An essay written for 1st year critical discourse:
What
does it mean to be a Modernist?
Modernism
in art is an abstraction that came to refer to the new forms and techniques of art
that emerged in the time of great historical change following the industrial
revolution. It spans from roughly the 1890s to the 1970s. Just as old ideas in
the sciences underwent radical change, many artists broke from tradition and
accepted forms and reinvented the visual arts. Speaking broadly, art started to
move past its instrumentalist and strictly representational roles and began to
communicate and reflect the new ideas of the increasingly complex society that
gave birth to it, in brand new ways.
That
new modes of art were produced in the late 1800s is not, in retrospect,
surprising. The combustible engine, radio and the telephone had recently
shattered man's millennia old concept of space. Likewise, mass media, by
facilitating nationalism, had changed human identity. New modes of transport and communication
meant that ideas spread and mutated at a rate unimaginable to previous
generations. Intellectual and artistic movements were able to became
international and borderless. Science
and secular liberal thinking were taking the place of religious tradition and
fatalism. The invention of photography had wiped out painting's monopoly on
representational art.
The
revolutionary and not so revolutionary social, scientific and philosophic ideas
that the world was brimming with in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
bubbled through into artistic minds and found voice, and often powerful
symbols, in images. Munch and Giacometti's figures of anguish, loneliness and
isolation became symbols of existentialism.
Surrealists attempted to plumb the subconscious depths that Freud had
brought into the public mind. Muybridge's scientific photographic analyses of
human and animal movement provided artists with a new way of looking at time
and space. Politically it was a time of extremes, and so it was in the art
world. Boundaries were pushed, distorted, and broken. Countless movements with
various agendas, accompanied by now unreadable manifestos, spawned: the
futurists (Italian proto-fascists), the constructivists (Russian socialists),
the Dadaists (disparate avant garde
intellectuals), to name but a few. The web-like relationships and interweaving
influences of the artistic groups of the 20th century, combined with the
influences of science, technology and the new medias that were emerging, created
a seething arena of new and relevant ideas. It may now be looked on as telling
the story of its age and, for some, a heralded utopian future that didn't
materialise.
Impressionism
provided one bridge to modernism. The import of this movement was that it
acknowledged and celebrated the role of human perception in painting. While a
photograph is light directly creating
a picture, the impressionists saw that a painting of something is the light
from that thing, fleetingly impressed in the mind through the eyes, and
transferred to the canvas. The impressionists consciously painted these subjective
impressions. This new approach was paralleled at the time by the new scientific
theories about the subjective properties of light: electromagnetic waves
de-codified by the mind. Because impressionism retained a single view point,
tended to have traditional subject matter, and contained behind it's
spontaneity "the essence of realism" (Hughes, 113), it is considered
a precursor to modernism. There are however a handful of impressionists who
have been admitted entry to the modernist pantheon.
There
is no way to pin the birth of modernism down, but there is a widespread acceptance
that Cezanne had a lot to do with it. It is difficult to visit a major gallery
today without spotting at least one painting of someone mimicking his style,
and impossible to visit one where his influence is not apparent. Cezanne was a
true original, his style strange, blocky and searching, his planes flattened
and tilted. The picturesque was not his aim. There is a solid physicality to his paintings
that set them apart form the other impressionists. Though his edges are sharp
and clearly delineated, or perhaps because of this, there is always some
uncertainty in regards to the positioning of the objects, and their relation to
one another, as if he is searching to find a language to express these actual
objects on a two dimensional plane. The result is striking and was
revolutionary in it's time.
Signac
and Seurat's Pointillism, a kind of post-impressionism, sought to express form
using scientific colour theory. They used the concept of optical mixing, where
planes of small discrete points of colour are combined and mixed by the mind,
to create new colours and subtle tonal effects. This technically specific movement
later fed into genres as diverse as neo-expressionism and super-realism.
Expressionism
too played a large part in the departure from tradition that modernism
represented. Figures such as Van Gogh (regarded a post-impressionist), Munch
and Schiele charged their canvases with raw emotion, transfiguring landscapes
and figurative images into reflections of the soul. This reflexivity, the idea
that the painting would say as much about the painter's inner world as the
subject, was a notion that modernism constantly toyed with. Abstract
expressionists took it even further by discarding the subject altogether. At
the other end of the spectrum, Duchamp and, later, Warhol subverted the notion,
discarding the role of the artiste by
essentially making him/her a reproducer of popular cultural artifacts. The
Dadaists scorned expressionism and, by heading in the opposite direction with
gags and provocation aimed at the art world (e.g. Duchamp's witty Fountain), paradoxically brought art to
new levels of austere group navel-gazing in the latter part of the century.
In
the early 1900s Picasso and Braque took Cezanne's late work to it's logical
conclusion by rendering single objects from multiple viewpoints, breaking them
down into their constituent parts, piecing them back together, simplifying
them. The style was cubism, and Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) was the first of it's kind. Drawing on Cezanne, El Greco and African
masks, Picasso's depiction of five whores describes space in a way that was
shockingly new and almost indecipherable. In fact, it was such an unusual
painting for its time that it was two years finished before Picasso was
prepared to show it publicly. Picasso continued to leap from genre to genre throughout
his career, and was of the opinion that his different modes of painting were
simply different means to express different ideas and did not imply evolution
or progress in art (Harrison and Wood, 216-217). This is an interesting statement to consider
in the context of writing an essay on modernism: it is not compatible with the
construct of history as a sum of innovations. And yet Picasso was surely a man
personally qualified to make it.
