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The Modernist World The Arts in an Age of Global Confrontation

THINKING AHEAD

How would you define , and how do , , , and reflect its spirit?

What were the effects of the Great War on the Western imagination?

f the rhythm of life had long been regulated by the physi­ from the top of the Eiffel Tower, seen towering over Delau­ ology of a man or a horse walking, or, on a sailing voyage, nay's work, establishing worldwide Standard Time. By 1903, Ihy the vagaries of weather (calm, storm, and wind direc­ Orville Wright had been airborne 59 seconds, and by 1908, tion), after 1850 it was regulated by the machine- first by he would fly for 91 minutes. A year later, Bleriot crossed the the steam engine and the train; then, in 1897, by the auto­ English Channel by plane (though it would be another 18 mobile; and then, finally, hy the airplane. At the dawn of the years until Charles Lindbergh would cross the Atlantic by twentieth century, the wo rld was in motion. As early as 1880, air). The airplane in Delaunay's painting is a "box-kite" de­ one Fn.: nch aJverti~ in g company boasLeJ that it could post sign built in a suburb beginning in 1907 by the Voisin a hillhoard ad in 35,937 municipalities in five days' time­ brothers, Gabriel and Charles, the first commercial airplane a billboard of the kind advertising Astra Construction in manufacturers in Europe. Finally, the signboard "MAGIC" The Cardiff Team (Fig. 14.1), a painting by refers to Magic City, an enormous -hall near the Eiffel [duh-lawn-AY] (1885-1941). The painting depicts the men Tower. Delaunay's Cardiff Team captures the pulse of Paris in of the Cardiff (Wales) rugby team leaping up at a rugby ball the first decades of the twentieth century, and the heartbeat in the center of the painting. They represent the interna­ of modern life. tionalization of sport; the first modern Olympic Games had Delaunay called his work "Simultanism," a term derived taken place in 1896 in Athens, followed by the 1900 Games from Michel Eugene Chevreul's 1839 book on color The in Paris, staged in conjunction with the Exposition Univer­ Principle of Harmony and Contrast of Colors-in the original selle, and rugby was a medal sport in each. The rugby ball is French title the word translated as "harmony" is simultanee­ framed by the famous Grande Roue de Paris. Built for the but the term signified more than just an approach to color 1900 Exposition Universelle, at 100 meters (328 feet) in theory. The name referred to the immediacy of vision, and height, it was the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, surpass­ suggested that in any given instant, an infinite number of ing by 64 feet the original Ferris wheel, built for Chicago's states of being existed in the speed and motion of modern Columbian Exposition in 1893, and although it would be life. Everything was in motion, including the picture itself. demolished in 1920, the Grande Roue remained the world's The still photograph suddenly found itself animated in tallest Ferris wheel until it was surpassed by three Japanese the moving picture, first in 1895 by the Brothers Lumiere, Ferris wheels in the 1990s. On July 1, 1913, the year that in Paris, and then after 1905, when the Nickelodeon, the Delaunay painted The Cardiff Team, a signal was broadcast first motion-picture theater in the world, opened its doors

<4 Fig. 14.1 Robert Delaunay, The Cardiff Team. 1913. Oil on canvas, 10'83/s'' x 6'10" . Musee d'Art Moderne de Ia Ville de Paris. Everything in the painting seems to rise into the sky as if, for Oelaunay, the century is "taking off" much like the airplane. Even the construction company's name. "Astra," refers to the stars.

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439 in , Pennsylvania. By 1925, Russian fi lmmaker THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN THE ARTS Sergei Eisenstein would cram 155 separate shots into a four-minute sequence of his film The -a In other words, over the course of the last two decades of the shot every 1.6 seconds. In 1900, France had produced 3,000 nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, the automobiles; by 1907, it was producing 30,000 a year. The way we understood the physical universe radically changed. technological advances represented by the automobile were The arts responded. In painting, those who fo llowed upon the closely connected to the development of the internal com­ Impressionist -the Post-Impress ionists, as they bustion engine, pneumatic tires, and, above all, the rise of were soon known-saw themselves as inventing a new future the assembly line. After all, building 30,000 automobiles a for painting, one that reflected the spirit of innovation that year required an efficiency and speed of production unlike defined . In Paris, the studio of Spanish-born Pablo any ever before conceived. Henry Ford (1863- 1947), the Picasso [pee-KAH-soh] (1871-1973) was quickly recognized American automobile maker, attacked the problem. Ford by artists and intellectuals as the center of artistic innova­ asked Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), the inventor of "scien­ tion in the new century. From around Europe and America, tific management," to determine the exact speed at which artists flocked to see his work, and they carried his spirit­ the assembly line should move and the exact motions work­ and the spirit of French painting generally- back with them ers should use to perform their duties; in 1908, assembly- line to , Germany, and America. New art movements-new production as we know it was born. "isms," including Delaunay's Simultanism-succeeded one Amid all this speed and motion, the world also suddenly another in rapid fire. Picasso's work also encouraged radical seemed a less stable and secure place. Discoveries in sci­ approaches to poetry and to music, where the discord ant, ence and physics confirmed this. In 1900, German physicist sometimes violent distortions of his paintings found their Max Planck (1858-194 7) proposed the theory of matter and expression in sound. energy known as quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, the fundamental particles are unknowable, and are only hypo­ Post-Impressionist Painting thetical things represented by mathematics. Furthermore, the Among the Post-Impressionists were Paul Cezanne, Pau l very technique of measuring these phenomena necessarily Gauguin, and Georges Seurat, all of whom exhibited at var­ alters their behavior. Faced with the fact that light appeared ious Impressionist shows, but rather than creating Impres­ to travel in absolutely contradictory ways, as both particles sionist works that captured the optical effects of light and and waves, depending upon how one measured it, in 1913, atmosphere and the fleeting qualities of sensory experience, Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) built on quantum they sought to capture something transcendent in their phys ics to propose a new theory of complementarity: two act of vision, something that captured the essence of their statements, apparently contradictory, might at any moment be subject. . equally true. At the very end of the nineteenth century, in Cambridge, England, ] . ] . Thompson detected the existence of separate compo­ nents in the previously indivisible atom. He called them "electrons," and by 1911, Ernest Rutherford had introduced a new model of the atom-a small, positively charged nucleus containing most of the atom's mass around which elec­ trons continuously orbit. Suddenly matter itself was understood to be continually in motion. Meanwhile, in 1905, Albert Einstein had pub­ lished his theory of relativity and by 1915 had produced the Gen­ eral Principles of Relativity, with its model of the non-Euclidean, four­ dimensional space-time continuum. Between 1895 and 1915, the tradi­ tional physical universe had liter­ Fig. 14.2 Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. 1884. Oil on canvas. 5'1Hf' x 10'114" Helen Birch ally been transformed-and it was Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.224. Combination of quadrant captures F1 , F2, G1 . G2 . Photograph © 2006. The not a universe of entities available Art Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved. Capuchin monkeys like th e on e held on a leash by the woman on the right to the human eye. were a popular pet in 1880s Paris.

