Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1900-1945
Gertrude Stein
Modernity Modernism
Modernist Music & Art
Non-harmonic tones & dissonant
chords:
Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky’s The Rite of
Spring (1913)
Nick LaRocca & the Original Dixieland Jazz Band
(1922)
George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Modernist Music & Art
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
creator of the twelve-tone system of musical
composition
Painted & exhibited his work with a group of
artists in the circle of the Russian painter
Wassily Kandinsky
composed Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
accompanying chamber ensemble employs a
different combination of instruments for each of
the 21 poem-based songs of the cycle
the vocal soloist uses the Sprechstimme
(German for “speech voice”), or Sprechgesang
(“speech song”), a blend of speech and song
Modernist Music & Art
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971)
first performance of The Rite of Spring (1913)
unconventional choreography
harsh dissonances
driving, asymmetrical, shifting rhythms of the music
hostile uproar so noisy that the dancers
could not hear the orchestra
later concert performances were well received.
Modernist Music & Art
Chicago jazz bands:
Nick LaRocca & the Original Dixieland Jazz Band
first recorded in 1922
Concerts in New York, then London
North Side of Chicago:
White musicians: Mugsy Spanier, Bunny Berigan,
Wingy Manone
South Side of Chicago:
Black musicians: Jimmy Noone, Lovie Austin,
Johnny Dodds, and Louis Armstrong
the 1920s: the big bands; popular in the
1930s and early 1940s period known as
the swing era
Modernist Music & Art
George Gershwin
both popular and classical forms
Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Concerto in F (1925)
opera Porgy and Bess (1935)
Modernist Art Exhibitions
1913, New York - the
Armory Show, officially
known as The
International Exhibition
of Modern Art
The emblem of the
Armory Show, an
uprooted pine tree, was
taken from the
Massachusetts flag
carried into battle during
the Revolutionary War
Modernist Art Exhibitions
shock and outrage triggered by Duchamp's Nude
Descending the Staircase and Matisse's Luxury &
the other cubists
Predecessors:
the 1908 exhibition of the Eight, seen as the
American predecessor to the Armory Show
Alfred Stieglitz’s shows at the Little Galleries of
Photo-Secession, known as '291‘ (for its address at
291 5th Avenue).
championed artists like Cézanne, Matisse, and
Picasso as well as early American modernists: John
Marin, Marsden Hartley, Oscar Bluemner, and
Abraham Walkowitz
over half the exhibitors at the New York show
were American
Cubism:
Pablo Picasso & Georges
Braque; 1907-08
ambiguous sense of
space through
geometric shapes that
flatten and simplify
form
spatial planes that are
broken into fragments,
forms that overlap and
penetrate one another
onset in Picasso's Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon
painting of women
composed of jagged shapes,
Pablo Picasso - Les Demoiselles flattened figures, and forms
d'Avignon borrowed from African
masks
Derived from Cézanne’s
passage: a device in which
one physical object is
allowed to penetrate
another physical object
defied the laws of physical
experience
encouraged artists to view
paintings as having an
internal logic—or integrity—
that functions
independently of, or
even contrary to,
physical experience
P. Picasso -- Girl with Dark Hair freedom from material
reality in artistic
imagination
Cubism - two phases:
Analytical cubism (until
1912)
fragments the
physical world into
intersecting
geometric planes and
interpenetrating
volumes
Synthetic cubism
(through 1915)
synthesizes
(combines) abstract
shapes to represent
objects in a new way.
Pablo Picasso
Woman with a Mustard Pot (1910)
synthesis of two modern-art styles:
cubism and futurism
William Carlos Williams:
creating "an atmosphere of
release, color release, release
from stereotyped forms,
trite subjects"
"There had been a break
somewhere, we were streaming
through, each thinking his own
thoughts, driving his own designs
toward his self’s objectives . . .
The poetic line, the way the image
was to lie on the page was our
immediate concern . . . I had
never in my life before felt that
way. I was tremendously stirred"
Marcel Duchamp
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
Marcel Duchamp: Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923)
Charles Sheeler
Landscape (1913)
Alfred Maurer
Autumn, 1912
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-
1986)
Although O'Keeffe handled
her subject matter
representationally, the
starkly linear quality, the
thin, clear coloring, and the
boldly patterned
compositions produce
abstract designs
the details are so enlarged
that they become
unfamiliar and
surprising.
Psychological
Realism
(S. Lewis, E. Wharton)
Phenomenological
Subjectivism
(Henry James)
MIDMODERNISM
The subject matter of art and
literature becomes:
the everyday
Modernist art
opposes emotional reality to the middle-class factual
one
replaces factual representation (superficial similarity to
exterior/apparent reality) with deep psyche ones (free
imaginative process).
Consequences: in painting > abstraction; in
literature abstruseness.
High Modernism
Imagination achieves complete
autonomy: in art nothing is now
prohibited.
The artwork is the most real of realities
for the modernist.
Self is transient, subjected to
contingency. The modernist work is
permanent.
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)
Defamiliarization