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Surrealism was made "movement" made in the 20th century in art and literature, it was created with the purpose to let the human mind flow with a non rational aspect to it, so something like unconcius mind.

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Fauvism originated back in 1905, it florished in paris as a non naturalistic use of color. This style of painting was short lived, but for what it lasted it gave influence to many german expressionists, this including Henri Matisse.

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Impressionism originated back in france in the 1860s. At first it was looked as a skeptical method because of its shifting effect of light and color. It took a modern change on feelings since it seeked for an expresion or experience it generated instead of looking for and accurate deception. Impressionism also applies for music, it is assimilated to "debussy".

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Date: February 19, 1896 - September 28, 1966.
French Theoretician and Writer.
Artwork: "Egg in the church or The snake". This artwork is a take on the body of a woman, typically for Andre he mixed it with surrealism creating distorted woman while adding sexuality and religion. it was a take on freedom of expression.

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Date: September 16, 1886 - June 7, 1966 (Switzerland).
French-German sculptor, painter, and collagist.
Artwork: "Cloud Shepard". This artwork is a representation of hans' ambition, he made it his life long mission to create art  that alludes to forms in nature while steadfastly avoiding representation. This peace was no exception at all, it symbolises the cycle of life, microscopically but it does while using a contrast between the bronze and the reflection as clouds.

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Date: December 31, 1869 - November 3, 1954 (France)
French painter, draftsman, and collagist.
Artwork: "Luxe, Calme, et Volupte". This peace took for inspiration henri's vacation as well as the poem "Invitation to voyage (1857)." This voyage had a house which matisse saw the view as paradise and took the oportunity to use this view as a representation for the painting. In it we can see various nude women, these representing traditional classical idyll, we can also see one women in a contenporary dress which represents henri´s wife.

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/matisse-henri/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/vlaminck-maurice-de/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/van-gogh-vincent/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/cezanne-paul/

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Summary of Vincent van Gogh

The iconic tortured artist, Vincent Van Gogh strove to convey his emotional and spiritual state in each of his artworks. Although he sold only one painting during his lifetime, Van Gogh is now one of the most popular artists of all time. His canvases with densely laden, visible brushstrokes rendered in a bright, opulent palette emphasize Van Gogh's personal expression brought to life in paint. Each painting provides a direct sense of how the artist viewed each scene, interpreted through his eyes, mind, and heart. This radically idiosyncratic, emotionally evocative style has continued to affect artists and movements throughout the 20 th century and up to the present day, guaranteeing Van Gogh's importance far into the future.

Accomplishments

Van Gogh's dedication to articulating the inner spirituality of man and nature led to a fusion of style and content that resulted in dramatic, imaginative, rhythmic, and emotional canvases that convey far more than the mere appearance of the subject.

Although the source of much upset during his life, Van Gogh's mental instability provided the frenzied source for the emotional renderings of his surroundings and imbued each image with a deeper psychological reflection and resonance.

Van Gogh's unstable personal temperament became synonymous with the romantic image of the tortured artist. His self-destructive talent was echoed in the lives of many artists in the 20th century.

Van Gogh used an impulsive, gestural application of paint and symbolic colors to express subjective emotions. These methods and practice came to define many subsequent modern movements from Fauvism to Abstract Expressionism.

The Life of Vincent van Gogh

Vincent expressed his life via his works. As he famously said, "real painters do not paint things as they are... they paint them as they themselves feel them to be."

Important Art by Vincent van Gogh

The Potato Eaters

This early canvas is considered Van Gogh's first masterpiece. Painted while living among the peasants and laborers in Nuenen in the Netherlands, Van Gogh strove to depict the people and their lives truthfully. Rendering the scene in a dull palette, he echoed the drab living conditions of the peasants and used ugly models to further iterate the effects manual labor had upon these workers. This effect is heightened by his use of loose brushstrokes to describe the faces and hands of the peasants as they huddle around the singular, small lantern, eating their meager meal of potatoes. Despite the evocative nature of the scene, the painting was not considered successful until after Van Gogh's death. At the time this work was painted, the Impressionists had dominated the Parisian avant-garde for over a decade with their light palettes. It is not surprising that Van Gogh's brother, Theo, found it impossible to sell paintings from this period in his brother's career. However, this work not only demonstrates Van Gogh's commitment to rendering emotionally and spiritually laden scenes in his art, but also established ideas that Van Gogh followed throughout his career.

Oil on canvas - The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

The Courtesan (after Eisen)

While in Paris, Van Gogh was exposed to a myriad of artistic styles, including the Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. These prints were only made available in the West in the mid-19 th century. Van Gogh collected works by Japanese ukiyo-e masters like Hiroshige and Hokusai and claimed these works were as important as works by European artists, like Rubens and Rembrandt. Van Gogh was inspired to create this particular painting by a reproduction of a print by Keisai Eisen that appeared on the May 1886 cover of the magazine Paris Illustré. Van Gogh enlarges Eisen's image of the courtesan, placing her in a contrasting, golden background bordered by a lush water garden based on the landscapes of other prints he owned. This particular garden is populated by frogs and cranes, both of which were allusions to prostitutes in French slang. While the stylistic features exhibited in this painting, in particular the strong, dark outlines and bright swaths of color, came to define Van Gogh's mature style, he also made the work his own. By working in paint rather than a woodblock print, Van Gogh was able to soften the work, relying on visible brushstrokes to lend dimension to the figure and her surroundings as well as creating a dynamic tension across the surface not present in the original prints.