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440 CHAPTER 14 The Modernist World Pointillism: Seurat and the Harmonies of Color One of the Seurat's emphasis on contrasting colors appealing. It became most talented of the Post-Impressionist painters was Georges another ingredient in his synthesis of techniques. He began Seurat [suh-RAH] (1859-91), who exh ibited h is master­ to apply complementary colors in richly painted zones using piece, A Sunday on La Grand]atte, in 1886 when he was 27 dashes and strokes that were much larger than Seurat's years old (Fig. 14.2). It depicts a Sunday crowd of Parisians /)Ointilles. enjoying the weather on the island of La Grand ]atte in Color, in van Gogh's paintings, becomes symbolic, the Seine River just northeast of . The subject mat­ charged with feelings. To viewers at the time, the dashes of ter is typically Impressionist, but it lacks that style's sense of thickly painted color, a technique known as impasto, seemed spontaneity and the immediacy of its brushwork. Instead, La thrown onto the canvas as a haphazard and unrefined mess. Grand ]atte is a carefully controlled, scientific application of And yet, the staccato rhythms of this brushwork seemed to tiny dots of color-pointilles [pwahn-TEE], as Seurat called van Gogh himself deeply autobiographic, capturing almost them-and his method of painting became known as poin­ stroke by stroke the pulse of his own volatile personality. A tillism [POIN-tih-lizm] to some, and neo- to painting like Portrait of Patience Escalier [ess-kah-lee-AY] is others. not just a portrait, but also the embodiment of van Gogh's In setting his "points" of color side by side across the feeling for nature (Fig. 14.3). Escalier's blue coat, though canvas, Seurat determined that color could be mixed, as he traditional peasant garb, evokes the deep blue skies of the put it, in ", calm, or sad" combinations. Lines extending south of France, and the orange background reproduces what upward could also reflect these same feelings, he explained, van Gogh described as "the furnace of the height of harvest imparting a cheerful tone, as do warm and luminous colors time ... orange colors flashing like lightning, vivid as red-hot of red, orange, and yellow. Horizontal lines that balance dark iron." He further explained that" ... although it does not pre­ and light, warmth and coolness, create a sense of calm. Lines tend to be the image of a red sunset, [it] may nevertheless reaching in a downward direction and the dark, cool hues of give a suggestion of one." Through color, van Gogh calls to green, blue, and violet evoke sadness. With this symbolic theory of color in mind, we can see much more in Seurat's La Grand ]atte than simply a Sunday crowd enjoying a day at the park. There are 48 people of var­ ious ages depicted, including soldiers, families, couples, and singles, some in fashionable attire, others in casual dress. A range of social classes is present as well, illustrating the mix­ ture of diverse people on the city's day of leisure. Although overall the painting balances its lights and darks and the horizontal dominates, thus creating a sense of calm, all three groups in the foreground shadows are bathed in the melan­ choly tones of blue, violet, and green. With few exceptions­ a running child, and behind her a couple-almost everyone in the painting is looking either straight ahead or downward. Even the tails of the pets turn downward. This solemn feature is further heightened by the toy-soldier rigidity of the figures. Seurat's painting suggests more than it portrays. As one critic of the time wrote of La Grande ]atte, "one understands then the rigidity of Parisian leisure, tired and stiff, where even rec­ reation is a matter of striking poses." Symb oli c Color: Van Gogh Seurat's influence on French painting was profound. Dutch painter (1853-90), studied Seurat's paintings while living in Paris in 1886-87 and experimented extensively with Seurat's color combinations and pointillist technique, which extended even to his drawings, as a means to create a rich textural surface. Van Gogh was often overcome with intense and uncon­ trollable emotions, an attribute that played a key ro le in Fig. 14.3 Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Patience Escalier. August 1889. Oil on canvas. 27 Ys" X 22". Private Collection/Photo© Lefevre Fine Art. Ltd. the development of his unique artistic style. Profoundly (The Bridgeman Art Library Van Gogh would comment on the peasants committed to discovering a universal harmony in which in the south of France. "The natives are like Zola's poor peasants, innocent and all aspects of life were united through art, van Gogh found gentle beings."

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CHAPTER 14 The Modernist World 441 Fig. 14.4 Vincent van Gogh, . 1889. Oil on canva s, 28%" x 36!4'' . Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (4721941) Digital Image ©The Museum of / Licensed by Scala/Art Resource. New York . Saint-Remy, where van Gogh painted this work, lies at the foot of a small range of mountains between Aries and Aix-en-Provence . This part of France is plagued in the winter months by the mistral. strong winds that blow day after day out of the Alps down the Rhone River valley. The furious swirls of van Gogh's sky and the blowing cypress trees suggest that he might be representing this wind known to drive people mad. in contrast to the harmonies of the painting's color scheme.

