Some of the -isms Post WW1 - LIS470 Visual Communication
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Some of the -isms Post WW1 LIS470 Visual Communication
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• Art Deco:
• Constructivism, Cubism, Modernism, Bauhaus, Art
Nouveau, Futurism ... between WW1 and WW2
• Part of the stream of “decorate everything” end-
of-the-Victorian era movement
• Guimard, Grasset, Lacenal: Société des artistes
décorateurs
• Main pt: use of modern iconography and faceted,
fractionated forms (e.g., sunburst, chevrons)
Quick list of the movements for today Art Deco Movement Art Deco was primarily a design style, popular in the 1920s and 1930s. In simplified terms, the Art Deco movement can be considered as the follow-up style on Art Nouveau - more simplified and closer to mass production. The Art Deco movement was dominant in fashion, furniture, jewelry, textiles, architecture, commercial printmaking and interior decoration. The best known name is René Lalique, a jeweler and glassmaker. The Chrysler building in New York (1930) is an example of Art Deco style in architecture. Impressionism Impressionism began in Paris as a reaction to a very formal and rigid style of painting - done inside studios and set by traditional institutions like the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The exhibition of Edouard Manet’s famous painting, Déjeuner sur l’herbe, in 1863 in the Salon des refusés (organized by those painter who were rejected by the Académie des Beaux-Arts), caused a scandal. It can be considered as the beginning of Impressionism. The Impressionist painters preferred to paint outside and studied the effect of light on objects. Their preferred subjects were landscapes and scenes from daily life. The best known names in Impressionist painting are Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Pierre Auguste Renoir in France and Alfred Sisley in England.
Fauvism The word Fauvism comes from the French word fauve, which means “wild animals.” This new modern art style was a bit wild - with strong and vivid colors. Paul Gauguin and the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh had carried Impressionism to its limits by using expressive colors. Fauvism went one step further in using simplified designs in combination with an "orgy of pure colors" as it was characterized by their critics. The first exhibition by Fauvist artists took place in 1905. The best-known fauve artists are Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminch, Kees van Dongen and Raoul Dufy. Expressionism Expressionism, in simplified terms, was some kind of a German modern art version of Fauvism. The expressionist movement was organized in two groups of German painters. One was called Die Brücke, literally meaning The Bridge. The group was located in Dresden with the artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Otto Müller and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. After World War I, this group was followed by another group of artists, calling themselves Dresdner Sezession. The second Expressionist gathering of artists was centered in Munich. The group is known by the name Der Blaue Reiter, meaning The Blue Rider. The famous names are Franz Marc, August Macke, Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexei Yavlensky.
Cubism Cubism, another modern art movement, was primarily restricted to painting and sculpture. Nevertheless it had a major influence on the development of modern art. Cubism was initiated by the Spaniard Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braques in Paris before World War I. Paul Cezanne, usually categorized as a Post- Impressionist, can be considered as their predecessor. Cubism had strong roots in African tribal art. In cubism, geometrical forms and fragmentations are favored. Everything is reduced to cubes and other geometrical forms. Often several aspects of one subject are shown simultaneously. As famous artists besides Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris and Lyonel Feininger are to be mentioned. Cubism paved the way for abstract art. Surrealism Surrealism is another of the many modern art movements in the 20th century. Its philosophical father was André Breton, a French poet and writer who published the Surrealist guidelines, called Manifesto in 1924 in Paris. Surrealism emphasizes the unconscious, the importance of dreams, the psychological aspect in arts. Surrealism became an important movement in the fine arts, literature and in films (by the Spaniard Buñuel for instance). For the fine arts, the best-known names are Salvador Dali, the Italian Giorgio de Chirico with his strange and eerie town views, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, René Margritte and the Russian Marc Chagall.
Abstract Art Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky is said to be the father of abstract art. Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter, is another dominant character in establishing abstract painting. Mondrian had experienced cubism in Paris. During World War II many leading artists emigrated to the US, for instance Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall. Thus New York became the new center for modern art and abstract painting.
Cubism and information?
• Grid approach to representation
• Analytical cubism: a toolbox of visual literacy and
seeing if the result is successful communication
• Synthetic cubism: increasingly abstracted ideas
Bracque (l) and Gris (r)
Leger
Picasso
Picasso, painted by GrisFuturism • Italian school, 1909-? • Marinetti’s manifesto • Carrà, Severini, Balla, Boccioni, Sant’Elia • Goal: to portray the dynamic character of 20th century life • Glorified danger,war, and the machine age! • Favored Fascism • Representing movement simultaneously, representing several aspects of form in motion ...
