Modern Art
Oh Boy!

• By 1900 the photograph had replaced the painting as the primary source of images.
• No further advances were possible in realistic painting.
• Subject matter for artists became aesthetics, ideas, and emotions.
• The idea that a painting should function as a window into reality was over.

Expressionism

• Sought to convey through color, brushstrokes and shapes their own emotional state.
• Dedicated to defying tradition
• Dedicated to linear and coloristic freedom

Edvard Munch: 1863-1944

• Paints human emotions; particularly themes of sexual longing, destructive passion, jealousy and death.
• Humans are trapped by overwhelming natural and spiritual forces.
• Caught between new bohemian intellectualism and rigid northern Christianity.

Henri Matisse: 1869-1954

• Every aspect of painting was subject to the artists emotions; pattern, color, line, and subject.
• Paintings are opportunities to create beautiful patterns of visual elements.

George Rouault: 1871-1958

• Member of the Expressionist movement: The Fauves (wild beasts).
• Reality is secondary to feelings, and not necessarily beauty.
• Had a deep, mystical catholic spirituality
• Sought a return to a more medieval style

(slide) Misery
(slide) King

Cubism

• Cubism was the natural outcome of Cezannes search for form through color.
• Cubists sought to equalize the entire surface of a painting
• Cubists fully broke the window of renaissance painting
• Cubists often included an element of time in their work

Pablo Picasso: 1881-1973

• Invented Cubism
• Invented collage painting
• Invented collage sculpture
• The most influential artist of the 20th century
• Each painting must abide by its own logic
• Art could be about anything: Beauty, ugliness, emotion, intellectualism.

(slide) Various Portraits
(slide) First Communion: Age 14
(slide) Science and Charity: Age 16
(slide) Absinth Drinker: Paris 1901
(slide) Self Portrait: 1901 (a self portrait in the 'blue period')
(slide) The Guitarist

(slide) Rose Period: 1905-07
(slide) Gertrude Stein: 1906
Influences: 1907 (slides of Japanese prints and African photos and masks)
(slide) The Women of the Red Light District (note African influence; first cubist painting)
(slide) Monet: 1907 (what art is in 1907)
Picasso:1907 (What Picasso was doing in 1907)
1909 (Note fractured picture frame; note how to see the pattern on the surface of the painting)
(slide) 1911 (uses collage; multiple media, combines found objects and painting)
(slide) 1913 (returns to traditional styles)
(slide) 1917
(slide) 1919
(slide) Igor Stravinsky 1920 (uses line drawings)
(slide) 1923 (painting
(slide) 1925 (his son in 1925)
(slide) 1932 (cubist; girl before mirror)
(slide) Guernica 1936 (most successful anti-war painting in history)
(slide) Francoise 1946
(slide) Francoise, Claude, Paloma 1951

Surrealism and Da Da

• These art movement were primarily a response to the devastation of WWI and the early psychological works of Freud and Jung.
• Philosophers looked for explanations for human behavior that seemed outside God's grace.
• Artists sought to illustrate the folly of governments, and to condemn the societies that could let WWI happen.

(slide) WWI images

Sigmund Freud: 1856 - 1939

• Human behavior was the result of the desires and fears of the unconscious.
• We have an id, ego, super-ego
• Most behavior, good and bad seems to derive from the expression or repression of the sex drive.

Carl Jung: 1875 - 1961

• Pioneered the idea of a collective unconscious.
• Used the interpretation of dreams as a way to understand the unconscious.
• Invented many archetypes of personalities based on the desires of the unconscious.

Renee Magritte: 1898-1967
(slides) Images of paintings that deal with perceptions

• Art based on the absurd found in everyday life.
• He uses poetry and humor
• Explores themes of psychology, dream images and human phobias.
• Magic realism

(slides) Additional slides of perception

Salvador Dali: 1904-1989

• Wanted to create hand colored photographs of the subconscious.
• Dream elements and symbols for time, spirituality, death and sexuality all convene in beautifully rendered canvasses.
• The meanings of the canvasses are to be teased out using psychoanalysis.

(slide) Woman at the Window 1925
(slide) The Specter of Sex Appeal 1934
(slide) The Weaning of Furniture Nutrition
(slide) Crucifixion (influenced by the atomic bomb)
(slide) The Persistence of Memory
(slides) Various additional pictures
(slide) The Last Supper
(slide) Ascention.
(slide) Gala as the Virgin Mary

Frida Kahlo: 1907 - 1954

• Painted fantastic, surreal and uncensored scenes from her life.
• Wanted to express her inner being.
• Her work is about emotions and dreams.

(slides) Frida and her husband
(slide) Pages from her visual journal
(slide) Frida postage stamps
(slides) Self portrait in Mexican costume
(slide) After a hair cut
(slides) Self-Portrait in naturalistic setting >br>(slide) Self-portrait; the heart is squeezed in two ways
(slide) Self-Portrait: As Hunted Stag
(slide) Photos of husband and wife
(slide) Self-Portrait: Diego tatooed on her forehead
(slides) Self-Portraits: Dealing with her injuries
(slide) Photo while painting in her bed

Max Ernst: 1891-1976

• Portrays the inner workings of the mind and dream imagery.
• Questions societal norms and the idea of progress.
• Point out the stupidity of culture and war
• Is involved with theories of personality
• 1916: University studies in Psychology and Philosophy are interrupted by induction into the German Army; fought in WWI trenches, survived to paint pictures of machines in natural elements

(slide) Tank/Elephant
(slide) Woman as part of machine
(slides) Various paintings images of machines/living things.
(slides) Images of dream-like object
(slide)Dressing of the Bride
(slide) The Anti-Pope
(slide) Virgin Spanking the Infant Jesus.
(slide) Napolean in the Desert

Joseph Cornell: 1903-1972

• Uses symbols to hint at human psychology and the inner workings of the mind.
• Creates miniature surreal installations.
• Shows the obsessive and compulsive side of human existence.
• Uses the technique of the Memory Box

(slides) Did a number of Medici paintings
(slides) Greta Garbo and various other boxes

Joan Miro: 1893-1983

• Painter of fantasy
• Fascinated with automatic writing, and how personality and psychology were revealed through handwriting, doodles and chance.
• Investigates what the mind might be trying to say by creating art from random doodles

(slides) Various examples of random art

Marcel Duchamp: 1887-1968

• Founding member of the Da Da movement.
• Wanted to show the absurdity of modern culture and war. Was a soldier in WWI and reflected the absurdity of war
• Examined the function of the artist
• Wanted to show the absurdity of art.
• Highly ironic

  (slide) 1911
  (slide) Nude Descending a Staircase (cubist painting)
  (slide) Postage stamp of Nude Descending a Staircase
  (slide) Cubists
  (slide) With his hair shaved in shape of star; one of first artists to use his body
  (slide) Himself
  (slide) Photo of self in Women's clothes
  (slide) Himself as group of card players
  (slide) Fountain (the signed urinal) Raises the question, "What makes a thing a work of art?"
  (slide) Photo of self sitting in front of Fountain
  (slide) Experiments in measurement -- standard stoppages
  (slide) Parisian Air (slides) Read-made art objects (bicycle wheel, snow shovel, bottle rack)
  (slide) The Malic Molds
  (slide) The Chocolate Grinder
  (slides) Photos of self as Check player
  (slide) The Hidden Noise
  (slide) The Briefcase Retrospective
  (slide) Photo of self playing chess; retired to write books on playing chess.
  (slide) Playing chess at his retrospective with nude woman
  (slide) Last piece, the wooden door