A History of 20th-Century Art

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ISBN: 9782080105646 | 2080105647
Cover: Paperback
Copyright: 3/15/2001

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Here is a fresh, exhilarating approach to the history of twentieth-century art. Rejecting the year-by-year sequential approach of conventional accounts, author Bernard Blistène tackles the subject thematically, using key works as a springboard to understanding the ideas and techniques of the major artists of the century.

The book encompasses the visual arts in the broadest sense of the term. In addition to painting, sculpture and the new art forms of the postwar era, it covers architecture, photography, industrial design and video. Each chapter treats a different theme-- from Fauvism to film, Dada to design-- providing:

* a general overview of the movement or period in question
* numerous illustrations of particular works, each accompanied by brief explanatory texts
* chronologies detailing important events within and around the world of art
* bibliographies and suggested museum visits for each movement.

With over 500 illustrations, A History of 20th-Century Art provides a lucid and compelling introduction to artistic creation in the last century.

Fauvism

(23)

``from objects to signs''

At the dawn of the twentieth century, with impressionism and Symbolism waning and with the Neo-Impressionists and the Nabis engaged in a reassessment of the fundamentals of painting, a new generation emerged that broke decisively with convention. Abandoning local color and adopting a rich palette, they produced intensely vivid images of lasting significance to modern art. With the Fauves was born the inevitable distinction between the real and its depiction

Cubism

(8)

``from image to language''

Hailing Cezanne and rejecting Matisse's elegiac style, Picasso and Braque invented Cubism. Turning their backs on the work of Lautrec, Degas, the Fauvists and the old masters that had inspired their early canvases, they looked to African sculpture to discover the visual and symbolic elements for a new idiom. In the winter of 1906-7, Picasso created the emblematic work of the twentieth century-Les Demoiselles d'Avignon-and supplied the enduring model from which an analysis of the form and structure of painting reached full critical potential

Cubism

(8)

``from static to dynamic''

Cubism, following on from Impressionism and Fauvism, signaled the first break with traditional forms of representation, but the sheer number of styles that followed in its wake makes any inventory impractical. Cubism laid the foundations of modern art for the many artists who came into contact with it in Paris or through international exhibitions. This chapter attempts to outline the questions the movement posed for artists

Sculpture 1880-1914

(8)

``from monument to readymade''

From Rodin to Brancusi, from Picasso to Duchamp, artists questioned the principles of sculpture, undermining the very basis and purpose of the art. The subject matter of the artwork was replaced by the work of art as subject. The rejection of sculpture's commemorative function led to the development of an autonomous language. Form in space was no longer the result of technical or stylistic mastery, but instead a process of redefining the art's rules and functions

Architecture 1890-1914

(8)

``from ornamentation to simplicity''

At the end of the nineteenth century, new technology and growing urbanization led to profound transformations in architecture. As a counterpoint to the early innovations of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Glasgow School, architects and designers embarked on the construction of the modern utopias. Throughout a variety of centers, from the Vienna Sezession to Chicago and California, from Munich to Brussels, from Paris to Nancy, a new idiom emerged: Art Nouveau

Expressionism

(6)

``between figure and abstraction''

Developments on the German artistic scene, centered around Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter, contrasted with events occurring simultaneously in Paris. The members of these groups hailed from all over Europe and the alternative vision they presented opened up a deep aesthetic rift on the eve of World War I

Dada

(6)

``between war and peace''

Rather than a movement proper, Dada was more a frenzied state of mind. Emerging from and during World War I, it burned like a wildfire from Zurich to New York and was to leave lasting scars even after it burned out around 1922. Anarchistic, revolutionary, even censorious it certainly was; but it was also indifferent, dilettante and poetic. From buffer states and battlefields, Dada radiated from many centers, and its bright fire still rages

Surrealism

(8)

``from The Manifesto to exile''

Building on the ruins of a culture it later helped to bring to grief, Surrealism strove to ``change life'' and to create a genuine humanism through the celebration of the true measure of man. As Aragon put it, Surrealism's ``vice is the unreasonable and impassioned use of astounding images'' and it bequeathed to twentieth-century art an infinite variety of artworks of every kind that proclaimed the ``originating power of the mind.''

