Cubism

Cubism - One of the most influential art

movements (1907-1914) of the
twentieth century, Cubism was begun by
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973)
and Georges Braque (French, 1882-
1963) in 1907. They were greatly
inspired by

- African sculpture,

- by painters Paul Czanne
(French, 1839-1906) and

-by the Fauves.



Fishing Boats
Georges Braque
In Cubism the subject matter is broken up,
analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted
form. Picasso and Braque initiated the
movement when they followed the advice of
Paul Czanne, who in 1904 said artists
should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder,
the sphere and the cone."
In a nutshell: SHATTERING FORM
The Castle at la Roche-Guyon
Georges Braque
While artists associated
with Europe were following
the expressionist
tendencies, Two Artists
were reducing the role of
color to a minimum to
concentrate on the
problem of representing
form in space.
Le Portugais (The Emigrant), 1911-1912
Georges Braque
Picasso and Braque
started working
together in 1909, and
by 1910 their styles
became so
intertwined that it
became virtually
identical.


For a time they ceased
signing their works.
Self Portraits
The three musicians
Picasso

From 1901 to 1904, Picasso split time between Paris and Barcelona. For reasons historians don't fully
understand, he painted predominantly in blue during these years, producing works like The Old Guitarist. After
1904, when Picasso decided to stay in Paris, this "Blue Period" came to a close. It was followed by a "Rose
Period," filled with (you guessed it) red hues--including those in Boy with a Pipe, which sold for more than $100
million in 2004.

The Old Guitarist.
Boy with a Pipe
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
By 1907, the bloom was off the Rose Period, and Picasso's art was taking
a decidedly modern turn. That year, his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with
its African motifs and fractured spaces, was too striking even for the
Parisian avant-garde. Picasso kept the painting under wraps for several
years, though many now consider it a masterpiece.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
(The Young Ladies of Avignon)
a large oil painting of 1907 by Pablo Picasso (18811973) which portrays
five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Aviny street in Barcelona. All
of the figures depicted are physically jarring, none
conventionally feminine, all slightly menacing, and each is
rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two of the women are
rendered with African mask-like faces, giving them a savage and
mysterious aura. In his adaption of Primitivism and
abandonment of perspective in favour of a flat,
two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical
departure from traditional European painting. The work is one of Picasso's
most famous, and is widely considered to be a seminal work in the early
development of both Cubism and modern art. It is in the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City, having been acquired by the
museum in 1939.

Guernica
Guernica is a town in north Spain.
Guernica was devastated by German air bombardment in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.
Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly
innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of
the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion Guernica
was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. This tour
helped bring the Spanish civil war to the world's attention.

Francisco de Goya (Period:ROCOCO)
The Third of May 1808
This painting is the first of its kind: The first true anti war painting.
Flashback
DADA
1916
1914
World War 1
Soldiers with their heads full of gallant ideas about battles rushed headlong into the
most horrible deaths imaginable. Science and technology in which the world had
put its faith showed its dark side-trench warfare, poison gas, bombardment by air,
machine guns, tanks, submarines etc. The ideal of the progress was shown to be
pretty hollow, and ten million people lost their lives in one of the bloodiest wars in
history.
In 1916, a group of artists waiting out war in Zurich, in neutral Switzerland,
banded together as a protest art movement called DADA.
This movement was picked up in America. Later German(Hannah Hoch)
and French artists also joined this movement (Francis Picabia)
Dada became synonymous with ANTI
DADA was a big NO
DADA was a big YES
Anti art, Anti middle class society, anti
politicians, anti good manners, anti business as
usual, anti all that had brought about he war
Yes to Creativity, to life, to spontaneity, to
silliness
Fountain
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, white glazed ceramic plumbing fixture and painted signature, readymade porcelain
urinal on its back. The urinal, purchased from "Mott Works" company in New York and signed "R. Mutt," was submitted
to the jury-free 1917 Independents exhibition but was suppressed by the hanging committee. This is a photograph of
either the second version of 1951 or the third of 1964.

DADA




Dada artists produced works which were
nihilistic( belief that nothing is worthwhile) or
reflected a cynical attitude toward social values,
and, at the same time, irrational absurd and
playful, emotive and intuitive. Less a style than a
zeitgeist (ideas and spirit of time),

Dadaists typically produced art objects in
unconventional forms produced by
unconventional methods. Several artists
employed the chance results of accident as a means of
production, for instance.

