Art of the 20th Century




A Revolution in the Arts

 

Art Styles in 20th century Art Map


 

The Great Avant-garde Movements



 

Year by Year - 1916 -1919


 

Dadaism
 

The upheavals that took place in the art world prior to the outbreak of World War I shared a determination to give the aesthetic message new content and form. Efforts to achieve this exploited hitherto unexplored methods and techniques. The rupture with tradition and the past was sometimes violent and provocative, and excessively intellectualized and individualistic attitudes had undermined the message that artists sought to convey to the spectator. However, the value of aesthetic endeavour had never been questioned. No one had refuted the need for art that could be an expression of the moment, through the rational analysis of structure or the interpretation of rhythms and shades of colour, In spite of earnest experimentation and an eagerness among artists to expound theories, a reaction of radical denial soon set in. This took the form of a rejection of all artistic creation and culture, all coherent and rational communication, as if the outbreak of such a dreadful war, the impoverishment of moral values, and the decay of humankind that it revealed, made any attempt at communication futile and untimely. The term "Dada", first used in Zurich in 1916, came to stand for a movement inspired by the profane, nihilistic attitudes of artists who rejected the concept of the "creation of a work of art". Instead, banal, everyday objects, bereft of any intrinsic aesthetic value, were adopted for their allusive, symbolic, and conceptual resonances. Works were often dependent upon the artist's choice of a title that exploited double meanings and humorous ambiguities. Dadaists were not interested in formal plastic-qualities, preferring to concentrate on a controversial and provocative action that displaced and decontextualized an object, endowing it with multiple meanings. These were the aims of Marcel Duchamp who proved to be the most interesting and intellectual of all the exponents of Dadaism. Although his early works anticipated and inspired American Dadaism, Duchamp was never recognized as one of the movement's founders. Some of his earliest "readymade" works such as the Bottle-Rack (1914) were bereft of any intervention on the part of the artist, while others were "assisted": for example, his Bicycle Wheel (1913) was fixed to a stool, or Mona Lisa (1919). which was adorned with a little goatee beard, a moustache, and a provocative, cryptic caption. His notorious Fountain was shown in New York in 1917. While Duchamp was laying the foundations of Conceptual art in Europe and the US, a group of war exiles who had taken refuge in Zurich, launched Dadaism in the Cabaret Voltaire, a club opened by a versatile German, Hugo Ball. The movement's manifesto (published in 1918 by Tristan Tzara) promoted ideology above artistic content, and stated that Dadaism should have no meaning whatsoever. Among the founding members were Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, and Richard Huelsenbeck, who were joined in 1918 by Francis Picabia (1879-1953), founder of the Spanish Dadaist movement. When Huelsenbeck returned to Berlin in 1917 and joined forces with George Grosz, Otto Dix (1891-1969), Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), and John Heartfield (1891-1968).
 

Jean Arp Enak's Tears (Terrestrial Forms) 1917 Raoul Hausmann Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head) 1919

Dadaism also spread through Germany. There, it became recognizably-controversial as most of the Dadaists belonged to the League of Spartacus, a radical socialist group that became the German Communist Party in 1919. It found expression in collages and photomontages that violently denounced certain aspects of society. The collaboration between Jean Arp and Max Ernst in Cologne produced some of Dadaism's most interesting figurative works, including "frottages", created by shading over the texture of an object in order to reproduce its surface image in the form of a rubbing.

Meanwhile, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), a lone Dadaist in Hanover, recycled an enormous variety of discarded items for his merz pictures - taken from kommerz meaning commerce - which denounced the commercialization of avant-garde art.

During the years immediately after the war, Paris was the focal point of Dadaism. In the movement's last phase, confrontation grew between Tzara, who remained committed to his nihilistic stance, and Andre Breton, who took Dadaism as a starting point to develop a new modern movement, which would find expression in Surrealism.
 

