11902–1912

Visual Artof the20th Century

Edward Lucie-Smith

Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458

Edward Lucie-Smith

Visual Artof the20th Century

Copyright © 1996 Edward Lucie-Smith

Prentice Hall Inc.Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DATA

Lucie-Smith, Edward. Visual arts in the twentieth century / Edward Lucie-Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–8109–3924–7 (Abrams). —ISBN 0–13–494436–4 (Prentice Hall). 1. Art, Modern–20th century. I. Title N6490.1792 1997 709’.04—dc20 96–18460 CIP

Designers: Andrew Schoolbred and Ian HuntPicture researcher: Visual Arts LibraryCopy editor: Robert StewartProject editor: Damian ThompsonAdditional research: Jack Collis-Harvey

Printed and Bound in Singapore

Cover design: Misha Anikst

Frontispiece: Nicholas de Stael, Les Matigues, 1954. Oil on canvas

Details: p.16: Gaugin, The Vision after the Sermon (see fig. 1.14). p.50: Rouesseau, The Snake Charmer (see fig 2.10). p.76: Malevich, Taking in the Rye (see fig. 3.21). p.110: Moholy-Nagy, Construction, Work 4 (see fig. 4.19). p.150: Mukhina, Worker and Collective Farm Woman (see fig. 5.25). p.182: Bacon, Three Studies … (see fig. 6.19). p.214: De Staël, Les Martigues (see fig. 7.35). p.250: Auerbach, Mornington Crescent, Winter (see fig. 8.28). p.296: Eggleston, Memphis (see fig. 9.40). p.332: Fischl, Squirt (see fig. 10.17). p.364: Ypuhan, Mao and Blonde Girl Analyzed (see fig. 11.7).

Author’s acknowledgments: My thanks are due to Damian Thompson and Lee Ripley Greenfield of Calmann & King; to Suzie Green, Celestine Dars, and Didier Lenart of the Visual Arts Library (responsible for the picture research); to Robert Stewart, who patiently and tactfully edited my text; and to the ever-helpful staff of the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. This book would not have come into existence without their efforts and is dedicated to all of them.

ContentsIntroductionChapter One: Before 1900The Social and Intellectual BackgroundThe Industrial BackgroundThe Romantic MovementKarl Marx and The Communist ManifestoCharles Baudelaire and the “The Painter of Modern Life”Friedrich Nietzche and Sigmund FreudThe Symbolist Movement

ArchitectureTechnical InnovationResponses to New Social NeedsLouis SullivanArt Nouveau and the Search for Aesthetic UnityVictor Horta and Antonio GaudiCharles Rennie MackintoshEdwin Lutyens

PaintingThe New Exhibiting SocietiesThe Great ForerunnersVincent van GoghPaul Gaugin and the Cult of the PrimitiveGaugin in the South SeasPaul CézanneEdvard MunchThe NabisHenri de Toulouse-LautrecPierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard

SculptureAuguste RodinMedardo RossoThe Position of Women Artists

PhotographyThe Birth of the Snapshot CameraPhotography as a ProfessionDocumentory PhotographyPictorialist PhotographyThe Importance of the “Amateur” PhotographerSubject-Matter and Pictorialist Photography

KeyworksGeorges Seurat: La Grande JatterAuguste Rodin: The Gate of Hell

Chapter Two: 1900–1909Technological AdvancesInternational Tensions

ArchitectureArchitecture in the United StatesThe Green Brothers and Bernard MaybeckThe Early Work of Frank Lloyd WrightArchitecture in EuropeOtto WagnerJosef HoffmanPeter Beherns and AEG

PaintingPainting in EuropeThe Survival of Art Nouveau: Gustav KlimptPicasso: The Blue PeriodHenri Rouesseau, called Le DouanierThe FauvesHenri MatisseCubismPaula Modersohn-Becker

