The Rise of Western Modernism

ARTS 1304, Unit 2

Rococo to Neoclassicism

Europe in 1700 CE

Rococo luxury & excess in France
The false narratives of Neoclassicism

Topics to Cover:

A Brief note on Context

Nicolas Poussin

Landscape with St. John on Patmos

1640 CE | Oil on canvas

Peter Paul Rubens

The Disembarkation of Marie de' Medici

1600 CE | Oil on canvas

The Rococo

Germain Boffrand

Salon de la Princesse

Paris, France, 1737-1740 CE

Palace of Versailles, France

Hall of Mirrors

Gardens of Versailles, 1764 plan

Pavilion Frais

L'Orangerie

Parterre du Midi (foreground) & L'Orangerie (background)

Interior of Linderhof Castle, Bavaria, Germany

François Boucher

Le Chinois Galant

1742 CE | Oil on canvas

Examples of Ming Dynasty Porcelain

François Boucher

Cupid a Captive

1754 CE
Oil on Canvas

Jean-Honore Fragonard

The Bathers

1761-1765 CE, Oil on canvas

Jean-Honore Fragonard

The Swing

1766 CE
Oil on canvas

Neoclassicism

Path of the Mt. Vesuvius Ash Cloud

Angelica Kauffman

Cornelia, Pointing to her Children as her Treasures

1785 CE | Oil on canvas

Jacques Louis David

The Death of Marat

1793 CE | Oil on canvas

Thomas Jefferson

Monticello

Charlottesville, VA, 1772 CE

Jefferson Memorial, Washington DC

US Supreme Court, Washington DC

British Museum, London

Lincoln Trust & Savings Bank, Chicago

Romanticism
& Realism

The Napoleonic Empire, 1812

Intensity & Subjectivity within Romanticism
Realism and the Rise of Empiricism

Topics to Cover:

Europe in 1850

Intensity & Subjectivity within Romanticism

Francisco Goya

Saturn Devouring One of His Sons

1820-1822 CE
Oil mural transferred to canvas

The Industrial Revolution

Francisco Goya

Saturn Devouring One of His Sons

1820-1822 CE
Oil mural transferred to canvas

Eugène Delacroix

Odalisque

1845-1850 CE | Oil on canvas

Eugène Delacroix

Liberty Leading the People

1830 CE | Oil on canvas

Théodore Géricault

The Raft of the Medusa

1819 CE | Oil on canvas

Caspar David Friedrich

Wanderer above a Sea of Mist

1817-1818 CE
Oil on canvas

Caspar David Friedrich

Monk by the Sea

1809-1810 CE | Oil on canvas

Immanuel Kant

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the Sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the Sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.

Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, 1781

Illustration of the Sublime

Frederic Edwin Church

The Heart of the Andes

1859 CE | Oil on canvas

Realism
and the Rise of Empiricism

Frederic Edwin Church

The Heart of the Andes

1859 CE | Oil on canvas

Eugène Delacroix

Liberty Leading the People

1830 CE | Oil on canvas

Ernest Meissonier

The Barricade (Memory of Civil War)

1850 CE
Oil on canvas

Gustave Courbet

Burial at Ornans

1849 CE | Oil on canvas

Honoré Daumier

Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1934

1834 CE | Lithograph

Honoré Daumier

Fight between Schools

1855 CE | Lithograph on newsprint

Edouard Manet

Olympia

1863 CE | Oil on canvas

Edouard Manet

Olympia

1863 CE | Oil on canvas

Impressionism &
Post-Impressionism

France c. 1870

Impressionism
& Ephemerality
The Goals of the
Post-Impressionists

Topics to Cover:

Impressionism
& Ephemerality

Claude Monet

Impression-Sunrise

1872 CE | Oil on canvas

Example of Monet's techniques

Auguste Renoir

La Moulin de la Galette

1876 CE | Oil on canvas

Berthe Morisot

Reading

1873 CE | Oil on canvas

Claude Monet

Bridge Over a Pool of Lilies

1899 CE
Oil on canvas

The Goals of the
Post-Impressionists

Vincent Van Gogh

The Sower

1888 CE | Oil on canvas

Vincent Van Gogh

The Red Vineyard

1888 CE | Oil on canvas

Vincent Van Gogh

The Night Café

1888 CE | Oil on canvas

George Seurat

The Bathers

1883-1884 CE | Oil on canvas

Paul Cézanne

Mont Sainte-Victoire

1902-1904 CE | Oil on canvas

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree,
a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an
oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the
exact color and shape, until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you.

-Claude Monet

Paul Cézanne

The Large Bathers

1906 CE | Oil on canvas

Early Western Modernism

An Overview of 'Modernism'

Europe at the end of World War I

Ways of Seeing: Cubism to Surrealism
Futurism vs. Dada

Topics to Cover:

Ways of Seeing:
Cubism to Surrealism

THEO VAN DOESBURG

Composition VIII (The Cow) | 1917 CE

PIET MONDRIAN

Grey Tree

1911 CE

PIET MONDRIAN

Tableau I

1921 CE

PABLO PICASSO

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

1907 CE
Oil on canvas

PABLO PICASSO

Gertrude Stein

1906–1907 CE
Oil on canvas

GEORGES BRAQUE

The Portuguese

1911 CE
Oil on canvas

GEORGES BRAQUE

Houses at l'Estaque

1908 CE
Oil on canvas

In the year 1906, Braque, Derain, Matisse and many others were still striving for expression through color, using only pleasant arabesques, and completely dissolving the form of the object.

