quantum and relativistic)
physics, modern (analytical and
continental) philosophy and modern
number theory in mathematics date
from this period and contributed to
Modernist thought and creativity.
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Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase
Background to Modernism : The Age of Discovery,
Renaissance, Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution
Moveable-type press
ā€¢ encouraged widespread literacy and
ā€¢ an ever-greater emphasis on the individual
ā€¢ translations of the Bible in national languages
Reformation
ā€¢ Counter-Reformation
ā€¢ Humanism and the scientific method (The Enlightenment).
The Renaissance
ā€¢ reintroduced the observational method of the Ancient Greeks
ā€¢ valorised the democratic system born in Athens
ā€¢ human and individual rights, utopian ideals and new social
theories flourished.
New technologies and new understandings of the fundamental
laws of nature led to new industries and new wealth.
Global exploration opened up new parts of the world
ā€¢ new materials
ā€¢ new markets
ā€¢ new classes appeared
ā€¢ mercantile and innovative middle classes
Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein for a
1518 edition of Utopia by Thomas
Moore. The traveler Raphael Hythloday
is depicted in the lower left-hand corner
describing to a listener the island of
Utopia, whose layout is schematically
shown above him.
Social change
The old European social structures could not survive the onslaught of
religious turmoil, an increasingly demanding and powerful non-aristocracy
and rapidly changing demographics. The Age of Exploration had opened up
new resources and new markets for the burgeoning European economies.
Social struggles such as the 30 Year War tore countries apart and nations
fought amongst themselves ā€“ jockeying for position in Europe and for the
lionā€™s share of the spoils as they carved up the New World, and later much of
the Pacific and Asia, into colonies and ā€˜protectorates.ā€™
Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588-08-08 by
Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, painted 1796,
depicts the battle of Gravelines.
The Industrial Revolution (18th
-19thC) ā€“ money changes everything.
Despite the turmoil, in the long term
European populations benefited from the
flood of new goods, materials and money
that poured into Europe. Peasants left
their fields and poured into cities, which
grew rapidly and chaotically. Traditional
family and community structures were
shattered and a new kind of class, the
urban working class, developed;
unshackled and unsheltered by the feudal
structures of the past.
New mass-production factories, full of
machinery operated by women and
children working for near starvation-
wages, destroyed skilled artisansā€™
livelihoods. But new technology and new
methods of production also created new
opportunities and encouraged the growth
of universal education. Innovation bred
innovation, and science and technology
became the pastime of the day for people
of all classes.
Advances in knowledge,
particularly in the natural and
geological sciences, undermined a
literal belief in the Bible and a new
age of practical secularism began.
As the aristocracy became ever
more peripheral, destroyed by
their own traditions and privileges,
democracy began to spread and
the middle-classes became ever
more powerful.
Progress and human endeavor
began to replace ā€˜Godā€™s Willā€™ as the
driver of society.
Secularism
For an interesting essay and pics about the evolution
of the evolution cartoon:
http://www.howlandbolton.com/essays/read_more.php?sid=331
Having moreā€¦wanting it all: The birth of consumerism
Mechanisation made everyone richer (eventually)
and everything cheaper, but the Industrial
Revolution would not be so called if it had not
fundamentally changed society. In the Middle
Ages, Sumptuary Laws had made sure that
everyone knew their place in society. Only
Nobles, for example, were allowed to wear
luxurious materials and colours. The high volume
cheap production that new machines such as the
Spinning Jenny and power-loom made possible
needed new markets to be profitable. Now
anyone could dress like the rich ā€“ or certainly a
lot more colourfully than theyā€™d previously been
able to.
Consumerism was born and with it a new interest
in aesthetics. Everyone wanted nice things.
The advertising and fashion industries had their
modern beginnings at this point.
Modernism and art
New money changed the
art world too. Increasingly
artists produced for
secular and middle-class
buyers whilst the old
model of religious and
aristocratic patronage
disappeared. Artā€™s subjects
changed with the change
of audience. Once valued
primarily as spiritual or
imperial statement, art
had to find new uses, new
markets and new
meanings.
Modern? Art
Until recently, the word "modern" used to
refer generically to the contemporaneous; all
art was modern at the time it was made.
For example: In 1437, Cennino Cennini wrote
in his ā€˜Il Libro dell'Arteā€™ (translated as "The
Craftsman's Handbook"), that Giotto made
painting "modernā€. Giorgio Vasari (Lives of
the Artists), writing in 16th-century Italy,
referred to the art of his own period as
"modern."
Today, however, what we mean when we talk
about ā€™Modern/ist Artā€™ is the art historical
term. Art historically, "Modernism" refers to a
period from, roughly, the 1860s through to
the 1970s and is used to describe the style
and the ideology of art produced during that
era. This is one of the reasons that art made
since 1970 is generally called ā€˜contemporaryā€™
no matter what theory it might individually
espouse. No art has been ā€˜modernā€™ since the
80s.
The Raising of Lazarus, fresco, Arena Chapel,
Padua, 1303-6
THIS WAS MODERN ART
Damien Hirst Ā«Beagle 2Ā» Dot Painting 2005.
http://www.orbit.zkm.de/?q=node/63
THIS IS NOT MODERN ART.
THIS IS CONTEMPORARY ART.
Sonia Delaunay
Fabric No. I
c1928 Paris
THIS IS MODERN ART.
Modernism = Formalism?
Modernism has been couched
largely in formal terms. Art
historians speak of modern art as
concerned primarily with
essential qualities of colour and
flatness and as exhibiting over
time a reduction of interest in
subject matter (i.e a tendency
towards abstraction, minimalism
and conceptualism). Many now
argue that this concentration on
the formal innovations and
particular aesthetics introduced
by Modernism was an attempt to
ignore and devalue the very real
social agendas of many of the
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Robert Motherwell. At Five in the Afternoon. 1949.
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Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV 1969-70 Barnett Newman
American Nationalism promoted Modernism
Modernism reached its apotheosis in the ā€˜50s
and ā€˜60s, by which time it was most strongly
associated with the USA and its values.
American Modernist art was abstract art and
was heavily promoted internationally by the US
Government to assert its own cultural
hegemony globally.
Its most fervent and, perhaps, last major
theorist was Clement Greenberg.
ā€œModernism includes more than art and
literature. By now it covers almost the
whole of what is truly alive in our cultureā€
Clement Greenberg ā€˜Modernist Paintingā€™
http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/mode
rnism.html
Mark Rothko
Red, Orange, Tan and Purple, 1954
Oil on canvas
84 1/2 x 68 1/2 inches (214.5 x 174 cm)
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Ingredients of Modernism: Romanticism
The first half of the 19th century for
Europe was marked by a series of
turbulent wars and revolutions,
which fostered a series of ideas and
doctrines now identified as
Romanticism, which focused on
individual subjective experience,
the supremacy of ā€˜Natureā€™ and ā€˜the
sublimeā€™ as the standard subject for
art, revolutionary or radical
extensions of expression, and
individual liberty.
