Art of the Early Twentieth Century

Lesson 1:

Many Movements in European Art

The Fauves• Meaning “Wild Beasts” – the term was coined by

an art critic who did not approve of the French groups style of art.

• This new style was simple in design and was characterized by brightly colored, loose brushwork, which was unrealistic, free and wild.

• Fauves were Influenced by the ideas of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin but more daring– Van Gogh- his use of color and movement of

brushstroke– Gauguin- use of broad, flat shapes and lively line

patterns

Henri Matisse• The leader of the Fauves.

• turned to art when he was a 20-year-old law student.

• spent a brief period as a student of an academy painter, but found this experience almost as frustrating as studying law.

• then studied with another artist, Gustave Moreau, who was not as rigid. He encouraged Matisse to exercise greater freedom in his use of color.

The Red Studio Artist: Henri Matisse

The Red Studio• By 1905, Matisse had developed a style using broad

areas of color that were not meant to look like the shapes or colors found in nature.

• In The Red Studio, Matisse uses his studio as subject matter.

• The intense red hue of this painting strips away the unnecessary details, unifies the painting, suspends the objects in the studio in midair to be examined. It is a strong, pure red selected for its visual impact, not for its accuracy.

• Besides color, shapes, lines and textures were important to Matisse and he used them in new and exciting ways to create a colorful decorative pattern.

• His goal and purpose in creating his art was to bring pleasure and peaceful viewing to the person looking at the painting. The use of simplicity was a more direct form of personal expression.

• He creates unity with the red color field. To help balance out the red, Matisse holds your interest with contrast of greens, pinks, black, and white.

The Knife Thrower

• Nowhere are Matisse’s simple, direct forms more obvious than in his version of a circus knife thrower.

• Matisse playfully contrasts the furious actions of a knife thrower with the inactive pose of his female assistant.

• Matisse's Later Life – Later in his life he reduced his designs to

paper cutouts that he then arranged into compositions.

Georges Rouault

• Where as Matisse was interested in showing pleasure and happiness in his art, Rouault chose to illustrate the more sorrowful side of life. Even with this difference they did share the fact that art for them was a form of personal expression.

• His works were bold visual sermons condemning the world’s injustices and suffering.

The Old King Artist: Georges Rouault

The Old King• The strong black outlines make the painting look

like stained glass and also unify his picture while stressing the sorrowful expression of the figure.

• Is Rouault trying to tell you that even a king, with all his power and wealth, cannot find comfort in a world of suffering, or is he suggesting that no king is powerful enough to offer his subjects the happiness needed to guarantee his own happiness?

• He sometimes kept his pictures for as long as 25 years, during which he endlessly studied and changed them, hoping to achieve perfection.

German Expressionism

• Artworks that communicated strong emotional feelings.

• Artists interested in communicating their deep emotional feelings through their artworks, were called Expressionists.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

• Over a brief career she created some 400 paintings and more than 1,000 drawings and graphic works.

• Her paintings demonstrate the depth of her feelings and her ability to communicate those feelings in a highly personal, expressive style.

Old Peasant WomanArtist: Paula Modersohn-Becker

Old Peasant WomanArtist: Paula Modersohn-Becker• The only example of Modersohn-Becker’s work in

the United States. The viewer is presented with a haunting image of a peasant woman.

• Seated, with her arms crossed and clutched to her chest, the old woman stares ahead as if in prayer.

• Her lined face, rough hands, and coarse clothing speak of the hardships she has endured, although the hardships have failed to shake her faith or

temper her dignity.

Street, BerlinArtist: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Street, BerlinArtist: Ernst Ledwig Kirchner

• Kirchner uses clashing angular shapes to express one of his favorite themes: the tension and artifical elegance of the city.

• The people here are jammed together on a street, part of a never-ending parade.

• They look strangely alike, as if cut from the same piece of cardboard with slashes from a razor-sharp knife.

• It is hard to tell what they are thinking because their faces look like masks.

Street, BerlinHistorical Context

• Behind those masks are “real” faces. • The faces are hidden, though, because

they might betray the people’s true feelings. • This picture was painted in Berlin just

before the outbreak of WWI.• It many be the artist’s attempt to suggest

the tension lurking just beneath the phony elegance of the German capital on the brink of war.

Kirchner’s Death

• Kirchner’s art revealed tension, hardships, and was a commentary on the times. When his works were condemned by Hitler in 1938, he was ill and upset about the conditions in Germany and was unable to face up to this insult and took his own life.

Kathe Kollwitz

1) 2)

1) Germany’s Children Starve! 2) Killed In Action

• She was another of Germany’s Expressionists.

• She used her art to protest against the tragic plight of the poor before and after WWI.

• To reach the greatest number of viewers, she chose to express her ideas with etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs.

• She was influenced by the Fauves, van Gogh, Munch, and other German Expressionists

Edvard Munch

• His childhood was marked by the deaths of some of his family members and by his own poor health.

• The fear, suffering, and experience of death in his own life became the subject matter for his art.

The Sick ChildArtist: Edvard Munch

The Sick ChildArtist: Edvard Munch

• This painting was inspired by the death of his older sister.

