Early Expressionism. Munch: The Mind Cracking

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1 Early Expressionism Munch: The Mind Cracking Edvard Munch (12 December January 1944) was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy. Many of his paintings, including The Scream, have universal appeal in addition to their highly personal meaning. Munch s art was highly personalized and he did little teaching. His private symbolism was far more personal than that of other Symbolist painters. Nonetheless, Munch was highly influential. He was an important inspiration particularly for German expressionist movement. His philosophy was: I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of Man s urge to open his heart. Expressionists followed his philosophy From Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, Munch learned Paris and spent some time there, but his most fertile period was between and 1908 when he was in Berlin. He was reactionary against conventional behaviour. MOOD: Munch was always an outsider. He was always in a melancholic mood. He called his paintings as his children. Childhood: He had a traumatic childhood: his mother and eldest sister died of consumption, when he was young. His fanatically religious father raised Munch. Even as an adult, Munch was so afraid of his father that he wanted his first nude painting to be covered by the exhibition organizers, so that his father could not see it. He was treated for depression at a sanatorium when he was young. There he realized that his psychological problems were a catalyst for his art. SPECIALITY: Munch was specialized in portraying extreme emotions, like jealousy, sexual desire, and loneliness. INFLUENCES: Early work: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist works of France and Art Nouveau STYLE: Early work: violent brushstrokes, tormented themes; late work: optimistic themes, less moving brushstrokes Munch was a forerunner of expressionism, a style that portrayed emotions through distortiing form and color. 1

2 The Scream an icon of contemporary life: Depicts an agonized figure against a blood red sky. Munch: above the blue back fjord hung the clouds red as blood, red as tongues of fire. Represents the intolarable fear of losing one s mind. Every line in the painting heaves with agitation, setting up the turbulent of rythms with no relief for the eye: hypnosis of the spectator Today, it is a cliché for high anxiety, but at the time it was exhibited, it caused such an disturbance, so that the exhibition was closed. The Scream Oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard. Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Although it is a highly unusual representation, nevertheless, this painting is of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Until the 20th century Mary was usually represented in high art as a chaste, mature woman. True to the Norwegian cultural beliefs and way of life, the painting is a strong dose of realism. Ms. Sigrun Rafter, an art historian at the Oslo National Gallery suggests that: Munch intended to represent Mary in the life-making act of intercourse, with the sanctity and sensuality of the union captured by Munch. The usual golden halo of Mary has been replaced with a red halo symbolizing the love and pain duality. The viewers viewpoint is that of the man with her. Even in this unusual pose, she embodies some of the key elements of canonical representations of the Virgin: She has a quietness and a calm confidence about her. Her eyes are closed, expressing modesty, but she is simultaneously lit from above; Her body is seen, in fact, twisting toward the light so as to catch more of it, even while she does not face it with her eyes. These elements suggest aspects of conventional representations of the Annunciation. The Annunciation is, in Christianity, the revelation to Mary, the mother of Jesus by the angel Gabriel that she would conceive a child to be born the Son of God. Madonna 2

3 Puberty, 1895; Oil on canvas, 150 x 110 cm; Nasjonalgalleriet (National Gallery), Oslo The Dance of Life, ; Oil on canvas; National Gallery, Oslo 3

4 After 1910, Munch returned to Norway, where he lived and painted until his death. In his later paintings Munch showed more interest in nature, and his work became more colorful and less pessimistic. Self Portrait: Between Clock and Bed, ; Oil on canvas, x cm; Munch Museum, Oslo The Twentieth Century: MODERN ART Twentieth century art provided the sharpest break with the past in the whole evolution of Western Art. 4

5 Twentieth century art took to an extreme what Courbet and Manet began in the 19th century: portraying contemporary life rather than historical events. It declared all subjects as fair. It liberated form from traditional rules: as in Cubism. It freed color from accurately representing an object: as in Fauvism. Modern artists confronted convention, tradition. They listened to Gauguin s demand a breaking of all the old windows, even if we cut our fingers on the glass. At the core of this philosophy of rejecting the past called Modernism, was a relentless quest for radical freedom of expression. Released from the need to please a patron, the artist stressed private concerns, experiences and imagination as the sole source of art. Art gradually moved away from any pretense of rendering nature toward pure abstraction, where form, line and color dominate. 5

6 PARIS and NEW YORK: THE INSPIRATIONS OF MODERN ART During the first half of the century, the school of Paris reigned supreme. Whether or not artists of a particular trend live in Paris, most movements emanated from France. Until World War II, the City of Light shined as the brightest inspiration of modern art. Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism originated there. In the 1950s, the New York School of Abstract Expressionism dethroned the School of Paris. The forefront of innovation shifted for the first time to the United States, where Action painter jackson Pollock, as his colleague Willem de Kooning said, busted our idea of picture all to hell. WORLD HISTORY ART HISTORY ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY Wrights flight airplane 1903 Machintosh builds Hill HOuse Einstein announces relativity theory 1905 First Fauve exhibit, Die Brücke founded Earthquake shakes San Francisco 1906 Gaudi starts building Casa Mila 1907 Brancusi carves first abstract sculpture 1908 Picasso and Braque found Cubism Ash Can painters introduced realism Wright invents Prairie House 1910 Kandinsky paints first abstract canvas 1911 Der Blaue Reiter formed Henry Ford develops assembly line 1913 Armory Show shakes up American art World War I declared Dada begins Lenin leads Russian revolution 1917 De Stijl founded 1918 Bauhaus formed 1920s Mexican muralists active U.S. Women win vote 1920 Soviets suppress Constructivism Hitler writes Mein Kampf 1924 Surrealists issue manifesto Gropius builds Bauhaus in Dessau Lindbergh flies solo across Atlantic 1927 Buckminister Fuller designs Dymaxian House Fleming discovers penicillin 1928 Stock Market crashes 1929 Le Corbusier s Villa Savoy sets style for Modernism FDR becomes President 1933 Commercial television begins 1939 U.S: enters WWII s American scene painters popular, Social Realists paint political art Empire State Building opens First digital computer developed 1944 Pope s National Gallery is last major Classical building in U.S. Hiroshima hit with atom bomb 1945 Dubuffet coins term L Art Brut Mahatma Gandhi assasinated, Israel founded 1948 People s Republic of China founded 1949 Oral Contraceptive invented 1950 Abstract expressionism recognized DNA structure discovered, Mt. Everest scaled 1953 Supreme Court outlaws segregation 1954 Salk invents polio vaccine Harold Rosenberg coins term Action Painting Elvis sings rock n roll 1956 Wright builds Guggenheim Soviets launch Sputnik 1957 EXPRESSIONISM SURREALISM ABSTRACT EXPPRESSIONISM CONSTRUCTIVISM FAUVISM FUTURISM PRECISIONISM HIGH CUBISM EARLY CUBISM LATE CUBISM 6

7 Fauvism ( ) Les Fauves (French for The Wild Beasts) were a short-lived and loose grouping of early 20th century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only three years, , and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain. CHARACTERISTICS: The paintings of the Fauves were characterized by: seemingly wild brush work and harsh colors, a high degree of simplification and abstraction in their subject matter. INFLUENCES: Fauvism can be classified as: an extreme development of Van Gogh's Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionist painters, in particular Paul Signac. Other key influences were Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated color notably in paintings from Tahiti strongly influenced Derain's work at Collioure in In 1888, Gauguin had said to Paul Sérusier.: How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion. Fauvism can also be seen as a mode of Expressionism. ORIGINS OF FAUVISM: Gustave Moreau was the movement's inspirational teacher; a controversial professor at the École des Beaux- Arts in Paris and a Symbolist painter, he taught Matisse, Marquet, Manguin, Rouault and Camoin during the 1890s, and was viewed by critics as the group's philosophical leader until Matisse was recognized as such in 1904.Moreau's broad-mindedness, originality and affirmation of the expressive potency of pure color was inspirational for his students. Matisse said of him, "He did not set us on the right roads, but off the roads. He disturbed our complacency. This source of empathy was taken away with Moreau's death in 1898, but the artists discovered other catalysts for their development. In 1896, Matisse, then an unknown art student, visited the artist John Peter Russell on the island of Belle Île off Brittany. Russell was an Impressionist painter; Matisse had never previously seen an Impressionist work directly, and was so shocked at the style that he left after ten days, saying, "I couldn't stand it any more." The next year he returned as Russell's student and abandoned his earth-colored palette for bright Impressionist colors, later stating, "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me." Russell had been a close friend of Vincent van Gogh and gave Matisse a Van Gogh drawing. In 1901, Maurice de Vlaminck encountered the work of Van Gogh for the first time at an exhibition, declaring soon after that he loved Van Gogh more than his own father; he started to work by squeezing paint directly onto the canvas from the tube. In parallel with the artists' discovery of contemporary avant-garde art came an appreciation of pre- Renaissance French art, which was shown in a 1904 exhibition, French Primitives. Another aesthetic feeding into their work was African sculpture, which Vlaminck, Derain and Matisse were early collectors of. Many of the Fauve characteristics first cohered in Matisse's painting, Luxe, Calme et Volupté ("Luxury, Calm and Pleasure"), which he painted in the summer of 1904, whilst in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. 7

8 Henri Matisse (31 December November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of color and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. He was a Master draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but excelled primarily as a painter. Matisse is regarded, with Picasso, as the greatest artist of the 20th century. Although he was initially labeled as a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s, he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art. Luxe, Calme et Volupté is an oil painting by Henri Matisse from Its title comes from the poem L'Invitation au voyage, from Charles Baudelaire's volume Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil): Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, Luxe, calme et volupté. There all is order and beauty, Luxury, peace, and pleasure. Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, 1904, Musée National d'art Moderne. Matisse's early work, which he began exhibiting in 1895, was informed by the dry academic manner, particularly evident in his drawing. Discovering manifold artistic movements that coexisted or succeeded one another on the dynamic Parisian artistic scene, such as Neo-Classicism, Realism, Impressionism, and Neo-Impressionism, he began to experiment with a diversity of styles, employing new kinds of brushwork, light, and composition to create his own pictorial language. FAUVISM TO COME... Its somber coloration is typical of Matisse's works executed between the end of 1901 and the end of 1903, a period of personal difficulties for the artist. This episode has been called Matisse's Dark Period. A Glimpse of Notre-Dame in the Late Afternoon, Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 72,5 x 54,5 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York In its palette and technique, Matisse's early work showed the influence of: Édouard Manet ( ) and Paul Cézanne ( ). In the summer of 1904, while visiting his artist friend Paul Signac at Saint-Tropez, Matisse discovered the bright light of southern France, and this discovery led him change his color selection to a much brighter palette. He also was exposed, through Signac, to a Pointillist technique of small color dots (points) in complementary colors, perfected in the 1880s by Georges Seurat ( ). In the summer of 1906, Matisse and André Derain ( ) made a vacation to Collioure, a seaport on the Mediterranean coast, and there, Matisse created brilliantly colored canvases structured by color applied in a variety of brushwork, ranging from thick impasto to flat areas of pure pigment, sometimes accompanied by a sinuous, arabesque-like line. 8