Frottage

Technique of reproducing a texture or relief design by laying paper over it and rubbing it with some drawing medium, for example pencil or crayon. Max Ernst and other Surrealist artists incorporated such rubbings into their paintings by means of collage. It is also a popular method of making rubbings of medieval church brasses and other ancient monuments and inscriptions.

 

Merz

Term applied to a flat or relief collage of collected junk. It is associated with KURT SCHWITTERS, who apparently invented the word when cutting out the word ‘Commerzbank’ from a newspaper for a collage he was making. Merz is also the title of a Dada magazine that he edited from 1923.

 

COLLAGE, READY-MADES, AND PHOTOMONTAGE
 

The introduction of new materials into works of art was initiated by the Cubists. Everyday objects were combined with trompe I oeil paintings of objects in their collages and papiers colles. used chromatically or metaphorically to give the painting greater reality and spatial autonomy. For his Futurist works Fusion of a Head and a Window-dad Head + House + Light, Boccioni used hair, part of a window, and even an iron railing. In answer to Giovanni Papinis criticisms in 1914, he stated that it was vital to replace imitation with reality in order to increase expressive potential. The Dadaists experimented endlessly with heterogenous materials, either as an expression or admiration for modern technology, or as a rejection of industrialized society. Ready-mades were banal objects elevated to works of art through their selection by the artist. Schwitters' assemblages were made with discarded items, while Heartfield and Grosz used old photographs and newspapers.
 

Kurt Schwitters Cherry Picture 1921 Collage of colored papers, fabrics, printed labels and pictures, pieces of wood, and gouache on cardboard background

Collage

Art form and technique, incorporating the use of pre-existing materials or objects attached as part of a two-dimensional surface. Despite occasional usage by earlier artists and wide informal use in popular art, collage is closely associated with 20th-century art, in which it has often served as a correlation with the pace and discontinuity of the modern world. In particular it often made use of the OBJET TROUVÉ, while the principle of collage was extended into sculpture in the form of the ASSEMBLAGE. The first deliberate and innovative use of collage in fine art came in two works by Picasso in the spring of 1912. In The Letter he pasted a real Italian postage stamp on to a depicted letter, while Still-life with Chair-caning (Paris, Mus. Picasso) included printed oil-cloth simulating a chair-caning pattern, the oval canvas surrounded by a ‘frame’ made of a continuous loop of rope. Picasso followed this by affixing a piece of gingerbread (untraced) to the lower part of Guitare: ‘J’aime Eva’  from the summer of 1912. His Cubist colleagues were meanwhile experimenting with adapting the technique for their own purposes. Juan Gris added fragments of a mirror, for example, to the Hand Basin, which he sent to the Salon de la Section d’Or in October 1912, where the first Cubist collages were publicly exhibited. At about the same time Georges Braque purchased imitation wood-grain paper, generally used for interior decoration, at a shop in Avignon. By combining this faux bois paper, affixed to a white sheet, with drawing, Braque created the papier collé (‘pasted paper’), a specific form of collage, closer to traditional drawing than to painting, consisting essentially of a collage of paper elements with a paper support (e.g. Glass and Playing Cards, 1912; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.). Braque and then Picasso made many papiers collés in the last three months of 1912 and in early 1913, with Picasso often using cuttings from the newspaper Le Journal to introduce the possibility of allusion to everyday events in the very fabric of the work, whereas Braque tended to restrict himself to the more abstract wood-grain papers, carefully arranged for formal effect. Picasso also developed the idea of collage into three-dimensional work with the first assemblages, such as the cardboard Guitar (1912; New York, MOMA).