Oil on canvas - The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Café Terrace At Night

This was one of the scenes Van Gogh painted during his stay in Arles and a painting where he used his powerful nocturnal background. Using contrasting colors and tones, Van Gogh achieved a luminous surface that pulses with an interior light, almost in defiance of the darkening sky. The lines of composition all point to the center of the work drawing the eye along the pavement as if the viewer is strolling the cobblestone streets. The café still exists today and is a "mecca" for van Gogh fans visiting the south of France. Describing this painting in a letter to his sister he wrote, "Here you have a night painting without black, with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green and in this surrounding the illuminated area colors itself sulfur pale yellow and citron green. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot..." Painted on the street at night, Van Gogh recreated the setting directly from his observations, a practice inherited from the Impressionists. However, unlike the Impressionists, he did not record the scene merely as his eye observed it, but imbued the image with a spiritual and psychological tone that echoed his individual and personal reaction. The brushstrokes vibrate with the sense of excitement and pleasure Van Gogh experienced while painting this work.

Oil on canvas - Kröller-Muller Museum, Otterlo

Starry Night

Starry Night is often considered to be Van Gogh's pinnacle achievement. Unlike most of his works, Starry Night was painted from memory, and not out in the landscape. The emphasis on interior, emotional life is clear in his swirling, tumultuous depiction of the sky - a radical departure from his previous, more naturalistic landscapes. Here, Van Gogh followed a strict principal of structure and composition in which the forms are distributed across the surface of the canvas in an exact order to create balance and tension amidst the swirling torsion of the cypress trees and the night sky. The result is a landscape rendered through curves and lines, its seeming chaos subverted by a rigorous formal arrangement. Evocative of the spirituality Van Gogh found in nature, Starry Night is famous for advancing the act of painting beyond the representation of the physical world.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paul-Ferdinand Gachet

Dr. Gachet was the homeopathic physician that treated Van Gogh after he was released from Saint-Remy. In the doctor, the artist found a personal connection, writing to his sister, "I have found a true friend in Dr. Gachet, something like another brother, so much do we resemble each other physically and also mentally." Van Gogh depicts Gachet seated at a red table, with two yellow books and foxglove in a vase near his elbow. The doctor gazes past the viewer, his eyes communicating a sense of inner sadness that reflects not only the doctor's state of mind, but Van Gogh's as well. Van Gogh focused the viewer's attention on the depiction of the doctor's expression by surrounding his face with the subtly varied blues of his jacket and the hills of the background. Van Gogh wrote to Gauguin that he desired to create a truly modern portrait, one that captured the "the heartbroken expression of our time." Rendering Gachet's expression through a blend of melancholy and gentility, Van Gogh created a portrait that has resonated with viewers since its creation. A recent owner, Ryoei Saito, even claimed he planned to have the painting cremated with him after his death, as he was so moved by the image. The intensity of emotion that Van Gogh poured into each brushstroke is what has made his work so compelling to viewers over the decades, inspiring countless artists and individuals.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Biography of Vincent van Gogh

Childhood

Vincent Van Gogh was born the second of six children into a religious Dutch Reformed Church family in the south of the Netherlands. His father, Theodorus Van Gogh, was a clergyman and his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, was the daughter of a bookseller. Van Gogh exhibited unstable moods during his childhood, and showed no early inclination toward art-making, though he excelled at languages while attending two boarding schools. In 1868, he abandoned his studies and never successfully returned to formal schooling.

Early Training

In 1869, Van Gogh apprenticed at the headquarters of the international art dealers Goupil & Cie in Paris and eventually worked at the Hague branch of the firm. He was relatively successful as an art dealer and stayed with the firm for almost a decade. In 1872, Van Gogh began exchanging letters with his younger brother Theo. This correspondence continued through the end of Vincent's life. The following year, Theo himself became an art dealer, and Vincent was transferred to the London office of Goupil & Cie. Around this time, Vincent became depressed and turned to God.

After several transfers between London and Paris, Van Gogh was let go from his position at Goupil's and decided to pursue a life in the clergy. While living in southern Belgium as a poor preacher, he gave away his possessions to the local coal-miners until the church dismissed him because of his overly enthusiastic commitment to his faith. In 1880, Van Gogh decided he could be an artist and still remain in God's service, writing, "To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture." Van Gogh was still a pauper, but Theo sent him some money for survival. Theo financially supported his elder brother his entire career, as Vincent made virtually no money from making art.

A year later, in 1881, dire poverty motivated Van Gogh to move back home with his parents, where he taught himself to draw. He became infatuated with his cousin, Kee Vos-Stricker. His continued pursuit of her affection, despite utter rejection, eventually split the family. With the support of Theo, Van Gogh moved to the Hague, rented a studio, and studied under Anton Mauve - a leading member of the Hague School. Mauve introduced Van Gogh to the work of the French painter Jean-François Millet, who was renowned for depicting common laborers and peasants.