ā€˜Wanderer above the sea of fogā€™ by Caspar David Friedrich
In search of stimulationā€¦
Romanticism exalted
individualism, subjectivism,
irrationalism, imagination,
emotions and nature - emotion
over reason and senses over
intellect. Since they were in revolt
against the Academy, they
favoured the deployment of
potentially unlimited number of
styles (anything that aroused
them).
Francisco Goya - Saturn Eating Cronus
(One of the Black Paintings)
The movement basically started as a reaction to the political turmoil of the times,
but it was fertilized by the influx of foreign art coming from Canada, Asia and
around the world.
Some big names during the period are:
ā€¢ William Blake
ā€¢ Henry Fuseli
ā€¢ Francisco de Goya
ā€¢ Friedrich Overbeck
ā€¢ Eugene Delacroix
ā€¢ William Turner
ā€¢ John Constable
Eugene Delacroix - Liberty Leading the People, 28th July, 1830
William Blake
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More about Romanticism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
Romanticism - Art History Archive
http://www.arthistoryarchive.
com/arthistory/romanticism/arthistory_romanticism
.html
The 18th and 19th Centuries
http://www.all-art.org/history372.html
Left: The Mandrake A Charm - c1785 Fuseli
Above: Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare II ā€“ 1790
L'art pour l'art'
ā€œArt should be independent of all claptrap ā€”should
stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye
or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely
foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the
likeā€œ James Whistler
Young artists increasingly made a virtue of their
exclusion from the Salons of the Academies. Some,
most wittily, James Whistler, championed the notion
of ā€˜Art for Artā€™s Sakeā€™ ā€“ and insisted that the unique
elements of art itself were the proper subject for
artists. Hence, rather than simple title his famous
painting of his mother with a descriptive title (ā€˜Motherā€™
for example), he entitled it ā€˜Arrangement in Grey and
Blackā€™ ā€“ insisting that it was the compositional and
tonal effects that were the content of the painting.
Whistler professed to be perplexed and annoyed by
the insistence of others upon viewing his work as a
"portrait." In his 1890 book, ā€˜The Gentle Art of Making
Enemiesā€™, he writes:
ā€œTake the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal
Academy as an "Arrangement in Grey and Black." Now
that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of
my mother; but what can or ought the public to care
about the identity of the portrait?ā€
James McNeill Whistler, 1871
Oil on canvas
144.3 Ɨ 162.4 cm, 56.8 Ɨ 63.9 in
Musee d'Orsay, Paris
More about Whistler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNeill_Whistler
Realism ā€“ just looking
Parallel to the activities of aesthetes like
Whistler were the activities of the
Realists. Taking their cue from the vibrant
genre and symbolic but exquisitely
precise still-life painting of 16th
and 17th
Dutch art painting and from the
observational informality of English
painter Constableā€™s rural painting, a group
of French artists formed what became
known as the Barbizon School after the
village they first gathered.
They sought to draw inspiration directly
from nature. Natural scenes became the
subjects of their paintings rather than
mere backdrops to dramatic events. One
of them, Jean-Franois Millet, extended the
idea from landscape to figures ā€” peasant
figures, scenes of peasant life, and work
in the fields.
In The Gleaners (1857), Millet portrays
three peasant women working at the
harvest. There is no drama and no story
told, merely three peasant women in a
field.
The Gleaners. Jean-Franois Millet. 1857.
Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
Pre-Raphaelites: Old-school Realists
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of
English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848
by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
William Holman Hunt. They wanted an art of spiritual
realism and opposed the materialism of their time.
They thought Art had lost its way, had become false,
formulaic and decadent. And they knew who to
blame ā€“ Raphael. It was all his fault, what with his
smooth Classical illusions and charmingly elegant
compositions. They would look at nothing that came
after him, instead basing their work on the ā€˜trueā€™
earlier artists (hence pre-Raphaelite).
They also strongly objected to the influence of Sir
Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal
Academy of Arts. They called him "Sir Sloshua",
believing that his broad technique was a sloppy and
formulaic form of academic Mannerism. In contrast
they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense
colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento
Italian and Flemish art.
Persephone, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The Pre-Raphaelites emphasised the
personal responsibility of individual artists
to determine their own ideas and method
of depiction. Influenced by Romanticism,
they thought that freedom and
responsibility were inseparable.
Paradoxically, they were particularly
fascinated by Medieval culture. They
believed it had a spiritual and creative
integrity lost in later eras. This emphasis
on medieval culture was to clash with the
realism promoted by their stress on
independent observation of nature.
In its early years, the Pre-Raphaelites
believed that the two interests were
consistent with one another, but in later
years the movement divided in two
directions.
The realist side was led by Hunt and
Millais, while the medievalist side was led
by Rossetti and his followers, Edward
Burne-Jones and William Morris. This split
was never absolute, since both factions
believed that art was essentially spiritual
in character, opposing their idealism to
the materialist realism associated with
Courbet.
Hylas and the Nymphs: John William Waterhouse, 1896
Burne-Jones
The Arming of Perseus
(unfinished), 1885,
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Synthesis
These dual movements; one
emphasising aesthetics, the other
insisting on close attention to
nature and observation, came
together in the Impressionists.
Another major influence was Japanese
art prints (Japonism), which had
originally come into France as wrapping
paper for imported goods. The art of
these prints contributed significantly to
the "snapshot" angles and
unconventional compositions which
would become characteristic of the
movement.
View of Mount Fuji from Satta Point in the
Suruga Bay, woodcut by Hiroshige,
published posthumously 1859.
Impressionism : seeing with light
Impressionism initially focused on work done, not in
studios, but outdoors (en plein air), from nature. We have
seen how interest in light and optics exploded at the
beginning of the 19thC, leading to the development of
new optical technologies such as photography and
animation, and to new understanding of the mechanisms
of human sensation. The Impressionists, using these new
understandings, argued that human beings do not see
objects, but instead see light itself.
Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible
brushstrokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its
changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the
passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of
movement as a crucial element of human perception and
experience, and unusual visual angles.
The Impressionists relaxed the boundary between subject
and background so that the effect of an Impressionist
painting often resembles a snapshot, a part of a larger
reality captured as if by chance. Photography was gaining
popularity, and as cameras became more portable,
photographs became more candid. Photography inspired
Impressionists to capture the moment, not only in the
fleeting lights of a landscape, but in the day-to-day lives
of people.
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Degas, Ballet Dancers on Stage.
Impressionism triumphantā€¦
The public, at first hostile, gradually came to
believe that the Impressionists had captured a
fresh and original vision, even if it did not receive
the approval of the art critics and establishment.
Impressionism is now the most generally popular
art movement ever.
By recreating the sensation in the eye that views
the subject, rather than recreating the subject,
and by creating a welter of techniques and forms,
Impressionism became seminal to various
movements in painting which would follow,
including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism,
Fauvism, and Cubism.
Initially rejected from the most important
commercial show of the time ā€” the government
sponsored Paris Salon ā€” the art was shown at the
Salon des Refusee, created by Emperor Napoleon
III to display all of the paintings rejected by the
Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles,
but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted
tremendous attention, and opened commercial
doors to the movement.
