03.11.2011
ART IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Futurism, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture Constructivism Precisionism
Week 6
THREE MODERNIST MOVEMENTS
FUTURISM CONSTRUCTIVISM PRECISIONISM PERIOD: 1909-1918 1913-1932 1915-1930
LOCALE: Italy Russia United States
ARTISTS: Boccioni, Balla, Severeni, Tatlin, Malevich, Sheeler, Carrà, Russolo Popova, Rodchenko, Demuth, Lissitzky, Gabo, Pevsner O’Keeffe
FEATURES: Lines of force Geometric art, reflecting Sleek (düz) urban representing movement modern technology and industrial forms and modern life
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Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916) States of Mind II: Three States of Mind , 1911 Those Who Go, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm).
Futurism: Kinetic art
States of Mind III: Those Who Stay, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm).
States of Mind I: The Farewells, Oil on canvas, (70.5 x 96.2 cm).
The kinetic energy of an object is the energy which it possesses due to its motion.
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Futurism: Kinetic art
Futurism was an Italian phenomenon. Futurism began in 1909 as a literary movement when the Italian poet F.T.Marinetti issued its manifesto. Marinetti a hyperactive self-promoter nicknamed ―The Caffeine of Europe‖ challenged artists to show ―courage, audacity, and revolt‖ and to celebrate “a new beauty, the beauty of speed.”
. Futurist artists tried to unveil the poetry in motion. . The key to Futurist art was MOVEMENT. . The painters combined bright Fauve colors with fractured Cubist planes to express propulsion (itici kuvvet). . Their quest was ―to throw all tradition,‖ therefore they published a manifesto to voice their highly reactionary philosophy.
Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, (Milan) Poesia, February 11, 1910.
Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini
―..... With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will: 1.Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism. 2.Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation. 3.Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent. 4.Bear bravely and proudly the smear of “madness” with which they try to gag all innovators. 5.Regard art critics as useless and dangerous. 6.Rebel against the tyranny of words: ―Harmony‖ and ―good taste‖ and other loose expressions which can be used to destroy the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin... 7.Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past. 8.Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science.
The dead shall be buried in the earth’s deepest bowels! The threshold of the future will be swept free of mummies! Make room for youth, for violence, for (gözüpek) daring!‖
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Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916) States of Mind II: Three States of Mind , 1911 Those Who Go, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm).
Futurism: Kinetic art
States of Mind III: Those Who Stay, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm).
States of Mind I: The Farewells, Oil on canvas, (70.5 x 96.2 cm).
Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916) States of Mind II: Three States of Mind , 1911 Those Who Go, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). Set in a train station, this series of three paintings explores the psychological dimension of modern life's transitory nature. In The Farewells, (veda) Boccioni captures chaotic movement and the fusion of people swept away in waves as the train's steam bellows into the sky. Oblique lines hint at departure in Those Who Go, in which Boccioni said he sought to States of Mind III: express "loneliness, anguish, and dazed confusion." In Those Who Stay, Those Who Stay, vertical lines convey the weight of Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). sadness carried by those left behind.
States of Mind I: The Farewells, Oil on canvas, (70.5 x 96.2 cm).
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Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1910-11. Carlo Carrà (Italian, 1881-1966) Oil on canvas, (198.7 x 259.1 cm), MoMA.
Ritmi Plastici, 1911. Carlo Carrà (Italian, 1881-1966) Ink on paper, (10.7 x 7.4 cm).
Carlo Carra met Umberto Boccioni and Luigi Russolo, and together they came to know Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and to write the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (1910). Carrà continued, however, to use the technique of Divisionism despite the radical rhetoric of Futurism. In an attempt to find new inspiration Marinetti sent them to visit Paris in autumn 1911, in preparation for the Futurist exhibition of 1912. Cubism was a revelation, and in 1911 Carrà reworked a large canvas that he had begun in 1910, the Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (New York, MOMA). He had witnessed the riot at the event in 1904. The crowd and the mounted police converge in violently hatched red and black, as Carrà attempted the Futurist aim to place the spectator at the centre of the canvas. In the reworking he attempted to make the space more complex and the lighting appear to emerge from within.