In January 1882, while wandering the streets of The Hague, Van Gogh encountered a young prostitute (who also worked as a seamstress and housecleaner) by the name of Clasina Maria Hoornik. He soon came to refer to her as Christien, which he then shortened to, simply, Sien. She was destitute, addicted to alcohol, pregnant, and had her five year-old daughter Maria Wilhelmina, in tow. Van Gogh took pity on her, and took her into his care for the next year and a half. This dismayed his friends and family, and some of his patrons and benefactors, including his cousin-in-law Anton Mauve, and art dealer Hermanus Tersteeg, abruptly withdrew their support for him.

While Sien's account of their relationship portrays it as one merely of convenience and benevolence, it seems that Van Gogh felt more of a connection, and even had plans to marry her. In return for his support, Sien (as well as her children and mother) modeled for over fifty of Van Gogh's works, such as his 1882 drawing Sorrow, in which Sien appears pregnant, and which the artist once called "the best figure I've drawn". It seems, however, that what Van Gogh valued about her was the challenging life she had faced (she had during her life, become pregnant four different times by four different men, all of whom had abandoned her, and two of the children had died during infancy). He once referred to her as "pockmarked" and "no longer beautiful", and often depicted her frowning, and in difficult or unflattering situations. Sien and her family also appeared in Van Gogh's 1883 series The Public Soup Kitchen.

Mature Period

In 1884, after moving to Nuenen, Netherlands, Van Gogh began drawing the weathered hands, heads, and other anatomical features of workers and the poor, determined to become a painter of peasant life like Millet. Although he found a professional calling, his personal life was in shambles. Van Gogh accused Theo of not trying hard enough to sell his paintings, to which Theo replied that Vincent's dark palette was out of vogue compared to the bold and bright style of the Impressionist artists that was popular. Suddenly, on March 26, 1885, their father died from a stroke, putting pressure on Van Gogh to have a successful career. Shortly afterward, he completed the Potato Eaters (1885), his first large-scale composition and great work.

Leaving the Netherlands for the last time, in 1885 Van Gogh enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. There he discovered the art of Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, whose swirling forms and loose brushwork had a clear impact on the young artist's style. However, the rigidity of academicism of the school did not appeal to Van Gogh and he left for Paris the following year. He moved in with Theo in Montmartre - the artist's district in northern Paris - and studied with painter Fernand Cormon, who introduced the young artist to the Impressionists. The influence of artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Georges Seurat, as well as pressure from Theo to sell paintings, motivated Van Gogh to adopt a lighter palette.

From 1886 to 1888, Van Gogh became acutely interested in Japanese prints and began to avidly study and collect them, even curating an exhibition of them at a Parisian restaurant. In late 1887, Van Gogh organized an exhibition that included his work and that of his colleagues Emile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and in early 1888, he exhibited with the Neo-impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac at the Salle de Repetition of the Theatre Libre d'Antoine.

Late Years and Death

The majority of Van Gogh's best-known works were produced during the final two years of his life. During the fall and winter of 1888, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived and worked together in Arles in the south of France, where Van Gogh eventually rented four rooms at 2 Place Lamartine, which was dubbed the "Yellow House" for its citron hue. The move to Provence began as a plan for a new artist's community in Arles as alternative to Paris and came at a critical point in each of the artists' careers. While at the "Yellow House" Gauguin and Van Gogh worked closely together and developed a concept of color symbolic of inner emotion and not dependent upon nature. Despite enormous productivity, Van Gogh suffered from various bouts of mental instability, likely including epilepsy, psychotic episodes, delusions, and bipolar disorder. Gauguin left for Tahiti, partially as a means of escaping Van Gogh's increasingly erratic behavior. The artist slipped away after a particularly violent fight in which Van Gogh threatened Gauguin with a razor and then cut off part of his own left ear.

On May 8, 1889, reeling from his deteriorating mental condition, Van Gogh voluntarily committed himself into a psychiatric institution in Saint-Remy, near Arles. As the weeks passed, his mental well-being remained stable and he was allowed to resume painting. This period became one of his most productive. In the year spent at Saint-Remy, Van Gogh created over 100 works, including Starry Night (1889). The clinic and its garden became his main subjects, rendered in the dynamic brushstrokes and lush palettes typical of his mature period. On supervised walks, Van Gogh immersed himself in the experience of the natural surroundings, later recreating from memory the olive and cypress trees, irises, and other flora that populated the clinic's campus.

Shortly after leaving the clinic, Van Gogh moved north to Auvers-sur-Oise outside of Paris, to the care of a homeopathic doctor and amateur artist, Dr. Gachet. The doctor encouraged Van Gogh to paint as part of his recovery, and he happily obliged. He avidly documented his surroundings in Auvers, averaging roughly a painting a day over the last months of his life. However, after Theo disclosed his plan to go into business for himself and explained funds would be short for a while, Van Gogh's depression deepened sharply. On July 27, 1890, he wandered into a nearby wheat field and shot himself in the chest with a revolver. Although Van Gogh managed to struggle back to his room, his wounds were not treated properly and he died in bed two days later. Theo rushed to be at his brother's side during his last hours and reported that his final words were: "The sadness will last forever."

