Vienna: Secessionists (anti-academic art)

Otto Wagner—Postal savings bank architect.  There is a good link to views of the Vienna Post Sparkasse building at http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Post_Office_Savings_Bank.html

Otto Wagner, b. July 13, 1841, d. Apr. 11, 1918, was an Austrian architect and teacher who believed that structural beauty could be attained only through practicality and rationalism. His earliest notable achievements were numerous stations and other structures for the Vienna Stadtbahn (1894-1901), in which exposed ironwork and metal floral decoration show Wagner’s restrained handling of Art Nouveau motifs. Continuing in this manner, Wagner created the Majolika Haus (1898), an apartment complex with a flat, rectangular facade covered with colorful faience plaques. Wagner’s most audacious conception was the Postal Savings Bank (1903-06) in Vienna, a graceful building with a facade of thin marble slabs secured by exposed aluminum bolts. This architectonic clarity is reaffirmed by the vaulted glass ceiling of the main banking room. The same geometric rationalism is evident in his domed Steinhof Asylum church (1903-07).

His teaching at the Vienna Akademie, his textbook, Moderne Arkitektur (1895), and his serenely pragmatic later buildings make him one of the fathers of modern architecture and a powerful influence on such younger Viennese architects as Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, and Josef Olbrich.

Robert F. Chirico

Bibliography: Haiko, Peter, Otto Wagner: Sketches, Projects, and Executed Buildings (1987); Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1977); Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of Modern Design (1961); Richards, J. M., Introduction to Modern Architecture (1940; rev. ed., 1970)

Gustav Klimt—Beethoven frieze

The work of the painter and illustrator Gustav Klimt, b. July 14, 1862, d. Feb. 6, 1918, embodies the high-keyed erotic, psychological, and aesthetic preoccupations of turn-of-the-century Vienna’s dazzling intellectual world. He has been called the preeminent exponent of art nouveau. Klimt began (1883) as an artist-decorator in association with his brother and Franz Matsoh. In 1886-92, Klimt executed mural decorations for staircases at the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; these confirmed Klimt’s eclecticism and broadened his range of historical references. Klimt was a cofounder and the first president of the Vienna Secession, a group of modernist architects and artists who organized their own exhibition society and gave rise to the secession movement, or the Viennese version of Art Nouveau. He was also a frequent contributor to Ver Sacrum, the group’s journal.

The primal forces of sexuality, regeneration, love, and death form the dominant themes of Klimt’s work. His paintings of femmes fatales, such as Judith I (1901; Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna), personify the dark side of sexual attraction. The Kiss (1907-08; Osterreichische Galerie) celebrates the attraction of the sexes; and Hope I (1903; National Gallery, Ottawa) juxtaposes the promise of new life with the destroying force of death.

The sensualism and originality of Klimt’s art led to a hostile reaction to his three ceiling murals--Philosophy (1900), Medicine (1901), and Jurisprudence (1902)--for the University of Vienna.

Other important decorative projects undertaken by Klimt were his celebrated Beethoven frieze (1902; Österreichische Galerie), a cycle of mosaic decorations for Josef Hofmann’s Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905-09), and numerous book illustrations.

Klimt’s style drew upon an enormous range of sources: classical Greek, Byzantine, Egyptian, and Minoan art; late-medieval painting and the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer; photography and the symbolist art of Max Klinger; and the work of both Franz von Stuck and Fernand Khnopff. In synthesizing these diverse sources, Klimt’s art achieved both individuality and extreme elegance.

Jeffery Howe

Bibliography: Belli, Gabriello, Gustav Klimt Masterpieces (1989); Comini, Alessandra, Gustav Klimt (1975); Hofmann, Werner, Gustav Klimt (1972); Novotny, Fritz, and Dobai, Johannes, Gustav Klimt (1968; repr. 1976); Sarmany-Parsons, I., Gustav Klimt (1987); Witford, Frank, Klimt (1990)

Oscar Kokoschka

Oskar Kokoschka, b. Mar. 1, 1886, d. Feb. 22, 1980, was a leading Austrian painter, printmaker, and writer. While a student (1904-09) at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, he was influenced by the Vienna Secession movement, especially the work of Gustav Klimt. Kokoschka soon evolved his own highly personal style in which was reflected the anxious, decadent atmosphere of prewar Vienna. A nervous linearity and psychological intensity characterize The Portrait of August Forel (1909; Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim, Germany); such early expressionist portraits are among his most memorable paintings. A public performance (1909) of his sadistic play Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murder, the Hope of Women; 1907), about the battle of the sexes, provoked scandal, and in 1910, seeking a less hostile milieu, Kokoschka moved to Berlin. There he joined the artist group associated with the influential magazine Der Sturm.

Returning (1911) to Vienna, Kokoschka began a relationship with Alma Mahler that inspired Bride of the Wind (1914; Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland). In part to escape this affair, he joined the Austrian army, only to be severely wounded in 1916. After a painful convalescence, he taught (1919-24) at the Dresden Academy. The work of this period is typified by The Power of Music (1919; Staatliche Gemaldegalerie, Dresden), with its bold colors and broad, crude forms. After 1924, Kokoschka traveled through Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, painting spatially distorted, somewhat impressionistic cityscapes. In 1934 he moved to Prague, but, perceiving the Nazi menace, fled to London in 1938. When the Nazis included some of his works in the Exhibition of Degenerate Art (1937), Kokoschka responded with his Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist (1937; Emil Korner Collection, Port William, Scotland). He became a British citizen but lived in Switzerland after 1953.

Ida K. Rigby

Bibliography: Gombrich, E. H., Homage to Kokoschka (1984); Hodin, J. P., Oskar Kokoschka: The Artist and His Time (1966); Hoffmann, Edith, Kokoschka: Life and Works (1947); Kokoschka, Oskar, My Life, trans. by David Britt (1974); Leshko, Jarslaw, Orbus Pictus: The Prints of Oskar Kokoschka (1987); Schmalenbach, Fritz, Oskar Kokoschka, trans. by Violet M. Macdonald (1968); Wingler, Hans Maria, Oskar Kokoschka: The Work of the Painter (1958).

Egon Schiele: brutal, direct approach to sexual imagery

Austrian expressionist artist Egon Leo Adolf Schiele, b. June 12, 1890, d. Oct. 31, 1918, was at odds with art critics and society for most of his brief life. Even more than Gustav Klimt, Schiele made eroticism one of his major themes and was briefly imprisoned for obscenity in 1912. His treatment of the nude figure suggests a lonely, tormented spirit haunted rather than fulfilled by sexuality. At first strongly influenced by Klimt, whom he met in 1907, Schiele soon achieved an independent anticlassical style wherein his jagged lines arose more from psychological and spiritual feeling than from aesthetic considerations. He painted a number of outstanding portraits, such as that of his father-in-law, Johann Harms (1916; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), and a series of unflinching and disquieting self-portraits. Late works such as The Family (1918; Oesterreichische Galerie, Vienna) reveal a newfound sense of security. Schiele had begun to achieve some degree of stability and success when he died in an influenza epidemic.

Jeffery Howe

Bibliography: Comini, Alessandra, Egon Schiele (1976), Egon Schiele’s Portraits (1974), and Schiele in Prison (1973); Kallir, Jane, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works (1990); Mitsch, Erwin, Egon Schiele (1975)

German Expressionism—

Die Brücke (Dresden): interest in primitive art; myth of the innocent savage

Die Brücke ("The Bridge"), a German expressionist art movement, was founded in Dresden, Germany, in 1905 by Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl. They were later joined by Max Pechstein, Otto Muller, Axel Gallen-Kallela, and Cuno Amiet, and, briefly (1906-07), by Emil Nolde. Their goal was the renewal of German art and a renaissance of German cultural life. In order to educate the public to new art forms, they mounted exhibitions and sent subscribers yearly portfolios of their prints.

Their first exhibition (1906) was accompanied by a manifesto calling on all future-minded artists to unite. They fashioned themselves after a medieval guild, at first living and working communally. By 1911 most of the members had moved to Berlin. They spent summers frolicking nude at nearby lakes or living in Baltic fishing villages in an effort to recapture a primal innocence and freshness of inspiration.

The expressionistic style of the Die Brücke artists is characterized by dynamic, animated brushwork, vibrant color, and emotionally distorted forms and spaces. With Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Edvard Munch as their heroes, they sought to evoke an emotional and psychological reality behind surface appearance. They excelled in woodcut printmaking, incorporating the angular forms of Oceanic and African art for heightened emotional impact. (See EXPRESSIONISM.)

Although their work bears formal affinities with that of the Fauves (see FAUVISM), the Brücke artists, unlike the Parisian group, were primarily concerned with psychological expression. Their art was permeated, to varying degrees, by angst over modern society.

Tensions in the group, present from about 1910, culminated in 1913 in its dissolution, the immediate result of protest over Kirchner’s controversial history of the organization, Chronicle of the Brücke. An art collection and historical archive of the movement is housed in the Brücke Museum, West Berlin.

Ida K. Rigby

Bibliography: Myers, Bernard S., The German Expressionists (1957); Selz, Peter, German Expressionist Painting (1957)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, b. May 6, 1880, was a leading German expressionist painter and a master of graphics, especially the woodcut. He first studied architecture but turned to painting in Munich (1903-04) and then, in Dresden (1905), became a founding member of Die Brücke (The Bridge) with Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. This group was strongly influenced by Vincent van Gogh’s intense color and heavy impasto (thickness of paint) as well as the color experiments of the French Fauves (see FAUVISM). Kirchner also learned from the works of Albrecht Durer, woodcuts of the late Gothic period, and primitive sculpture.

