Modernism

Move Toward Modernism

Eakins, Shad Fishermen Setting the Net at Gloucester, New Jersey (1881)

Eakins, Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River (1881)

Symbolism

• “simplification of line”

• “arbitrary color”

• “expressive, flattened form” (Fiero 790)

Hodler, The Chosen One (1893-94)

Hodler, Tired of Life

Japanese Woodblock Prints

• Imported to West beginning in 1860s

• Flat colors, curving lines

• “Empty” space

• Unique perspectives

• Everyday life & landscapes

• See quote, Fiero 797: “Before Japan . . . the painter always lied.”

Katsushika Hokusai, Mount Fuji Seen Below Wave at Kanagawa

Degas, Before the Ballet, 1890-92

Degas, The False Start, 1870

Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (1836)

Cassatt,

The Bath (1891)

Cassatt,

The Letter

(1890-91)

Cassatt,

The Bath

(1891-92)

Cassatt, Portrait of a Little Girl (1878)

Cassatt, The Boating Party (1893-94)

Art Nouveau

• Ornamental style extremely popular in 1890s & early 1900s—a popular modernism

• Serpentine lines, organic forms• Modern industrial materials (iron, glass)• Influenced by Asian & Islamic art• Often featured women with luxuriant hair,

seducing or enchanting

Nietzsche

• “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”(787).

• A critic of democracy: democracy=mediocrity• Celebrates the “superman” who rises above

traditional morality• Celebrates the “Dionysian” (irrational) over the

“Apollonian” (rational) spirit in the Western tradition

Monet,

Rouen Cathedral,

1893

Rodin,

Gates of Hell

1880-1917

Rodin, The Thinker

Elements of Modernism

• Abstraction

• Primitivism

• Experimentation with time and space

Abstraction in Painting

• Abstraction: nonrepresentational art: self-consciousness of medium: art for art’s sake

• Maurice Denis: painting is “a flat surface covered with shapes, lines, and colors assembled in a particular order” (809)

Cezanne, The Basket of Apples (c. 1895)

Cezanne, Still Life with Peppermint

Bottle, c. 1894

Mount Sainte-Victoire Seen from

Bellevue. c. 1882-85.

Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibemus Quarry, c. 1897

Cezanne, Mount Sainte-Victoire. 1904-1906

Abstraction in Literature

• Ezra Pound: imagism: “rhythmic arrangement of words” producing an emotional “shape” (820)—Pound inspired by Chinese calligraphy

• Pound declared, “make it new”

• Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” (1916)

• Frost, “The Road Not Taken” (1916)

Pound’s explanation

Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion.

And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour.

Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue (1921)

Primitivism

• Modernists influenced traditional cultures of Africa and Oceania (Gauguin, Picasso, etc.)

• Background: 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle: showed arts of Asia, Africa, and Oceania

• Rise of anthropology: Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, a comparative study of traditional folk customs

Primitivism

• Modernist interest in primitive cultures arose from contact with those cultures

• Ironically, this contact contributed to the destruction of those cultures

• Modernist primitivism is therefore nostalgic

Gertrude Stein, 1906

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

Time and Space: Experimentation

• Background: Einstein’s special theory of relativity: time and space related

• Henri Bergson: duration: the fusing or streaming together of past and present

• Painting (spatial medium): introduces time

• Literature (temporal medium): introduces space: “Spatial Form”

Cubism

• Analytic: through multiple perspectives, time enters into the space of the canvas

• Synthetic: real objects pasted onto the canvas—presentation and representation merge together

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

1910

Braque, Still Life on a Table, c. 1914

Juan Gris,

Roses

Picasso, Guernica (1937)

Literature and Time-Space Experimentation

• Literature (temporal medium) calls attention to space: “Spatial Form” (see cummings 851); OR

• Disruptions in experience of time (stream of consciousness): Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (847); Joyce, Ulysses (850); Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (878)

Futurism

• Marinetti issues Futurist manifestoes

• Focus on modern sensation: “A roaring motorcar is more beautiful than the winged Victory of Samothrace” (827)

Joseph Stella

The BrooklynBridge

(c. 1920-22)

Duchamps, Nude Descending a Staircase, #2 (1912)

Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)

Nonobjective Art

Mondrian, Brabant Farmyard (1904)

Mondrian, Gray Tree (1911)

Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue (1921)

Lozenge Composition in Red, Grey, Blue, Yellow, and Black (1924-25)

Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43)

De Stijl (The Style)

• Rietveld, Red and Blue Chair (1918)

Modern Architecture

Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924)• mastered high-rise construction using the load-

bearing steel frame•  1871 Chicago Fire provided a clean slate for

Chicago building•  1891 Monadnock Building (Burnham & Root):

limit of bearing-wall construction: 16 floors•  1894-5, Sullivan’s Guaranty Building in Buffalo:

vertical piers dominate the pattern and emphasize verticality

Burnham & Root,

Monadnock Building

(1889-91)

Sullivan and Adler,

Guaranty Building,

Buffalo

(1894-95)

Louis Sullivan: Carson, Pirie, Scott, Building, Chicago, 1899.

Frank Lloyd Wright

• Student of Sullivan

• Stressed horizontality

• Influenced by Japanese architecture

• Founded the so-called Prairie School

Wright, Robie House, Chicago (1909)

Wright, Fallingwater, Pennsylvania (1936-39)

Walter Gropius (1883-1969)

• Founder of the Bauhaus (“House for Building”) in 1919 through a fusion of Grand Ducal Academy of Art with the Arts and Crafts School

• The idea was to create an idealistic community of craftsmen, like the medieval cathedral builders

• Wanted to unify architecture, sculpture, painting, and design

• Gropius embraced mass housing and industrial design

• His preferred materials: steel, concrete, and glass

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau (1925-26)

International Style• Emphasis on truth-telling: no decoration

• Subscribed to idea that form follows function

• Building seen as volume generated by interplay of planes and spaces

• Planar flatness of walls: preference for stucco, which unfortunately cracks

• Le Corbusier (France), Walter Gropius (Germany), Philip Johnson (U.S.)

 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

• mastered the use of glass in the steel-frame skyscraper, creating the face of the modern corporation

• linear, rational, and (in theory) cheap

• believed in an objective architecture based on the machine age; rejected ornaments, calling them “noodles”

Mies, continued

• Philip Johnson said: “[Mies] believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, and especially of his architecture.”

• 1954-58 Seagram Building: made the curtain wall of bronze because he wanted a warm dark color: most elegant but most expensive curtain wall ever hung on steel frame

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, New York, 1954-58

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, New York, 1954-58

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (“Le Corbusier”—the crowlike one)

Le Corbusier and the International Style

• Le Corbusier was a failed sociological architect but an inspired aesthetic one

• He was among the founders of the International Style (term coined in 1932 by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock), as evidenced in his Villa Savoye, 1929-31

Villa Savoye, 1929-31

Le Corbusier

• Promoted La Ville Radieuse, the “Radiant City”

• Voisin Plan of 1925 would clear 600 acre L-shaped site on Right Bank

• Get rid of history to make way for a “vertical city . . . bathed in light and air”

• Wanted wide roads for cars (Voisin was the carmaker that sponsored the research: Peugeot and Citroen declined)

Le Corbusier, Ville contemporaine pour trois million d’habitants (1922)

Le Corbusier, Drawing for the Voisin Plan (1925)

Le Corbusier, Drawing for the Voisin Plan (1925)

Le Corbusier, Unite d’Habitation, Marseilles (1946-52)

• A one-unit Radiant City• Influenced by utopian ideas of Charles

Fourier (1772-1837)• 18 stories, containing flats for 1600 people• Unrealistic: shopping mall on the 5th floor,

but the French shop in outdoor markets• Roof is sun-drenched, simple, the only

successful part of the building

Brasilia, Brazil

What can we learn from Le Corbusier’s failures?

• Modernist principles might be good for a painting, or even a house, but they do not succeed as a basis for organizing a city or society.