Here is a history of 20th-century art which breaks away from the shackles of more traditional accounts. Rather than confining the century to a year-by-year narrative, the author Bernard Blistene -- one of France's leading curators and art historians -- has compiled an up-beat book, presenting the principal tendencies, movements and figure-heads of 20th-century art in a series of thematically organized chapters. We discover the essential contributions of movements from the early part of the century, including Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Expressionism, and Surrealism, but we also look at the return to Classicism after the First World War; the parallel development of American and European art from the 1950s onwards; and the evolution of architecture over the decades. Also vital to this new account are the arts outside of painting and sculpture -- namely Design, Photography, Cinema and Video -- which played such a pivotal role through the.century. Here they are given their due in specially allocated chapters. In addition to an introductory text on the given theme, eac |
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15 | (23) |
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``from objects to signs'' |
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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 |
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23 | (8) |
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``from image to language'' |
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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 |
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31 | (8) |
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``from static to dynamic'' |
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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 |
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39 | (8) |
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``from monument to readymade'' |
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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 |
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47 | (8) |
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``from ornamentation to simplicity'' |
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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 |
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55 | (6) |
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``between figure and abstraction'' |
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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 |
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61 | (6) |
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``between war and peace'' |
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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 |
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67 | (8) |
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``from The Manifesto to exile'' |
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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.'' |
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75 | (6) |
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``between order and model'' |
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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 |
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Abstraction and Constructivism |
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81 | (8) |
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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 |
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Sculptures, Assemblages, Constructions |
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89 | (6) |
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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 |
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95 | (8) |
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``rationalism and modernism'' |
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``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 |
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103 | (12) |
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``from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism'' |
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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 |
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115 | (12) |
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``painting: from image to tool'' |
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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 |
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127 | (10) |
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``Pop art, Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus and the Happening'' |
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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 |
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137 | (8) |
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``between form and gesture'' |
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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 |
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145 | (10) |
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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.'' |
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155 | (12) |
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``the situation and its risks'' |
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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 |
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167 | (10) |
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``things--a user's guide'' |
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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 |
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177 | (10) |
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``the memory of the gaze'' |
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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 |
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187 | |
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``moving image: projections and installations'' |
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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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Bernard Blistène, formerly Deputy Director of the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris (Centre George Pompidou), is Chief Curator of the Musees de France and has recently been appointed Inspector General of Fine Arts at the French Ministry of Culture. He has written several books and curated key exhibitions including "Rendezvous: Masterpieces from the Centre George Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums" (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1998), and "Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture, and Design from France, 1958-1998" (Guggenheim Museum SoHo, 1998).
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