The Legacy of Vincent van Gogh

Clear examples of Van Gogh's wide influence can be seen throughout art history. The Fauves and the German Expressionists worked immediately after Van Gogh and adopted his subjective and spiritually inspired use of color. The Abstract Expressionists of the mid-20 th century made use of Van Gogh's technique of sweeping, expressive brushstrokes to indicate the artist's psychological and emotional state. Even the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s, like Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl, owe a debt to Van Gogh's expressive palette and brushwork. In popular culture, his life has inspired music and numerous films, including Vincente Minelli's Lust for Life (1956), which explores Van Gogh and Gauguin's volatile relationship. In his lifetime, Van Gogh created 900 paintings and made 1,100 drawings and sketches, but only sold one painting during his career. With no children of his own, most of Van Gogh's works were left to brother Theo.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Vincent van Gogh

Similar Art

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Van Gogh gloriously conveyed his emotional and spiritual state in iconic Starry Night, Cafe, and Sunflower paintings.

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Date: April 4, 1876 - October 11, 1958 (Rueil-la-Gadelière)
French painter, graphic designer, and writer.
Artwork: "Reclining Nude" (1905). Reclining nude takes on a classic subject used by many painters and artists. The female nude. Maurice takes on this subject implying his own techniques, he uses unnatural and vibrant colors. This body is so heavily outlined that it starts to deform and lose its shape, to the point it becomes abstract shapes.

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Date: March 30, 1853 - July 29, 1890 (Auvers-sur-Oise, France)
Dutch draftsman and painter.
Artwork: "Starry Night" is often considered van gogh´s pinnacle achievement, unlike many of his works this was done out of pure memory and with no inspiration of any landscape outside. This painting brings more than the eye can see, it brings lots of emocions in the twirling and naturalistic landscape. This painting used lots of different techniques, one that particularly stood out was the seeming chaos yet formal arrangement produced by the strict princpal of structure. This painting characterizes itself for being beyond the representation of the physical world.

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Date: January 19, 1839 - October 22, 1906 (Aix-en-Provence, France)
French draftsman and painter.
Artwork: “L'Evenement” (1866). In this portrait we can see the artists father sitting in an old chair reading the newspaper. In this position we can see the diferent tones of light depending on the position of where everything is. This artwork uses thick pasto to create those different shades of light arround the room. It takes impressionism to a whole nother level since the artist claims the guy in the portrait is reading a liberal paper, something unlikely he claims.

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Futurism focuses itself on progress and modernity, it replaces the traditional artistic notions and seeks to replace them with an energetic celebration of the machine age. It mixes urban landscapes with different modern technologies and eliminates the term ¨Real¨ and adds different elements which makes futurism a never ending hole of possibilities. (1909 - 1944)

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/boccioni-umberto/

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Summary of Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni was one of the most prominent and influential artists among the Italian Futurists, an art movement that emerged in the years before the First World War. Boccioni was important not only in developing the movement's theories, but also in introducing the visual innovations that led to the dynamic, Cubist-like style now so closely associated with the group. Emerging first as a painter, Boccioni later produced some significant Futurist sculpture. He died while volunteering in the Italian army, aged only thirty-three, making him emblematic of the Futurists' celebration of the machine and the violent destructive force of modernity.

Accomplishments

Although Boccioni deserves a great amount of credit for evolving the style now associated with Italian Futurism, he first matured as a Neo-Impressionist painter, and was drawn to landscape and portrait subjects. It was not until he encountered Cubism that he developed a style that matched the ideology of dynamism and violent societal upheaval that lay at the heart of Futurism. Boccioni borrowed the geometric forms typical of the French style, and employed them to evoke crashing, startling sounds to accompany the depicted movement.

Boccioni believed that scientific advances and the experience of modernity demanded that the artist abandon the tradition of depicting static, legible objects. The challenge, he believed, was to represent movement, the experience of flux, and the inter-penetration of objects. Boccioni summed up this project with the phrase, "physical transcendentalism."

Despite his fascination with physical movement, Boccioni had a strong belief in the importance of intuition, an attitude he inherited from the writings of Henri Bergson and the Symbolist painters of the late-19th century. This shaped Boccioni's approach to depicting the modern world, encouraging him to give it symbolic, almost mythical dimensions that evoked the artist's emotions as much as the objective reality of modern life. In this respect, Boccioni's approach is very different from that of the Cubists, whose work was grounded in an attempt to closely describe the physical character of objects, albeit in a new way.

Biography of Umberto Boccioni

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Umberto Boccioni was one of the most prominent and influential artists among the Italian Futurists, an art movement that emerged in the years before the First World War. Boccioni was important not only in developing the movement's theories, but also in introducing the visual innovations that led to the dynamic, Cubist-like style now so closely associated with the group.

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/severini-gino/

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"M Severini favors low shows and socks of different colours...This Florentine coquetry exposes him to the risk of being thought absent-minded, and he told me that café waiters often feel obliged to call his attention to what they suppose is an oversight, but which is actually an affectation."

Summary of Gino Severini

Severini was one of the most progressive of all the twentieth-century Italian artists. An early and important figure within the Futurist movement, the Paris-based Severini produced unique works that, through their emphasis on urban Parisian scenes (rather than machines), broadened the thematic possibilities for the movement. Having exhausted his commitment to Futurism, and to the French avant-gardes' penchant for pictorial deconstruction, he shifted his interest to Neo-Classicism; a move that saw him aligned with the interwar "Return to Order" movement. His modernist credentials were tested somewhat through his associations with the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini's "Third Rome" project (the dream of establishing a New Roman Empire), for which he provided murals and mosaics for architectural structures inspired by imperial Rome. In later years, however, Severini was "reborn" through his new commitment to the Catholic faith which saw the artist produce religious mosaics so finely skilled they earned him the title: "Father of Modern Mosaics". Complementing his considerable achievements as a painter and mosaicist, Severini proved an accomplished polemicist, publishing theoretical essays and books on the art of painting throughout his long career.