9 The Open Window also known as Open Window, Collioure, is a painting by Henri Matisse from 1905, oil on canvas, former collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, New York, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. An example of the Fauvist style of painting that Matisse became famous for; and for which he was a leader, roughly between the years The theme of an open window in Matisse's work is a recurring theme throughout his long career. In Open Window, Collioure, 1905, he painted the view out the window of his apartment in Collioure, on the Southern coast of France. We see sailboats on the water, from Matisse's hotel window out onto the harbor of Collioure. He used the theme of the open window in Paris and especially during the years in Nice and Etretat, and in his final years, particularly during the late 1940s. Open Window, Collioure, 1905, Oil on Canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Green Stripe (Madame Matisse), 1905 In his green stripe portrait of his wife, he has used color alone to describe the image. Her oval face is bisected with a slash of green and her coiffure, purpled and top-knotted, juts against a frame of three jostling colors. Her right side repeats the vividness of the intrusive green; on her left, the mauve and orange echo the colors of her dress. This is Matisse's version of the dress, his creative essay in harmony. Matisse painted this unusual portrait of his wife in The green stripe down the center of Amélie Matisse's face acts as an artificial shadow line and divides the face in the conventional portraiture style, with a light and a dark side, Matisse divides the face chromatically, with a cool and warm side. The natural light is translated directly into colors and the highly visible brush strokes add to the sense of artistic drama. Green Stripe (Madame Matisse) 1905; Oil and tempera on canvas, 40.5 x 32.5 cm; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen 9

10 Woman with a Hat (La femme au chapeau) is a painting by Henri Matisse from It is believed that the woman in the painting was Matisse's wife, Amelie. It was exhibited with the work of other artists, now known as "Fauves" at the 1905 Salon d'automne. Critic Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the phrase : "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. The pictures gained considerable condemnation, such as "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" from the critic Camille Mauclair, but also some favorable attention. The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat: This had a very positive effect on Matisse, who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work. Woman with a Hat, Oil on Canvas, 79.4x 59.7 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Les toits de Collioure, 1905, Oil on Canvas, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia Les toits de Collioure is a painting by Henri Matisse from It is an example of the Pointillist style that Matisse employed during his early period of Fauvism. The painting is in the collection of The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. Le bonheur de vivre (The joy of Life), is a painting by Henri Matisse. In the central background of the piece is a group of figures that is similar to the group depicted in his painting The Dance (second version). This painting was Matisse's own response to the hostility his work had met with in the Salon d'automne of 1905, a response that entrenched his art even more deeply in the aesthetic principles that had governed his Fauvist paintings which had caused a furor and which did so on a far grander scale, too. Henri Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre, , Oil on Canvas, 175 x 241 cm, Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA 10

11 Paintings such as Woman with a Hat (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), when exhibited at the 1905 Salon d'automne in Paris, gave rise to the first of the avant-garde movements (fall ), named "Fauvism by a contemporary art critic, referring to its use of arbitrary combinations of bright colors and energetic brushwork to structure the composition. During his brief Fauvist period, Matisse produced a significant number of remarkable canvases, such as the portrait of Madame Matisse, called The Green Line (1905; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen); Bonheur de vivre (1905 6; Barnes Collection, Merion, Pa.); Marguerite Reading (1905 6; MoMA, New York); two versions of The Young Sailor (1906), the second of which is at the Metropolitan Museum ; Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (1907; Baltimore Museum of Art); and two versions of Le Luxe (1907), among others. Blue Nude I. (Souvenir de Biskra) Oil on canvas. Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA. Blue Nude II, 1952, gouache découpée, Pompidou Centre, Paris They represent female nudes either seated or standing, and are among Matisse's final works in any medium. During the early to mid-1940s Matisse was in poor health. Eventually by 1950 he stopped painting in favor of his paper cutouts. The Blue Nudes, are a major series' of Matisse's final body of works known as the cutouts. They are widely viewed as an important and innovative group of Matisse's collages. Subsequently, Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it in his "Notes of a Painter" in The years were focused on art and decoration, producing several large canvases such as: Reclining Odalisque; two important mural-size commissions, Dance and Music ( ); a trio of large studio interiors, exemplified by The Red Studio (1911; MoMA, New York); and a group of spectacularly colored Moroccan pictures. Madras Rouge, x 80.5 cm. Oil on canvas. In the collection of the Barnes Foundation 11

12 The painting shows five dancing figures, painted in a strong red, set against a very simplified green landscape and deep blue sky. It reflects Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art, and uses a classic Fauvist color palette: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. The painting is often associated with the "Dance of the Young Girls" from Igor Stravinsky's famous musical work The Rite of Spring. The Dance (second version) is commonly recognized as "a key point of (Matisse's) career and in the development of modern painting". The Dance (second version), 1910 Oil on Canvas, 260 x 391 cm, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia The Dessert: Harmony in Red is a painting by French artist Henri Matisse, from It is considered by some critics to be Matisse's masterpiece. It is an example of Impressionism's lack of a central focal point. The painting was ordered as "Harmony in Blue," but Matisse was dissatisfied with the result, and so he painted it over with his preferred red. It is in the permanent collection of the Hermitage Museum, but currently (as of February 2008) on temporary display in the Royal Academy, London, England. MATISSE AND PICASSO: Around 1904 he met Pablo Picasso, who was 12 years younger than him. The two became life-long friends as well as rivals and are often compared; one key difference between them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still life, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors. The Dessert: Harmony in Red, 1908, Oil on Canvas, 180 x 220 cm, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg Matisse also limits his perspective in this work. He makes elisions in the line around the table, frames the chair, the window, and the little house in an innovative manner by cutting them off, and encloses two of the planes, the green and the blue in a window. 12

13 Matisse painted The Conversation at a time when he had abandoned the open, spontaneous brushwork of his Fauve period in favor of a flatter and more decorative style. The painting is large (69 5/8 in. x 85 3/8 in., or 177 cm x 217 cm), and shows Matisse in profile, standing at the left in striped pajamas, while his wife, Amélie, sits at the left. The flatly painted blue wall behind them is relieved by a window opening onto a garden landscape. The pajamas worn by Matisse were fashionable as leisure wear in early 20th century France. They had recently been introduced to Europe from India, and Matisse habitually thereafter wore pajamas as his studio working clothes. The Conversation, c.1911, Oil on Canvas, 177 x 217 cm; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia Art historian Hilary Spurling has described this "stern encounter" as "portray[ing] the profound underlying shape or mechanism of a relationship laid down for both parties on the day, soon after they first met in 1897, when Matisse warned his future wife that, dearly as he loved her, he would always love painting more." These were followed by four years ( ) of experimentation and discourse with the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. The resulting compositions were much more austere, almost geometrically structured and at times close to abstraction, as shown in the View of Notre-Dame (1914; MoMA, New York), the Yellow Curtain (1915; private collection), The Piano Lesson (1916; MoMA, New York), Bathers by a River (1916; Art Institute, Chicago), and a group of portraits in which a seated figure or the sitter's head is positioned against a thinly brushed, neutral background. Yet he also created meticulously drawn portraits such as the famous Plumed Hat (1919; MoMA, New York). Le Rifain assis, , Oil on Canvas, 200 x 160 cm. Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA The Yellow Curtain, 1915, Oil on Canvas, 146 X 97 cm, Museum of Modern Art New York City 13

14 Andre Derain ( ) Derain was one of the founding fathers of fauvism, and one of its wildest practitioners. Influenced by van Gogh and working with Vlaminck in 1904 he felt that the impressionists had disintegrated their work into dots excessively. Instead, he chose to use wide, choppy brush strokes of pure color. In 1905, he worked with Matisse to bring the technique to maturity. Derain and Matisse worked together through the summer of 1905 in the Mediterranean village of Collioure and later that year displayed their highly innovative paintings at the Salon d'automne. The vivid, unnatural colors led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to derisively dub their works as les Fauves, or "the wild beasts", marking the start of the Fauvist movement Boats Boats at Collioure's Harbor Collioure 1905, Paintings of Collioure Boats at Collioure Suburb of Collioure 14

15 St. Paul's Cathedral from the Thames, 1906 Blackfriars Bridge, 1906 In March 1906, the noted art dealer Ambroise Vollard sent Derain to London to compose a series of paintings with the city as subject. In 30 paintings (29 of which are still extant), Derain put forth a portrait of London that was radically different from anything done by previous painters of the city such as Whistler or Monet. With bold colors and compositions, Derain painted multiple pictures of the Thames and Tower Bridge. These London paintings remain among his most popular work. André Derain was a quintessential Fauve. He reduced his brushstrokes to Morse Code: dots and dashes of burning primary colors, exploding, he said, like, charges of dynamite. The Houses of Parliament,

16 The Thames, 1906 Charing Cross Bridge, London,

17 Derain pioneered strong color as an expressive end in itself. His bold, directional brushstrokes eliminated lines and the distinction between light and shade. For the first two decades of the twentieth century, Derain was at the avant-garde hub, a creator Fauvism, and an early Cubist. He later turned into old Masters for inspiration and his work became dry and academic. The Dancer, 1906 Revision: Fauvism Movement in French painting from c to 1906 characterized by a violence of colors, often applied unmixed from commercially produced tubes of paint in broad flat areas, by a spontaneity and even roughness of execution and by a bold sense of surface design. It was the first of a succession of avant-garde movements in 20th-century art and was influential on near-contemporary and later trends such as Expressionism, Orphism and the development of abstract art. An early-20th-century movement in painting begun by a group of French artists and marked by the use of bold, often distorted forms and vivid colors. 17

18 Picasso ( ) The King of Modern Art For half a century, Picasso led the forces of artistic innovation, shocking the world by introducing a new style, an then moving on as soon as his unorthodoxy became accepted. His most significant contribution, aided by Braque, was inventing Cubism, the major revolution of twentieth century art. Until the age of 91, Picasso remained vital and versatile. Although Picasso worked in a number of distinctive styles, his art was always autobiographical. The paintings, he said, are the pages of my diary. Women were his chief sources of information, so a chronolocigal overview of his paintings reveal the features of his lovelife. Blue Period ( ) The Old Guitarist Pablo Picasso Oil On Panel, 1903 Picasso s first original style grew out of his down-and-out years as an impoverished artist. The Blue Period of is socalled because of the cool blue shades Picasso used. Frequently he depicted solitary figures set against almost empty backgrounds, the blue palette imparting a mood of melancholy and desolation to images that suggest unhappiness and dejection, poverty, despondency, and despair. Most prevalent among his subjects were the old, the destitute, the blind, the homeless, and the otherwise underprivileged outcasts of society. Brooding Woman (recto), Three Children (verso), 1904 Pablo Picasso (Spanish, ) Watercolor on paper, (27 x 36.8 cm), MoMA. 18

