Introduction to the 20th century: Modernisation / Modernity / Modernism

MODERNISATION - Technical advancements

MODERNITY - How the culture is a perception of the technical advancements, philosophical category.

MODERNISM - Is a label in a way, given to Cubism onwards. Art that is finally embracing modernity and modernisation.


- The foundation of proper abstract art cuts all ties with nature. There was a gigantic revolution in terms of humanistic theory of art - It is to speak its own language, not to speak that of nature. The architecture of the 20th century is completely modern, completely abandoning the styles.

"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away... All that is solid melts into air."

Karl Marx, 1848

"The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years." 

Charles Péguy, 1913 

• MODERNISM: 

• Art as expression and an agent of social changes: response of the individual to the conditions of modern life → resulting in the avant-gardes. 

• Symbolic/formal values instead of representational values: progression towards abstraction and self-determination of art → resulting in the avant-gardes.

• Expression of the self.

"If pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has necessitated it... When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented... A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth century artist."

Fernand Léger, 1914 

- In this quote the 'modern man' is a metaphor for everything.

Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind: The Farewells, 1911, MoMa, New York

Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind: Those who go, 1911, MoMa, New York

- Boccioni is a futurist artist. He painted these giant representations of movement, that are quick and relative. Showing a world in motion, with people embracing, fragmented, seen from many different perspectives at the same time. 

Vasily Kandinsky, Blue Mountains, 1911

Vasily Kandinsky, Composition 7, 1913, Moscow

Vasily Kandinsky, Composition 8, 1923, Moscow

 - We can still see reality in Matisse and Picasso, they are going towards something that is pattern-like and fragmented, but Kandinsky starts to compose paintings to evoke music. He was very spiritual, and went towards an art that is completely abstracted. He was the first to make the jump and make an art that was self-sufficient.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow, 1925

- Mondrian founded De Stijl (Dutch for The Style). All of the artists of this movement, including Mondrian and Kandinsky, really thought they were establishing THE language of the future. They believed it was their duty to find a new language. Mondrian bases his on proportion and uses on the essentials - primary colours and lines. 

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950

- The end of the line from the emancipation of nature reaches its apex with Jackson Pollock. The first great American artist. Pollock is a giant, he creates something that is completely autonomous. An expression of the self. Conceptual art. 

- Here we have two extremities - Masaccio's Holy Trinity, with realistic perspective, illusionism, naturalism, marks the beginning of the great illusionistic effort. You cannot understand Pollock unless it is juxtaposed with naturalism etc. and what came before. 

- Kritios Boy and Jackson Pollock - Another symbolic beginning and end. Representing who we are and representing inner feelings and forces. Certainly more based on rational proportions and the external world. Pollock is more intrinsically linked to irrationality. 

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept), 1950s

- After Jackson Pollock where can art go? In terms that Pollock completely reveals that the canvas is flat, that there is nothing beyond the canvas. And so conceptual art begins, the art in which we still live. An art that meditates on itself. The final gesture to reveal that the canvas is not a window into reality. 

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah

- Alternatively, to start exploring completely different mediums, leave the traditional mediums and start exploring other possibilities, land art for example - playing with nature. 

Piers Manzoni, Artist's Shit, 1961, 90 exemplars
A tin was sold for €124,000 at Sotheby's on May 23rd 2007

- What is art? Doesn't need to be craftful, or even need to represent reality or nature anymore, but to meditate on what art is in a contemporary world. It's a gesture. 

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991

- Damien Hirst, nature represented in art - A complex artist. 

"The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological - technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science."

Stephen Hawking, 1999 

Fauves 1904-08

- The traditional Modernists were the avant-gardes of the 20th century. Paris was still the centre of artistic talent.

- 'Fauves' was labelled by a critic, Fauves meaning 'Wild Beasts'.

- The art of the Fauves, in a way, carries on the path set by Gauguin, Cézanne and Seurat, they too were very interested in colour. The Cubists carry on the intellectual properties of Cézanne, deconstructing space.

- Picasso and Matisse are always juxtaposed. Matisse is more conservative in his style, and more interested in colour.

- Early portrait of his friends were more and more geometric, he was using colour more symbolically rather than representatively.

Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, San Francisco Museum of Art

Matisse, The Young Sailor II, 1906, Met Museum, NYC

- Woman with a Hat was highly criticised because of the acidity of the colours used on her face, and there is lots of priming visible. It was thought to be unfinished and brutally executed in irrational colours.

Matisse, Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), 1905-06

- The Joy of Life is a gigantic painting. Matisse is basing himself on traditional paintings of nymphs in the gardens. What counts is the harmony of the colour, rather than the subjects. There are uniform zones of colour, with no chiaroscuro. Its flatness is very decorative. He reduces the composition to the bare minimum. What counts is the image itself, how the colours balance each other. There is a completely random perspective. Matisse more than any other before him, uses colour in a completely new way, in a very expressive way.

Matisse, La Danse, 1909-10, St. Petersburg

- Picasso and Braque were more interested in space, they disregard colour in many ways. In contrast, Matisse is the opposite, colour is drastic to him. He indulges in colour and simplified human forms. He attempts to evoke the human spirit through colour. Again here it is very flat, with a complete lack of perception of depth.

Matisse, The Dessert: Harmony in Red, 1908, St. Petersburg 

Matisse, L'Atelier Rouge, 1911, MoMa, NYC

- Matisse loved and collected fabrics and he was obsessed with patterns. He achieved extreme results in his experimentation of colour. The space in L'Atelier Rouge is constructed only through colour. He used the abstract nature of colour to evoke a sensation.