Accomplishments

Severini's Futurists works were distinguished in the way they privileged the lyrical and rhythmical joys of urban life. Allowing for the influences of Divisionism, Fauvism, and Cubism to inform his work, Severini used contrasts in color and shape with the primary goal of heightening the decorative and kinetic quality of his work. In this way he facilitated a truly cross-cultural Futurism to emerge.

Leaving behind the Parisian nightclub scene (to which he had become so attached), and disillusioned with the violent and chaotic path trodden by the Italian Futurists, a more reflective Severini turned to his friend Pablo Picasso and the lessons of Synthetic Cubism. By adopting its flattened planes and simplified forms, Severini produced a series of still lifes and landscapes that found beauty in everyday and/or natural subjects.

Putting to one side any sense of patriotic duty (the Futurist remained steadfast in their goal of maintaining a uniquely Italian culture), and the experimental tendencies of the French avant-garde, Severini joined a pan-European group of artists and intellectuals in his support for the interwar "Return to Order" movement. His Neo-Classical style saw him bring the principles of the Italian Renaissance to modern subjects. Such was his enthusiasm for the Classical movement, and particularly its legacy of pictorial proportion and balance, he published (much to the chagrin of the Cubists) an influential theoretical tome, Du cubism au classicisme (From Cubism to Classicism) in 1921.

Back in his native Italy, Severini's later career saw him bring renewed interest and credibility to the ancient art of Byzantine mosaics. Having contributed retro-imperial walkways for Mussolini's bloated architectural edifices, he worked under the influence of a new spiritualism (one brough on by personal tragedy) that saw him visualize Christian parables for churches in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.

The Life of Gino Severini

Severini's declared that one could locate the dynamism of modern life, not so much in the driving pistons of machines, but more in the "beautifully masked and under-dressed women", the "showers of confetti" and the "multicolored streamers" he encountered in the nightclubs of Paris.

Important Art by Gino Severini

Le Boulevard

Severini was one of the most important figures within the first flowerings of the Futurist movement. Based in Paris (rather than Milan or Rome) he is credited (amongst other things) with widening the scope and appeal of Futurism by focusing on contemporary urban life rather than the dynamic workings of machines. Like other modern movements, the Futurists wanted to show the modern world, not as it was seen (literally), but rather as it was experienced. One of the ways in which Severini sought to achieve this was through rhythmical and repetitive shapes that recreated a kind of lyrical or musical effect. In this respect, Le Boulevard is one of Severini's best-known early works. Thematically, it deals with the march of modernity with the crowded canvas showing pedestrians moving up and down one of the city's busy boulevards. Trees grow upwards on the canvas and we can also discern small animal figures. The "old world" is represented here through a horse and cart (to the right of the frame) which is juxtaposed by the dazzling headlights of a motorcar (on the left).

The art historian Celia White summed up the work by saying "in the tumultuous [...] overlapping visual planes [that] rise to the surface [Severini presents] a scene at once solid and dispersed, defined yet indecipherable". Movement and change are represented thus through the triangulated forms and repeated patterns, creating a patchwork-like effect. The influence of Divisionism is evident here, with the complementary colors that accentuate contrast and bring a musical quality to the work, and the color palette can be attributed to the influence of Fauvism that had recently defined the Parisian avant-garde. As art critic Michael Glover remarked: "Movement - and it is a canvas which seethes with movement - is represented by the juxtaposition of brilliant, triangular prisms of colour. Certain physical details - the men in their bowler hats, for example - are very clearly represented". It is known that Severini showed the work to Georges Braque, with whom he shared a studio complex in Montmartre. Indeed, Severini would channel the principles of Analytic and Synthetic Cubism in subsequent works.

Oil on canvas - The Esoterick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London

Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin

Futurists were well known for their fascination with kinetics - especially in movement of cars, trains and planes. But Severini stood apart from this tradition in his preference for studies of the human form. Inspired by his hedonistic nights in Parisian clubs, the Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin depicts the movement and noise of the dancehalls which Severini loved to frequent. (He wrote in his autobiography: "They were expensive, but being a good dancer, I was soon admitted free and received special favors".)

In its fragmented planes, the work clearly carries the influence of Cubism. The subject at the work's heart are dancing women; one with curled brown hair, bare-shouldered, whose pink, blue and purple dress contrasts with her partner who wears white. Alongside her dances a hatted and mistouched suitor whose moves are intimated through repeated shapes laid out in a spiral. All around are cultural references: the words "polka" (bohemian dance) and "valse" (waltz) share the frame with a bunting of national flags. The frame is dense with figures and shapes thus emphasizing the rhythmic atmosphere of the nightclub.