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Two Sisters (On the Terrace), 1881
Manet
Edouard Manet is generally considered the
first modernist painter. Paintings such as his
shocking ā€˜Le Dejeuner sur l'herbeā€™ are seen to
have ushered in Modernism.
Edouard Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, 18633
Oil on canvas (Musee d'Orsay, Paris)
When Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe was exhibited at the Salon des Refusee in 1863 a
lot of people were scandalized. When his painting of Olympia was exhibited the
public were even more upset.
Night Art
picnic with nude from Manet
http://www.youtube.com/wa
tch?v=1OX9PhquTWE
For more of Manetā€™s paintings:
Manet
http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=rQiD8Wfl7lk
Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863
Oil on canvas (Musee d'Orsay, Paris)
Other Important Impressionists: Paul
Cezanne Cezanne was one of the major predecessors of
the Cubists and other 20thC art movements. He
believed that all reality was built on simple
ā€˜primitiveā€™ shapes. He was interested in the
simplification of naturally occurring forms to
their geometric essentials, he wanted to "treat
nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" (a
tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, a
human head a sphere, for example).
Additionally, the concentrated attention with
which he recorded his observations of nature
resulted in a profound exploration of binocular
vision, which results in two slightly different
simultaneous visual perceptions, and provides
us with depth perception and a complex
knowledge of spatial relationships. We see two
different views simultaneously; Cezanne
employed this aspect of visual perception in his
painting to varying degrees. The observation of
this fact, coupled with Cezanneā€™s desire to
capture the truth of his own perception, often
compelled him to render the outlines of forms
so as to at once attempt to display the distinctly
different views of both the left and right eyes.
Thus Cezanneā€˜s work augments and transforms
earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single-
point perspective.
Corner of Quarry, 1900-02
More at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne
Claude Monet
The most prolific of the Impressionists and the one who most clearly embodies their
aesthetic
In 1872 he painted
Impression, Sunrise
(Impression: soleil levant)
depicting a Le Havre
landscape. It hung in the
first Impressionist exhibition
in 1874 and is now
displayed in the Mus
Marmottan-Monet, Paris.
From the painting's title, art
critic Louis Leroy coined the
term "Impressionism",
which he intended to be
derogatory, however the
Impressionists appropriated
the term for themselves.
Art of Monet
http://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=FPlW1H9m4dc
Mary Cassatt
An american-born artist who lived in Paris and
participated in four Impressionist exhibitions. As
well as practicing the Impressionist aesthetic,
Cassatt was important because of her subject
matter; the social and private lives of women,
with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds
between mothers and children.
The Child's Bath (The Bath), Mary Cassatt,
(1893), oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
Others Impressionists:
ā€¢Edgar Degas (a realist who despised the term Impressionist, but
is considered one, due to his loyalty to the group)
ā€¢Armand Guillaumin
ā€¢Berthe Morisot
ā€¢Camille Pissarro
ā€¢Pierre-Auguste Renoir
ā€¢Alfred Sisley
Absinthe, 1876, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas
Symbolism
The second great 19thC school was
Symbolism, a literary and art movement
that originated in Belgium and France.
Symbolism was largely a reaction against
Naturalism and Realism, movements which
attempted to objectively capture reality.
Spurred on by the increasing
mechanisation of the environment, some
opted in favour of spirituality, the
imagination, and dreams.
Symbolism was marked by a belief that
language is expressly symbolic in its
nature, and that poetry and writing should
follow whichever connection the sheer
sound and texture of the words create.
The Symbolist movement in literature has
its roots in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers
of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire. The
aesthetic was developed by Stephane
Mallarme and Paul Verlaine during the
1860s and '70s. During the 1880s, the
aesthetic was articulated through a series
of manifestoes and attracted a generation
of writers and artists.
You'd Stick the World into Your Bedside Lane
You'd stick the world into your bedside lane.
It's boredom makes you callous to all pain.
To exercise your teeth for this strange task,
A heart upon a rake, each day, you'd ask.
Your eyes lit up like shopfronts, or the trees
With lanterns on the night of public sprees,
Make insolent misuse of borrowed power
And scorn the law of beauty that's their dower.
Oh deaf-and-dumb machine, harm-breeding fool
World sucking leech, yet salutary tool!
Have you not seen your beauties blanch to pass
Before their own reflection in the glass?
Before this pain, in which you think you're wise,
Does not its greatness shock you with surprise,
To think that Nature, deep in projects hidden,
Has chosen you, vile creature of the midden,
To knead a genius for succeeding time.
O sordid grandeur! Infamy sublime!
Trans. Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1952)
Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867) and Les Fleurs du
mal (Flowers of Evil).
http://fleursdumal.org/
Symbolist Art
Symbolism was a continuation of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition,
which included such artists as Caspar David Friedrich, Fernand Khnopff and John Henry
Fuseli and it was even more closely aligned with the self-consciously dark and private
Decadent Movement.
Fernand Khnopff's The Caress, 1887
Symbolist painting
The Symbolist painters mined mythology
and dream imagery for a visual language
of the soul, seeking evocative paintings
that brought to mind a static world of
silence. The symbols used in Symbolism
are not the familiar emblems of
mainstream iconography but intensely
personal, private, obscure and ambiguous
references.
More a philosophy than an actual style of
art, the Symbolist painters influenced the
contemporary Art Nouveau movement
and Les Nabis.
In the 20thC, the Symbolists were
important influences on the Surrealists
and Dadaists, whilst their influence can be
felt today in artists such as Hirst and
Barney, but also in popular culture,
particularly horror and fantasy genre
books, films and games.
Gustave Moreau (1826-1898)
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Symbolist Art
There were several, rather dissimilar, groups of
Symbolist painters and visual artists, among
whom Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt, Odilon
Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-
Latour, Edvard Munch, Felicien Rops, and Jan
Toorop were numbered.
Symbolism in painting had an even larger
geographical reach than Symbolism in poetry,
reaching Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Victor
Borisov-Musatov, Martiros Saryan, Mikhail
Nesterov, Leon Bakst in Russia, as well as Frida
Kahlo in Mexico, Elihu Vedder, Remedios Varo,
Morris Graves, David Chetlahe Paladin, and Elle
Nicolai in the United States. Auguste Rodin is
sometimes considered a Symbolist in sculpture.
Redon, Odilon
The Smiling Spider
1881
Gustav Klimt
Austrian Symbolist painter and
one of the most prominent
members of the Vienna Art
Nouveau (Vienna Secession)
movement. His major works
include paintings, murals,
sketches and other art objects,
many of which are on display in
the Vienna Secession gallery.
Klimt's primary subject was the
female body, and his works are
marked by a frank eroticism -
nowhere is this more apparent
than in his numerous drawings
in pencil. These female
subjects, whether formal
portraits or indolent nudes,
invariably display a highly
sensitized fin de siecle
elegance.
A section of the Beethoven Frieze
Gustave Moreau
(1826 ā€“1898) French Symbolist painter whose
main focus was the illustration of biblical and
mythological figures.
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Edvard Munch
(1863 ā€“1944) Norwegian
Symbolist painter, printmaker, and
an important forerunner of
Expressionistic art.
