MODERNISM and THE VISUAL ARTS

Vortex = a whirling, spiralling mass of fluid or air, especially a whirlpool or

whirlwind; A vortex implies catastrophe, and catastrophe asserts a reality
which won’t let us relax (it is menacing, disturbing, ominous)

FAUVISM (1900-1910) – (Les Fauves = The Wild Beasts; name given by an art
critic who compared their strikingly colourful works with traditional paintings)
is applied to a group of French artists: Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Andre
Derain etc.

One of Fauvism's major contributions to modern art was its radical goal of
separating colour from its descriptive, representational purpose and allowing it
to exist on the canvas as an independent element. It referred to the use of
bold, non-naturalistic colours (often applied directly from the tube with no
mixing). Also, the fragmented way that they were applied — in larger and
smaller blocks — made the paintings seem rather sketchy, clumsy and
unfinished to their contemporary audience. The spectator identifies the form
to be “right” and the colour to be “wrong.” But colour is no longer subject to
form; it represents the artist’s subjective vision and a state of mind.

H. Matisse: “When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the
sky.”

These artists also rejected traditional three-dimensional space and instead

they used flat areas or patches of brilliant colours to create a new pictorial
space.

The Fauves liberated art to become the free play of colours, patterns, shapes
and designs.

CUBISM – the chief break with the Western tradition of representational art;
an utter disregard for tradition and conventional standards of Renaissance
perspective by breaking up the picture into a series of planes viewed from
different vantage viewpoints.

Instead of reproducing the object according to realistic conventions dating

from the Renaissance, the painter is free to break apart the object and
distribute its pieces about the canvas as the composition requires. Paintings
cease to be representational (photographic); they began to speak a new
language and are stimulated by a new perception of reality, a non-objective
perception of reality.

The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy
nature instead they applied dislocation and fragmentation of form to render
the essence of objects.

ANALYTIC CUBISM – (also called ‘hermetic’); Picasso and Braque so abstracted

their works that they were reduced to a series of overlapping planes and facets
mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks. The small facets of a
dissected or “analyzed” object are reassembled to evoke that same object
under multiple juxtaposed perspectives which makes the original image barely
recognizable

SYNTHETIC CUBISM - colour reappears (bright, flashy), size scales are not
realistic; real objects are introduced in the artworks (‘papier collé’ coloured
paper, ‘collage’ other objects: newspaper cuts, music sheets, playing cards etc)
breaking down the boundaries between art and reality/life

FUTURISM - was an Italian art movement led by the poet Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti (he gave lectures in London in which he openly attacked the most
cherished British features rating them as snobbery and “old worm-eaten
traditions”).

Futurism set out to make Italy modern by attacking its traditions and
attempting to find a new beauty, which would replace traditional beauty. They
saw the advances in technology, the artefacts of modern industry and
technology as a new beauty. Futurists celebrated the power, force and speed
of the modern machine even if this machine was destructive.

Futurists sought to convey in their art the rapid pace of modern life. Focus was
placed on creating a unique and dynamic vision of the future and artists
incorporated portrayals of urban landscapes as well as new technologies such
as trains, cars, and airplanes into their depictions. Speed, violence, and the
Proletariat were all glorified by the group as ways to advance change.

Luigi Russolo – Dynamism of a Car

What you see here is a car in motion. The idea of fragmenting the appearance
of motion shows definite Cubist influences. In particular, taking an object and
de-constructing it into new entities that are then re-arranged into a new
interpretation of the same object – a fundamentally new perspective on the
familiar. You can see the shape of the aerodynamic modeled car, broken into
triangular facets and re-arranged, but instead of dwelling on perspectives of a
stationery object, Luigi Russolo took the concept a step further and conveyed
the object’s trajectory. In Dinamismo di un’Automobile, horizontally stacked
red arrows point in the direction of the car’s motion. The sleek, futuristic-
looking car seems to move at high speed, its large black tires, casting a moving
shadow on the pavement. Now think of what cars actually looked like in 1912…
A bat mobile (driven by superhero Batman) to the modern eye, yet one
conceived and executed some 100 years ago.

