Lecture on Modern Art
We are going to look at Modern Art this lecture will be probably longer than a lot of the other ones because I’m going to go over the major changes that happen in art from 1800 to 1945. so we’re going to see art kind of changing every couple of years
Up until now in our history study in the Renaissance in the Baroque the Greeks we’ve been seeing basic Styles stay the same for hundreds of years and the modern world is not going to be like that in the modern world it’s going to be every new group of artists is
Looking to learn from their predecessors but to do the next thing to be new make it new like Ezra pound the poet says is really what it’s all about in modern art and I’m going to take you through a lot of it you could do probably an entire semester class on
What we’re doing today and I want to get you through it so far last week we can look at American art and where the United States and New York City in particular becomes the leading place for art in the world and we’ll look at modern to postmodern next week
In two different lectures so to get to that point we got to go through a lot of Modern Art now for this modern art section there’s a quiz it’s multiple choice you should be used to the quizzes by now this quiz is 15 questions rather than three that
Should give you some idea of how much more information is in here and then there’ll be a lecture assessment and the lecture assessment will ask you what your favorite art was and hopefully you’ll all find something there’s a lot of kind of cool interesting stuff going on here
And then also four questions on things that you learned from the lecture kind of what we’ve been doing all semester so let’s get into the very fun wild world of Modern Art okay so before we start here let’s see what this modern world looks like
So the Rue de rivole is one of the most famous streets in Paris a Commercial Street with shops on the first floor and then expensive apartments on the upper floors this was made when Paris was rebuilt after a peasant Uprising and they completely leveled Paris and rebuilt it
As a modern city straight streets kind of like the spokes of a wheel leading into roundabouts that take you to important points in the city you can see that they’re kind of beginning to anticipate the wider streets of modernity even though we don’t have cars yet with all the horse buggies the idea
That there’s going to be more people wider streets kind of a sense of modernity and in a modern city because of colonialism like Paris you don’t just have people from France living in Paris you have people from colonies people from all over the world out of state workers people who are expatriating
Especially because Paris is the center of the cultural World certainly the center of the painting world and has been really since Paris started their official arts school and their yearly salons their major shows on Art it is the place to be an artist on the right you’re seeing the kinds of
Clothes that can be bought now in these shops so people don’t have to make their own clothes when they’re middle class and they have a little bit of money they can go out and buy the umbrella the Hat the sofa the you know all of these things are now accessible to this middle
Class that has been arriving since the Industrial Revolution began in the late 16 early 1700s so we had left off on the Baroque era in a supplemental lecture and I kind of described art up until about 1700. in 1700 you have the enlightenment in the enlightenment philosophers and theorists are getting
Away from a strict belief that religion solves everything Copernicus is showing us that our Earth is not the center of the universe as we go further into this Darwin is going to show us that we are no different than other animal forms and so in this era of the Enlightenment people
Are beginning to believe that perhaps governance should not be done by Kings and dictators but perhaps maybe people should be able to govern and that they have certain rights and the enlightenment will lead to the American Revolution and the French Revolution in this time period we have a painting style called neoclassicism
And neoclassicism Jacques Louis David great French painter is one of the best of these artists now here we are seeing where the French Revolution failed and in fact a general comes into power and also modernizes Paris before it goes off the rails with too many wars Napoleon Bonaparte
So we are seeing the style of neoclassicism really done well here very clear space like we would see in the Renaissance sober colors rather than heightened colors and then classicizing either modern subject matter or showing classical Tales from Ancient Rome or the Greeks so here we are looking at this really
Great painting of Napoleon with his name in stone following in the carthaginian general Hannibal who beats the Romans by Crossing mountains and we are doing the same thing here as he is crossing the Alps leading the charge with his horse rearing up the wind blowing the horse’s mane forward the drapery moving forward
The tail blowing forward and him pointing forward very heroic painting not actually truthful in what was happening but very very heroic and patriotic for the French people this is a student of Jacques Louis David genre is a painter who transitions between the neoclassic and the Romantic here is a
Neoclassic painting he judgs of Jupiter and theaters we are seeing the subject of Homer’s Iliad the nymph theatus is pleading with Jupiter to intervene on behalf of her son the warrior Achilles in the background Jupiter’s wife Juno is spying on this because Jupiter is always cheating all the time
