1. Today’s Essential Questions
What characteristics are inherent in Modernist texts? (art, poetry, novels)
How is modernism a reaction to romanticism?
What is art?

2. Rough Progression of Western Painting Trends
“Madonna and child” circa 1230
B. Berlinghieri
Raphael’s “School of Athens” 1510
Picasso’s 1912 Les Demoiselles
D’Avignon
Friedrich’s “Wanderer
over a Sea of Clouds” 1818
Pollock’s 1947 “Lucifer”

3. Rough Progression of European Literary Eras
Bible-focused literacy
Dante: Formal writing in vernacular about religion (1300s)
Renaissance: Shakespeare (1600s)
Celebration of collective understanding and literacy
Focus on Christianity and humanity
Enlightenment (late 1700s)
Erudite focus on reason, reality
Romanticism (middle 1800s)
Focus on the ideal and a return to nature
Modernism (early 1900s)
Lament for the loss of meaning a modern world

4. Modernism: Characteristics
Themes/Ideas
Literary Techniques
Disjointed narratives
Lack of central heroic figure
Pessimism about human nature
Focusing on inner world of reality, not outer
Fragmentation, juxtaposition of events, narrators, etc.
“Open” endings; lack of resolution
Intensive use of allegory, metaphor, allusion, symbol
Questioning the reliability of any individual’s experience/perspective
Critiquing traditional cultural values
Mourning the loss of meaning and hope in the modern world
exploration of how this loss may be faced

5. In your table groups, discuss:
What is art?
Why is art made?
How do you know when something isn’t art?

6. Introduction to Modernism
Yves Klein: “Blue”

8. Yves Klein (French, 1928–1962) Blue Monochrome : MOMA
Date: 1961
Medium: Dry pigment in synthetic polymer medium on cotton over plywood
Dimensions: 6' 4 7/8" x 55 1/8" (195.1 x 140 cm)
Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—has been a strategy adopted by many painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent.
Klein likened monochrome painting to an "open window to freedom."
He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue.
Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.

10. [Pedantic Distinctions Between] Genres of Modern Art
Cubism: Pablo Picasso
Expressionism: Edvard Munch
Futurism: Umberto Boccioni
Supremitism: Kasimir Malevich
Dada: Michel Duchamp
Kinetic Art: Alexander Calder
Surrealism: Salvador Dali

11. Pablo Picasso “the father of cubism”

12. What do you think an artist is
What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far, far from it: at the same time, he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.
-- Pablo Picasso

13. Cubism is the most influential visual art style of the early twentieth century. It was created by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963) in Paris between 1907 and 1914.
Left: “Road Near L'Estaque” by Georges Braque Right: Garden by James Rose.

16. “Ma Jolie” by Pablo Picasso, 1911-1912

17. Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) "Ma Jolie" : MOMA
Date:Paris, winter
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:39 3/8 x 25 3/4" (100 x 64.5 cm)
Ma jolie (My pretty girl) was the refrain of a popular song performed at a Parisian music hall Picasso frequented. The artist suggests this musical association by situating a treble clef and music staff near the bold, stenciled letters. Ma jolie was also Picasso's nickname for his lover Marcelle Humbert, whose figure he loosely built using the signature shifting planes of Analytic Cubism. This is far from a traditional portrait of an artist's beloved, but there are clues to its representational content. The central triangular mass subtly indicates the shape of a woman's head and torso, and a group of six vertical lines at the painting's lower center represent the strings of a guitar, which the woman strums. In Cubist works of this period, Picasso and Georges Braque employed multiple modes of representation simultaneously: here, Picasso combined language (in the black lettering), symbolic meaning (in the treble clef), and near abstraction (in the depiction of his subject).

18. “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso 1937

19. Guernica: Pablo Picasso Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
Year
1937
Type
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
349 cm × 776 cm
137.4 in × 305.5 in)
Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace.

20. Expressionism

21. Expressionism was a modernist movement originating in Germany
Presents the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality

22. NEW YORK, 2 May 2012 – Auction history was made at Sotheby’s when Edvard Munch’s iconic masterpiece The Scream sold for $119,922,500 / £73,921,284 / €91,033,826 in New York, marking a new world record for any work of art at auction. The iconic work is one of the most instantly recognizable images in both art history and popular culture, perhaps secondly to the Mona Lisa. A group of at least eight bidders jumped into the competition, but it was a prolonged battle between two highly determined phone bidders that carried the final selling price to its historic level, after more than 12 minutes.

23. The Scream: Edvard Munch
Pastel on board.
1895.
Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (1895), among the most celebrated and recognized images in art history, will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art for a period of six months. Of the four versions of The Scream made by Munch between 1893 and 1910, this pastel-on-board from 1895 is the only one remaining in private hands; the three other versions are in the collections of museums in Norway. The Scream is being lent by a private collector.
"The startling power of Munch's original work endures almost despite the image's present-day ubiquity," notes Ann Temkin …

24. Suprematism– Kasimir Malevich
His work was suppressed in Soviet Russia in the 1930s and remained little known during the following two decades.
The Stalinist regime turned against forms of abstraction, considering them a type of “bourgeois” art, that could not express social realities.
Eight Red Rectangles, 1915