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mind not just the landscape of southern France, but also the his most famous composition (Fig. 14.4 ). Here the swirling enduring lifestyle and nobility of the peasants who li ve in it. cypresses (in which red and green lie harmoniously side by Van Gogh understood that in paintings like Portrait of side) and the rising church steeple unite earth and sky. Simi­ Patience Escalier, he was active ly abandoning Impress ion­ larly, the orange and ye llow stars and moon unite with the ism. In so doing, he established not only his signature style, brightly lit windows of the town. Describing his thoughts but also a vigorous and modern aesthetic sense. As he wrote about the painting in a letter to his bro ther, van Gogh wrote, while working on the painting: "Is it not emotion , the sincerity of one's feeling for nature, that draws us?" But finally, in July 1890, after a number of W hat I learned in Pari s is leaving me and I am return­ stays in hospitals and asylums, he committed suicide in the ing to the id eas I had ... before I knew the impress ionists. fi elds outside Auvers-sur-Oise, where he was being treated by A nd I should not be surprised if the impress ionists soon Dr. Paul Gachet, who was the subj ect of several of the great find faul t with my way of working . ... Because instead of artist's last portraits. trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express mys elf The Structure of Color: Cezanne O f all the Post-Impress ion­ forcibl y. ists, Paul Cezanne [say-ZAHN] (1 839-1906) was the only A lthough his work grew ever bolder and more creative one who continued to paint en plein air. In thi regard, he as the years passed, van Gogh continued to suffer from the remained an Impressionist, and he continued to paint what emotional instability and depress ion that had tormented him he called "optics." The duty of the painter, he said, was "to mos t of his adult life. In December 1888, van G ogh's per­ give the image of what we see," but innocently, "forgetting sonal emotional turmoil reached a fever pitch when he sli ced everything that has appeared before." Since the , off a section of his earlobe and presented it to an Aries pros­ Western art had been dedicated to representing the wo rld as titute as a present. After a brief stay at an Aries hospital, he the eye sees it- that is, in terms of perspectival space. But was released, but by the end of January, the city received a Cezanne realized that we see the world in far more complex petition signed by 30 townspeople demanding his committal. terms than just the retinal image before us. We see it thro ugh In early May, he entered a mental hospital in Saint-Remy, the multiple lenses of our lived experi ence. This multiplicity not far from Aries, and there he painted Starry Night, perhaps of viewpoints, or perspectives, is the dominant feature of Still

442 CHAPTER 14 The Modernist World Life with Plaster Cast (Fig. 14.5 ). Nothing in the composi­ tion is spatially stable. Instead we wander through the small space in the corner of Cezanne's studio just as the painter's eye would do. His viewpoint constantly moves, contemplat­ ing its object from this angle, then that one. The result of this vision is a representation of nature as a series of patches of color that tend to flatten the surface of his paintings. Note, for instance, how the fruit and onions on the table are modeled by radical shifts in color rather than gradations from light to dark (traditional chiaroscuro). Cezanne returned to the same theme continually-par­ ticularly stilllifes and Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain overlooking his native Aix-en-Provence [eks-ahn-proh­ VAHNSS] in the south of France (Fig. 14.6). ln the last decade of his life, the mountain became something of an obsession, as he climbed the hill behind his studio to paint it day after day. He especially liked to paint after storms when the air was clear and the colors of the landscape were at their most saturated and uniform intensity. Cezanne acknowl­ edges the illusion of space in the mountain scene by means of three bands of color. Patches of gray and black define the foreground, green and ye llow-orange the middle ground, and violets and blues the distant mountain and sky. Yet in each of these areas, the predominant colors of the other two are repeated-the green brushstrokes of the middle ground in the sky, for instance-all with a consistent intensity. The distant Fig. 14.5 Paul Cezanne , Still Life with Plaster Cast. ca. 1894. Oil on paper colors possess the same strength as those closest. Together on board, 26Y2" x 32W. The Samuel Courtauld Trust. Courtauld Institute of Art with the uniform size of Cezanne's brushstrokes-his patches Gallery. London . Cezanne's challenge to tradition is highlighted by the tension do not get smaller as they retreat into the distance-this use between his radical approach to the representation of space and his inclusion. of color makes the viewer very aware of the surface quali­ at the heart of the painting. of a plaster cast of a seventeenth-century Cupid sculpted .by Pierre Puget [poo-ZHAY] (1620-94). ties and structure of Cezanne's composition. It is this tension between spatial perspectives and surface flatness that would become one of the chief preoccupations of modern painting in the forthcoming century. Escape to Far Tahiti: Gauguin ln 1891, the painter [g oh-GAN] (1848-1903) left France for the island of Tahiti, part of French Polynesia, in the South Pacific. A frustrated businessman and father of five children, he had taken up art with a rare dedication a decade earlier, studying with and Pau l Cezanne. Gauguin was also a friend of van Gogh, with whom he spent several months painting in Aries during the Dutch artist's most productive period. He had also been inspired by the 1889 Exposition Universelle, where indigenous peoples and housi ng from