Severini wanted to create a multi-sensory experience, which he embellished with sequins around the canvas. But he merges these Cubist elements with the Futurist interest in capturing the dynamism of motion. His philosophy was that his Italian counterparts must visit Paris to learn about the cutting-edge developments in modern art. According to art historians Dr Charles Cramer and Dr Kim Grant: "In Dynamic Hieroglyphic he adopts [Braque and Picasso's] recent innovations by including painted words and collaging sequins onto the painting's surface. Severini's painting is, however, markedly different from their Synthetic Cubism in its subject matter as well as its brilliant colors and decorative qualities. In this respect it is closer to the paintings of the Salon Cubists, such as Jean Metzinger's Dancer in a Café". Severini described the work as one of his best canvases.

Oil on canvas with sequins - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Dancer = Propeller = Sea

This colorful abstract work represents the movement of a dancer, a propeller, and the sea. The curvilinear shapes can be understood at once to depict motion and the physicality of the ocean, while the sharper, straight edges supply the manmade element. The bright spectrum of color, interspersed evenly throughout the canvas introduce a note of dynamism and vitality. The Futurists were fascinated by the interactions of movement and matter and the dynamic speeds of the modern world, and this work aims to capture the sensory and visual analogies that resonate across seemingly unrelated objects.

Curator Lisa Messenger said of this piece: "In Severini's mind there was a visual equivalent between the movement of a dancer, an airplane propeller spinning and the roiling motions in the sea. He has combined them into one big abstract composition that suggests simultaneity. You can see them all at the same time, the same way Cubism tried to show the many sides of the same head". Severini was a signatory of the Futurist Painting Technical Manifesto (with Balla, Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo) which stated: "The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself [...] On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career".

Interestingly, Severini used a diamond shaped canvas to enhance the sense of motion in this work - a move that would have been highly unusual at the time. However, this novelty was lost on the work's caretakers and when it was exhibited in Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery in 1917, it was hung as a regular square canvas. It was also mis-hung when it went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was not until Severini saw for himself how his painting had been (mis)hung that it was repositioned according to the artist's wishes.

Oil on canvas - The Met, New York

Maternity

While the Futurist remained committed to presenting a uniquely Italian culture between the two World Wars, many intellectuals of the age (artists, architects, designers, graphic artists and so forth) supported an ambitious ideological project that promoted a so-called "Return to Order". The art historian Rose London summed up the ethos thus: "Historically, in times such as these, wherein society is craving order, simplicity, and security, art often desires the same; and we bear witness to a 'call to order' - a return to classical tradition". She added that this pattern was most "vehemently [...] seen during and after the First World War, with Picasso's neoclassical turn, Gino Severini's 1916 series of figurative paintings exemplary in ' Maternity', and Juan Gris's mid-war return to figure subjects and old master paintings".

While Severini was still experimenting with Cubist techniques, Maternity was the first of his works to signal his shift towards Neo-Classicism; evident here in his modern treatment of the classical elements of motherhood. Severini's "mother" is patently not lionized or beautified but her pose still adheres to the rules of a classical proportion. Her clothing is modern but the folds in the fabric of her blouse is reminiscent of classical sculpture and painting. Her hairstyle appears rather classic in design, but her facial expression and body language connote a sense of modern anxiety. The mother is posed, but there is (as one had come to expect from Severini) a sense of movement in the painting: she seems uncomfortable sat on her wooded stool while her demeanour and facial expressions - her eyes are almost closed and her face is expressionless - suggest she is very much representative of a mother of her time; a mother who worries about the fate of her children in the midst of the "war to end all wars".

Oil on canvas - Museo dell'Accademia Etrusca

Nature Morte (Still life)

This work was one of a series of still lifes Severini produced before the 1920s. The Synthetic-Cubist influence is clear, in the combined flattened planes, the simplified forms and the straight edges that extend beyond the subjects. The canvas represents a more settled time in the artist's life - while his earlier works showed dancers, nights out, and Parisian energy, here is absorbed in the calm of the quotidian that was a ripple effect of his time of quiet refuge in the French countryside during the German invasion. It also represents his close connection with his French friends. The Futurists could be a rowdy bunch and there was often a note of hostility between the French and Italians. Severini wrote in his autobiography: "I always deeply regretted the erroneous Futurist feeling of antagonism, of competing with Paris and Cubism; it would have been more advantageous for them to function harmoniously". Severini was a socialite who brought opposing factions together, and this work pays tribute to the family bonds he found Paris, a city he regarded as his intellectual and spiritual home.

The influence of Picasso in this work is clear; in subject matter as much as style. The pair shared a close friendship, often eating out together when Severini was living in Paris. He said: "Picasso lived a rather conventional life with his ladyfriend [Eva Goeul] as if they were a married couple, and therefore all around him were still-life objects, home-like objects, which caught his eye a hundred times a day. Perhaps that was, if not the determining factor in his frequent choice of the still-life, at least the explanation for it. After my marriage when I began to lead a more sedentary life, I too, understood the beauty inherent in certain trivial objects, and the idea that a painting or a poem might be composed around anything at all became quite clear to me".

The art historian Celia White wrote that the "death of Boccioni in 1916 brought Severini closer to the cubist and purist painters, as well as Henri Matisse and Jean Cocteau". She added that a "greater exposure to the bold colour and structured surfaces of synthetic cubism and the purist work of Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant initiated a shift in Severini's practice away from the expression of movement in favour of an emphasis on plasticity". The upshot was that by "the time of Nature morte, the objects are invested with a far less abstract solidity that presages Severini's return to classicism in the early 1920s".