19 The Blind Man's Meal, painted in Barcelona in the autumn of 1903, summarizes the stylistic characteristics of Picasso's Blue Period: rigorous drawing, simple hieratic compositions and forms, and of course, a blue tonality. The composition presents a forlorn figure seated at a frugal repast The Blind Man's Meal, 1903 Pablo Picasso (Spanish, ) Oil on canvas (95.3 x 94.6 cm) In a letter, preserved in the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania, Picasso gives a very precise description of the composition: "I am painting a blind man at the table. He holds some bread in his left hand and gropes with his right hand for a jug of wine." An empty bowl and a white napkin complete the still life on the table. The man's slightly contorted figure, long thin El Greco like hands, unadorned surroundings, and his blindness make his disenfranchised condition all the more poignant. The highlights on his face and neck, hands, bread, and napkin put the figure in relief against the austere background. The painting is not merely a portrait of a blind man; it is also Picasso's commentary on human suffering in general. The meager meal of bread and wine invites references to the figure of Christ and the principal dogma of Catholic faith, whereby bread and wine represent Christ's body and blood, sacramental associations that Picasso as a Spaniard would have known. Additionally, the work elicits affinities to Picasso's own situation at the time, when, impoverished and depressed, he closely identified with the unfortunates of society. Rose Period ( ) The Rose Period signifies the time when the style of Pablo Picasso's painting used cheerful orange and pink colors in contrast to the cool, somber tones of the previous Blue Period. It lasted from 1904 to Picasso was happy in his relationship with Fernande Olivier whom he had met in 1904 and this has been suggested as one of the possible reasons he changed his style of painting. Harlequins, circus performers and clowns appear frequently in the Rose Period and will populate Picasso's paintings at various stages through the rest of his long career. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. The Rose Period has been considered French influenced, while the Blue Period more Spanish influenced, although both styles emerged while Picasso was living in Paris. Picasso's highest selling painting, Garçon à la pipe (Boy with a pipe) was painted during the Rose Period. Other Rose Period works include: Woman in a Chemise (Madeleine) ( ), Lady with a Fan (1905), Two Youths (1905), Harlequin Family (1905), Harlequin's Family With an Ape (1905), La famille de saltimbanques (1905), Boy with a Dog (1905), Nude Boy (1906), and The Girl with a Goat (1906). Pablo Picasso, Garçon à la pipe, (Boy with a Pipe), 1905, Rose Period 19

20 The destitute outcasts featured in Picasso's Blue Period gave way, in 1905, to circus performers and harlequins in more colorful settings. At the Lapin Agile is a canvas nearly square and broadly painted. It was originally conceived to decorate a bar in Montmartre. We depict the interior of that bar here. Since the painting would be seen across a crowded and smoky room, Picasso's composition was of posterlike simplicity. He aligned glasses and figures hatted and shown from full-face to profile view along severe diagonals, ending with a seated guitarist, Frédéric (Frédé) Gérard, the café's owner. Standing at the counter is Picasso himself, dressed as the melancholy and gaunt Harlequin in a vivid diamondpatterned shirt and three-cornered hat. Behind him, in profile with heavy makeup and pouty lips, leans Germaine Pichot, a model and notorious femme fatale, wearing a gaudy orange dress, bead choker, boa, and feathered hat. In 1901, unrequited love for Germaine had driven Picasso's close friend Carlos Casagemas to suicide, a melodrama that continued to haunt Picasso several years later. At the Lapin Agile, 1905 Pablo Picasso (Spanish, ) Oil on canvas (99.1 x cm) Les Demoiselles d'avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Avinyó Street in Barcelona. All of the figures depicted are physically jarring, none conventionally feminine, all slightly menacing, and each is rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two of the women are rendered with African masklike faces, giving them a savage and mysterious aura. In his adaption of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. The work is one of Picasso's most famous, and is widely considered to be a seminal work in the early development of both Cubism and modern art. Les Demoiselles d'avignon, 1907 Oil on canvas; x cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Although still a transitional work, this large painting may be called the first Cubist picture. Its combined influences are manifold, ranging from El Greco, the bathers of Cézanne, and Iberian and African art that Picasso had recently seen at the ethnographic museum in Paris. Picasso made innumerable preparatory studies for this work. The title, given years later by a friend of Picasso, is an ironic reference to a cabaret or maison publique on the Carrer d'avinyó (Avignon Street) in Barcelona. The dynamic power of this work, its expressionistic violence and the barbaric intensity of the five women, especially the two on the right, was unsurpassed in European art at that time. The picture remained with Picasso until 1920, when it passed into the collection of the famous couturier Jacques Doucet. While in Picasso's studio and seen by other artists, the work acquired a legendary reputation. 20

21 Cubism Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. There are two branches of Cubism: 1. Analytic Cubism was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France. 2. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity. Art historian Douglas Cooper divided Cubism into three phases: 1. Early Cubism ( ) Picasso Braque 2. High Cubism ( ) Juan Gris 3. Late Cubism ( ) 21

22 Analytical Cubism Analytical Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was developed between 1908 and In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the twodimensional picture plane. Color was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on color, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities. Synthetic Cubism Synthetic Cubism was the third main movement within Cubism that was developed by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and others between 1912 and Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter. It was the beginning of collage materials being introduced as an important ingredient of fine art work. the invention of a new art form called, collage. 22

23 The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points. The liberating formal concepts initiated by Cubism also had far-reaching consequences for Dada and Surrealism, as well as for all artists pursuing abstraction in Germany, Holland, Italy, England, America, and Russia. In Cubist work up to 1910, the subject of a picture was usually discernible. Although figures and objects were dissected or "analyzed" into a multitude of small facets, these were then reassembled, after a fashion, to evoke those same figures or objects. During "high" Analytic Cubism ( ), also called "hermetic," Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in nearmonochromatic browns, grays, or blacks. In their work from this period, Picasso and Braque frequently combined representational motifs with letters. Their favorite motifs were still lifes with musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, playing cards, and the human face and figure. Landscapes were rare. Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), late spring 1910, Paris. Pablo Picasso (Spanish, ) Oil on canvas, (100.3 x 73.6 cm), MoMA. 23

24 Candlestick and Playing Cards on a Table, Autumn 1910 Georges Braque (French, ) Oil on canvas Oval: 65.1 x 54.3 cm The composition of this small oval painting consists of clearly defined Cubist planes in hues of brown and ocher highlighted by black and white. At the center can be identified the corner of a table upon which rests the round base of a brass candlestick and, at the right, two playing cards the ace of hearts and the six of diamonds. This still life presents one of the earliest instances of Braque's choice of an oval format. Soon, both Braque and Picasso would make frequent use of this shape. In rectangular Analytic Cubist paintings, planes and facets of forms concentrate in the center of a composition, and the corners remain relatively empty. An oval format avoids such corners, and therefore Braque and Picasso sometimes favored this shape. Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, Pablo Picasso, (Spanish, ) The Art Institute of Chicago. Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a business sense? 24

25 "Ma Jolie," Pablo Picasso "Ma Jolie," winter , Paris Pablo Picasso (Spanish, ) Oil on canvas, (100 x 64.5 cm), MoMA. "Ma Jolie!" (My pretty girl) was Picasso's pet name for his lover Marcelle Humbert ("Eva"). These easily legible words form a stark contrast to the nearly indecipherable image of Eva playing a string instrument. Numerous clues connect "Ma Jolie" to reality: 1. a triangular form in the lower center, strung like a guitar; 2. below the strings, four fingers, with an angular elbow to the right; and 3. in the upper half, perhaps a floating smile. Together these elements suggest a woman holding a musical instrument, but the picture hints at reality only to deny it. Planes, lines, spatial cues, shadings, and other traces of painting's language of illusion are abstracted from descriptive uses; the figure almost disappears into a network of flat, straight-edged, semitransparent planes. Yet "Ma Jolie," an example of high Analytic Cubism, is actually a painting on a very traditional theme a woman holding a musical instrument. The palette of brown and sepia is reminiscent of the work of Rembrandt, and Picasso emphasizes the handmade nature of the brushstrokes, underlining the artist's human presence. Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, Summer 1911 Pablo Picasso (Spanish, ) Oil on canvas (61.3 x 50.5 cm) Picasso painted Still Life with a Bottle of Rum during the summer of 1911 in Céret, the small town in the French Pyrenees that was so popular with poets, musicians, and artists especially the Cubists before World War I that it has been called the "spiritual home of Cubism." One is hard-pressed to see the bottle of rum indicated in the title of this work, which was painted during the most abstract phase of Cubism, known as "high" Analytic Cubism ( ). In the upper center of the picture are what seem to be the neck and opening of a bottle. Some spidery black lines to the left of it might denote sheet music, and the round shape lower down, the base of a glass. In the center, at the far right, is the pointed spout of a porrón (Spanish wine bottle). SIGNIFICANCE: This is one of the first works in which Picasso included letter forms. It has been suggested that the ones shown at the left, LETR, refer to Le Torero, the magazine for bullfighting fans Picasso being one of them but they might simply be a pun on lettre, French for "word." 25

26 Still Life with a Pair of Banderillas, Summer 1911 Georges Braque (French, ) Oil on canvas (65.4 x 54.9 cm) Braque joined Picasso in Céret, a small town in the French Pyrenees, sometime during the last two weeks in August and first week of September By that time, their works had become difficult to distinguish a phenomenon that the artists actually strove to achieve, by not signing their paintings. During the last phase of the style known as Analytic Cubism also referred to as "high" or "hermetic" Picasso and Braque broke down their forms ever more. Thus their compositions consisted mainly of large, abstract planes and diagonal lines. The sober palette of grays, browns, and blacks some opaque, some not often applied, as here, in short brushstrokes to create a dappled effect, enabled the planes to overlap and merge with one another in a shallow, relieflike space. Some tenuous links with reality survive where images of naturalistic objects, or parts of them, are incorporated in the composition. The banderillas of the title, which cross each other diagonally and horizontally, are the most recognizable objects in the picture. The letters ORERO stand for the bullfighting magazine Le Torero, references to which also appear in contemporary works by Picasso, as in Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, painted at the same time in Céret. Artillery, 1911 Roger de La Fresnaye (French, ) Oil on canvas (130.2 x cm) Forms are reduced to their utmost simplicity and geometric core, while the color scheme taking its cue from the tricolore held aloft is composed of red, white, and blue, along with earthen tones. Painted in 1911, the year he became associated with Cubism and joined the Section d'or group, Artillery demonstrates the artist's ever greater emphasis on the solid geometry that underlies all forms in nature. 26

27 While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating this new visual language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand Léger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de La Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and even Diego Rivera. Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound influence on twentiethcentury sculpture and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp- Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz. Portrait of Picasso, 1912 Juan Gris (Spanish, ) Oil on canvas Although the painting is neither signed nor dated, stylistically it belongs to the group of still lifes Gris composed while in Céret, a small town in the Pyrenees, from August to October It was a most productive period for the artist. By then he had developed a colorful Cubist style of broad, angular, overlapping planes, a style that within a year would evolve into a fully formed Synthetic Cubism, influenced by Picasso's and Braque's papiers collées. On the simulated wood-grain table rest three playing cards heart, diamond, and club a violin, and the newspaper Le Journal. The violin is indicated by different shaded passages of wood-graining, as also by the instrument's purple, green, and black "shadows." Black, sky blue, and purple angular planes enrich the composition, which is set against a deep rust-red diamond-patterned background emulating the wallpaper. Violin and Playing Cards, 1913 Juan Gris (Spanish, ) Oil on canvas (100 x 65.4 cm) 27

