Modern Art and Architecture

I

Introduction

Modern Art and Architecture, a term that can be applied to all Western or Western-inspired art and architecture from about 1900 onwards, but which is generally used more specifically to designate forms of visual expression from this period that are consciously in tune with progressive aesthetic attitudes. In the second sense, Modern Art and Architecture represents a breakaway from the historical revivalism that had characterized much 19th-century art and a repudiation of many ideals and assumptions that had prevailed since the Renaissance.

Even in this more restricted sense (with which this article is concerned), Modern Art and Architecture is a broad and imprecise term, which is used in different ways by different scholars. Some extend it back to the mid-19th century—in painting, for example, to the work of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and the Impressionists (with their contemporary subjects and unconventional techniques), and in architecture to the buildings of Sir Joseph Paxton (with his novel use of industrial materials). However, in everyday usage (and particularly as applied to painting and sculpture) the phrase is generally restricted to art since the beginning of the 20th century, when a series of revolutionary movements fundamentally changed the way artists saw and represented the world.

This aesthetic revolution was characterized by a profusion of styles, movements, and “isms”, many of them short-lived, expressing a restlessness in the search for new directions and novel principles. Some major artists were involved in more than one of these groupings and trends, while others stood apart from them and pursued their own ideals and experiments. Many of these leading figures were based in Paris, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was unrivalled as the world capital of art, but several other countries were prominent in the birth and development of Modern Art; Germany, for example, was particularly important as a centre of Expressionism, and Russia of various types of Abstract Art. Paris maintained its position as the chief focus of artistic innovation until World War II, after which the United States—particularly New York—took the lead.

In the following sections, some of the main trends and outstanding individuals of Modern Art are discussed in roughly chronological order under three main headings: painting, sculpture (which includes also newer forms of expression now usually grouped with the traditional visual arts), and architecture. It must be remembered that while these developments were taking place, the majority of painters and sculptors (and to a lesser degree architects) continued to work in much more traditional styles—unmoved or only superficially influenced by avant-garde styles and attitudes.

II

Modern Art

A

Painting

Avant-garde painters of the late 19th century, for example the Post-Impressionists and the Symbolists, pursued many different ideals, but a common denominator among most of them was a diminished concern for realism and a greater concern for personal freedom of expression. In the early 20th century a younger generation of painters adopted even greater distortions of line, colour, and pictorial space, and the decade from about 1905 up to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was a time of unprecedented artistic experimentation. During this period a series of revolutionary movements transformed painting (and to a lesser extent sculpture), creating what we now generally understand by the term “Modern Art”. The most important of these movements were Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism (which had various offshoots), and Abstract Art.

A

1

Fauvism and Expressionism

The Fauves were a group of French painters who first exhibited together in 1905. Henri Matisse was the most famous member and others included André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and the Dutch-born Kees van Dongen. They were united by their love of very strong, bright colour, which they used for emotional effect rather than to depict the world accurately. This emotionalism means that their work can be seen as an aspect of Expressionism, which flourished in various countries but mainly in Germany. In the same year that Fauvism was founded, 1905, a group of young German Expressionist artists came together in Dresden under the name Die Brücke (The Bridge). Among the members were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Their work has much in common with the vigour and boldness of Fauvism, but it can be very different in spirit, for they often portrayed the fears and sufferings of humanity. A second major group of German Expressionist painters, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), was organized in Munich in 1911; its two leading members were Wassily Kandinsky (a Russian émigré) and Franz Marc. The Blaue Reiter painters were in general more spiritual in outlook than those of Die Brücke, with leanings towards abstraction. Like the Fauvists and many other avant-garde artists of the time, the German Expressionists at first met with incomprehension or hostility from the general public, but they had supporters among some of the more adventurous dealers and collectors.

A

2

Cubism and its Offshoots

Cubism marked an even more fundamental break with the art of the past than Fauvism or Expressionism, for it abandoned the use of a single, fixed viewpoint—a standard convention in European painting since the Renaissance. Instead, Cubist painters used a variety of viewpoints, so that several aspects of an object or scene could be depicted simultaneously in one image. By breaking down and analysing forms in this way, the artist presented the essence or accumulated vision of an object or scene, rather than trying to show it as it appeared at any particular moment from any particular position. The joint creators of Cubism were Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who worked in close collaboration in Paris from 1907 until 1914, when their paths separated because of the war. By 1911 numerous other painters in Paris had been converted to Cubism, including Juan Gris (who called it “a new way of representing the world”) and Fernand Léger, and it proved immensely influential, becoming the starting point or major ingredient of several other “isms”. These included Futurism in Italy (launched in 1909), Orphism in France (originating in 1911), and Vorticism in England (flourishing briefly in 1914-1915 before being dissipated by the war).