Futurist Manifesto (Marinetti, 1909)
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements
of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A
racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring
motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its
orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of
the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must
be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment
when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are
already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the
anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian
cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic
surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their
violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the
clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny
rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous
steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the
flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.Futurism • A love of danger, habit of energy and of fearlessness • Is the point to shock the public? • [Informative? What’s communicated?] • Influenced Russian constructivism • Rejection of harmony, increase the number of colors in the work; crazy for fonts ... Parole en liberté.
Futurism • From harmony, flowing forms, bucolic idealism to embracing the noise of the industrial age • oral noise [poetry w/o punctuation] • musical noise [no time indication] • choral noise [just yells & shrieks] • Destroy the cult of the past [cf return to spirituality and purity of the past] • Emphasize originality [hence individualism?]
Futurism • “Regard all art critics as useless and dangerous” [but they could critique!] • “Support and glory in the day-to-day ... successes of Science”
In reaction: Dadaism (Tzara’s 1918 manifesto)
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/tzara.html
There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued
from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a
supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound
heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke,
enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering
world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough,
bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania
for improvement.
I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not sentimental. We are a
furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of
disaster, fire, decomposition.* We will put an end to mourning and replace tears by sirens
screeching from one continent to another. Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with the
sadness of poison. Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also
elements of poetry.
I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread demoralization wherever I
go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes from hell to heaven, restore the fecund
wheel of a universal circus to objective forces and the imagination of every individual.Dadaism (Tzara, 1922) Ladies and Gentlemen: I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, tlhe refined public, a Dadaist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I won't be able to tell you. Another characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender his resignation from the Dada movement *was myself.* Everybody knows that Dada is nothing. I broke away from Dada and from myself as soon as I understood the implications of *nothing.* Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers. Like everything in life, Dada is useless. Dada is without pretension, as life should be. Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
Dadaism • Reaction a “world gone mad” • 1916-23 - not long lasting, but not expected to • Just an emphasis on the new, recreating • Rejects war, blind faith in technical progress, and moral codes. • Had their own journal, of course, Dada.
Marcel Duchamp (Dadaist)
Tristan Tzara
Dadaism
You know you’ve made it when ...
Dadaism in Germany German Dadaists were politically charged - moves to extreme absurdism and looses influence
Surrealism, 1920s • André Breton: Manifesto du surrealisme: the true function of thought ... • Rejects conventions: speak from unaltered mental symbols • Intended to be more uplifting, through liberation from social and moral conventions • Open mind to “uninhibited truth”
André Breton, 1924, Manifesto
We are still living under the reign of logic, but the logical processes of our time apply
only to the solution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism which
remains in fashion allows for the consideration of only those facts narrowly relevant to our
experience. Logical conclusions, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say,
boundaries have been assigned even to experience. It revolves in a cage from which
release is becoming increasingly difficult. It too depends upon immediate utility and is
guarded by common sense. In the guise of civilization, under the pretext of progress, we
have succeeded in dismissing from our minds anything that, rightly or wrongly, could be
regarded as superstition or myth; and we have proscribed every way of seeking the truth
which does not conform to convention. ... [cut]
It would be dishonest to dispute our right to employ the word SURREALISM in the
very particular sense in which we intend it, for it is clear that before we came along this
word amounted to nothing. Thus I shall define it once and for all:
SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to
express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the
absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral
preoccupations.
ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain
forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the
disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic
mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of
life. http://www.iefd.org/manifestos/surrealist_manifesto.phpSurrealism • Questions of intentionality (Ernst and Dalí) • Visual automism (intuitive stream of consciousness and of calligraphy) • Joan Miró and J. Arp
Joan Miró
Expressionism
Expressionism • Color, drawing, proportion are exaggerated or distorted
Expressionism • Color, drawing, proportion are exaggerated or distorted • Symbolic content is very important
Expressionism • Color, drawing, proportion are exaggerated or distorted • Symbolic content is very important • Tactile properties are introduced into painting
Expressionism • Color, drawing, proportion are exaggerated or distorted • Symbolic content is very important • Tactile properties are introduced into painting • Revolt against conventional aesthetic forms
Expressionism • Color, drawing, proportion are exaggerated or distorted • Symbolic content is very important • Tactile properties are introduced into painting • Revolt against conventional aesthetic forms • Reject military, political movements; empathy for the poor
Expressionism • Color, drawing, proportion are exaggerated or distorted • Symbolic content is very important • Tactile properties are introduced into painting • Revolt against conventional aesthetic forms • Reject military, political movements; empathy for the poor • two groups: Die Brücke (1905) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911)
Die Brücke
Kölnisher Kunstverin
(1839-)
koelnischerkunstverein.deDer Blaue Reiter Kandinsky
Franz Marc
Kandinsky and Klee - Expressionists tending to the spiritual
Kandinsky
Kandinsky
Paul Klee
Klee
Klee
What do these movements have to do with information?