 

Assemblage

Art form in which natural and manufactured, traditionally non-artistic, materials and objets trouvés are assembled into three-dimensional structures. As such it is closely related to COLLAGE, and like collage it is associated with Cubism, although its origins can be traced back beyond this. As much as by the materials used, it can be characterized by the way in which they are treated. In an assemblage the banal, often tawdry materials retain their individual physical and functional identity, despite artistic manipulation. The term was coined by Jean Dubuffet in 1953 to refer to his series of butterfly-wing collages and series of lithographs based on paper collages, which date from that year. Although these were in fact collages, he felt that that term ought to be reserved for the collage works of Braque, Picasso and the Dadaists of the period between 1910 and 1920. By 1954 Dubuffet had extended the term to cover a series of three-dimensional works made from primarily natural materials and objects. The concept of assemblage was given wide public currency by the exhibition The Art of Assemblage at MOMA, New York, in 1961. This included works by nearly 140 international artists, including Braque, Joseph Cornell, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters. Several of the works shown were in fact collages, but the breadth of styles and artists included reflects the wide application of the term and the sometimes fine distinction between assemblage and collage. The ‘combine paintings’ of Rauschenberg, for example, fall awkwardly between the two, being essentially planar but with often extensive protrusions of objects. The inclusion of real objects and materials both expanded the range of artistic possibilities and attempted to bridge the gap between art and life.

 

Objet trouve

Term applied in the 20th century to existing objects, manufactured or of natural origin, used in, or as, works of art. With the exception of the READY-MADE, in which a manufactured object is generally presented on its own without mediation, the objet trouvé is most often used as raw material in an ASSEMBLAGE, with juxtaposition as a guiding principle. Prior to the 20th century unusual objects were collected in cabinets of curiosities, but it was only in the early 20th century that found objects came to be appreciated as works of art in their own right. Antoni Gaudí, for example, used broken pieces of pottery to cover exterior surfaces in the Park Guell buildings (1900–14) in Barcelona  and on various buildings designed by him during the same period. The development of COLLAGE in Cubism heralded a greater dependence on found objects, paralleling the incorporation of conversational fragments in the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire from 1912; Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in particular, used real items in their paintings and constructions as a way of commenting on the relationship between reality, representation and illusion. Their example in turn encouraged Vladimir Tatlin to use ordinary objects in his reliefs of 1913–14, and other sculptors, such as Alexander Archipenko and Umberto Boccioni, to extend the range of materials acceptable in sculpture.
 

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Photomontage

Technique by which a composite photographic image is formed by combining images from separate photographic sources. The term was coined by Berlin Dadaists c. 1917-18 and was employed by artists such as George Grosz, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch for images often composed from mass-produced sources such as newspapers and magazines.

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De Stijl

 

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November Group

Finnish group of painters who first exhibited in November 1917. Though the two groups co-existed for some time, the November Group was effectively the successor to the SEPTEM GROUP, representing a nationalist Expressionist art in contrast to the international Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist art of the latter. Its leader was Tyko Konstantin Sallinen, and other members included Marcus Collin (1882–1966), Alvar Cawén (1886–1935), Jalmari Ruokokoski (1886–1936) and William Lonnberg (1887–1949). The group exhibited between 1917 and 1924, though even before this, largely through the impact of Sallinen’s work, Expressionism had become established in Finnish art.

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Agitprop [Rus. agitatsionnaya propaganda: ‘agitational propaganda’].

Russian acronym in use shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 for art applied to political and agitational ends. The prefix agit- was also applied to objects decorated or designed for this purpose, hence agitpoyezd (‘agit-train’) and agitparokhod (‘agit-boat’), decorated transport carrying propaganda to the war-front. Agitprop was not a stylistic term; it applied to various forms as many poets, painters and theatre designers became interested in agitational art. They derived new styles and techniques for it from Futurism, Suprematism and Constructivism

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Proletkult [from Rus. Proletarskaya kul’tura: ‘proletarian culture’].

