Continuing our discussion of early 20th century art, we began class by looking at Pablo Picasso. Picasso freed himself from the representational functions and constructs of line, color, form, and voids to create his style of abstract art. Developing a style known as Analytical Cubism, which was an analysis of form, Picasso created Ma Jolie. The painting is a reduction for multiple aspects of art – color (brown earth tones), depth (all forms brought to same plane), brushstrokes (repetitive and consistent width), and lines (straight, diagonal, with a few curves). The abstraction of a woman utilizes multiple vantage points in one image to represent many views and create a more complete representation of the subject. Another branch of Cubism developed into Synthetic Cubism, bringing together multiple ideas or themes in one image. Popular for this style were “papier collé”, paper collages. This signaled real pieces of reality coming back into artwork. Around the same time, the avant-garde was working to shock to bourgeoise and resulted in the style of Futurism developing. Boccioni’s States of Mind 1: Farewells exhibited the style, focusing on capturing motion in a form of plastic art.
Post WWI, there was an emphasis on the nonsensical after the shocking death and destruction of the war. The Dada style developed during this time with an interest in returning to primitive, ignorant states and the abstract. The Entombment of the Birds and Butterflies (Head of Tzara) by Jean Arp was influenced by the carefree artistic style, created by randomly dropping paper on the ground to determine the sculpture’s composition. Marcel Duchamp was also a prominent Dadaist who created art through Ready-mades. Fountain represented a reduction in contemporary art by simply rotating a urinal and signing it R. Mutt. Other artists like Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim also used everyday objects to create art. Ray’s The Gift painted an everyday iron black and glued thumbtacks onto its flat side. Oppenheimer’s Object (Luncheon in Fur) covered a teacup, saucer, and spoon in fur, provoking a sensory disgust in viewers. These past two artistic creations can be categorized under Surrealism as they aimed to balance the reality of life with a strange, unexpected twist.