Fauvism, the first twentieth-century movement in modern art, was initially inspired by the examples of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne. The Fauves ("wild beasts") were a loosely allied group of French painters with shared interests. Several of them, including Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, and Georges Rouault, had been pupils of the Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau and admired the older artist's emphasis on personal expression. Matisse emerged as the leader of the group, whose members shared the use of intense color as a vehicle for describing light and space, and who redefined pure color and form as means of communicating the artist's emotional state. In these regards, Fauvism proved to be an important precursor to Cubism and Expressionism as well as a touchstone for future modes of abstraction.

Goldfish were introduced to Europe from East Asia in the 17th century. From around 1912, goldfish became a recurring subject in the work of Henri Matisse.

Color

The goldfish immediately attract our attention due to their color. The bright orange strongly contrasts with the more subtle pinks and greens that surround the fish bowl and the blue-green background. Blue and orange, as well as green and red, are complementary colors and, when placed next to one another, appear even brighter. This technique was used extensively by the Fauves, a

Golden age

In a view consistent with other Europeans who visited North Africa, Matisse admired the Moroccans’ lifestyle, which appeared to him to be relaxed and contemplative. For Matisse, the goldfish came to symbolize this tranquil state of mind and, at the same time

Contemplation

Goldfish invites the viewer to indulge in the pleasure of watching the graceful movement and bright colors of the fish. Matisse once wrote that he dreamt of “an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be […] a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue."

Constructing pictorial space

The painting contains a tension created by Matisse’s depiction of space. The fish are seen simultaneously from two different angles. From the front, the goldfish are portrayed in such a way that the details of their fins, eyes and mouths are immediately recognizable to the viewer. Seen from above, however, the goldfish are merely suggested by colorful brushstrokes. If we then look at the plants through the transparent glass surface, we notice that they are distorted compared to the ‘real’ plants in the background.

Matisse paints the plants and flowers in a decorative manner. The upper section of the picture, above the fish tank, resembles a patterned wallpaper composed of flattened shapes and colors. What is more, the table-top is tilted upwards, flattening it and making it difficult for us to imagine how the goldfish and flowerpots actually manage to remain on the table. Matisse constructed this original juxtaposition of viewpoints and spatial ambiguity by observing Paul Cézanne’s still-life paintings. Cézanne described art as “a harmony parallel to nature”. And it is clear here that although Matisse was attentive to nature, he did not imitate it but used his image of it to reassemble his own pictorial reality. Although this can be confusing for the viewer, Matisse’s masterful use of color and pattern successfully holds everything together.

Cold Coffee and Analytic Cubism

To understand Cubism it helps to go back to Cézanne’s still life paintings or even further, to the Renaissance. Let's use an example that worked nicely in the classroom. I was lecturing, trying to untangle Cubism while drinking incresingly cold coffee from a paper cup. I set the cup on the desk in the front of the room and said, “If I were a Renaissance artist in mid-15th century Italy painting that cup on that table, I would position myself at particular point in space and construct the surrounding objects and space frozen in that spot and from that single perspective. On the other hand, if this was the late 19th century and I was Cézanne, I might allow myself to open this view up quite a bit. Perhaps I would focus on, and record, the changes of shape and line that result when I shift my weight from one leg to the other or when I lean in toward the cup to get a closer look. I might even allow myself to render slightly around the far side of the paper cup since, as Cézanne, I am interested in vision and memory working together. Finally, if I were Braque or Picasso in the early 20th century, I would want to express even more on the canvas. I would not be satisfied with the limiting conventions of Renaissance perspective nor even with the initial explorations of the master Cézanne.

As a Cubist, I want to express my total visual understanding of the paper coffee cup. I want more than the Renaissance painter or even Cézanne, I want to express the entire cup simultaneously on the static surface of the canvas since I can hold all that visual information in my memory. I want to render the cup’s front, its sides, its back, and its inner walls, its bottom from both inside and out, and I want to do this on a flat canvas. How can this be done? The answer is provided by The Portuguese. In this canvas, everything was fractured. The guitar player and the dock was just so many pieces of broken form, almost broken glass. By breaking these objects into smaller elements, Braque and Picasso are able to overcome the unified singularity of an object and instead transform it into an object of vision. At this point the class began to look a little confused, so I turned back to the paper cup and began to tear it into pieces (I had finished the coffee). If I want to be able to show you both the back and front and inside and outside simultaneously, I can fragment the object. Basically, this is the strategy of the Cubists.

German Expressionism refers to a number of related creative movements beginning in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin during the 1920s. These developments in Germany were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central European culture in fields such as architecture, dance, painting, sculpture, as well as cinema. This article deals primarily with developments in German Expressionist cinema before and immediately after World War I.

WHAT IS THE CONTRAST IN THIS IMAGE

psychological drama - contrast between the artist’s clothing and studio space that we can read a complicated coming of age for an idealistic young artist

German Expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge) artists set about creating an entirely new way of being artists.

2 INFLUENCES Nietzsche's book & “primitive” art , Thus Spoke Zarathustra uses the bridge as a metaphor for the connection between the barbarism of the past and the modernity of the future. The Brücke artists considered themselves the inheritors of this idea, and created art that looked to the past and the future at once.

honest and direct, more natural ----“folk art”

CONTENT Paintings created outside, in nature, together with the unidealized nudes were hallmarks of the group’s work. The roughly sketched,

metaphor = not to the body—but to his identity as an artist.