Russian mass cultural and educational organization dealing with amateur activity in various forms of art and study for the proletariat. It was founded in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in September 1917. By the early 1920s it had around 150 sections, with up to 400,000 members, and it published over 20 magazines. The theorists behind Proletkul’t included Aleksandr Bogdanov, Pavel Lebedev-Polyansky (1881/2–1948) and V. F. Pletnyov, who affirmed the dominant role and separate nature of ‘proletarian culture’ and rejected cultural heritage. Members of Proletkul’t incorporated in their work a complex of sociological dogma mixed with fanatical political ideas and often with downright demagogy. The Bolshevik government subjected Proletkul’t to severe criticism both for its aggressively limited approach and for its ideological dissension from party policy. From the end of 1920 Proletkul’t was mainly occupied with study and teaching programmes, bringing in well-known artists such as Pavel Kuznetsov and Sergey Konyonkov to teach in its studios. With time, the organization’s efforts in the sphere of fine art tended more towards design. By the second half of the 1920s Proletkul’t had lost its mass character, and in 1932 it was abolished along with other artistic organizations. From the start, Proletkul’t’s tendency towards a mass approach and democracy in art was a distorted version of the concept of ‘proletarian exclusivity’; it was marked by intolerance and regimented thinking.

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Svomas [Svobodniye (gosudarstvenniye) khudozhestvenniye masterskiye; Rus.: Free State Art Studios].

Art schools set up in several cities in the USSR, including Moscow and Petrograd (St Petersburg), after the October Revolution of 1917. The teaching was dominated by the avant-garde, including Futurists and Productivists, and the schools supported mumerous artists in conditions of the harshest subsistence. In December 1918 the First Free Art Studio and the Second Free Art Studio were set up on the basis of, respectively, the Stroganov School of Applied Art and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In November 1920 these merged to form VKHUTEMAS (Higher (State) Artistic and Technical Workshops).

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Formists [Pol. Formisci].

Polish group of painters and sculptors that flourished between 1917 and 1922, from 1917 to 1919 known as the Polish Expressionists (Ekspresjonisci Polscy). A foretaste of the Formists’ work appeared in the three Wystawy niezaleznych (‘Exhibitions of the Independents’; 1911–13) in Kraków, organized by the artists later to become leading Formists: the painter and stage designer Andrzej Pronaszko (1888–1961), his brother Zbigniew Pronaszko and Tytus Czyzewski, who all opposed Impressionism and favoured Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism. The Formists first exhibited in Kraków in 1917. Their aim was to find a new form and a new national style (they saw themselves as the Polish equivalent of the Italian Futurists and French Cubists) that was in part a continuation of the artistic ideology of the turn of the century (Polish modernism). A wide variety of artists took part in Formist exhibitions, including Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Leon Chwistek, the painter Tymon Niesiolowski (1882–1965), August Zamoyski and the graphic artist Wladyslaw Skoczylas (1883–1934), who later became the chief ideologist of national art.

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Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting)
 

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was unimpressed by the avant-garde movements of the years immediately prior to World War I. After leaving his native Greece in 1906, following the death of his father, he studied in Germany. He later moved to Italy, and in 1911. to Paris, where he met Apollinaire. De Chirico was contemptuous of many of the avant-garde painters who he met in France, and dismissed the Futurists' contribution to art as worthless.

While in Germany, he was influenced by the work of the Symbolists, and his first mature paintings had a strange, dreamlike quality about them. An admiration for the tradition of the Tuscan school of primitive artists and classic figurative painting was evident in the works of de Chirico and his contemporary Carlo Carra, with whom he launched a new movement. In the first issue of the group's review Valori Plastici (published in 1918), de Chirico called the style Metaphysical Painting. Between 1914 and 1918, the work of de Chirico slowly gained critical recognition in Italy. The artist's work was shown in Paris in 1912 and 1913, and reproductions of his paintings appeared in the American arts magazine 291, while the originals were shown at the Dada gallery in Zurich. Prior to 1914, the only person to share de Chirico's artistic theories was his brother, Alberto Savinio (1891-1952). He was primarily a writer and musician, who also promoted the work of the poet and Dadaist Tristan Tzara in Italy. Savinio's play, La chanson de la mi-mort, which was published by Apollinaire in Soirees de Paris in 1913, inspired de Chirico to use mannequins in his painting - disquieting creatures who peopled such works as The Philosopher and the Poet-(1914) and The Seer (1915). Savinio's "Hermaphrodito" (published by La Voce in 1918), a surreal and ambiguous piece, is the literary equivalent of de Chirico's pictorial idiom.