So he’s showing us the clean Contours clear colors uh precise draftsmanship that is indebted to David that we see in Ong as well we also see here in aung his movement towards Romanticism and I don’t go a lot into Romanticism here and I probably don’t show as much as I should have in
Terms of the landscape painting in Roman I think Landscapes are the best thing in Romanticism frankly in Romanticism you have these great landscape paintings in America and Europe and they show this love of the sublime and also a new form of kind of religion the deists uh which
Thomas Jefferson would have been one the Deus believe that God made everything but basically leaves us alone so where you find God is in a sunset you find it in a beautiful Canyon in the creation itself we also in Romanticism we get some dubious subject matter especially the
Kind of love of what they call orientalism so we see these other civilizations in Asia as very exotic and here we see from aung two examples of him really I think romanticizing the idea of a harem and a harem is a uh women odelesques are basically sex slaves from the Middle East
And we are seeing here these odorless on the right very much a European fantasy I’m pretty sure aung never saw an actual Harem notice the women are all seem to be pretty happy they’re playing music and dancing and naked and hanging out and very free and looks like a kind of a
Good time not what it really is in legrando delesque on the left aung is taking proportion and he’s playing around with it the way Michelangelo was in the last judgment he has elongated her backbone with about three or four vertebrae and is playing around with the
Leg in terms of the upper leg appears to be connecting up here somewhere rather than down here so he is taking license with the painting he is trying to create more sexual energy in the painting by these elongations I think we get a more sober romantic artist he is famous for painting LIberty
Leading The Charge really famous painting about the revolution here I wanted to show this in contrast to aung’s painting of harems so here he is showing us a less of a mirror to the world that we would be getting in the ONG where you don’t see the brush Strokes instead you see you
Know the illusion of like a mirror to the world well Deborah craw he’s painting a little quicker the paint’s a little bit thicker and we’re gonna see that today in art where painting is becoming more about the surface less about the three-dimensional perspective Illusions and here we’re seeing his
Version of a harem a little less optimistic probably than what we were seeing from aung the first major major modern style in the mid-1800s is realism realism is about showing Everyday People the lower class the working class and making them into giant heroic paintings like the stone Breakers very large painting where
You don’t see the faces of the workers you simply see them breaking stones to make gravel to pave roads and you also see they’re probably handmade clothing and their clothing that is kind of beat up from doing this very Hands-On hard labor Corbett is painting the life around him
Rather than painting Napoleon or glorizing other parts of the world he is trying to paint the world as it looks and here in this burial which is 20 feet by 10 feet he does this burial not of a king not of some important hero but just some everyday person in this small town
In France influenced by Corby is Edward Manet and menet’s luncheon in the grass is kind of one of those watershed moments in art so he’s joining corbe and painting Modern Life and he is also making this painting based on Rococo fet glance that were the last part of the Baroque
We are seeing modern parisians middle class people middle class clothing with the men are clothed the woman is looking at us nude they have just had some kind of picnic perhaps also sexual dalliance has gone on here as well the configuration of the three figures is
Based on another work of art in the Louvre and painting is now referring back to its own history and not pretending that it’s anything else the modeling the light and Shadow on the figure was considered to be really rough and crude because there’s not a lot of
Darks on this figure the figure we think maybe was painted from a photograph that had a flash on it and the Flash would have drained all of the shadows out of the figure so this was a painting that was refused by the official Salon show and put into a salon of the
Refusals so there were so many artists being refused for the state show that artists were getting very upset and they decided to show the refused paintings as well and that’s where man A’s painting shows up and we begin to have a history of official shows State shows and then
Other shows that are not part of the state often being more popular are having more artistic Merit so here in this uh in this print we are seeing a borrowed composition from a Raphael where we see the three figures here in the Judgment of Paris and the exact
Three figures the woman looking at us the way the guy is leaning here but now been turned into modern art of the middle class and again the fat Gallant that had been a very popular kind of painting genre for a couple hundred years wealthy people going into idealize
Gardens and forests and having orgies and picnics but now we’re seeing the middle class doing it after man a in the 1860s in the 1870s we get a new group of young artists called the Impressionists this partly is able to happen because of the mass producing
Of paint that is now not paint you have to make yourself but paint that you can buy in tubes like we saw in our painting lecture and then also you can buy collapsible easels and these easels you can collapse and then you can set them up and paint
