STUDY IMAGES #4

ModernismPrintmaking and Multiples

Hugo Ball

Karawane Sound Poem Text and Performance image

Cabaret Voltaire

February 5, 1916

DADA and the reaction to WW I

Marcel Duchamp,In Advance of the Broken Arm,1964, fourth version, after lost original of November 1915 (The Museum of Modern Art)

A Duchamp Ready Made where Duchamp starts to use the title as a definition for the viewer. The Title is the idea of the piece, telling the story of the piece, and removing the object from popular use.Except this is the fourth version.

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Marcel Duchamp,Fountain,porcelain urinal, 1917 (replica after lost original, 1951), (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Fountain is a 1917 work widely attributed to Marcel Duchamp. The scandalous work was a porcelain urinal, which was signed "R.Mutt" and titled Fountain. Submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, Fountain was rejected by the committee, even though the rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee. Fountain was displayed and photographed at Alfred Stieglitz’s studio, and the photo published in The Blind Man, but the original has been lost. The work is regarded by some art historians and theorists of the avant-garde, such as Peter Bürger, as a major landmark in 20th century art. Replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s are now on display in a number of different museums

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• Broadway Boogie-Woogie is a painting by Piet Mondrian completed in 1943, shortly after he moved to New York in 1940. Art critics consider Broadway Boogie-Woogie to be Mondrian's masterpiece, and a culmination of his aesthetic.

Piet MondrianBroadway Boogie-WoogieOil paint, 50" x 50” (127 cm x 127 cm)1942–1943, Museum of Modern Art

Frida Kahlo. The Two Fridas. 1939 5’8”x5’8”

Goya,From the Disasters of War1810-1820, Intaglio Print

Munch: Inner Pictures of the Soul

• Like Van Gogh, Munch uses his art to express his inner state

• The swirling lines become ripples of tension – nature is threatening

• Making inner feelings visible would be the aim of many artists in the new century and would be known as Expressionism

Francisco GoyaThe Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,c. 1797, 21.5 cm × 15 cm. One of the most famous prints of the Caprichos

Raul HausmanDer Geist Unserer Zeit – Mechanischer Kopf(Mechanical Head [The Spirit of Our Time])c. 1920

Der Geist Unserer Zeit - Mechanischer Kopf specifically evokes the philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). For Hegel, whose books include Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), everything is mind. Among Hegel's disciples and critics was Karl Marx. Hausmann's sculpture might be seen as an aggressively Marxist reversal of Hegel: this is a head whose "thoughts" are materially determined by objects literally fixed to it.

However, there are deeper targets in western culture that give this modern masterpiece its force. Hausmann turns inside out the notion of the head as seat of reason, an assumption that lies behind the European fascination with the portrait. He reveals a head that is penetrated and governed by brute external forces.

The Spirit of Our Time - Mechanical Head, Raoul Hausmann (1919)Jonathan Jones The Guardian, Friday 26 September 2003

Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm. Number 30. 8’9”x17’3”

Alexander Calder. Lobster Trap and Fish Tail. 1939. Hanging mobile. 8’6”x9’6” steel, aluminum

Bed is one of Rauschenberg’s first “combines,” the artist’s term for his technique of attaching found objects, such as tires or old furniture, to a traditional canvas support. In this work, he took a well-worn pillow, sheet, and quilt, scribbled on them with pencil, and splashed them with paint in a style similar to that of Abstract Expressionist “drip” painter Jackson Pollock.

Legend has it that these are Rauschenberg’s own pillow and blanket, which he used when he could not afford to buy a new canvas. Hung on the wall like a traditional painting, his bed, still made, becomes a sort of intimate self-portrait consistent with Rauschenberg’s assertion that “painting relates to both art and life…[and] I try to act in that gap between the two.”

Robert RauschenbergBed1955. Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 6' 3 1/4" x 31 1/2" x 8" (191.1 x 80 x 20.3 cm)

Andy WarholCambell’s Soup Cans1962Synthetic polymer paint on canvas20 by 16 inches (51 cm × 41 cm) each for 32 canvasesMuseum of Modern Art.

