Modern Art (1900–50)

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There are several general surveys that are good as textbooks for large portions of the material at hand, but the most widely accepted are:

• For a general, all-purpose textbook: H.H. Arnason and Elizabeth Mansfield, History of Modern Art, 7th Ed. (New York: Pearson, 2012).
• For modern American art: Wayne Craven, American Art: History and Culture, Revised 1st Ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002) or the exhibition catalog David Anfam, American Art in the Twentieth Century (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1993).

Given Modernism’s penchant for short-lived movements preceded by manifestos that expressed their unique aims, Mary Ann Caws’s Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) may be a useful source if you would like to have students read such groundbreaking works as the “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” any of Tristan Tzara’s excellent Dada manifestos, or André Breton’s Surrealist manifestos.

Web resources:

For modern art, The Art Story.org is a site that provides matter-of-fact information on a large number of European and U.S. artists during the time period covered by this lecture.

There are also a number of museum websites that provide excellent support for the study of modern art, including, but not limited to:

• The Art Institute of Chicago
• The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
• The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washingon, DC
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)
• The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (SFMoMA)
• The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
• The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

The Second Wave: Art Between the Wars

World War I had a devastating effect on Europe and on the psyches of every man, woman, and child that it reached. In the arts, there was a decided shift following World War I toward concepts of order, harmony, and beauty to counteract the chaos, division, and ugliness of the war machine. One reason was reconstruction: the trench warfare and artillery shelling of the world’s first modern war truly carved up the European landscape, and recovery efforts required a certain amount of organization. Another was reconciliation: Europe needed to come together and heal after the war, rather than slipping into factions based on wartime alignments. If links could be made, say, to a shared Greco-Roman past (exemplified artistically in notions of order, proportion, and beauty), then that might enable Europeans to see each other once more on common ground.

A third reason could be described as follows to really drive the point home for students: after witnessing 16,000,000 deaths (and 20,000,000 more wounded and disfigured), some early abstractionists deemed it inhumane—even barbaric—to represent the human body as distorted or fragmented in the way that prewar Cubism and Expressionism did. Indeed, there was even a feeling among a small set of intellectuals that World War I was something akin to divine punishment for the decadence of modernity, and that abstraction in the arts was symptomatic of that decadence. Ultimately, all of this pointed to a trend toward order in the interwar period.

Purism is an excellent place to start in outlining this shift. Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier) published the Purist manifesto “Après le cubisme” (“After Cubism”) in 1918, declaring the earlier abstract movement dead and championing stability and inherent order in their art. Jeanneret’s Still Life is a case in point. While every bit as modern as a Cubist canvas (there is no true attempt at naturalism, but instead, a hard-edged abstraction built on solid, geometric forms), there is still a “cleaning-up” that occurs in Jeanneret’s painting that mitigates the confusion and chaos of the more formally challenging Cubism.

Indeed, many of the more radical artists of the prewar period experienced something of a crisis in addressing abstraction after WWI. This formally retrograde movement within prewar avant-garde circles has been referred to as the Return to Order. Without belaboring the point, it is nonetheless instructive and effective to show two works by the Italian Futurist Gino Severini and two by Picasso that indicate the modified stakes in their art before and after the war. Armored Train by Severini is an absolute celebration of the war machine painted soon after Italy’s engagement. The surging, upright (perhaps even transcendent?) form of the train carrying soldiers firing rifles is painted in a host of pastel colors that aestheticize the bravery and violence of combat. Two Pierrots, painted in the aftermath of the conflict, shows Severini at an about-face, painting a naturalistic portrait of two actors from the Commedia dell’Arte theatrical troupe, which began in Italy in the seventeenth century. Picasso’s Three Women at a Spring, seen in comparison to his earlier Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (above) is striking in the geometrically underpinned solidity of its figures, with their powerful, column-like legs (note the “fluting” created by their Roman-style gowns) and stable poses. While it should be noted that Picasso continued to paint in a Cubist style during these years alongside paintings like Three Women, he was nevertheless influenced and affected by the Return to Order.

