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)