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Andy Warhol, Brillo Soap Pads Box1964silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on wood, 17 x 17 x 14 in.The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Founding Collection. Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

In the mid-1960s Warhol carried his consumer-product imagery into the realm of sculpture. Calling to mind a factory assembly line, Warhol employed carpenters to construct numerous plywood boxes identical in size and shape to supermarket cartons. Then, with assistance from Gerard Malanga and Billy Linich, he painted and silkscreened the boxes with logos of the different consumer products: Kellogg's corn flakes, Brillo soap pads, Mott's apple juice, Del Monte peaches, and Heinz ketchup. The finished sculptures were virtually indistinguishable from their cardboard supermarket counterparts. Warhol first exhibited these at the Stable Gallery in 1964, cramming the space with piled-high boxes that recalled a cramped grocery warehouse.

Andy Warhol,Gold Marilyn Monroe,Silkscreen ink, Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymerpaint on canvas, 71.25 x 57 in. (211.4 x 144.7 cm), 1962 (MoMA)

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Henri Matisse. "The Red Studio”1911. Size: 71" x 7' 2" (approx. 180 x 220 cm). Oil on Canvas. In the collection of Moma, New York.

Matisse gets his place in the timeline of painting because of his use of color. He did things with color no-one had before, and influenced many artists who followed. Matisse's Red Studio is important for its use of color and its flattened perspective, his altering of reality and our perception of space.

Cézanne's ghost, Matisse's Bonheur de Vivre, and Picasso's egoOne of the most important canvases of the twentieth century, Picasso’s great breakthrough painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was constructed in response to several significant sources. First amongst these was his confrontation with Cézanne’s great achievement at the posthumous retrospective mounted in Paris a year after the artist’s death in 1907. The retrospective exhibition forced the young Picasso, Matisse and many other artists to contend with the implications of Cézanne’s art. Matisse's Bonheur de Vivre of 1906 was one of the first of many attempts to do so, and the newly completed work was quickly purchased by Leo & Gertrude Stein and hung in their living room so that all of their circle of avant-garde writers and artists could see and praise it. And praise it they did. Here was the promise of Cézanne fulfilled—and one which incorporated lessons learned from Seurat and Van Gogh, no less! This was just too much for the young Spaniard.Pablo Picasso,

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8" (243.9 x 233.7 cm). 1907 (MoMA)

Hanne HöchWorksCut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic,1919, collage of pasted papers, 90 x 144 cmDada.

Collage using images from popular culture, as a comment on contemporary culture and politics. Uses DADA as a knife to cut between the masses and the empowered class. Also uses DADA as a foil of silliness to denigrate the ruling class. This is through the use of popular phases in the paper and substituting DADA for the product or politician’s name.

The war has left them crippled and deformed

but their capacity to play skat

remains in tact. It is a three-handed

card game favored by the

Krupps, German manufacturers of

the types of weapons that

misfigured men such as these.

OTTO DIX,The Skat PlayersOil on canvas with photomontage and collage,43 5/16 x 34 1/4" (110 x 87 cm)Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

Alternatives to Abstract Expressionism: Rauschenberg and Johns

• The work of Jasper Johns also challenged the basic premises of the previous generation

• His Flag paintings seem to follow the rules of Abstract Expressionism – they are flat, abstract, painterly

• Yet they also slyly undermine those same rules – they have subjects – they are instantly recognizable as flags

• Instead of expressing a search for inner truth – they are impersonal

• He encourages us to “look” and to think about (not assume we know) what we see

Picasso and Cubism

• In 1937 Picasso used the vocabulary of Cubism to express his outrage at the bombing of Guernica, during the Spanish civil war (by the Nazis in support of the Spanish fascists)

• Picasso created an image about the universal suffering of the innocent in war

• A broken soldier symbolizes the end of heroic warfare – bodies of women, children, and animals are twisted and expressively distorted

Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother,

Nipomo, California. February 1936

Willem de Kooning. Woman I.

1950-42.

Oil on canvas 6’3” x 4’10”