The Bridge( 1905)

Historical background
The founding members of Die Brücke in 1905 were four Jugendstil
architecture students: Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966), Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976). They met
through the Königliche Technische Hochschule (technical university) of Dresden,
where Kirchner and Bleyl began studying in 1901 and became close friends in
their first term. They discussed art together and also studied nature, having a
radical outlook in common. Kirchner continued studies in Munich 1903–1904,
returning to Dresden in 1905 to complete his degree.The institution provided a
wide range of studies in addition to architecture, such as freehand drawing,
perspective drawing and the historical study of art. The name Die Brücke was
intended to symbolize the link, or bridge, they would form with art of the future.
Die Brücke aimed to eschew the prevalent traditional academic style and
find a new mode of artistic expression, which would form a bridge (hence the
name) between the past and the present. They responded both to past artists
such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder, as well
as contemporary international avant-garde movements.The group published a
broadside called Programme in 1906, where Kirchner wrote: We call all young
people together, and as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to
wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably
established forces.
As part of the affirmation of their national heritage, they revived older
media, particularly woodcut prints. The group developed a common style based
on vivid color, emotional tension, violent imagery, and an influence from
primitivism. After first concentrating exclusively on urban subject matter, the
group ventured into southern Germany on expeditions arranged by Mueller and
produced more nudes and arcadian images. They invented the printmaking
technique of linocut, although they at first described them as traditional
woodcuts, which they also made.
Patronage and artistic life
The group was founded in 1905 in Germany by four architectural students in
Dresden—Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who gave the group its name, Fritz Bleyl, Erich
Heckel, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Other artists joined the organization over the
next several years, including Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Otto Müller, the Swiss
artist Cuno Amiet, the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and the Dutch Fauvist
painter Kees van Dongen. These young artists formed an idealistic, communal
atmosphere in which they shared techniques and exhibited together.

From their first manifesto, written by Kirchner in 1905, Die Brücke sought to

create an authentic art that defied the conventions of traditional painting as well as
the then-dominant schools of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. The
paintings and prints by Die Brücke artists encompassed all varieties of subject
matter—the human figure, landscape, portraiture, still life—executed in a
simplified style that stressed bold outlines and strong colour planes. Like many
avant-garde artists at the time, Kirchner and Heckel admired the apparent lack
of artifice in art from places such as Africa and the Pacific islands and emulated
this supposedly “primitive” quality in their own work. Similar qualities were being
explored at the same time by the French Fauve artists, yet manifestations of angst,
or anxiety, appear in varying degrees in the works of Die Brücke painters and
generally distinguish their art from Fauvist art, which treats form and colour in a
more lyrical manner. Die Brücke art was also deeply influenced by the expressive
simplifications of late German Gothic woodcuts and by the prints of the
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. The movement contributed to the revival of
the woodcut, making it a powerful means of expression in the 20th century.

The first Die Brücke exhibition, held in 1906 in the Seifert lamp factory
in Dresden, marked the beginning of German Expressionism. From this date until
1913, regular exhibitions were held. (By 1911, however, Die Brücke’s activities
had shifted to Berlin, where several of the members were living.) The group also
enlisted “honorary members” to whom they issued annual reports and gift
portfolios of original prints, which are highly valued collector’s items today.

Innovations of early twentieth – century architecture

 The Modernist movement in architecture was an attempt to create a
nonhistorical architecture of Functionalism in which a new sense of space would
be created with the help of modern materials. A reaction against the stylistic
pluralism of the 19th century, Modernism was also coloured by the belief that the
20th century had given birth to “modern man,” who would need a radically new
kind of architecture.
The Viennese architect Adolf Loos opposed the use of any ornament at all
and designed purist compositions of bald, functional blocks such as the Steiner
House at Vienna (1910), one of the first private houses of reinforced concrete.
Peter Behrens, having had contact with Joseph Olbrich at Darmstadt and with Josef
Hoffmann at Vienna, was in 1907 appointed artistic adviser in charge of the AEG
(Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft), for which he designed a turbine factory
(1909) at Berlin. Behrens strongly affected three great architects who worked in his
office: Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
In Germany, Gropius followed a mechanistic direction. His Fagus Works
factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine in Germany (1911) and the Werkbund exposition
building at the Cologne exhibition (1914) had been models of industrial
architecture in which vigorous forms were enclosed by masonry and glass; the
effect of these buildings was gained by the use of steel frames, strong silhouette,
and the logic of their plans. There were no historical influences or expressions of
local landscape, traditions, or materials. The beauty of the buildings derived from
adapting form to a technological culture.