In nature and Claude Monet is one of the artists that is doing this in his painting Impression Sunrise from 1872 we get the beginning of the Impressionists artists they are painting quickly in nature they are painting thickly with the paint they’re no longer trying to make the
Illusion save the water here it’s just Strokes out of the brush so it’s brightly colored he doesn’t use black anymore his Shadows are all cool colors with warm highlights that we studied in the elements lecture here we see it again in this painting he’s painting on a boat and the paint is
Really bright because of the lack of black so think about this we’ve been seeing black used in paintings with Caravaggio with da Vinci and now we see an artist who realize that the paint can become brighter by not using that and by also putting warm and cool colors next
To each other to heighten each other it’s about color it’s about a feeling rather than an exact representation of the world after the Impressionists you get a group of artists that we call the post-impressionists who are just kind of doing their own thing and have been influenced by impressionism which is
Lord sharat we see middle-class people on a Sunday hanging out just kind of having that Leisure Time that comes from being able to live in a city and work a job where you get some time off and enough money to survive and also to do things like go to cafes to buy some
Clothing and just kind of enjoy life a little bit this painting is made out of dots that he is putting dots millions of dots next to each other that when you stand back from it you get this really beautiful painting of middle class life another post-impressionist is Vincent
Van Gogh Van Gogh is heightening the color using it right out of the tube so his blue skies are really blue the red wallpaper in the night Cafe is the pure red out of the tube no using the colors in the way that we see from delaqua where notice
The Reds here aren’t so bright the Reds have light and Shadow on them and look like they might really look in a real room Van Gogh has taken us to a new place now he’s still making the sky blue he’s still making the light yellow he’s making the pool table green but his
Heightening of color is taking us to a kind of new place in art and his art also is expressing his kind of inner feelings that he has Gogan is a contemporary who lived briefly with Van Gogh he is going to Tahiti and the uh the South Pacific to
Get away from modern society he is painting natives there he is also brightening the color as well as you see in the Vermilion down here and the yellow trees in the background and his claw his painting somewhat almost look as if maybe they’re sewn together or they’re collage-like another important post impressionist is
Cezanne with Cezanne he is not interested in the surface anymore that the Impressionists were interested in he’s interested in the underneath geometry and he is taking us away from the surface to that geometry he’s painting still lives and monsen Victoria many many times in this painting notice that he is completely flattened the
Space the brightness of the colors are not creating a sense of perspective and deep space but instead a very flattened space and we’re seeing The Strokes of the paint and how they’re all kind of patching together here rather than seeing a lot of detail like we would have seen from the northern Renaissance
In the 20th century the avant-garde the Arts trying to make new and in a way disassociating itself from everyday people who maybe won’t understand art as it’s becoming more crude and changing all the time Matisse is the joy of life is one of the most important paintings that we’ve looked at today
In this painting and the fove painting he is using bright bright color like Van Gogh was doing but instead of where Van Gogh was going where the sky was blue and the people were painted people color he’s painting people purples and greens uh the sky is blue the the ground the
Earth is all all these different colors Matisse freeze artists from having to use color that is exactly the way the world Works instead artists can use color too however they want to feel and make us feel in the painting and that is an important part of German expressionism here from Ernst Kirchner
In this street and Dresden we no longer it’s almost like the Gothic era again where we no longer are seeing the anatomies of the Renaissance we are getting these ghosts like people painted in all these different colors a street that doesn’t look like a street but is
Pink bubble gum color we are heightening through arbitrary colors and wavering Contours like we saw from the screed from Edward monk to increase feeling in painting and that feeling in painting is going to continuous painting becomes more abstract this is Kandinsky his composition 4 on the left and his
Totally abstract black lines from 1911. Kandinsky starts by still including recognizable things in paintings like figures but the perspectives are turning and changing we have a rainbow here a sun over here mountains are something here we’re not a hundred percent sure what we’re seeing anymore now it’s about
Formal elements line color space and feeling Pablo Picasso he’s influenced by Cezanne and he’s going to take Cezanne a step further in cubism so the damn Daniels of uh Evan Young in 1907 he has created a painting that has no foreground and no background it’s completely flat
He has also created figures who don’t have the round smooth curviness of previous figure painting that we’ve seen instead they are like diamonds they are broken into geometric shapes and on the right you see the influence of Picasso viewing African masks so his influences are no longer the Renaissance his influences
Are African art Egyptian art and Mayan art that is what’s making painting new another example from his contemporary George Brock here again the lack of three-dimensional space when Brock really gets into it as cubism progresses we start to see kind of a sense of no ability to read the plane