His best-known painting, The
Scream (1893), is one of the
pieces in a series titled The Frieze
of Life, in which Munch explored
the themes of life, love, fear,
death, and melancholy.
Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon, a native of Bordeaux, produced a rich
and enigmatic corpus: 'Like music', he declared, 'my
drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the
indeterminate.ā€™
In contrast with Goya's monsters and Kubin's
nightmare visions, his work is imbued with a
melancholy passivity. While origins of this disposition
must be sought in the artist's experience, the overall
effect is entirely consistent with the moods of
Symbolism ... : nocturnal, autumnal, and lunar rather
than solar.
His mature production began around 1875 when
Redon entered the shadowy world of charcoal and the
lithographer's stone. This period yielded sequences
such as [Guardian Spirit of the Waters (1878)] and
[Cactus Man (1881)]. Redon made it clear that they
had been inspired by his dreams, and they inspire in
the spectator a conviction like that of dreams.
Redon's art was always commanded by his dreams,
but the thematic content of his work over his last
twenty years is more densely mythical, brimming with
newfound hope and light which rose quite
unexpectedly out of the depths of the artist's
personality.
Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, by Odilon Redon
Jan Toorop
(1858 -- 1928) was a Dutch painter whose works straddle the space between the
Symbolist painters and Art Nouveau.
Resources
Modernism, Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/roots.html
Arts: Art History: Periods and Movements: Modernism
http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Art_History/Periods_and_Movements/Modernism/
Modernism and the Arts in the 20th Century: Links
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/HP/20th_mod.html
MIA Modernism (Overview of design movements)
http://www.artsmia.org/modernism/
Modernism: designing a new world 1914-1939 (V&A exhibition
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1331_modernism/flash.html

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Birth of Modernism

  • 1. The Beginnings of Modernism Modernism is an historical trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation ā€“ i.e, it is both progressive and optimistic. Growing out of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, it was one the dominant ideologies of the 20thC and continues to underlie and influence contemporary cultural, social and political practices around the world. The term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. In essence, the modernist movement argued that the new realities of the industrial and mechanized age were permanent and desirable.
  • 2. Looking for Perfection Broadly, Modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the four decades before 1914. "Just as the ancients drew the inspiration for their arts from the world of nature...so we should draw ours from the mechanized environment we have created." ā€”Antonio Sant'Elia Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (1914) QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture. Miss Evelyn Leigh Ralliston, of Teaneck, New Jersey winner of the costume contest at the first annual Ectomo Halloween Masquerade Ball, 1919
  • 3. Change is good Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of thinkers who rebelled against 19thC academic and historicist traditions. They believed that the ā€˜traditionalā€™ forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were outdated in the face of the new economic, social and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world. Modern (quantum and relativistic) physics, modern (analytical and continental) philosophy and modern number theory in mathematics date from this period and contributed to Modernist thought and creativity. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture. Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase
  • 4. Background to Modernism : The Age of Discovery, Renaissance, Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution Moveable-type press ā€¢ encouraged widespread literacy and ā€¢ an ever-greater emphasis on the individual ā€¢ translations of the Bible in national languages Reformation ā€¢ Counter-Reformation ā€¢ Humanism and the scientific method (The Enlightenment). The Renaissance ā€¢ reintroduced the observational method of the Ancient Greeks ā€¢ valorised the democratic system born in Athens ā€¢ human and individual rights, utopian ideals and new social theories flourished. New technologies and new understandings of the fundamental laws of nature led to new industries and new wealth. Global exploration opened up new parts of the world ā€¢ new materials ā€¢ new markets ā€¢ new classes appeared ā€¢ mercantile and innovative middle classes Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein for a 1518 edition of Utopia by Thomas Moore. The traveler Raphael Hythloday is depicted in the lower left-hand corner describing to a listener the island of Utopia, whose layout is schematically shown above him.
  • 5. Social change The old European social structures could not survive the onslaught of religious turmoil, an increasingly demanding and powerful non-aristocracy and rapidly changing demographics. The Age of Exploration had opened up new resources and new markets for the burgeoning European economies. Social struggles such as the 30 Year War tore countries apart and nations fought amongst themselves ā€“ jockeying for position in Europe and for the lionā€™s share of the spoils as they carved up the New World, and later much of the Pacific and Asia, into colonies and ā€˜protectorates.ā€™ Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588-08-08 by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, painted 1796, depicts the battle of Gravelines.
  • 6. The Industrial Revolution (18th -19thC) ā€“ money changes everything. Despite the turmoil, in the long term European populations benefited from the flood of new goods, materials and money that poured into Europe. Peasants left their fields and poured into cities, which grew rapidly and chaotically. Traditional family and community structures were shattered and a new kind of class, the urban working class, developed; unshackled and unsheltered by the feudal structures of the past. New mass-production factories, full of machinery operated by women and children working for near starvation- wages, destroyed skilled artisansā€™ livelihoods. But new technology and new methods of production also created new opportunities and encouraged the growth of universal education. Innovation bred innovation, and science and technology became the pastime of the day for people of all classes.
  • 7. Advances in knowledge, particularly in the natural and geological sciences, undermined a literal belief in the Bible and a new age of practical secularism began. As the aristocracy became ever more peripheral, destroyed by their own traditions and privileges, democracy began to spread and the middle-classes became ever more powerful. Progress and human endeavor began to replace ā€˜Godā€™s Willā€™ as the driver of society. Secularism For an interesting essay and pics about the evolution of the evolution cartoon: http://www.howlandbolton.com/essays/read_more.php?sid=331
  • 8. Having moreā€¦wanting it all: The birth of consumerism Mechanisation made everyone richer (eventually) and everything cheaper, but the Industrial Revolution would not be so called if it had not fundamentally changed society. In the Middle Ages, Sumptuary Laws had made sure that everyone knew their place in society. Only Nobles, for example, were allowed to wear luxurious materials and colours. The high volume cheap production that new machines such as the Spinning Jenny and power-loom made possible needed new markets to be profitable. Now anyone could dress like the rich ā€“ or certainly a lot more colourfully than theyā€™d previously been able to. Consumerism was born and with it a new interest in aesthetics. Everyone wanted nice things. The advertising and fashion industries had their modern beginnings at this point.
  • 9. Modernism and art New money changed the art world too. Increasingly artists produced for secular and middle-class buyers whilst the old model of religious and aristocratic patronage disappeared. Artā€™s subjects changed with the change of audience. Once valued primarily as spiritual or imperial statement, art had to find new uses, new markets and new meanings.
  • 10. Modern? Art Until recently, the word "modern" used to refer generically to the contemporaneous; all art was modern at the time it was made. For example: In 1437, Cennino Cennini wrote in his ā€˜Il Libro dell'Arteā€™ (translated as "The Craftsman's Handbook"), that Giotto made painting "modernā€. Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Artists), writing in 16th-century Italy, referred to the art of his own period as "modern." Today, however, what we mean when we talk about ā€™Modern/ist Artā€™ is the art historical term. Art historically, "Modernism" refers to a period from, roughly, the 1860s through to the 1970s and is used to describe the style and the ideology of art produced during that era. This is one of the reasons that art made since 1970 is generally called ā€˜contemporaryā€™ no matter what theory it might individually espouse. No art has been ā€˜modernā€™ since the 80s. The Raising of Lazarus, fresco, Arena Chapel, Padua, 1303-6 THIS WAS MODERN ART
  • 11. Damien Hirst Ā«Beagle 2Ā» Dot Painting 2005. http://www.orbit.zkm.de/?q=node/63 THIS IS NOT MODERN ART. THIS IS CONTEMPORARY ART. Sonia Delaunay Fabric No. I c1928 Paris THIS IS MODERN ART.
