A2 & As Unit 1 & 3: Modernism
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Modernism
Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism
What is Modernism?
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. Modernism questioned the certainties of the previous age: Religion, Autocracy, Classicism A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form, and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction). Literary scholar Peter Childs sums up the complexity:
"There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair."[6]
These oppositions are inherent to modernism: it is in its broadest cultural sense the assessment of the past as different to the modern age, the recognition that the world was becoming more complex, and that the old "final authorities" (God, government, science, and reason) were subject to intense critical scrutiny. Current interpretations of modernism vary. Some divide 20th century reaction into modernism and postmodernism, whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement.
Changing Perceptions
In the early years of the twentieth century, artists forged a radically new image of the world. The everyday experience of urban life was being transformed by innovations in science and technology. Trains, cars and aeroplanes introduced a greater sense of speed, while the popularity of film, radio and the phonograph similarly emphasised change, dynamism and movement. The French philosopher Henri Bergson suggested that these developments demanded a new understanding of existence, and that the simultaneous combination of multiple perceptions and memories was one of the essential characteristics of modern life.
Modernism’s themes include: 1. Rebellion 2. Increasing abstraction 3. Flattening of space 4. Using color, line and shape expressively rather than descriptively 5. Removal of content until eventually the artwork itself was removed 6. Linear progression of these ideas from one movement to the next
The Impressionists “blurry” images of everyday scenes were the first steps toward modernist Abstraction.
Eugene Manet and daughter Julie in the garden Berthe Morisot 1883
They also flattened 3-dimensional space, and were the first artists of Western modernism to paint the world abstractly, rather than how they saw it—two themes of modernism.
Little girl in a blue armchair Mary Cassatt 1878
In the 1870s the Post-impressionists pushed abstraction farther and flattened space more.
Self-portrait Paula ModersohnBecker 1906
They began to use color expressively rather than descriptively —another modernist theme.
The blue room Suzanne Valadon 1923
After the turn of the century, Cubism increased abstraction and flattened space even more. It showed objects from multiple sides simultaneously. For these reasons it is a metaphor for the 20th century. Still life Liubov Popova c. 1916
Inner and outer expansion
The period from 1890 -1914 saw the founding of Modern Logical Philosophy (Wittgenstein, Rusell etc) , Psychoanalysis (Freud). The aeroplanec, radio telegraphy, X-Rays and atomic physics (Einstein) Each of these scientific and analytic discoveries carried a symbolic and romantic dimension, as they expanded the field of vision to embrace exterior flight and the interior body, radio waves and light waves.
Cubism
Cubism, especially in the form developed by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso between 1909 and 1914, offered a revolutionary response to the experience of the modern world. Rejecting the need for realism, painters shifted to a re-conception of the world around them. Picasso and Braque embarked on a period of austere, almost monochromatic paintings in which objects and figures were constructed from fragmentary planes and facets. Their works of 1910-11 reached the verge of total abstraction
Pablo Picasso 1881 –1973 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907
Georges Braque (13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) ‘Simultaneous Perspectives’
Early Film and Cubism
Early film played a catalytic role in the development of Cubism, but as an added layer of reference that does not displace the canonical descriptions and analysis. There is biographical evidence that Picasso was an early cinephile– Picasso first saw a film in 1896 in Barcelona. By 1907 movie-going was a weekly ritual for “la Bande á Picasso.” And by that date, Picasso was certainly borrowing and transcribing from the movies he had been watching for many years; by 1909 he and Braque had formed a fruitful alliance. Cubism’s love affair with film was always within the context of the whole experience of “going to the movies.” Its initial infatuation was with the early single shot film and one-reelers, with slap-stick stories and news events. The engagement of Cubism with film is an affair in which both iconography and process perform their parts in an unlikely marriage of incongruent visual media. Cubist painting adopted the cinema’s heroes and its villains, the musicians who played at the cinema and in it–and their “sound.” But the two artists were just as taken by film’s processes, its camera angles, lighting, shadow patterns, fades and dissolves, and editing techniques, especially time lapses and overlaps that followed the principles of segmentation, division, and alternation to create a unique pattern of scanning within the frame.