Whatsoever in the Immigrant here we might have a guitar here we might have an arm here there might be a nose and an eye here but it is all becoming very very difficult to figure out in Italy we have a metaphysical kind of painting dreams being painted by Giorgio
De carrico in his disquieting muses we are seeing something that looks like it might be pulled directly from a dream these mysterious figures these Long Shadows and this giant mystery of these disconnected images that have the disconnected quality that you might have in a dream
In Italy also we have a group called The futurists the futurists in the early 20th century are falling in love with the machine that maybe people should be more like machines and we are seeing the admirers of speed and Technology Youth and violence the car the airplane the
Industrial city here we’re looking at bassione’s unique forms of continuity and space a type of human figure that is also a field of energy and a field of movement rather than the detail of the eyes the nose the arms and stuff like that ft marinetti is the guiding theoretic
Force in the futurists he believes that the world should be destroyed and rebuilt more like machines and is playing around with a new kind of typography exploding letters and words and showing what the words look like rather than Simply Having words on a line like in a book
Imbala’s dynamism out of a dog on a leash we see the sense and the influence of film the influence of the moving image on painting as we see the dog’s legs the person who owns the dog the chain the ears the tail everything working at these different speeds
And then all of that optimism in the early part of the 20th century Falls away because of World War One in World War one you have a world a war of European powers who are trying to divvy up the rest of the world that they are colonizing the world has machine
Guns this war has airplanes trench warfare really poor tactics and ultimately not much is accomplished in the war other than a lot of people being massacred and at the end of it the Ottoman Empire being dismantled and turned into modern states of Iraq and Iran and turkey
So here’s the reality of the war here heroism and in this war really absurd things are going on like in the in 1916 in the CR in Christmas the sides so the French get out of their trenches the Germans get out of their trenches they’re fighting each other in
This war and they meet each other in the No Man’s Zone and they exchange Christmas gifts they get drunk together they play soccer and then get back in their trenches and fight each other to the death a total war the complete absurdity of that and again the
Uselessness kind of of this war leads to a very I think the most important movement we’re studying today which is Dada so Dada starts in the neutral country Switzerland in Zurich pacifists from Germany Hugo ball is doing spoken word poetry in a bar where he is speaking gibberish artists are
Showing paintings in bathrooms and a new movement is coming so it is anti-art anti-middle class anti-politicians anti-good manners everything that keeps this war going on it is a political edge and a type of art not serving the state not serving religion but trying to serve people by
Refusing to live in the logic of the world that created this war instead being totally illogical like piccabia the comedian of the Dada artist with his child carburetor here influenced by the idea of the machine people of the futurists and playing around with kind of silly ways of diagramming everything sphere of the
Migraine destroy the future strange stuff like that Marcel ducamp who we have mentioned on several occasions he is taking art away from making anything we have seen the fountain before and here we have the bicycle wheel where he has taken a bicycle apart and then drilled the front
Tire into a stool rendering the stool useless and the bicycle useless and he calls this utterly useless so you can’t write it you can’t sit on it what do you do with it it must be art same thing with the urinal it’s on a pedestal it’s
Not in a bathroom what is it it must be art so art now through the dadas is something that can be designated and have a sense of humor to it we see him writing a mustache and a goatee an image of the Mona Lisa writing
The letters l h o o q that in French means that she has a nice butt which is impossible to know from the painting in this cheap postcard reproduction here we see the artist playing chess with a socialite in Los Angeles named Eve babetz so his very first Museum show is
In Santa Monica and in Santa Monica he’s showing his paintings and his sculptures but he’s also performing playing chess with anyone that wants to play chess with him Eve Babette’s is kind of the Kim Kardashian of her age tells the news media that she will be their nude playing chess with him
And in this Photograph we see him completely engrossed in the game and not looking at this voluptuous young LA Woman and the again the absurdity reigning in everything that he does from Dada and from Hugo ball we get the spoken word poetry in this spoken word poetry
We are seeing words that appear to be words but are nonsense and the complete nonsense of all of this is kind of the how the dadas feel about the nonsense of the political factions telling them to stay in the war and that there’s some sort of Glory in war also
In Dada like in Modern Warfare where bombs drop on it the good soldiers and the bad soldiers you see artists using chants Max Ernst is taking a paint can and Swinging the paint can over the canvas lying on the floor creating these images that happen by chance