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World War II, though fully as destructive as its predecessor, had different psycho-logical effects. It did not induce widespread cynicism, the brutally nihilistic sense of irony, which had often infected the arts after World War I. Nor was there the feeling, common-place in the 1920s, that a whole elaborate civilization had crumbled into ruins, leaving a legacy of estrangement and alienation. There was, however, despair and horror. The full extent of the Holocaust became visible; it was no longer possible to deny the reality of the Nazi concentration camps, nor that of the whole mechanism of genocide which the Nazis had created. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was publicly justified by the American authorities as the sole means available for bringing the war in the Pacific to a swift conclusion, but the unprecedented power of this new weapon, as well as its long-term effects on those victims who were not killed outright, produced a feeling of oppression which was later to be intensified by the nuclear arms race between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Holocaust and the bomb became frequent subjects for art in the immediate post war epoch, though both artist and critic often declared that these subjects were too vast and too intractable for any artistic venture to encompass.

Meanwhile, the effects of a massive emigration began to be felt. Many leading artists and architects left Europe for the safety of the United States. Their impact on American culture was profound. They were not, however, solely responsible for the American primacy in the visual arts which now unmistakably asserted itself.

CHAPTERSIX

This was due to other factors as well. One was American economic supremacy, now visible for all to see. Another was the fact that the comparatively brief hiatus in cultural exchanges imposed by the war had enabled American artists to take stock of their own potential. Abstract Expressionism, the major new artistic style of the 1940s, was the result of increasing confidence in a peculiarly American attitude toward the relationship between human beings and society—it involved a subjective reinterpretation of a peculiarly American myth, that of the frontier, and of the way in which the individual was empowered to push that frontier forward according to the dictates of his own will.

Painting in Great BritainA Change of ClimateA world at war was clearly not a good place for architects, and it is not surprising that many fewer important building were com-pleted during the 1940s that the 1930—de-spite the worldwide economic slump. Never-theless, the decade witnessed an important theoretical shift, a change in the balance of power away from those architects who clung to the idea of traditional forms towards those who regarded themselves as committed Modernists.

There were several reasons for this shift. One was the departure from Europe of leading architects, among them most of the chief practitioners of the International Style. Walter Gropius, formerly head of the Bauhaus, lefts Germany in 1934, and in 1937

1920--1929

Choanalysts, that had interested themselves in visual representation made by the mentally ill, by untrained artists, and by children. Photographers linked to the Surrealists recorded the graffiti in which Paris abounded. Some of the Dubuffet’s most effective early works were portraits of his friends, intellectuals such as the Surrealist writer, Georges Limbour (FIG. 6.14), done in a style derived from wall graffiti. Dubuffet attempted to reproduce the texture of the wall itself, as well as the brutal concision of this type of drawing. The effectiveness of the portraits depended partly on the artist’s choice of a style so apparently at odds with the sophisticated personalities whom he portrayed. Dubuffet was also fascinated by material which seemed inappropriate to the uses he made of them –in the following decade he made collages of butterflies’ wings, and sculpture from lumps of coal, sponges, or crumpled silver paper. From these experiments he evolved an influential philosophy of art brut, or “art in the raw,” which was to take postwar figurative art in a new direction, one hostile to any idea of smoothness or fine finish of the sort that had been momentarily revived by Dalí.

Wols

In the fateful year of 1945, Douin exhibited another artist who was to affect the post war development of European art, though to a much lesser extent than Dubuffet. This was Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, 1913–51), who had emigrated from Germany in 1933, both to escape that Nazi regime and to get away from a stifling bourgeois family background. In the 1930s he made a career as a photographer affiliated to the Surrealist; but he was interned on the outbreak of war. After his release, he lived from hand to mouth, mostly in the south of France, and began to make small paintings and drawings inspired by nature, but less and less specific in their imagery. Though more modest in

6.14 Wols, Untitled, 1946–7. Oil on Canvas, 317/8 x 255/8 in (81 x 65 cm). Private collection.

There is a close resemblance between Wols’s work and the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock (which Wols did not know at the time). The brushwork is free, gestural, and unplanned.

196 Chapter Six

scale that the paintings being made by the emerging Abstract Expressionists in America (which he did not know) , Wols’s composi-tions of the mid-1940s (FIG. 6.15) look astonishingly like Pollock’s work of the same period or a little later. They prepared the way for the acceptance of Abstract Expressionism in Europe.

Expressionism in Northern EuropeThe Cobra Group

In the 1940s, the European artists who–apart from Wols–offered the closest parallel to what was taking place in New York were that who came together to form the short-lived Cobra Group, founded in 1948. The name was taken from the cities the members were came from–Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Among the members were the Dane, Asger Jorn (1914–73), and the Dutch-man, Karel Appel (1921– ). While the Cobra Manifesto published in the Dutch periodical, Reflex, in 1948 specifically rejected “Western Classical culture” and called for its replace-ment “by a system whose laws are based on the immediate demands of human vitality,”6 Cobra was visibly linked to the development of Modernism in the first decades of the century. The different between Cobra artists, like their American colleagues, believed in giving free rein to subconscious fantasy, their work remained more firmly in the old Expressionist tradition, which traced its line of descent directly to Edvard Munch. There was, in fact, to be a continuity in the develop-ment of figurative Expressionism in northern Europe which easily withstood the challeng-es to which Abstract Expressionism would eventually succumb. Appel’s early work also owes something to what Picasso and Miró had been doing in the 1930s, adding to these touches of childlike spontaneity (FIG. 1.16). Jorn, the first Danish artist to make a major impact on the international scene since the beginning of Modernism, is more mystical and more somber.

6.15 Jean Dubuffet, Limbour as a Crustacean, 1946. Oil and sand on canvas, 455/8 x 35 in (116 x 88.8 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithson-ian Institution, Washington, D.C (Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn).

This portrait of the Surrealist writer, Georges Limbour, was inspired by urban graffiti, a spontaneous form of expression which, along with the scrib-blings of children and pychotics, Dubuffet listed as the sources of art brut.

6.16 Karel Appel, Children with Questions II, 1947. Wooden reliefs nailed to wooden board, painted in oil, 33 5/8 x 22 1/8 in (85 x 56 cm). Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.

Appel’s early paintings show the impact made on him by the work of Picasso and Miró, but are still basically Expressionist in style.

Painting in Great BritainGreat Britain was never invaded, as most of the rest of Europe was (Switzerland, Sweden, and the Iberian peninsula were the other exceptions), nor did it become subject to an enemy power. On the other hand, its geographical closeness to the European continent meant that for most of the war years it was a country under siege. Before the war, the British school, under the tutelage of critics such as Roger Fry (1886–1934) had consistently looked across the Channel for inspiration. Now communication with Paris was cut off, and the British remained unaware of the revolution which was taking place in America. For the first time for many years, British art was thrown back entirely on it own resources.

Stanley Spencer

There were a few British painters of the senior generation whom this suited very

1971960–1969

Stuart Davis and American Cubism

Some American artists of the period, chief among them Stuart Davis (1892–1964), wanted to find ways of combining what was specifically American with what they had learned from European Modernism—in Davis’s case, specifically from Cubism. He wrote in a notebook entry for 20 November, 1920: “I too feel the thing Whitman felt and I too will express it in pictures—America—the wonderful place we live in.”2 A number of his paintings feature commercial packaging in a way that foreshadows the Pop Art of the 1960s. An example is Odol (FIG. 4.29), which celebrates the distinctive bottle and logo of a popular brand of mouthwash.

Georgia O’Keeffe: The Shelton with Sunspots The Shelton with Sunspots (fig. 4.28) belongs to a small series of painting celebrating the city of New York painted by Georgia O’Keefe in the mid-1920s. It depicts the new residential hotel near Grand Central Station where she and her husband, Alfred Stieglits, occupied a suit on the thirtieth floor. Thanks to Stieglitz’s efforts on her behalf, O’Keeffe had already become famous for her paintings of flowers and other natural objects, and some of her admirers were shocked when she turned to urban themes. O’Keeffe would have none of this. “You have to live in today,” she said briskly. “Today the city is something bigger, more complex than ever before in history.”* Her city painting celebrate urban life in a very different way from those produced some ten and more years earlier by members of the Ashcan School. Theirs are full of the bustle of the streets; hers are cool

4.28 Georgia O’Keeffe, The Shel-ton with Sunspots, 1926. Oil on canvas, 481/2 x 301/4in (123.2 x 76.8 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (Gift of Leigh B. Block).

