Modern Art and Architecture

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Abstract Art

Cubism was also an influence on Abstract Art, which emerged in several countries around 1910 and soon developed several “isms” of its own. The early abstract artists varied greatly in style and approach. In Russia, for example, Kasimir Malevich was inspired by Christian mysticism to create his extremely austere abstract paintings (his ideas reached their ultimate distillation with pictures of a white square on an almost undifferentiated white background), whereas Kandinsky and his followers in Germany were typically much more intuitive, emotional, and colourful in approach, often finding their inspiration in nature or music.

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Dada

During World War I a new artistic movement arose that was in some ways even more of a break with tradition than Cubism or Abstract Art. This was Dada, which went beyond radical stylistic innovation and questioned the whole basis and meaning of art. Dada was born in 1915, more or less simultaneously in Switzerland and the United States (specifically in Zurich and New York)—two countries that were at this time neutral during the war. The movement reflected disgust at the horrors of the war and disillusionment with the values of the society from which it had emerged. Dada artists tried to shock people from complacency, and many of them abandoned conventional materials and techniques in favour of such methods as collage, photomontage, and the nonsense poem. They had no regard for traditional ideals of craftsmanship and often allowed chance procedures or effects to play a part in the creation of their work. In Europe the leading Dadaists included Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Kurt Schwitters; in America the three most important figures were Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia (both French by birth), and Man Ray. The movement was short-lived (it had virtually died out by 1922) and flourished in only a few cities (including Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, and Paris), but nevertheless it was highly influential, establishing the deliberately iconoclastic, debunking strain that has run through so much of subsequent avant-garde art.

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Surrealism

The immediate sequel to Dada was Surrealism, which was the most widespread and influential art movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Like Dada, it was envisaged as a whole way of life, rather than as a matter of artistic style, but whereas Dada was nihilistic in spirit, Surrealism was positive in outlook. The essential idea of the movement was to release the power of the unconscious mind. André Breton, the French writer who was Surrealism’s chief spokesman, believed that this would help combat what he regarded as the excessive materialism and rationalism of the modern world. Surrealist artists were stimulated by such ideas in various ways, but the most famous paintings of the movement are probably the strange, dream-like visions of Salvador Dalí and the witty compositions of René Magritte, which abound in visual puns and paradoxes. The Surrealists were good at promoting their work (through exhibitions and magazines, for example), and many artists of the period were influenced by their imagery, even if they did not subscribe wholeheartedly to their ideas. In Britain, for example, the hauntingly mysterious landscapes of Paul Nash reflect this influence.

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Early Modern Painting in the United States

Until about 1950, modern styles and movements almost all originated in Europe and only later spread to the United States and other parts of the Western world. In the early years of the 20th century numerous American artists worked in Europe (particularly Paris) and some of them were in the vanguard of ideas, but it was not until 1913 that the American public saw its first major exhibition of Modern Art—the Armory Show, held initially in New York and subsequently in Chicago and Boston. It made a powerful impact on many American artists, encouraging them to experiment with modern idioms. Stuart Davis, for example, applied Cubist ideas to American subject matter, creating a vigorous and distinctive style. However, other American artists felt a patriotic urge to repudiate European influence, and in the period between the two world wars several of them worked in a vein of descriptive realism that has been called American Scene Painting. The major figure of this trend is Edward Hopper, who was the first artist to show how such distinctively American subjects as motels and filling stations could provide rich pictorial material. The prevailing theme of Hopper’s work is the loneliness of modern urban life. Some of his contemporaries worked in a similar realistic manner but were more concerned with rural and small-town America. Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood are the three main representatives of this trend, which is known as Regionalism and can be considered a Midwestern branch of American Scene Painting.

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Abstract Expressionism

Around 1940 a loosely affiliated group of young American painters—active mainly in New York—began moving away from the prevailing realism to create a new and distinctive type of abstraction, now known as Abstract Expressionism. The most famous representative of this movement is Jackson Pollock, and other leading figures include Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. They—and the other representatives of the movement—did not share a common style, but rather a similarity of outlook, believing that abstract painting could make powerful statements about the human condition; many of them liked to work on very large canvases, which emphasized the scale of their ambitions. Their intellectual leanings—notably their interest in the unconscious, symbolism, and myth—were stimulated by the presence of many European expatriate artists, particularly Surrealists, who had left Europe for America during World War II. In his most characteristic pictures Pollock worked in an explosively energetic style, splashing and dribbling paint on the canvas (his technique is known as Action Painting), but other members of the group (notably Newman and Rothko) used relatively flat and broad areas of colour, conveying feelings of vastness and solitude.