Picasso & Braque
Picasso and Braque were not simply absorbing the movies but competing with them, creating modernity even as they were valiantly defending painting from its threat. “Painting always wanted to suggest movement, and suddenly here was movement,” Ms. Rose said. “This was totally amazing for everybody. And for them painting was the most important thing in the world. So they had to capture this movement for painting.”
Early Film and Cubism
It is difficult to imagine the sensation the moving picture evoked in the first decade of the 20th century–it captured reality: “the movement that is life.” Just as photography had been a challenge and opportunity for artists in the 19th century, moving pictures were the new challenge of the 20th century. By the time Picasso painted his breakout canvas, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), film was an important entertainment medium, declared part of the French cultural patrimony. In the next three years, the invention that had begun as a diversion in street fairs, vaudeville, and the café-concerts had taken over the vaudeville theatres and expanded into purpose-built theatres that were attended by people of all classes. With the proliferation of the cinématographe the stage was set for a whole new perceptual structure in the traditional visual arts.
Early Film and Cubism
Early critics tended to ignore or dismiss any connection, largely because they saw cinema as a straightforwardly mimetic medium, far removed from the revolutionary break in painting — in seeing, really — that Picasso and Braque had created. The most extensive consideration of movies and Cubism was made by Natasha Staller in 2001, in her book “A Sum of Destructions: Picasso’s Cultures and the Creation of Cubism,” in which she found specific correspondences between some of Picasso’s work and the images and techniques in the films of Georges Méliès, the French moviemaker and special-effects pioneer. “Picasso appropriated Méliès’s techniques of jarring multiple perspectives, fragmented bodies and body parts, a comic self-conscious dialogue between apparent art and apparent reality,” Ms. Staller wrote. Especially in Picasso’s work, she began to see elements of the cinematograph itself buried in portraits and still life: a crank handle doubling as a woman’s nose in a 1910 painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, her head and body echoing elements of the machine’s lens and film-collecting box and legs, among many other things.
George Melies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWY3LjLw91Q
Definitions – The Avant-Garde
It is difficult howeverto define film in the same terms as Modernism Commercial film evolving from the Lumiere ‘actualities in the 1890’s, embraced narrative, fluidity and desired to absorb, move and enchant audiences. By 1916 D W Griffiths was making the epic narrative film Intolerance In opposition smaller groups developed to question and re-define the growth and influence of cinema
The First Avant-garde
For some film was seen to be the ideal tool to herald the new industrial age and a new way of seeing. For others such as Maxim Gorky it was seen negatively as ‘ A kingdom of Shadows’ Philosphers such as Wittgenstein suggested its ability to understand ‘constructed time and duration’ Modernist artists such as the Futurists and abstract painters such as Ruttman and Eggeling saw film as a means of developing avant-garde abstration.
Lightplay Laslo Moholy Nagy (Bauhaus) (1895 – 1946) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAPLscAO3mE
Dziga Vertov – Man with A Movie Camera
Cubism in art; painting, sculpture, film, etc. played a huge part in the Russian movement of film. Especially in the works of Dziga Vertov and his film, Man with a Movie Camera. Cubism was an art form that depicts an out with the old and in with the new movement. Its style is very Picasso-esque. As one can see, in Man with a Movie Camera, some of the scenes are very different and overlaid on top of each other. Vertov’s style also is like Cubism in that his whole film had to do with street life and the ways of it. The entirety of the film illustrated the workings of the lower classes in Russia, providing a sort of documentary of the lower classes lifestyles in Russia in the 1930s. (Natalia Nussinova)
Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtEOT2ACy0I
Each of modernism’s movements logically followed the movement before it by abstracting more and thinning space more. Each removed something more from art. This gives modernism its linear, self-destructive quality.
Two girls in front of birch trees Paula Modersohn-Becker c. 1905
Futurism
Artists and public alike were outraged by Cubism, but the geometrical fragmentation of form was soon taken up in artistic centres across Europe as a sign of modernism. For the Italian Futurists, it became part of a campaign against cultural and political stagnation in a rapidly industrialising country.
Futurism
Futurism was an ideology that was conceived in Italy in the first decade of the twentieth century. The force behind futurism was Thomas Marinetti. Marinetti’s vision was not just concerned with the arts but was a vision that would permeate all areas of life..
