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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).
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Kurt Schwitters

Cherry Picture
1921
Collage of colored papers, fabrics, printed labels and pictures,
pieces of wood, and gouache on cardboard background
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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).
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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.
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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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DADAISM IN THE US
Marcel Duchamp and
Francis Picabia were
instrumental in the success of Dadaism in the US. They took part in
the 1913 Armory Show in New York (Duchamp
exhibited his Nude Descending a Staircase),
which provided the first important opportunity for a comparison and
exchange of ideas between European and North American avant-garde
artists.
Duchamp
and
Picabia were
fascinated by the level of industrialization and mechanization in the
US.
Duchamp
interpreted these themes in his ready-made works, while
Picabia translated
them onto canvas in his "mecanomorphic" pictures. On their return
visit to the US from 1915 to 1918. they contributed to the 291
review (which
Picabia
later emulated in Barcelona under the title 391)
and participated in exhibitions at the 291 gallery, which was
founded by the photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz. Here, they
were joined by the ingenious
Man Ray, a great
experimenter with new artistic materials and the ironic and caustic
creator of paradoxical objects, which were unmistakably of Dadaist
inspiration. Together with
Duchamp and
Katherine Dreier,
Man
Ray founded the Societe Anonyme, the first permanent
exhibition devoted to avant-garde art.
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Katherine
Sophie Dreier
(1877 – 1952)

Abstract Portrait of Marcel
Duchamp
1918
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De Stijl
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De Stijl
[Dut.: ‘the style’].
Dutch
periodical founded by
Theo van Doesburg in 1917 and published
in Leiden until 1932; the name was also applied from the 1920s
to a distinctive movement and to the group of artists
associated with it. The periodical’s subtitle,
Maandblad voor de beeldende vakken (Monthly Journal of the
Expressive Professions), indicates the range of artists to
which it was appealing, and
van Doesburg’s intention was that
it be a platform for all those who were concerned with a new
art: painters, sculptors, architects, urban planners,
typographers, interior designers and decoratve artists,
musicians, poets and dramatists. The search for a nieuwe
beelding (new imagery) was characterized by the elementary
components of the primary colours, flat, rectangular areas and
only straight, horizontal and vertical lines. Former ideals of
beauty had to be relinquished in favour of a new consciousness
to represent the spirit of the times.
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De Stijl
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
(Dutch: “The Style”), group of Dutch artists in Amsterdam in 1917,
including the painters Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Vilmos
Huszár, the architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, and the poet A. Kok;
other early associates of De Stijl were Bart van der Leck, Georges
Vantongerloo, Jan Wils, and Robert van't Hoff. Its members, working in
an abstract style, were seekinglaws of equilibrium and harmony
applicable both to art and tolife.
De Stijl's most outstanding painter was Mondrian, whose art was rooted
in the mystical ideas of Theosophy. Although influenced by his contact
with Analytical Cubism in Paris before 1914, Mondrian thought that it
had fallen short of its goal by not having developed toward pure
abstraction, or, as he put it, “the expression of pure plastics”
(which he later called Neoplasticism). In his search for an art of
clarity and order that would also express his religious and
philosophical beliefs, Mondrian eliminated all representational
components, reducing painting to its elements: straight lines, plane
surfaces, rectangles, and the primary colours (red, yellow, and blue)
combined with neutrals (black, gray, and white). Van Doesburg, who
shared Mondrian's austere principles, launched the group's periodical,
De Stijl (1917–32), which set forth the theories of its members.
As a movement, De Stijl influenced painting, decorative arts
(including furniture design), typography, and architecture, but it was
principally architecture that realized both De Stijl's stylistic aims
and its goal of close collaboration among the arts. The Worker's
Housing Estate in Hoek van Holland (1924–27), designed by Oud,
expresses the same clarity, austerity, and order found in a Mondrian
painting. Gerrit Rietveld, another architect associated with De Stijl,
also applied its stylistic principles in his work; the Schröder House
in Utrecht (1924), for example, resembles a Mondrian painting in the
severe purity of its facade and in its interior plan. Beyond The
Netherlands, the De Stijl aesthetic found expression at the Bauhaus in
Germany during the 1920s and in the International Style.
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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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Marcus Collin
(1882-1966)

Iltakavely kaupingen valoss
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Alvar Cawen
(1886–1935)

Portrait
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Jalmari Ruokokoski
(1886-1936)

Portrait
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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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Pavel Kuznetsov
(1878-1968)

In the Steppe, 1908
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Sergey Konyonkov
(1874-1971)

Bather, 1917
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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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Tymon
Niesiolowski
(1882–1965)
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Bathing
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Boats
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Reclining Nude
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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.
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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.
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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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Felice Casorati

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FELICE CASORATI
After studying painting at the academies of Padua, Naples, and
Verona,
Felice Casorati (1886-1963) exhibited work at the Venice Biennale in
1907, He was a knowledgeable admirer of late 19th-century painting,
especially French and German works, but no influence of these
paintings or the current avant-garde movements can be seen in his
work. A figurative painter,
Casorati preferred to elaborate a style of
his own, and, like Carra, diversified into architecture and stage
design. His work had a classical flavour to it and a very deliberate
use of line and colour. He sought to explore spatial values and to
convey emotion with mastery and rigour. Described as a "painter of
solitude", he earned an international reputation that continues to
grow in stature.
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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.
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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.
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Still Life
1920
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Amedee Ozenfant
(b Saint-Quentin, Aisne, 15 April 1886; d Cannes, 4
May 1966).
French painter, writer and teacher. Born into a bourgeois family,
he studied at Dominican colleges, first Saint-Elme d’Arcachon and
then Captier in Saint-Sébastien. Following his studies, he
returned to his native Saint-Quentin, where he began to paint in
watercolours and pastels. In 1904 he enrolled in the drawing
course taught by Jules-Alexandre Patrouillard Degrave at the Ecole
Municipale de Dessin Quentin Delatour in Saint-Quentin. By 1905 he
was producing plein-air paintings in oil. In the same year he
travelled to Paris, where he studied the decorative arts, first
with the French painter Maurice Verneuil (b 1869) and then with
Charles Cottet.
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Nacres (Mother of pearl)
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Maroc
1919
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Glasses and
Bottles
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Guitar and Bottles
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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.
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