CONTEXT- Adolf Hitler persecuted artists who painted in a style that he considered outside of the Aryan ideal soon after he became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. The Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition of 1937 was a grand spectacle that the Nazis organized to mock the modernist art they hated. This was a humiliating time for Kirchner. At least thirty-two of his works were exhibited in the Degenerate Art exhibition. In addition, more than 600 of his works were removed from public collections. He committed suicide in 1938.

The artist rarely depicted real people, though she frequently used her talents in support of causes she believed in. This work, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht was created in 1920 in response to the assassination of Communist leader Karl Liebknecht during an uprising of 1919. This work is unique among her prints, and though it memorializes the man, it does so without advocating for his ideology.

The Socialists and Communists both wanted to eliminate Capitalism and establish communal control over the means of production, but while the Socialists believed that the best way to achieve that goal was to work step by step from within the Capitalist structure, the Communists called for an immediate and total social revolution that would put governmental power in the hands of the workers.

a lamentation, a traditional motif in Christian art depicting the followers of Christ mourning over his dead body, casting Liebknecht as the Christ figure.

The German Expressionist artists, in particular Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Brücke group, used woodcuts as early as 1904 to capture the rough, vital energy that they perceived in the work of so-called “primitive” societies without a fine art tradition.

dream of a better, more spiritual future through the transformative powers of art.

910 many of the artist’s abstract canvases shared a common literary source, the Revelation of Saint John the Divine; the rider came to signify the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who will bring epic destruction after which the world will be redeemed.

cataclysmic events on one side of the canvas and the paradise of spiritual salvation on the other. I

Neo-Plasticism or “The New Plastic Painting,

The plastic arts—media such as sculpture, that molds three-dimensional form, or, in Mondrian’s case, painting on canvas.

painters had attempted to render three-dimensional forms in believable spaces

Focus instead on the material properties of paint and its unique ability to express ideas abstractly using formal elements such as line and color.

Mondrian believed his abstraction could serve as a universal pictorial language representing the dynamic, evolutionary forces that govern nature and human experience. In fact, he believed that abstraction provides a truer picture of reality than illusionistic depictions of objects in the visible world. Perhaps this is why Mondrian characterized his style as “abstract real” painting.

emulate contemporary styles, including Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Symbolism in an effort to find his own artistic voice.

PROCESS

“composition” (the organization of forms on the canvas) signals his experimentation with abstract arrangements.

too static or too dynamic,

concluding that asymmetrical arrangements of geometric (rather than organic) shapes in primary (rather than secondary) colors best represent universal forces.

German philosopher Hegel that art and civilization progress by successive moments of tension and reconciliation between oppositional forces. For Mondrian then, composing with opposites such as black and white pigments or vertical and horizontal lines suggest an evolutionary development.

Theosophy, lines, shapes, and colors symbolized the unity of spiritual and natural forces.

De Stijl (The Style)

commitment to relational opposites, asymmetry, and pure planes of color.

a harmony of contrasts that signify both balance and the tension of dynamic forces.

Propaganda

an ode to the success of the First Five-Year Plan

COMPOSOTION

only three types of color and tone.

QUESTION: HOW did art movements such as Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Symbolism influence the composition of this piece

Manipulating reality

positive propaganda became, little by little, a means to hide a disastrous economic policy from the rest of the world.

despite our increasingly sophisticated understanding of the distinction between image and reality, Stepanova's photomontages are an important reminder of how an artist can blur the line between aesthetic passion and ideology.

DADA / SUREALISM

DADA

To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge,

Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words "da, da," meaning "yes, yes" in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name "Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French–German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'.^[4]

SURREALISM

how might an otherwise typical, functional object be modified so it represents something deeply personal and poetic? How might it, in Freudian terms, resonate as a sublimation of internal desire and aspiration?

external and internal realities united

Surrealism shared much of the anti-rationalism of Dada, the movement out of which it grew. The original Parisian Surrealists used art as a reprieve from violent political situations and to address the unease they felt about the world's uncertainties. By employing fantasy and dream imagery, artists generated creative works in a variety of media that exposed their inner minds in eccentric, symbolic ways, uncovering anxieties and treating them analytically through visual means.

Transformation of ordinary materials into something spectacular that transports us makes us see things in a new way. ASK WHAT IS ART, WHAT THE ARTIST DOES. Does art have to be made- or is it philosophy and theory?

Visceral Responses

Oppenheim described her creations as “not an illustration of an idea, but the thing itself.”

Unlike Read and Dalí, Oppenheim stresses the physicality of Object,

Bauhaus, was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicised and taught.

140. The Two Fridas, Frida Kahlo (essay, image, additional resources)

141. The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 49, Jacob Lawrence (video-short version, video-long version, photo, additional resources)

142. The Jungle, Wilfredo Lam (essay, image, additional resources)

143. Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park, Diego Rivera (essay, image, additional resources)

145. Woman I, Willem de Kooning (video, images, additional resources)

147. Marilyn Diptych, Andy Warhol (essay, image, additional resources)

148. Narcissus garden, Yayoi Kusama (essay, image, additional resources)

149. The Bay, Helen Frankenthaler (essay, quiz, image, additional resources)

150. Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, Claes Oldenburg (essay, photo, additional resoures)

151. Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson (video, images, additional resources)

152. House in New Castle County, Robert Ventura, John Rausch and Denise Scott Brown (essay, photos, additional resources)