This is not to say, however, that all attempts at postwar organization and harmony were retreats. Some of the most radical abstraction that Modernism featured was also built around principles of simplicity, order, and functionality. Neoplasticism, also known as De Stijl (“The Style”), began in the Netherlands in 1917 as an attempt to reach universal principles in art by reducing it to its most essential means of form and color. Piet Mondrian’s Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Yellow, Blue, and Black, for example, limits itself to horizontal and vertical lines; primary colors; and white, gray, and black: the absence and presence of certain amounts of pigment. By working within these most basic parameters, Mondrian’s work resists recognizable imagery, which always necessarily carries varying meaning based on the culture that produces it. Due to its simple geometry and balance, Neoplasticism was able to move easily from painting into the realms of design and architecture. Indeed, the diamond orientation of Mondrian’s Lozenge Composition causes his horizontal and vertical lines to end in diagonal breaks at the end of the canvas. As there is no frame around the painting, the eye tends to “complete” the dynamic black diagonals by continuing them onto the wall upon which the canvas is mounted. In creating this visual effect, Mondrian essentially created a small painting that nevertheless conditions our experience of an entire wall; beyond its highbrow universal aims, then, this painting cleverly crosses a boundary into practical and functional interior design.

Due to certain similarities between the two, Neoplasticism came into close contact with Constructivism in the 1920s. Constructivism is usually divided into two camps—Russian and International—with Russian remaining politically tethered to social purpose and the ideals of the Soviet Revolution of 1917, and International “freeing” itself to focus more on formal innovation. Despite their differences, all Constructivist art was made possible by new, industrial forms and materials, and that necessary materialism led to geometric forms and an idea that the artist should also be an engineer, constructing a new and radical modern world. El Lissitzky’s self-portrait, The Constructor, perfectly delineates the role of the artist-engineer. First, Lissitzky shows his competency in a host of artistic media: photography and photomontage, technical drawing, typography, and—implied by the compass—architecture. His superimposition of his eye onto the center of his hand indicates the artist’s eye that sees wed to the engineer’s hand that creates. Notably, when Lissitzky “signs” his work, it is in a legible, regularized modern typeface rather than as an ostentatious physical trace of his handwriting. Lissitzky’s self-portrait suggests that the art and society of the future will be one designed by the modern, rational engineer rather than the traditional “genius” artist.

Showing a photograph from the 1922 International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists in Weimar, Germany is an easy and effective way to explain the truly international spirit of collaboration that took place in the arts during the interwar period. The silliness of seeing these groundbreaking artists hamming it up for the camera also breathes life into their pursuits, showing them as fun-loving individuals in an exciting artistic moment rather than stuffy thinkers working laboriously in studios.

It also provides a wonderful chance to develop the Bauhaus (1919–33) as an influential and essential player in the interwar period. Built on the influences of Expressionism, Neoplasticism, and Constructivism (among others), the Bauhaus was a revolutionary new take on the traditional art school model, bringing the fine arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) and the applied arts (typically, design fields like furniture, stained glass, woodworking, printmaking, and so on) under one roof and one curriculum. Later in its tenure, the original mission statement of art and craft changed to art and technology, as the Bauhaus geared itself more toward industrial production of its modern designs. The “ultimate” work of Bauhaus art, perhaps, is actually the building designed to house it in Dessau from 1925 to 1926 by its first director, Walter Gropius. [Amy Raffel discusses the Dessau Bauhaus in her excellent lecture on Architecture Since 1900.]

A Poster for a Bauhaus Exhibition by Herbert Bayer from 1923 shows how Bauhaus design elements translated into the graphic arts like poster-making. Like the works by Mondrian or Lissitzky, Bayer’s poster incorporated geometric forms (triangles, circles, squares, and regular lines in right angles) to create a dynamic new method of expression that could be easily reproduced and disseminated. Though Bayer experimented with many different font types in his poster, each is bold, regular and legible. Limiting his palette to few colors (again, like Mondrian or Lissitzky might have), Bayer made a bold, attention-grabbing statement with his modern poster design.

The Bauhaus is perhaps best known, though, for the actual products that it produced in its design studio. Marcel Breuer’s “Wassily” Chair, named after painter and eventual Bauhaus professor Wassily Kandinsky (above), used factory-produced tubular steel and canvas to create a sparse-looking but comfortable modern seat. Influenced by the geometry of Neoplasticism and the functionality and industrial bent of Constructivism, Breuer’s famous piece of furniture exemplifies the Bauhaus’s goal of simple, modern, and aesthetically pleasing design. An easy present-day comparison that students might easily wrap their heads around is Ikea, which makes functional, streamlined, artfully designed objects available for public consumption.

