Early Modernism & Art
An Overview of 'Modernism'
Impression-Sunrise
Claude Monet | 1872 CE | Oil on canvas
Example of Monet's techniques
La Moulin de la Galette
Auguste Renoir | 1876 CE | Oil on canvas
Reading
Berthe Morisot | 1873 CE | Oil on canvas
Bridge Over a Pool of Lilies
Claude Monet
1899 CE
Oil on canvas
The Sower
Vincent Van Gogh
1888 CE | Oil on canvas
The Night Café
Vincent Van Gogh | 1888 CE | Oil on canvas
The Bathers
George Seurat | 1883-1884 CE | Oil on canvas
The Bathers
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
(Rococco)
Cornelia Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures
Angelica Kauffman
(Neoclassical)
Mont Sainte-Victoire
Paul Cézanne | 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.
-Claude Monet, 1874 CE
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.
The Large Bathers
Paul Cézanne | 1906 CE | Oil on canvas
Composition VIII (The Cow)
Theo van Doesburg | 1917 CE | Oil on canvas
-Theo van Doesburg, Principles of Neo-Plastic Art, 1919 CE
The visual artist can leave the repetition of stories, fairy-tales, etc., to poets and writers.
The only way in which visual art can be developed and deployed is by revaluing and purifying the formative means.
Painterly means are:
colors, forms, lines and planes.
Grey Tree
Piet Mondrian | 1911 CE | Oil on canvas
Tableau I
Piet Mondrian
1921 CE
Oil on canvas
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Pablo Picasso
1907 CE
Oil on canvas
Gertrude Stein
Pablo Picasso
1906–1907 CE
Oil on canvas
Violin & Palette
Georges Braque
1908 CE
Oil on Canvas
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.'
—Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism, 1949
Dimensionality & Hypercubes
Violon
Pablo Picasso
1911-1912 CE
Oil on canvas
Still Life with Chair-Caning
Pablo Picasso | 1912 CE | Oil and oilcloth on canvas
The Persistence of Memory
Salvador Dalí |1931 CE | Oil on canvas
Exploring Surrealism
Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)
Meret Oppenheim | 1936 CE | Fur-covered cup
The Son of Man
René Magritte
1964 C
Oil on canvas
Golconda
René Magritte | 1953 CE | Oil on canvas
Magritte was fascinated by the seductiveness of images.
—Charly Herscovici, 2007 CE
Ordinarily, you see a picture of something and you believe in it, you are seduced by it; you take its honesty for granted.
But Magritte knew that representations of things can lie.
These images of men aren't men, just pictures of them, so they don't have to follow any rules.
This painting is fun, but it also makes us aware of the falsity of representation.
The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images
René Magritte | 1928–1929 CE | Oil on canvas
"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it!
And yet, could you stuff my pipe?
No, it's just a representation, is it not?
So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe",
I'd have been lying!"
—Magritte