Innovations of early twentieth – century painting

Initially influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and other late-19th-
century innovators, Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on
Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube,
sphere, and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907; see gallery)
Picasso created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel
scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal
masks and his own new proto-Cubist inventions. Analytic cubism, exemplified by
Violin and Candlestick, Paris, was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges
Braque from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism was followed by Synthetic
cubism, characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage
elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter.
Crystal Cubism was a distilled form of Cubism consistent with a shift
between 1915 and 1916 towards a strong emphasis on flat surface activity and
large overlapping geometric planes, practised by Braque, Picasso, Jean Metzinger,
Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz,
Alexander Archipenko, Fernand Léger, and several other artists into the 1920s.
During the years between 1910 and the end of World War I and after the
heyday of cubism, several movements emerged in Paris. Giorgio de Chirico moved
to Paris in July 1911, where he joined his brother Andrea (the poet and painter
known as Alberto Savinio). Through his brother he met Pierre Laprade, a member
of the jury at the Salon d'Automne, where he exhibited three of his dreamlike
works: Enigma of the Oracle, Enigma of an Afternoon and Self-Portrait. During
1913 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d’Automne,
where his work was noticed by Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others.
His compelling and mysterious paintings are considered instrumental to the early
beginnings of Surrealism. Song of Love (1914) is one of the most famous works by
de Chirico and is an early example of the surrealist style, though it was painted ten
years before the movement was "founded" by André Breton in 1924.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, as Cubism evolved, several
other important movements emerged; Futurism (Giacomo Balla), Abstract art
(Wassily Kandinsky), Der Blaue Reiter (Kandinsky and Franz Marc), Bauhaus
(Kandinsky and Paul Klee), Orphism, (Robert Delaunay and František Kupka),
Synchromism (Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright), De Stijl (Theo
van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian), Suprematism (Kazimir Malevich),
Constructivism (Vladimir Tatlin), Dadaism (Marcel Duchamp, Picabia and Jean
Arp), and Surrealism (Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, Joan Miró, René
Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst). Modern painting influenced all the visual
arts, from Modernist architecture and design, to avant-garde film, theatre and
modern dance, and became an experimental laboratory for the expression of visual
experience, from photography and concrete poetry to advertising art and fashion.
Van Gogh's paintings exerted great influence upon 20th-century Expressionism, as
can be seen in the work of the Fauves, Die Brücke (a group led by German painter
Ernst Kirchner), and the Expressionism of Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, Marc
Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and others.

Innovations of early twentieth – century sculpture

Many previous artistic movements in Europe had simply passed on ideas
and techniques from previous generations, adding their own innovations as they
went. They did not seek revolution, rather evolution but also rarely looked beyond
styles relatively local to themselves. The likes of Kirchner, though, preferred to
throw the net much wider with regards drawing in ideas and inspirations to drive
their own work. Many members of the group held a great enthusiasm for the use of
woodblocks, a technique which suggests the influence of past members of the
North Renaissance, such as Albrecht Durer and Lucas Cranach. This technique was
also used effectively by a number of artists from Japan as well.
In terms of colour, their balances are bold - the closest comparison can
perhaps be made with traditional art from the regions of Africa and Oceania. You
will also see the influence of African art on Pablo Picasso, who bridged the gap
between the continent and European abstact art. The use of heavy contrasting tones
was also used by Norwegian Expressionist, Edvard Munch, and you will find great
similarities between his work and those of the Die Brücke movement.
Additionally, contrasts have been made to the Fauvists, such as Matisse, who also
chose abrupt colour schemes that would immediately strike you before you could
process the precise details placed in front of you.

