Today we finished up our discussion of prominent pre-WW1 artistic movements and began to tackle the heavy hitters after WW1.
We started with the Young Ladies of Avignon, going into more detail about the layers of abstraction present in the painting. Professor Plesch noted that the painting itself was a revolutionary step away from the mimetic nature of art that defined the Western canon since the early Renaissance, which I thought was pretty interesting because the painting itself doesn’t feel very special, at least to me.
After that, we touched on the second important movement in which Picasso was involved — Cubism. Cubism existed in two forms, analytic and synthetic. The former refers to the philosophical exploration and artistic experimentation of space and form, while the latter refers to the composition of representational objects through simple geometric shapes viewed from various angles.
We then discussed Dadaism across Europe and America. Dadaism began in earnest with Hugo Ball, a German poet whose poems were intentionally nonsensical and ridiculous to highlight those same qualities in modern society. Interestingly, I had to perform a poem of his for my German class a few weeks back, and I had a great time! Dadaism, though universally thought-provoking and abstract, employed varying degrees of political commentary. Duchamp’s New York Dada was concerned primarily with questions of aesthetics and art broadly, as we saw with his, Fountain. German Dada, however, is fervently political and criticizes the vacuity of the post-war German state through assemblages and collages (dubbed photomontages to sound more mechanistic and manufactured).
We closed by briefly surveying Surrealism, a movement that owes its existence to the theories of Sigmund Freud. Inspired by the Austrian Psychoanalyst, Surrealists plumbed the annals of their unconscious minds through automatic artistic practices to pull imperialistic, believable, dream scapes.