Kirchner painted female nudes, mountainous landscapes, and city streets. His Self-Portrait with Model (1907; Kunsthalle, Hamburg) shows the artist wearing a brightly striped robe--perhaps his model’s--shadowed with green, and his expression violent and masklike. In Five Women on the Street (1913; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne) the expression of pain is even more aggressive. Kirchner transforms the long dresses and feather boas of the time into sinister, barbaric costumes. During this period he replaced his bright palette with a darkly shadowed range of colors. Kirchner’s bitter view of his world is expressed all the more sharply in his starkly savage and highly acclaimed woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings, of which he produced about 2,000.

Drafted into the German army during World War I, Kirchner suffered a nervous breakdown. On his release from the army he settled in Switzerland and returned to intense color for a time. By the late 1920s, however, his palette had become subdued. The forms of his landscapes and portraits became less angular and more serene and the emotional urgency of his earlier works disappeared, although an undercurrent of melancholy remained. By the mid-1930s his works were being attacked (and many were later confiscated) by the Nazis, who were unsympathetic to the avant-garde. On June 15, 1938, in despair and poor health, he committed suicide.

Carter Ratcliff

Bibliography: Gordon, Donald E., Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: A Retrospective Exhibition (1968); Grohmann, Will, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1961); Henze, Anton, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1980); Selz, Peter, German Expressionist Painting (1957).

Erich Heckel, b. July 31, 1883, d. Jan. 27, 1970, was one of the best-known German expressionist painters (see EXPRESSIONISM). In 1904 he went to Dresden to study architecture, but in 1905 he joined with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Fritz Bleyl to form the group called Die Brücke ("The Bridge"). Deeply affected by the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, these artists attempted to bring revolutionary ideals, spontaneity of expression, and a return to the methods of the artisan to their work, which included printmaking as well as painting. Inspired by French fauvism, Heckel painted his subjects--chiefly female nudes and landscapes--with vigorous brushstrokes of bright color. Die Brücke was disbanded in 1913. During World War I, Heckel served with the Red Cross in Flanders, and later his highly personal expressionist style became less violent and more meditative. Denounced by the Nazi government in 1937, he spent World War II in seclusion. From 1949 to 1955, he taught at the Karlsruhe Academy of Plastic Arts, continuing to paint until the last years of his life.

Carter Ratcliff

Bibliography: Dube, Wolf-Dieter, The Expressionists (1985); Haftmann, Werner, Twentieth Century Painting (1965); Herbert, Barry, German Expressionism (1983); Selz, Peter, German Expressionist Painting (1957)

France: Fauves (influenced by Paul Gaugin

Henri Matisse, b. Dec. 31, 1869, d. Nov. 3, 1954, ranks among the greatest painters of the 20th century. He worked as a law clerk until 1891, when he began to study under the conservative painter Adolphe William Bouguereau at the Academie Julian. In 1892, Matisse entered the atelier of Gustave Moreau, whose highly finished Salon paintings were preceded by adventurous experiments with color and symbolism that were important to Matisse’s later development. During the late 1890s, Matisse became familiar with the work of the postimpressionists, especially that of Paul Cézanne, which exerted a strong influence on his style. During those years Matisse met Charles Camoin, Georges Rouault, and Albert Marquet, painters of his age who, with Maurice Vlaminck, Andre Derain, and Georges Braque, were to join with him in forming the Fauve group (see FAUVISM).

"Les Fauves," or "Wild Beasts," was a derogatory label applied to these artists when they exhibited together in Paris in 1905. Their imagery--composed of strokes of bright, often clashing, color--defied all traditional canons of competent painting and shocked the general public. Led by Matisse and Derain, the Fauves released painting from realistic depiction, freeing it to express the pleasures of pure color. Recognizable subjects appear in the paintings of the Fauves--portraits, still lifes, and interiors are especially prevalent. However, these motifs are used as pretexts for pictorial innovation, sometimes tending toward pure abstraction. Typical of Matisse’s painting during this period is Woman with a Hat: Madame Matisse (1905; private collection, California), in which the sitter’s dress, skin, and feathered hat are rendered in an unnaturalistic pattern of energetically brushed greens, pinks, and lavenders. The masterpieces of his early work are a series of large canvases titled The Dance (1910; Museum of Modern Western Art, Moscow).

Under the influence of Cubism, Matisse’s palette became more somber and his shapes took on a geometrical severity for a time--as in The Moroccans (1916; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) and The Piano Lesson (c.1917; Museum of Modern Art). During the 1920s, Matisse’s color brightened again and his patterns became more complex, especially in his Odalisques, female nudes against arabesques of North African fabrics. He also adopted decorative motifs from ancient Persian art.

Matisse carried the expressive freedom of his Fauve manner into sculpture, which first achieved distinctive individuality in the flowing, semiabstract forms of La Serpentine (1909; Museum of Art, Baltimore, Md.) and The Back (1909-30; Museum of Modern Art), a series of monumental figure studies. In 1931-33 he returned to an earlier theme in The Dance, a pair of large mural paintings, one of which is at the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa.

Throughout his career Matisse employed his serene and joyous imagery in mediums outside the fine arts--book illustration, tapestry and rug design, and architectural decoration. From 1944 to the end of his life, he produced decoupes, in which he cut shapes from colored paper and pasted them onto fields of white. These works, which achieve an ultimate blending of Matisse’s vibrant color with the energetic flow of his line, are considered by many to be his best. Matisse’s supreme accomplishment, which may be seen in all his work, was to liberate color from its traditionally realistic function and to make it the foundation of a decorative art of the highest order.

Carter Ratcliff

Bibliography: Barr, Alfred H., Matisse: His Art and His Public, rev. ed. (1974); Dutchuit, Georges, Matisse: Fauve Period (1956); Elsen, Albert E., The Sculpture of Henri Matisse (1971); Flam, Jack, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1969-1918 (1986); Fry, Roger, Henri Matisse (1930); Lieberman, William S., Matisse: Fifty Years of His Graphic Work (1956); Marchiori, Giuseppe, Matisse (1967); Matisse, Henri, Matisse on Art, ed. by Jack Flam (1973); Russell, John, The World of Matisse (1969); Selz, Jean, Matisse, trans. by A. P. H. Hamilton (1964)

André Derain

Andre Louis Derain, b. June 17, 1880, d. Sept. 8, 1954, was part of the original group of French painters to work in the early modernist style known as fauvism. As an art student in Paris, Derain first came to prominence in 1905, when he, together with Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and others, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. The critic Louis Vauxcelles, offended by their use of brilliant, pure colors and spontaneous execution, called them les fauves ("wild beasts"), giving the new style its name. Derain’s Fauvist works typically display bright patches of color and bold, asymmetrical compositions, as in Westminster Bridge (1907; private collection, Paris).

Toward the end of 1907, Derain abandoned Fauvism and, like his new friends Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, turned to Paul Cézanne for inspiration. Derain, however, never fully adopted the cubist style forged by these other artists from 1908 on. By 1918, Derain had repudiated both Cubism and the new abstract art in favor of a more traditional approach to the construction of solid forms, based on the example of the old masters. From the 1920s on, a strong classical influence is evident in Derain’s paintings and drawings and in the stage designs he produced for the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev and other companies.

Bibliography: Diehl, Gaston, Derain, trans. by A. P. H. Hamilton (1964); Sutton, Denys, Andre Derain (1959)

Paris acts as magnet for modern art & artists

Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,

Cubism

Georges Braque, use of collage

Georges Braque, b. May 13, 1882, d. Aug. 31, 1963, in collaboration with Pablo Picasso, was the founder of Cubism. After receiving training at the local art school in Le Havre, Braque went to Paris in 1900. There he studied (1902-04) at the Academie Humbert and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Leon Bonnat. Braque’s early works, those of 1903-05, were executed in the mood of early impressionism. Greatly influenced by Andre Derain, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck, Braque entered (1906 or 1907) his Fauve period, in which he used soft undulating patterns and brilliant colors. Unlike the other Fauves (see FAUVISM), however, he showed an interest in architectonic solidity of composition and an emphasis on strongly defined volumes rather than color and brushwork.

A crucial change in Braque’s art came in the fall 1907, when he rediscovered Paul Cézanne at the memorial exhibitions at the Salon d’Automne and the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. At this time, he also met Picasso. In the late work of Cézanne, both Braque and Picasso saw a new geometrization of form and new spatial relationships that were to become the basis of Cubism. Spurred by his close association with Picasso, whose Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906-07) has been called "the first painting of the 20th century," Braque transformed his style radically. Within three years, Picasso and Braque invented analytic Cubism, a new, completely nonillusionistic and nonimitative method of depicting the visual world. Their concerns were so mutual and their association so intense that in many instances only experts can distinguish Braque’s paintings of 1910-12 from those of Picasso. Violin and Pitcher (1910; Kunstmuseum, Basel) is one of the best examples of Braque’s analytic Cubism. The paintings of this period are all executed in muted greens, grays, ochers, and browns. The objects are fragmented, as though seen from multiple viewpoints. This multiplicity introduced the element of time into vision. These fragments, or cubes, are organized along a grid, thereby creating a compact pictorial structure.

Braque’s works from the period 1917-20 are derived compositionally from synthetic Cubism, the second phase of Cubism, which began about 1914. Much flatter and more variegated in color, they include brightly dotted decorative passages. Around 1930-31, Braque moved to the coast of Normandy in France. As a result, he changed the subjects of his paintings; bathers, beach scenes, and seascapes were now his favorite themes. Stylistically, he became increasingly interested in ornamentation and patterned surfaces. During the late 1930s and early ‘40s, Braque was drawn to melancholy themes. From 1945, birds were a dominant subject. Braque’s canvases done during the 1950s show a return to the brilliant colors of the Fauve period, as in the Louvre ceiling (1952-53) and the decoration for the villa at Saint Paul-de-Vence (1954). Active until the end of his life, Braque produced an oeuvre that includes sculpture, graphics, book illustration, and decorative art.