Fig. 14.6 Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1902-04. Oil on canvas, 28W x 363/,6" Photo Graydon Wood. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The George W Elkins Collection. 1936. E1936-1-1. Cezanne painted this from the top of the steep hill known as Les Lauves. just north of Aix-en-Provence but within walking distance of the city center. He built his own studio on a plot of land halfway up the hill, overlooking the city

CHAPTER 14 The Modernist World 443 Fig. 14.7 Paul Gauguin, Mahana no atua (Day of the God). 1894. Oil (possibly mixed with wax) on canvas. 26%" x 355/s ". The Art Institute of Chicago. Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926 .198 ). Photograph© 2007, The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved. There is no record of Gauguin ever exhibiting this work. It was first exhibited at the Boston Art Club in 1925.

around the world were di played. "I can buy a native house," Gauguin arranged for two exhibition at n Pari~ gal­ he wrote his friend Emile Bernard, "like those you saw at lery in November 1893 and another in December 1894. He the World's Fair. Made of wood and dirt with a thatched opened a studio of his own, painted olive green and a bril­ roof." To other fr iends he wrote, "I will go to Tahiti and I liant chrome yellow, and decorated it with paintings, tropical hope to finish out my life there ... far from the European plants, and exotic furnishings. He initiated a regular Thurs­ struggle for money ... able to listen in the silence of beauti­ day where he lectured on his paintings and regaled ful tropical nights to the oft murmuring music of my heart­ guests with stori es of his travels, as we ll as playing music on a beats in loving harmony with the mysteri ous beings in my range of instruments. entourage." In this studio, he painted Mahana no atua (Day of the God) Gauguin's first trip to Tahiti was not everything he of 1894 (Fig. 14.7). Based on idealized recollections of his dreamed it wou ld be, since by March 1892 he was penniless. escape to Tahiti, the canvas consists of three zones. In the When he arrived back in France, he had painted 66 pictures top zo ne or background, figures carry food to a carved idol, but had only four francs (about $12 today) to his name. He representing a native god, a musician plays as two women spent the next two years energetically promoting his work dance, and two lovers embrace beside the statue of the deity. and writing an account of his journey to Tahiti, entitled Below, in the second zone, are three nude figures. The one to Noa Noa (noa means "fragrant" or "perfumed"). It is a fic­ the right assumes a fetal position suggestive of birth and fer­ tionalized version of his travels and bears little resemblance tility. The one to the left appears to be day dreaming or nap­ to the details of his journey that h e honestly recorded in ping, possibly an image of reverie. The middle figure appears his letters. But Noa Noa was not meant to be true so much to have just emerged from bathing in the water be low that as sensational, with its titillating story of the artist's liaison constitutes the third zone. She directs her gaze at the viewer with a 13-year-old Tahitian girl, Tehamana, offered to him and, so, suggests an uninhibited sexuality. The bottom, by her family. He presents himself as a primitif. In French, watery zone is an irregular patchwork of color, an abstract the word /Jrimitif suggests the primal, original, or irreducible. composition of se nsuous line and fluid shapes. As in van Gauguin believed that "primitive" ways of thinking offered Gogh's work, color is freed of its representational function to an entry into the primal powers of the mind, and he consid­ become an almost pure expression of the artist's feelings. ered his paintings visionary glimpses into the primal forces Gauguin returned to Tahiti in June 1895 and never came of nature. back to France, completing nearly 100 paintings and over