The Futurist Manifesto
The foundation of Marinetti’s agenda can be clearly seen in the futurist Manifesto of 1909, published in the French newspaper Le Figaro. It is significant that Marinetti chose a French newspaper to introduce the public to Futurism. Paris in the early part of the twentieth century was regarded as the art capital of the world. Artists, writers, filmmakers from all over the world flocked to Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was the birthplace of Cubism (which was a rival to Futurism), the writings of Gertrude Stein and after the first world war, a call to the new world order. It was then only right and fitting that Marinetti championed Futurism in Paris.
The Futurist Manifesto of 1909 (Published in Le Figaro, Paris February 20th 1909)
We shall sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. The essential elements of our poetry shall be courage, daring and rebellion. Literature has hitherto glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and sleep; we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. We declare that the world’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing motor car, its framed adorned with great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath…….a roaring motor car, which looks as though running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We shall sing of the man at the steering wheel, whose ideal stem transfixes the Earth, rushing over the circuit of her orbit. The poet must give himself with frenzy, with splendour and with lavishness, in order to increase the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements. There is no more beauty except in strife. No master piece without aggressiveness. Poetry must be a violent onslaught upon the unknown forces, to command them to bow before man. We stand upon the extreme promontory of the centuries!…..Why should we look behind us, when we have to break in the mysterious portals of the Impossibe? Time and Space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have created speed, eternal and ever present. We wish to glorify War- the only health giver of the world-militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that Kill, the contempt for woman. We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarism meanesses. We shall sing of the great crowds in the excitement of labour, pleasure and rebellion; of the multi-coloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capital cities; of the nocturnal vibration of arsenals and workshops beneath their violent electric moons; of the greedy stations swallowing smoking snakes; of factories suspended from the clouds by their strings of smoke; of bridges leaping like gymnasts over the diabolical cutlery of sunbathed rivers; of advent liners scenting the horizon; of broad chested locomotives prancing on the rails like huge steel horses bridled with long tubes; and of the gliding flight of aeroplanes, the sound of whose screw is like the flapping of flags and the applause of an enthusiastic crowd. It is in Italy that we launch this manifesto of violence, destructive and incendiary, by which we this day found Futurism, because we would deliver Italy from its canker of professors, archaeologists, cicerones and antiquaries. Italy has been too long the great market of the second-hand dealers. We would free her from the numberless museums which cover her with as many cemeteries.
The Futurist Painters
Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Umberto Boccioni.
Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound 1913-1914
Influenced by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla adopted the Futurism style, creating a pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed.
Umberto Boccioni (19 October 1882 – 17 August 1916) Visioni simultanee, ca. 1912
A painter and a sculptor. Like other Futurists, his work centered on the portrayal of movement (dynamism), speed, and technology.
Changing content
The first manifesto was published in 11 February 1910. The manifesto argued for artists to distance themselves from the official art of the day and look to the present day for their subject matter and technique. Instead of painting historical, mythological or religious subjects the Futurists encouraged them to paint the new spectacle that was beginning to seep in to people’s everyday life. Beauty and subject matter were to be found now in motorcars, liners, planes, and electricity. In representing these new experiences they were to capture the interpenetration and dynamism of a subject.
‘Dynamic Sensation’
The aim of the Futurist painters was to capture the “dynamic sensation”. In order to portray the “dynamic sensation” artists had to be aware that objects/individuals in life did not exist in isolation to their surroundings; objects penetrated their surroundings. Interpenetration stems from the notion that an object/subject cannot be seen in isolation from its surrounding, but must be viewed in relation to its environment. Therefore all objects/subjects weave into each other, and are seen in relation to other objects/subjects. Another element of dynamic sensation was that objects were not static but were constantly moving, and it was essential to depict this movement. Each painter then proceeded to develop an art form that would be able to translate this dynamic sensation onto canvas. To heighten or emphasise this aspect of interpenetration the painters experimented with different painting techniques, borrowing from the divisionists and developments in photography. The divisionist technique of applying unmixed colour in small dabs alongside each other seemed to lend itself to interpenetration. However, divisionist approach was not a new development in the art world and Marinetti’s obsession with the new demanded a new technique. The painters then referred to current developments in photography and hit on a technique that in their eyes captured the dynamism that they were searching for. In rendering movement, they would use the notion of simultaneity. To represent a galloping horse, several repeated leg movements would illustrate movement of the legs. Another aspect of their technique, also, was the lack of clearly defined outlines. Boundaries are fluid, there is no clarification where one subject ends and where one begins. Movement is also expressed by using such devices as clearly defined horizontals or verticals. All that the artists were stating was contentious to a public that was steeped in the chronicles of the past. To build on their manifestos, the Futurists organised soirées to convey their policies. These soirées were deliberately provocative, and would often end up with either the audiences or futurists group being arrested.