  • 12. Modernism = Formalism? Modernism has been couched largely in formal terms. Art historians speak of modern art as concerned primarily with essential qualities of colour and flatness and as exhibiting over time a reduction of interest in subject matter (i.e a tendency towards abstraction, minimalism and conceptualism). Many now argue that this concentration on the formal innovations and particular aesthetics introduced by Modernism was an attempt to ignore and devalue the very real social agendas of many of the artists. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture. Robert Motherwell. At Five in the Afternoon. 1949.
  • 13. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture. Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV 1969-70 Barnett Newman
  • 14. American Nationalism promoted Modernism Modernism reached its apotheosis in the ā€˜50s and ā€˜60s, by which time it was most strongly associated with the USA and its values. American Modernist art was abstract art and was heavily promoted internationally by the US Government to assert its own cultural hegemony globally. Its most fervent and, perhaps, last major theorist was Clement Greenberg. ā€œModernism includes more than art and literature. By now it covers almost the whole of what is truly alive in our cultureā€ Clement Greenberg ā€˜Modernist Paintingā€™ http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/mode rnism.html Mark Rothko Red, Orange, Tan and Purple, 1954 Oil on canvas 84 1/2 x 68 1/2 inches (214.5 x 174 cm) QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
  • 15. Ingredients of Modernism: Romanticism The first half of the 19th century for Europe was marked by a series of turbulent wars and revolutions, which fostered a series of ideas and doctrines now identified as Romanticism, which focused on individual subjective experience, the supremacy of ā€˜Natureā€™ and ā€˜the sublimeā€™ as the standard subject for art, revolutionary or radical extensions of expression, and individual liberty. ā€˜Wanderer above the sea of fogā€™ by Caspar David Friedrich
  • 16. In search of stimulationā€¦ Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature - emotion over reason and senses over intellect. Since they were in revolt against the Academy, they favoured the deployment of potentially unlimited number of styles (anything that aroused them). Francisco Goya - Saturn Eating Cronus (One of the Black Paintings)
  • 17. The movement basically started as a reaction to the political turmoil of the times, but it was fertilized by the influx of foreign art coming from Canada, Asia and around the world. Some big names during the period are: ā€¢ William Blake ā€¢ Henry Fuseli ā€¢ Francisco de Goya ā€¢ Friedrich Overbeck ā€¢ Eugene Delacroix ā€¢ William Turner ā€¢ John Constable Eugene Delacroix - Liberty Leading the People, 28th July, 1830
  • 18. William Blake QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
  • 19. More about Romanticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism Romanticism - Art History Archive http://www.arthistoryarchive. com/arthistory/romanticism/arthistory_romanticism .html The 18th and 19th Centuries http://www.all-art.org/history372.html Left: The Mandrake A Charm - c1785 Fuseli Above: Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare II ā€“ 1790
  • 20. L'art pour l'art' ā€œArt should be independent of all claptrap ā€”should stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the likeā€œ James Whistler Young artists increasingly made a virtue of their exclusion from the Salons of the Academies. Some, most wittily, James Whistler, championed the notion of ā€˜Art for Artā€™s Sakeā€™ ā€“ and insisted that the unique elements of art itself were the proper subject for artists. Hence, rather than simple title his famous painting of his mother with a descriptive title (ā€˜Motherā€™ for example), he entitled it ā€˜Arrangement in Grey and Blackā€™ ā€“ insisting that it was the compositional and tonal effects that were the content of the painting. Whistler professed to be perplexed and annoyed by the insistence of others upon viewing his work as a "portrait." In his 1890 book, ā€˜The Gentle Art of Making Enemiesā€™, he writes: ā€œTake the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an "Arrangement in Grey and Black." Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?ā€ James McNeill Whistler, 1871 Oil on canvas 144.3 Ɨ 162.4 cm, 56.8 Ɨ 63.9 in Musee d'Orsay, Paris More about Whistler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNeill_Whistler
  • 21. Realism ā€“ just looking Parallel to the activities of aesthetes like Whistler were the activities of the Realists. Taking their cue from the vibrant genre and symbolic but exquisitely precise still-life painting of 16th and 17th Dutch art painting and from the observational informality of English painter Constableā€™s rural painting, a group of French artists formed what became known as the Barbizon School after the village they first gathered. They sought to draw inspiration directly from nature. Natural scenes became the subjects of their paintings rather than mere backdrops to dramatic events. One of them, Jean-Franois Millet, extended the idea from landscape to figures ā€” peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields. In The Gleaners (1857), Millet portrays three peasant women working at the harvest. There is no drama and no story told, merely three peasant women in a field. The Gleaners. Jean-Franois Millet. 1857. Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
  • 22. Pre-Raphaelites: Old-school Realists The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. They wanted an art of spiritual realism and opposed the materialism of their time. They thought Art had lost its way, had become false, formulaic and decadent. And they knew who to blame ā€“ Raphael. It was all his fault, what with his smooth Classical illusions and charmingly elegant compositions. They would look at nothing that came after him, instead basing their work on the ā€˜trueā€™ earlier artists (hence pre-Raphaelite). They also strongly objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts. They called him "Sir Sloshua", believing that his broad technique was a sloppy and formulaic form of academic Mannerism. In contrast they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. Persephone, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
  • 23. The Pre-Raphaelites emphasised the personal responsibility of individual artists to determine their own ideas and method of depiction. Influenced by Romanticism, they thought that freedom and responsibility were inseparable. Paradoxically, they were particularly fascinated by Medieval culture. They believed it had a spiritual and creative integrity lost in later eras. This emphasis on medieval culture was to clash with the realism promoted by their stress on independent observation of nature. In its early years, the Pre-Raphaelites believed that the two interests were consistent with one another, but in later years the movement divided in two directions. The realist side was led by Hunt and Millais, while the medievalist side was led by Rossetti and his followers, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. This split was never absolute, since both factions believed that art was essentially spiritual in character, opposing their idealism to the materialist realism associated with Courbet. Hylas and the Nymphs: John William Waterhouse, 1896 Burne-Jones The Arming of Perseus (unfinished), 1885,
  • 24. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
  • 25. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
  • 26. Synthesis These dual movements; one emphasising aesthetics, the other insisting on close attention to nature and observation, came together in the Impressionists. Another major influence was Japanese art prints (Japonism), which had originally come into France as wrapping paper for imported goods. The art of these prints contributed significantly to the "snapshot" angles and unconventional compositions which would become characteristic of the movement. View of Mount Fuji from Satta Point in the Suruga Bay, woodcut by Hiroshige, published posthumously 1859.