444 CHAPTER 14 The Modernist World 400 woodcuts in the eight remaining years of his life. He moved in 1901 to the remote island ofHivaoa [hee-vah-OH­ uh], in the Marquesas [mar-KAY-suz], where in the small vil­ lage of Atuona [aht-uh-WOH-nuh] he built and decorated what he called his House of Pleasure. Taking up with another young girl, who like Tehamana gave birth to his child, Gauguin alienated the small number of priests and colonial French officials on the islands but attracted the interest and friendship of many native Marquesans, who were fascinated by his nonstop work habits and his colorful paintings. Hav­ ing suffered for years from heart disease and syphilis, he died quietly in Hivaoa in May 1903.

Pablo Picasso's Paris: At the Heart of the Modern Picasso's Paris was centered at 13 rue Ravignon [rah-veen­ YOHN], at the Bateau-Lavoir [bah-TOH lah-VWAHR] ("Laundry Barge"), so nicknamed by the poet . It was Picasso's studio from the spring of 1904 until Octo­ ber 1909, and he continued to store his paintings there until September 1912. Anyone wanting to see his work would have to climb the hill topped by the great white cathedral of Sacre Coeur [sah-KRAY ker] in the Montmartre [mohn­ MART] quarter, beginning from the Place Pigalle [plahss pee­ GAHL], and finally climb the stairs to the great ramshackle space, where the walls were piled deep with canvases). Or they might see his work at the Saturday evening salons of Fig . 14.8 , Gertrude Stein. 1906. Oil on canvas. H. 393/s. expatriate American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein W 32 in. (1 00 X 81.3 em). Image copyright© The Metropolitan Museum of [stine] (1874-1946) at [fler-OOS] behind Art/Art Resource. NY Art© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society the [zhar-DEHN due louks-em­ lARS). New York. According to Stein, in painting her portrait. "Picasso passed BOOR] on the Left Bank of the Seine. If you knew someone [on] .. to the intensive struggle which was to end in Cubism." who knew someone, you would be welcome enough. Many Picassos h~ng on her walls, including his portrait of her, painted in 1906 (Fig. 14.8). In her book The AutobiograjJhy of Alice B. Toklas (1932)­ actually her own memoir disguised as that of her friend and the painting began. All of a sudden one day Picasso lifelong companion-Stein described the making of this pic­ painted out the whole . I can't see you anymore ture in the winter of 1906 (Reading 14.1): when I look, he said irritably, and so the picture was left like that.

READING 14.1 from Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography Picasso actually finished the picture early the following fall, of Alice B. Toklas (1932) painting her face in large, masklike masses in a style very dif­ ferent from the rest of the picture. No longer relying on the Picasso had never had anybody pose for him since visual presence of the sitter before his eyes, Picasso painted he was sixteen years old. He was then twenty-four not his view of her, but his idea of her. When Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude had never thought of having her portrait later commented that some people thought the painting did painted, and they do not know either of them how it came about. Anyway, it did, and she posed for this por­ not look like Stein, Picasso replied, "It will." trait ninety times. There was a large broken armchair The Aggressive New Modern Art: Les Demoiselles where Gertrude Stein posed. There was a couch where d'Avignon In a way, the story of Gertrude Stein's portrait is everybody sat and slept. There was a little kitchen chair a parable for the birth of modern art. It narrates the shift in where Picasso sat to paint. There was a large easel painting from an optical art-painting what one sees-to and there were many canvases. She took her pose, Picasso sat very tight in his chair and very close to his an imaginative construct-painting what one thinks about canvas and on a very small palette, which was of a what one sees. The object of painting shifts, in other words, brown gray color, mixed some more brown gray and from the literal to the conceptual. The painting that most thoroughly embodied this shift was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

CHAPTER 14 The Modernist World 445