Magdalena Dabrowski

Bibliography: Cogniat, Raymond, Georges Braque (1980); Cooper, Douglas, Braque: The Great Years (1973); Elderfield, John, The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities (1976); Leymarie, Jean, Braque (1961); Monod-Fontaine, Isabel, and Carmean, E. A., Braque: Papiers Colles (1982); Mullins, Edwin, The Art of Georges Braque (1968); Richardson, John, Georges Braque (1958); Russell, John, Braque (1959); Zurcher, Bernrd, Braque: His Life and Work, translated by Simon Nye (1989)

Emphasis on urban life

Italy: Futurists (right-wing politics), link to Cubism

Umberto Boccioni, b. Oct. 19, 1882, d. Aug. 16, 1916, was an Italian futurist painter and sculptor and a leading theoretician of the futurist movement. In 1898 he moved to Rome, where he met Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, both of whom later became fellow futurists. Balla’s neoimpressionist style influenced Boccioni’s early work. This influence was enhanced by the paintings of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, which Boccioni saw in Paris in 1902. During the years 1902-04, he traveled throughout Europe and Russia, where he acquainted himself with the latest movements in art. Returning to Italy in 1905, Boccioni joined (1909) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Italian futurism, and painted his first major futurist work, Riot in the Gallery (1909; Jesi Collection, Milan). He was a coauthor with Marinetti and the painters Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Balla, and Severini, of the Technical-Manifesto of Futurist Painters (1910) and became active in the movement throughout Europe. On a trip to Paris in 1911, Boccioni first encountered the cubists. Subsequently, his style showed a strong cubist influence, which became apparent in his growing interest in the intensive analysis of form. By 1912 he had developed an interest in sculpture, publishing the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture that year.

Boccioni’s stylistic evolution led from neoimpressionism to an idiom influenced by Cubism and the theories of universal dynamism. In an attempt to capture a material world in flux and resolve the contrast between the world of external appearances and that of the internal spirit, Boccioni gradually moved toward greater abstraction. His paintings, such as The City Rises (1910; Museum of Modern Art, New York), and sculpture, for example, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), are characterized by the fusion of the object and its environment.

Boccioni was perhaps the most gifted of the futurist artists, and his work was influential in the development of other abstract styles.

Magdalena Dabrowski

Bibliography: Golding, John, Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1972); Lista, Giovanni, Futurism (1986); Martin, Marianne W., Futurist Art and Theory 1909-1915 (1968); Taylor, Joshua, Futurism (1961); Tisdall, Caroline, and Bozzolla, Angelo, Futurism (1978)

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: "War, sole hygene of the world."

The Italian playwright and poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, b. Alexandria, Egypt, Dec. 22, 1876, d. Dec. 2, 1944, began the aesthetic movement futurism in 1909, when his flamboyant, extraordinary "Futurist Manifesto" appeared in the Parisian daily Le Figaro. The manifesto exalted machines, speed, and war, which was defined as "the world’s only hygiene." To exemplify his theories of words freed from the constraints of tradition, Marinetti eliminated all adjectives, adverbs, and punctuation from his plays and poems. He also proposed a break with metrical schemes, syntax, and every other convention of creative writing. Initially limiting these theories to literature, Marinetti soon extended them to painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. Largely because of his early support of fascism, he won nomination in 1929 to the newly reconstituted Royal National Academy, becoming its president after the death (1937) of the scientist Guglielmo Marconi. Marinetti’s works include Mafarka the Futurist (1910; Eng. trans., 1972) and Zang Tumb Tumb; The Siege of Adrianople (1914; Eng. trans., 1972).

Sergio Pacifici

Bibliography: Joll, James, Three Intellectuals in Politics: Blum, Rathenau, and Marinetti (1960); Marinetti, F. T., Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by R. W. Flint (1972), Stung by Salt and War, comp. and trans. by Richard Pioli (1987), and the Futurist Cookbook, ed. by Leslie Chamberlain and trans. by Sue Brill (1989).

Germany,

Vassily Kandinsky: "Der Blaue Reiter"

The Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky, b. Dec. 4 (N.S.), 1866, d. Dec. 13, 1944, is often regarded as the originator of abstract art. Although interested in painting from an early age, he did not become a full-time artist until 1896, when he abandoned a legal career to study painting in Munich. Trips to Paris familiarized him with neoimpressionism and the work of Paul Gauguin and the Fauves. In 1907 he exhibited with the German expressionist group Die Brücke, and in 1909 he founded the New Association of Munich Artists. In 1910, Kandinsky executed his first abstract painting and wrote his famous theoretical study Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), developing his ideas about nonrepresentational painting, the psychological power of pure color, and the analogy between art and music. In 1911, Kandinsky, with August Macke, Franz Marc, and, later, Paul Klee, founded Der Blaue Reiter group. During the same year Kandinsky and Marc published their theories of abstract art and in December 1911 and February 1912 held exhibitions of their work.

After spending some time in Switzerland, Kandinsky returned (1914) to Moscow, where he taught and organized numerous artistic activities. He moved (1921) to Germany once again and became a teacher at the Bauhaus in 1925. In 1926 he wrote Point and Line to Plane, an analysis of geometric forms in art. During this decade Kandinsky’s painting evolved from the more expressionistic and highly colored improvisations of his early work toward more precisely drawn and geometrically arranged compositions. When the Bauhaus was closed (1933) by the Nazis, Kandinsky moved to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. His later works are arrangements of organically shaped forms resembling microscopic creatures. Kandinsky’s paintings and theoretical writings exercised a strong influence on the subsequent development of modern art, especially on the development of abstract expressionism.

Barbara Cavaliere

Bibliography: Grohmann, Will, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work (n.d.); Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning The Spiritual In Art (1947; repr. 1976) and Complete Writings on Art, 2 vols. (1982); Kandinsky, Wassily, and Marc, Franz, eds., The Blaue Reiter Almanac (1974); Lacosta, M.C., Kandinsky (1979); Le Targat, F., Kandinsky (1987); Overy, Paul, Kandinsky: The Language of the Eye (1969); Picon, Gaetan, Washton, Rose-Carol, and Kandinsky, Nina, Kandinsky: Parisian Period 1934-1944 (1969); Volboudt, P., Kandinsky, trans. by J. Brenton (1986); Weiss, P., Kandinsky in Munich (1982; repr. 1986).

Franz Marc, "The Fate of the Animals"

One of Germany’s leading expressionist painters, Franz Marc, b. Feb. 8, 1880, died during World War I before his art could reach its full development. Marc found his direction in his early twenties, during a visit to Paris, where he saw paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and the Fauves. Upon his return to Munich he began to incorporate these ideas into his own work. By 1908, Marc had made animals his exclusive subject matter, rendering them in a sinuous, organic style related to Jugendstil, a style closely allied to Art Nouveau. In 1911, Marc became a founding member, with Wassily Kandinsky, of Der Blaue Reiter, an association of expressionist painters that established contact with similar movements in France and Italy. Thereafter, Marc began to depict his subjects--horses, deer, tigers--in a more intellectualized, geometric manner. His series Deer in the Forest (1913-14; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe) shows recognizable images becoming progressively more enmeshed in surging diagonal lines and patterns of vivid, often clashing color. By 1914, when he enlisted in the German Army, Marc’s work had become almost wholly abstract. He was killed on Mar. 4, 1916, at Verdun, France.

Carter Ratcliff

Bibliography: Dube, Wolf-Dieter, The Expressionists, trans. by Mary Whittall (1972); Selz, Peter, German Expressionist Painting (1957)

Macke, August: b. Jan. 3, 1887, Meschede, Ger.

d. Sept. 26, 1914, Perthes-les-Hurlus, Fr.

German painter who was a leader of Der Blaue Reiter group, one of the sources of German Expressionism. Macke was influenced, particularly in his earlier work, by his teacher Lovis Corinth, as well as by the Cubists and the Impressionists. A lyrical temperament, however, is revealed in his works, which avoid the often violent style and subject matter of his fellow Expressionists. His art combines the tradition of French painting--its sense of the grace of movement and atmosphere in landscape painting--with the cosmic sentiment of German art.

In 1914 Macke traveled to Tunis with Paul Klee, and there he painted a series of works that place the subject upon a grid of various pure colours. These paintings demonstrate the effect that Orphic Cubism had upon Macke and number among his most widely admired works. Macke was killed in action in World War I.

pre-war Russia: mystic abstraction

Kasimir Malevich: "Red Square" Suprematist

Russian painter Kasimir Malevich, b. Feb. 11 (N.S.), 1878, d. May 15, 1935, was a key figure in the development of abstract art. After studying at the Kiev School of Art and in Moscow, he executed several works in a figurative style influenced by the Fauves. In later works, such as Woman with Baskets: Dynamic Arrangement (1912; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), he worked in a cubist style. By 1915 he had carried Cubism to its logical limits by eliminating all references to pictorial representation and by reducing forms to basic geometric shapes painted in flat, pure colors against plain backgrounds. He called (1913) this style suprematism, by which he meant to indicate that pure feeling without any reference to the visual world was the supreme concern of art. Pursuing this theory, he embarked (1917-18) on a series of paintings in which white geometric shapes were set against white backgrounds, as in his Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918; Museum of Modern Art).