L'équilibriste

Underneath a trespassing blood-red sky, and placed within the grounds of classical architectural ruins, circus performers and deformed jesters practice their craft with a cold detachment. Indeed, the performers complement the freestanding colonnades and porticoes that signify the demise of the great Roman age. The painting carries a palpable feel of mourning, and a longing for a return to a time when civilization and progress were to be celebrated rather than dreaded. As White put it, "Painted between the two world wars, L'Équilibriste's geographical and historical uncertainty speak of a Europe in limbo - reeling from the effects of one war while anticipating the next".

Severini's "return to classicism" reached its apotheosis with L'équilibriste, a painting produced when the threat of another war and the march of fascism was haunting the minds of many artists. The "Return to Order" movement offered a way of restoring some sort of formal equilibrium to painting, but in terms of Severini's own oeuvre, L'équilibriste ranks as a keywork in his stylistic journey. Indeed, White puts Severini's move from the avant-garde ( Nature morte) to Neo-Classicism ( L'équilibriste) down to "an aesthetic [that] may be attributable to the lasting effects of his formal art training in Rome and an exposure to the divisionist technique at an early age" - what she called Severini's newly found devotion "to reconstructing the surface of the painting following decades of deconstruction" - just as much any earnest political gesture. White's argument was that Severini's reputation has suffered unjustly because of his "duel" (Italian/French) identity. But, she argues, the classicism of L'équilibriste, "combined with [the] influence of his Italian roots, allowed Severini to come full circle by the 1930s, back to what he had always excelled at: the production of a harmonious, ordered canvas. This love of order, the aspiration towards solution rather than dissolution, permeates all of his work, and as such [he deserved to] be celebrated rather than sidelined" in the history or early twentieth century modernism.

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena collection

Mosaic of San Marco

In later life, Severini sought a spiritual calm in his work which he realized chiefly through frescoes and mosaics. These commissioned works brought him financial stability but, more than that, they bestowed on him a sense of order that brought him closer to God and earned him the title "Father of Modern Mosaic". In Mosaic of San Marco, he produced a Cubist-inspired portrait of St Mark the Evangelist with the lion at his feet for the facade of the church in the town of his birth.

Inspired by Early Byzantine mosaics, Severini claimed that working in this medium gave "him time to think, to gather, and see what might be the best way to express his desire". He likened this process to the way Cezanne placed his brush strokes one by one on the canvas. As art historian Ilona Jesnick observed: "It was an extraordinary journey for an artist as pivotal to Modernism as Severini: the urbane Italian of Parisian café society, the Futurist, the atheist. He became the advocate of the serene skills of artists expressing their spiritual world of Christian faith. Severini was a man of contradictions".

Although he had previously declared himself an atheist (he had been a Futurist after all), the shock of the loss of his son Tonio helped bring him back to Catholicism and its religious narratives. Severini said he felt "strongly bound to Cortona", so it was most fitting that his mosaic should be displayed on the main church in the town in which he was both born and buried. As Jesnick said: "Decoration, with its ancient heritage and social function, had become, for Severini, a truer art than the self-regarding work of the easel painter". He also believed that the mosaic must respect the architecture of the building, renouncing the use of foreshortenings and perspective. This made Cubism the most suitable style as it emphasized the surface. Severini said: "I have [...] so much love for this wonderful art form [...] Mosaic can powerfully help restore to art the order, clarity and purity and also the sense of reality that the modern world with its many contradictions can no longer give".

Mosaic on the front-facade of the Church of St. Mark - Cortona, Italy

Biography of Gino Severini

Childhood

Gino Severini was born in the town of Cortona, a province of Arezzo, Tuscany. His mother earned a living as a dressmaker while his father worked as a steward at the Magistrate's District Court, a position the painter later described as "the lowest rung in the whole civil service system". His early years were scarred with tragedy when his younger sister died of malaria. Writing in his 1946 autobiography The Life of a Painter, Severini recalled: "Her death was the first real sorry event of my life, stamping it indelibly, and causing me to suddenly grow up". When he was 15, his parents moved away, leaving their son in the charge of his paternal grandparents with whom he lived in "utterly miserable conditions". He did however gain early life skills by assisting his laborer grandfather in his job as a bricklayer. Severini later stated (with some satisfaction) that: "The inhabitants of Cortona are notoriously rugged, fiercely proud, and independent [and] I feel in myself shades of that same toughness and independent spirit and a bit of that vital juice, that sap, running through my veins".

At the age of 15 Severini was expelled from the entire Italian school system after stealing an exam paper. Along with five classmates, he snuck into school through a window and unlocked the principal's office with a homemade key. The teenagers were sent to the court in Arezzo, and then the Court of Appeals in Florence. The boys escaped a custodial sentence but Severini never again attended formal education. While he had not yet shown any kind of aptitude for drawing, he loved acting in plays, designing sets on sheets of newspaper, and taking on directing roles in amateur productions which he set up with his friends.

Early Training

Following his expulsion from the school system, Severini rejoined his father whom he helped with his work, much of which involved traveling the length and breadth of Italy serving legal papers. The family moved to Radicofani, in the Province of Siena, where Severini began to paint, studying reproductions of Titian, or copying from postcards and magazines. The young Severini began to think about becoming a professional artist, though he had little access to materials and worked from a set of watercolors mixed with rubber cement to give the impression of oil. He commented: "I took my subjects from the widest range of reproductions [...] Rarely did I copy anything from nature. It never occurred to me that painting was work; it was all just a game to me".

