ART & PHOTOGRAPHY 1900-1920
“A photographer is like a cod that produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.” -- George Bernard Shaw
“Photography You are smoke from the heat Which is its beauty And there in you Photography Languid shades One can hear A melody Photography you are the shadow Of the Sun Which is its beauty” -- Guillaume Apollinaire Calligrames: Photography (1918)
And so, The Photograph… • Has replaced many of the functions of fine art • Has become an extensive form of visual communications • Has created new realms of inexpensive and popular imagery • Has created its own realm of fine art and its own social system of elite iconographies
NATURALISM • J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) • John Constable (1776-1837)
LUMINISM • Frederick Edwin Church (1826-1900) • Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867)
NATURALISM: BARBIZON SCHOOL • Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867) • Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875)
THE ACADEMY • Formally established “schools of art” • Generally had rules, dues, social events, officers, & even a physical location with rooms, studios, libraries & exhibit spaces • Institutional legitimacy often led to formal & conservative styles • Membership often led to exclusivity & sometimes stifling traditionalism • “More concerned with making a career, not making art” – Ossip Zadkine
THE ACADEMY • Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905) • Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) • Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) • Paul Delaroche (1797-1856) • Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912)
PAUL DELAROCHE L’Hémicycle des Beaux-arts. 1841-42.
ALEXANDRE CABANEL The Birth of Venus. 1862.
REALISM • Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) • Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) • James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) • Edouard Manet (1832-1883)
REALISM • Derived from the observations of Descartes & Locke who felt that truth could be discovered through the senses • Revolt against The Academy’s Romanticism • Faith in objective reality undistorted by emotionalism or personal bias • Often depicting people at work throughout the era of the Industrial Revolutions • Celebrating nobility of the working classes • Styles are often rougher & have a less delicate color palettes
• “Artists should be of their own time.” -- Charles Baudelaire
ÉDUARD MANET A Bar at the Follies-Bergere. 1882.
IMPRESSIONISM • • • • • •
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) Claude Monet (1840-1926) Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
IMPRESSIONISM • Style evolves in reaction to the Academy & the Salons • Emphasis on effect rather than line & form • Fascination with light, motion & moment • Subject matter becomes the “impression” of the world itself • Use of color to duplicate sense of world • Celebrating the everyday experience of life
CLAUDE MONET Impression, Sunrise. 1872.
• “Landscape is nothing but an impression, and an instantaneous one, hence this label that was given us, by the way because of me. I had sent a thing done in Le Harve, from my window, sun in the mist and a few masts of boats sticking up in the foreground… They asked for a title for the catalogue, it couldn’t really be taken for a view of Le Harve, and I said, ‘Put Impression.’” -- Claude Monet
ÉDUARD MANET The Luncheon on the Grass. 1862.
• “Impression – I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it…and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” -- Louis Leroy Le Charivari (1874)
POST-IMPRESSIONISM • • • •
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) Georges Seurat (1859-1891) Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
POST-IMPRESSIONISM • Style evolved as reaction to Impressionists • Became much more concerned with structure & form • Lessening interest in transitory effects of light & motion • Turning to different subjects • Color to amplify structure instead of duplicating reality
EUROPEAN SECESSIONISM • Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) • Egon Schiele (1890-1918) • Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
EUROPEAN SECESSIONISM • • • • •
Pessimistic views of life Viewing the world with anxiety & despair Obsessions with death Torture - from without & within Freud - first use of the term “subconscious” in his examination of suicide • Denial of 3-dimensionality - Flattening of subjects • Humanity in crisis
ART NOUVEAU • Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) • Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) • Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)
ART NOUVEAU • Illustrative or decorative • Often used for functional purposes – posters, advertisements, etc. • Organic forms and flowing lines • Subjects accented by plant-like forms and flowers
FAUVISM • Henri Matisse (1869-1954) • André Derain (1880-1954) • Georges Braque (1882-1963)
FAUVISM • Intense use of color • “Living in the country of color” • Vivid form & glorious shapes defined by hues of color rather than by line alone • Non-illusionistic imagery • Life-affirming art – the artist with “the sun in his belly” • Art of the late 19th century, but set at a higher temperature
MODERNISM • • • • •
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973) Georges Braque (1882-1963)
HENRI MATISSE Woman with a Hat. 1905.
MODERNISM • Revolution from the classical Academy as well as the Naturalism of the 19th century • Evolves from the Scientific & Industrial revolutions of the earlier century, but rejects their Formalism in preference to the celebration of Individualism • Conflict between freedom & will which results in rejection of previous generations & experimentation with styles & content • Came to be reflected in all the fine arts
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE [Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki] (1880-1918)
MODERNISM: CUBISM • Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973) • Georges Braque (1882-1963) • Jean Metzinger (1883-1956)
MODERNISM: CUBISM • A derisive critical term referring to cube-like arrangement of small planes of the subjects • Painting represents the idea of something rather than the thing itself • Form & color as catalysts of the profound expression of human spirit • Divesting subject of formal associations of time, place & character • Substituting angular, schematic & often brutal conceptions of world • “You paint what you know is there, not what you can see.” – Gertrude Stein
PABLO PICASSO Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907.