4.29 (right) Stuart Davis, Odol, 1924. Oil on cardboard, 243/8 x 175/8 in (62 x 44.7 cm). Cincin-nati Art Museum, Ohio.

In this Cubist-influenced work Davis anticipates Pop art preoc-cupations

and detached. What is peculiarly modern about her work is the impact made on it by the camera—perhaps not surprisingly in view of the fact that she was married to the most celebrated of all American photographers, who had already taken skyscrapers, who had already taken skyscrapers such as New York’s Flatiron Building as part of his subject matter. In The Shelton with Sunspots, the lighting effects are typical of the way in which the camera records an image when photographer is looking directly toward the source of light. Like her Precisionist con-temporary, Charles Sheeler, O’Keeffe owes comparatively little to European Modernism (she never set foot in Europe until she was sixty-five, and then refused to meet Picasso on the grounds that she spoke no French and he no English), but much to the new photo-graphic way of seeing pioneered by Stieglitz and by slightly younger photographers such as Paul Strand.

KEYWORK

132 Chapter Four

4.31 Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu, 1928. Oil on canvas, 331/2 x 283/4 in (85 x 73 cm). Private collection.

This is the first painting of Tar-sila’s Anthropophagist series.

4.30 Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Deposition, 1924. Oil on canvas, 3 ft 67/8 in x 4 ft3/4 in (1.09 x 1.34 m). Museu de Arte Contem-poranea da Universidade de São

Painting in Latin AmericaThe 1920s were the years in which Modernism became something close to a worldwide phenomenon. Having made their impact in North America, Modernist ideas now started to make themselves felt elsewhere in the western hemisphere. In Latin America, where artists were ready for new ways of thinking the 1920s saw a series of significant artistic events. One was the “Semana de Arte Moderna” (“Week of the Modern Art”) held in São Paolo in 1922. The Semamn was a mixture of things: music, literature, and poetry, as well as art. An important part of it was the desire to assert a new cultural nationalism, since the event coincided with the centenary of Brazilian in-dependence. One of the participating artists, Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899–1967) signaled on of the direction the future was to take. His painting of the 1920s, for example, Deposition (FIG. 4.30), are a strange mixture of indigenous influences and sophisticated European Art Deco. Questioned about his artistic influences, Rego Monteiro, who had been trained in Paris, supplied a long list: “Futurism, Cubism, Japanese prints, black art, the Parisian School, Brazilian Baroque and above all the art of the American Indians on the island of Marajo.”

Brazil: Tarsila do Amaral

Rego Monteiro’s interest in Amerindian cultures links him to a more important artist, Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), “the Brazilian painter who best achieved aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style.” Tarsila, when it took place. She studied with the minor Cubists, André Lhote and Albert Gleizes, and also with Fernand Léger. On her return home in December, 1923, she began to explore the popular culture of Brazil and to paint in a style which mingled the influence of local naïve art with that of Léger. By 1928 she had entered her most creative period, that of the Anthropophagy or Cannibalism, so named from the manifesto, Antropófago, published by her husband, the poet and