• He captures the pale complexion, colorless lips, and hopeless state of a child weakened and finally conquered by illness.

• He chose to describe inner feelings.• Pictures like this shocked the viewers at first. His

figures seemed crude and grotesque when compared to the colorful and lighthearted visions of the Impressionists.

The ScreamArtist: Edvard Munch

The ScreamArtist: Edvard Munch

• The curved shapes and colors in this work are expressive rather than realistic.

• Everything is distorted to communicate an overpowering emotion.

• The subject of the picture is fear.

• The person is this painting is terrified.

• The scream comes from the open mouth and is so piercing that the figure must clasp it hands tightly over its ears.

Non-Objective Art

• A style that employs color, line, texture and unrecognizable shapes and forms with no apparent reference to reality.

Wassily Kandinsky• Kandinsky freed the artist from subject matter• His main goal was to convey moods and feelings

and he achieved this, by arranging the elements of art in certain ways.

• Colors, values, lines, shapes, and textures were selected and carefully arranged on the canvas for a certain effect.

• He felt that art elements, like musical sounds, could be arranged to communicate emotions and feelings.

• He felt that a painting should be the “exact duplicate of some inner emotion”.

Improvisation 28 (second version)Artist: Wassily Kandinsky

Composition vii, Kandinsky

Cubism• Artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges

Braque started with Cezanne’s idea that all shapes in nature are based on the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder.

• They carried this idea further by trying to paint three-dimensional objects as if they were seen from many different angles at the same time.

• They developed a style of painting, called Cubism, in which artists tried to show all sides of three-dimensional on a flat canvas.

The Cubist Approach • Can be illustrated with simple sketches.• An ordinary object, such as a coffee cup, would

be drawn from several different points of view. • After these first sketches have been done, the

artist studies them to find the parts of the object that are most interesting and most characteristic of the object.

• These parts are then arranged in a composition.• Thus, parts from the top, sides and bottom of the

object are blended together to complete the picture.

• This produces a complex arrangement of new shapes that can be confusing to the viewer, which unfortunately hampered the Cubist recognition.

The Cubist Collage • Cubists were also interested in making the surfaces

of their paintings richer and more exciting by adding a variety of actual textures.

• Around 1911, Picasso, Braque, and others began to add materials such as newspaper clippings, pieces of wallpaper, and labels to the picture surface.

• This technique, known as collage, involves adding other materials to the picture surface.

• It further blurred the recognizable connection between the painting and any represented object.

Guitar, Céret

Pablo Picasso

• Led a long and productive life during which he passed through many different stages.

• After working in the Cubist style, he returned to paintings of the human figure in which he used a greater range of colors.

• Picasso lived a long and full life; he was 91 years old when he died in 1973.

Guernica Artist: Pablo Picasso

GuernicaArtist: Pablo Picasso

• In 1937, he painted is famous antiwar picture, Guernica

• A large mural made for the Pavillon of the Spanish Republic.

• The work was inspired by the bombing of the ancient Spanish city of Guernica by German planes during the Spanish Civil War.

• Because the city had no military importance, the destruction served no other purpose than to test the effectiveness of large scale bombing. As a result of this “test,” the city and most of its inhabitants were destroyed.

GuernicaArtist: Pablo Picasso

• Like the Expressionists, Picasso exaggerates and distorts forms

• He overlaps flat shapes in an abstract design, as did the Cubists

• He uses bold blacks, whites, and grays instead of color to give the impression of newsprint or newspaper photographs. Adding to the look of newsprint is the stippled effect on the horse.

Georges Braque• Unlike Picasso who constantly changed styles, Braque

maintained that a painting is a flat surface and remained involved with that idea.

• Between 1907 and 1914, Braque worked closely with Picasso to develop Cubism.

• He was called to served in the army during WWI in 1915. • After recovering from being seriously wounded in the

war, he returned to painting but from that point on his work showed a renewed respect for subject matter, more playful curves, and brighter colors. He would add sand to his paint and build up a rich, heavy surface.

Purple PlumsArtist: Georges Braque

Purple PlumsArtist: Georges Braque

• Braque preferred to paint still lifes, but instead of concentrating only on fruits and flowers, he painted more permanent, manufactured objects such as tables, bottles, mandolins, books and pipes.

• He selected objects that people use when relaxing and enjoying pleasant thoughts. Braque intended them to put the viewers in a gentle, comfortable mood.

Aristide Maillol

• Maillol was not interested in dramatic gestures and expressions, or in a sculptured surface made up of bumps and hollows.

• He admired the balance, simplicity, and peacefulness of ancient Greek sculptures, and tried to capture these same qualities in his own work.

The Mediterranean Artist: Aristide Maillol

• This echoes the classical characteristics of balance and peacefulness.

• From the side, the figure forms a large triangular shape, which gives it a balanced, stable look. Smaller triangles are created by the raised leg and the arm supporting the head.

• The repetition of these triangular shapes is important here because it helps to unify the work in the same way that a certain color used over and over again can unify a painting.

Georges Braque