Cubism (1907-1930)
Historical background
first met in 1905, but it wasn’t until 1907 that Picasso showed Braque what
is considered the first Cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. This portrait of
five prostitutes draws heavy influence from African tribal art, which Picasso had
recently been exposed to at the Palais du Trocadéro, a Paris ethnographic museum.
Breaking nearly every rule of traditional Western painting, the work was
such a huge leap from his previous blue and pink periods, which were far more
representational and emotional. Picasso was hesitant to display the work to the
public, and it went unseen until 1916.
Braque, who painted in the Fauvist movement, was both repelled and
intrigued by the painting. Picasso worked with him privately on the implications of
the piece, developing together the Cubist form. Braque is the only artist to ever
collaborate with Picasso, and over a period of two years, they spent every evening
together, with neither artist pronouncing a finished work until agreed on by the
other.
Braque’s response to Picasso’s initial work was his 1908 painting Large
Nude, noted for incorporating the techniques of Paul Cézanne as a sobering
influence. Thus began the first era of Cubism, known as Analytical Cubism, which
was defined by depictions of a subject from multiple vantage points at once,
creating a fractured, multi-dimensional effect expressed through a limited palette
of colors.
The term Cubism was first used by French critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1908
to describe Braque’s landscape paintings. Painter Henri Matisse had previously
described them to Vauxcelles as looking comprised of cubes. The term wasn’t
widely used until the press adopted it to describe the style in 1911.
In 1909, Picasso and Braque redirected their focus from humans to objects to
keep Cubism fresh, as with Braque’s Violin and Palette.
Patronage and artistic life
Wider exposure brought others to the movement. Polish artist Louis
Marcossis discovered Braque’s work in 1910, and his Cubist paintings are
considered to have more of a human quality and lighter touch than the works of
others.
Spanish artist Juan Gris remained on the fringes of the movement until
1911. He distinguished himself by refusing to make the abstraction of the object
more essential than the object itself. Gris died in 1927, and Cubism represents a
significant portion of his life’s work.
French painter Fernand Léger was initially influenced by Paul Cézanne and
upon meeting Cubist practitioners embraced the form in 1911, focusing on
architectural subjects.
Marcel Duchamp flirted with Cubism beginning in 1910 but was often
considered at odds with it. His famous 1912 painting, Nude Descending a
Staircase (No. 2), reflects the influence but features a figure in motion. Typically in
Cubist works, the viewer is more placed in motion, since the perspective
presented on canvas are multiple planes, as if the artist is moving around the
subject and capturing all views in one image.
Innovations of early twentieth – century architecture
Art history changed lot during the start of the 20th century. First World War
affected this transition and changed up the process as many artist tried to express
their feelings in a different way during the war times. Early cubism can be found
in the works of Paul Cezanne and his simplified view of nature in his art. Cezanne
influenced both Picasso and Braque with his art and open way for cubism to
evolve.
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon work of art opened a new page in
cubism and it becomes a cornerstone for the first revolution in 20th-century art.
Painting produced between 1906-07 said to be the first signings of the “Cubist
thought”. Picasso was definitely impressed and influenced by Paul Cezanne’s
Female Bathers in From of a Tent, with the composure of the subject matter and
the perspective used in the artwork. He then used this approach in Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon as he created a different perspective by using three-
dimensional female nudes and the two-dimensional space including ornaments in
the room.
Innovations of early twentieth – century painting
By 1911 Picasso was recognized as the inventor of Cubism, while Braque's
importance and precedence was argued later, with respect to his treatment of
space, volume and mass in the L’Estaque landscapes. But "this view of Cubism is
associated with a distinctly restrictive definition of which artists are properly to be
called Cubists," wrote the art historian Christopher Green: "Marginalizing the
contribution of the artists who exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911.
The assertion that the Cubist depiction of space, mass, time, and volume
supports (rather than contradicts) the flatness of the canvas was made by Daniel-
Henry Kahnweiler as early as 1920, but it was subject to criticism in the 1950s and
1960s, especially by Clement Greenberg.