One last major avant-garde movement of the interwar period was Surrealism, whose adherents rejected the notions of order and beauty supported above. For the Surrealists, who claimed heritage in the prewar Dada movement, it was exactly that dogged adherence to rationality that had led humanity on an unending pursuit of progress. Following the philosophical concepts of psychologists like Freud, Surrealism claimed precedence for the irrational, for chance, for the uncanny, and for the unconscious. Following Freud’s pronouncement that the unconscious mind was the seat of artistic creativity, the Surrealists sought out to connect with it, whether through automatism (creating without the use of the conscious mind) or the interpretation of dreams (where the unconscious mind, it could be argued, creates on its own time).

Battle of Fishes by André Masson is an example of automatism in drawing and painting. Masson began by splashing and adhesive gesso across his canvas, then sprinkling sand on it to see where it would stick; this integrated a (relatively) uncontrolled element of chance into the work. Working from the forms created by the sand, Masson quickly—and as absentmindedly as possible—doodled drawings on the rest of the canvas, also occasionally applying paint directly from the tube. The unplanned image that emerged was one that Masson read as a violent struggle between two fanged sea beasts. Having fought in World War I and having seen the widespread destruction of French soil, Masson claimed this work sprang from his unconscious mind with the universal truth that nature, left to its own devices, will ultimately reveal the barbarism and nastiness of life.

Indeed, barbarism would be the order of the 1930s. The Bauhaus closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis, who objected to the school’s liberalism (it was, at its conception, a decidedly Socialist institution). And indeed, an unfortunate truth of the 1930s is that the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, Stalin’s declaration against avant-garde art in Soviet Russia in 1932, and the occupation of France by Germany in World War II led to a significant shutdown in artistic activity.

An effective way to explain this succinctly to students is to briefly discuss a postcard depicting the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. Centered around the iconic Eiffel Tower, the postcard shows the German Pavilion on the left (designed by the Third Reich’s main architect, Albert Speer), across from the Soviet Pavilion on the right (helmed by figures of a male proletarian worker and female communal farmer holding a hammer and sickle, respectively). The Constructivist-inspired Soviet Pavilion seems to hurl itself at the Neoclassically inspired German pillar, as the two countries were wary competitors at the moment. Legendarily, Speer paid off a low-level bureaucrat at the World’s Fair to find out how tall the Soviet building intended to be, such that he could ensure that the German Pavilion would be taller. All of this suggests that the countries of Europe were very clear as early as 1937 that a major conflict was imminent.

On this slide in the Slideshow (below), the text below the postcard is a hyperlink to a one-minute promotional video from the World’s Fair that contains extremely powerful imagery that is very effective in driving home the importance of political allegiances at the time and their effect on the art world. A brief shot of the Nazi flag flapping in front of the Eiffel Tower is a harrowing reminder of the French occupation.

And when the video’s narrative of the German and Soviet participation stops long enough for a segment on the low-lying, unassuming Spanish Pavilion, a very poignant moment occurs. The camera pans across Picasso’s Guernica, which was a mural-sized Cubist-Surrealist work commissioned by the Spanish Republican government during the Spanish Civil War. The tiny town of Guernica in the Basque section of Northern Spain had been catastrophically bombed by German and Italian airplanes at the behest of Spanish Nationalist leader Francisco Franco in 1936. The fact that none of this is stated in the video—the silence itself—is telling.

While the video is a time capsule that serves to explain the stakes of the international showdown of WWII, Guernica itself is a powerful antiwar image that might stand here for the powerful international network of propagandistic art during WWII. While students will recognize the Cubist aspects of the work from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, it should be pointed out that Picasso also used certain biomorphic (resembling living forms) shapes that recall Masson’s automatic images. Indeed, a major piece of Surrealist iconography (one with which Masson would have agreed) was the Minotaur of Greek mythology. Half-human, half-bull, the Minotaur signified for the Surrealists the dual nature of Man as both higher being of reason and instinctive animal. The bull’s head, then, at the left of Guernica‘s sweeping scene of wreckage, alludes to man’s destructive nature, which leaves bodies broken, children dead, and women crying.

