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Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” was created by Pablo Picasso in 1907 in Paris. The artwork depicts a group of nude young prostitutes staring at a viewer, therefore breaking the fourth wall (Picasso, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, n.d.). The painting is considered revolutionary because it symbolized the breakaway from Renaissance art and marked the formation of the Cubist movement. As a cubist, Picasso tries to shatter the three-dimensional image and then submit it in the form of a two-dimensional painting. Picasso uses nonlinear perspective and simplifies the chiaroscuro to transmit his own ideas on female sexuality. The viewer perceives the woman in the center as both standing across and lying on the bed. Additionally, the faces of two women on the picture resemble traditional African masks, which were brought to France as colonial trophies. The painting is a blend of contemporary styles and ideas, indicating the emergence of modern art.
Picasso, Still-Life with Chair Caning
“Still Life with Chair Caning” is a Pablo Picasso collage painting created in 1912. It depicts a Parisian café table composition: a newspaper represented by the written letters “JOU,” which flatten the painting; and a pipe, the bowl of which has been separated from the stem (Smarthistory, 2011a). A wine glass also looks disassembled, which represents the cubist technique of painting an object from various perspectives. It contrasts with the Renaissance concept of portraying something from a single vantage point and at a single point in time. Another element contributing to the artwork’s two-dimensionality is the chair caning, a pre-fabricated image that Picasso glued to the canvas. With his collage-style still life, Picasso states that manufactured objects can create an illusion more successfully than paint. Finally, Picasso uses rope as the picture frame, which can be seen as a mockery of academic art that utilized pretentious luxury frames.
Guernica (Picasso)
“Guernica” is an anti-war painting created by Picasso in 1937 commemorating the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The picture is black and white, which underlines the dark nature of the events depicted (Spencer’s Painting of the Week, 2011). “Guernica” is filled with terrifying characters: a bull standing over a woman lamenting a dead child, an agitated horse, a dead soldier. The bombed-out scene is engulfed in fire, a bull’s tail and a person with stretched-out arms are in flames. The bulb at the top evokes the atmosphere of a torture chamber, and also sounds similar to the word “bomb” in Spanish. However, Picasso expresses the hope for future peace in little details and hidden images: a woman carrying a lantern, a flying up bird resembling a dove, and a flower growing out of a dead soldier’s hand.
Brancusi, Bird in Space
“Bird in Space” is an abstract sculpture created in 1928 by French-Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. The statue is bronze, its pedestal is stone, and it is sometimes exhibited with a second wooden pedestal, which creates a sequence of materials from the most primal to the most artificial (Smarthistory, 2011b). “Bird in Space” depicts a representation of the idea of a bird as a flashing, curving, rising figure. The sculpture was to be a part of the 1936 Museum of Modern Art exhibition. Artworks go through customs and are not taxable; however, the US customs service refused to pass the sculpture untaxed because it did not consider “Bird in Space” to be a work of art, which even led to a lawsuit. Nevertheless, the sculpture is not as entirely abstract as it may seem because it still implies ascending motion and flight.
1913 | “Dynamism of a Soccer Player” by Umberto Boccioni
“Dynamism of a Soccer Player” is a painting created in 1913 by an Italian futurist, Umberto Boccioni. At the beginning of the 20th century, futurists perceived art as something that would be essential for future generations (The Museum of Modern Art, 2013). They used fast, loud industrial elements as central themes in each of their works. Photography and cinema were developing rapidly, and futurists wanted to incorporate movement into their art too. One of the futurists’ main objectives was to create scandal and controversy through their artwork. “Dynamism of a Soccer Player” depicts a footballer as a series of figures and colors. Perhaps futurists did not expect people to understand their paintings. It was more important to them that the viewer felt like he was witnessing something that was turning over many years of old historical art traditions.
Piet Mondrian – ‘Abstract Painting as We Know It’ | TateShots
Piet Mondrian is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century and one of the greatest contributors to abstract painting. He is known for his original and outstanding use of colors (Tate, 2014). His philosophy was that the color should not represent some particular object from reality (i.e., a yellow circle representing the sun), but could actually be used just as itself. In his painting, Mondrian comes to recreate certain perpendicular relationships in which each zone expresses a particular kind of color. He tried to find harmony in the unbalanced, so he mixed colors in unusual combinations. As a result, Mondrian was able to make the colors speak for themselves and create a new type of environment that can only be created through painting.
Kazimir Malevich | TateShots
Kazimir Malevich was a Russian avant-garde suprematist painter whose work revolutionized art. Malevich experimented with different art styles, and his most famous masterpiece, the “Black Square”, was first demonstrated at the “Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10” in St. Petersburg in 1915 (Tate, 2014a). He placed his “Black Square” in the corner, where icons were hung in village houses, and labeled the image an icon of his time. Thus, Malevich invented a new religion, with the “Black Square” serving as its symbol. Subsequently, he explored the themes of peasant life as well as the underwhelming topics of bolshevism and Stalinism. Malevich signed his later works with a little black square as a reminder that he was also the creator of such a groundbreaking avant-garde masterpiece. It seems like he was trying to propagate the possibility of stylistic eclecticism, which makes Malevich’s ideas and art relevant nowadays.
Henri Matisse Understanding Modern Art
Henri Matisse was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He was inspired by Neo-Impressionism and Symbolism, but his main teacher was Paul Cezanne (The Arts Hole, 2020). He is the most popular member of a fauvist movement. Matisse’s works are known for wild use of colors and their rejection of three-dimensionality. In some ways, he opposed neo-impressionism because he abandoned their color balance theory and did not pay attention to it. The impressionist philosophy aimed for the depiction of the first sight of a certain object, but Matisse left this approach. He displayed his impression only on the first sketch, subsequently redrawing it many times in order to get to the essence of it. His approach largely influenced the formation of modern design, which can be seen around, for example, in the form of advertising images or various logos.