28 The Conquest of the Air, Roger de La Fresnaye (French, ) Oil on canvas, (235.9 x cm), MoMA. This work, created in Paris, belongs to a group of about seventeen other papiers collés by Picasso composed solely from newspaper articles. Here, he arranged cuttings from Le Journal of December 3 and 9, 1912, on a sort of scaffolding of straight and slightly curved charcoal lines. The various texts refer to the Balkan Wars, to the unrest of miners in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais départements, to critical issues debated in Parliament and in the Chambers, and to local announcements and advertisements. During the winter of , Picasso executed a great number of papiers collés, which initiated the era of Synthetic Cubism. With this new technique of pasting colored or printed pieces of paper in their compositions, Picasso and Braque swept away the last vestiges of three-dimensional space (illusionism) that still remained in their "high" Analytic work. THE DIFFERENCE: In Analytic Cubism, the small facets of a dissected or "analyzed" object are reassembled to evoke that same object, In the shallow space of Synthetic Cubism initiated by the papiers collés large pieces of neutral or colored paper themselves allude to a particular object, either because they are often cut out in the desired shape or else sometimes bear a graphic element that clarifies the association. Man with Hat and a Violin, December Pablo Picasso (Spanish, ) Cut-and-pasted newspaper, with charcoal, on two sheets of cut-and-pasted paper (122.2x47.3 cm) 28

29 Still Life with Tenora (summer or fall 1913). Georges Braque (French, ) Cut-and-pasted printed and painted paper, charcoal, chalk, and pencil on gessoed canvas, (95.2 x cm), MoMA. Still Life with Tenora is a consummate example of Braque's papier collé (literally, pasted paper) style. The bold geometric fragments of contrasting types of paper interlaced with the figurative motifs drawn in charcoal evoke the structure of a fugue, in which two distinct melodies intertwine in a rich, sonorous composition, each acting as a foil to the other's reality. SUMMARY: So, the artists chose to break down the subjects they were painting into a number of facets, showing several different aspects of one object simultaneously. The work up to 1912 is known as Analytical Cubism, concentrating on geometrical forms using subdued colors. The second phase, known as Synthetic Cubism, used more decorative shapes, stencilling, collage, and brighter colors. It was then that artists such as Picasso and Braque started to use pieces of cut-up newspaper in their paintings. The invention of the papier collé in 1912 by Braque and Pablo Picasso introduced a revolution in Western painting, whose repercussions are still being felt today. By pasting fragments of paper (newspaper, wallpaper, and wood-grained paper) onto their still-life compositions, they introduced real materials and textures into an art hitherto based on illusionistic renderings. The significance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated because through this technique these artists declared the autonomy of the painted or drawn image, and radically severed it from any attempt at representation. The fragments attached to the picture's surface rarely followed the contours or silhouettes of the drawn motifs (glasses, bottles, or musical instruments), but, paradoxically, contradicted them. Thus, they countered the conventional devices of modeling and depth perspective, and drew attention to the absolute flatness of the two-dimensional plane. The papier collé, invented by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in 1912, found a rich and complex expression in the 1914 works of Gris. In conception, his papiers collés are closer to paintings than are the sparely drawn compositions of his forerunners; unlike them Gris covers the whole surface with pasted papers and paint. In works such as Breakfast, Gris's use of printed papers is more literal than theirs: the wood-grained fragments usually follow some of the contours of a table and are therefore integral to the composition; and his perspectival cues are relatively legible and precise. His superimposed drawings of domestic objects, fragmented yet softly modeled and most often seen from above, combine to create a more representational pictorial composition than those of Braque and Picasso. Despite these observations, Breakfast is full of troubling contradictions. The striped wallpaper background spills across the table; certain objects (a glass on the left, a bottle in the upper right) appear as ghostly presences; the coffeepot is disjointed; the tobacco packet is painted and drawn in photographically realistic trompe l'oeil, but its label is real. Thus, while aspects of domestic comfort are captured in this image, Gris also raises many subjective and objective questions about how reality is perceived. Breakfast Juan Gris (Spanish, ) Gouache, oil, and crayon on cut-and-pasted printed paper on canvas with oil and crayon, (80.9 x 59.7 cm), MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p

30 Along with Picasso, Braque, and Gris, Fernand Léger ranks among the foremost Cubist painters. By 1912, he had developed his own adaptation of Cubism. Utilizing pure color, he simplified the forms in his pictures into geometric components of the cone, cube, and sphere, leaving their contours unbroken. Leger was also fascinated by machines and modern technology. The curved forms Léger added to the angular Cubist vocabulary was his most significant reputation. He is also noted for his urban, industrial landscapes full of polished, metallic shapes, robotic humanoids, and hard-edged mechanical gears. Exit the Ballets Russes, 1914 Fernand Léger (French, ) Oil on canvas, (136.5 x cm) The Bargeman, which shows a boat set against a background dominated by the facades of houses, provided the artist with the opportunity to combine several of his favorite themes: motion, the city, and men at work. With colorful and overlapping disks, cylinders, cones, and diagonals, Léger presents a syncopated, abstract equivalent of the visual impressions of a man traveling along the Seine through Paris. All that can be seen of the bargeman, however, are his tube-like arms, in the upper part of the composition, which end in metallic-looking claws. The Bargeman, 1918 Fernand Léger (French, ) Oil on canvas (48.6 x 54.3 cm) 30

31 Table by a Window, November 1917 Jean Metzinger (French, ) Oil on canvas (81.3 x 65.1 cm) Jean Metzinger was a member of the so-called Puteaux Group of artists, who were disciples of Cubism centered around the brothers Duchamp-Villon. He was also a theoretician and, with his close friend Albert Gleizes, co-authored the book Du Cubisme, published in Throughout his career, Metzinger liked to create variations on the same theme. During the years , still life constituted one such major theme. This work depicts an arrangement of objects a vase with flowers, a glass and an absinthe spoon, the journal L'Heure, and a playing card placed on a table next to a window in the artist's studio in Meudon near Paris. Man with a Guitar, Jacques Lipchitz (American, born Lithuania ) Limestone, (97.2 x 26.7 x 19.5 cm), MoMA. Still Life with Fruit Dish and Mandolin, 1919, Juan Gris (Spanish, ) Oil on Canvas 31

32 The Studio, 1928, Pablo Picasso (Spanish, ) Oil on Canvas Synthetic cubism employs strong colors and decorative sheds. At left the painter holds a brush indicated by a small diagonal line at the end of horizontal arm. his oval head contains three vertical eyes, perhaps suggesting the painter s superior vision. A floating circle is all that remains of the artist s palette. His subject, a still life of fruit bowl and bust on a table with red tablecloth, also consists of geometric shapes. What holds the composition together are repeated and precisely related vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. 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. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. Guernica shows suffering people, animals, and buildings wrenched by violence and chaos. The overall scene is within a room where, at an open end on the left, a wideeyed bull stands over a woman grieving over a dead child in her arms. The centre is occupied by a horse falling in agony as it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. It is important to note that the cut in the horse's side is a major focus of the painting. Two "hidden" images formed by the horse appear in Guernica (illustrated to the right): A human skull overlays the horse's body. A bull appears to gore the horse from underneath. The bull's head is formed mainly by the horse's entire front leg which has the knee on the ground. The leg's knee cap forms the head's nose. A horn appears within the horse's breast. The bull's tail forms the image of a flame with smoke rising from it, seemingly appearing in a window created by the lighter shade of gray surrounding it. Under the horse is a dead, apparently dismembered soldier; his hand on a severed arm still grasps a shattered sword from which a flower grows. On the open palm of the dead soldier is a stigma, a symbol of martyrdom derived from the stigmata of Christ. Picasso created this mural in one month. Painting is not done to decorate apartments, Picasso said, it is an instrument of war for attack and defense against enemy. Picasso incorporated certain design elements to create a powerful effect of anguish. He used a black-white-gray palette to emphasize hopelessness and purposely distorted figures to evoke violence. The jagged lines and shattered planes of Cubism denote terror and confusion, while a pyramid format holds the composition together. Some of Picasso s symbols like the slain fighter with a broken sword implying defeat, was not hard to decipher. Picasso s only explanation of these symbols was: The bull is not fascism, but it is brutality and darkness...the horse represents the people. 32

33 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. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. A light bulb blazes in the shape of an evil eye over the suffering horse's head (the bare bulb of the torturer's cell.) Picasso's intended symbolism in regards to this object is related to the Spanish word for light bulb; "bombilla", which makes an allusion to "bomb" and therefore signifies the destructing effect which technology can have on society. To the upper right of the horse, a frightened female figure, who seems to be witnessing the scenes before her, appears to have floated into the room through a window. Her arm, also floating in, carries a flame-lit lamp. The lamp is positioned very close to the bulb, and is a symbol of hope, clashing with the light bulb. From the right, an awe-struck woman staggers towards the center below the floating female figure. She looks up blankly into the blazing light bulb. Daggers that suggest screaming replace the tongues of the bull, grieving woman, and horse. A bird, possibly a dove, stands on a shelf behind the bull in panic. On the far right, a figure with arms raised in terror is entrapped by fire from above and below. A dark wall with an open door defines the right end of the mural. The shape and posture of the bodies express protest. Picasso uses black, white, and grey paint to set a somber mood and express pain and chaos. Flaming buildings and crumbling walls not only express the destruction of Guernica, but reflect the destructive power of civil war. The newspaper print used in the painting reflects how Picasso learned of the massacre. The light bulb in the painting represents the sun. The broken sword near the bottom of the painting symbolizes the defeat of the people at the hand of their tormentors. (Berger 1980) THREE MODERNIST MOVEMENTS FUTURISM CONSTRUCTIVISM PRECISIONISM PERIOD: LOCALE: Italy Russia United States ARTISTS: Boccioni, Balla, Severeni, Carrà, Russolo Tatlin, Malevich, Popova, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Gabo, Pevsner Sheeler, Demuth, O Keeffe FEATURES: Lines of force representing movement and modern life Geometric art, reflecting modern technology Sleek urban and industrial forms 33

34 Futurism: Kinetic art Futurism was an Italian phenomenon. Futurism began in 1909 as a literary movement when the Italian poet F.T.Marinetti issued its manifesto. Marinetti a hyperactive self-promoter nicknamed The Caffeine of Europe challenged artists to show courage, audacity, and revolt and to celebrate a new beauty, the beauty of speed. Futurist artists tried to unveil the poetry in motion. The key to Futurist art was MOVEMENT. The painters combined bright Fauve colors with fractured Cubist planes to express propulsion. Their quest was to throw all tradition, therefore they published a manifesto to voice their highly reactionary philosophy. Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, (Milan) Poesia, February 11, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini... With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will: 1.Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism. 2.Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation. 3.Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent. 4.Bear bravely and proudly the smear of madness with which they try to gag all innovators. 5.Regard art critics as useless and dangerous. 6.Rebel against the tyranny of words: Harmony and good taste and other loose expressions which can be used to destroy the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin... 7.Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past. 8.Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science. The dead shall be buried in the earth s deepest bowels! The threshold of the future will be swept free of mummies! Make room for youth, for violence, for daring! 34