Dada was more of an
attitude than a coherent
movement
L.H.O.O.Q
1919
Marcel Duchamp

Among the notable artists of this
movement:
Jean Arp
Tristan Tzara
Francis Picabia
Marcel Duchamp was the most
prominent artist of this movement
Literally, the word dada
means several things in
several languages: it's French
for "hobbyhorse" and Slavic
for "yes yes." Some
authorities say that the name
Dada is a nonsensical word
chosen at random from a
dictionary.

This movement was never
very stable and eventually
melded into Surrealism in
1924
Many artists
associated with this
movement later became
associated with Surrealism.
Many other movements have
been influenced by Dada,
including Pop Art.


Bicycle Wheel
Marcel Duchamp
Ready-mades
The Dadaist with its most lasting impact on American Art in
the 20
th
century was Marcel Duchamp, whose ready-mades
probed the border between art and life. A ready made is a
work of art that the artist has not made but designated. The
Bottle Dryer is Duchamps strangest ready made. This work is
a signed replica of 1964. It is a replica because Duchamp
never intended for his ready made to be permanent. His
project was to find an object- with no aesthetic interest- and
exhibit it as art. After the exhibition it was returned to life.
After the exhibition in 1914 the Bottle Dryer went back to the
store.

Ready made
"Ready made" is the most controversial
artistic concept of the history of art. It is
art desecration with inerasable
consequences for the future artists and art
world itself.

Marcel Duchamp:

There is one thing that I want to clear. The
choice of these "ready-made" was not
dictated by aesthetic reasons. This
choice settles on a reaction of visual
indifference and simultaneously a total
absence of good or bad taste... in reality a
complete anesthesia.

Bottle Dryer
Marcel Duchamp
The Bottle Dryer looks strangely menacing like a dress
with protective spikes.
Picabia delighted in the
similarities between
human and machines, and
he created paintings that
looked like diagrams.
Lenfant Carburetor (The Child Carburateur)
Francis Picabia
1919
Madame Picabia, 1958
Francis Picabia

In this work, a female bust cut from a fashion magazine is adorned with nuts,
bolts, and gears, and her eyes are masked with spinning wheels. The title
refers to the French artist Francis Picabia, whose portraits often incorporate
machine parts.

The Handsome Pork Butcher
Rejecting grandiose settings and noble poses, this work
was originally composed of household paint and sewing
ephemera. Later Picabia substantially reworked the
painting, creating a more complex image by
superimposing a female face onto the original male
portrait and replacing the variety of collage elements
with just combs. Painted towards the end of his
association with the Dada movement, this work
demonstrates Picabias ability to combine artistic
innovation with social satire.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp, The
Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even [aka Large
Glass] 1915-1923, oil and
other media, 9 feet 1 1/4
inches x 5 feet 9 inches,
Philadelphia Museum of
Art. It took eleven years to
bring this work to what
Duchamp called a state of
"final incompletion." Only
when it was accidentally
cracked in 1926 did
Duchamp announce that it
was "finished."

'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse', 1920
Man Ray

'Cloth- wrapped, compressed, nonutilitarian, has played an early and important role in the twentieth century art concepts. Dadaist
Man Ray wrapped an 'enigma', 'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse', 1920.
Christo some forty years later wrapped a building; 'The Museum of Modern Art Packaged', 1968. In the early 60's Claes Oldenbury
had introduced cloth (muslin) as a basic material for his art forms- 'Wrinkled, torn and creased surfaces, rippled edges, expressing
the physical sensations, visual perceptions and poetic associations that the object arouses in the viewer are assumed to be relative
entirely to his own experience.







Observatory Time - The Lovers,
Man Ray, 1934



Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor,
George Grosz 1919
George Grosz (born, Georg Ehrenfried Gross) (American, born Germany,
1893-1959), Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor, 1919, oil,
crayon, papers and five buttons sewn on canvas, 49 x 39.5 cm, Georges
Pompidou Center, Paris.

Cabaret Voltaire. A club founded in Zurich in February 1916 by the
German poet, musician, and theatrical producer Hugo Ball (18861927); it
was one of the chief breeding grounds of the Dada movement.

A press announcement on 2 February read: Cabaret Voltaire. Under this name a
group of young artists and writers has been formed with the object of becoming a
centre for artistic entertainment. The Cabaret Voltaire will be run on the principle of
daily meetings where visiting artists will perform their music and poetry. The young
artists of Zurich are invited to bring along their ideas and contributions.