25. Suprematism
The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” rather than on visual depiction of objects.

26. Suprematism– Kasimir Malevich
The style of severe geometric abstraction with which he is most closely associated, Suprematism, was a leading force in the development of Constructivism, the repercussions of which continued to be felt throughout the 20th century.
Russian painter, printmaker, decorative artist and writer of Ukranian birth. One of the pioneers of abstract art, Malevich was a central figure in a succession of avant-garde movements during the period of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and immediately after. The style of severe geometric abstraction with which he is most closely associated, Suprematism, was a leading force in the development of Constructivism, the repercussions of which continued to be felt throughout the 20th century. His work was suppressed in Soviet Russia in the 1930s and remained little known during the following two decades. The reassessment of his reputation in the West from the mid-1950s was matched by the renewed influence of his work on the paintings of Ad Reinhardt and on developments such as Zero, Hard-edge painting and Minimalism.
Black Square, 1923

28. “Glass Painting with Sun” by Wassily Kandinsky

29. “Glass Painting with Sun” by Wassily Kandinsky: Russian
Stadtische Galerie, Munich
1910
Kandinsky made the transition during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia without problem and became a key player in the art establishment there.
In 1919, he became director of the Museum for Artistic Culture in Moscow and had his work displayed with that of Kasimir Malevich and other Russian artists in the First State Exhibition.
In 1921 Kandinsky was elected vice-president of the Russian Academy of Aesthetics and also became head of its psychology department. Two years later he had his first one-man exhibition in New York.
He became a German citizen in 1928 but became a French citizen in Perhaps part of the reason for changing his citizenship again was because Kandinsky's work was shown in the 1937 Nazi exhibition of Degenerate Art and 57 of his art works in German museums were confiscated.

30. Futurism Futurism was a modernist movement originating in Italy
Glorifies themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane and the industrial city.

31. “The Street Enters the House” by Umberto Boccioni, 1911

32. "La strada entra nella casa" (The Street Enters the House) Sprengel Museum Hannover: Germany
1911
Umberto Boccioni’s painting is one of the most significant works in Italian Futurism
Boccioni’s painting is about the notion of simultaneity. Fragmented forms in the piece not only suggest a street, but also represent the sound and rhythm to be found there.

33. Dada & Kinetic art

34. Dada
Dada was an artistic and literary movement that began in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland.
It arose as a reaction to World War I, and the nationalism, and rationalism, which many thought had brought war about.
Dada's aesthetic, marked by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes, proved a powerful influence on artists in many European and American cities

35. “Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp Tate Modern Gallery: London
1917
The idea of designating such a lowly object as a work of art
Soon after the 1917 exhibition, Duchamp took Fountain to be photographed by his friend, the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Steiglitz. Since the original was lost thereafter, this photograph became the basis for the later replicas.
The Tate's version is number two in an edition of eight made by the Galleria Schwarz in Milan in October 1964.

36. “Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp
Duchamp bought an urinal from a plumbers' merchants, and submitted it to an exhibition organized by the Society of Independent Artists.
The Board of Directors, who were bound by the constitution of the Society to accept all members' submissions, took exception to the Fountain and refused to exhibit it. Duchamp and Arensburg, who were both on the Board, resigned immediately in protest.
An article published at the time, which is thought to have been written by Duchamp, claimed, ‘Mr Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' shop windows. Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object.’

37. “Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp
“Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip 'Mutt and Jeff' which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man ... I wanted any old name, And I added Richard [French slang for moneybags]. That's not a bad name for a pissotière. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT.” - Duchamp

38. “East Wing Mobile” by Alexander Calder, 1976

39. “Lobster Trap and Fishtail” by Alexander Calder, 1939

41. “Eagle” by Alexander Calder Olympic Sculpture Park: Seattle

42. Kineticism

43. Spanish Surrealists

44. Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech
Born
11 May 1904 Figueres, Catalonia, Spain
Died
23 January 1989 (aged 84) Figueres
Resting place
Crypt at Dalí Theatre and Museum, Figueres
Nationality
Spanish
Education
San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Madrid, Spain
Known for
Painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, writing, film, jewelry

45. Surrealism
Surrealism: the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought.
Surrealist works feature the element of surprise and unexpected juxtapositions
Surrealist methodology--the use of techniques, such as automatic writing, self-induced hallucinations, and word games like the exquisite corpse, to make manifest repressed mental activities.

46. “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dali, 1931 MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, NYC)

47. 1931. Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 13" (24.1 x 33 cm)

48. “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dali, 1931 MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, NYC)
Salvador Dalí frequently described his paintings as “hand painted dream photographs.” He based this seaside landscape on the cliffs in his home region of Catalonia, Spain. The ants and melting clocks are recognizable images that Dalí placed in an unfamiliar context or rendered in an unfamiliar way. The large central creature comprised of a deformed nose and eye was drawn from Dalí’s imagination, although it has frequently been interpreted as a self-portrait. Its long eyelashes seem insect-like; what may or may not be a tongue oozes from its nose like a fat snail from its shell.
Time is the theme here, from the melting watches to the decay implied by the swarming ants. Mastering what he called “the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling,” Dalí painted this work with “the most imperialist fury of precision,” but only, he said, “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” There is, however, a nod to the real: the distant golden cliffs are those on the coast of Catalonia, Dalí’s home.

49. “Harlequin's Carnival” by Joan Miro, 1924-1925

50. ****************************************

51. Post-modern art

52. Today’s Essential Questions
What characteristics are inherent in Modernist texts? (art, poetry, novels)
How is modernism a reaction to romanticism?
What is art?

53. Modernism: Characteristics
Themes/Ideas
Literary Techniques
Disjointed narratives
Lack of central heroic figure
Pessimism about human nature
Focusing on inner world of reality, not outer
Fragmentation, juxtaposition of events, narrators, etc.
“Open” endings; lack of resolution
Intensive use of allegory, metaphor, allusion, symbol
Questioning the reliability of any individual’s experience/perspective
Critiquing traditional cultural values
Mourning the loss of meaning and hope in the modern world
exploration of how this loss may be faced