For a few years after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Malevich and his followers dominated Soviet art schools and museums, and Malevich set himself up as director of the art school in Vitebsk, ousting Marc Chagall, whom he considered old-fashioned. After 1921, however, abstract art fell out of favor in the USSR, and Malevich’s suprematist paintings were stigmatized as decadent by the government. He never regained official favor. Only in 1989, with the mounting of a major retrospective exhibition in Moscow, was the artist rehabilitated and accorded full recognition in his homeland.

Bibliography: Barr, Alfred J., Cubism and Abstract Art (1936); Gray, Camilla, Kasimir Malevich, 1878-1935 (1959), and The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922 (1971); Malevich, Kasimir, The Non-Objective World, trans. by Howard Dearstyne (1959).

Suprematism was one of the most austere kinds of geometric abstract art in the early part of the 20th century. Created in Russia by the painter Kasimir Malevich in 1913, the movement lasted in his native country until 1921, when official government policy turned against all such art. Suprematist ideas, however, were important to the evolution of abstract art in Germany and the Netherlands. Malevich’s work became particularly influential in the west as a result of the German translation of his Non-Objective World published (1927) by the Bauhaus. One of the most important books on abstract art, it ranks with the writings of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. In his suprematist paintings, as the artist later explained, Malevich wanted to rid art of "the ballast of the objective world" and did so initially by using only the square. He then evolved a more complex art employing a variety of pure geometric shapes (see constructivism). Unlike Mondrian’s art, which sought stillness, Malevich’s, in its use of diagonals, was dynamic. Malevich’s aim was to produce an art of what he called "pure feeling," devoid of the realism of objects in the visible world.

David Irwin

Bibliography: Andersen, Troel, Malevich, rev. trans. by Arnold McMillin (1970); Gray, Camilla, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922, rev. ed. (1971); Malevich, Kasimir, Essays on Art 1915-33, trans. by Xenia Glowackiz Prus and Arnold McMillin, 2d ed. (1971).

Post-war Berlin

George Grosz: anti-right wing, anti-Weimar

The German-American painter, caricaturist, and graphic artist George Grosz, b. Berlin, July 26, 1893, d. July 6, 1959, is best known for his acerbic satires of German society. "I wanted to protest against this world of mutual destruction.... I saw misery, want, stupor, hunger, cowardice, ghastliness.... a hellish procession of dehumanized figures rolls on.... against mankind gone mad I painted this protest," he stated in his defense at a trial for blasphemy in Germany in 1930.

After studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts Grosz moved (1912) to Berlin to attend art school and to work as a magazine and book illustrator. He studied the work of Honore Daumier, Francisco de Goya, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He served in the German army during World War I and spent time in a military mental institution; his experiences motivated the publication of his antiestablishment caricatures. In 1919, Grosz joined the Club Dada in Berlin and in 1920 organized the First International Dada Fair. His kaleidoscopic images of postwar Berlin give a strident portrait of a dislocated society, as in Dedicated to Oskar Panizza (1917-18; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart). The first of Grosz’s many portfolios to be confiscated by the police was God with Us (1920), a satire on German society. In 1921 he was fined for slandering the German army and in 1924 for obscenity in Ecce Homo (1923). Grosz’s graphic images of grimacing, lewdly gesticulating figures--murderers, sadists, alcoholics, prostitutes, and addicts--and caricatures of judges, generals, capitalist bosses, war profiteers, and patriots portrayed a spiritually bankrupt society.

Because of the rise of the Nazi party, Grosz left Germany in 1932 to live in the United States. He was invited (1933) to teach at the Art Students League of New York and became a U.S. citizen in 1938. Away from his German sources of inspiration, Grosz’s work became less strident and more realistic, as in Couple (1934; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City). The outbreak of World War II, however, caused him to resume his social commentary, for example Peace, II (1946; Whitney Museum of American Art). His autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No: The Autobiography of George Grosz, was published in 1946.

Ida K.Rigby

Bibliography: Baur, John, George Grosz (1954); Bittner, Herbert, ed., George Grosz (1951); Hess, Hans, George Grosz (1974); Lewis, Beth, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (1971).

Fernand Léger: "Mechanical Elements" machine as hero

The French painter Fernand Leger, b. Argentan, Feb. 4, 1881, d. Aug. 17, 1955, was a major figure in the development of Cubism and a prime expositor of modern urban and technological culture. After moving (1900) to Paris he worked as an architectural draftsman and a photographic retoucher and also studied informally at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julien. By 1911, Leger had become a key member of the evolving cubist movement. His personal style of Cubism is characterized by tubular, fractured forms and bright colors highlighted by juxtaposition with cool whites--a decorative scheme that conveys a sense of form in relief. Major works of this cubist period include La Noce (1911-12; Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris), Woman in Blue (1912; Oeffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel), and Contrasts of Forms (1913; Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Following World War I, Leger concentrated more and more on urban and machine imagery, which led logically to his association (1919-c.1925) with the purism of Le Corbusier and Amedee Ozenfant. In paintings such as The Mechanic (1920; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) and Three Women (1921; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), he favored sharply delineated, flat shapes, unmodeled color areas, and combinations of human and machine forms. After 1930, Leger’s style favored precisely delineated and monumental forms modeled in planes and set in shallow space, and he concentrated on depicting scenes of proletarian life, such as his Great Parade (1954; Guggenheim Museum, New York City).

Magdalena Dabrowski

Bibliography: Buck, R.T., et al., Fernand Leger (1982); Cassou, Jean, and Leymarie, Jean, Fernand Leger, trans. by W. K. Haugham (1973); De Francia, Peter, Fernand Leger (1983); Diehl, Gaston, Fernand Leger (1985); Fabre, Gladys C., and Rose, Barbara, Leger and the Modern Spirit (1983); Green, Christopher, Leger and the Avant-Garde (1976); Rosenblum, Robert, Cubism and Twentieth Century Art, rev. ed. (1976); Schmalenbach, Werner, Leger (1986).

Reactions: Dadaism

Dada was an international, avant-garde art and literary movement that flourished between 1915 and 1922. The Dadaists’ declared purpose was to protest the senseless violence of World War I, which they believed had made all established moral and aesthetic values meaningless. The term itself means "hobbyhorse" in French and was supposedly chosen at random from the dictionary. Dada promulgated anti-art and non-sense, declaring that art did not depend in any way on established rules or on craftsmanship; the only law was that of chance, and the only reality that of the imagination. Dada is often viewed as nihilistic (see Nihilism), but it can also be seen as a kind of thoughtful irrationality, a way toward liberation achieved by penetrating into the unknown regions of the mind. Dada appeared nearly simultaneously in Zurich, New York City, and Paris, and soon took hold in Germany. It finally concentrated in Paris.

In Zurich, where political exiles of all kinds took refuge during World War I, Dada was initiated by Hugo Ball, a German actor and playwright; Jean ARP, an Alsatian painter and poet; Richard Huelsenbeck, a German poet; Marcel Janco, a Romanian artist; and Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet. Together they founded the Cabaret Voltaire--a theater, literary gathering place, and exhibition center. They offered scandalous and mysterious entertainments, lectured, and exhibited together a variety of artists such as Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso. Arp illustrated the works of Huelsenbeck and Tzara, and created a new type of collage by tearing pieces of colored paper and arranging them according to chance. In 1918, Tzara wrote the manifesto for the movement.

Marcel Duchamp, who in 1915 had moved to New York City and in the same year coined the term "ready-made," was the chief anticipator of Dada. For his ready-mades, Duchamp took mundane objects such as snow shovels, urinals, and bottle racks, gave them titles, and signed them, thus turning their context from utility to aesthetics. Duchamp also invented word games, made an abstract film, and edited several reviews in the United States from 1913. His friend Francis Picabia worked with him and with Man Ray in New York on the Dada review 291; Picabia founded the 391 review in Barcelona in 1917.

In 1919 Max Ernst launched Dadaism in Cologne with his friend Arp. Ernst’s type of collage technique was an important contribution to the Dada cause, as was the collage-painting of Kurt Schwitters, the chief figure of Dada in Hanover, Germany, who called Dada Merz, "something cast-off, junk."

Dada emerged as a group activity in Paris when a Dada salon opened at the Montaigne Gallery in 1922. Dada has had a long and significant influence in art to the present time, and was the subject of a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989.

Dada found literary expression in France--principally in the form of nonsense poems and random combinations of words--with the writings of Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Paul Eluard. They founded the revue Litterature in 1919; it was published until 1924. These writers soon abandoned the Dada movement, however, and turned to Surrealism.

Barbara Cavaliere

Bibliography: Ades, D., et al., In the Mind’s Eye: Dada and Surrealism (1985); Erickson, John, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art (1984); Hedges, I., Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (1983); Lemoine, S., Dada (1987); Lippard, L., ed., Dadas On Art (1971); Matthews, J. H., The Theatre in Dada and Surrealism (1974); Motherwell, Robert, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets, 2d ed. (1989); Richter, Hans, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (1965; repr. 1985); Rubin, William, Dada and Surrealist Art (1969); Verkauf, Willy, Dada: Monograph of a Movement (1957)

Marcel Duchamp: "Ready-mades" urinals, hatracks, bicycle wheel

Marcel Duchamp, b. July 28, 1887, d. Oct. 2, 1968, was a French painter and theorist, a major proponent of DADA, and one of the most influential figures of avant-garde 20th-century art. After a brief early period in which he was influenced chiefly by Paul CÉZANNE and Fauve color (see FAUVISM), Duchamp developed a type of symbolic painting, a dynamic version of facet CUBISM (similar to FUTURISM), in which the image depicted successive movements of a single body. It closely resembled the multiple exposure photography documented in Eadweard MUYBRIDGE’s book The Horse in Motion (1878).