It opened on 5 March. Among the leading figures were the singer Emmy
Hennings (later Ball's wife), the poets Tristan Tzara and Richard
Hlsenbeck, and the artists Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, and
Hans Richter. The Cabaret Voltaire was, in Richter's words,

an overnight sensation',

but it was forced to close early in 1917 because of the complaints of
respectable citizens outraged by the nightly excesses'. After the closure Ball
and Tzara rented a gallery, opened in March 1917 as the Galerie Dada, to
which they transferred their activities.

Cabaret Voltaire was the name of the first Dada publicationa pamphlet
edited by Ball issued on 15 June 1916.

Compose an Activity
Take 10 minutes
Set Performance date and venue
"Dada Knows everything. Dada spits on everything. Dada says
"knowthing,"
Dada has no fixed ideas. Dada does not catch flies.
Dada is bitterness laughing at everything that has been
accomplished, sanctified....
Dada is never right...
No more painters, no more writers, no more religions, no more
royalists, no more anarchists,
no more socialists, no more politics, no more airplanes, no more
urinals...
Like everything in life, Dada is useless, everything happens in a
completely idiotic way...
We are incapable of treating seriously any subject whatsoever, let
alone this subject: ourlselves."

Futurism
1909
Began in Italy

It quickly spread to France, Germany,
Russia and the Americas, appealing
to all for something more vigorous
and robust, something in keeping
with the Machine Age.

Speed, noise, machines,
transportation, communication,
information...and all the transient
impressions of life in the modern city
intoxicated the futurists.

They loathed the cult of the past.
Futurism was a
celebration of the
machine age,
glorifying war and
favoring the growth of
fascism. Futurist
painting and sculpture
were especially
concerned with
expressing
movement and the
dynamics of
natural and man-
made forms.

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)
Giacomo Balla
Futurism was presented as a modernist movement celebrating the
technological, future era. The car, the plane, the industrial town and
the likes were representing the motion in modern life and the
technological triumph of man over nature.
Futurism was inspired by the development of Cubism
and went beyond its techniques.
The Futurist painters made the rhythm of their
repetitions of lines.
Inspired by some photographic experiments, they were
breaking motion into small sequences, and using the
wide range of angles within a given time-frame all
aimed to incorporate the dimension of time within the
picture. Brilliant colors and flowing brush strokes also
additionally were creating the illusion of movement.
Futurism influenced many other 20th century art
movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism,
Constructivism and Surrealism.
Methodology
The Hand of the Violinist (1912)
Balla
Swifts, Paths of Movement and
Dynamic Sequences (1913)
Balla
Giacomo Balla
Plastic Construction of Noise and
Speed (1915)
Polymer Construction
Balla
Shape Noise Motorcyclist (1915)
Balla
Flight of the Sparrows
Balla
Study for the painting
Umberto Boccioni
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
Boccioni, who sought to infuse art with
dynamism and energy, exclaimed, "Let
us fling open the figure and let it
incorporate within itself
whatever may surround it." The
contours of this marching figure appear to
be carved by the forces of wind and speed
as it forges ahead. While its windswept
silhouette is evocative of an ancient statue,
the polished metal alludes to the sleek
modern machinery beloved by Boccioni
and other Futurist artists.
Horizontal Constructions
Dynamism of a Soccer Player
Boccioni
A strada entra nella casa, (The street enters the house) 1911
B
o
c
c
i
o
n
i

Carlo Carra
Leaving the Theatre
Carlo Carr
1909
Omaggio a Betuda Futurista
1915

Interventionist Demonstration, 1914
Tempera and collage on cardboard, 38.5 x 30 cm about 15x12 inches


Carra is clearly following the
cubist painterly style in this collage poem
the composition moves
outward from center in concentric circles
and with a number of rays
or lines of force moving out from this
center giving an impression of an
explosion of a loud noise or sound. The
words as well emanate from
this same center for the most part helping
to emphasize the feeling of
expansion from a center. The several dark,
blackish zones in the
center also give an effective sense of spatial
depth - a deep void -
from which the 'sound' is coming and the
space gradually flattening
out toward the edges. This sort of visual
'poem' would later develop
into what became known as
concrete
poetry
.