Contemporary views of Cubism are complex, formed to some extent in
response to the "Salle 41" Cubists, whose methods were too distinct from those
of Picasso and Braque to be considered merely secondary to them. Alternative
interpretations of Cubism have therefore developed. Wider views of Cubism
include artists who were later associated with the "Salle 41" artists, e.g., Francis
Picabia; the brothers Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel
Duchamp, who beginning in late 1911 formed the core of the Section d'Or (or the
Puteaux Group); the sculptors Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky and Ossip
Zadkine as well as Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens; and painters such as Louis
Marcoussis, Roger de La Fresnaye, František Kupka, Diego Rivera, Léopold
Survage, Auguste Herbin, André Lhote, Gino Severini (after 1916), María
Blanchard (after 1916) and Georges Valmier (after 1918). More fundamentally,
Christopher Green argues that Douglas Cooper's terms were "later undermined
by interpretations of the work of Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger that stress
iconographic and ideological questions rather than methods of representation.
John Berger identifies the essence of Cubism with the mechanical diagram.
"The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram: The diagram being a visible
symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need
not eschew certain aspects of appearance but these too will be treated as signs
not as imitations or recreations.
Contemporary views of Cubism are complex, formed to some extent in
response to the "Salle 41" Cubists, whose methods were too distinct from those
of Picasso and Braque to be considered merely secondary to them. Alternative
interpretations of Cubism have therefore developed. Wider views of Cubism
include artists who were later associated with the "Salle 41" artists, e.g., Francis
Picabia; the brothers Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel
Duchamp, who beginning in late 1911 formed the core of the Section d'Or (or the
Puteaux Group); the sculptors Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky and Ossip
Zadkine as well as Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens; and painters such as Louis
Marcoussis, Roger de La Fresnaye, František Kupka, Diego Rivera, Léopold
Survage, Auguste Herbin, André Lhote, Gino Severini (after 1916), María
Blanchard (after 1916) and Georges Valmier (after 1918). More fundamentally,
Christopher Green argues that Douglas Cooper's terms were "later undermined
by interpretations of the work of Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger that stress
iconographic and ideological questions rather than methods of representation.
John Berger identifies the essence of Cubism with the mechanical diagram.
"The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram: The diagram being a visible
symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need
not eschew certain aspects of appearance but these too will be treated as signs
not as imitations or recreations.
Innovations of early twentieth – century sculpture
There was a distinct difference between Kahnweiler's Cubists and the Salon
Cubists. Prior to 1914, Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger (to a lesser extent) gained
the support of a single committed art dealer in Paris, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,
who guaranteed them an annual income for the exclusive right to buy their
works. Kahnweiler sold only to a small circle of connoisseurs. His support gave his
artists the freedom to experiment in relative privacy. Picasso worked in
Montmartre until 1912, while Braque and Gris remained there until after the First
World War. Léger was based in Montparnasse.
In contrast, the Salon Cubists built their reputation primarily by exhibiting
regularly at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, both major
non-academic Salons in Paris. They were inevitably more aware of public
response and the need to communicate. Already in 1910 a group began to form
which included Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay and Léger. They met regularly at
Henri le Fauconnier's studio near the boulevard du Montparnasse. These soirées
often included writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon. Together
with other young artists, the group wanted to emphasise a research into form, in
opposition to the Neo-Impressionist emphasis on color.
Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of the 26th Salon des Indépendants (1910),
made a passing and imprecise reference to Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger
and Le Fauconnier as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to
pallid cubes."[22][23] At the 1910 Salon d'Automne, a few months later,
Metzinger exhibited his highly fractured Nu à la cheminée (Nude), which was
subsequently reproduced in both Du "Cubisme" (1912) and Les Peintres Cubistes
(1913).