Matisse, Blue Nude II, 1952, Pompidou Centre, Paris

- His cut-outs express the same - all about colour. His main preoccupation is colour.

André Derain, Mountains at Collioure, 1905, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Vincent van Gogh, The Olive Trees, 1889

André Derain, Charing Cross Bridge, London, 1906, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

- André Derain was one of the artists that gravitated around Matisse. He tended to paint landscapes rather than figures. He was also very much inspired by Van Gogh and Gauguin. His painting Charing Cross Bridge, is a very famous painting, here he too uses colour in a completely symbolic way.

Cubism 1907-14

- While the Fauves were concentrating on colour, the Cubists were focused on the flat surface of the canvas; they rejected the traditional conventions and techniques of linear perspective, chiaroscuro and the idea of imitating nature.

- Pablo Picasso was of course the most influential artist of this period. He opened up infinite possibilities in terms of formal creation. Not only in painting but in everything, inc. the way we understand formal compositions in the 20th century. Although the Cubist revolution is hard to empathise with, it is undeniable that it opened up modernity. 

Pablo Picasso, Science and Charity, 1897, Museu Picasso, Barcelona

- Like Matisse, Picasso had classical training - unlike some of the Impressionist artists. He knew perfectly the classical tradition, but set out to revolutionise it. You have to know your enemy very well in order to defeat it. He knew perfectly the value and importance of classical antiquity. 

- Picasso, unlike Van Gogh, was very successful and died a superstar. He was celebrated as a hero throughout his lifetime. He arrived in Paris in the late 19th century. He went through his 'Blue Period', which was very figurative, often with coiling figures in the background of other figures (La Vie). This blue tint dominates his work for 2 or 3 years. He used blue in a symbolic way to represent melancholy, he was looking for a new medium of expression. He loved the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, and distorted his images in a similar way. 

- His 'Pink Period' symbolised resurrection to life, and to colour in a way. He's going towards a decorative way of using colour, interested in Spanish tradition of painting. 

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, MoMa, NYC

- In 1907, Picasso and George Braque saw an exhibition by Cézanne, after which he painted this painting, which was very influential. Fellow artists thought it was jarring, brutal and harsh. It was kept out of the public for a long time, until it was published in a magazine. Step-by-step Picasso abandons the traditional form of the human figure, and so we see the beginning of Cubism. The women in this painting are prostitutes. Why was this painting so shocking in 1907? Because it was very different from everything previously. It is a rough painting, a genius invention, but not a traditionally beautiful painting.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus, 1879, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with a Plaster Cast Cupid, c. 1895, Courtauld Galleries, London

- He uses the traditional theme of nudes, the female nude was seen to be the place of beauty, but instead Picasso produces something that is the human body completely emancipated. He is playing with the genre of the female nude. The immediacy of this painting was also shocking. The women are brutally represented as angular machines. Taking what Cézanne had been doing 10 years before, space bending and perspective angles, and clashing one against the other. The background is as big as the foreground.

El Greco, The Opening of the Fifth Seal, 1608-14, Met Museum, NYC

- Picasso was also inspired by the late mannerist painter El Greco.

- Picasso also loved primitive/ancient Iberian sculpture and African masks, with their simplification of the human form. African masks were one of the most influential objects for this period. The essential impact of African masks was the depiction of the inner soul rather than the actual external physiognomy.

Cézanne, L'Estaque with Red Roofs, 1885

- The Cubists were heavily influence by the late works of Cézanne.

Georges Braque, Houses at L'Estaque, 1908

- After this initial phase, where artists started to dissolve the traditional perspective. Picasso and Braque became a sort of duo, they went to each other studios, went to exhibitions together, and developed a very similar style. This is strikingly evident in Braque's Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantlepiece and Picasso's Ma Jolie [Woman with Guitar]:

Braque, Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantlepiece, 1911, Tate Modern, London

Picasso, Ma Jolie [Woman with Guitar], 1911, MoMa, NYC

- Between the years 1908 and 1912, Cubism developed into the period in which experimentation on the vision of field was carried out. Picasso and Braque used a dull palette with little colour so as not to distract the viewer with the colours. They were trying to represent objects from many different perspectives at once, as one's perception of reality is based on multiple, and constant points of view. 

- Most Cubist paintings are still lives, what is important is not catching the movement, but focussing on the flat surface, on capturing the multiple visual experiences of one still object.

- Renaissance perspective is not realistic. Cubist art is very intellectual, it deconstructs what we think of as art theory. The attention is focussed upon space and composition, not colour. This abandonment of single point perspective influenced literature, poetry, cinematography, etc. 

"We never, in fact, see an object in all its dimensions at once. Therefore what has to be done is to fill a gap in our seeing. Conception gives us the means. Conception makes us aware of the object in all its forms, and even makes us aware of objects we would not be able to see."

Maurice Raynal regarding the 'Art of Conception' as opposed to the 'Art of Vision', 1912

- Cubism is a much more conceptual form or art, rather than illusionistic. 

Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass, 1912, Sant' Antonio, Texas

- Picasso then moved on to this. This was a very famous phase of Picasso's career, he began to incorporate collages into his Painting. Here he represents a guitar, composed of things one doesn't associate with Painting - a piece of paper. a sheet of music, etc. It addresses the relationship between what a work of art is, and what is reality. He is incorporating real objects into a fictional field - the field of Art. What is real and what is fictional in this Painting? It is impossible to say. In a way, he is not representing nature, but using it to represent something different. It reveals in itself that it is a visual game.

- This generation, although academically trained, set out to deconstruct the imagination of the public.