Nevinson was the only artist from the English avant-garde to join Futurism.
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson The Arrival would appear to the the
audience at first glance as highly energetic due to the use of vibrant and bold
colours that have been applied in fine brush strokes (Fauvism, Synthetic
Cubism) and to the geometric shapes and intersecting lines (Cubism). Through
this image and the fragmentation of forms, veiwers are able to see what seems
to be a ship, this is semi abstract because although the geometric and
superimposed shapes have a look of being abstract, they also make the look of
a large ship.

Futurism offers a much more exhilarating experience for the audience as it also
shows energy, movement and menace.

Nevinson aligned himself with the Italian futurists who celebrated and
embraced the violence and mechanised speed of the modern age. But his
experience as an ambulance driver in the First World War changed his view.
In his paintings of the Front, the soldiers are reduced to a series of angular
planes and grey colouring. In the La Mitrailleuse, they appear almost like
machines themselves, losing their individuality, even their humanity, as they
seem to fuse with the machine gun which gives this painting its title.

ENGLISH CUBISM (CUBO-FUTURISM) OR VORTICISM – An avant-garde

response to the impact of French Cubism and Italian Futurism on artists and
writers in London and New York. 'Vorticism' is the name given to a brief artistic
movement in the history of twentieth century painting when, for a couple of
years more or less coinciding with the outbreak of the First World War, a group
of English painters appeared who could be counted among the most radically
'abstract' painters in Europe.

The group was founded by the artist and writer Wyndham Lewis in 1914.
Their only group exhibition was held in London the following year. The
paintings by Lewis that have survived were striking and powerful, tending
towards graphic design. His style incorporated geometric forms as well as
references to machines and urban architecture. He believed that artists should
observe the kinetic energy of modern society from a fixed vantage point at the
centre of the vortex, so to speak. Imagine that you are in the centre of a
tornado and you see matter/objects spinning around you at extremely high
speed. At some point, the contour of objects disappear; they become
fragmented and ultimately they disintegrate like shattered glass. So does the
vision of these artists explode in sharp angles and planes.

The First World War effectively destroyed Vorticism. Lewis himself served at
the western front as an officer. During this time he produced several
memorable paintings and drawings of battle scenes, such as A Battery Shelled.
The huge, oil on canvas painting shows the German shelling of a British
artillery. In the picture, Lewis represents the British soldiers as “insect like,
scuttling for cover” and the German soldiers are given “naturalistic” facial
expressions conveying a sense of disengagement and indifference to the chaos
before them.

The painting had been Lewis’s personal meditation on war. He knew the
fighting firsthand and empathized with the common soldier. His composition
had attempted to capture the power of technology and machine-age
weaponry and its domination over men during the Great War, making humans
no more than industrial waste.

Working with the poet Ezra Pound, Lewis, already developing into an excellent
writer in his own right, stated the publication BLAST, the literary counterpart
to Vorticism. The journal was short lived, only two issues came out: one just
before the Great War and the last BLAST was published in 1915.
His reputation was later tarnished by his association with the British Fascist
Party.

Unlike Cubists, Vorticists more fully embraced geometric, abstract imagery,

while not abandoning three-dimensional space.

SURREALISM – an artistic and literary movement founded in Paris in the 1920s

by the poet André Breton.

Have you ever had a strange dream? Describe it. What would your dreams look
like if, when you woke up, you painted them onto canvasses with photographic
precision? Are you familiar with Dixit cards? How would you describe the
images represented on those cards?

According to AB, the main goal of the movement was to "resolve the
previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.“ That meant creating
paintings filled with disconcerting and illogical scenes – paintings through
which an artist's unconscious might be allowed to express itself.

Surrealism’s goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience

from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism. Influenced by the
psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud (who believed that dreams are
coded messages from the subconscious), surrealism valued the superior
qualities of the irrational, unconscious mind. Surrealism’s desire to break free
of reason made these artists focus on dreams, psychoanalysis, and fantastic
imagery to express the inner workings of the mind.