Metaphysical painting( 1910-1920)

Historical background
Metaphysical painting, style of painting that flourished mainly between
1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo
Carrà. These painters used representational but incongruous imagery to produce
disquieting effects on the viewer. Their work strongly influenced the Surrealists in
the 1920s.
 Metaphysical painting originated with de Chirico. In Munich, Germany,
where he spent his formative years, de Chirico was attracted to 19th-century
German Romantic painting and to the works of the philosophers Arthur
Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. The latter’s search for hidden meanings
beyond surface appearances and his descriptions of empty squares surrounded by
arcaded buildings in the Italian city of Turin made a particularly deep impression
on de Chirico. In his painting Turin Melancholy (1915), for example, he illustrated
just such a square, using unnaturally sharp contrasts of light and shadow that lend
an aura of poignant but vaguely threatening mystery to the scene. The arcades in
this painting, as well as the deep perspectival space and dark-toned sky, are
pictorial devices typical of de Chirico’s strange, evocative works. He gave his
paintings enigmatic titles—such as The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1913–14), The
Philosopher’s Conquest (1914), and The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913)—that
contribute to their cryptic effect.
Many of de Chirico’s paintings depict mannequins, as do works done about
1917–21 by the former Futurist Carlo Carrà, who came under de Chirico’s
influence. In 1917 the two artists met in Ferrara, Italy, where, together with de
Chirico’s younger brother—a poet, musician, and painter known as Alberto
Savinio—they formulated the rather obscure principles of the scuola metafisica
(“Metaphysical school”). (De Chirico, however, had already arrived at his
Metaphysical style several years before the movement came into existence, and
by 1911 he had shown paintings of this nature in Paris.) Other Metaphysical
painters included Giorgio Morandi, Filippo de Pisis, and Mario Sironi.
The Metaphysical school proved short-lived; it came to an end about 1920
because of dissension between de Chirico and Carrà over who had founded the
group. After 1919 de Chirico produced weaker images, lacking the mysterious
power of his earlier work, and his painting style eventually sank into an eccentric
Classicism.
Patronage and artistic life
In February 1917, the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà met de Chirico in Ferrara,
where they were both stationed during World War I. Carrà developed a variant of
the Metaphysical style in which the dynamism of his earlier work was replaced by
immobility, and the two artists worked together for several months in 1917 at a
military hospital in Ferrara. According to art historian Jennifer Mundy, "Carrà
adopted de Chirico's imagery of mannequins set in claustrophobic spaces, but his
works lacked de Chirico's sense of irony and enigma, and he always retained a
correct perspective". After an exhibition of Carrà's work in Milan in December
1917, critics began to write of Carrà as the inventor of Metaphysical painting, to
de Chirico's chagrin. Carrà did little to dispel this idea in Pittura Metafisica, a book
he published in 1919, and the relationship between the two artists ended. By
1919, both artists had largely abandoned the style in favor of Neoclassicism.
Other painters who adopted the style included Giorgio Morandi around
1917–1920, Filippo de Pisis, and Mario Sironi.[5] In the 1920s and later, the
legacy of Metaphysical painting influenced the work of Felice Casorati, Max Ernst,
and others. Exhibitions of Metaphysical art in Germany in 1921 and 1924 inspired
the use of mannequin imagery in works by George Grosz and Oskar Schlemmer.
Many paintings by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and other Surrealists make use of
formal and thematic elements derived from Metaphysical painting.
Between the two World Wars in Italy there were numerous architectural
vulgarisations of the metaphysical poetics of the "Piazze d'Italia", whose timeless