Cezanne's great example was still not understood. Painting threatened to debase itself to the level of ornamentation; it sought to be 'decorative,' to 'adorn' the wall.

From The Rise of Cubism, by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1949

Years of research had proved that closed form did not permit an expression sufficient for the two artists' aims. Closed form accepts objects as contained by their own surfaces, i.e., the skin; it then endeavors to represent this closed body, and, since no object is visible without light, to paint this 'skin' as the contact point between the body and light where both merge into color.

This chiaroscuro can provide only an illusion of the form of objects.

In the actual three dimensional world the object is there to be touched even after light is eliminated.

Thus the painters of the Renaissance, using the closed form method, endeavored to give the illusion of form by painting light as color on the surface of objects. It was never more than 'illusion.'

GEORGES BRAQUE

Violin & Palette

1908 CE
Oil on Canvas

GEORGES BRAQUE

Violin & Palette

1908 CE
Oil on Canvas

PABLO PICASSO

Still Life with Chair-Caning

1912 CE | Oil and oilcloth on canvas

PABLO PICASSO

Violon

1911-1912 CE
Oil on canvas

Exploring Surrealism

SALVADOR DALÍ

The Persistence of Memory

1931 CE | Oil on canvas

RENÉ MAGRITTE

The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images

1928–1929 CE | Oil on canvas

MERET OPPENHEIM

Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)

1936 CE | Fur-covered cup

JOAN MIRÓ

Painting

1933 CE | Oil on canvas

An Interview with Dalí

Futurism vs. Dada

We intend to sing to the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
Courage, boldness, and rebelliousness will be the essential elements of our poetry.
Up to now literature has exalted contemplative stillness, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt movement and aggression, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch...
We affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car with a hood that glistens with large pipes resembling a serpent with explosive breath [...] a roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot — that is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

From The Futurist Manifesto, by Filippo Marinetti:

GIACOMO BALLA

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

1912 CE | Oil on canvas

UMBERTO BOCCIONI

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

1913 CE (cast 1931 CE)
Bronze

GINO SEVERINI

Armored Train

1915 CE
Oil on canvas

MARCEL DUCHAMP

L.H.O.O.Q.

1919 CE

Pencil on paper color reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa

MARCEL DUCHAMP

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

1912 CE
Oil on canvas

MARCEL DUCHAMP

Fountain

1917 CE
Porcelain

MARCEL DUCHAMP

Fountain, (second version)

1950 CE
Porcelain

1964 replica of Duchamp's sculpture

Sold in 1964 at Sotheby's auction house to the Tate Britain museum...

...for $1.7 million

That's equal to $16.6 million in 2023.

Interview with Martin Creed, Conceptual Artist

Modernism into Postmodernism

Intro to Postmodernism

The Metaphysics of Postmodernism

Sartre, Greenberg, & Expressionism
Minimalism vs. Pop Art

Topics to Cover:

Sartre, Greenberg, & Expressionism

20th Century Existentialism

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Man Pointing (no. 5 of 6)

1947 CE
Bronze

Works from Giacometti's 2017 Retrospective at Tate Modern

The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital.

The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.

-Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844

FRANCIS BACON

Painting

1946 CE
Oil and pastel on linen

FRANCIS BACON

Figure with Meat

1945 CE
Oil on canvas

BARNETT NEWMAN

Vir Heroicus Sublimis

1950–1951 CE | Oil on canvas

JACKSON POLLOCK

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

1950 CE | Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas

LEE KRASNER

The Seasons

1957 CE | Oil and house paint on canvas

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

The Bay

1963 CE | Acrylic on canvas

Greenberg & Expressionist Hype

JACKSON POLLOCK

No. 30 (Autumn Rhythm)

1950 CE | Enamel paint on canvas

MARK ROTHKO

No. 14

1961 CE
Oil on canvas

MARK ROTHKO

No. 12

1954 CE
Oil on canvas

“I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. The fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions. If you…are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.”

-Mark Rothko

MARK ROTHKO

Rothko Chapel

1964-1971 CE

Mark Rothko

MARK ROTHKO

Orange, Red, Yellow

1961 CE
Acrylic on canvas

Minimalism vs. Pop Art

DONALD JUDD

Untitled

1969 CE
Brass and colored fluorescent Plexiglass on steel brackets

DAN FLAVIN

The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham)

1963 CE | Fluorescent lights

"It is what it is, and it ain’t nothin’ else. . . . There is no overwhelming spirituality you are supposed to come into contact with. . . . It’s in a sense a “get-in-get-out” situation. And it is very easy to understand. One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find."
- Dan Flavin

FRANK STELLA

Mas o Menos (More or Less)

1964 CE | Metallic powder in acrylic emulsion on canvas