In 1912, Duchamp painted his famous Nude Descending A Staircase, which caused a scandal at the 1913 ARMORY SHOW in New York City. In the same year he developed, with Francis PICABIA and Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, the radical and ironic ideas that independently prefigured the official founding of Dada in 1916 in Zurich. In Paris in 1914, Duchamp bought and inscribed a bottle rack, thereby producing his first ready-made, a new art form based on the principle that art does not depend on established rules or on craftsmanship. Duchamp’s ready-mades are ordinary objects that are signed and titled, becoming aesthetic, rather than functional, objects simply by this change in context. Dada aimed at departure from the physical aspect of painting and emphases in ideas as the chief means of artistic expression.

In 1915, Duchamp moved to New York City, where he was befriended by Louise and Walter Arensberg and their circle of artists and poets, which constituted New York Dada. That same year he began his major work, The Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a construction of wire and painted foil fitted between plates of transparent glass. In 1918 he completed his last major painting, Tu m’, a huge oil and graphite on canvas, a unique combination of real and painted objects and illusionistic and flat space. Following his maxim never to repeat himself, Duchamp "stopped" painting (1923) after 20 works and devoted himself largely to the game of chess. Nevertheless, by 1944 he had secretly begun sketches on a new project, and between 1946 and 1949 created his last work, the Etant Donnes (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Barbara Cavaliere

Bibliography: Alexandrian, Sarane, Duchamp (1977); Bailly, Jean-Christophe, Duchamp. trans. by Jane Brenton (1986); Bonk, E., Marcel Duchamp; Box in a Valise (1989); Cabanne, P., Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1971; repr. 1987); Golding, John, Duchamp (1973); Kuenzli, R.E., and Maumann, F.M., eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century (1989); Moure, G., Marcel Duchamp (1988); Paz, Octavio, Marcel Duchamp, trans. by D. Gardner and R. Phillips (1981); Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 2d ed. (1970).

Constantin Brancusi "Bird in Space"

Constantin Brancusi, b. Pestisani Gorj, Romania, Feb. 21, 1876, d. Mar. 16, 1957, was one of the most innovative and influential sculptors of the 20th century. He studied at the academies of Krakow, Bucharest, and Munich and, in 1904, went to Paris, where he studied sculpture for two years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Antonin Mercie. In 1906 Brancusi came into contact with Auguste RODIN but refused to work with him, seeking instead his own expressive form. The first important example of his personal style is the stone sculpture The Kiss (1908), which was erected over a friend’s grave in the Cimetiere Montparnasse in Paris. It demonstrates his use of primitivism in its simplicity of form and compactness.

Brancusi’s primitivism is specifically modern; unlike the primitive art from which it takes its inspiration, it is symbolic rather than depictive, and it gives attention to form for its own sake. Brancusi subscribed to one of the most decisive ideas of modern sculpture, "truth to materials," that is, he respected the medium and conserved its specific quality by doing the least possible to shape his works.

Brancusi, about 1910, began producing nonrepresentational sculptures in marble or metal, concentrating on two basic themes: variations of the egg shape and soaring bird motifs. Among these works are The New-Born (1915; marble, Philadelphia Museum of Art; and 1920; polished bronze, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Bird in Space (1919-25, several versions in marble and bronze), both of which exemplify his sensuous, simply modeled, contemplative, and mystical style.

An important feature of Brancusi’s work is the continuity it establishes between the space occupied by the object and the space outside it, a quality much emulated in subsequent sculpture from Henry MOORE to Carl ANDRE. Brancusi’s wood sculpture, which emphasizes the natural condition of both shape and surface, anticipates a similar quality in DADA and surrealist found sculpture and in the junk sculpture of the 1950s (see SURREALISM). In his independent search for elemental, organic forms that transmit the elemental ideas of life, Brancusi created an enigmatic and mystical art that is concerned with inner reality. He wrote: "...That which they call abstract is the most realist, because what is real is not the exterior form but the idea, the essence of things." BARBARA CAVALIERE

Bibliography: Geist, Sidney, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture (1968; repr. 1983) and Brancusi: The Sculpture and Drawings (1975); Lewis, David, Constantin Brancusi (1957); Hulton, Pontus, and Dumitresco, Natalia, eds., Brancusi, trans. by Mark Paris (1987); Read, Herbert, Constantin Brancusi (1957); Spear, Athena T., Brancusi’s Birds (1969); Varia, Radu, Brancusi (1985).

Geometric abstraction--remove the object from the painting

Piet Mondrian (church paintings, trees become more abstract)

Piet Mondrian, b. Mar. 7, 1872, d. Feb. 1, 1944, among the most prominent of the 20th century’s geometric painters, evolved an austere art of black lines and colored rectangles placed against white backgrounds. Mondrian wished to create not only a new art but also a new perception of life. In his view, the contradictions of the modern world--for example, the discipline imposed by technology versus the freedom of the individual--were more apparent than real. By rising above the particular (or the tradition of representational art) to the general (or abstract art), humanity could achieve a new metaphysical synthesis. This belief is implicit in paintings that to some people look like nothing more than highly refined adventures in esthetics.

Mondrian’s early paintings are fairly conventional Dutch landscapes, but after 1908--when he became aware of recent and avant-garde art movements of that time (symbolism and Fauvism)--he began to withdraw from imitation of nature. This inclination was supported by his decision in 1909 to join the Theosophical Society, whose religious mysticism encouraged him to turn inward to a spiritual world.

Finally, in 1911, Mondrian discovered the cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Thereafter, in Paris (1912-14), he produced his own version of CUBISM. It was to be a very short step from his cubist trees and still lifes to the pure abstractions that he produced from 1916 onward.

Throughout World War I, Mondrian remained in Holland, which was a neutral nation. Isolation from Paris at this time fostered an independent modern movement in Holland, leading Mondrian and several other Dutch artists to form the DE STIJL group (1916), which published its own periodical (De Stijl, 1917-32). There, Mondrian explained his ideas, which were later codified in the pamphlet Neoplasticism (1920). He used straight lines joined at right angles because he believed this to be the angle of perfect equilibrium. He used red, yellow, blue, black, white, and gray because they are not found in their purest form in nature and are therefore the most abstract colors. In short, Mondrian wanted his art to express a universal, spiritual, and harmonious conception of the universe and of humanity’s place within it.

Mondrian emigrated to the United States in 1940 and died in New York City four years later. He influenced not only artists slightly younger than himself, such as Ben Nicholson and Max Bill, but also, in the 1950s and ‘60s, some of the American hard-edge abstractionists. An extensive collection of Mondrian’s work is preserved in the Gemeente Museum, The Hague.

David Irwin

Bibliography: Elgar, Frank, Mondrian, trans. by Thomas Walton (1968); Mondrian, Piet, Mondrian, ed. by H. L. Jaffe (1970); Mondrian, Piet, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, 1937 and Other Essays, 1941-43, ed. by Robert Motherwell (1945); Seuphor, Michel, Piet Mondrian (1956); Welsh, R. P., Mondrian (1966)

Russian Revolution: artists are part of the political struggle

Constructivists [like a Russian Bauhaus?]

Vladimir Tatlin: "Tower"

The Russian painter and sculptor Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin, b. Dec. 28 (N.S.), 1885, d. May 31, 1953, was the founder of CONSTRUCTIVISM, which grew out of his interest in exploring the sculptural possibilities of various "modern" materials--such as glass, concrete, wire, and sheet metal--through abstract reliefs and constructions. In 1913, Tatlin, who had been conventionally trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, visited Pablo Picasso in Paris. This encounter revolutionized his outlook and prompted him to launch his artistic experiments. In 1919 he began plans for a concert-lecture-exhibit hall to be called Monument to the Third International (never carried beyond a scale model).

A union of architecture, sculpture, light, painting, and motion, it would have consisted of two cylinders and a glass pyramid rotating at different speeds and encircled by a spiral tower 400 m (1,312 ft) high. Abstract art was discredited by the Soviet government in 1920; Tatlin moved to Leningrad in 1921, where he taught the study of materials at the Research Institute for Artistic Culture.

Barbara Cavaliere

Bibliography: Gray, Camilla, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922 (1962); Nakov, A. B., Tatlin’s Dream: Russian Suprematist and Constructivist Art, 1910-1923 (1973).

Alexander Rodchenko, LiubovPopova, Varvara Stepanova

http://masters-of-photography.com/R/rodchenko/rodchenko_articles1.html

Rodchenko, Alexander (Russian): 1891-1956

Alexander Rodchenko, one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution, worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles - usually high above or below - to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."

Rodchenko was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. He moved with his family to Kazan, in eastern Russia, in 1902. He studied at the Kazan School of Art under Nikolal Feshin and Georgii Medvedev, and at the Stroganov Institute in Moscow. He made his first abstract drawings, influenced by the Suprematism of Malevich, in 1915. The following year, he participated in "The Store" exhibition organized by Vladimir Tatlin, who was another formative influence in his development as an artist.

Rodchenko was appointed Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund by the Bolshevik Government in 1920. He was responsible for the reorganization of art schools and museums. He taught from 1920 to 1930 at the Higher Technical -Artistic Studios (Vkhutemas/Vkhutein).

In 1921 he became a member of the Productivist group, which advocated the incorporation of art into everyday life. He gave up painting in order to concentrate on graphic design for posters, books, and films. He was deeply influenced by the ideas and practice of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, with whom he worked intensively in 1922.