In 1917, the two brothers met Carra, who had already been described as a Metaphysical painter by the art critics Papini and Soffici, and who also seemed to be in search of a link between modern and classical painting. At that time, Carra sought to escape from Futurism through a new construction of form, hoping to emulate the Tuscan primitive painters. Sensing that he was on the brink of finding his own, definitive style, his aim was to construct and see shapes anew, and to be "the Giotto of the 20th century".

After Boccioni's death in 1916 and Severini's departure for Paris, Carra was one of the leading artists in Italy, and his paintings were among the most representative of the quest to recover formal values in art. His earliest Metaphysical paintings were shown at the end of 1917 at the Chini Gallery in Milan. Although sharing the same rarefied immobility as de Chirico's work. Carra's paintings are less sinister and have a certain mellow, picturesque quality. Carra explained the theory that underpinned his paintings in Metaphysical Painting (published in 1919).

The main protagnists of Metaphysical painting were de Chirico and Carra, but Filippo De Pisis (1896-1956) and Giorgio Morandi were also briefly and peripherally involved. The influence of the style on De Pisis was slight, while Morandi continued to incorporate Metaphysical elements into his work during his long career. He used estrangement and isolation as a means of concentrating and meditating on the plastic and chromatic aspects of reality, rejecting any literary allusion, any sense of mystery, or nostalgia for classical antiquity. After World War I, and with order in Europe apparently restored, the Metaphysical "School" (a misnomer considering its few, often argumentative members) had run its course. Its successor arose from parallel artistic developments in other parts of Europe where the early 20th-century ''renaissance" was taking place, and made far more general use of formal models in the classical tradition, encapsulating ethical as well as aesthetic values. Derain, Matisse, and Picasso, among others, were subjecting art to close scrutiny and rational evaluation in order to create their own, new and vibrant, classicism.

La Ronda, a literary magazine, and Valori Plastici, edited by Mario Broglio and concentrating on the figurative arts, both served as catalysts for idealistic cultural movements in Italy. Published from 1918 to 1921, Valori Plastici welcomed theoretical articles and illustrations from contributors who condemned avant-garde experimentalism. Among them were the sculptor Arturo Martini (1889-1947) and the art critic and painter Ardengo Soffici. The review favoured a return to classical values, criticizing European avant-garde movements for abandoning these principles. Known as the Valori Plastici group, supporters of the review were invited to take part in the exhibition held at Berlin's Nationalgalerie in 1921. Among those who took this opportunity of meeting like-minded German artists from the Magischer Realismus ("Magic Realism") and the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") groups were Carra, de Chirico, Morandi, and Martini.

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Pittura Metafisica [Arte Metafisica].
 

Term applied to the work of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra before and during World War I and thereafter to the works produced by the Italian artists who grouped around them. Pittura Metafisica was characterized by a recognizable iconography: a fictive space was created in the painting, modelled on illusionistic one-point perspective but deliberately subverted. In de Chirico’s paintings this established disturbingly deep city squares, bordered by receding arcades and distant brick walls; or claustrophobic interiors, with steeply rising floors. Within these spaces classical statues and, most typically, metaphysical mannequins (derived from tailors’ dummies) provided a featureless and expressionless, surrogate human presence. Balls, coloured toys and unidentifiable solids, plaster moulds, geometrical instruments, military regalia and small realistic paintings were juxtaposed on exterior platforms or in crowded interiors and, particularly in Carra’s work, included alongside the mannequins. In the best paintings these elements were combined to give a disconcerting image of reality and to capture the disquieting nature of the everyday.