atmosphere seemed to be congenial to the propaganda needs of the time.
Squares of metaphysical flavor were built in the historical centers, as in Brescia or
Varese, or in newly founded cities, such as those of the Agro Pontino (Sabaudia,
Aprilia), to culminate in the spectacular unfinished E42 in Rome
Innovations of early twentieth – century architecture
Many of his paintings show a desolate city square or claustrophobic interior
painted in sombre colours with theatrical lighting and ominous shadows.
Some may have been based on scenes in Turin and Ferrara, where De
Chirico lived. Describing his own work, he spoke of the loneliness created when
"still lifes come alive or figures become still".
On the other hand, Carra's pictures generally show a lyrical approach to the
same type of iconographical images, with more light, brighter colours and
occasional humour. While his oil painting can be disconcerting, it is seldom
sinister. See also The Drunken Gentleman (1916), one of Carra's most imaginative
Renaissance-inspired still lifes.
Innovations of early twentieth – century painting
The paintings de Chirico produced between 1909 and 1919, his
metaphysical period, are characterized by haunted, brooding moods evoked by
their images. At the start of this period, his subjects were motionless cityscapes
inspired by the bright daylight of Mediterranean cities, but gradually he turned his
attention to studies of cluttered storerooms, sometimes inhabited by mannequin-
like hybrid figures.
De Chirico's conception of Metaphysical art was strongly influenced by his
reading of Nietzsche, whose style of writing fascinated de Chirico with its
suggestions of unseen auguries beneath the appearance of things.[11] De Chirico
found inspiration in the unexpected sensations that familiar places or things
sometimes produced in him: In a manuscript of 1909 he wrote of the "host of
strange, unknown and solitary things that can be translated into painting ... What
is required above all is a pronounced sensitivity. Metaphysical art combined
everyday reality with mythology, and evoked inexplicable moods of nostalgia,
tense expectation, and estrangement. The picture space often featured illogical,
contradictory, and drastically receding perspectives. Among de Chirico's most
frequent motifs were arcades, of which he wrote: The Roman arcade is fate its
voice speaks in riddles which are filled with a peculiarly Roman poetry.
Innovations of early twentieth – century sculpture
De Chirico's best-known works are the paintings of his metaphysical period.
In them he developed a repertoire of motifs—empty arcades, towers, elongated
shadows, mannequins, and trains among others—that he arranged to create
images of forlornness and emptiness that paradoxically also convey a feeling of
"power and freedom". According to Sanford Schwartz, de Chirico—whose father
was a railroad engineer—painted images that suggest "the way you take in
buildings and vistas from the perspective of a train window. His towers, walls, and
plazas seem to flash by, and you are made to feel the power that comes from
seeing things that way: you feel you know them more intimately than the people
do who live with them day by day.
In 1982, Robert Hughes wrote that de Chirico could condense voluminous
feeling through metaphor and association ... In The Joy of Return, 1915, de
Chirico's train has once more entered the city ... a bright ball of vapor hovers
directly above its smokestack. Perhaps it comes from the train and is near us. Or
possibly it is a cloud on the horizon, lit by the sun that never penetrates the
buildings, in the last electric blue silence of dusk. It contracts the near and the far,
enchanting one's sense of space. Early de Chiricos are full of such effects. Et quid
amabo nisi quod aenigma est? ("What shall I love if not the enigma?")—this
question, inscribed by the young artist on his self-portrait in 1911, is their subtext.
In this, he resembles his more representational American contemporary,
Edward Hopper: their pictures' low sunlight, their deep and often irrational
shadows, their empty walkways and portentous silences creating an enigmatic
visual poetry.