  • 27. Impressionism : seeing with light Impressionism initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plein air), from nature. We have seen how interest in light and optics exploded at the beginning of the 19thC, leading to the development of new optical technologies such as photography and animation, and to new understanding of the mechanisms of human sensation. The Impressionists, using these new understandings, argued that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brushstrokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The Impressionists relaxed the boundary between subject and background so that the effect of an Impressionist painting often resembles a snapshot, a part of a larger reality captured as if by chance. Photography was gaining popularity, and as cameras became more portable, photographs became more candid. Photography inspired Impressionists to capture the moment, not only in the fleeting lights of a landscape, but in the day-to-day lives of people. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture. Degas, Ballet Dancers on Stage.
  • 28. Impressionism triumphantā€¦ The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if it did not receive the approval of the art critics and establishment. Impressionism is now the most generally popular art movement ever. By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism became seminal to various movements in painting which would follow, including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time ā€” the government sponsored Paris Salon ā€” the art was shown at the Salon des Refusee, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention, and opened commercial doors to the movement. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture. Pierre-Auguste Renoir Two Sisters (On the Terrace), 1881
  • 29. Manet Edouard Manet is generally considered the first modernist painter. Paintings such as his shocking ā€˜Le Dejeuner sur l'herbeā€™ are seen to have ushered in Modernism. Edouard Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, 18633 Oil on canvas (Musee d'Orsay, Paris)
  • 30. When Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe was exhibited at the Salon des Refusee in 1863 a lot of people were scandalized. When his painting of Olympia was exhibited the public were even more upset. Night Art picnic with nude from Manet http://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=1OX9PhquTWE For more of Manetā€™s paintings: Manet http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=rQiD8Wfl7lk Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 Oil on canvas (Musee d'Orsay, Paris)
  • 31. Other Important Impressionists: Paul Cezanne Cezanne was one of the major predecessors of the Cubists and other 20thC art movements. He believed that all reality was built on simple ā€˜primitiveā€™ shapes. He was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials, he wanted to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, a human head a sphere, for example). Additionally, the concentrated attention with which he recorded his observations of nature resulted in a profound exploration of binocular vision, which results in two slightly different simultaneous visual perceptions, and provides us with depth perception and a complex knowledge of spatial relationships. We see two different views simultaneously; Cezanne employed this aspect of visual perception in his painting to varying degrees. The observation of this fact, coupled with Cezanneā€™s desire to capture the truth of his own perception, often compelled him to render the outlines of forms so as to at once attempt to display the distinctly different views of both the left and right eyes. Thus Cezanneā€˜s work augments and transforms earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single- point perspective. Corner of Quarry, 1900-02 More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne
  • 32. Claude Monet The most prolific of the Impressionists and the one who most clearly embodies their aesthetic In 1872 he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Mus Marmottan-Monet, Paris. From the painting's title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism", which he intended to be derogatory, however the Impressionists appropriated the term for themselves. Art of Monet http://www.youtube.com/w atch?v=FPlW1H9m4dc
  • 33. Mary Cassatt An american-born artist who lived in Paris and participated in four Impressionist exhibitions. As well as practicing the Impressionist aesthetic, Cassatt was important because of her subject matter; the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children. The Child's Bath (The Bath), Mary Cassatt, (1893), oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
  • 34. Others Impressionists: ā€¢Edgar Degas (a realist who despised the term Impressionist, but is considered one, due to his loyalty to the group) ā€¢Armand Guillaumin ā€¢Berthe Morisot ā€¢Camille Pissarro ā€¢Pierre-Auguste Renoir ā€¢Alfred Sisley Absinthe, 1876, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas
  • 35. Symbolism The second great 19thC school was Symbolism, a literary and art movement that originated in Belgium and France. Symbolism was largely a reaction against Naturalism and Realism, movements which attempted to objectively capture reality. Spurred on by the increasing mechanisation of the environment, some opted in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams. Symbolism was marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its nature, and that poetry and writing should follow whichever connection the sheer sound and texture of the words create. The Symbolist movement in literature has its roots in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire. The aesthetic was developed by Stephane Mallarme and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. During the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated through a series of manifestoes and attracted a generation of writers and artists. You'd Stick the World into Your Bedside Lane You'd stick the world into your bedside lane. It's boredom makes you callous to all pain. To exercise your teeth for this strange task, A heart upon a rake, each day, you'd ask. Your eyes lit up like shopfronts, or the trees With lanterns on the night of public sprees, Make insolent misuse of borrowed power And scorn the law of beauty that's their dower. Oh deaf-and-dumb machine, harm-breeding fool World sucking leech, yet salutary tool! Have you not seen your beauties blanch to pass Before their own reflection in the glass? Before this pain, in which you think you're wise, Does not its greatness shock you with surprise, To think that Nature, deep in projects hidden, Has chosen you, vile creature of the midden, To knead a genius for succeeding time. O sordid grandeur! Infamy sublime! Trans. Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952) Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867) and Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). http://fleursdumal.org/
  • 36. Symbolist Art Symbolism was a continuation of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition, which included such artists as Caspar David Friedrich, Fernand Khnopff and John Henry Fuseli and it was even more closely aligned with the self-consciously dark and private Decadent Movement. Fernand Khnopff's The Caress, 1887
  • 37. Symbolist painting The Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence. The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and Les Nabis. In the 20thC, the Symbolists were important influences on the Surrealists and Dadaists, whilst their influence can be felt today in artists such as Hirst and Barney, but also in popular culture, particularly horror and fantasy genre books, films and games. Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
  • 38. Symbolist Art There were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, among whom Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin- Latour, Edvard Munch, Felicien Rops, and Jan Toorop were numbered. Symbolism in painting had an even larger geographical reach than Symbolism in poetry, reaching Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Victor Borisov-Musatov, Martiros Saryan, Mikhail Nesterov, Leon Bakst in Russia, as well as Frida Kahlo in Mexico, Elihu Vedder, Remedios Varo, Morris Graves, David Chetlahe Paladin, and Elle Nicolai in the United States. Auguste Rodin is sometimes considered a Symbolist in sculpture. Redon, Odilon The Smiling Spider 1881
  • 39. Gustav Klimt Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau (Vienna Secession) movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches and other art objects, many of which are on display in the Vienna Secession gallery. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism - nowhere is this more apparent than in his numerous drawings in pencil. These female subjects, whether formal portraits or indolent nudes, invariably display a highly sensitized fin de siecle elegance. A section of the Beethoven Frieze
  • 40. Gustave Moreau (1826 ā€“1898) French Symbolist painter whose main focus was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. QuickTimeā„¢ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
  • 41. Edvard Munch (1863 ā€“1944) Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker, and an important forerunner of Expressionistic art. His best-known painting, The Scream (1893), is one of the pieces in a series titled The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy.