1331920–1929

GENERAL EVENTS

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

ART

1920 1921 1922 1923 1924

ARCHITECTURE

•FoundationoftheLeagueofNations

•19thAmendmentgivesAmericanwomenthevote

•ColettepublishesChérie•GandhilaunchescivildisobediencecampaigninIndia

•SwisspsychiatristHermannRorshachinventsink-blottest

•Thompsonsubmachinegunpatented

•StructureoftheMilkyWaydemonstratedforthefirsttimethroughtheuseofphotography

CHAPTERFOUR

•DeathofAmedeoModigliani

•DadaexhibitionattheWinterBrasserie,Cologne

•EdwinLutyens,FinsburyCircusfaçadeofBritannic(nowLutyens)House,London

•Beginningofhyperinfla-tioninGermany

•BeginningofUSstock-marketboom

•EndofMexicanrevolution•Sacco-VanzettimurdertrialintheUnitedStates

•LuigiPrandellostagesSix Characters in Search of an Author

•SovietstatesunitetoformUSSR

•Mussolini’s“MarchonRome”leadstoformationofFacistgovernment,Italy

•IrishFreeStateofficiallyproclaimed

•JamesJoycepublishesUlysses

•LouisArmstrong’sfirstrecording

•Germanmarkat4milliontoUSSR

•Hitlermountscoup d’etatinMunich,whichfails

•GretaGarbo’sfilmdebut•JohnMaynardKeynespublishesATract on Monetary Reform

•Continuoushotstriprollingofsteelinvented

•Diptheriavaccinediscovered

•“GrosserBerlinKunstausstellung,”exhibitioninBerlin

•MaxBeckmann,TheTrapeze

•MarcelDuchamp,The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors

•TheAmericancollectorAlbertC.Barnesbuys100worksfromChaimSoutine

•FirstSurrealistmanifestopublished,Paris

•StuartDavis,Odol•FernandLégerdirects

Mechanical Ballet

•GerritRietveld,SchröderHouse,Utrecht,theNetherlands

•J.J.P.Oud,HookofHollandhousingestate(–1927)

•Firstuseofinsecticides•25millionradiosinuseinUnitedStates

•DeathofLenin•FirstWinterOlympics,Chamonix,Switzerland

•GeorgGershwincomposesRhapsodyinBlue

•E.M.ForesterpublishesA Passage to India

•HitlerwritesMein Kampf whileinprison

•Insulinfirstgiventodiabetics

•DiscoveryofVitaminE

•“SemanadeArteModerna”heldinSãoPaolo,Brazil

•PabloPicasso,Women on the Beach

•MarcChagallandVassilyKandinskyleaveRussiaforGermany

•AugustePerret,NotreDamechurch,LeRaincy,France

•RudolfSchindler,LovellBeachHouse,LosAngeles(–1926)

•AugustePerret,NotreDamechurch,LeRaincy,France

•RudolfSchindler,LovellBeachHouse,LosAngeles(–1926)

•Firsttuberculosisvaccine

•Insulindiscovered•AlbertEinsteinwinstheNobelprizeinphysics

•DiegoRiverareturnstoMexicofromtheUnitedStates

•ConstantinBrancusi,Bird in Space(1stversion)

•FernadLéger,Three Women

•MaxErnst,The Elephant of the Celebes

•ErichMendelsohn,EinsteinTower,Allenstein,Germany

•LudwigMiesvanderRohedevelopsaskyscraperprojectinglass,thebirthof“curtainwall”construc-tion

Le Corbusier Van Alen, Chrysler Building: see pg. 120

Rivera, Creations p. 135

1920--19291925 1926 1927 1928 1929

•BauhausaccusedofBolshevismanddegeneracy—forcedtoleaceWeimarforDessauGermany

•MarioSironi,Solitude

•FirstNovencentogroupexhibition,Rome

•PaulKlee,Neighborhood of the Italian Villas

•GeorgesGrosz,Pillars of Society

•OttoDix,Sylvia von Harden

•FirstexhibitionofMaxErnst’sfrottagesinParis

•RenéMagritte,TheMurdereThreatened

•ErnstBarlach,Güstrow Angel

•DeathofJuanGris

•TarsiladoAmaral,Abaporu

•AndréBretonpublishesSurrealism and Painting

•PietMondrian,Foxtrot B•CharlesScheeler,UpperDeck

•InaugurationofMOMA,NewYork

•SalvadorDalíandLouisBunueldirectthesurrealistfilmfantasy Un chien andalou

•ExpositiondesArtsDécoratifs,Paris

•WalterGropius,DessauBauhaus(–1926)