The composition was inspired by Carr's
sighting of leaflets dropped from an
airplane as they fluttered down over the
Piazza del Duomo.




Carra
Portrait of the Poet Marinetti
1910,
Carlo Carr

Futurism came into being with
the appearance of a manifesto
published by the poet Filippo
Marinetti on the front page of the
February 20, 1909, issue of Le
Figaro. It was the very first
manifesto of this kind.

Carra
Other artists
Rene Magritte
Gino Severini
Surrealism
Surrealism or surrealist art - A
twentieth century avant-
garde art movement that
originated in the nihilistic
ideas of the Dadaist and
French literary figures,
especially those of its founder,
French writer Andr Breton
(1896-1966). At first a Dadaist
he opened a studio for
"surrealist research.

Influenced by the theories of
Sigmund Freud (German,
1856-1939) and Hegel
(German Philosopher), the
images found in surrealist
works are as confusing and
startling as those of dreams.

Surrealist works can have a
realistic, though irrational
style, precisely describing
dreamlike fantasies
Les Maris de la Tour Eiffel
Marc Chagall, 1938.
The Surreal Mind
The influences of Freud and Hegel

Psychoanalysis
Dream Interpretations
Automatic Writing



Refusal of the
concrete
manifestation of
reality.
The philosophy of mind begins with the consideration of the individual, or subjective, mind.
It is soon perceived, however, that individual, or subjective, mind is only the first stage, the
in-itself stage, of mind. The next stage is objective mind, or mind objectified in law, morality,
and the State. This is mind in the condition of out-of-itself. There follows the condition
of absolute mind, the state in which mind rises above all the limitations
of nature and instituitions, and is subjected to itself alone in art, religion, and
philosophy. For the essence of mind is freedom and its development must consist in
breaking away from the restrictions imposed on it in it otherness by nature and human
institutions.
Marc Chagall was a Russian-born Jew
whose deep faith displayed itself
repeatedly throughout his body of
work. In addition to Old Testament
themes, Russian village life was a
common favorite subject. His dreamy,
vividly-colored, often playful pieces
caused him to be associated with the
Surrealists (a charge he vigorously
denied).

Besides painting, Chagall's huge
output included book illustration, set
and costume design, murals,
lithography and a number of truly
amazing stained glass windows.

A Cubist, Fauvist, Expressionist and
Surrealist he refused to be associated
with any movement.

The Promenade
Marc Chagall
The Fiddler, 1912
Three Candles
I and the village
Birthday
Marc Chagall
Paris through the window
Self Portrait with seven fingers
"Study for Over Vitebsk"
Abraham and the Three Angels
Marc Chagall

A flamboyant painter and sometime writer, sculptor and
experimental film-maker, Salvador Dali was probably the
greatest Surrealist artist, using bizarre dream imagery to
create unforgettable and unmistakable landscapes of his inner
world. His most famous work is The Persistence Of Memory.

Dal was a versatile artist. Some of his
more popular works are sculptures and
other objects, and he is also noted for his
contributions to theatre, fashion, and
photography, among other areas.
The Sacred Heart of J esus
Dal was highly imaginative, and also had
an affinity for partaking in unusual and
grandiose behavior, in order to draw
attention to himself. This sometimes irked
those who loved his art as much as it
annoyed his critics, since his eccentric
manner sometimes drew more public
attention than his artwork.
Salvador Dali
Dal was a colorful and imposing presence in his
ever-present long cape, walking stick, haughty
expression, and upturned waxed mustache.
"Every morning upon awakening, I experience a
supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dal."

The Persistence of Memory
Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali
Leda Atomicus
Dali
.
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a
Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)
Dali
Dali
He believed in the "greater reality"
of man's subconscious over his reason
The Temptation of St.Anthony
Salvador Dali
The feeling of Becoming
The Sacrament of the Last Supper
D
a
l
i

Soft Self Portrait with fried Bacon
Magritte was born on November 21,
1898, in the town of Lessines, Belgium.
He was a Surrealist who used out of
place and out of proportion imagery to
provoke thought.

His accessible and vivid Surrealism
caught on in the 1960s and his works
(or variations on them) were
popularized as album covers for such
artists as Jeff Beck, Jackson Browne
and Styx.

. He became well known for a number
of witty and thought-provoking
images. His intended goal for
his work was to challenge
observers' preconditioned
perceptions of reality and force
viewers to become hypersensitive to
their surroundings.

