Urban Perception
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SHATTER RUPTUREBREAK THE MODERN SERIES, PART 1 FEBRUARY 15–MAY 3 Stuart Davis, Ready-to-Wear (detail), 1955. Restricted gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund W. Kunstadter; Goodman Endowment. A century ago, society and life were changing as rapidly and radically as they are in today’s digital age. Quicker communication, faster production, and wider circulation of people, goods, and ideas—in addition to the outbreak of two wars—produced a profoundly new understanding of the world, and artists in the first half of the twentieth century responded to these issues with both anxiety and exhilaration. This was the moment of modernism: a movement in which centuries-old conventions of visual and other forms of representation were radically questioned, overturned, and reinvented. Freeing themselves from the restraints of tradition, modern artists developed groundbreaking pictorial strategies that reflected the conditions of the age. Shatter Rupture Break, the first exhibition in the Art Institute’s Modern Series, explores the theme of fragmentation as it permeated modern life in Europe and the Americas and served as an inspiration for revolutionary formal and conceptual developments in art making. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Self-Portrait, 1910. Promised gift of a private collection. of speed in a whirling depiction of a carousel, and URBAN PERCEPTION Alvin Langdon Coburn used a kaleidoscope to break up and repeat the photographic image in his “All great art is born of the metropolis,” declared aptly named Vortograph. poet Ezra Pound, highlighting one of the most significant shifts of modern life: the development Other artists, architects, and designers sought of urban environments characterized by soaring to rethink how modern society could be structures, dense populations, and a pace of deconstructed and then reconstructed through life accelerated by advances in transportation, modern forms, as seen in Ladislav Sutnar’s Build industry, communication, and commerce. Avant- the City set, a children’s toy encouraging playful garde artists translated these conditions into experimentation through brightly colored blocks. visual terms, creating new means of pictorial El Lissitzky developed his prouns as a middle representation that were meant to exemplify the ground between art and architecture—a means excitement and anxiety caused by modern society. of exploring the perception of three-dimensional To these artists, traditional modes of depicting the space using colored paper shapes that substitute world—for instance, gloriously sweeping vistas for built materials, while Frank Lloyd Wright or bucolic natural landscapes—no longer seemed designed a screen to give structure to an open appropriate to describe the modern experience, domestic space even as he perforated its form and so they reinvented artistic expression as with cutouts. something fragmented and fractured. Perhaps most radical of all, however, was the The act of seeing itself was disrupted by the embrace of film as an avant-garde medium. Artist built city, as both Ilse Bing and Robert Delaunay Robert Delaunay, Champs de Mars: The Red Tower, 1911/23. Fernand Léger, for example, shunned narrative Joseph Winterbotham Collection. exemplified in their images of the still-fascinating and employed close-ups, fast cuts, unusual Eiffel Tower (built in 1889); Delaunay shattered perspectives, and jarring effects—as well as an its gigantic form through the combination of equally dissonant soundtrack—to create the multiple perspectives, while Bing zoomed in, dynamically discordant Ballet mécanique. By allowing the tower’s abstracted geometries to exploiting the very nature of film as a moving structure photographic vision. Often, the emphasis medium, Leger induced a sense of modernity as on dismantling form led to additional innovations: a fast-paced, perceptually unstable spectacle. Gino Severini accentuated the destabilizing effects THE FRAGMENTED BODY The human body as well could no longer be seen as intact and whole. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed two world wars, with devastating death tolls due in no small part to modern military technology. Moreover, men returned from the front with unimaginable injuries, their missing limbs or disfigured faces constant visible reminders of the trauma. The British poet and World War I soldier Wilfred Owen des- cribed one veteran as “blind, and three parts shell”: as much metal as human. Ivan Albright depicted the suffering of the first world war as a medical draftsman assigned to the X-ray division in Nantes, France, documenting soldiers’ fractured bones and decaying Salvador Dalí, City of Drawers, 1936. Gift of Frank B. Hubachek. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí / Artists flesh in a graphically detailed sketchbook. During World War II, Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2015. artists and designers such as Charles and Ray Eames added their talents to the war effort. Experimenting with molded A Fractured Psyche plywood technology, the Eameses designed a splint that would be lightweight, inexpensive, and mass-produced; as a sculptural Just as with the body, the mind in the modern era also came to be seen as object, it evokes a healing limb. fragmented. Soldiers returned from World War I suffering from shell shock, their psyches bearing the scars of trauma as surely as their bodies did. Sigmund Freud’s A fragmented body became emblematic of a new way of psychoanalytic research, which divided the workings of the mind into the conscious understanding a fractured and the unconscious, had undermined the sense of the self as whole. In the 1920s world. When Alfred Stieglitz the Surrealists, among other artists, embraced Freud’s theories to break free from wanted to depict his lover, the constraints of the rational mind and an oppressive society. In order to unlock the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, he knew that a single photograph the subconscious, they experimented with free association, automatic writing and would not suffice; instead, he painting (allowing the pencil or brush to move in an unconscious manner), and the made hundreds of pictures analysis and representation of dreams. of her hands, neck, feet, head, and torso, hoping that Claude Cahun, Object, 1936. Through prior Stanisław Witkiewicz produced a series of self-portraits as an act of psychological gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman. © 2015 the sum of the pieces would Estate of Claude Cahun. form a greater whole. The exploration, culminating in a photograph in which he shattered the glass negative Surrealists in Paris especially fetishized individual body parts to and then reassembled its fragments to create an evocative image of the fractured produce dreamlike new forms. Claude Cahun’s Object—the only mind. Roberto Matta employed automatic painting for Psychological Morphology sculpture made by the artist still known to exist—combines a and related works, seeking a visual analogue for states of consciousness; he doll’s hand, hair, and a tennis ball painted with an eye, a favorite often referred to this series as “inscapes,” or interior landscapes. Ivan Albright’s Surrealist symbol of inner perception that here also suggests female anatomy. The photographer Umbo exposed the eerie, sculpture bust of his father appears complete from one angle but reveals only half dismembered effects of department store mannequins, while a man from another. The rough, grooved surface, the result of the artist’s fingers Hans Bellmer produced his own disturbing doll, whose childlike aggressively working the plaster cast, reinforces the notion of a mind violently but sexualized forms he contorted and manipulated to be sheared open and left exposed. The artistic expression of dreams and mental photographed. And inevitably, mechanized forms encroached on biological ones: Fernand Léger painted limbs as metal imagery perhaps reached a pinnacle not in a painting or a sculpture, but in a film. pipes and industrial fittings, while Alexandra Exter produced Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s film Un chien andalou mystified viewers with its marionettes comprised of tubes and cubes, mechanical beings dreamlike narrative, dissolves from human to animal forms, dismembered body that come to life with a human hand. parts, and shockingly violent acts in an attempt to translate the unconscious mind onto a celluloid strip. THE MODERN SERIES A quintessentially modern city, Chicago has been known as a place for modern art for over a century, and the Art Institute of Chicago has been central to this history. Exhibitions in the Modern Series are designed to bring together the museum’s acclaimed holdings of modern art across all media, display them in fresh and innovative ways within new intellectual contexts, and demonstrate the continued vitality and relevance of modern art for today. PIECES OF THE WORLD “Everything had broken down in any case,” Kurt invented term meant to signify an artistic practice Schwitters declared, “and new things had to be that included collage, assemblage, painting, made out of the fragments.” Encountering a world poems, and performance. By using thrown-away, torn asunder, some artists employed the ephemera ripped-up, and scissored-out scraps of German of society to piece together new art forms. The life, divorced from their original context, and then technique of collage was not unknown prior to reassembling them with nails and glue into new the twentieth century, but the aesthetic appeal and aesthetic statements, Schwitters exposed social widespread availability of mass-produced media and political