Henri Matisse Woman with a Hat 1905
The goal of the Expressionists in France and Germany was to use form and color to express their feelings and evoke an emotional response from viewers.
They were not trying to replicate the natural colors or forms of their subjects.
Henri Matisse Woman with a Hat 1905
The French Expressionists were called the Fauves by art critics.
The word Fauve means "wild beast."
Fauvists, such as Henri Matisse, used "wild"colors and seemed to slop the paint on the canvas in a way that did not seem very controlled to the critics.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Street Dresden 1908 (reworked 1919; dated on painting 1907)
The Die Brucke artists were German Expressionists. (Die Brucke means "the bridge.")
The Expressionists in Germany also broke from the traditional use of naturalistic color. They, like the French Expressionists, wanted to create more emotionally expressive works.
Notice how Kirchner uses complimentary colors to heighten the anxiety in this painting about urban isolationism.
How would you show the top, bottom, inside, outside and every side of an object all at once?
What if you wanted to show a complex mass from every angle in just one picture? This was the goal of the Cubists.
Their solution was to break their subjects down into pieces and put all of those fragments side by side.
Georges Braque The Portuguese 1911
Analytic Cubism came first. It tends to look complicated and even confusing.
The shapes are often geometric, sharp, and angular.
The colors are typically dull and dark with browns, blacks, grays, and greens dominating the palette.
Braque has a new approach to representing space that is not limited by traditional techniques such as overlapping or linear perspective.
The person playing the guitar has been broken and scattered like pieces of broken glass.
All of the fragments in the composition are placed side by side, sharing the space of the flat picture plane.
The subject is broken down into larger, simplified components that are synthesized back together in a composition that typically includes more organic shapes and brighter colors.
The Futurists in Italy disliked the pressure to compete with the great masters of the Italian Renaissance and the artists of Classical Greece and Rome.
They thought there was little respect for new artwork because everyone worshiped artists and work from the past.
For them, it was a little like being in the shadow of an older sibling.
Ivo Pannaggi Speeding Train 1922
Favorite subjects for Futurists were recent inventions, trains, cars, and anything else that moved fast or that was of the now.
Their artwork celebrated motion, energy, and speed.
New technology and scientific theories inspired them much more than ancient mythology and idealized forms.
Dada is a reaction to the chaos and widespread violence around the time of WWI.
To Dada artists, the global violence, widespread fear, and mass devastation seemed senseless.
Their artwork reflected this lack of reason and was a way of stating: "my world no longer makes sense so I will create art that does not make sense."
Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q. 1919
Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache and goatee on a cheap copy of the Mona Lisa as if to say, "no one else respects the rules or tradition so I don't have to either."
*Note about the title: L.H.O.O.Q. when pronounced in French, is a pun on "Elle a chaud au cul," which loosely translates to "She has a hot ass."
Marcel Duchamp 3 Standard Stoppages 1913-14
Marcel Duchamp In Advance of the Broken Arm 1915 (shown here is a 1945 copy of lost original)
The Surrealists were also influenced by the events leading up to and during WWII.
These artists found themselves powerless against the mass-spread violence of war. To them, it was like living in a nightmare.
Their interests in dreams and the subconscious were further inspired by the newly translated writings of the psychologist Sigmund Freud.
Salvador DalĂ Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) 1936
Joan Miro The Harlequin's Carnival 1924-25