Salvador Dali - Though set in a realistically-rendered landscape, The Persistence

of Memory features bizarre subject matter evocative of a dream or the product
of induced hallucination. In what he called "hand painted dream photographs,"
hard objects become inexplicably limp, time bends, and metal attracts ants like
rotting flesh. The monstrous creature draped across the painting's centre
resembles the artist's own face in profile; its long eyelashes seem insect-like or
even sexual, as does what may or may not be a tongue oozing from its nose
like a fat snail.

Paul Nash (soldier and official war painter in both First and Second World
Wars)
We are Making the New World c.1918 – it depicts the aftermath of the battle
of Passchendaele; he was much as the war poets: he wanted to tell the truth,
he wanted to show people back home in England, those who wanted the war
to go on endlessly what war was really like. He saw himself not as a mere
painter but as a messenger to those who still believed war to be a heroic,
chivalrous enterprise.

Nash was no good at painting the human figure, so instead, as he later said, “I
have tried to paint trees as though they were human beings.”

His powerful paintings showed the ghastly destruction of war, not through
piles of dead bodies but through landscapes of shattered trees with the sun
rising above blood-red clouds. The whole landscape is a body: tree stumps are
like mutilated limbs, the red clouds in the sky resemble scarred, burnt flesh,
earth is a blistering infected wound.

In Nash’s bitter vision the sun will continue to rise each and every day to
expose the desecration and to repeat judgment on the perpetrators. This new
world is unwanted, unlovable but inescapable.

The Menin Road, orginally to have been called 'A Flanders Battlefield', is the
most apocalyptic of his battlescapes (the landscape created by a battle, or else
a picture of a battle). Two figures try to find their escape way along a road
punctuated by shell-holes and lined by tree stumps. The devastation of the
landscape looks post-apocalyptic with concrete blocks in the foreground, metal
trash half buried, stagnant pools of muddy water, and the dead dried out plant
life. The trees are particularly striking, all dead and broken. Perhaps the most
chilling aspect of this painting is the two beams of light from unseen airplanes
that shine through the clouds; they mirror the rays of divine light that shine
through the clouds in so many religious paintings to represent God's presence.
They shine onto a scene completely devoid of grace or divinity.

Landscape from a Dream – is one of Nash’s most complex and elaborate

surrealist paintings, inspired by Freud’s theories of the significance of dreams
as reflections of the unconscious.

This painting marks the culmination of Nash’s personal response to Surrealism,

of which he had been aware since the late 1920s. As the title suggests, it
echoes the Surrealists’ fascination with Freud’s theories of the power of
dreams to reveal the unconscious. Nash explained that various elements were
symbolic: the hawk, which is staring at its own reflection belongs to the
material world, while the floating spheres reflected in the mirror refer to the
soul.

But the painting is open to various interpretations (just like any dream): the
hawk can stand for the solitude of the conscious mind which cannot free itself
from the constraints of reason but only dream to do so (the flying hawk). The
conscious mind wants to keep hidden and repress inappropriate feelings,
thoughts, emotions (hence the screen) but the glass screen cannot prevent the
two planes form overlapping (mirror and glass panel) allowing the unconscious
mind to slip into the lucid mind.

One of the most notable elements in the painting is colour and the effect that
it has on the rest of the painting. The dull colours of the background and the
outside world contrast sharply with the bright, warm colours included inside
the mirror.

CONCLUSIONS:

Modernism was characterised by the deliberate departure from tradition and

the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the
arts of the early and mid-twentieth century. Modernism refers to this period’s
interest in new types of paints and other materials, in expressing feelings and
ideas, in creating abstractions and fantasies, rather than representing what is
real. A key precursor in the change of painting was the invention of the
camera. The photographic image replaced the function of the painting, forcing
the painter to do more than just record the person or event as he saw it.

The carnage and destruction of The Great War changed things utterly. Before
World War I, people believed that technology was a sign of progress and that it
would help to serve humanity (Futurism). The horrors of technology applied to
warfare, however, highlighted the ambiguities of “progress”. It also
dramatically changed the way in which reality was perceived.

The old rules of perspective, color, and composition were no longer considered
valid. ‘Reality’- whatever that was - became a far more slippery prospect than
it had been a generation earlier. Modernists reacted by abandoning intellect
for intuition and depicting the world as they perceived it behind the veils of
physical appearance.