  • 42. Odilon Redon Odilon Redon, a native of Bordeaux, produced a rich and enigmatic corpus: 'Like music', he declared, 'my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.ā€™ In contrast with Goya's monsters and Kubin's nightmare visions, his work is imbued with a melancholy passivity. While origins of this disposition must be sought in the artist's experience, the overall effect is entirely consistent with the moods of Symbolism ... : nocturnal, autumnal, and lunar rather than solar. His mature production began around 1875 when Redon entered the shadowy world of charcoal and the lithographer's stone. This period yielded sequences such as [Guardian Spirit of the Waters (1878)] and [Cactus Man (1881)]. Redon made it clear that they had been inspired by his dreams, and they inspire in the spectator a conviction like that of dreams. Redon's art was always commanded by his dreams, but the thematic content of his work over his last twenty years is more densely mythical, brimming with newfound hope and light which rose quite unexpectedly out of the depths of the artist's personality. Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, by Odilon Redon
  • 43. Jan Toorop (1858 -- 1928) was a Dutch painter whose works straddle the space between the Symbolist painters and Art Nouveau.
  • 44.
  • 45. Resources Modernism, Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/roots.html Arts: Art History: Periods and Movements: Modernism http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Art_History/Periods_and_Movements/Modernism/ Modernism and the Arts in the 20th Century: Links http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/HP/20th_mod.html MIA Modernism (Overview of design movements) http://www.artsmia.org/modernism/ Modernism: designing a new world 1914-1939 (V&A exhibition http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1331_modernism/flash.html

Editor's Notes

  1. Modernism is an historical trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation ā€“ i.e, it is both progressive and optimistic. Growing out of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, it was one the dominant ideologies of the 20thC and continues to underlie and influence contemporary cultural, social and political practices around the world. The term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. In essence, the modernist movement argued that the new realities of the industrial and mechanized age were permanent and desirable.
  2. Broadly, Modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the four decades before 1914. "Just as the ancients drew the inspiration for their arts from the world of nature...so we should draw ours from the mechanized environment we have created." ā€”Antonio Sant'Elia Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (1914)
  3. Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of thinkers who rebelled against 19thC academic and historicist traditions. They believed that the ā€˜traditionalā€™ forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were outdated in the face of the new economic, social and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world. Modern (quantum and relativistic) physics, modern (analytical and continental) philosophy and modern number theory in mathematics date from this period and contributed to Modernist thought and creativity.
  4. The availability of printed material (16thC) produced by the moveable-type press encouraged widespread literacy and an ever-greater emphasis on the individual. In Europe religious Reformation was met by Counter-Reformation, setting off a dramatic cycle of events whose effects are still being felt today. Whilst the priests were otherwise occupied, Humanism and the scientific method quietly triumphed. The Renaissance had reintroduced the observational method of the Ancient Greeks and, in the process, valorised the democratic system born in Athens and the Roman Republic. Both were an obvious contrast to the decadent and remote lives of the Europeā€™s rulers. Arguments were advanced for human and individual rights, utopian ideals and new social theories flourished. New technologies and new understandings of the fundamental laws of nature led to new industries and new wealth. Global exploration opened up new parts of the world; unimaginable wealth, new foods and natural wonders, new material and new markets for Europeā€™s manufactures were all to be found in these ā€˜newā€™ lands. New classes appeared ā€“ notably the mercantile and innovative middle classes ā€“ and they soon had money to burn.
  5. The old European social structures could not survive the onslaught of religious turmoil, an increasingly demanding and powerful non-aristocracy and rapidly changing demographics. The Age of Exploration had opened up new resources and new markets for the burgeoning European economies. Social struggles such as the 30 Year War tore countries apart and nations fought amongst themselves ā€“ jockeying for position in Europe and for the lionā€™s share of the spoils as they carved up the New World, and later much of the Pacific and Asia, into colonies and ā€˜protectorates.ā€™
  6. Despite the turmoil, in the long term European populations benefited from the flood of new goods, materials and money that poured into Europe. Peasants left their fields and poured into cities, which grew rapidly and chaotically. Traditional family and community structures were shattered and a new kind of class, the urban working class, developed; unshackled and unsheltered by the feudal structures of the past. New mass-production factories, full of machinery operated by women and children working for near starvation-wages, destroyed skilled artisansā€™ livelihoods. But new technology and new methods of production also created new opportunities and encouraged the growth of universal education. Innovation bred innovation, and science and technology became the pastime of the day for people of all classes.
  7. Advances in knowledge, particularly in the natural and geological sciences, undermined a literal belief in the Bible and a new age of practical secularism began. As the aristocracy became ever more peripheral, destroyed by their own traditions and privileges, democracy began to spread and the middle-classes became ever more powerful. Progress and human endeavor began to replace ā€˜Godā€™s Willā€™ as the driver of society.
  8. Mechanisation made everyone richer (eventually) and everything cheaper, but the Industrial Revolution would not be so called if it had not fundamentally changed society. In the Middle Ages, Sumptuary Laws had made sure that everyone knew their place in society. Only Nobles, for example, were allowed to wear luxurious materials and colours. The high volume cheap production that new machines such as the Spinning Jenny and power-loom made possible needed new markets to be profitable. Now anyone could dress like the rich ā€“ or certainly a lot more colourfully than theyā€™d previously been able to. Consumerism was born and with it a new interest in aesthetics. Everyone wanted nice things. The advertising and fashion industries had their modern beginnings at this point.
  9. New money changed the art world too. Increasingly artists produced for secular and middle-class buyers whilst the old model of religious and aristocratic patronage disappeared. Artā€™s subjects changed with the change of audience. Once valued primarily as spiritual or imperial statement, art had to find new uses, new markets and new meanings.
  10. Until recently, the word "modern" used to refer generically to the contemporaneous; all art was modern at the time it was made. For example: In 1437, Cennino Cennini wrote in his ā€˜Il Libro dell'Arteā€™ (translated as "The Craftsman's Handbook"), that Giotto made painting "modern" Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Artists), writing in 16th-century Italy, referred to the art of his own period as "modern." Today, however, what we mean when we talk about ā€™Modern/ist Artā€™ is the art historical term. Art historically, "Modernism" refers to a period from, roughly, the 1860s through to the 1970s and is used to describe the style and the ideology of art produced during that era. This is one of the reasons that art made since 1970 is generally called ā€˜contemporaryā€™ no matter what theory it might individually espouse. No art has been ā€˜modernā€™ since the 80s.
  11. Modernism has been couched largely in formal terms. Art historians speak of modern art as concerned primarily with essential qualities of colour and flatness and as exhibiting over time a reduction of interest in subject matter (i.e a tendency towards abstraction, minimalism and conceptualism). Many now argue that this concentration on the formal innovations and particular aesthetics introduced by Modernism was an attempt to ignore and devalue the very real social agendas of many of the artists.
  12. Modernism reached its apotheosis in the ā€˜50s and ā€˜60s, by which time it was most strongly associated with the USA and its values. American Modernist art was abstract art and was heavily promoted internationally by the US Government to assert its own cultural hegemony globally. Its most fervent and, perhaps, last major theorist was Clement Greenberg. ā€œModernism includes more than art and literature. By now it covers almost the whole of what is truly alive in our cultureā€ Clement Greenberg ā€˜Modernist Paintingā€™
  13. The first half of the 19th century for Europe was marked by a series of turbulent wars and revolutions, which fostered a series of ideas and doctrines now identified as Romanticism, which focused on individual subjective experience, the supremacy of ā€˜Natureā€™ and ā€˜the sublimeā€™ as the standard subject for art, revolutionary or radical extensions of expression, and individual liberty.