Associated with metaphysical art include  also Alberto Savinio, Giorgio Morandi and Filippo De Pisis.

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Giorgio de Chirico Love Song 1914

THE METAPHYSICAL ART OF DE CHIRICO   The typical motifs in de Chirico's work — towers, arcades, statues, and trains - were drawn from nostalgic recollections of his childhood in Greece and later travels in Italy. His love of myth and classical culture made his work very distinctive, executed in an incisive and prominent formal artistic language. De Chirico studied in Munich and admired Bocklin and Klinger's masterly ability to situate mythological scenes in the present, in a rarefied and frozen atmosphere. This meant that when the young artist went to Paris in 1911, he was dismissive of any fragmentation and shattering of form, and the cult of speed and modern technology. His own work was utterly different, portraying scenes with a timeless, motionless atmosphere — deserted squares surrounded by shadowy colonnades, empty and inhospitable buildings, or distant cemeteries. He described his art as "Metaphysical" because it referred to a world beyond the real world. He realized this theory by stripping his subjects of all their usual associations and placing them in new and unusual settings. His paintings had no relation to nature or history, so they did not reveal recognizable details or clues as to their meaning; hence the sense of mystery and disquiet in his works. His strange atmospheres were evoked by the use of dark shadows, anonymous mannequins, the bizarre and alienating juxtaposition of objects, and the enigmatic titles that he chose for the works. This poetic conception of art. "austere and cerebral, ascetic and lyrical", as de Chirico himself described it. was suffused with the philosophy of Nietzsche who had maintained that art had no logical significance.

GIORGIO MORANDI

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) first came to public notice in Valori Plastici. A reserved artist, he preferred to work in isolation in his studio in Bologna, exploring and developing his own line of though in search of poetic purity. Having studied the work of Cezanne, whom he revered highly. Between 1920 and the late 1930s, Morandi concentrated almost exclusively on still lifes -making bottles, carafes, and fruit bowls the typical iconography of his work. Using subtle, atmospheric combinations of colour and a limited tonal range, he imbued his pictures with an intimate serenity. After World War II, he gained international recognition, and is widely regarded as one of great still-life artists of the 20th century.
 

Giorgio Morandi Still-Life

Arturo Martini

Arturo Martini A gifted sculptor, Martini (1889-1947) was influenced by the sculpture of the past, as well as by contemporary ideas. His understanding of the meaning and vaiue of the innovative experiments of the avant-garde is revealed in his essay "La scultura, lingua morta" (1945). When young, he was influenced by the work of Adolf Hildebrand and the painter Gino Rossi. His natural talent for modelling in clay and stucco endowed his work with movement and light. His passion for ceramics was demonstrated by his polychrome terracotta works and majolica ware, which inspired Lucio Fontana. His life-size sculptures and monuments, in some cases associated with the Fascist era, reveal his masterly and eclectic control of volume and form and his ability to sculpt any material including bronze, with an austere inventiveness and expressivity.

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PURISM
 

Mechanization inspired many artistic and literary movements of the 20th century, sometimes in admiration and sometimes in firm opposition. The rational, objective, and disciplined aspects of machinery were recognized either as aesthetic precedents or as a threat to all that was beautiful in society. Pure functionality fascinated artists but at the same time puzzled them. Two French artists provided a response to this problematic relationship with the machine age. Under the label of Purism, they expressed their belief in the need for artistic rigour, precision, and impersonality. Both Amedee Ozenfant (1886-1966) and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (1886-1965), later known as Le Corbusier, wanted a more rational interpretation of Cubism, beyond its literary or symbolic baggage and dynamic or decorative stimuli. Purist theory aimed to restore painting to a primitive purity in which representation would be lucid, self-evident, and geometrical. This ideal of efficiency and essentiality in art could be modelled on the aesthetics of machines and industrial technology, which the two painters recommended as a potential repertory of plastic forms.

