1. Rebellion in the Arts
Unit 11: Crisis Years

2. 1. Expressionism Vassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28
The scientific theories of Einstein and Rutherford convinced Kandinsky that material objects had no real substance. He was one of the first painters to explore complete abstraction in his canvases.
1. Expressionism

3. 2. Cubism Georges Braque, Still Life with a Bunch of Grapes
The Cubists rejected the pictorial illusionism that had dominated Western Art for centuries.
2. Cubism

4. Cubism Pablo Picasso, Guitar
In this model for a sculpture of sheet metal, Picasso presented this cutaway view of a guitar, allowing the viewer to examine both surface and interior space.
Cubism

5. 3. Dadaism (Excerpt from a manifesto)
Dada knows everything. Dada spits on everything. Dada says “knowthing,” Dada has no fixed ideas. Dada does not catch flies. Dada is bitterness laughing at everything that has been accomplished, sanctified….
No more painters, no more writers, no more religions, no more royalists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more police, no more airplanes…
Like everything in life, Dada is useless, everything happens in a completely idiotic way…We are incapable of treating seriously any subject whatsoever, let alone this subject: ourselves.
3. Dadaism (Excerpt from a manifesto)

6. Jean Arp,
Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance
Arp dropped torn paper squares onto a sheet of paper and then glued them into the resulting arrangement. His reliance on chance reinforced the anarchy inherent in Dada.
Dada – Literal meaning is “child’s hobbyhorse,” word was randomly picked from a French-to-German dictionary

7. Dadaism – “Readymades”
Marcel Duchamp,
Bicycle Wheel, and Fountain
Duchamp’s “readymade” sculptures were mass-produced objects that the Dada artist modified. He conferred the status of art on a urinal and forced people to see the object in a new light.
Dadaism – “Readymades”

8. Dadaism Man Ray, Cadeau (Gift)
With characteristic Dada humor, the American artist Man Ray equipped a laundry iron with a row of wicked-looking spikes, subverting its proper function of smoothing and pressing.
Dadaism

9. Max Ernst,
Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale
4. Surrealism

10. Surrealism Salvador Dalí The Persistence of Memory
Dalí aimed to paint “images of concrete irrationality.” In this realistically rendered landscape featuring three “decaying” watches, a haunting allegory of empty space where time has ended.
Surrealism

11. Surrealism René Magritte The Treachery of Images
The discrepancy between Magritte’s meticulously painted briar pipe and his caption, “This is not a pipe,” challenges the viewer’s reliance on the conscious and the rational in the reading of visual art.
Surrealism

12. Surrealism Meret Oppenheim, Object
The Surrealists loved the concrete tangibility of sculpture. Oppenheim’s functional fur-covered object captures the Surrealist flair for magical transformation.
Surrealism

13. 5. Functionalism – beauty in practical applications.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Fallingwater,
Bear Run , Pennsylvania
5. Functionalism – beauty in practical applications.

15. Coalition Government: A government controlled by a temporary alliance of several political parties.
Germany post-WWI
Weimar Republic : The republic government that was established in Germany in 1919 and ended in 1933.
After the Treaty of Versailles, Germany fell into massive war debt and unemployment
Important Terms

16. How did WWI change the balance of economic power in the world?
Germany – rebuilding and paying war debts
France and Italy – rebuilding
Russia – busy with Communist Revolution
Britain – mild war recovery
U.S. – 100% great since the war was never fought on our soil. Tons of growth!
Important Question