This document provides an overview of art in the 20th century. It showcases works from various artistic movements and highlights experimentation with new materials, styles, and a rejection of realism. Key developments include the rise of abstraction, the relationship between art and its social/political contexts, and questioning traditional boundaries between high and low art forms.
Basic Civil Engineering first year Notes- Chapter 4 Building.pptx
ART100SP16_Module4.1
1. Class 4.1
Art in the
Twentieth
Century
ART 100
Spring ‘16
Willem de Kooning, Woman V
1952-3
2. as we discussed previously,
the notion of an autonomous realm devoted purely to the
appreciation of beauty is peculiar to the modern West
(European and places colonized by Europe)
autonomous=standing on its own, independent of other
considerations, such as function.
3.
4. Mask depicting
warrior hunter (Oro
Efe)
early 20th century
Republic of Benin,
Ketu-Ohori (Yoruba)
Wood, pigment
15 x 13 inches
5. Attic Red Figure,
ca. 475 BCE–ca. 450
BCE (Early
Classical)
The Syracuse Painter
Hydria
6. Elevator gatescreen
from Chicago Stock
Exchange Building,
1894
Louis Henri Sullivan
(United States,
1856–1924)
Cast iron with
bronze plating
84 x 31 1/4 inches
13. Picasso, Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde, 1910
Catalan artist Pablo PICASSO
had no difficulty painting
representational pictures,
abstractions, and everything in
between. Here he fragments the
portrait of one of his art dealers
into rectangles and triangles.
Over time he will oscillate back and
forth between styles in a seemingly
effortless manner.
15. Pablo PICASSO, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912
For this collage, Picasso used wallpaper that imitated chair caning, and wrapped the
whole canvas in real rope. The other portions are painted in imitation of various objects
that might be found on a tabletop.
16. Picasso, Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and
Newspaper, 1913,Picasso, Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and
18. Marcel Duchamp realizes that the dynamic forms that interest him can be
found in actual objects just as well as in painting.
The bottle rack on the left was a common object in French life, used for
drying out empty wine bottles before reusing them.
19. Duchamp, Tu M’, 1918
This picture plays with illusion and reality, including a found object that sticks directly
out of the painting. The question Duchamp asks here: why paint a representation of
the object if you can just use the real thing?
21. René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-9
In his own way, Belgian artist Magritte asks a similar question, declaring that a
painting of a pipe can never be a real pipe.
22. Artists begin to feel a great freedom to use paint in different ways, or even to forget
about painting and use pictures clipped from magazines to express their ideas.
There are many different ways to put a recognizable figure together, and artists are
drawn to the challenge of finding new methods rather than relying on the old ones.
24. Fernand LÉGER, The Red Table, 1920. AIC
While some artists experiment with different ways
of breaking down a scene and putting it back together,
others question the need for a subject altogether.
Why not just paint colors and shapes, for their own
intrinsic appeal?
26. “There is no such thing as
‘abstract,’ or ‘concrete’… There is a
good picture and a bad picture.
There is the picture that moves you
and the picture that leaves you
cold… A picture has a value in
itself, like a musical score, like a
poem.”
—Fernand Léger
Here French artist Léger tries to explain that it doesn’t really matter whether a
picture has a subject matter.
45. Kur SCHWITTERS
Merz 32A (Cherry Picture)
1921
collage of colored papers,
fabrics, printed labels and
pictures, pieces of wood,
etc., and gouache on
cardboard background
36-1/8 x 27-3/4”
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York
51. Salvador DALI, Lobster Telephone, 1936
“I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I
am never served a cooked telephone; I do not understand why
champagne is always chilled and why on the other hand telephones, which
are habitually so frightfully warm and disagreeably sticky to the touch, are
not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them.”
57. I don’t like that word, “finish.” When
something is finished, that means it’s
dead, doesn’t it? I believe in
everlastingness. I never finish a
painting—I just stop working on it for a
while.
Arshile Gorky, 1948
58. Willem de Kooning
Queen of Hearts
1943-46
Oil and charcoal on fiberboard
46 1/8 x 27 5/8" inches
61. “…if you pick up some paint with your brush and
make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous
when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically.
It's really absurd to make an image, like a human
image, with paint, today, when you think about it, since
we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But
then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do
it. So I fear I have to follow my desires.”
—Willem de Kooning,
in a 1962 radio interview
Like Léger before him, de Kooning points
out that it doesn’t really matter if a painting
has a subject or not.
62. Robert RAUSCHENBERG
Pilgrim
1960
Rauschenberg called his
mixed media works “combines.”
In them he directly juxtaposes
fragments of the “real world”
with paintings. He seems to be
questioning the limits and
possibilities of both modes.
67. Edward KIENHOLZ
State Hospital
1966, interior view
Here Kienholz uses found
materials to express outrage
at modern institutions. The
materials are repulsive, but they
make an undeniably artistic
statement.
79. E.V. Day,
Flesh for Fantasy, 1999
Four blowup lovedolls and
stainless steel surgical wire
The pink vinyl flesh of two girls
and two boys is shredded into
fragments of varying degrees of
recognition and strewn through
out a room into what I hope will
be an explosive orgy. The
fragments are hung with
stainless steel steel surgical
wire, normally used for stitching
human bones. The wires are
connected to turn buckles in a
heart shaped configuration in
the floor, and shoot out
chaotically to the ceiling. "Flesh
for Fantasy" is situated in a
room with four entrances that
allows the viewer to pass
through and around the
installation from all directions.
87. Key points
• Imbrication of art and commerce
• constant cross-pollination between elite and popular
culture
• moving past realist modes of representation (post-
photographic)
• development of self-reflective capacity
• critical perspectives on the treatment of women and non-
whites in previous art
• awareness of the power of representation to shape belief