Thais 1916
Futurism and Film
The Futurists claimed that' the cinema, being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. It must become anti-graceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free.’ ‘One must free the cinema as an expressive medium’ The Futurists were the first modern artists who wanted to make films. They also designed sets for films such as Thais (1916) by Bragaglia. Futurist film was not based on a mirror image reality. They employed a new symbolic vocabulary and were not based on conventional narratives. They experimented with colour, lenses and visual effects. The film “Drama of the Futurists’ cabaret No 13 (1913/1914) is credited as being the first Futurist film.
Dimitri Kirsanoff "Ménilmontant" (1925)
Its story is told entirely in images, without the use of explanatory intertitles; Kirsanoff was among the very rare filmmakers of the silent era to attempt this. The film makes use of techniques such as montage, hand-held camera, ultra-rapid montage, and superposition to achieve the elusive, transcendent quality of "photogénie" so sought after by the French impressionist film directors of the era. Ménilmontant, thus, comes closer to poetry than to narrative prose.
Dimitri Kirsanoff "Ménilmontant" (1925)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOeIqYCeVxk
Symphonie Diagonale (1924) & Ballet Mecanique (1924)
Viking Eggeling (Swedish worked in Germany) 1880 - 1925 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxqqPiVDOQ4
Fernand Leger (1881 – 1955) Painter. In 1924, in collaboration with Dudley Murphy, George Antheil, and Man Ray, Léger produced and directed the iconic and Futurism-influenced film, Ballet Mécanique (Mechanical Ballet). Neither abstract nor narrative, it is a series of images of a woman's lips and teeth, close-up shots of ordinary objects, and repeated images of human activities and machines in rhythmic movement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SgsqmQJAq0
Vorticism
Vorticism was a short lived British art movement of the early 20th century. It is considered to be the only significant British movement of the early 20th century but lasted fewer than three years. The British Vorticists hailed the ‘vortex’ as an abstract image for the energy of modern life. The Vorticism group began with the Rebel Art Centre which Wyndham Lewis and others established after disagreeing with Omega Workshops founder Roger Fry, and has roots in the Bloomsbury Group, Cubism, and Futurism. Though the style grew out of Cubism, it is more closely related to Futurism in its embrace of dynamism, the machine age and all things modern (cf. Cubo-Futurism). However, Vorticism diverged from Futurism in the way that it tried to capture movement in an image. In a Vorticist painting modern life is shown as an array of bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer's eye into the centre of the canvas. The name Vorticism was given to the movement by Ezra Pound in 1913 although Lewis, usually seen as the central figure in the movement, had been producing paintings in the same style for a year or so previously.
Percy Wyndham Lewis ( November 18, 1882 – March 7, 1957)
An English painter and author (he dropped the name 'Percy', which he disliked). He was a cofounder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST .
David Garshen Bomberg ( December 5, 1890 – August 19, 1957)
Influence
Saul Bass – The Man with the Golden Arm 1955
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGnpJ_KdqZE
Catch Me if you Can Dir. Steven Spielberg (2002)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVEgK3nCkao
Demise and legacy
The unprecedented death toll of the First World War cut these international lines of cultural exchange in 1914 and left survivors literally shell-shocked by the dark side of modernity. Nevertheless, extensions of the new vision continued in the functional machine aesthetic of the 1920s and the artistic revolution of Cubism and its allies proved fundamental to subsequent developments.
Development of Modernism
Over the next few weeks we will be looking at the further developments of Modernism and their relationship to the moving image. Dada & Surrealism Abstract Expressionism Minimalism & Conceptual Art Post Modernism
Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism
What is Modernism?