Impressed by the photomontage of the German Dadaists, Rodchenko began his own experiments in the medium, first employing found images in 1923, and from 1924 on shooting his own photographs as well. His first published photomontage illustrated Mayakovsky's poem, "About This," in 1923.

From 1923 to 1928 Rodchenko collaborated closely with Mayakovsky (of whom he took several striking portraits) on the design and layout of LEF and Novy LEF, the publications of Constructivist artists. Many of his photographs appeared in or were used as covers for these journals. His images eliminated unnecessary detail, emphasized dynamic diagonal composition, and were concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space.

Throughout the 1920s Rodchenko's work was abstract often to the point of being non-figurative. In the 1930s, with the changing Party guidelines governing artistic practice, he concentrated on sports photography and images of parades and other choreographed movements.

Rodchenko joined the October circle of artists in 1928 but was expelled three years later for "formalism." He returned to painting in the late 1930s, stopped photographing in 1942, and produced abstract expressionist works in the 1940s. He continued to organize photography exhibitions for the government during these years. He died in Moscow in 1956.

In recent years Rodchenko's work has been the subject of renewed interest. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. A show of 50 prints was held in 1976 in Milan and Rome.

Germany: Bauhaus (Weimar, 1919): single vision for the arts, design school

The Bauhaus (full name staatliches Bauhaus, "state building house") was the most famous school of architecture and design of the 20th century. Founded by Walter GROPIUS at Weimar, Germany, in 1919, the Bauhaus was originally a combined school of fine art and school of arts and crafts. In his opening manifesto, Gropius issued a call for the unification of all the creative arts under the leadership of architecture. He declared that a mastery of materials and techniques was essential for all creative design. Students were to have two teachers in every course, one an expert craftsman, the other a master artist.

The preliminary course, organized by Johannes Itten, introduced students to rudiments of design, freed from historic associations: size, shape, line, color, pattern, texture, rhythm, and density. This course has become the foundation for design education in many countries. It was followed in the curriculum by advanced work with form and materials, including workshops in stone, wood, metal, pottery, glass, painting, and textiles. Industrial design became a major focus at the Bauhaus, which hoped to improve radically the quality of all manufactured goods.

Teachers appointed in the early years included Lyonel FEININGER, Gerhard Marcks, Johannes Itten, and Adolf Meyer (1919); Georg Muche (1920); Paul KLEE and Oskar SCHLEMMER (1921); Wassily KANDINSKY (1922); and Laszlo MOHOLY-NAGY (1923). From the beginning, the striking newness of the concepts developed at the Bauhaus and the liberal beliefs of many of the people associated with it aroused strong opposition.

In 1925 political pressures forced the removal of the school from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new complex of buildings for it, including classrooms, shops, offices, and dwellings for faculty and students.

This group of buildings in Dessau came to symbolize the Bauhaus to the rest of the world. Although Gropius repeatedly insisted that it was never his intention to codify a Bauhaus style or dogma, the need for a new architectural image appropriate to a technological age caused the Bauhaus to be adopted as a model for what came to be known as the INTERNATIONAL STYLE, or, more generally, MODERN ARCHITECTURE.

Gropius left the Bauhaus for private practice in 1928 and was succeeded as director by Hannes Meyer. Strong political pressures continued. In 1930 Ludwig MIES VAN DER ROHE took over as director, moved the school to Berlin in 1932, and finally closed and disbanded it under pressure from the Nazis in 1933.

Among the former students who became important teachers at the Bauhaus were Josef ALBERS, Marcel BREUER, and Herbert Bayer. The Bauhaus became influential around the world as a result of the continued active teaching and designing by former faculty and students, including many Americans. In the United States, Gropius became dean of the School of Architecture at Harvard University, Mies van der Rohe became dean of architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, and Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago.

The work and principles of the Bauhaus have been further disseminated by many publications and exhibitions that have circulated internationally. A major Bauhaus Archive, founded at Darmstadt in 1961, was moved in the 1970s to Berlin. Another Bauhaus Archive is kept at Harvard University. The design philosophy of the Bauhaus continues pervasive to the present day.

Ron Wiedenhoeft

Bibliography: Franciscono, Marcel, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar (1971); Marzona, E., and Fricke, R., eds., Bauhaus Photography (1985); Wingler, Hans, The Bauhaus (1969)

Walter Gropius, b. Berlin, May 18, 1883, d. July 1969, was one of the most important architects and educators of the 20th century. The son of a successful architect, Gropius received his professional training in Munich. After a year of travel through Spain and Italy, he joined the office of Peter BEHRENS, the most important European architect of the day, in Berlin.

In 1910, Gropius left Behrens to work in partnership with Adolf Meyer until 1924-25. This period was the most fruitful of Gropius’s long career; he designed most of his significant buildings during this time. The Fagus factory in Alfeld-an-der-Leine (1911) immediately established his reputation as an important architect. Notable for its extensive glass exterior and narrow piers, the facade of the main wing is the forerunner of the modern metal and glass curtain wall. The omission of solid elements at the corners of the structure heightens the impression of the building as a glass-enclosed, transparent volume. In his next major work, the Administration Building for the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne (1914), Gropius carried the idea further by glazing the entire facade including the corner stairwells. His entry in the Chicago Tribune competition of 1922 was an application of these principles to skyscraper design. In contrast to the winning Gothic design by Raymond Hood, Gropius’s solution was free of all eclectic or historical detail. Using the rectangular Chicago window employed by architects like Louis SULLIVAN, Gropius offered a significant European solution to the design problem posed by America’s most innovative structure, the skyscraper.

Gropius’s educational philosophy encompassed the designing of all functional objects. His goal was to raise the level of product design by combining art and industry. Although these principles were inherited from English reformers like William MORRIS, Gropius was able to implement them when he reorganized the Arts and Crafts School in Weimar, which became the world-famous BAUHAUS. The unique educational program of the school sought a balance between practical training in the crafts and theoretical training in design. The integration of the arts was stressed, as is evidenced by the faculty who were attracted there--Josef ALBERS, Marc CHAGALL, Lyonel FEININGER, Wassily KANDINSKY, Paul KLEE, and Laszlo MOHOLY-NAGY. In 1925 the Bauhaus was forced to move to Dessau, where a landmark of modern architecture was constructed: the Bauhaus in Dessau (1925-26). Asymmetrical in its overall composition, the Bauhaus consists of several connected buildings, each containing an important part of the school (including administration, classrooms, and studio space). The workshop wing, a 4-story glazed box, is the most striking part of the complex.

With Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Gropius fled to England, where he practiced briefly with Edwin Maxwell FRY. In 1937, Gropius was appointed to teach at Harvard. He was widely respected as a teacher and designed a number of American buildings, including the Harvard University Graduate Center (1950). Gropius espoused collaborative effort in the design process and founded a firm that he worked with until his death in 1969.

Leon Satkowski

Bibliography: Busignani, Alberto, Gropius (1973); Fitch, James M., Walter Gropius (1960); Franciscono, Marcel, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar (1971); Giedion, S., Walter Gropius, Work and Teamwork (1954); Gropius, Walter, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, trans. by P. Morton Shand (1935).

Le Corbusier: "Villa Savoye"

Charles Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, b. La Chaux-de-fonds, Switzerland, Oct. 6, 1887, d. 1965, was a Swiss-French architect who played a decisive role in the development of MODERN ARCHITECTURE. He first studied (1908-10) in Paris with August Perret, and then worked (1910) for several months in the Berlin studio of industrial designer Peter Behrens, where he met the future BAUHAUS leaders Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Shortly after World War I, Jeanneret turned to painting and founded, with Amedee Ozenfant, the purist offshoot of Cubism. With the publication (1923) of his influential collection of polemical essays, Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture, Eng. repr. 1970), he adopted the name Le Corbusier and devoted his full energy and talent to creating a radically modern form of architectural expression.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, Le Corbusier’s most significant work was in urban planning. In such published plans as La Ville Contemporaine (1922), the Plan Voisin de Paris (1925), and the several Villes Radieuses (1930-36), he advanced ideas dramatically different from the comfortable, low-rise communities proposed by earlier garden city planners. During this 20-year span he also built many villas and several small apartment complexes and office buildings. In these hard-edged, smooth-surfaced, geometric volumes, he created a language of what he called "pure prisms"--rectangular blocks of concrete, steel, and glass, usually raised above the ground on stilts, or pilotis, and often endowed with roof gardens intended to compensate for the loss of usable floor area at ground level.

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After World War II, Le Corbusier moved away from purism and toward the so-called New Brutalism, which utilized rough-hewn forms of concrete, stone, stucco, and glass. Newly recognized in official art circles as an important 20th-century innovator, he represented (1946) France on the planning team for the United Nations Headquarters building in New York City--a particularly satisfying honor for an architect whose prize-winning design (1927) for the League of Nations headquarters had been rejected. Simultaneously, he was commissioned by the French government to plan and build his prototypical Vertical City in Marseilles. The result was the Unite d’Habitation (1946-52)--a huge block of 340 "superimposed villas" raised above the ground on massive pilotis, laced with two elevated thoroughfares of shops and other services and topped by a roof-garden community center that contained, among other things, a sculptured playground of concrete forms and a peripheral track for joggers.

His worldwide reputation led to a commission from the Indian government to plan the city of CHANDIGARH, the new capital of the Punjab, and to design and build the Government Center (1950-70) and several of the city’s other structures. These poetic, handcrafted buildings represented a second, more humanistic phase in Le Corbusier’s work that also was reflected in his lyrical Pilgrim Church of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950-54) in the Vosges Mountains of France; in his rugged monastery of La Tourette, France (1954-59); and in the several structures he designed (from 1958) at Ahmedabad, in India. Le Corbusier accidentally drowned in a swimming accident off Cap Martin in the Mediterranean on Aug. 27, 1965.