Dada ( 1916)

Historical background

Dada was a philosophical and artistic movement of the early 20th

century, practiced by a group of European writers, artists, and
intellectuals in protest against what they saw as a senseless war—
World War I. The Dadaists used absurdity as an offensive weapon
against the ruling elite, whom they saw as contributing to the war.
But to its practitioners, Dada was not a movement, its artists not
artists, and its art not art.
Dada was born in Europe at a time when the horror of World War
I was being played out in what amounted to citizens' front yards.
Forced out of the cities of Paris, Munich, and St. Petersburg, a number
of artists, writers, and intellectuals found themselves congregating in
the refuge that Zurich (in neutral Switzerland) offered.
By mid-1917, Geneva and Zurich were awash in the heads of the
avant-garde movement, including Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Stefan Zweig,
Tristan Tzara, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Emil Ludwig. They were
inventing what Dada would become, according to writer and journalist
Claire Goll, out of literary and artistic discussions of expressionism,
cubism, and futurism that took place in Swiss coffeehouses. The name
they settled on for their movement, "Dada," may mean "hobby horse"
in French or perhaps is simply nonsense syllables, an appropriate name
for an explicitly nonsensical art.
Banding together in a loosely knit group, these writers and artists
used any public forum they could find to challenge nationalism,
rationalism, materialism, and any other -ism that they felt had
contributed to a senseless war. If society was going in this direction,
they said, we'll have no part of it or its traditions, most particularly
artistic traditions. We, who are non-artists, will create non-art since art
(and everything else in the world) has no meaning anyway.
Patronage and artistic life

Important Dada artists include Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968,

whose "ready-mades" included a bottle rack and a cheap reproduction
of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee); Jean or Hans Arp (1886–
1966; Shirt Front and Fork); Hugo Ball (1886–1947, Karawane, the
"Dada Manifesto," and practitioner of "sound poetry"); Emmy Hennings
(1885–1948, itinerant poet and cabaret chanteuse); Tzara (poet,
painter, performance artist); Marcel Janco (1895–1984, the bishop
dress theatrical costume); Sophie Taeuber (1889–1943, Oval
Composition with Abstract Motifs); and Francis Picabia (1879–1952, Ici,
c'est ici Stieglitz, foi et amour).
Dada artists are hard to classify in a genre because many of them
did many things: music, literature, sculpture, painting, puppetry,
photography, body art, and performance art. For example, Alexander
Sacharoff (1886–1963) was a dancer, painter, and choreographer;
Emmy Hennings was a cabaret performer and poet; Sophie Taeuber
was a dancer, choreographer, furniture and textile designer, and
puppeteer. Marcel Duchamp made paintings, sculptures, and films and
was a performance artist who played with the concepts of sexuality.
Francis Picabia (1879–1963) was a musician, poet, and artist who
played with his name (as "not Picasso"), producing images of his name,
art titled with his name, signed by his name.
Innovations of early twentieth – century architecture

Ready-mades (found objects re-objectified as art), photo-

montages, art collages assembled from a huge variety of materials: all
of these were new forms of art developed by Dadaists as a way to
explore and explode older forms while emphasizing found-art aspects.
The Dadaists thrust mild obscenities, scatological humor, visual puns,
and everyday objects (renamed as "art") into the public eye. Marcel
Duchamp performed the most notable outrages by painting a mustache
on a copy of the Mona Lisa (and scribbling an obscenity beneath), and
promoting The Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, which may not have
been his work at all.
The public and art critics were revolted—which the Dadaists
found wildly encouraging. Enthusiasm was contagious, so the
(non)movement spread from Zurich to other parts of Europe and New
York City. And just as mainstream artists were giving it serious
consideration, in the early 1920s, Dada (true to form) dissolved itself.
In an interesting twist, this art of protest—based on a serious
underlying principle—is delightful. The nonsense factor rings true. Dada
art is whimsical, colorful, wittily sarcastic, and at times, downright silly.
If one wasn't aware that there was, indeed, a rationale behind
Dadaism, it would be fun to speculate as to just what these gentlemen
were up to when they created these pieces.
Innovations of early twentieth – century painting
 Abstraction : new directions for placing abstract forms directly in
the center of the composition.
Frottage and Collage: formerly used for the children’s art. Inspired
by African art, in the past labeled primitive and ignored.
Europeans were stimulate by African cultures and African artist’s
ability to create in geometric and abstract terms, not using conventional
reality.
African freedom of expression inspired Europeans to rethink
traditional representation, write their thoughts into artistic manifestos.
Innovations of early twentieth – century structure
Artistic used new materials, plastic, and the new formats such as collages,
to create dynamic compositions. Dangled metal shapes from a ceiling and called
them mobiles.
DADA movement; found objects and turn them into a work of art. Ready-
mades became works of art because the artist said they were.