photographic studies of animal locomotion
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Balla, one of the founding members of Futurism, spent much of his career studying the dynamics of movement and speed. The subject of this painting is the flight of swifts; black wings whir before a window. Inspired by photographic studies of animal locomotion, Balla created an image of motion pushed close to abstraction. The wings each represent a different position in a trajectory of motion, and the bird’s body is rendered as a diagrammatic line. Here Balla looks to science to establish a new, Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences, 1913. modern language for Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871-1958) painting. Oil on canvas, (96.8 x 120 cm).
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Speeding Automobile, 1912. Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871-1958) Oil on wood, (55.6 x 68.9 cm).
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Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882–1916) Bronze H. (121.9 x 15 1/2 x 91.4 cm)
Boccioni, who sought to infuse art with dynamism and energy, exclaimed, "Let us fling open the figure and let it incorporate within itself whatever may surround it." The contours of this marching figure appear to be carved by the forces of wind and speed as it forges ahead. While its wind–swept silhouette is evocative of an ancient statue, the polished metal alludes to the sleek modern machinery beloved by Boccioni and other Futurist artists.
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Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882–1916) Bronze H. (121.9 x 15 1/2 x 91.4 cm) In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Boccioni puts speed and force into sculptural form. The figure strides forward. Surpassing the limits of the body, its lines ripple outward in curving and streamlined flags, as if molded by the wind of its passing. Boccioni had developed these shapes over two years in paintings, drawings, and sculptures, exacting studies of human musculature. The result is a three-dimensional portrait of a powerful body in action. In the early twentieth century, the new speed and force of machinery seemed to pour its power into radical social energy. The new technologies and the ideas attached to them would later reveal threatening aspects, but for Futurist artists like Boccioni, they were tremendously exhilarating. Innovative as Boccioni was, he fell short of his own ambition. In 1912, he had attacked the domination of sculpture by "the blind and foolish imitation of formulas inherited from the past," and particularly by "the burdensome weight of Greece." Yet Unique Forms of Continuity in Space bears an underlying resemblance to a classical work over 2,000 years old, the Nike of Samothrace. There, however, speed is encoded in the flowing stone draperies that wash around, and in the wake of, the figure. Here the body itself is reshaped, as if the new conditions of modernity were producing a new man.
Armored Train in Action, 1915.Gino Severini (Italian, 1883-1966) Charcoal on paper, (56.9 x 47.5 cm), MoMA.
This study for the most famous of the Futurist war paintings, The Armored Train (1915), Muscular Dynamism (1913). incorporates an unusual aerial Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916) perspective in its depiction of a Pastel and charcoal on paper, (86.3 x 59 cm), train filled with armed MoMA. soldiers. Severini enjoyed a unique vantage point—from his studio in Paris, he was able to observe the constant movement of trains filled with soldiers, supplies, and weaponry. Severini did not combat during World War I, but he took the advice of Marinetti to "try to live the war pictorially, studying it in all its marvelous mechanical forms."
The Futurists glorified modern technology, and World War I, the first war of the twentieth century to employ the technological achievements of the industrial age in a program of mass destruction, was for them the most important spectacle of the modern era. Their admiration for speed—made possible by machinery—is represented here by the fractured landscape, which accentuates the train's force and momentum as it cuts through the countryside. Armored Train in Action foreshadows a fundamental principle of Severini's later art: the "image-idea," in which a single image expresses the essence of an idea. Through a depiction of the plastic realities of war—a train, canon, guns, and soldiers—he provides a pictorial vocabulary necessary to grasp its deeper symbolism.
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Manifesto of Futurist Architecture It must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements. The decorative must be abolished. The problem of Futurist architecture must be resolved, not by continuing to pilfer from Chinese, Persian or Japanese photographs or fooling around with the rules of Vitruvius, but through flashes of genius and through scientific and technical expertise. Everything must be revolutionized. Roofs and underground spaces must be used; the importance of the façade must be diminished; issues of taste must be transplanted from the field of fussy moldings, finicky capitals and flimsy doorways to the broader concerns of bold groupings and masses, and large-scale disposition of planes. Let us make an end of monumental, funereal and commemorative architecture. Let us overturn monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps; let us sink the streets and squares; let us raise the level of the city.