MODERNISM: GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM • Ernest Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) • Emil Nolde (1867-1956)
MODERNISM: GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM • Formed in 1905 as Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden • “He who renders his inner convictions as he knows he must, and does so with spontaneity and sincerity, is one of us.” (Kirchner) • Human spirit endangered by the corruption of modern urban life • The fragmentation of figures is more emotional & less intellectual • Moving closer to pure abstraction
MODERNISM: ABSTRACTIONISM • Franz Marc (1880-1916) • Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) – On the Spiritual in Art (1912)
MODERNISM: ABSTRACTIONISM • Imagery without reference to any visible reality • Die Blaue Reiter (The Blue Group) in Munich, ca1912-1916 • Nonrepresentational imagery is spiritual in orientation • Art should speak directly to the soul & avoid materialism by using the language of color • Color like music finds beauty in the interrelationships of tones & intensities • Pure feelings removed from physical context
WASSILY KANDINSKY The Cow. 1910.
WASSILY KANDINSKY Composition VIII. 1923.
MODERNISM: FUTURISM • • • •
Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) Anton Giulico Bragaglio (1890-1960) Gino Severini (1883-1966)
MODERNISM: FUTURISM • Manifesto of Futurist Painters (1909) created by poet-editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) • Nostalgia for the past = Failure of nerve • Confidence & optimism in the Modern Era • Champions of technology which promises improved social change & new potentials of speed & harnessed energy • Change is acceptable, indeed mandatory, & one can use anything including violence to achieve it
FUTURISM • “The oldest among us are not yet thirty: we have at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!.... • “They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.” -- Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurist Painters (1909)
PHOTOGRAPHY’S ROAD TO MODERNISM 1880-1918
TECHNOLOGY • Photography moves away from the elite and into mass media & culture • Halftone • Press Photography • Picture Post Cards & Stereographs • Enlargement Printing - Solar to Electrical • Growth of the Photo industry -- Dry Plate & Hand Cameras -- Gelatin Roll Film & Kodak No. 1 -- “Instantaneous” Photography -- Flash and Artificial Light • Color experimentation: Autochromes
George Eastman (1854-1932) • • • • •
Eastman Dry Plate & Film Company Eastman Roll Fiilm Eastman Kodak Company Kodak No. 1 Camera “You press the button and we do the rest.”
ART PHOTOGRAPHY • • • • •
Naturalistic Photography Pictorialism The Photo-Secession Anthropological Pictorialism Pictorialism’s Decline
NATURALISTIC PHOTOGRAPHY • • • •
Rejection of the precision of science Use of differential or selective focus Translating the world “as the eye sees” Platinum printing
NATURALISTIC PHOTOGRAPHY • Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916) • Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936)
PICTORIALISM
• • • • •
The goal is the artistic reform of society -Denial of industrialization & mass produced photographs Alternative photochemical & photomechanical processes Self-expression above society Indistinct tones & focus -- Grey tonality & soft focus Rise of sentiment Flourishing of the camera clubs
PICTORIALISM • • • • •
Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901) George Davison (1854-1930) Heinrich Kuehn (1866-1944) F. Holland Day (1864-1933) Frederick H. Evans (1853-1943) -“Pure Photography”
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PICTORIALISM • Follows rules of Pictorialism • Ostensible subject matter is cultural or sociological • Truth may be more representational rather than factually accurate • The aesthetic triumphs over all else
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PICTORIALISM • Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952)
THE CITY • The Ideal City – Charles Dudley Arnold (1844-1927)
• The Modern City – Paul Martin (1864-1944)
• Social Reform – Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) – Jacob Riis (1849-1914) – Lewis Hine (1874-1940)
THE IDEAL CITY • Charles Dudley Arnold (1844-1927) [World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893]
THE MODERN CITY • Paul Martin (1864-1944) • Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1944)
SOCIAL REFORM • Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) • Christina Broom (1863-1939) • Jacob Riis (1849-1914) • Lewis Hine (1874-1940)
SCIENCE & PHOTOGRAPHY • • • •
X-Rays Movement The Futurists Motion Pictures
SCIENCE & PHOTOGRAPHY • • • • • • • •
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890-1960) Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) Georges Meliés (1861-1938) Paul Strand (1890-1976) Charles Sheeler (1883-1965)
“If you cannot see at a glance that the old game is up, that the camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paintbrush as an instrument of artistic representation, then you will never make a true critic; you are only, like most critics, a picture-fancier.” -- George Bernard Shaw, 1901
Picasso on Photograpy “At a time [1909] when we were eager to experience new and different sensations and were prepared to spend some strange evenings in the pursuit of them, we had gathered at Princet’s on one particular evening, after taking hashish…. “…As for Picasso: in a state of nervous hysteria he shouted that he had discovered photography, that he wanted to kill himself, he had nothing left to learn.” -- Fernande Olivier
WAR • • • •
Boer War Spanish-American War Mexican Revolution World War I
WAR • Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) • James H. “Jimmy” Hare (1856-1946) • Christina Broom (1863-1939) • Stereo & Press photographers – Keystone View Company – Underwood & Underwood
“Central branch of combat Touch through listening It pulls in the direction of the rustling The youth of the Class of 1915 And the sons of the electric rail Do not cry about the horrors of war….” -- Guillaume Apollinaire “Calligrammes: War”
WAR Summer 1914 “I said goodbye to Braque and Derain at the train station and never really found them again.” -- Pablo Picasso
“Photography You are smoke from the heat Which is its beauty And there in you Photography Languid shades One can hear A melody Photography you are the shadow Of the Sun Which is its beauty” -- Guillaume Apollinaire Calligrames: Photography (1918)