Rene Magritte
The Treachery of Images
Rene Magritte
The Lovers
Time Transfixed
Red Model
Magritte used the same approach in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit
realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the
item was an apple. In these "Ceci n'est pas" works, Magritte points out that no
matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item
accurately, we never do catch the item itself.
The Son of Man,1964
The Listening Room
Les Pommes Masques
"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing;
they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of
my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What
does that mean?' It does not mean anything, because
mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."
About the painting The Son of Man, 1964
Magritte said, Everything we see hides
another thing, we always want to see what
is hidden by what we see, but it is
impossible. Humans hide their secrets too
well ...
Magritte
The Magritte Museum in Brussels
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera (July 6, 1907
July 13, 1954; was a Mexican painter.
Perhaps best known for her self-
portraits, Kahlo's work is remembered
for its "pain and passion", and its
intense, vibrant colors. Her work has
been celebrated in Mexico as
emblematic of national and indigenous
tradition, and by feminists for its
uncompromising depiction of the
female experience and form.


Kahlo had a stormy but passionate
marriage with the prominent Mexican
artist Diego Rivera. She suffered
lifelong health problems, many of
which stemmed from a traffic accident
in her teenage years. These issues are
reflected in her works, more than half
of which are self-portraits of one sort
or another. Kahlo suggested, "I paint
myself because I am so often
alone and because I am the
subject I know best."

Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and
Hummingbird,
Did not belong to the surrealist group
but painted like one.
The Two Fridas
The Broken Column
Kahlo
Diego On My Mind
Kahlo
Kahlo
Tree of Hope, Stand Fast
Without Hope
The Henry Ford Hospital
Self Portrait with Cropped Hair
Kahlo
The Wounded Deer
What the Water Gave Me
Constructivism
and
Suprematism
1915-1940s
Constructivism
1915 to the 1940s
It was a movement created by the Russian
avant-garde, but quickly spread to the rest
of the continent.
Constructivist art is committed to
complete abstraction with a
devotion to modernity,
where themes are often geometric,
experimental and rarely emotional.

Objective forms carrying universal meaning
were far more suitable to the movement
than subjective or individualistic forms

Constructivist themes are also quite
minimal, where the artwork is broken
down to its most basic elements.




The principles of constructivism
theory are derived from three main
movements that evolved in the early
part of the 20th century:
-Suprematism in Russia,

-De Stijl (Neo Plasticism) in Holland
and the

--Bauhaus in Germany.

Key artists: Vladimir Tatlin,
Kasimir Malevich, Liubov Popova,
Aleksandr Rodchenko, Vavara
Stepanova, Vasily Kandinsky,
Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, El
Lissitzky.

Monument to the Third International,
Vladimir Tatlin, 1929

In 1913-14 Vladimir Tatlin
made and exhibited several
relief constructions using
industrial materials.

Tatlin used the term
Constructivism to describe
these works.

"Black Square and Red Square" 1915
Kasimir Malevich,
Before Constructivism became a form of
art, Malevich was founding its predecessor,
Suprematism.

Malevich did not care if his work
represented reality or not. Desiring only
"to free art from the burden of
the object,
he used geometric shapes in order to
produce a rich aesthetic feeling.
Malevich thought that the
purest art forms were
squares, as shown in his painting,
"Black Square and Red Square". The work
is visually pleasing, yet represents nothing
concrete. His ideas were passed on to
pupils such as Vladimir Tatlin and
Alexander Rodchenko, who formed the
next major group of Russian artists, the
Constructivists.

Rodchenko,
Russian photographer and Graphic Designer 1925
El Lissitzky.
Kasimir Malevich, : Suprematist Compositions
Malevich
White on White
In the early twentieth century, Suprematism represented a leap into a
totally non-representational, non-painterly, tarantella-like dynamic.

Basic geometric shapes, isolated or in groups, were being energized,
propelled into an optimistic ideal soaring from lower left to upper right,
the vector alone suggesting time.

The limits of perception and understanding are being questioned.
Vector: a quantity that has both direction and
magnitude, e.g. force or velocity
Tarantella: Italian Dance

Kazimir Malevich, Square, Study for the dcore of
Victory Over the Sun, Act 2, Scene 5, 1913
Pencil on paper

Liubov Popova: Painterly Architectonics
Black Rectangle Blue Triangle
Kassimer Malevich
Malevich: Cow and Violin
(oil on wood, 1913)
Malevich believed that cubism failed because
the viewer could not succeed in bringing the
fractured images into a visual unity and so
the depicted object became
incomprehensible. As a result, he said, the logical
conclusion was that logic must be
abandoned. Depicting a subject should be replaced by
the depiction of a variety of pictorial units (by which he
meant planes of color) in an asymmetric unity.