I COMBAT AND DESPISE:
1. All the (fals) pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde, Austrian, Hungarian, German and American; 2. All classical architecture, solemn, hieratic, scenographic, decorative, monumental, pretty and pleasing; 3. The embalming, reconstruction and reproduction of ancient monuments and palaces; 4. Perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubical and pyramidical forms that are static, solemn, aggressive and absolutely excluded from our utterly new sensibility; 5. The use of massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated and costly materials.
Antonio Sant’Elia Terraced Building with exterior elevators 1914
Manifesto of Futurist Architecture AND PROCLAIM: 1. That Futurist architecture is the architecture of calculation, of audacious temerity and of simplicity; the architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel, glass, cardboard, textile fiber, and of all those substitutesf or wood, stone and brick that enable us to obtain maximum elasticity and lightness; 2. That Futurist architecture is not because of this an arid combination of practicality and usefulness, but remains art, i.e. synthesis and expression; 3. That oblique and elliptic lines are dynamic, and by their very nature possess an emotive power a thousand times stronger than perpendiculars and horizontals, and that no integral, dynamic architecture can exist that does not include these; 4. That decoration as an element superimposed on architecture is absurd, and that the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials; 5. That, just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from the elements of nature, we—who are materially and spiritually artificial—must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created, and of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious integration; 6. That architecture as the art of arranging forms according to pre-established criteria is finished; 7. That by the term architecture is meant the endeavor to harmonize the environment with Man with freedom and great audacity, that is to transform the world of things into a direct projection of the world of the spirit;
From an architecture conceived in this way no formal or linear habit can grow, since the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city. This constant renewal of the architectonic environment will contribute to the victory of Futurism which has already been affirmed by words-in-freedom, plastic dynamism, music without quadrature and the art of noises, and for which we fight without respite against traditionalist cowardice.
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In its upwardly spiraling movement, this drawing Futurism was primarily concerned by Virgilio Marchi typifies Futurist architectural with images of speed and motion, design. It is one of several renderings made by Marchi which were intended to represent in 1919 and 1920 for an ideal contemporary city the spirit of the modern age. that was never erected. His plans indicated the Although the greatest expression of Futurism is found in the medium of preoccupation of the period with technological painting, there were some sculptural advances in transportation and pieces executed as well, most notably by construction. The building in the present study resembles a cone—round at the bottom, pointed at the Umberto Boccioni. Architecture, a later top. There are tunneled areas and open archways below, focus for the movement, provided with stairs leading to various flat levels. The two towers another three-dimensional forum for that rise from the center are openly constructed with Futurist ideas about dynamism. The stairs and columns. A spotlight is perched on a beam resulting schemes were visionary that extends from the peak of the left tower. The imaginings that were difficult to sweeping curves and strong, linear slashes of this beautiful drawing are reminiscent of Giacomo Balla's translate into actual structures earlier painted imagery. and so remained, for the most part, studies on paper.
Architectural Study: Search for Volumes in an Isolated Building, ca. 1919, Sketch by Virgilio Marchi (Italian, 1895–1960) Pencil and watercolor on paper 15 1/4 x 22 1/2 in. (38.7 x 57.2 cm)
THREE MODERNIST MOVEMENTS
FUTURISM CONSTRUCTIVISM PRECISIONISM PERIOD: 1909-1918 1913-1932 1915-1930
LOCALE: Italy Russia United States
ARTISTS: Boccioni, Balla, Severeni, Tatlin, Malevich, Sheeler, Carrà, Russolo Popova, Rodchenko, Demuth, Lissitzky, Gabo, Pevsner O’Keeffe
FEATURES: Lines of force Geometric art, reflecting Sleek (düz) urban representing movement modern technology and industrial forms and modern life
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Constructivism • Around 1914, Russian avant-gardes flourished with artists called Constructivists, like Vladimir Tatlin, Luibov Popova, Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Naum Gabo, and Antonie Pevsner.