•DeathofAntoniaGaudí •InaugurationoftheBauhausbuildinginDessau

•JohannesBrinkmanandL.C.vanderVlugt,VanNelleTobbacoFactory,Rotterdam,theNetherlands

•WilliamvanAlen,ChryslerBuilding,NewYork

•GerritRietveld,SchröderHouse,Utrecht,theNetherlands

•J.J.P.Oud,HookofHollandhousingestate(–1927)

•JohnLogieBairdtransmitsrecognizablehumanfeaturesbytelevision

•FirstLeicacamera•FirstsolareclipseinNewYorkfor300years

•Firstliquid-fuelrocket•Kodakproducesfirst16mmphotographicfilm

•RussianscientistI.V.PavlovpublishesConditionedReflexes

•15millionModelTFordsproducedbythisdate

•AlexanderFlemindiscoverspenicillin

•GeorgeEastmanexhibitsfirstcolormotionpictures

•TheGeigercounterisinvented

•Quartz-crystalclocksintroduced

•StalinoustsTrotskyfrompower

•Christiania,theNorwegiancapital,renamedOslo

•SergeiEisensteindirectsThe Battleship Potemkin

•F.ScottFitzgeraldwritesThe Great Gatsby

•“Hitlerjugend”(HitlerYouth)founded,Germany

•GeneralStrikeinBritain•FritzLangdirects

Metropolis•T.E.Lawrence(LawrenceofArabia)publishesThe Seven Pillars of Wisdom

•Germanyeconomycollapses

•TrotskykexpelledfromtheSovietCommunistparty

•CharlesLindberghfliessolonon-stopfromNewYorktoParis

•CivilwarbreaksoutinChina

•ChiangKai-shekelectedpresidentofChina

•AmeliaEarhartbecomesfirstwomantoflytheAtlantic

•D.H.LawrencepublishesLady Chatterley’s Lover

•FirstperformanceofBertoltBrecht’sThe Threepenny Opera,withmusicbyKurtWeill

•StockMarketcrashinNewYorkon2Octoberprecipitatesworldeconomiccrisis

•TrotskyexpelledfromtheUSSR

•“Talkies”replacesilentfilmsinpopularity

•DeathofSergeiDiaghilev

Schindler, Beach House: see p. 120

Sironi, Solitude: see p. 119

André Breton see pg. 124

14 Chapter Six

Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century offers an exciting new account of the century of art so affected by Modernism. A uniquely structured view of the period and the inclusion of often-overlooked material come together to create a survey that is thorough, insight-ful, and fresh.Painting, sculpture, photography, the graphic arts, and architecture are treated in decade-bydecade chapters, allowing for an inclusive vier of coexisting innovations and trendsInformation on historical, social, and intellectual movements and events is incorporated within the text, giving insight into the cultural environment that stimulated, surrounded, and supported individual acts of creativityThe work of artists from historically under-represent-ed regions of the world is also included, providing new insight into the global world of artEdward Lucie-Smith has also given us the first book of its kind that emphasizes photography—an art form both accessible and cutting-edge. In addition, the author re-evaluates Modernism by examining the di-verse and important roles women have played in this still influential movement. Finally, more than twenty “Key Work” analyses appear throughout the book. Critical and interpretive, these consise examinations concentrate on individual works of art and provide models by which other works may be approached and evaluated—a valuable touchstone for those who want to enjoy and understand modern art on their own.Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century is simply the most comprehensive overview of the art and culture of the very dynamic period. As a reliable reference tool and knowledgeable companion, it is an essential

guide through the exuberant thicket of art that has flourished over the past hundred years.500 illustration, including 150 in full color, 11 illus-trated time-lines, bibliography, index

About Edward Lucie-SmithWell known as an art historian, curator, lecturer, and critic, Oxford University-trained scholar Edward Luc-ie-Smith is also a poet, biographer, and broadcaster. His knowledge of twentieth-century art and culture is vastly wide ranging. Among his previous books for Abrams are Art and Civilization (1993), Race, Sex, and Gender in Contemporary Art (1994), The Art of Albert Paley (1996).