Henri
Matisse was a contemporary of Picasso who was also veering towards abstraction
in many of his works. Like Picasso, Matisse was a seminal modernist, and also
much like Picasso, a sponge of ideas and inspirations. He began as an
impressionist much influenced by Cezanne, and was one of the founding members
of the Fauves, or "wild beasts", an impressionist group typified by
it's wild non-representational colours. Matisse went on to draw on decorative
Islamic and Asian art, the German expressionists, and his peers, to name a few,
to create works recognisable by their vivid colour, bold lines and decorative
elements. In Matisse's hands many of the elements of modernism; expressionism,
impressionism, cubism, abstraction, naive art, were wielded, not as party
tricks, but as a coherent language. His French
Window of Colliere, 1914, preempted abstract minimalism by decades, and even
in his infirm old age Matisse broke new ground with his decorative
"cut-outs", large abstracted collage pieces created by cutting out
gouache painted paper with scissors.
With
literal representation no longer a concern mixed media became viable and
accepted. Collage was used by the cubists to add another layer of complexity to
their works. Soon collage, photomontage and typography had all become accepted tools,
often used to portray an industrial, mass produced and information-overloaded
world. Artists, propagandists, designers and advertisers alike recognised the
strong communicative power of these devices.
Cubism,
as a form of abstraction, encouraged other forms of abstraction and a deep well
was uncovered. Figures such as Kandinsky and Klee created wholly abstract works
(as opposed to abstracted) with stated idealist intentions. A primitive,
spiritual and universal language was sought, in line with new-age philosophies
and religions of the time. The Jungian idea of the subconscious also fed into
mainstream culture and provided artists with fodder for non-representational
works. Halfway through the century Jackson Pollock invented the visual
counterpart of jazz - the "all-over" painting. Using his paint drip
method, standing over the canvas, Pollock created works that were
revolutionary. They did not divide space in the way that all paintings until
that point had done. There was no subject and not even a point of focus. Any
region on the canvas was the equal of any other. Abstract expressionism was
born and America, for the first time, had claim to being the
homeland of an important movement of the visual arts.
Abstract
expressionism of the purest kind, Jackson's all-over paintings or Rothko's colour fields,
were meditative and atmospheric. Later Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg,
who had begun to use found objects and cultural artifacts and symbols as the
meat of their works, provided the link to pop-art. Warhol took the
appropriation of popular imagery further. By distancing the artist from his
work through means of commercial imagery, industrial printing processes, and
duplication, he created the perfect analogy for the modern consumer
lifestyle. Superficiality was celebrated. People were products. Fame could be bought, sold and borrowed. Pop-art
both epitomised and parodied shallow and disposable pop culture.
In
the first half of the 20th century, Utopian and Marxist ideas abounded in the
arts, especially in the fields of urban design and architecture. It was believed that a universal way of living
and a universal language of form could be achieved, and that it would pave the
way, literally, to a social paradise. This
search for universality was a theme of the times: there are parallels in the
creations, close to this time, of Esperanto, a unified language, and theosophy,
a unified religion.
The Bauhaus school is regarded as the great centre
of modernist design in the 1920s. Set up by architect Walter Gropius with the
intention of creating an art and design school that would encourage
cross-pollination of artistic disciplines, the school's legacy ultimately hangs
on its philosophy and the calibre of the people who taught there, among them
Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Mies Van De Rohe. The school's lofty aspiration of uniting form
and function while serving a new society's needs was never reached. In the end
the internationalist leftist creation of Gropius, who once spoke of the
"evil demon of commercialism" (Harrison and wood,269), failed in its attempts at commercial collaborations, and
was shut down by the Nazi government in 1933 (Crouch 70).
Constructivism
in Russia and De Stijl and The International Style in Western Europe were movements that similarly emphasised
utilitarianism, functionality, rationality, mechanisation, clean lines over
bourgeois ornamentation and the collective over the individual. Mondrian and
Rietveld's iconic black, white and primary colour scheme was a result of ideological
reductionism. The architecture that resulted from the idea of arranging space
as social medicine, and the uses to which it was put, were wildly varied. They
ranged from Le Corbusier's futuristic, levitating Villa Savoye in Poissy, to the appalling blockish buildings meted
out as Soviet punishment in the states of the former USSR, to the now ubiquitous skyscraper, the ultimate
phallic symbol of capitalism.
In
the history of modernism innumerable movements and groups schismed and merged, but
the strong unique visions of individuals were of equal importance. The dawning
acceptance of art that would have once been seen as quite radical was key. Each door opened another. These individuals
owed debts to the ground-breakers, but the fact that the ground was now broken
allowed them to bring their new forms and ideas into the public arena. In
pre-industrial western society a stiflingly socially conservative culture was
the norm. The turbulence of the ensuing social change had lifted this, and
these generations were living in a new and changed world. Modernism is the (in
my opinion unfortunate) name given to the intellectual dust that was raised and
the work it created.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crouch,
C., Modernism in Art Design &
Architecture, MacMillan Press, UK (1999)
Essers,
V., Matisse, Master of Colour, Taschen, Germany (1993)
Harrison, C.
& Wood, P., Eds., Art in Theory, 1900
- 2000, Blackwell Publishing, UK (2003)
Hughes,
R., The Shock of the New, BBC Books, UK (1991)