– From Cubism, the Constructivists borrowed broken shapes. – From Futurism, they adopted multiple overlapping images to express agitated (telaşlı) modern life. – They pushed art from being representational, to being abstract.
THE POLITICAL CONDITION IN RUSSIA: Three years later, in 1917, the well-known Russian revolution occured, and as a result of this revolution, the Russian society is converted from a feudal state to a ―people’s republic.” Lenin tolerated the avant-garde because he thought that with the help of those artists, and through newly developed novel visual styles, it could be possible to teach the illiterate public his own ideology. For a brief time, before Stalin cracked down, and banned ―elitist‖ easel painting, Russia’s most adventurous artists led a social, as well as artistic, revolution. They wanted to strip art, like the state, of petty bourgeois anachronisms (çağdışılık). They tried to remake art, as well as society, from scratch.
• About 1914, Tatlin (1885-1953) originated Russian geometric art. He called his art, which was highly abstract and was due an intention to reflect modern technology as “Constructivism.” • The aim of Tatlin‟s “Constructivism” was to “construct” art, not to create it. The style recommended to use industrial materials, such as glass metal and plastic in three dimensional works. • Tatlin’s most famous work was a monument to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution. Intended to be higher than Eiffel Tower, the monument was planned for the center of Moscow. Since it was hard to supply steel of that amount, his idea remained only as a model, but it would clearly would have been the most astonishing ―construct‖ ever. • Tilted like the leaning Tower of Pisa, the openwork structure of glass and iron was based on a contunial spiral to denote humanity‟s upward progress.
The Monument to the Third International.
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Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (February 23, 1879, previously 1878 – May 15, 1935)
From Cubism, the Constructivists borrowed broken shapes.
From Futurism, they adopted multiple overlapping images to express agitated modern life.
Abstraction, overlapping of images, a new construction
Autonomous shots, recomposed in a new construction → MONTAGE
Englishman in Moscow, 1914
Bureau and Room, 1913
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Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (February 23, 1879, previously 1878 – May 15, 1935) was a painter and art theoretician, pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist (üstünlük) movement. His squares floating on a white background and finally his white on white paintings simplified art more radically than ever before. Malevich wanted to “free art from the burden (yük) of the object.” He tried to make his shapes and colors as pure as musical notes, without reference to any recognizable object.
Suprematist Composition: White on White 1918. Oil on canvas, 79.4 x 79.4 cm; MoMA
• Malevich, who founded what he called Suprematism, believed in an extreme of reduction: ``The object in itself is meaningless... the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless''.
• What he wanted was a non-objective representation, ``the supremacy of pure feeling.'' This can sound convincing until one asks what it actually means. Malevich, however, had no doubts as to what he meant, producing objects of iconic power such as his series of White on White paintings or Dynamic Suprematism (1916; 102 x 67 cm ), in which the geometric patterns are totally abstract. • Malevich had initially been influenced by Cubism and primitive art, which were both based on nature, but his own movement of Suprematism enabled him to construct images that had no reference at all to reality. • Great solid diagonals of color in Dynamic Suprematism are floating free, their severe sides denying them any connection with the real world, where there are no straight lines. • This is a pure abstract painting, the artist's main theme being the internal movements of the personality. • The theme has no precise form, and Malevich had to search it out from within the visible expression of what he felt. They are wonderful works, and in their wake came other powerful Suprematist painters such as Natalia Goncharova and Liubov Popova.
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. Malevich described his aesthetic theory, known as Suprematism, as "the supremacy (üstünlük) of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts." . He viewed the Russian Revolution as having paved the way for a new society in which materialism would eventually lead to spiritual freedom. . This austere painting counts among the most radical paintings of its day, yet it is not impersonal; the trace of the artist's hand is visible in the texture of the paint and the subtle variations of white. . The imprecise outlines of the asymmetrical square generate a feeling of infinite space rather than definite borders.
