Post on 26-Dec-2015
Modern Art & Music Movies & Radio
Objectives
Recognize the characteristics of modernism in architecture, art, and music.
Trace the development and explain the significance of movies and radio between ca. 1900 and the 1930s.
Modernism
rejection of old forms/valuesconstant experimentationmodern art = 1860s-1970s
ARCHITECTURE
Architecture
functionalism: idea that bldgs should be useful, “functional”Le Corbusier: “a house
is a machine for living in”
Louis H. Sullivan’s Schlesinger & Mayer Dept. Store, Chicago, 1899-
1904
Louis H. Sullivan’s Wainwright Building, St. Louis, 1890-1891, all steel frame
Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center, Cambridge, MA, 1961-1964
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna Residence, Stanford, CA, 1936
Walter Gropius’s Fagus shoe factory, Alfeld, Germany, 1911-1913
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Apartments, Chicago, 1948-1951
Architecture
Bauhaus: German school of design that combined the study of crafts and fine arts1919-1933Founded by Walter Gropius
PAINTING
Impressionism (late 19th / early 20th c.)
Modern painting grew out of a revolt against French impressionism. French impressionism was characterized by the study of light – the attempt to capture the impression of light.
Monet, Bathing at La Grenouillere, 1869
Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Pissarro, Boulevard Montmarte – at various times of day and in various types of weather, 1897
Postimpressionism / Expressionism
Sought to portray the “unseen”: emotion & imagination
Emphasis on form rather than lightArtists include: van Gogh, Gauguin,
Cezanne, Seurat, Signac, and Toulouse-Lautrec
Van Gogh, La chambre de Van Gogh a Arles (Van Gogh's Room at Arles), 1889
Van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889
Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Halo, 1889
Gauguin, Tahitian Women OR On the Beach, 1891
“You must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.”
- Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire – (1) c. 1897-1898, (2) 1902, (3) 1904-1906
Matisse, Portrait of Andre Derain, 1905
Matisse, The Jazz Series (cutouts), 1943-1944
Cubism
Compositions of shapes and forms “abstracted” from the conventionally perceived world
Founded by Picasso
Picasso, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1906
Picasso, Guitar and Violin, ca. 1912
Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Woman falling from a burning house
Woman holding a dead child
Fragments of a warrior and a horse pierced by a spear
More expressionism – extreme abstraction
Kandinsky & German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)
“The observer must learn to look at [my] pictures … as form and color combinations … as a representation of mood and not as a representation of objects.”
- Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
Kandinsky, Improvisation 7, 1910
Kandinsky, Black and Violet, 1923
Kandinsky, Composition X, 1939
Dadaism
Attacked all accepted standards of art and behavior
“Dada” = “hobbyhorse” (nonsensical)
Start of The Dada Manifesto (1918, Tristan Tzara)
“The magic of a word –
DADA – which has placed the
Newsmen before the
Gate of an unexpected world
Has for us no
Importance whatsoever.”
More from The Dada Manifesto
“Thus was DADA born of a need for independence, of suspicion for the community. Those who belong to us keep their freedom. We recognize no theory. We have enough of the cubist and futuristic academies: laboratories of formalistic ideas. Does one engage in art to earn money and stroke the pretty bourgeois?”
Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (Mona Lisa with Moustache), 1919
Surrealism (1920s/30s)
By 1924, most Dada artists joined the Surrealist movement
Art that expresses the world of dreams and the unconscious
Inspired by psychologists Freud and Jung2 groups:
Biomorphic – abstract forms that suggest natural formsNaturalistic – recognizable scenes metamorphosed into
dream image
Joan Miró, Singing Fish
Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
Dali, Lighted Giraffes, 1936-1937
Magritte, L’art de vivre
MUSIC
Modern Music
emotional intensityexperimentationatonal = without a central key/tone; lacks
expected pattern
Ex. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913)
MOVIES AND RADIO
Movies
Movies appeared in the 1890s. 1st movie houses came out of LA in early 20th c.
First films were silents. “Talkies” came out in late 1920s.
US dominated the industryCharlie Chaplin
Movies = huge entertainment. Offered a form of escape.
Radio
Early 1920s – inventions1920 – first major public broadcasts of
special eventsEvery major country quickly set up
broadcasting networks – most were gov’t-owned (ex. BBC)
Movies and radio became propaganda toolsSergei Eisenstein – October (1927) Leni Riefenstahl – The Triumph of the
Will (1935)