35 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini... Our growing need of truth is no longer satisfied with Form and Color as they have been understood hitherto. The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself. Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular. All is conventional in art. Nothing is absolute in painting. What was truth for the painters of yesterday is but a falsehood today. We declare, for instance, that a portrait must not be like the sitter, and that the painter carries in himself the landscapes which he would fix upon his canvas....we would at any price re-enter into life. Victorious science has nowadays disowned its past in order the better to serve the material needs of our time; we would that art, disowning its past, were able to serve at last the intellectual needs which are within us. Our renovated consciousness does not permit us to look upon man as the center of universal life. The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp, which, with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heartrending expressions of color. The harmony of the lines and folds of modern dress works upon our sensitiveness with the same emotional and symbolical power as did the nude upon the sensitiveness of the old masters. In order to conceive and understand the novel beauties of a Futurist picture, the soul must be purified; the eye must be freed from its veil of atavism and culture, so that it may at last look upon Nature and not upon the museum as the one and only standard. As soon as ever this result has been obtained, it will be readily admitted that brown tints have never coursed beneath our skin; it will be discovered that yellow shines forth in our flesh, that red blazes, and that green, blue and violet dance upon it with untold charms, voluptuous and caressing. How is it possible still to see the human face pink, now that our life, redoubled by noctambulism, has multiplied our perceptions as colorists? The human face is yellow, red, green, blue, violet. The pallor of a woman gazing in a jeweler s window is more intensely iridescent than the prismatic fires of the jewels that fascinate her like a lark. The time has passed for our sensations in painting to be whispered. We wish them in future to sing and re-echo upon our canvases in deafening and triumphant flourishes. Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today withc without Divisionism. This is no process that can be learned and applied at will. Divisionism, for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary. Our art will probably be accused of tormented and decadent cerebralism. But we shall merely answer that we are, on the contrary, the primitives of a new sensitiveness, multiplied hundredfold, and that our art is intoxicated with spontaneity and power. We declare: 1.That all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified. 2.That it is essential to rebel against the tyranny of the terms harmony and good taste as being too elastic expressions, by the help of which it is easy to demolish the works of Rembrandt, of Goya and of Rodin. 3.That the art critics are useless or harmful. 4.That all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed. 5.That the name of madman with which it is attempted to gag all innovators should be looked upon as a title of honor. 6.That innate complementariness is an absolute necessity in painting, just as free meter in poetry or polyphony in music. 7.That universal dynamism must be rendered in painting as a dynamic sensation. 8.That in the manner of rendering Nature the first essential is sincerity and purity. 9.That movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies. We fight: 1.Against the bituminous tints by which it is attempted to obtain the patina of time upon modern pictures. 2.Against the superficial and elementary archaism founded upon flat tints, and which, by imitating the linear technique of the Egyptians, reduces painting to a powerless synthesis, both childish and grotesque. 3.Against the false claims to belong to the future put forward by the secessionists and the independents, who have installed new academies no less trite and attached to routine than the preceding ones. 4.Against the nude in painting, as nauseous and as tedious as adultery in literature. We wish to explain this last point. Nothing is immoral in our eyes; it is the monotony of the nude against which we fight. We are told that the subject is nothing and that everything lies in the manner of treating it. That is agreed; we too, admit that. But this truism, unimpeachable and absolute fifty years ago, is no longer so today with regard to the nude, since artists obsessed with the desire to expose the bodies of their mistresses have transformed the Salons into arrays of unwholesome flesh! We demand, for ten years, the total suppression of the nude in painting. Umberto Boccioni (Italian, ) Three States of Mind, 1911 Set in a train station, this series of three paintings explores the psychological dimension of modern life's transitory nature. In The Farewells, Boccioni captures chaotic movement and the fusion of people swept away in waves as the train's steam bellows into the sky. Oblique lines hint at departure in Those Who Go, in which Boccioni said he sought to express "loneliness, anguish, and dazed confusion." In Those Who Stay, vertical lines convey the weight of sadness carried by those left behind. States of Mind II: Those Who Go, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). States of Mind III: Those Who Stay, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). States of Mind I: The Farewells, Oil on canvas, (70.5 x 96.2 cm). 35

36 Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, Carlo Carrà (Italian, ) Oil on canvas, (198.7 x cm), MoMA. Ritmi Plastici, Carlo Carrà (Italian, ) Ink on paper, (10.7 x 7.4 cm). Carlo Carra met Umberto Boccioni and Luigi Russolo, and together they came to know Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and to write the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (1910). Carrà continued, however, to use the technique of Divisionism despite the radical rhetoric of Futurism. In an attempt to find new inspiration Marinetti sent them to visit Paris in autumn 1911, in preparation for the Futurist exhibition of Cubism was a revelation, and in 1911 Carrà reworked a large canvas that he had begun in 1910, the Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (New York, MOMA). He had witnessed the riot at the event in The crowd and the mounted police converge in violently hatched red and black, as Carrà attempted the Futurist aim to place the spectator at the centre of the canvas. In the reworking he attempted to make the space more complex and the lighting appear to emerge from within. Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences, Giacomo Balla (Italian, ) Oil on canvas, (96.8 x 120 cm). Balla, one of the founding members of Futurism, spent much of his career studying the dynamics of movement and speed. The subject of this painting is the flight of swifts; black wings whir before a window. Inspired by photographic studies of animal locomotion, Balla created an image of motion pushed close to abstraction. The wings each represent a different position in a trajectory of motion, and the bird s body is rendered as a diagrammatic line. Here Balla looks to science to establish a new, modern language for painting. 36

37 Speeding Automobile, Giacomo Balla (Italian, ) Oil on wood, (55.6 x 68.9 cm). Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 Umberto Boccioni (Italian, ) Bronze H. (121.9 x 15 1/2 x 91.4 cm) Boccioni, who sought to infuse art with dynamism and energy, exclaimed, "Let us fling open the figure and let it incorporate within itself whatever may surround it." The contours of this marching figure appear to be carved by the forces of wind and speed as it forges ahead. While its wind swept silhouette is evocative of an ancient statue, the polished metal alludes to the sleek modern machinery beloved by Boccioni and other Futurist artists. 37

38 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 Umberto Boccioni (Italian, ) Bronze H. (121.9 x 15 1/2 x 91.4 cm) In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Boccioni puts speed and force into sculptural form. The figure strides forward. Surpassing the limits of the body, its lines ripple outward in curving and streamlined flags, as if molded by the wind of its passing. Boccioni had developed these shapes over two years in paintings, drawings, and sculptures, exacting studies of human musculature. The result is a three-dimensional portrait of a powerful body in action. In the early twentieth century, the new speed and force of machinery seemed to pour its power into radical social energy. The new technologies and the ideas attached to them would later reveal threatening aspects, but for Futurist artists like Boccioni, they were tremendously exhilarating. Innovative as Boccioni was, he fell short of his own ambition. In 1912, he had attacked the domination of sculpture by "the blind and foolish imitation of formulas inherited from the past," and particularly by "the burdensome weight of Greece." Yet Unique Forms of Continuity in Space bears an underlying resemblance to a classical work over 2,000 years old, the Nike of Samothrace. There, however, speed is encoded in the flowing stone draperies that wash around, and in the wake of, the figure. Here the body itself is reshaped, as if the new conditions of modernity were producing a new man. Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses (Dinamismo di un cavallo in corsa + case), Gouache, oil, paper collage, wood, cardboard, copper, and coated iron, 44 1/2 x 45 1/4 inches. Peggy Guggenheim Collection Umberto Boccioni turned to sculpture in 1912 after publishing his manifesto on the subject on April 11 of that year. The Futurist aesthetic platform as articulated in this document advocates the use of various materials in a single work, the rejection of closed form, and the suggestion of the interpenetration of form and the environment through the device of intersecting planes. In Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses Boccioni assembled wood, cardboard, and metal, with painted areas showing a Futurist handling of planes influenced by the Cubism [more] of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Ironically, his intention of preserving unique forms caught in space and time is mocked by the perishability of his materials the work has been considerably restored and continues to present conservation problems. 38

39 Armored Train in Action, 1915.Gino Severini (Italian, ) Charcoal on paper, (56.9 x 47.5 cm), MoMA. Muscular Dynamism (1913). Umberto Boccioni (Italian, ) Pastel and charcoal on paper, (86.3 x 59 cm), MoMA. This study for the most famous of the Futurist war paintings, The Armored Train (1915), incorporates an unusual aerial perspective in its depiction of a train filled with armed soldiers. Severini enjoyed a unique vantage point from his studio in Paris, he was able to observe the constant movement of trains filled with soldiers, supplies, and weaponry. Severini did not combat during World War I, but he took the advice of Marinetti to "try to live the war pictorially, studying it in all its marvelous mechanical forms." The Futurists glorified modern technology, and World War I, the first war of the twentieth century to employ the technological achievements of the industrial age in a program of mass destruction, was for them the most important spectacle of the modern era. Their admiration for speed made possible by machinery is represented here by the fractured landscape, which accentuates the train's force and momentum as it cuts through the countryside. Armored Train in Action foreshadows a fundamental principle of Severini's later art: the "image-idea," in which a single image expresses the essence of an idea. Through a depiction of the plastic realities of war a train, canon, guns, and soldiers he provides a pictorial vocabulary necessary to grasp its deeper symbolism. Manifesto of Futurist Architecture No architecture has existed since A moronic mixture of the most various stylistic elements used to mask the skeletons o f modern houses is called modern architecture. The new beauty of cement and iron are profaned by the superimposition of motley decorative incrustations that cannot be justified either by con structive necessity or by our (modern) taste, and whose origins are in Egyptian, Indian or Byzantine antiquity and in that idiotic flowering of stupidity and impotence that took the name of neoclassicism. These architectonic prostitutions are welcomed in Italy, and rapacious alien ineptitude is passed off as talented invention a nd as extremely up-to-date architecture. Young Italian architects (those who borrow originality from clandestine and compulsive devouring of art journals) flaunt their talents in the new quarters of our towns, where a hilarious salad of little ogival columns, seventeenth-century foliation, Gothic pointed arches, Egyptian pilasters, rococo scrolls, fifteenth-century cherubs, swollen caryatids, take the place of style in all seriousness, and presumptuously put on monumental airs. The kaleidoscopic appearance and reappearance of forms, the multiplying of machinery, the daily increasing needs imposed by the speed of communications, by the concentration of population, by hygiene, and by a hundred other phenomena of modern life, never cause these self-styled renovators of architecture a moment's perplexity or hesitation. They persevere obstinately with the rules of Vitruvius, Vignola and Sansovino plus gleanings from a ny published scrap of information on German architecture that happens to be at hand. Using these, they continue to stamp the image of imbecility on our cities, our cities which should be the immediate and faithful projection of ourselves. And so this expressive and synthetic art has become in their hands a vacuous stylistic exercise, a jumble of ill-mixed formulae to disguise a run-of-the-mill traditionalist box of bricks and stone as a modern building. As if we who are accumulators and generators of movement, with all our added mechanical limbs, with all the noise and speed of our life, could live in streets built for the needs of men four, five or six centuries ago. This is the supreme imbecility of modern architecture, perpetuated by the venal complicity of the academies, the internment c amps of the intelligentsia, where the young are forced into the onanistic recopying of classical models instead of throwing their minds open in the search for new frontiers and in the solut ion of the new and pressing problem: the Futurist house and city. The house and the city that are ours both spiritually and materially, in which our tumult can rage without seeming a grotesque anachronism. The problem posed in Futurist architecture is not one of linear rearrangement. It is not a question of finding new moldings and frames for windows and door s, of replacing columns, pilasters and corbels with caryatids, flies and frogs. Neither has it anything to do with leaving a façade in bare brick, or plastering it, or facing it with stone or in determining formal differences between the new building and the old one. It is a question of tending the healthy growth of the Futurist house, of constructing it wi th all the resources of technology and science, satisfying magisterially all the demands of our habits and our spirit, trampling down all that is grotesque and antithetical (tradition, style, aesthetics, proportion), determining new forms, new lines, a new harmony of profiles and volumes, an architecture whose reason for existence can be found solely in the unique conditions of modern life, and in its correspondence with the aesthetic values of our sensibilities. This architecture cannot be subjected to any law of historical continuity. It must be new, just as our state of mind is new. The art of construction has been able to evolve with time, and to pass from one style to another, while maintaining unaltered the general characteristics of architecture, because in the course of history changes of fashion are frequent and are determined by the alternations of religious conviction and political disposit ion. But profound changes in the state of the environment are extremely rare, changes that unhinge and renew, such as the discovery of natural laws, the perfecting of mechanical means, th e rational and scientific use of material. In modern life the process of stylistic development in architecture has been brought to a halt. Architecture now makes a break with tradition. It must perforce make a fresh start. Calculations based on the resistance of materials, on the use of reinforced concrete and steel, exclude "architecture" in the classical and traditional sense. Modern constructional materials and scientific concepts are absolutely incompatible with the disciplines of historical styles, and are the principal cause of the grotesque appearance of "fashionable" buildings in which attempts are made to employ the lightness, the superb grace of the steel beam, the delicacy of reinforced concrete, in order to obtain the heavy curve of the arch and the bulkiness of marble. The utter antithesis between the modern world and the old is determined by all those things that formerly did not exist. Our lives have been enriched by elements the possibility of whose existence the ancients did not even suspect. Men have identified material contingencies, and revealed spiritual attitudes, whose repercussions are felt in a thousand ways. Principal among these is the formation of a new ideal of beauty that is still obscure and embryonic, but whose fascination is already felt even by the masses. We have lost our predilection for the monumental, the heavy, the static, and we have enriched our sensibility with a taste for the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift. We no longer feel ourselves to be the men of the cathedrals, the palaces and the podiums. We are the men of the great hotels, the railway stations, the immense streets, colossal ports, covered markets, luminous arcades, straight roads and beneficial demolitions. We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every deta il; and the Futurist house must be like a gigantic machine. The lifts must no longer be hidden away like tapeworms in the niches of stairwells; the stairwells themselves, rendered useless, must b e abolished, and the lifts must scale the lengths of the façades like serpents of steel and glass. The house of concrete, glass and steel, stripped of paintings and sculpture, rich o nly in the innate beauty of its lines and relief, extraordinarily "ugly" in its mechanical simplicity, higher and wider according to need rather than the specifications of municipal laws. It must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traff ic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements. The decorative must be abolished. The problem of Futurist architecture must be resolved, not by continuing to pilfer from Chinese, Persian or Japanese photographs or fooling around with the rules of Vitruvius, but through flashes of genius and through scientific and technical expertise. Everything must be revolutionized. Roofs and underground spaces must be used; the importance of the façade must be diminished; issues of taste must be transplanted fr om the field of fussy moldings, finicky capitals and flimsy doorways to the broader concerns of bold groupings and masses, and large-scale disposition of planes. Let us make an end of monumental, funereal and commemorative architecture. Let us overturn monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps; let us sink the streets and squares; let us raise the level of the city. I COMBAT AND DESPISE: 1. All the pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde, Austrian, Hungarian, German and American; 2. All classical architecture, solemn, hieratic, scenographic, decorative, monumental, pretty and pleasing; 3. The embalming, reconstruction and reproduction of ancient monuments and palaces; 4. Perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubical and pyramidical forms that are static, solemn, aggressive and absolutely excluded from our utterly new sensibility; 5. The use of massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated and costly materials. AND PROCLAIM: 1. That Futurist architecture is the architecture of calculation, of audacious temerity and of simplicity; the architecture of r einforced concrete, of steel, glass, cardboard, textile fiber, and of all those substitutesf or wood, stone and brick that enable us to obtain maximum elasticity and lightness; 2. That Futurist architecture is not because of this an arid combination of practicality and usefulness, but remains art, i.e. s ynthesis and expression; 3. That oblique and elliptic lines are dynamic, and by their very nature possess an emotive power a thousand times stronger than perpendiculars and horizontals, and that no integral, dynamic architecture can exist that does not include these; 4. That decoration as an element superimposed on architecture is absurd, and that the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials; 5. That, just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from the elements of nature, we who are materially and spiritually artificial must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created, and of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious integration; 6. That architecture as the art of arranging forms according to pre-established criteria is finished; 7. That by the term architecture is meant the endeavor to harmonize the environment with Man with freedom and great audacity, th at is to transform the world of things into a direct projection of the world of the spirit; From an architecture conceived in this way no formal or linear habit can grow, since the fundamental characteristics of Futur ist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city. This constant renewal of the architectonic environment will contribute to the victory of Futurism which has already been affirmed by words-in-freedom, plastic dynamism, music without quadrature and the art of noises, and for which we fight without respite against traditionalist cowardice. Antonio Sant Elia Terraced Building with exterior elevators

40 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture No architecture has existed since A moronic mixture of the most various stylistic elements used to mask the skeletons of modern houses is called modern architecture. The new beauty of cement and iron are profaned by the superimposition of motley decorative incrustations that cannot be justified either by constructive necessity or by our (modern) taste, and whose origins are in Egyptian, Indian or Byzantine antiquity and in that idiotic flowering of stupidity and impotence that took the name of neoclassicism. These architectonic prostitutions are welcomed in Italy, and rapacious alien ineptitude is passed off as talented invention and as extremely up-to-date architecture. Young Italian architects (those who borrow originality from clandestine and compulsive devouring of art journals) flaunt their talents in the new quarters of our towns, where a hilarious salad of little ogival columns, seventeenth-century foliation, Gothic pointed arches, Egyptian pilasters, rococo scrolls, fifteenth-century cherubs, swollen caryatids, take the place of style in all seriousness, and presumptuously put on monumental airs. The kaleidoscopic appearance and reappearance of forms, the multiplying of machinery, the daily increasing needs imposed by the speed of communications, by the concentration of population, by hygiene, and by a hundred other phenomena of modern life, never cause these self-styled renovators of architecture a moment's perplexity or hesitation. They persevere obstinately with the rules of Vitruvius, Vignola and Sansovino plus gleanings from any published scrap of information on German architecture that happens to be at hand. Using these, they continue to stamp the image of imbecility on our cities, our cities which should be the immediate and faithful projection of ourselves. And so this expressive and synthetic art has become in their hands a vacuous stylistic exercise, a jumble of ill-mixed formulae to disguise a run-of-the-mill traditionalist box of bricks and stone as a modern building. As if we who are accumulators and generators of movement, with all our added mechanical limbs, with all the noise and speed of our life, could live in streets built for the needs of men four, five or six centuries ago. Antonio Sant Elia Terraced Building with exterior elevators 1914 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture This is the supreme imbecility of modern architecture, perpetuated by the venal complicity of the academies, the internment camps of the intelligentsia, where the young are forced into the onanistic recopying of classical models instead of throwing their minds open in the search for new frontiers and in the solution of the new and pressing problem: the Futurist house and city. The house and the city that are ours both spiritually and materially, in which our tumult can rage without seeming a grotesque anachronism. The problem posed in Futurist architecture is not one of linear rearrangement. It is not a question of finding new moldings and frames for windows and doors, of replacing columns, pilasters and corbels with caryatids, flies and frogs. Neither has it anything to do with leaving a façade in bare brick, or plastering it, or facing it with stone or in determining formal differences between the new building and the old one. It is a question of tending the healthy growth of the Futurist house, of constructing it with all the resources of technology and science, satisfying magisterially all the demands of our habits and our spirit, trampling down all that is grotesque and antithetical (tradition, style, aesthetics, proportion), determining new forms, new lines, a new harmony of profiles and volumes, an architecture whose reason for existence can be found solely in the unique conditions of modern life, and in its correspondence with the aesthetic values of our sensibilities. This architecture cannot be subjected to any law of historical continuity. It must be new, just as our state of mind is new. The art of construction has been able to evolve with time, and to pass from one style to another, while maintaining unaltered the general characteristics of architecture, because in the course of history changes of fashion are frequent and are determined by the alternations of religious conviction and political disposition. But profound changes in the state of the environment are extremely rare, changes that unhinge and renew, such as the discovery of natural laws, the perfecting of mechanical means, the rational and scientific use of material. In modern life the process of stylistic development in architecture has been brought to a halt. Architecture now makes a break with tradition. It must perforce make a fresh start. Antonio Sant Elia Terraced Building with exterior elevators

41 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture Calculations based on the resistance of materials, on the use of reinforced concrete and steel, exclude "architecture" in the classical and traditional sense. Modern constructional materials and scientific concepts are absolutely incompatible with the disciplines of historical styles, and are the principal cause of the grotesque appearance of "fashionable" buildings in which attempts are made to employ the lightness, the superb grace of the steel beam, the delicacy of reinforced concrete, in order to obtain the heavy curve of the arch and the bulkiness of marble. The utter antithesis between the modern world and the old is determined by all those things that formerly did not exist. Our lives have been enriched by elements the possibility of whose existence the ancients did not even suspect. Men have identified material contingencies, and revealed spiritual attitudes, whose repercussions are felt in a thousand ways. Principal among these is the formation of a new ideal of beauty that is still obscure and embryonic, but whose fascination is already felt even by the masses. We have lost our predilection for the monumental, the heavy, the static, and we have enriched our sensibility with a taste for the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift. We no longer feel ourselves to be the men of the cathedrals, the palaces and the podiums. We are the men of the great hotels, the railway stations, the immense streets, colossal ports, covered markets, luminous arcades, straight roads and beneficial demolitions. We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail; and the Futurist house must be like a gigantic machine. The lifts must no longer be hidden away like tapeworms in the niches of stairwells; the stairwells themselves, rendered useless, must be abolished, and the lifts must scale the lengths of the façades like serpents of steel and glass. The house of concrete, glass and steel, stripped of paintings and sculpture, rich only in the innate beauty of its lines and relief, extraordinarily "ugly" in its mechanical simplicity, higher and wider according to need rather than the specifications of municipal laws. Antonio Sant Elia Terraced Building with exterior elevators 1914 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture It must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements. The decorative must be abolished. The problem of Futurist architecture must be resolved, not by continuing to pilfer from Chinese, Persian or Japanese photographs or fooling around with the rules of Vitruvius, but through flashes of genius and through scientific and technical expertise. Everything must be revolutionized. Roofs and underground spaces must be used; the importance of the façade must be diminished; issues of taste must be transplanted from the field of fussy moldings, finicky capitals and flimsy doorways to the broader concerns of bold groupings and masses, and large-scale disposition of planes. Let us make an end of monumental, funereal and commemorative architecture. Let us overturn monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps; let us sink the streets and squares; let us raise the level of the city. I COMBAT AND DESPISE: 1. All the pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde, Austrian, Hungarian, German and American; 2. All classical architecture, solemn, hieratic, scenographic, decorative, monumental, pretty and pleasing; 3. The embalming, reconstruction and reproduction of ancient monuments and palaces; 4. Perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubical and pyramidical forms that are static, solemn, aggressive and absolutely excluded from our utterly new sensibility; 5. The use of massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated and costly materials. Antonio Sant Elia Terraced Building with exterior elevators