  14. Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature - emotion over reason and senses over intellect. Since they were in revolt against the Academy, they favoured the deployment of potentially unlimited number of styles (anything that aroused them).
  15. ā€œArt should be independent of all claptrap ā€”should stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the likeā€œ James Whistler Young artists increasingly made a virtue of their exclusion from the Salons of the Academies. Some, most wittily, James Whistler, championed the notion of ā€˜Art for Artā€™s Sakeā€™ ā€“ and insisted that the unique elements of art itself were the proper subject for artists. Hence, rather than simple title his famous painting of his mother with a descriptive title (ā€˜Motherā€™ for example), he entitled it ā€˜Arrangement in Grey and Blackā€™ ā€“ insisting that it was the compositional and tonal effects that were the content of the painting. Whistler professed to be perplexed and annoyed by the insistence of others upon viewing his work as a "portrait." In his 1890 book, ā€˜The Gentle Art of Making Enemiesā€™, he writes: ā€œTake the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an "Arrangement in Grey and Black." Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?ā€
  16. Parallel to the activities of aesthetes like Whistler were the activities of the Realists. Taking their cue from the vibrant genre and symbolic but exquisitely precise still-life painting of 16th and 17th Dutch art painting and from the observational informality of English painter Constableā€™s rural painting, a group of French artists formed what became known as the Barbizon School after the village they first gathered. They sought to draw inspiration directly from nature. Natural scenes became the subjects of their paintings rather than mere backdrops to dramatic events. One of them, Jean-Franois Millet, extended the idea from landscape to figures ā€” peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields. In The Gleaners (1857), Millet portrays three peasant women working at the harvest. There is no drama and no story told, merely three peasant women in a field.
  17. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. They wanted an art of spiritual realism and opposed the materialism of their time. They thought Art had lost its way, had become false, formulaic and decadent. And they knew who to blame ā€“ Raphael. It was all his fault, what with his smooth Classical illusions and charmingly elegant compositions. They would look at nothing that came after him, instead basing their work on the ā€˜trueā€™ earlier artists (hence pre-Raphaelite). They also strongly objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts. They called him "Sir Sloshua", believing that his broad technique was a sloppy and formulaic form of academic Mannerism. In contrast they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art.
  18. These dual movements; one emphasising aesthetics, the other insisting on close attention to nature and observation, came together in the Impressionists. Another major influence was Japanese art prints (Japonism), which had originally come into France as wrapping paper for imported goods. The art of these prints contributed significantly to the "snapshot" angles and unconventional compositions which would become characteristic of the movement.
  19. Impressionism initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plein air), from nature. We have seen how interest in light and optics exploded at the beginning of the 19thC, leading to the development of new optical technologies such as photography and animation, and to new understanding of the mechanisms of human sensation. The Impressionists, using these new understandings, argued that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brushstrokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The Impressionists relaxed the boundary between subject and background so that the effect of an Impressionist painting often resembles a snapshot, a part of a larger reality captured as if by chance.[10] Photography was gaining popularity, and as cameras became more portable, photographs became more candid. Photography inspired Impressionists to capture the moment, not only in the fleeting lights of a landscape, but in the day-to-day lives of people.
  20. The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if it did not receive the approval of the art critics and establishment. Impressionism is now the most generally popular art movement ever. By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism became seminal to various movements in painting which would follow, including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time ā€” the government sponsored Paris Salon ā€” the art was shown at the Salon des Refusee, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention, and opened commercial doors to the movement.
  21. Cezanne was one of the major predecessors of the Cubists and other 20thC art movements. He believed that all reality was built on simple ā€˜primitiveā€™ shapes. He was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials, he wanted to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, a human head a sphere, for example). Additionally, the concentrated attention with which he recorded his observations of nature resulted in a profound exploration of binocular vision, which results in two slightly different simultaneous visual perceptions, and provides us with depth perception and a complex knowledge of spatial relationships. We see two different views simultaneously; Cezanne employed this aspect of visual perception in his painting to varying degrees. The observation of this fact, coupled with Cezanneā€™s desire to capture the truth of his own perception, often compelled him to render the outlines of forms so as to at once attempt to display the distinctly different views of both the left and right eyes. Thus Cezanneā€˜s work augments and transforms earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single-point perspective.
  22. In 1872 he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Mus Marmottan-Monet, Paris. From the painting's title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism", which he intended to be derogatory, however the Impressionists appropriated the term for themselves.
  23. An american-born artist who lived in Paris and participated in four Impressionist exhibitions. As well as practicing the Impressionist aesthetic, Cassatt was important because of her subject matter; the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
  24. The second great 19thC school was Symbolism, a literary and art movement that originated in Belgium and France. Symbolism was largely a reaction against Naturalism and Realism, movements which attempted to objectively capture reality. Spurred on by the increasing mechanisation of the environment, some opted in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams. Symbolism was marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its nature, and that poetry and writing should follow whichever connection the sheer sound and texture of the words create. The Symbolist movement in literature has its roots in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire. The aesthetic was developed by Stephane Mallarme and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. During the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated through a series of manifestoes and attracted a generation of writers and artists.
  25. The Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence. The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and Les Nabis. In the 20thC, the Symbolists were important influences on the Surrealists and Dadaists, whilst their influence can be felt today in artists such as Hirt and Barney, but also in popular culture, particularly horror and fantasy genre books, films and games.
  26. There were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, among whom Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edvard Munch, Felicien Rops, and Jan Toorop were numbered. Symbolism in painting had an even larger geographical reach than Symbolism in poetry, reaching Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Victor Borisov-Musatov, Martiros Saryan, Mikhail Nesterov, Leon Bakst in Russia, as well as Frida Kahlo in Mexico, Elihu Vedder, Remedios Varo, Morris Graves, David Chetlahe Paladin, and Elle Nicolai in the United States. Auguste Rodin is sometimes considered a Symbolist in sculpture.
  27. Odilon Redon, a native of Bordeaux, produced a rich and enigmatic corpus: 'Like music', he declared, 'my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.ā€™ In contrast with Goya's monsters and Kubin's nightmare visions, his work is imbued with a melancholy passivity. While origins of this disposition must be sought in the artist's experience, the overall effect is entirely consistent with the moods of Symbolism ... : nocturnal, autumnal, and lunar rather than solar. His mature production began around 1875 when Redon entered the shadowy world of charcoal and the lithographer's stone. This period yielded sequences such as [Guardian Spirit of the Waters (1878)] and [Cactus Man (1881)]. Redon made it clear that they had been inspired by his dreams, and they inspire in the spectator a conviction like that of dreams. Redon's art was always commanded by his dreams, but the thematic content of his work over his last twenty years is more densely mythical, brimming with newfound hope and light which rose quite unexpectedly out of the depths of the artist's personality.