Suprematist Composition: White on White 1918. Oil on canvas, 79.4 x 79.4 cm; MoMA
At the exhibition 0.10, the Black Square (1915; Moscow), painted on a square canvas surrounded by a margin of white, was hung across the corner of the separate room where works by Malevich and his followers were displayed; it was announced as the essential Suprematist work. On the one hand, it was radically nihilistic and could be interpreted as a gesture of rejection, providing no narrative, theme, composition or picture space, apparently rejecting all pictorial conventions and offering a canvas of unprecedented blankness; on the other hand, suspension across the corner of a room was a common way to display domestic icons, and by referring to this tradition its rejection of convention was not total. Black Square, 1915, Oil on Canvas, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
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Followed by the Black Circle (one version after 1920; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.) and the Black Cross (Paris, Pompidou), the Black Square can be related to an icon tradition that survived so strongly in Russia, using ancient forms that were increasingly admired by Russian artists seeking to exert their independence from western European traditions. Suprematism Term coined in 1915 by Kazimir Malevich for a new system of art, explained in his booklet : Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu: Novyy zhivopisnyy realizm „From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: the new realism in painting‟
Black Circle,1913-1915
The term itself implied the supremacy of this new art in relation to the past. Malevich saw it as purely aesthetic and concerned only with form, free from any political or social meaning. He stressed the purity of shape, particularly of the square, and he regarded Suprematism as primarily an exploration of visual language comparable to contemporary developments in writing. Suprematist paintings were first displayed at the exhibition ―The last Futurist exhibition of paintings: 0.10‖ held in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in December 1915; they comprised geometric forms which appeared to float against a white background. While Suprematism began before the Revolution of 1917, its influence, and the influence of Malevich’s radical approach to art, was pervasive in the early Soviet period.
Suprematism (Self-Portrait), 1916
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Malevich declared that the Black Square constituted the „zero of form‟, an end to old conventions and the origin of a new pictorial language. The forms of this language were strictly geometrical as in the Suprematism series, but they rapidly evolved into increasingly complex paintings in which the geometrical elements employed richer colours and inhabited an ambiguous and complex pictorial space.
Suprematism (Supremus No. 58) 1916; Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 70.5 cm; State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Suprematism, 1916-17; Oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm; Fine Arts Museum, Krasnodar
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Suprematist Painting 1917; Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 65.4 cm; The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova (April 24, 1889 – May 25, 1924) was a Russian avant-garde artist (Cubist, Suprematist and Constructivist), painter and designer. She was also a rarity in the highly masculine world of Soviet art. She added glowing color to Analytical Cubism.
Through a synthesis of styles, Popova worked towards what she termed painterly architectonics. After first exploring Impressionism, by 1913, in Composition with Figures, she was experimenting with the particularly Russian development of
Cubo-Futurism: a fusion of two equal influences from France and Italy.
Air+Man+Space, 1912
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Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko [O.S. 23 November] 1891 – December 3, 1956) was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova. -Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He 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 Poster/Flier
1920s. Rodchenko and Stepanova
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (November 23, 1890 – December 30, 1941), better known as El Lissitzky, was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the former Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design.
Perhaps the most famous work by “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge", a 1919 lithograph by Lissitzky Lissitzky from the same period was the 1919 propaganda poster, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.
In the poster, the intrusive red wedge symbolizes the Bolsheviks, who are penetrating and defeating their opponents, the Whites, during the Russian Civil War.
Russia was going through a civil war at the time, which was mainly fought between the "Reds" (communists and revolutionaries) and the "Whites" (monarchists, conservatives, liberals and socialists who opposed the Bolshevik Revolution).
The image of the red wedge shattering the white form, simple as it was, communicated a powerful message that left no doubt in the viewer's mind of its intention. The piece is often seen as alluding to the similar shapes used on military maps and, along with its political symbolism, was one of El Lissitzky's first major steps away from Malevich's non-objective suprematism into a style his own.