Classicisms and Realisms

(6)

``between order and model''

Between 1919 and 1939, with the rise of abstraction and the revolutionary movements centered around Surrealism and Dada, a confused, heterogeneous situation emerged. New types of work were created that lay outside these categories, works that, as Jean Clair has written, ``bypass the theology of the avant-garde'' and force us to call its very significance into question

Abstraction and Constructivism

(8)

``geometry and utopia''

In the mid-1910s, the ``invention'' of abstraction echoed throughout Europe in the form of various currents and approaches whose common characteristic was the refusal to regard art as the mere representation of reality. Wedding spiritualism to social program, Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, Dutch Neo-Plasticism and De Stijl, the Bauhaus in Germany, and the groups and movements that sprung from the emigration to France of numerous artists, constituted one of the most important episodes in the forging of the avant-garde credo

Sculptures, Assemblages, Constructions

(6)

``spatial languages''

Sculptures, assemblages, constructions: a triangle that attempts to circumscribe the diversity of the avant-garde approach to space in the wake of the break between monumental forms and the readymade that occurred at the beginning of the century. From Tatlin's Corner Constructions to Brancusi's Endless Column, from the welded sculptures of Julio Gonzalez and Picasso to the Surrealist objects hailed by Andre Breton, these multiple experiments went beyond the classic interwar model and opened the way to more diffuse reflections on form and meaning

Architecture 1914-1939

(8)

``rationalism and modernism''

``Architectural Expressionism,'' a trend centered around Rudolf Steiner, Bruno Taut, Heinz Polzig and Erich Mendelsohn, heralded the end of nineteenth-century utopianism. In the interwar period, the International Style triumphed, poised between rationalism and modernism

The United States

103

(12)

``from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism''

With Abstract Expressionism and Minimalist abstraction, the United States began to extend its economic and industrial dominance into the sphere of ideas. Enthused by a dream of self-purification, ``American painting,'' as defined by Clement Greenberg, could now join the modern art community, becoming the dominant force to an extent that hitherto it could scarcely have dared expect

Europe 1939-1970

115

(12)

``painting: from image to tool''

To cover a whole continent over such a long period in a single overview is to invite disaster. It presupposes and indeed encourages the idea of a rivalry between Europe and the United States, as well as neglecting art produced in other regions. The hypothesis, however, helps to account for the various often contradictory postwar trends emerging at a time when ``modern art'' was experiencing (almost) official consecration

The Real in Question

127

(10)

``Pop art, Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus and the Happening''

Although very different from each other, these movements all share, not so much a rejection of the traditional principles of painting, as a steadfast willingness to remain open to other disciplines and to be receptive to practices from other very different fields. Pop art, Nouveau Realisme, Mec art, Fluxus, the Happening and Lettrism together countered Clement Greenberg's opinion expressed in 1939 that mass culture could only ever produce phony art

Sculpture 1939-1970

137

(8)

``between form and gesture''

The term ``sculpture'' seems inappropriate to define the various practices and movements that arose in the first half of the twentieth-century avant-garde, clearing the way for a complete overhaul of its function and purpose. As sculpture embraced instability, pared itself to the essential or incorporated the amorphous, it edged toward installation, environment, or mechanical contraption. The few examples taken from a host of movements are intended to summarize the evolution and variety of what amounted to a totally new language

Architecture 1944-2000

145

(10)

``after modernism''

It is impossible to provide a complete inventory of the movements and figures that have left their mark on half a century of architecture, but these few milestones indicate the challenges it posed and provide evidence of its on-going metamorphosis. As Francois Chaslin reaffirmed in an editorial for Architecture d'aujourd'hui (December 1990), there is still some point in ``trying to sort it all out.''

Art Today

155

(12)

``the situation and its risks''

For this chapter, we were tempted to co-opt Christian Boltanski's notion of the Inventory for our own devices; a cruel yet entirely safe choice for the art historian, since it can mention everything and signify nothing-save perhaps the vanity and the inability of sitting in judgement over a history which requires constant rewriting. After Arte Povera, Supports/Surfaces, after the various incarnations of Minimal and Conceptual art, and after Vito Acconci's Body art, the 1970s pointed the way to fresh areas and disciplines, opening the door to a pressing crowd of competing utopias

Design

167

(10)

``things--a user's guide''

As the century became mechanized, it witnessed the birth of a consumer culture with its attendant products, consumer durables and logos. Decade after decade, these became indicative of our different ways of living and of ``being in the world.'' As soon as the borders between the various genres broke down and they became porous to every branch of knowledge, design made its impact and triggered an irreversible process of production that affects our daily lives as well as the diverse forms of contemporary aesthetics

Photographies

177

(10)

``the memory of the gaze''

In an image-based society, reproduction techniques occupy pride of place. Among these, in what Walter Benjamin called ``the age of mechanical reproduction,'' photography has contributed to the broadening of both our ideas and techniques. In a time of new technology and virtual reality, photography still affirms its usefulness as a way of looking at the world and of grasping, in countless forms and styles, the real in all its guises

Cinema, Video

187

``moving image: projections and installations''

Born with the century, cinema has since imposed itself as one of the paramount models for contemporary art. In its confrontation with social, political and economic realities, it has applied its own codes that an image-conscious world recognizes as holding up a mirror to our very peculiar struggle. With their projections and installations, the visual arts too have cinema in their sights, and-in the era of television and video, of communication technologies and multimedia-are putting it through a series of tests which will expand its horizons and extend its field of operations

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A History of 20th-Century Art

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials