Lecture, 1911-19

Editor's Notes

• #2: How did artists continue to experiment and play with visual forms and materials during the second decade of the 20th century?
• #3: How did the devastation of WWI affect art and artists during this period? World War I began and ended during this decade, from 1914-1918 and as you know, had a tremendous influence on world history. It pitted the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) against the Allies (Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, and eventually, the U.S.). Centered on Europe where we are focusing much of our attention, it caused the deaths of over 9 million and wounded over 20 million, largely a result of improvements in the machinery of war, which had the ability to inflict mass casualties and ghastly injuries. Mainly made up of trench warfare using machine guns, tanks and chemical weapons, World War I ushered in modern warfare. Imagine how this must have affected the artists working during this time who either served as soldiers (Paul Klee, Max Ernst), with many of them dying in training or on the battlefield (the Futurists Umberto Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia are a couple, Franz Marc the German Expressionist) or who saw friends and family return home gravely injured physically and mentally? How might this have affected what they produced? How could this catastrophic event have influenced the rather optimistic belief in the possibilities of industrialization and modernization that flourished at the start of the century?
• #4: In your readings, you probably recognized two dominant artistic practices throughout 1911-19. It is during this decade that we see the first pure abstract paintings, but it is also during this decade that we see the first steps toward conceptual art, in the work of Marcel Duchamp. While these emphases on optical experience and form on one hand and art as an intellectual exercise or idea on the other may look totally different, I would argue that they are actually two sides of the same coin. Neither attempt to reproduce the visual world as it had been shown in art prior to 1900. Your book posits about Cubism, the first art movement we will discuss today that the artists and thinkers associated with it were interested in “the superiority of conceptual knowledge over perceptual realism.” They wanted to show us what could not be seen but only imagined, a kind of fourth dimension.
• #5: Picasso returns his “borrowed” Iberian stoneheads to the Louvre from which they had been stolen by Pieret, Apollinaire’s secretary -Picasso’s early interest in Iberian and African heads nurtured his distortion of the form. It grew until he eventually fragmented the form altogether, analyzing its various components. Georges Braque began experimenting with Cubism first them began a collaboration with Picasso that would last from 1908 until 1914
• #6: -Kahnweiler was Picasso’s dealer during the Cubist period, and wrote the most important early account of it, “The Rise of Cubism” in 1920—this is where “analytical cubism” was coined
• #12: What is the iconic? -a conventional, formulaic style in which the image resembles the thing it portrays, no matter the style, even if abstract shapes, they serve as counterpart to object they depict (i.e. triangle for a torso) (vs. the symbolic—arbitrary signs that bear no visible or audible connection to the meanings or objects they refer to, i.e. “dog”
• #14: Duchamp withdrew from the Cubist group when they rejected this work, Nude Descending a Staircase, and brothers (assoc. with this group_ encouraged him to withdraw this painting from the 1912 Salon des Independents. -Called “explosion in a Shingle factory”—this slur shows the influence of industrialization and factory produced goods -Then abandons painting, abandons Cubism, as he would later do with art, in part because of its tendency towards institutionalization—Cubism had become a doctrine, and this work was rejected by the group that est this doctrine
• #16: What is art? (ontological) How do we know its art? (epistemological) Who determines what art is? (institutional) – Art Since 1900 Fountain was submitted to American Society of Independent. Artists for first exhibition on April 17. The show was not juried & Duchamp in charge of hanging committee. The show accepted all submissions but this one
• #18: An international movement, “Dada”—means baby talk in German, “hobbyhorse” in French, mult meanings in diff languages – A rewriting of the arts, starting all over, beginning again with nonsense, like child’s play -Grew out of artist’s dissatisfaction with middle class values, conservative traditions in art making, the tragedy of WWI – in some cases, it emphasizes a nihilistic approach to art and life; also emphasizes chance and accident in making art. Hugely influential on later art movements, in particular AbEx, Pop Art movements in US. Many Dadaist works no longer exist. Emphasis on their ephemerality. -Dada as the anti-movement -advocated a distaste for beauty, “beauty is dead,” morality, “systems”, pictorialism or illusionism in ptg, “the new artist protests”, preservation of freedom, independence--“art is a private affair. The artist produces for himself” -also interested in the unconscious (Freud, Jung) – art for self-revelation and catharsis Hans Arp, Collage of Squares Arranged Acc to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17 -Dadaist formal exercise combines cubism, collage, futurism, readymade etc -cut small squares of commercial paper, drops them, and glues them in place -resistance to the egoism of expressionist art (in favor of anonymity, like Duchamp resisted the traditional elements of art – composition, authorship, etc)
• #19: Like Duchamp, who was affiliated with Dada, these artists shared a dislike of schools and doctrines, fixed ways of doing anything, and bourgeois or middle class morality and propriety, church and state, and art market
• #21: Following Ball’s departure, Dada was made into a more cohesive movement by Tristan Tzara who wrote a manifesto (in 1918), opened a gallery, and produced a publication, Dada
• #26: Stieglitz enrolled as an engineering student in Berlin in 1882 and took a course in photochemistry Had no previous art training, no interest in the ‘art world’
• #27: Overall, modern (avant-garde) artists no longer sought objectivity, a desire to accurately reproduce the external world, or as Duchamp calls it, the “retinal art” tradition. They either abstracted the form by breaking it up into geometric planes, like the Cubists, by turning it into a chaotic assemblage of bright brushstrokes, like the Fauves, or they favored complete nonobjectivity, as in the case of Mondrian above, and removed all representational forms in favor of pure abstraction. In a sense, the interest in the image beyond the window (like the woman in Durer’s print above) becomes an interest in the frame itself. What remains is the grid, the flat, rectangular, or square, form. As you have read, much early 20th century art, in keeping with true modernist self-reflexivity, explored this tension between image and frame. Remember Robert Storr’s definition of modernism: “Modernism…is that art that takes itself—its compositional techniques, methods of image making, physical presence, and constructive or destructive relation to the traditions of art—as its primary subject. Before modernist art is about anything else—an image, a symbol, the communication of an experience—it is about the logic and structure of the thing that carries meaning, and about how that thing came into being. In this respect, all modernist art is essentially abstract, even though only some modernist art looks it.” Abstraction, even pure abstraction, abounds during the second decade of the 20th century in the work of Mondrian, Malevich, Leger, Arp, and the Delaunays, among many others. It will continue to be a primary avenue for artistic exploration throughout the 20th century.