What do these movements have to do with information? • Advertising ... poster art ... mass communication
What do these movements have to do with information? • Advertising ... poster art ... mass communication • Speak directly to the mind?
What do these movements have to do with information? • Advertising ... poster art ... mass communication • Speak directly to the mind? • Artist above society - by right of being an “artist”
What do these movements have to do with information? • Advertising ... poster art ... mass communication • Speak directly to the mind? • Artist above society - by right of being an “artist” • Modernism: theories of breaking down wholes into parts ... instrumental for mass education, reproduction of ideas; perhaps mode of critique
What do these movements have to do with information? • Advertising ... poster art ... mass communication • Speak directly to the mind? • Artist above society - by right of being an “artist” • Modernism: theories of breaking down wholes into parts ... instrumental for mass education, reproduction of ideas; perhaps mode of critique • Individual art
What do these movements have to do with information? • Advertising ... poster art ... mass communication • Speak directly to the mind? • Artist above society - by right of being an “artist” • Modernism: theories of breaking down wholes into parts ... instrumental for mass education, reproduction of ideas; perhaps mode of critique • Individual art • Colors ... and the technology to print many colors, cheaply, on large format paper
What do these movements have to do with information? • Advertising ... poster art ... mass communication • Speak directly to the mind? • Artist above society - by right of being an “artist” • Modernism: theories of breaking down wholes into parts ... instrumental for mass education, reproduction of ideas; perhaps mode of critique • Individual art • Colors ... and the technology to print many colors, cheaply, on large format paper • Ephemeral.
Constructivism
Constructivism • Russian art movement (c 1913,Vladimir Tatlin)
Constructivism • Russian art movement (c 1913,Vladimir Tatlin) • 1916: Gabo & Pevsner: politically intended, abstract constructions
Constructivism
• Russian art movement (c 1913,Vladimir Tatlin)
• 1916: Gabo & Pevsner: politically intended, abstract
constructions
• building on cubism & futurism but with
architectonic emphasisConstructivism
• Russian art movement (c 1913,Vladimir Tatlin)
• 1916: Gabo & Pevsner: politically intended, abstract
constructions
• building on cubism & futurism but with
architectonic emphasis
• Soviets liked it at first ... but disparaged as
unsuitable for mass propaganda.Constructivism
• Russian art movement (c 1913,Vladimir Tatlin)
• 1916: Gabo & Pevsner: politically intended, abstract
constructions
• building on cubism & futurism but with
architectonic emphasis
• Soviets liked it at first ... but disparaged as
unsuitable for mass propaganda.
• Nagy, RodchenkoConstructivism Taitlin
Tatlin’s Internationale monument
Constructivism all over the place! • http://www.unb.ca/naweb/2k/posters/Sadikfinal.htm
Constructivism - László Moholy-Nagy
Moholy-Nagy
Dadaist and then
Constructivist ... created
“photograms”
Joins Bauhaus under Gropius
in 1925;
establishes “New
Photographer’s” movementLasting influence? • Educational theory using constructivism: • http://www.edwebproject.org/ constructivism.basics.html • http://www.artsined.com/teachingarts/Pedag/ Constructivist.html
Constructivist educational theory
• J. Bruner (1960s-80s):
• Instruction must be concerned with experiences
& contexts that make the student willing and able
to learn
• Instruction must be structured so that it can be
easily grasped by the student
• Instruction should be designed to facilitate
extrapolation and or fill in the gaps (going being
the info given)Next? • Theories of the role of art and society • Use of visual communication to speak directly to the mind ... to avoid social conventions, but at what cost? • Manipulation of the public? • Propaganda? • Education?
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