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913
“Composition VII” was created in 1913 in Munich by the Russian abstractionist painter Wassily Kandinsky. It can be said that Kandinsky experienced and incorporated synesthesia into his art (Smarthistory, 2011c). It is an abnormal blending of the senses in which stimulation of one sensory organ produces sensation in another organ at the same time. Kandinsky was also acquainted with Arnold Schoenberg, a Viennese composer who experimented with atonal sounds. Kandinsky is attempting to elicit his own subjective experience of an object he is looking at. “Composition VII” consists of multicolored lines and shapes moving in different directions, which do not appear harmonious to the viewer, so the painting, therefore, can represent a conflict. Kandinsky’s later works became more minimalistic, which suggests that “Composition VII” symbolized the catharsis that destroyed the old order and cleared the way for the new one.
“Degenerate Art” exhibit explores Nazi assault on modern art
The “Degenerate Art” exhibition that was organized by the Nazis was intended to show the two types of art. One being true Aryan art that is healthy and righteous and the other being “degenerate” that disfigures reality (PBS NewsHour, 2014). Hitler was afraid of the idea of modern art because it broke with the traditional concept of art. Weimar Republic leftist artists like Otto Dix portrayed real life in often unpleasant and distorted ways. Nazis also hated the antiwar and pacifist pathos of modern art. They were preparing for the Second World War, and that is why Nazi art often shows war in a heroic and noble way. The modern recreation of this Nazi exhibition is aimed at showing the nature of any movement that tries to fight with contemporary art and to protect the world from such occasions.
Otto Dix. DER KRIEG (“WAR”) The Dresden Triptych
Otto Dix is considered to be the founding father of New Realism, a genre that he managed to establish in Europe in the 1920’s. He was a unique author who was able to recreate true chaos in his works (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2014). He spent three years in the trenches of the First World War, and this experience left a mark on him. He was inspired by the classic art that dealt with suffering and horror, especially the iconography of Christ. The exhibition features his triptych format painting “War”, on which he worked for three years. X-ray technology helped to track how the picture was created and to see the elements that Dix originally wanted to include in his work but subsequently abandoned. The author managed to depict the traumatizing and devastating aspects of the war that he saw with his own eyes.
Art as concept: Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm
Marcell Duchamp was one of the members of the Dada movement, and he invented the approach he called Ready-Mades. He would take a particular object from reality and exhibit it. One of his works, “In Advance of a Broken Arm”, is just a regular snow shovel hanging on a rope (Smarthistory, 2012a). Because it is not an art in the traditional sense, Duchamp provides a certain amount of cynicism with it. In fact, the author is being really anti-art in its usual sense with this exhibition. Duchamp mocks the way that the art market works because this is just a regular snow shovel that costs a few dollars in the store, but on the auction, it could cost a few millions. The title of the work is fascinating because it does not explain anything and makes a viewer think of their own explanation.
Magritte, The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)
One of the most famous of Magritte’s paintings, “The Treachery of Images”, is a very sophisticated painting that says a very new word in the art world. There is a very detailed depiction of a pipe, which is accompanied by the inscription “This is not a pipe” (Smarthistory, 2011d). As a result, the viewers find themselves in a state of conflict between the image and the text. On the one hand, the author is absolutely right because the object on the painting is not a pipe, it is only a representation of the pipe. On the other hand, the viewer’s perception is forced to deceive itself and confuse the real thing with its image because this is the nature of the art. This inscription breaks the fourth wall asking viewers what art really is.
Dali, The Persistence of Memory
“The Persistence of Memory” is one of the most famous paintings created by Salvador Dalí. The artwork comprises a desert landscape, melting clocks, and a distorted face and looks very psychedelic, corresponding to the art of the surrealists to which Dalí belonged (Smarthistory, 2012b). The painting is a dreamscape; there is an unendurable silence and stillness in the vastness of absurd environment. The main topic of the painting is time, which is an element of our industrial culture. However, Dalí examines time as a subjective phenomenon that can change based on people’s experiences. Time can be incomprehensible and frightening, which is why people attempt to quantify, limit, and classify it. Dalí confronts the idea of objectivity and intends to persuade the viewer that this approach is erroneous.
References
PBS NewsHour. (2014). “Degenerate Art” exhibit explores Nazi assault on modern art [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. (n.d.). [Video]. Khan Academy. Web.
Smarthistory. (2011). Picasso, Still-Life with Chair Caning [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Smarthistory. (2011). Brancusi, Bird in Space [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Smarthistory. (2011). Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913 [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Smarthistory. (2011). Magritte, The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Smarthistory. (2012). Art as concept: Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Smarthistory. (2012). Dali, The Persistence of Memory [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Spencer’s Painting of the Week. (2011). Guernica (Picasso) [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. (2014). Otto Dix. DER KRIEG (“WAR”) The Dresden Triptych [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Tate. (2014). Piet Mondrian – “Abstract Painting as We Know It” | TateShots [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Tate. (2014a). Kazimir Malevich | TateShots [Video]. YouTube. Web.
The Arts Hole. (2020). Henri Matisse Understanding Modern Art [Video]. YouTube. Web.
The Museum of Modern Art. (2013). 1913 | “Dynamism of a Soccer Player” by Umberto Boccioni [Video]. YouTube. Web.
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