Their main aim was to provide examples of universal values such as order, austerity, and clarity. Other European movements of the time, which were also providing a positive response to the brutality, chaos, and irrationality of war. had much in common with these views. In their manifesto "Apres le Cubisme" (published in 1918), Ozenfant and Le Corbusier stated that the greatest joy of the human spirit was the perception of order and the greatest human satisfaction was to be found in helping to bring about, or being part of. this order. Their paintings were almost exclusively still lifes of domestic objects such as jugs, glasses, and pipes. Clearly delineated against a simple perspective plane, these works adhered to a "general grammar of sensibility" that simplified forms, standardized compositional relationships, and swept away accident and emotivity in favour of a synthesis of lines and chromatic fields. In October 1920, in order to disseminate their purist and rational doctrine, the two artists in conjunction with the poet Paul Dermee launched a review. L'Esprit Nouveau. which was published on a regular basis until 1925. This magazine was probably more effective in making an original contribution to the avant-garde movements in Europe than the rather repetitive and frozen paintings that were being produced by Ozentant and Le Corbusier.
 

Purism

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

in painting, a variant of Cubism (q.v.) developed in France in about 1918 by the painter Amédée Ozenfant and the architect and painter Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). The two artists, critical of the later decorative trend in Cubism and the creation of arbitrary and fantastic forms, advocated a return to clear, precise, ordered forms, expressive of the modern machine civilization. The collaboration of the two artists began with their book Après le cubisme, of 1918, and continued with essays published from 1920 to 1925 in their review, L'Esprit Nouveau.

In an essay entitled “Purism,” which appeared in this review, the authors defined painting as “an association of purified, related, and architectured elements.” This concept of painting is reflected in their still-life canvases, which present clean, pure, integral forms. In “Still Life” (1920), for example, Le Corbusier repeats the rhythmic, curving contours of a guitar (a favourite Cubist motif) in the shoulders of a bottle and in other objects on the table; by tilting the tops of the objects toward the spectator, he gives an added emphasis to their cubic volume. A motif of circles is carried out in the various sizes of the openings in bottles, pipes, and containers. The colour scheme is purified to include only the neutrals—gray, black, and white—and monochromes of green. Paint is smoothly applied to enhance the cool, harmonious shapes of the objects. He thus creates a “symphony of consonant and architectured forms.”

As a movement in painting, Purism did not have an appreciable following. There were many painters, however, who, like the Purists, were attracted to a machine-inspired aesthetic; most notable were the French painter Fernand Léger and the American Precisionist painters of the 1920s.
 

Le Corbusier

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

born October 6, 1887, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland
died August 27, 1965, Cap Martin, France


byname of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret internationally influential Swiss architect and city planner, whose designs combine the functionalism of the modern movement with a bold, sculptural expressionism. He belonged to the first generation of the so-called International school of architecture and was their most able propagandist in his numerous writings. In his architecture he joined the functionalist aspirations of his generation with a strong sense of expressionism. He was the first architect to make a studied use of rough-cast concrete, a technique that satisfied his taste for asceticism and for sculptural forms.
Education and early years.

Le Corbusier was born in a small town in the mountainous Swiss Jura region, since the 18th century the world's centre of precision watch making. All his life he was marked by the harshness of these surroundings and the puritanism of a Protestant environment. At 13 years of age, Le Corbusier left primary school to learn the enamelling and engraving of watch faces, his father's trade, at the École des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds. There, Charles L'Eplattenier, whom Le Corbusier later called his only teacher, taught him art history, drawing, and the naturalist aesthetics of Art Nouveau.