Across the Atlantic

Unfortunately, it is not particularly easy to integrate the modern art of the United States into a chronological discussion of European movements, given the entirely different host of historical and sociocultural factors that influenced each. Though certain U.S. artists traveled across the Atlantic Ocean (and vice versa), Modernism took a bit longer to “land” in the U.S. among artists, critics, and the viewing public. There were, however, a number of movements in the U.S. that embraced modernity in the arts, and the country’s economic superiority in the aftermath of WWII (among other things) led to New York City supplanting Paris as the unofficial capital of the Western art world in the postwar period. Though the host of U.S. artists could be fodder for their own lecture, a handful of examples will give students a grasp of major trends.

The states’ first twentieth-century avant-garde movement was the Ashcan School, a cluster of artists trained in Realism whose work often resembles a gritty variant of Impressionism. Where Impressionism celebrated the modern Paris, Ashcan painters tended toward a more Realist depiction of the diverse avenues, storefronts, apartments, and neighborhoods of modern New York City. George Bellows’s Cliff Dwellers is exemplary of this movement’s style and subject matter. Rendered in an impressionistic style with a dark palette of browns, grays, and blacks, Cliff Dwellers offered a glimpse into New York City’s Lower East Side, where European immigrant families lived on the outskirts of the great metropolis. Though the avenue is packed with bodies, and the title of the work implies that these people live on a sort of precipice, Bellows doesn’t stereotype or sentimentalize his figures, giving an honest portrayal of the conditions of lower-class life and suggesting both overcrowding and vitality in his lively canvas.

If Ashcan artists were the U.S.’s first homegrown modern movement, the so-called Stieglitz Circle (a group centered around photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz) was one that actively courted European styles in art. Stieglitz, who fought for photography to be esteemed among the fine arts rather than used for its documentary function, favored works that focused on formal qualities rather than subject matter. [For more on Stieglitz, see Beth Saunders’s excellent lecture on Twentieth-Century Photography.]

Georgia O’Keeffe’s City Night—like Cliff Dwellers—addresses modern New York City, but a comparison of the two shows a drastic difference in its treatment. Where Bellows reported on the relatable livelihood of the city’s ground-level inhabitants, O’Keeffe focused on the sterile linearity and ominous presence of the city’s emblematic skyscrapers. O’Keeffe, who famously left the vertical New York City skyline for the vast, horizontal expanses of the American southwest in her later years, expressed her discomfort with the cloying nature of the modern city in City Night, where the dark, manmade skyscrapers absorb all natural light, dwarfing the moon. If Bellows expressed interest in the scenes provided by the modern city (like, perhaps, Boccioni), O’Keeffe hinted at the alienation it created (like Kirchner). It is connections like these that will reveal to your students how important the modern city was thematically to early twentieth-century artists.

Two important movements in U.S. modernism collide in the work of Aaron Douglas. Douglas was a major artistic figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural blossoming of African-American influence that originated in New York City after World War I. Partly as a result of his prominence, he was invited to work on Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression. This commission resulted in the mural cycle Aspects of Negro Life, featuring several mural paintings representing social, historical, and cultural facets of African and African-American life.

The mural episode From Slavery through Reconstruction uses an abstract visual style in a fiery color palette to heighten the drama of the black experience in the United States. Near the left of Douglas’s wall, black slaves pick cotton, alluding not just to the hardships of African-American bondage, but also to the powerful, if forced contribution that African slaves made to the growth of the United States. While a figure near the right of the composition holds up a scroll with the Emancipation Proclamation that freed African-Americans from slavery during the American Civil War (emphasized by the concentric circles that radiate outward from it), hooded Ku Klux Klan members loom at the left margin, suggesting the terror tactics used by racists during the Reconstruction to threaten and oppress freed slaves. There are, however, hope and celebration in Douglas’s mural, as the powerful central figure points to a city on a hill: perhaps the White House, the Capitol building, or simply some other “promised land,” freed from bigotry, where African-Americans might find refuge. On the right, a jazz trumpeter plays triumphantly for an applauding crowd while a dancer accompanies, suggesting the flowering of African-American culture within the Harlem Renaissance itself. Indeed, the fact that this mural was commissioned by the federal government points to a recognition of the atrocities committed during the era of slavery and a continued push toward the inclusion of African-Americans in the political and cultural life of the nation.