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El Lissitzky, Proun 30t, 1920. Sprengel Museum Hannover
Lissitzky's Suprematist story of two squares in six constructions, 1922
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El Lissitzky , Proun 5, Installation
Proun 19D, c. 1922 Gesso, oil, collage, etc., on plywood Proun G7, 1923 The Museum of Modern Art, New York Distemper, tempera, varnish and pencil on canvas, 77 x 62 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf
Section of the Room for Constructivist Art, 1926
Photomontage of the Wolkenbügel (Cloud-Iron) in Nikitskii Square, 1925
Design for the Abstract Cabinet, 1927-1928
Drawing of the Wolkenbügel (Cloud-Iron) in Nikitskii Square, 1925
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Entrance, 1930 International Fur Trade Exhibition, Leipzig
Model for the interior of the Soviet Pavilion International Fur Trade Exhibition, Leipzig
THREE MODERNIST MOVEMENTS
FUTURISM CONSTRUCTIVISM PRECISIONISM PERIOD: 1909-1918 1913-1932 1915-1930
LOCALE: Italy Russia United States
ARTISTS: Boccioni, Balla, Severeni, Tatlin, Malevich, Sheeler, Carrà, Russolo Popova, Rodchenko, Demuth, Lissitzky, Gabo, Pevsner O’Keeffe
FEATURES: Lines of force Geometric art, reflecting Sleek (düz) urban representing movement modern technology and industrial forms and modern life
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Precisionism
• The artists who came to be known as the Precisionists never formally organized themselves as a group or issued a manifesto; instead, they were associated through their common style and subjects.
• Around 1920, a number of artists in the United States began experimenting with a highly controlled approach to technique and form.
• They consistently reduced their compositions to simple shapes and underlying geometrical structures, with clear outlines, minimal detail, and smooth handling of surfaces.
• Their paintings, drawings, and prints also showed the influence of recent work by American photographers, such as Paul Strand, who were utilizing sharp focus and lighting, unexpected viewpoints and cropping, and emphasis on the abstract form of the subject.
The Precisionists borrowed freely from recent movements in European art, including Purism's call to visual order and clarity and Futurism's celebration of technology and expression of speed through dynamic compositions. Charles Demuth adapted Cubism's geometric simplifications and faceted, overlapping planes, while Morton Schamberg can be linked to Dada through his use of machinery as nontraditional subject matter.
Demuth spent several summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, located at the tip of Cape Cod and a popular summer destination for artists and writers in the early twentieth century. He painted a number of Provincetown landmarks, including this view of the Center Methodist Episcopal Church. In this watercolor, the church's prominent steeple and spire rise above the surrounding residential architecture. Built in 1860, the church had been designed in a variant of the English Baroque style, which is often associated with the architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723). Certain elements of Demuth's composition are indebted to his knowledge of Cubism and Futurism. Repeated, diagonal "lines of force" break the area of the sky into fragments, and the houses in the foreground seem crystallized from multiple planes; however, the overall effect is legible and cohesive. In demonstrating that he could apply his Precisionist style to more traditional subjects as well as modern industrial ones, Demuth remained a painter of the American scene.
After Sir Christopher Wren, 1920 Charles Demuth (American, 1883–1935) Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on cardboard (60.5 x 51 cm)
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In other respects, however, the Precisionists defined themselves as distinctively American artists. Artists such as Charles Sheeler, Elsie Driggs, Ralston Crawford, and Louis Lozowick, as well as Demuth, distanced themselves from European influences by selecting subjects from the American landscape and regional American culture. These subjects included elements unique to early twentieth-century life, including urban settings (particularly the dramatic engineering advances of skyscrapers and suspension bridges) and the sprawling industrial locales of steel mills, coalmines, and factory complexes. Many of the same artists also applied their new, hard-edged style to long-familiar American scenes, such as agricultural structures or local crafts and domestic architecture. Even such conventional motifs as a still life of fruit or flowers were treated to a fresh assessment in the Precisionist style.