42 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture AND PROCLAIM: 1. That Futurist architecture is the architecture of calculation, of audacious temerity and of simplicity; the architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel, glass, cardboard, textile fiber, and of all those substitutesf or wood, stone and brick that enable us to obtain maximum elasticity and lightness; 2. That Futurist architecture is not because of this an arid combination of practicality and usefulness, but remains art, i.e. synthesis and expression; 3. That oblique and elliptic lines are dynamic, and by their very nature possess an emotive power a thousand times stronger than perpendiculars and horizontals, and that no integral, dynamic architecture can exist that does not include these; 4. That decoration as an element superimposed on architecture is absurd, and that the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials; 5. That, just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from the elements of nature, we who are materially and spiritually artificial must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created, and of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious integration; 6. That architecture as the art of arranging forms according to pre-established criteria is finished; 7. That by the term architecture is meant the endeavor to harmonize the environment with Man with freedom and great audacity, that is to transform the world of things into a direct projection of the world of the spirit; From an architecture conceived in this way no formal or linear habit can grow, since the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city. This constant renewal of the architectonic environment will contribute to the victory of Futurism which has already been affirmed by words-in-freedom, plastic dynamism, music without quadrature and the art of noises, and for which we fight without respite against traditionalist cowardice. In its upwardly spiraling movement, this drawing by Virgilio Marchi typifies Futurist architectural design. It is one of several renderings made by Marchi in 1919 and 1920 for an ideal contemporary city that was never erected. His plans indicated the preoccupation of the period with technological advances in transportation and construction. The building in the present study resembles a cone round at the bottom, pointed at the top. There are tunneled areas and open archways below, with stairs leading to various flat levels. The two towers that rise from the center are openly constructed with stairs and columns. A spotlight is perched on a beam that extends from the peak of the left tower. The sweeping curves and strong, linear slashes of this beautiful drawing are reminiscent of Giacomo Balla's earlier painted imagery. Futurism was primarily concerned with images of speed and motion, which were intended to represent the spirit of the modern age. Although the greatest expression of Futurism is found in the medium of painting, there were some sculptural pieces executed as well, most notably by Umberto Boccioni. Architecture, a later focus for the movement, provided another three-dimensional forum for Futurist ideas about dynamism. The resulting schemes were visionary imaginings that were difficult to translate into actual structures and so remained, for the most part, studies on paper. Architectural Study: Search for Volumes in an Isolated Building, ca. 1919, Sketch by Virgilio Marchi (Italian, ) Pencil and watercolor on paper 15 1/4 x 22 1/2 in. (38.7 x 57.2 cm) 42

43 Constructivism Around 1914, Russian avant-gardes flourished with artists called Constructivists, like Vladimir Tatlin, Luibov Popova, Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Naum Gabo, and Antonie Pevsner. From Cubism, the Constructivists borrowed broken shapes. From Futurism, they adopted multiple overlapping images to express agitated modern life. They pushed art from being representational, to being abstract. THE POLITICAL CONDITION IN RUSSIA: Three years later, in 1917, the well-known Russian revolution occured, and as a result of this revolution, the Russian society is converted from a feudal state to a people s republic. Lenin tolerated the avant-gardebecause he thought that with the help of those artists, and through newly developed novel visual styles, it could be possible to teach the illiterate public his own ideology. For a brief time, before Stalin cracked down, and banned elitist easel painting, Russia s most adventurous artists led a social, as well as artistic, revolution. They wanted to strip art, like the state, of petty bourgeois anachronisms. They tried to remake art, as well as society, from scratch. About 1914, Tatlin ( ) originated Russian geometric art. He called his art, which was highly abstract and was due an intention to reflect modern technology as Constructivism. The aim of Tatlin s Constructivism was to construct art, not to create it. The style recommended to use industrial materials, such as glass metal and plastic in three dimensional works. Tatlin s most famous work was a monument to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution. Intended to be higher than Eiffel Tower, the monument was planned for the center of Moscow. Since it was hard to supply steel of that amount, his idea remained only as a model, but it would clearly would have been the most astonishing construct ever. Tilted like the leaning Tower of Pisa, the openwork structure of glass and iron was based on a contunial spiral to denote humanity s upward progress. The Monument to the Third International. 43

44 The tower's main form was a twin helix which spiraled up to 400 m in height, which visitors would be transported around with the aid of various mechanical devices. The main framework would contain four large suspended geometric structures. These structures would rotate at different rates of speed. At the base of the structure was a cube which was designed as a venue for lectures, conferences and legislative meetings, and this would complete a rotation in the span of one year. Above the cube would be a smaller pyramid housing executive activities and completing a rotation once a month. Further up would be a cylinder, which was to house an information centre, issuing news bulletins and manifestos via telegraph, radio and loudspeaker, and would complete a rotation once a day. At the top, there would be a hemisphere for radio equipment. There were also plans to install a gigantic open-air screen on the cylinder, and a further projector which would be able to cast messages across the clouds on any overcast day. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (February 23, 1879, previously 1878 May 15, 1935) was a painter and art theoretician, pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement. His squares floating on a white background and finally his white on white paintings simplified art more radically than ever before. Malevich wanted to free art from the burden of the object. He tried to make his shapes and colors as pure as musical notes, without reference to any recognizable object. From Cubism, the Constructivists borrowed broken shapes. From Futurism, they adopted multiple overlapping images to express agitated modern life. Abstraction, overlapping of images, a new construction Autonomous shots, recomposed in a new construction MONTAGE Englishman in Moscow,

45 Bureau and Room, 1913 Kasimir Malevich, who founded what he called Suprematism, believed in an extreme of reduction: ``The object in itself is meaningless... the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless''. What he wanted was a non-objective representation, ``the supremacy of pure feeling.'' This can sound convincing until one asks what it actually means. Malevich, however, had no doubts as to what he meant, producing objects of iconic power such as his series of White on White paintings or Dynamic Suprematism (1916; 102 x 67 cm ), in which the geometric patterns are totally abstract. Malevich had initially been influenced by Cubism and primitive art, which were both based on nature, but his own movement of Suprematism enabled him to construct images that had no reference at all to reality. Great solid diagonals of color in Dynamic Suprematism are floating free, their severe sides denying them any connection with the real world, where there are no straight lines. This is a pure abstract painting, the artist's main theme being the internal movements of the personality. The theme has no precise form, and Malevich had to search it out from within the visible expression of what he felt. They are wonderful works, and in their wake came other powerful Suprematist painters such as Natalia Goncharova and Liubov Popova. 45

46 Malevich described his aesthetic theory, known as Suprematism, as "the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts." He viewed the Russian Revolution as having paved the way for a new society in which materialism would eventually lead to spiritual freedom. This austere painting counts among the most radical paintings of its day, yet it is not impersonal; the trace of the artist's hand is visible in the texture of the paint and the subtle variations of white. The imprecise outlines of the asymmetrical square generate a feeling of infinite space rather than definite borders. Suprematist Composition: White on White Oil on canvas, 79.4 x 79.4 cm; MoMA At the exhibition 0.10, the Black Square (1915; Moscow), painted on a square canvas surrounded by a margin of white, was hung across the corner of the separate room where works by Malevich and his followers were displayed; it was announced as the essential Suprematist work. On the one hand, it was radically nihilistic and could be interpreted as a gesture of rejection, providing no narrative, theme, composition or picture space, apparently rejecting all pictorial conventions and offering a canvas of unprecedented blankness; on the other hand, suspension across the corner of a room was a common way to display domestic icons, and by referring to this tradition its rejection of convention was not total. Black Square, 1915, Oil on Canvas, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg 46

47 Followed by the Black Circle (one version after 1920; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.) and the Black Cross (Paris, Pompidou), the Black Square can be related to an icon tradition that survived so strongly in Russia, using ancient forms that were increasingly admired by Russian artists seeking to exert their independence from western European traditions. Suprematism Term coined in 1915 by Kazimir Malevich for a new system of art, explained in his booklet : Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu: Novyy zhivopisnyy realizm From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: the new realism in painting Black Circle, The term itself implied the supremacy of this new art in relation to the past. Malevich saw it as purely aesthetic and concerned only with form, free from any political or social meaning. He stressed the purity of shape, particularly of the square, and he regarded Suprematism as primarily an exploration of visual language comparable to contemporary developments in writing. Suprematist paintings were first displayed at the exhibition The last Futurist exhibition of paintings: 0.10 held in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in December 1915; they comprised geometric forms which appeared to float against a white background. While Suprematism began before the Revolution of 1917, its influence, and the influence of Malevich s radical approach to art, was pervasive in the early Soviet period. Suprematism (Self-Portrait),

48 Malevich declared that the Black Square constituted the zero of form, an end to old conventions and the origin of a new pictorial language. The forms of this language were strictly geometrical as in the Suprematism series, but they rapidly evolved into increasingly complex paintings in which the geometrical elements employed richer colours and inhabited an ambiguous and complex pictorial space. Suprematism (Supremus No. 58) 1916; Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 70.5 cm; State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg Suprematism, ; Oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm; Fine Arts Museum, Krasnodar 48

49 Suprematist Painting 1917; Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 65.4 cm; The Museum of Modern Art, New York Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova (April 24, 1889 May 25, 1924) was a Russian avant-garde artist (Cubist, Suprematist and Constructivist), painter and designer. She was also a rarity in the highly masculine world of Soviet art. She added glowing color to Analytical Cubism. Through a synthesis of styles, Popova worked towards what she termed painterly architectonics. After first exploring Impressionism, by 1913, in Composition with Figures, she was experimenting with the particularly Russian development of Cubo-Futurism: a fusion of two equal influences from France and Italy. Air+Man+Space,

50 Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko [O.S. 23 November] 1891 December 3, 1956) was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova. -Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles usually high above or below to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again." Rodchenko Poster/Flier 1920s. Rodchenko and Stepanova 50

51 He was a central exponent of Russian Constructivism, owing much to the pre-revolutionary work of Malevich and Tatlin. He was closely involved in the cultural debates and experiments that followed the Revolution of In 1921 he denounced, on ideological grounds, easel painting and fine art. He became an exponent of Productivism in many fields, including poster design, furniture, photography and film. He resumed painting in his later years. His work was characterized by the systematic way in which from 1916 he sought to reject the conventional roles of self-expression, personal handling of the medium and tasteful or aesthetic predilections. His early nihilism and condemnation of the concept of art make it problematic even to refer to Rodchenko as an artist: in this respect his development was comparable to that of Dada, although it also had roots in the anarchic activities of Russian Futurist groups. Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (November 23, 1890 December 30, 1941), better known as El Lissitzky, was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the former Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design. Perhaps the most famous work by Lissitzky from the same period was the 1919 propaganda poster, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge", a 1919 lithograph by Lissitzky In the poster, the intrusive red wedge symbolizes the Bolsheviks, who are penetrating and defeating their opponents, the Whites, during the Russian Civil War. Russia was going through a civil war at the time, which was mainly fought between the "Reds" (communists and revolutionaries) and the "Whites" (monarchists, conservatives, liberals and socialists who opposed the Bolshevik Revolution). The image of the red wedge shattering the white form, simple as it was, communicated a powerful message that left no doubt in the viewer's mind of its intention. The piece is often seen as alluding to the similar shapes used on military maps and, along with its political symbolism, was one of El Lissitzky's first major steps away from Malevich's nonobjective suprematism into a style his own. 51