It was L'Eplattenier who decided that Le Corbusier, having completed three years of studies, should become an architect and gave him his first practice on local projects. From 1907 to 1911, on his advice, Le Corbusier undertook aseries of trips that played a decisive role in the education of this self-taught architect. During these years of travel through central Europe and the Mediterranean, he made three major architectural discoveries. The Charterhouse of Ema at Galluzzo, in Tuscany, provided a contrast between vast collective spaces and “individual living cells” that formed the basis for his conception of residential buildings. Through the 16th-century Late Renaissance architecture of Andrea Palladio in the Veneto region of Italy and the ancient sites of Greece, he discovered classical proportion. Finally, popular architecture in the Mediterranean and in the Balkan peninsula gave him a repertory of geometric forms and also taught him the handling of light and the use of landscape as an architectural background.

At the age of 30 he returned to live in Paris, where his formation was completed a year later when he met the painter and designer Amédée Ozenfant, who introduced him to sophisticated contemporary art. Ozenfant initiated Le Corbusier into Purism, his new pictorial aesthetic that rejected the complicated abstractions of Cubism and returned to the pure, simple geometric forms of everyday objects. In 1918 they wrote and published together the Puristmanifesto, Après le cu bisme. In 1920, with the poet Paul Dermée, they founded a polemic avant-garde review, L'EspritNouveau. Open to the arts and humanities, with brilliant collaborators, it presented ideas in architecture and city planning already expressed by Adolf Loos and Henri van de Velde, fought against the “styles” of the past and against elaborate nonstructural decoration, and defended functionalism.

The association with Ozenfant was the beginning of Le Corbusier's career as a painter and as a writer. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (then still known as Jeanneret) together wrote a series of articles for L'Esprit Nouveau that were to be signed with pseudonyms. Ozenfant chose Saugnier, the name of his grandmother, and suggested for Jeanneret the name Le Corbusier, the name of a paternal forebear. The articles written by Le Corbusier were collected and published as Vers une architecture . Later translated as Toward a New Architecture (1923), the book is written in a telling style that was to be characteristic of Le Corbusier in his long career as a polemicist. “A house is a machine for living in” and “a curved street is a donkey track, a straight street, a road for men” are among his famous declarations. His books, whose essential lines of thought were born of travels and lectures hardly changed at all in 45 years, constituted a bible for succeeding generations of architects.Among the most famous are Urbanisme (1925; The City of Tomorrow, 1929), Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches (1937; When the Cathedrals Were White, 1947), La Charte d'Athènes (1943), Propos d'urbanisme (1946), Les Trois Établissements humains (1945), and Le Modular I (1948; TheModular, 1954).

L'Esprit Nouveau was the springboard for Le Corbusier's entrance into practice. In 1922 he became associated with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and together they opened a studio. The association of the two cousins lasted until 1940. It corresponds to the first of the two main periods, separated by World War II, that can be distinguished in Le Corbusier's work; the second period covers the years from 1944 to the architect's death in 1965.


The first period.

The years from 1922 to 1940 were as remarkably rich in architecture as in city planning projects. As was always to bethe case with Le Corbusier, unbuilt projects, as soon as they were published and circulated, created as much of a stir as did the finished buildings. In the Salon d'Automne of 1922,Le Corbusier exhibited two projects that expressed his idea of social environment and contained the germ of all the works of this period. The Citrohan House displays the five characteristics by which the architect five years later defined his conception of what was modern in architecture: pillars supporting the structure, thus freeing the ground beneath the building; a roof terrace, transformable into a garden and an essential part of the house; an open floor plan; a facade free of ornamentation; and windows in strips that affirm the independence of the structural frame. The interior provides the typical spatial contrast between open, split-level living space and the cell-like bedrooms. An accompanying diorama of a city illustrated ahead of its time the concept of green parks and gardens at the foot of a cluster of skyscrapers.

The ideas for city planning set forth at the Salon d'Automne, an annual semi-official exhibition, were taken up again and developed in 1925 at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, in a pavilion that was to be a “manifesto of the esprit nouveau.