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. Modernism questioned the certainties of the previous age: Religion, Autocracy, Classicism A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form, and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction). Literary scholar Peter Childs sums up the complexity:
"There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair."[6]
These oppositions are inherent to modernism: it is in its broadest cultural sense the assessment of the past as different to the modern age, the recognition that the world was becoming more complex, and that the old "final authorities" (God, government, science, and reason) were subject to intense critical scrutiny. Current interpretations of modernism vary. Some divide 20th century reaction into modernism and postmodernism, whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement.
Changing Perceptions
In the early years of the twentieth century, artists forged a radically new image of the world. The everyday experience of urban life was being transformed by innovations in science and technology. Trains, cars and aeroplanes introduced a greater sense of speed, while the popularity of film, radio and the phonograph similarly emphasised change, dynamism and movement. The French philosopher Henri Bergson suggested that these developments demanded a new understanding of existence, and that the simultaneous combination of multiple perceptions and memories was one of the essential characteristics of modern life.
Modernism’s themes include: 1. Rebellion 2. Increasing abstraction 3. Flattening of space 4. Using color, line and shape expressively rather than descriptively 5. Removal of content until eventually the artwork itself was removed 6. Linear progression of these ideas from one movement to the next
The Impressionists “blurry” images of everyday scenes were the first steps toward modernist Abstraction.
Eugene Manet and daughter Julie in the garden Berthe Morisot 1883
They also flattened 3-dimensional space, and were the first artists of Western modernism to paint the world abstractly, rather than how they saw it—two themes of modernism.
Little girl in a blue armchair Mary Cassatt 1878
In the 1870s the Post-impressionists pushed abstraction farther and flattened space more.
Self-portrait Paula ModersohnBecker 1906
They began to use color expressively rather than descriptively —another modernist theme.
The blue room Suzanne Valadon 1923
After the turn of the century, Cubism increased abstraction and flattened space even more. It showed objects from multiple sides simultaneously. For these reasons it is a metaphor for the 20th century. Still life Liubov Popova c. 1916
Inner and outer expansion
The period from 1890 -1914 saw the founding of Modern Logical Philosophy (Wittgenstein, Rusell etc) , Psychoanalysis (Freud). The aeroplanec, radio telegraphy, X-Rays and atomic physics (Einstein) Each of these scientific and analytic discoveries carried a symbolic and romantic dimension, as they expanded the field of vision to embrace exterior flight and the interior body, radio waves and light waves.
Cubism
Cubism, especially in the form developed by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso between 1909 and 1914, offered a revolutionary response to the experience of the modern world. Rejecting the need for realism, painters shifted to a re-conception of the world around them. Picasso and Braque embarked on a period of austere, almost monochromatic paintings in which objects and figures were constructed from fragmentary planes and facets. Their works of 1910-11 reached the verge of total abstraction
Pablo Picasso 1881 –1973 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907
Georges Braque (13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) ‘Simultaneous Perspectives’
Early Film and Cubism
Early film played a catalytic role in the development of Cubism, but as an added layer of reference that does not displace the canonical descriptions and analysis. There is biographical evidence that Picasso was an early cinephile– Picasso first saw a film in 1896 in Barcelona. By 1907 movie-going was a weekly ritual for “la Bande á Picasso.” And by that date, Picasso was certainly borrowing and transcribing from the movies he had been watching for many years; by 1909 he and Braque had formed a fruitful alliance. Cubism’s love affair with film was always within the context of the whole experience of “going to the movies.” Its initial infatuation was with the early single shot film and one-reelers, with slap-stick stories and news events. The engagement of Cubism with film is an affair in which both iconography and process perform their parts in an unlikely marriage of incongruent visual media. Cubist painting adopted the cinema’s heroes and its villains, the musicians who played at the cinema and in it–and their “sound.” But the two artists were just as taken by film’s processes, its camera angles, lighting, shadow patterns, fades and dissolves, and editing techniques, especially time lapses and overlaps that followed the principles of segmentation, division, and alternation to create a unique pattern of scanning within the frame.
Picasso & Braque
Picasso and Braque were not simply absorbing the movies but competing with them, creating modernity even as they were valiantly defending painting from its threat. “Painting always wanted to suggest movement, and suddenly here was movement,” Ms. Rose said. “This was totally amazing for everybody. And for them painting was the most important thing in the world. So they had to capture this movement for painting.”
Early Film and Cubism
It is difficult to imagine the sensation the moving picture evoked in the first decade of the 20th century–it captured reality: “the movement that is life.” Just as photography had been a challenge and opportunity for artists in the 19th century, moving pictures were the new challenge of the 20th century. By the time Picasso painted his breakout canvas, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), film was an important entertainment medium, declared part of the French cultural patrimony. In the next three years, the invention that had begun as a diversion in street fairs, vaudeville, and the café-concerts had taken over the vaudeville theatres and expanded into purpose-built theatres that were attended by people of all classes. With the proliferation of the cinématographe the stage was set for a whole new perceptual structure in the traditional visual arts.
Early Film and Cubism
Early critics tended to ignore or dismiss any connection, largely because they saw cinema as a straightforwardly mimetic medium, far removed from the revolutionary break in painting — in seeing, really — that Picasso and Braque had created. The most extensive consideration of movies and Cubism was made by Natasha Staller in 2001, in her book “A Sum of Destructions: Picasso’s Cultures and the Creation of Cubism,” in which she found specific correspondences between some of Picasso’s work and the images and techniques in the films of Georges Méliès, the French moviemaker and special-effects pioneer. “Picasso appropriated Méliès’s techniques of jarring multiple perspectives, fragmented bodies and body parts, a comic self-conscious dialogue between apparent art and apparent reality,” Ms. Staller wrote. Especially in Picasso’s work, she began to see elements of the cinematograph itself buried in portraits and still life: a crank handle doubling as a woman’s nose in a 1910 painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, her head and body echoing elements of the machine’s lens and film-collecting box and legs, among many other things.
George Melies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWY3LjLw91Q
Definitions – The Avant-Garde
It is difficult howeverto define film in the same terms as Modernism Commercial film evolving from the Lumiere ‘actualities in the 1890’s, embraced narrative, fluidity and desired to absorb, move and enchant audiences. By 1916 D W Griffiths was making the epic narrative film Intolerance In opposition smaller groups developed to question and re-define the growth and influence of cinema
The First Avant-garde
For some film was seen to be the ideal tool to herald the new industrial age and a new way of seeing. For others such as Maxim Gorky it was seen negatively as ‘ A kingdom of Shadows’ Philosphers such as Wittgenstein suggested its ability to understand ‘constructed time and duration’ Modernist artists such as the Futurists and abstract painters such as Ruttman and Eggeling saw film as a means of developing avant-garde abstration.
Lightplay Laslo Moholy Nagy (Bauhaus) (1895 – 1946) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAPLscAO3mE
Dziga Vertov – Man with A Movie Camera
Cubism in art; painting, sculpture, film, etc. played a huge part in the Russian movement of film. Especially in the works of Dziga Vertov and his film, Man with a Movie Camera. Cubism was an art form that depicts an out with the old and in with the new movement. Its style is very Picasso-esque. As one can see, in Man with a Movie Camera, some of the scenes are very different and overlaid on top of each other. Vertov’s style also is like Cubism in that his whole film had to do with street life and the ways of it. The entirety of the film illustrated the workings of the lower classes in Russia, providing a sort of documentary of the lower classes lifestyles in Russia in the 1930s. (Natalia Nussinova)
Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtEOT2ACy0I
Each of modernism’s movements logically followed the movement before it by abstracting more and thinning space more. Each removed something more from art. This gives modernism its linear, self-destructive quality.
Two girls in front of birch trees Paula Modersohn-Becker c. 1905
Futurism
Artists and public alike were outraged by Cubism, but the geometrical fragmentation of form was soon taken up in artistic centres across Europe as a sign of modernism. For the Italian Futurists, it became part of a campaign against cultural and political stagnation in a rapidly industrialising country.
Futurism
Futurism was an ideology that was conceived in Italy in the first decade of the twentieth century. The force behind futurism was Thomas Marinetti. Marinetti’s vision was not just concerned with the arts but was a vision that would permeate all areas of life..
The Futurist Manifesto
The foundation of Marinetti’s agenda can be clearly seen in the futurist Manifesto of 1909, published in the French newspaper Le Figaro. It is significant that Marinetti chose a French newspaper to introduce the public to Futurism. Paris in the early part of the twentieth century was regarded as the art capital of the world. Artists, writers, filmmakers from all over the world flocked to Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was the birthplace of Cubism (which was a rival to Futurism), the writings of Gertrude Stein and after the first world war, a call to the new world order. It was then only right and fitting that Marinetti championed Futurism in Paris.
The Futurist Manifesto of 1909 (Published in Le Figaro, Paris February 20th 1909)
We shall sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. The essential elements of our poetry shall be courage, daring and rebellion. Literature has hitherto glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and sleep; we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. We declare that the world’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing motor car, its framed adorned with great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath…….a roaring motor car, which looks as though running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We shall sing of the man at the steering wheel, whose ideal stem transfixes the Earth, rushing over the circuit of her orbit. The poet must give himself with frenzy, with splendour and with lavishness, in order to increase the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements. There is no more beauty except in strife. No master piece without aggressiveness. Poetry must be a violent onslaught upon the unknown forces, to command them to bow before man. We stand upon the extreme promontory of the centuries!…..Why should we look behind us, when we have to break in the mysterious portals of the Impossibe? Time and Space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have created speed, eternal and ever present. We wish to glorify War- the only health giver of the world-militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that Kill, the contempt for woman. We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarism meanesses. We shall sing of the great crowds in the excitement of labour, pleasure and rebellion; of the multi-coloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capital cities; of the nocturnal vibration of arsenals and workshops beneath their violent electric moons; of the greedy stations swallowing smoking snakes; of factories suspended from the clouds by their strings of smoke; of bridges leaping like gymnasts over the diabolical cutlery of sunbathed rivers; of advent liners scenting the horizon; of broad chested locomotives prancing on the rails like huge steel horses bridled with long tubes; and of the gliding flight of aeroplanes, the sound of whose screw is like the flapping of flags and the applause of an enthusiastic crowd. It is in Italy that we launch this manifesto of violence, destructive and incendiary, by which we this day found Futurism, because we would deliver Italy from its canker of professors, archaeologists, cicerones and antiquaries. Italy has been too long the great market of the second-hand dealers. We would free her from the numberless museums which cover her with as many cemeteries.
The Futurist Painters
Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Umberto Boccioni.
Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound 1913-1914
Influenced by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla adopted the Futurism style, creating a pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed.
Umberto Boccioni (19 October 1882 – 17 August 1916) Visioni simultanee, ca. 1912
A painter and a sculptor. Like other Futurists, his work centered on the portrayal of movement (dynamism), speed, and technology.
Changing content
The first manifesto was published in 11 February 1910. The manifesto argued for artists to distance themselves from the official art of the day and look to the present day for their subject matter and technique. Instead of painting historical, mythological or religious subjects the Futurists encouraged them to paint the new spectacle that was beginning to seep in to people’s everyday life. Beauty and subject matter were to be found now in motorcars, liners, planes, and electricity. In representing these new experiences they were to capture the interpenetration and dynamism of a subject.
‘Dynamic Sensation’
The aim of the Futurist painters was to capture the “dynamic sensation”. In order to portray the “dynamic sensation” artists had to be aware that objects/individuals in life did not exist in isolation to their surroundings; objects penetrated their surroundings. Interpenetration stems from the notion that an object/subject cannot be seen in isolation from its surrounding, but must be viewed in relation to its environment. Therefore all objects/subjects weave into each other, and are seen in relation to other objects/subjects. Another element of dynamic sensation was that objects were not static but were constantly moving, and it was essential to depict this movement. Each painter then proceeded to develop an art form that would be able to translate this dynamic sensation onto canvas. To heighten or emphasise this aspect of interpenetration the painters experimented with different painting techniques, borrowing from the divisionists and developments in photography. The divisionist technique of applying unmixed colour in small dabs alongside each other seemed to lend itself to interpenetration. However, divisionist approach was not a new development in the art world and Marinetti’s obsession with the new demanded a new technique. The painters then referred to current developments in photography and hit on a technique that in their eyes captured the dynamism that they were searching for. In rendering movement, they would use the notion of simultaneity. To represent a galloping horse, several repeated leg movements would illustrate movement of the legs. Another aspect of their technique, also, was the lack of clearly defined outlines. Boundaries are fluid, there is no clarification where one subject ends and where one begins. Movement is also expressed by using such devices as clearly defined horizontals or verticals. All that the artists were stating was contentious to a public that was steeped in the chronicles of the past. To build on their manifestos, the Futurists organised soirées to convey their policies. These soirées were deliberately provocative, and would often end up with either the audiences or futurists group being arrested.