Though these movements and their protagonists were valued internationally, the movement that momentarily positioned the U.S. as the center of the international avant-garde was Abstract Expressionism. The genesis of this “school” of artists was built upon a number of motivators. Many of its artists were influenced by the large-scale works of the Mexican mural movement and the WPA mural project that derived from it. The arrival of a large number of avant-garde artist-refugees from Nazi-occupied areas of Europe in the 1930s brought new techniques and philosophies. Additionally, the growing cultural milieu created by earlier New York City artists set the stage for this “next big thing.”

Jackson Pollock’s Full Fathom Five was one of his first “drip paintings,” for which he became perhaps the most famous artist of his time. His working process involved using brushes, sticks, and paint cans to dribble paint over the surface of a canvas stretched horizontally on the floor of his studio. Dubbed “all-over” painting, Pollock’s approach took abstraction to a level where the completed painting had no defined focal point, giving the eye liberty to travel across the skeins of paint he let fall onto his canvas. He learned these techniques in the experimental workshop of the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1936 as well as from the automatism of the French Surrealists, several of whom arrived in New York City just before World War II. Pushing painting to the limits of two-dimensionality and non-objectivity prescribed by earlier artists like Mondrian, Pollock and his cohorts imbued their canvases with psychological and emotional values, trying to reach something of a chaotic, primal human universality in the wake of WWII rather than the precise, orderly geometric universality of the pre-WWII avant-garde.

Condensing the heady rush of fifty years of modernity in art to an hour and fifteen minutes has surely forced you to leave out some valuable, game-changing artists, movements, or works. While there are some that could be addressed within Europe and the U.S. (Metaphysical Art, Suprematism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Vorticism, Berlin Dada, Orphism, American Regionalism, Precisionism, etc.), you could also have your students choose from a list of artists or movements from other parts of the world and write a short paper detailing some of the artists’ works and their contribution to their own movements, or how they might have manipulated, modified, adapted, or even subverted the aims of the original movements with which their work forms a dialog. While several “third-world” countries did not have the infrastructure in place for Modernism to catch on by 1950, Latin America has several options for exploration, and other parts of the world retained access to European and American currents:

• Mexican Muralism
• Antropofagia (Brazil)
• Universal Constructivism (Uruguay)
• Magical Realism, or Marvelous Realism (Latin America)
• The “Progressives” (India)
• the “Surrealist” works of Ai-Mitsu or other artists in Japan

Another post-class activity that can be very interesting is to prepare a number of slides that show the art of totalitarian regimes between World War I and World War II. This can allow students to truly understand the formal and historical significance of a freely created work like Picasso’s Guernica and helps to explain the stilted “official” work that was coming out of Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union during the interwar period. A Novecento work by Mario Sironi, or a Fascist-era Futurist work by Gerardo Dottori can give an idea of the classicizing and regime-supporting work created under Mussolini; a painting by Adolf Ziegler or a sculpture by Arno Breker will show Nazism’s backward turn to Neoclassicism; and a painting by Aleksandr Gerasimov or the sculpture Proletarian Worker and Collective Farm Girl by Vera Mukhina (the one surmounting the Soviet Pavilion on the 1937 World’s Fair postcard shown above) can be used to explain how—after 1932—Stalin decreed that only works of Socialist Realism would be allowed from Soviet artists. This should be very successful not only in demonstrating the cultural pitfalls of totalitarian regimes, but also in explaining the heightened political stakes of the interwar period, even in the world of fine art.

Finally, another way to teach this material is through exhibition history. The first half of the twentieth century is filled with momentous, groundbreaking exhibitions, from the Salon d’Automne of 1905 where Fauvism was unveiled to the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Germany in 1937 and beyond. Bruce Altshuler’s The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry Abrams, 1994) is an extremely readable and engaging text on this subject; having small groups of students present on each of the exhibitions would quite nearly communicate all the necessary information of this lecture without the professor saying a word.