ARP is allowing these collage squares to fall wherever they land and then pasting them on after the war dada will break up the war is kind of holding them all together so data will remain political in Berlin in France they will follow the guy on the right here Andre bratan who is talking
About an art about dreams and psychic automatism the notion that great art should come directly from the unconscious influence by Freud and that your conscious mind should not make any rational decisions and we get great surrealists art like Merit oppenheim’s luncheon infer great artists like Salvador Dali who is
Painting in a somewhat classical style but painting really strange imagery like in the Persistence of memory where we see Dali’s skull without Dali’s skin on his skull without the bones melting clocks like it’s so hot that it’s melted time a tree growing out of a
Wooden box or a dead tree that has come out of a wooden box ants on a pocket watch water floating in the background that is the surrealist the dreamlike the Absurd imagery of surrealism surrealism from Magritte is questioning space and also here in his treachery of images he’s painting a pipe and then
Telling us this is not a pipe well of course what he’s saying is this is an image of a pipe you can’t put tobacco in it and this is also kind of the beginning of up until now in books when you saw an image the text was always
Recognizable and enhanced the image here you can no longer trust the text and the image to go along with each other in Mexico we get a great surrealist artist in Frida Kahlo Frida Kahlo is doing self-portraits of herself and the pain that she is going through with her separation and loneliness from her
Artist uh husband Diego Rivera and also she had been hit by a bus and the pain that she is going through physically the pain she is going through in her heart with two fridas where she has actually cut her heart out in one of the images and Frida is always looking sternly back
At us she is not simply taking a gaze in Russia suprematism is an art movement of basic geometric shapes Circle squares lines rectangles in a limited range of colors founded by Kashmir malovic in Russia in 1915. he is creating an art that he calls the supremacy of pure artistic feeling rather than the
Depiction of objects no core meaning at all simply formalism here and shapes floating together in space seemingly without gravity in the Russian Revolution the Communist Bolshevik Revolution we get that same Supremacy but now being used with industrial intentions the modernizing of Russia that Vladimir tatlan is showing
Us in his counter reliefs he’s using not marble and wood to make sculptures to carve he’s using rope and steel and Industrial materials to make abstract sculptures and with El liziski we are seeing abstract sculptures but with meaning coming from the revolution like the red triangle that would be on the Insignia
On the Bolshevik soldiers in an image here showing us the civil war between the red and the white army with slogans happening but still floating in space very much like malovic’s suprematism from Piet Mondrian we get distill from distill Mondrian who had been a very good landscape
Painter in the early 20th century the effective cubism and expressionism has him simplifying intensifying the colors from expressionism and then taking the Cubist sensibility and flattening all the space and eventually leading to paintings that are only vertical and horizontal lines no more diagonals no more curves they are asymmetric rather
Than symmetric and are only using the primary colors that are becoming kind of the modern symbol of colors in the style at the German School the Bauhaus this is a new kind of school that is teaching people how to design being influenced by distill being influenced by constructivism and using simple
Geometric solutions for Designing modern living spaces modern kitchens notice how the kitchen space here has a lot of the qualities of a distilled painting the Simplicity the idea that the new technologies should be used to make things simple to use like an iPhone for example and that the modern interior has
Abstract paintings abstract images on the rugs geometrically sound compositions in the living spaces and the idea that we are decorating dragons and gargoyles and all this other stuff no longer applicable if you go to IKEA you see the effect of the Bauhaus on modern living spaces today
In the Bauhaus in Dessau the school that they built they built a school that looks exactly like the colleges that we go to today the modern community colleges built out of steel glass and cement and they are made to be functional with huge sweeping geometric areas to them in the dorm room
Notice that in the dorm room again when we look at the distill painting with the square and the rectangles that go horizontally and vertically look at how the dorm room has all the same attributes vertical rectangles horizontal rectangles a square broken up by rectangles simple stripes and
Rectangles on the bed spread very simple reusable cabinets and drawers and desks all the stuff that you would see at most University campuses and Community College if they have Living Spaces in them exactly what dorms look like today the legacy of the Bauhaus and the legacy
Of all this modernism is the modern city that we live in the modern Skyscraper the steel and glass and simple geometric shapes that we studied earlier in our architecture lecture okay so a lot of stuff here 15 question quiz lecture assessment let me say goodbye to you and I hope you
Enjoyed the modern art lecture here a lot of stuff happening and we have a couple more lectures on Contemporary Art coming up so we’re going to end our class on our after World War II and what has been going on I will talk to you soon bye everyone