Peter Blake and Leli Sudler

Bibliography: Baker , Geoffrey H., Le Corbusier, 2d ed. (1989); Benton, Tim, The Villas of Le Corbusier (1987); Besset, Maurice, Le Corbusier (1976; repr. 1987); Blake, Peter, Le Corbusier: Architecture and Form (1963) and The Master Builders (1976); Brooks, H. Allen, Le Corbusier (1987); Curtis, William J., Le Corbusier (1986); Guiton, Jacques, The Ideas of Le Corbusier (1981); Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, ed. by Willy Boesiger, abr. ed. (1967); Serenyi, Peter, ed., Le Corbusier in Perspective (1975); Weber, Heidi, Le Corbusier--the Artist (1989)

USA: Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House, "Falling Water" Guggenheim museum, Johnson Wax building

The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, b. Richland Center, Wis., June 8, 1867, d. Apr. 9, 1959, was one of the most innovative and influential figures in MODERN ARCHITECTURE. In his radically original designs for both residential and commercial structures, as well as in his prolific writings on modern architecture and society, he championed the virtues of what he termed organic architecture, a building style based on natural forms.

After briefly studying civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Wright moved to Chicago, where he went to work (1887) as a draftsman in the office of Adler and Sullivan. While working under Louis SULLIVAN--whom Wright called "Lieber Meister"--he began designing and building on his own a few private houses for some of Adler and Sullivan’s clients. These "bootlegged houses," as Wright called them, soon revealed an independent talent quite distinct from that of Sullivan. Wright’s houses had low, sweeping rooflines hanging over uninterrupted walls of windows; his plans were centered on massive brick or stone fireplaces at the heart of the house; his rooms became increasingly open to each other, with space flowing from one into the next; and the overall configuration of his plans became more and more asymmetrical, reaching out toward some real or imagined prairie horizon.

In contrast to the expansive openness of those houses which inspired the PRAIRIE SCHOOL, Wright’s urban buildings (unlike Sullivan’s, for instance) tended to be walled in, somewhat inhospitable to the city, and lit primarily through skylights. Whereas two of the finest buildings of Wright’s early period--the Larkin Company Administration Building (1904; demolished 1950) in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Unity Church (1906) in Oak Park, Ill.--reflected an antiurban bias, houses he designed in the same period--for example, the ROBIE HOUSE (1909) in Chicago, and the Martin House (1904) in Buffalo--reached out into the landscape with large, glazed walls, low-slung roof overhangs, terraces, and similar devices.

Wright worked on his own after 1893, when the issue of his bootlegged houses finally caused a break with Adler and Sullivan’s office. During the 20 years that followed he became one of the best-known (and, because of a tempestuous personal life, one of the most notorious) architects in the United States. Two editions of his work brought out (1910, 1911) by the Berlin publisher Wasmuth, along with a parallel exhibition that traveled throughout Europe, boosted Wright’s fame in European architectural circles and influenced such key figures in contemporary architecture as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

His reputation assured on both sides of the Atlantic, Wright began to reinforce the philosophical underpinnings of his innovative building style. In keeping with his agrarian bias, Wright proclaimed that the structural principles found in natural forms should guide modern American architecture. He praised the virtues of an organic architecture that would use reinforced concrete in the configurations found in seashells and snails and would build skyscrapers the way trees were "built"--that is, with a central "trunk" deeply rooted in the ground and floors cantilevered from that trunk like branches. Spaces within such buildings would be animated by natural light allowed to penetrate the interiors and to travel across textured surfaces as the incidence of sunlight and moonlight changed.

His view of architecture was essentially romantic. Although Wright often paid lip service to the rational systems called for by mass-produced building (modular planning and prefabrication), his efforts in those directions seemed half-hearted at best. The most spectacular buildings of his mature period--Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel (1915-22; demolished 1968); Fallingwater (Kaufmann House; 1936), Bear Run, Pa.; the S. C. Johnson and Son Wax Company Administration Center (1936-50), Racine, Wis.; TALIESIN WEST (1938-59); and New York City’s GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM (completed 1959)--were based on forms borrowed from nature, and the intentions were clearly romantic, poetic, and intensely personal. At his death he left a rich heritage of completed buildings of almost uniform splendor; few disciples, however, could match the special genius reflected in his works. Unlike Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and other giants of modern architecture, Wright was, at heart, an essentially idiosyncratic architect whose influence was immense but whose pupils were few.

Peter Blake And Leli Sudler

Bibliography: Blake, Peter, The Master Builders (1976); Gutheim, Frederick, ed., In the Cause of Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright (1975); Hitchcock, Henry Russell, In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887-1941, 2d ed. (1969); Kaufmann, Edgar, and Raeburn, Ben, Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings (1970); Scully, Vincent, Jr., Frank Lloyd Wright (1960); Sweeney, Robert L., Frank Lloyd Wright: An Annotated Bibliography (1978); Twombly, Robert C., Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture (1979); Wright, Frank Lloyd, An Autobiography, 3d ed. (1943; repr. 1977).

Art Deco is an architectural and decorative-arts style, popular from 1910 to 1940, that is characterized by highly stylized natural and geometric forms and ornaments, usually strongly symmetrical. Outstanding American examples of Art Deco are the CHRYSLER BUILDING and RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL in New York City. Some of the century’s most significant artists, such as Pablo PICASSO, Fernand LEGER, Sonia Delaunay, and Wassily KANDINSKY, produced work in the style, as did designers of furnishings, textiles, jewelry, and advertising.

Art Deco themes were often classical motifs reduced to geometric stylizations. Edgar Brandt decorated wrought-iron screens with symmetrical fountains; Emil Ruhlman inlaid ebony cabinets with ivory to depict floral arrangements of geometrical precision; Rene LALIQUE etched scenes, such as a gracefully striding female with a wolfhound or a gazelle, into crystal or frosted glass; and Jean Puiforcat and Daum depicted abstract geometric forms.

The term Art Deco, coined in the 1960s when interest in the style revived, was derived from L’Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. This Paris exhibition of 1925 came midway in Art Deco’s development and was a definitive display of the style. At this time Art Deco was also known as "Art Moderne" or "Modernistic"; later it was called "Jazz Pattern," or "Skyscraper Modern."

The INTERNATIONAL STYLE in architecture developed at the same time, and after 1925 it considerably influenced the final phase of Art Deco. Along with CUBIST painting and the German BAUHAUS school, the work of LE CORBUSIER and other International Style architects effected a change from the earlier, more decorative phase of Art Deco toward a simpler, bolder approach typical of the 1930s.

Art Deco emerged as a reaction to ART NOUVEAU. Its two forerunners were Charles Rennie MACKINTOSH of Scotland and Josef HOFFMANN of Vienna. These men were reformers of the excesses of the Art Nouveau style, and their works in 1900 were an indication of what was to appear in the next decades.

Hoffman’s austere Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905-11), with its mosaic murals by Gustave KLIMT, was surprisingly advanced for its time, and it marked the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco. In 1903 Hoffman founded the WIENER WERKSTATTE, a workshop that produced some of the earliest Art Deco designs.

These concepts were introduced in Paris in 1910 with an exhibition of decorative arts from Munich and Vienna at the Louvre. On display was a new style based on a simplification of the early 19th-century neoclassical BIEDERMEIER style and of peasant art, or FOLK ART, quite the antithesis of Art Nouveau. Another significant event in Paris in 1910 was the presentation by the BALLETS RUSSES DE SERGE DIAGHILEV of Scheherazade. Leon BAKST had concocted oriental sets and costumes in dazzling, barbaric colors; this brought a demand in the fashion world for exoticism, soon answered by the couturier Paul POIRET. In 1912, Poiret created his own design school, the Atelier Martine, to further his Art Deco ideas. By the 1920s the effects of cubist painting were seen in advertising and product designs. Coco CHANEL used cubist colors and forms in creating women’s fashions, which she adorned with Art Deco jewelry.

African sculpture and ancient Egyptian and Southwest American Indian arts all had their influence on Art Deco in this decade, as did Archaic Greek art. With the influence of the Bauhaus and the International Style after 1925, Art Deco arrived at a final development that reflected the industrial age, thus achieving a reconciliation of the arts and machine production that had troubled artists and designers since the Industrial Revolution began.

E. M. Plunkett

Bibliography: Arwas, Victor, Art Deco (1985), Art Deco Sculpture (1985), and Glass: Art Nouveau to Art Deco (1987); Battersby, Martin, Art Deco Fashion (1974; repr. 1984); Duncan, Alistair, American Art Deco (1986) and, as ed., The Encyclopedia of Art Deco: An Illustrated Guide to a Decorative Style from 1920 to 1939 (1988); Hillier, Bevis, The World of Art Deo (1971; repr. 1981); Lesieutre, Alain, The Spirit and Splendour of Art Deco (1974); Lucie-Smith, Edward, Art Deco Painting (1990); Menten, Theodore, The Art Deco Style (1972)

Diego Rivera, b. Dec. 8, 1886, d. Nov. 24, 1957, was the most prominent painter of the modern Mexican mural movement. After attending the Academy of San Carlos, where one of his teachers was the landscapist Jose Maria Velasco, he became influenced by the caricaturist Jose Guadalupe Posada and other popular Mexican artists. During two trips (1907-10 and 1911-21) to Europe, he was profoundly influenced by the art of Giotto and Francisco Goya as well as by modern masters, notably Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre Auguste Renoir. Rivera executed some cubist works but soon discarded European avant-garde aesthetics in favor of an approach that reflected his view of the struggle between social classes. By the time he returned (1921) to Mexico, he was committed to a new popular art movement based on large mural works depicting contemporary Mexican life.