This photograph was made at the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home that Charles Sheeler shared with fellow painter and photographer Morton Schamberg. The spare geometry of the eighteenth-century Doylestown farmhouse proved an irresistible subject for an artist eager to explore with a camera the radical formal ideas that had impressed him in the paintings of Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque. It is an elegantly balanced, harmonious work, a testament to Sheeler's clarity of vision and ability to distill a scene to its essence—a salient feature of the artist's work in all media.
[Doylestown House—The Stove], 1917 Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965) Gelatin silver print (23.1 x 16.3 cm)
The connections between the Precisionist approach and a wider social context were strong ones. In the later 1910s and 1920s, the United States was expanding its communications technology, industrial production, and construction in urban settings. The changing cityscape was documented by Strand and Sheeler in 1920, in their short film Manhattan. However, as the country experienced a psychological reaction to the mass destruction wrought overseas by the First World War and, later, the economic hardships of the Great Depression within its own borders, the United States entered a period of political isolationism. Cultural critics voiced a need for America to seek and shape its national identity through its own history, landscape, artifacts, and regional traditions. This attitude was also reflected in a revival of interest in American folk art. The functional design of Shaker furniture, for example, was now taken as evidence of preindustrial self-sufficiency, and was also seen as proto-modern in its simplicity.
Accordingly, there existed two opposing views of the machine's place in contemporary American society, both of which were embodied by Precisionist art.
1. One view was the utopian ideal of technology bringing order to the modern world by enhancing the speed, efficiency, and cleanliness of everyday life. It is worth noting that Precisionism coincided with the landmark Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, and the like-minded Machine-Age Exposition hosted by New York in 1927, both of which endorsed the amalgamation of art, design, and industry in streamlined products for everyday use.
2. The opposing view stressed the dehumanizing effects of technology, warning that it would replace workers, create pollution, and dominate the landscape in a destructive manner. Occasionally, these two attitudes coexisted in an ambiguous tension within a single work of art.
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Machinery, 1920 Charles Demuth (American, 1883–1935) Tempera and pencil on cardboard (60.9 x 50 cm)
This painting was first shown in an exhibition of Demuth's works titled Arrangements of the American Landscape Forms, held in 1920.
Rather than a traditional landscape scene, it depicts industrial architecture in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Despite some abstract use of force lines and fragmented planes, the subject remains identifiable. It is a scene of rooftop machinery set against a background of windows belonging to an adjacent factory building; the central structure is a cyclone separator, a centrifuge-like apparatus often used in industrial settings, consisting of a tank, a funnel, and two arm like duct pipes.
Like Demuth's painting The Figure 5 in Gold, this work was dedicated to his close friend, the poet William Carlos Williams. Williams himself contemplated the analogy between the arts and technology. In 1944, he wrote, "To make two bald statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words" (introduction to The Wedge, 1944).
Forms in Space, 1927 John Storrs (American, 1885–1956) Stainless steel and copper (52.1 x 10.2 x 4.1 cm)
Storrs was the son of a Chicago architect and real estate developer, and the modern architecture of his native city would influence his sculpture throughout his career. He studied at various institutions in both the United States and Paris, where he was a student of Auguste Rodin for a brief time.
He developed an approach to sculpture that acknowledged historical influences ranging from Native American ceramics to ancient Egyptian and Greek stone carving, while also incorporating recent styles such as Art Deco design.
Storrs produced his "skyscraper sculptures" in materials associated more with industry and the decorative arts than with the fine arts. They are formal experiments with volume and space, the balance of vertical and horizontal masses, and the play of light on polished surfaces. Examples such as Forms in Space, in particular, signal his interest in the latest architectural styles seen in Chicago and New York, where the ever-taller office towers and apartment buildings were "set back" at their upper stories, in accordance with new urban zoning requirements.
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Americana, 1931 Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965) Oil on canvas (121.9 x 91.4 cm)
Between 1926 and 1934, Sheeler produced a series of seven paintings that depict the interior of his home in South Salem, New York, and his collection of early American furnishings.
The conflicting geometric patterns of the rugs, pillows, woven sofa covering, and backgammon set create a sense of visual disorientation in this scene, as do the unusual perspective and cropping of objects. However, the objects themselves are rendered in an extremely precise manner.