52 A Proun by El Lissitzky, c For a period El Lissitzky proceeded to develop a suprematist style of his own. He painted a series of abstract, geometric paintings which he called Proun (pronounced "pro-oon"). (Project for the Affirmation of the New). Lissitzky's Proun compositions utilize shifting axes and multiple perspectives to convey the idea of rotation in space. Later, El Lissitzky defined them ambiguously as "the station where one changes from painting to architecture. Proun was essentially El Lissitzky's exploration of the visual language of suprematism with spatial elements, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives; both uncommon ideas in suprematism. Suprematism at the time was conducted almost exclusively in flat, 2D forms and shapes, and El Lissitzky, with a taste for architecture and other 3D concepts, tried to expand suprematism beyond this. His Proun works (known as Prounen) spanned over a half a decade and evolved from straightforward paintings and lithographs into fully three-dimensional installations. They would also lay the foundation for his later experiments in architecture and exhibition design. While the paintings were artistic in their own right, their use as a staging ground for his early architectonic ideas was significant. In these works, the basic elements of architecture volume, mass, color, space and rhythm were subjected to a fresh formulation in relation to the new suprematist ideals. Through his Prouns, utopian models for a new and better world were developed. This approach, in which the artist creates art with socially defined purpose, could aptly be summarized with his edict "task oriented creation." Commenting on Proun in 1921, El Lissitzky stated, "We brought the canvas into circles... and while we turn, we raise ourselves into the space." El Lissitzky, Proun 5, Installation Proun 19D, c Gesso, oil, collage, etc., on plywood The Museum of Modern Art, New York Proun G7, 1923 Distemper, tempera, varnish and pencil on canvas, 77 x 62 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf 52

53 El Lissitzky, Proun 30t, Sprengel Museum Hannover Lissitzky's Suprematist story of two squares in six constructions,

54 Section of the Room for Constructivist Art, 1926 Photomontage of the Wolkenbügel (Cloud-Iron) in Nikitskii Square, 1925 Design for the Abstract Cabinet, Drawing of the Wolkenbügel (Cloud-Iron) in Nikitskii Square, 1925 Entrance, 1930 International Fur Trade Exhibition, Leipzig Model for the interior of the Soviet Pavilion International Fur Trade Exhibition, Leipzig 54

55 Precisionism The artists who came to be known as the Precisionists never formally organized themselves as a group or issued a manifesto; instead, they were associated through their common style and subjects. Around 1920, a number of artists in the United States began experimenting with a highly controlled approach to technique and form. They consistently reduced their compositions to simple shapes and underlying geometrical structures, with clear outlines, minimal detail, and smooth handling of surfaces. Their paintings, drawings, and prints also showed the influence of recent work by American photographers, such as Paul Strand, who were utilizing sharp focus and lighting, unexpected viewpoints and cropping, and emphasis on the abstract form of the subject. The Precisionists borrowed freely from recent movements in European art, including Purism's call to visual order and clarity and Futurism's celebration of technology and expression of speed through dynamic compositions. Charles Demuth adapted Cubism's geometric simplifications and faceted, overlapping planes, while Morton Schamberg can be linked to Dada through his use of machinery as nontraditional subject matter. Demuth spent several summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, located at the tip of Cape Cod and a popular summer destination for artists and writers in the early twentieth century. He painted a number of Provincetown landmarks, including this view of the Center Methodist Episcopal Church. In this watercolor, the church's prominent steeple and spire rise above the surrounding residential architecture. Built in 1860, the church had been designed in a variant of the English Baroque style, which is often associated with the architect Christopher Wren ( ). Certain elements of Demuth's composition are indebted to his knowledge of Cubism and Futurism. Repeated, diagonal "lines of force" break the area of the sky into fragments, and the houses in the foreground seem crystallized from multiple planes; however, the overall effect is legible and cohesive. In demonstrating that he could apply his Precisionist style to more traditional subjects as well as modern industrial ones, Demuth remained a painter of the American scene. After Sir Christopher Wren, 1920 Charles Demuth (American, ) Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on cardboard (60.5 x 51 cm) 55

56 In other respects, however, the Precisionists defined themselves as distinctively American artists. Artists such as Charles Sheeler, Elsie Driggs, Ralston Crawford, and Louis Lozowick, as well as Demuth, distanced themselves from European influences by selecting subjects from the American landscape and regional American culture. These subjects included elements unique to early twentieth-century life, including urban settings (particularly the dramatic engineering advances of skyscrapers and suspension bridges) and the sprawling industrial locales of steel mills, coalmines, and factory complexes. Many of the same artists also applied their new, hard-edged style to long-familiar American scenes, such as agricultural structures or local crafts and domestic architecture. Even such conventional motifs as a still life of fruit or flowers were treated to a fresh assessment in the Precisionist style. This photograph was made at the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home that Charles Sheeler shared with fellow painter and photographer Morton Schamberg. The spare geometry of the eighteenth-century Doylestown farmhouse proved an irresistible subject for an artist eager to explore with a camera the radical formal ideas that had impressed him in the paintings of Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque. It is an elegantly balanced, harmonious work, a testament to Sheeler's clarity of vision and ability to distill a scene to its essence a salient feature of the artist's work in all media. [Doylestown House The Stove], 1917 Charles Sheeler (American, ) Gelatin silver print (23.1 x 16.3 cm) The connections between the Precisionist approach and a wider social context were strong ones. In the later 1910s and 1920s, the United States was expanding its communications technology, industrial production, and construction in urban settings. The changing cityscape was documented by Strand and Sheeler in 1920, in their short film Manhattan. However, as the country experienced a psychological reaction to the mass destruction wrought overseas by the First World War and, later, the economic hardships of the Great Depression within its own borders, the United States entered a period of political isolationism. Cultural critics voiced a need for America to seek and shape its national identity through its own history, landscape, artifacts, and regional traditions. This attitude was also reflected in a revival of interest in American folk art. The functional design of Shaker furniture, for example, was now taken as evidence of preindustrial self-sufficiency, and was also seen as proto-modern in its simplicity. Accordingly, there existed two opposing views of the machine's place in contemporary American society, both of which were embodied by Precisionist art. 1. One view was the utopian ideal of technology bringing order to the modern world by enhancing the speed, efficiency, and cleanliness of everyday life. It is worth noting that Precisionism coincided with the landmark Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, and the like-minded Machine-Age Exposition hosted by New York in 1927, both of which endorsed the amalgamation of art, design, and industry in streamlined products for everyday use. 2. The opposing view stressed the dehumanizing effects of technology, warning that it would replace workers, create pollution, and dominate the landscape in a destructive manner. Occasionally, these two attitudes coexisted in an ambiguous tension within a single work of art. 56

57 Machinery, 1920 Charles Demuth (American, ) Tempera and pencil on cardboard (60.9 x 50 cm) This painting was first shown in an exhibition of Demuth's works titled Arrangements of the American Landscape Forms, held in Rather than a traditional landscape scene, it depicts industrial architecture in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Despite some abstract use of force lines and fragmented planes, the subject remains identifiable. It is a scene of rooftop machinery set against a background of windows belonging to an adjacent factory building; the central structure is a cyclone separator, a centrifuge-like apparatus often used in industrial settings, consisting of a tank, a funnel, and two arm like duct pipes. Like Demuth's painting The Figure 5 in Gold, this work was dedicated to his close friend, the poet William Carlos Williams. Williams himself contemplated the analogy between the arts and technology. In 1944, he wrote, "To make two bald statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words" (introduction to The Wedge, 1944). Forms in Space, 1927 John Storrs (American, ) Stainless steel and copper (52.1 x 10.2 x 4.1 cm) Storrs was the son of a Chicago architect and real estate developer, and the modern architecture of his native city would influence his sculpture throughout his career. He studied at various institutions in both the United States and Paris, where he was a student of Auguste Rodin for a brief time. He developed an approach to sculpture that acknowledged historical influences ranging from Native American ceramics to ancient Egyptian and Greek stone carving, while also incorporating recent styles such as Art Deco design. Storrs produced his "skyscraper sculptures" in materials associated more with industry and the decorative arts than with the fine arts. They are formal experiments with volume and space, the balance of vertical and horizontal masses, and the play of light on polished surfaces. Examples such as Forms in Space, in particular, signal his interest in the latest architectural styles seen in Chicago and New York, where the ever-taller office towers and apartment buildings were "set back" at their upper stories, in accordance with new urban zoning requirements. 57

58 Americana, 1931 Charles Sheeler (American, ) Oil on canvas (121.9 x 91.4 cm) Between 1926 and 1934, Sheeler produced a series of seven paintings that depict the interior of his home in South Salem, New York, and his collection of early American furnishings. The conflicting geometric patterns of the rugs, pillows, woven sofa covering, and backgammon set create a sense of visual disorientation in this scene, as do the unusual perspective and cropping of objects. However, the objects themselves are rendered in an extremely precise manner. This painting is as much a statement about national pride and the virtues of home and craftsmanship as it is a portrait of the artist's living space. Sheeler was not alone in his interest in these crafts; a number of influential collectors developed an interest in American folk and decorative arts in the 1920s and 1930s. In an era that placed increasing emphasis on technology and mass production, and in the years following the international crisis of World War I, such objects were nostalgic reminders of an ostensibly simpler time. Although the subjects of Blume's pictures were frequently mystifying and tended toward Surrealism, his technique possessed a sharp clarity that associated him with the Precisionist school of painting. South of Scranton, 1931 Peter Blume (American, born Russia, ) Oil on canvas (142.2 x 167 cm) South of Scranton gathers various scenes that the artist encountered during an extended road trip in spring The industrial machinery, coal piles, and smoking locomotives at the left side of the painting represent selective locales from the path. Blume then traveled further south to Charleston, South Carolina, where he witnessed several sailors performing acrobatic exercises aboard the deck of a German cruiser ship in the harbor. 58

59 White Canadian Barn II, 1932 Georgia O'Keeffe (American, ) Oil on canvas (30.5 x 76.2 cm) This austere image, from a series of seven or eight barn paintings, was inspired by a summer trip that O'Keeffe made to the rugged Gaspé Peninsula of Canada in The barn, as she depicts it, is stark in color and design, and precisely delineated. She allowed the subject matter to determine the appropriate proportions of the composition: the narrow, horizontal format of White Canadian Barn II echoes the flat rectangular forms of the barn roof and walls. The picture space is divided into three distinct areas denoting sky, building, and ground. Although the barn's strictly frontal presentation almost completely negates its three-dimensional form and depth, its somber coloring and massive size indicate a tangible and weighty presence. O'Keeffe distilled the essential geometric shape from each architectural element of the structure and also eliminated the textured patterns of its surfaces and other small details; only two impenetrable, black doorways anchor the breadth of the painting. While the artist denied having any connections to organized art movements, her series of barn images (a subject atypical in her nature-inspired oeuvre) does closely fit the style of the Precisionist painters. Water, 1945 Charles Sheeler (American, ) Oil on canvas 24 x 29 1/8 in. (61 x 74 cm) Water depicts one of the power generators built by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, when hydroelectric power was being distributed throughout the Tennessee River region of the United States. Sheeler's experience as a photographer influenced his Precisionist style of painting, in which he emphasized the geometric shapes of objects in a hard-edged, clearly lit manner. For Sheeler, these monumental, streamlined forms signified human ingenuity in harnessing nature's power. His interpretation of American industry was somewhat idealized: workers are never shown, and the machinery is pristine and gleaming, free of any dirt or smoke. Sheeler expressed his feelings about the emotional symbolism of technology when he wrote: "Every age manifests itself by some external evidence. In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression" (quoted in Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition, 1938). 59