In his early mural projects, such as those at the National Preparatory School (1922) and the Ministry of Education Building (1923-28) in Mexico City, he concentrated on social and political themes expressed in bold, dramatic forms. After a visit to Russia (1927-28), where his Marxist views were reinforced, he painted more ideologically oriented and realistically rendered murals, as at the National Palace (1929-55) and at Cuernavaca’s Palace of Cortes (1929-30). His growing reputation led to invitations to paint frescoes at the San Francisco Stock Exchange (1931), the Detroit Institute of Art (1932), and Rockefeller Center (1933) in New York City--although the last-named work was destroyed by its sponsors because it contained a portrait of Lenin. Rivera’s murals are rich in archaeological detail and painted in a sharply outlined, linear style. Most of them have clear, three-dimensional figures in a shallow space, although a deep spatial extension of landscape appears at the top of some works. Rivera also executed many easel paintings and portraits and designed and built his Mexico City house, the Anahuacalli, which is now a museum housing the extensive collection of pre-Columbian art that he left to the Mexican people.

Donald And Martha Robertson

Bibliography: Arquin, Florence, Diego Rivera (1971); Hurlburt, Laurance P., The Mexican Muralists in the United States (1990); Paine, Francis F., Diego Rivera (1931; repr. 1972); Reed, A. M., The Mexican Muralists (1960); Rivera, Diego, with Gladys March, My Art, My Life (1960); Wolfe, Bertram D., The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (1968)

René Magritte, b. Francois Ghislain Magritte, in Lessines, Belgium, Nov. 21, 1898, d. Aug. 15, 1967, was a leading painter and theorist of surrealism (see SURREALISM, art). He worked as a commercial artist for some years, at one time designing wallpaper--a dreary activity that had the virtue of teaching him about illusions of depth and the effects of repeated patterns.

The aspiring painter was influenced by orphic Cubism and by futurism, but the surrealistic vistas and alien perspectives of Giorgio de CHIRICO had the most lasting impact on his art. By 1925 he was concentrating almost entirely on surrealist works.

Almost all of Magritte’s paintings feature some sort of visual paradox: a restless blue sky with a hole in it, a human body with a fish’s head, a hat suspended in midair. His seas and skies seem bright and sunny, but there is a disturbing artificiality about the too-regular clouds and the too-glassy water. The point of this interplay between precisely drawn objects and abnormal settings and features is that the common-sense perception of reality is only one way of looking at the world. In The Human Condition I (1934; Claude Spaak Collection, Choisel, France), Magritte forcefully demonstrates the paradoxes of perception by placing a painting showing a landscape view within the window overlooking an identical view.

Magritte’s matter-of-fact way of depicting anomalies and incongruities in the fabric of reality often seems as humorous as it is disturbing. Many of his paintings are laden with visual jokes--such as the woman with a fish’s head in Le Chant d’Amour (1948; Private collection, Chicago), who is simply a mermaid with the piscine half above instead of below. Underlying the humor, however, is a serious attempt to demonstrate the multifaceted character of perceived reality.

Phil Patton

Bibliography: Gablik, Suzi, Magritte (1970); Hammacher, Abraham M., Magritte, trans. by James Brockway (1974); Noel, Bernard, Magritte (1977); Soby, J. T., Rene Magritte (1966); Torczyner, Harry, Magritte: Ideas and Images (1977).

The Spanish painter Salvador Dali, b. May 11, 1904, d. Jan. 23, 1989, was a leader of SURREALISM. He studied (1921-26) at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid and associated with such future Spanish modernists in the arts as Federico GARCIA LORCA and Luis BUNUEL; his early work was influenced by the Italian futurists, particularly Carlo CARRA, and later by the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de CHIRICO. Dali himself stated that the true motivating forces in his work were his inbred Catalan sense of fantasy and what he called his megalomania.

After moving to Paris, Dali frequented the Cafe Cyrano, the headquarters of the Parisian surrealists, and in 1929 first exhibited his own surrealist paintings. He studied the writings of Sigmund Freud and subsequently declared an ambition to "systemize confusion." Such paintings as Persistence of Memory, popularly known as Soft Watches (1931; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), and The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955; National Gallery, Washington, D.C.) became widely known and part of the definitive record of 20th-century art.

Displaying an early technical virtuosity, Dali worked in several media, including jewelry, advertisements, beer bottle design, and ballet sets and costumes. In collaboration with Bunuel, Dali created the famous surrealist films Un Chien andalou (1928; An Andalusian Dog) and L’Age d’or (1931; The Age of Gold). His personal eccentricities--flowing capes, handlebar mustache, and popping eyes--made him recognized around the world.

Bibliography: Ades, Dawn, Dali and Surrealism (1982); Dali, Salvador, Diary of a Genius, trans. by Richard Howard (1965); De Liano, I. G., Dali (1984); Descharnes, Robert, Dali: The Work, the Man, trans. by Eleanor Morse (1984); Morse, A. Reynolds, Salvador Dali (1966); Rom, Rudolf, Salvador Dali: The Surrealist Angel, rev. ed. (1985); Secrest, Meryle, Salvador Dali (1985); Soby, James T., Salvador Dali (1946; repr. 1970).

learned the fine draftsmanship and the taste for free expression that became hallmarks of his style. His good fortune in teachers continued when he enrolled (1912) in the Academy Gali, whose director, Francisco Gali, insisted on the importance of music and poetry in developing aesthetic sensibility and of integrating the arts on a spiritual level. Another formative influence on the young artist was Jose Dalmau, a modernist art dealer who introduced Miro to Fauvism and Cubism.

Although he enjoyed close contact with his countryman Pablo Picasso after moving to Paris (1919), Miro was influenced much more by the Fauves and the primitivism of Henri Rousseau than by the rigors of Cubism. His first paintings in Paris combined extreme realism and geometrical abstraction, often inspired by the austere Catalan landscape of his homeland. Contacts with the Dadaist poets in the early 1920s acquainted Miro with surrealism, and he began to experiment with hallucinatory and dream-inspired art. From 1924 on he was a key figure in the circle of Andre Breton and other surrealists. Miro brought to the surrealist movement a humorous sense of fantasy and a startlingly fresh palette, as in his poetic and colorful The Harlequin’s Carnival (1924-25; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.) and Dog Barking at the Moon (1926; Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Throughout the late 1920s and ‘30s, Miro experimented with ever freer compositions whose organization results from the interplay of their individual elements rather than from a schema imposed from the outside. In works such as Painting (1933; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) his debt to collage art is noticeable in the loose organization of the composition. After executing a group of paintings reflecting the anguish and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, Miro turned his intensely individualistic style to ceramics, tapestry design, and mural painting--fields to which he made significant contributions in his later years.

Irma B. Jaffe

Bibliography: Chilo, Michel, Miro: the Artist, the Work, trans. by Margreth Schultze (1977); Dupin, Jacques, Miro, trans. by Norbert Guterman (1962); Penrose, Roland, Miro (1970); Rowell, Margit, Miro (1970); Soby, James T., Joan Miro, trans. by Ricardo Gullon (1959); Sweeney, James J., Joan Miro (1941; repr. 1970

The German painter-poet Max Ernst, b. Apr. 2, 1891, d. Apr. 1, 1976, was a member of the DADA movement and a founder of SURREALISM. He studied philosophy at the University of Bonn (1909-11) and in 1913 visited Paris, where he first met his lifelong friend Jean ARP and other avant-garde artists of the time. A self-taught artist, he formed a Dada group in Cologne, Germany, with Arp and Johannes Baargeld in 1919. Like his fellow Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, he evolved a technique based on assemblage, or COLLAGE. He pioneered a method akin to brass rubbing called frottage, in which a sheet of paper is placed on the surface of an object and then penciled over until the texture of the surface is transferred.

In 1922, Ernst moved to Paris, where he collaborated with the French surrealists Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Philippe Soupault on the review Litterature. He showed at the first surrealist painting exhibition in Paris in 1925. His vivid imagination was constantly provoked by absurdities, and his work is full of disturbing images--often of fantastic birds and animals set in bizarre landscapes--that reflect his fascination with the art of the insane. While in Paris he painted L’Elephant celebes (1921; Tate Gallery, London) and created collages composed entirely of ready-made printed fragments. His two important collage books, La Femme 100 tetes (The Woman with 100 Heads; 1929), with an introduction by Breton, and the equally ambiguous Une Semaine de bonte (A Week of Goodness; 1933) are full of irrational, often erotic, imagery of an intensely private nature.

After being interned in southern France (1939-40), Ernst spent World War II in the United States, where he completed Europe After the Rain (1940-42; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.). In New York he worked with Breton and Marcel Duchamp on the magazine V V V, which published the work of European exiles from Nazi Germany. In 1948 he wrote Beyond Painting. Important retrospective exhibitions have since established him as one of the great masters of the 20th century.

John Furse

Bibliography: Cavaliero, John, intro. by, Max Ernst Sculpture, 1934-1974 (1988); Legge, Ely M., Max Ernst (1989); Lieberman, W. S., Max Ernst (1961; repr. 1972); Quinn, Edward, ed., Max Ernst, trans. by Kenneth Lyons (1977); Rainwater, Robert, Max Ernst (1986); Russell, John, Max Ernst: Life and Work (1967); Schneede, Uwe, The Essential Max Ernst, trans. by R. W. Last (1972).

Fascism: Spanish Civil War

Picasso: Guernica

Exhibition of "Degenerate Art" in Nazi Germany

State-sponsored art in Soviet Union

Many artists choose exile