This painting is as much a statement about national pride and the virtues of home and craftsmanship as it is a portrait of the artist's living space.
Sheeler was not alone in his interest in these crafts; a number of influential collectors developed an interest in American folk and decorative arts in the 1920s and 1930s. In an era that placed increasing emphasis on technology and mass production, and in the years following the international crisis of World War I, such objects were nostalgic reminders of an ostensibly simpler time.
South of Scranton, 1931 Peter Blume (American, born Russia, 1906–1992) Oil on canvas (142.2 x 167 cm) Although the subjects of Blume's pictures were frequently mystifying and tended toward Surrealism, his technique possessed a sharp clarity that associated him with the Precisionist school of painting.
South of Scranton gathers various scenes that the artist encountered during an extended road trip in spring 1930. The industrial machinery, coal piles, and smoking locomotives at the left side of the painting represent selective locales from the path.
Blume then traveled further south to Charleston, South Carolina, where he witnessed several sailors performing acrobatic exercises aboard the deck of a German cruiser ship in the harbor.
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White Canadian Barn II, 1932 Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887–1986) Oil on canvas (30.5 x 76.2 cm)
This austere image, from a series of seven or eight barn paintings, was inspired by a summer trip that O'Keeffe made to the rugged Gaspé Peninsula of Canada in 1932. The barn, as she depicts it, is stark in color and design, and precisely delineated. She allowed the subject matter to determine the appropriate proportions of the composition: the narrow, horizontal format of White Canadian Barn II echoes the flat rectangular forms of the barn roof and walls. The picture space is divided into three distinct areas denoting sky, building, and ground. Although the barn's strictly frontal presentation almost completely negates its three- dimensional form and depth, its somber coloring and massive size indicate a tangible and weighty presence. O'Keeffe distilled the essential geometric shape from each architectural element of the structure and also eliminated the textured patterns of its surfaces and other small details; only two impenetrable, black doorways anchor the breadth of the painting. While the artist denied having any connections to organized art movements, her series of barn images (a subject atypical in her nature-inspired oeuvre) does closely fit the style of the Precisionist painters.
Water, 1945 Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965) Oil on canvas 24 x 29 1/8 in. (61 x 74 cm)
Water depicts one of the power generators built by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, when hydroelectric power was being distributed throughout the Tennessee River region of the United States. Sheeler's experience as a photographer influenced his Precisionist style of painting, in which he emphasized the geometric shapes of objects in a hard-edged, clearly lit manner. For Sheeler, these monumental, streamlined forms signified human ingenuity in harnessing nature's power. His interpretation of American industry was somewhat idealized: workers are never shown, and the machinery is pristine and gleaming, free of any dirt or smoke. Sheeler expressed his feelings about the emotional symbolism of technology when he wrote: "Every age manifests itself by some external evidence. In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers—it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression" (quoted in Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition, 1938).
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Initially, no single label existed for this loosely associated group of artists of the Machine Age. They were frequently called "the Immaculates" or "modern classicists" throughout the 1920s. Although the "precision" and the "precise line" of their art were often noted in written reviews, it was not until 1927 that Alfred H. Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, officially used the name "Precisionists" to describe them as a group. Other early sponsors of the style in New York City included Charles Daniel of the Daniel Gallery, who exhibited the work of Charles Demuth, Niles Spencer, Charles Sheeler, and Preston Dickinson; Stephen Bourgeois of the Bourgeois Gallery, who promoted Joseph Stella and George Ault; and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her Whitney Studio Club.
Some of these artists, such as Demuth, Stella, and Sheeler, continued to work in a Precisionist style for several decades. Meanwhile, a second generation of artists working in a Precisionist style emerged during the 1930s. While still taking the American industrial landscape as a frequent subject, they tended more toward abstraction or Surrealism in their depictions of modernity. With the close of the 1930s, furthermore, the United States was approaching involvement in the Second World War; the use of atomic bombs in that war would give rise to widespread unease about technology's power to destroy, undermining the confident outlook that had made the Precisionist mode possible.
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