Thais 1916
Futurism and Film
The Futurists claimed that' the cinema, being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. It must become anti-graceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free.’ ‘One must free the cinema as an expressive medium’ The Futurists were the first modern artists who wanted to make films. They also designed sets for films such as Thais (1916) by Bragaglia. Futurist film was not based on a mirror image reality. They employed a new symbolic vocabulary and were not based on conventional narratives. They experimented with colour, lenses and visual effects. The film “Drama of the Futurists’ cabaret No 13 (1913/1914) is credited as being the first Futurist film.
Dimitri Kirsanoff "Ménilmontant" (1925)
Its story is told entirely in images, without the use of explanatory intertitles; Kirsanoff was among the very rare filmmakers of the silent era to attempt this. The film makes use of techniques such as montage, hand-held camera, ultra-rapid montage, and superposition to achieve the elusive, transcendent quality of "photogénie" so sought after by the French impressionist film directors of the era. Ménilmontant, thus, comes closer to poetry than to narrative prose.
Dimitri Kirsanoff "Ménilmontant" (1925)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOeIqYCeVxk
Symphonie Diagonale (1924) & Ballet Mecanique (1924)
Viking Eggeling (Swedish worked in Germany) 1880 - 1925 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxqqPiVDOQ4
Fernand Leger (1881 – 1955) Painter. In 1924, in collaboration with Dudley Murphy, George Antheil, and Man Ray, Léger produced and directed the iconic and Futurism-influenced film, Ballet Mécanique (Mechanical Ballet). Neither abstract nor narrative, it is a series of images of a woman's lips and teeth, close-up shots of ordinary objects, and repeated images of human activities and machines in rhythmic movement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SgsqmQJAq0
Vorticism
Vorticism was a short lived British art movement of the early 20th century. It is considered to be the only significant British movement of the early 20th century but lasted fewer than three years. The British Vorticists hailed the ‘vortex’ as an abstract image for the energy of modern life. The Vorticism group began with the Rebel Art Centre which Wyndham Lewis and others established after disagreeing with Omega Workshops founder Roger Fry, and has roots in the Bloomsbury Group, Cubism, and Futurism. Though the style grew out of Cubism, it is more closely related to Futurism in its embrace of dynamism, the machine age and all things modern (cf. Cubo-Futurism). However, Vorticism diverged from Futurism in the way that it tried to capture movement in an image. In a Vorticist painting modern life is shown as an array of bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer's eye into the centre of the canvas. The name Vorticism was given to the movement by Ezra Pound in 1913 although Lewis, usually seen as the central figure in the movement, had been producing paintings in the same style for a year or so previously.
Percy Wyndham Lewis ( November 18, 1882 – March 7, 1957)
An English painter and author (he dropped the name 'Percy', which he disliked). He was a cofounder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST .
David Garshen Bomberg ( December 5, 1890 – August 19, 1957)
Influence
Saul Bass – The Man with the Golden Arm 1955
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGnpJ_KdqZE
Catch Me if you Can Dir. Steven Spielberg (2002)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVEgK3nCkao
Demise and legacy
The unprecedented death toll of the First World War cut these international lines of cultural exchange in 1914 and left survivors literally shell-shocked by the dark side of modernity. Nevertheless, extensions of the new vision continued in the functional machine aesthetic of the 1920s and the artistic revolution of Cubism and its allies proved fundamental to subsequent developments.
Development of Modernism
Over the next few weeks we will be looking at the further developments of Modernism and their relationship to the moving image. Dada & Surrealism Abstract Expressionism Minimalism & Conceptual Art Post Modernism
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