In this work, Malevich juxtaposed a violin, presented in
the language of synthetic cubism, against a realistic
violin and a realistic cow. Malevich wrote of this work
that "the above picture represents a moment of
struggle through the confrontation of two forms: that
of the cow and that of the violin in a cubist
construction. Logic has always placed a barrier against
new subconscious movements.

The 'Alogical' movement has been created to free it
[logic and art] from preconceptions."
Kazimir Malevich.
Peasant Woman
with Buckets and a Child.
1912
peasant woman,1930
Peasant woman with buckets, 1912


Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (Red Square), 1915
Malevich


Malevich's use of the term
"alogic" related to Russian
futurist poetry, called "zaum,"
which concerned the goal of
freeing words from constraints
imposed by the need to mean
something. Both the idea of
the zaum and Malevich's alogic
were influenced by Uspensky's
ideas about transcending
three-dimensional
reality. As Uspensky had
written, three-dimensional
reality is governed by
logic. Therefore, in order to
reach higher realities, one had
to abandon logic, and art was
the path for doing this.

It is the precursor to the twentieth century movement and style known
as Minimilism, minimal art, reductivism, and rejective art. This
movement stresses the idea of reducing a work of art to the minimum
number of colors, values, shapes, lines and textures. No attempt is made
to represent or symbolize any other object or experience.

6 chance divisions of 4 black and white squares from odd and even numbers
generated by Pi
Franois Morellet (French)
Bauhaus
German Movement
1919-1930
Bauhaus
Bauhaus - A very influential German school
of art and design. Underlying the Bauhaus
aesthetic was a fervent utopianism, based
upon ideals of simplified forms and
unadorned functionalism, and a belief that
the machine economy could deliver
elegantly designed items for the masses,
using techniques and materials employed
especially in industrial fabrication and
manufacture steel, concrete, chrome,
glass, etc. All students took a preliminary
course before moving on to specialist
workshops, including carpentry, weaving,
pottery, stagecraft, graphic arts, and graphic
design.
It was founded in 1919, and closed by the
Nazis in 1933.
Once the school was closed, many Bauhaus
teachers emigrated to the U.S.A.


Kandinsky is certainly an "odd duck"- to look
at his paintings is often to wonder what
exactly he was trying to do. They seem
quite simple, with lines and shapes in
various colors, often with heavy use of the
primary colors (red, yellow, blue). They also
seem mildly erratic, completely abstract,
and lacking in solid form. Kandinsky
attempted to answer the "What is he
doing?" question with Concerning the
Spiritual in Art, and ended up writing a
classic piece on painting theory.
To put it quite simply, Kandinsky was
painting music (or attempting to). He
wanted to dissolve the distinctions between
music and painting, and was attempting to
do so through the use of color and line. He
felt that music was the only art form that
truly expressed the soul, and wanted to
achieve this in painting.

Wassily Kandinsky
Vassily Kandinsky
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Kandinsky, himself an accomplished
musician, once said Color is the
keyboard, the eyes are the
harmonies, the soul is the piano with
many strings. The artist is the hand
that plays, touching one key or
another, to cause vibrations in the
soul. The concept that color and
musical harmony are linked has a
long history, intriguing scientists
such as Sir Isaac Newton. Kandinsky
used color in a highly theoretical way
associating tone with timbre (the
sound's character), hue with pitch,
and saturation with the volume of
sound. He even claimed that when
he saw color he heard music.

Composition VIII
Vassily Kandinsky
In the Gray
Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944),
The Twittering Machine
Paul Klee

Paul Klee
Paul
Klee
Growth
Paul Klee
De Stijl
De Stijl -An art movement
advocating pure abstraction and
simplicity form reduced to the
rectangle and other geometric shapes,

and color to the primary colors, along
with black and white.

Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944) was
the group's leading figure. Another
member, painter Theo van Doesberg
(Dutch, 1883-1931) Their work exerted
tremendous influence on the Bauhaus
and the International Style.
Piet Mondrian
Theo Van Doesburg