His mother, realizing that his opportunities were limited in rural Italy, took her son off to Rome where she worked as a seamstress while Severini undertook work as a shipping clerk. His mother subsequently returned to her husband, and Severini was left in Rome to fend for himself. He wrote: "I lived in hapless conditions. I had rented the corner nook of a kitchen in via Sardegna as sleeping quarters, where a couch and a table just fit next to the window". With the support of a patron from Cortona, Severini was able to attend art classes at the Free School for Nude Studies (an annex of the Rome Fine Art Institute) and at the arts academy Villa Medici, where he began reading philosophy and politics. His formal art education ended after two years however when his benefactor, on seeing Severini's somewhat unruly portfolio, withdrew his financial support, telling his young charge, "I absolutely do not understand your lack of order".

In 1900 Severini was introduced to the influential Italian painter Umberto Boccioni at a musical performance. "We took to each other instantly", he said, "We apparently shared many of the same opinions". The next day they went together to paint the Nomentana Bridge and to swim in the Aniene River and thus began a lifelong friendship that gave rise to a "healthy rivalry" between the two men. Severini was soon welcomed into Boccioni's artistic circle and through them he was introduced to the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the Russian novelists, and to the general principles of Marxism.

It was Boccioni who introduced Severini to Giacomo Balla who, in turn, schooled him to the technique of Divisionism; the process of painting with divided, (rather than mixed) color and breaking the painted surface down into a series of stippled dots and stripes. In 1903 and 1904, a few of Severini's works (thought to be rural landscapes presented in a naturalistic style) were accepted into the annual Amatori e Cultori exhibition. Flushed we a new self-confidence, he moved to Florence where, aside from a few commissions to copy works for the Uffizi Gallery, he failed to prosper. Having returned briefly to Rome, where he contributed some portraits for covers of the edition of the Socialist newspaper Avanti, he headed for Paris, arriving in the French capital in the November 1906. He would say later, "The cities to which I feel most strongly bound are Cortona and Paris: I was born physically in the first, intellectually and spiritually in the second".

Mature Period

"Few have ever arrived in an unfamiliar city as penniless and helpless as I was", the artist wrote about his arrival in the French capital, "I had no friends, no money (barring the 50 francs I counted in my pocket that evening), only a scant knowledge of French, and most important of all, I had no profession; I was a nonentity". His fortunes took an upturn two months later when he bumped into his fellow countryman Amedeo Modigliani outside the Moulin de la Galette. The two men would become lifelong friends. He soon befriended Suzanne Valadon and Paul Signac and through that association he became a fixture of the Parisian avant-garde scene, socializing with artists of the calibre of Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, and individuals from literary and theatrical circles such as Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jules Romains and Lugné-Poë. Based in the bohemian district of Montmartre, Severini dedicated himself to his painting. According to the art historian Celia White, Severini's "canvases during this decade [fused] the harmonious composition of the traditional landscape painting with the dissolving surfaces and complex manipulation of colour that had emerged in art following Impressionism". But, as the art historian Ester Coen, observed, Severini had by now become "fully aware of the importance of Balla's teaching and of the need to break away completely from an excessively naturalistic approach" to his painting.

Severini lived, in his words, in a "cold sixth-floor Parisian room without proper bedding, enough food or heat"; a situation he described as "absolutely murderous". He was also unfulfilled in his art and destroyed most of his efforts. He made friends, however, with the Italian painters Bucci, Colao, Duderville, and the writer Buggelli, all of whom lived near Severini in a small hotel room near Montmartre. They would invite him round for a feast of spaghetti and other delicious foods and he recalled that: "Either dreamers or realists, these four friends, together with Baldo and Modigliani, kept my memories of Italy alive".

Severini took naturally to the Parisian social scene, and would hold cramped parties in his tiny room, where people would dance old Italian regional polkas and mazurkas to the accordion, and enjoy suppers of fine foods smuggled in by maids working for wealthy bourgeois families. But despite his improving social life, his painting career failed to take off and he struggled to make ends meet. Indeed, in 1907 his paintings and meagre possessions were impounded and he was evicted from his room. He was moved on from one rented room to the next, and endured periods of ill health. Yet despite these setbacks, Severini recalled leading a "very active, interesting life" that involved attending dance halls where he consumed "as much champagne as the occasion permitted".

1910 was a significant year in Severini's professional and personal life. He had begun to frequent the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, where he made the acquaintance of actors and playwrights. He met the anarchist and art critic Félix Fénéon and the poet Paul Fort and enjoyed short stays with friends in the countryside at Poitou. He took a studio in the Pigalle district, at the Impasse Guelma, where his neighbours included Braque, Valadon, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Utrillo. He was soon socializing with Picasso, with whom he formed a close friendship, and he met his future wife - "an obstinate, unmannerly young lady, with whom it was impossible to reason for more than five minutes without a quarrel" - named Jeanne Paul Fort (daughter of Paul Fort). This new relationship took Severini by complete surprize: "I had never before felt the immense danger of seriously falling in love. Having for once and all established that a vagabond adventurer and miserable soul like myself would not fall in love, I felt myself impervious".

Following the launch of the Futurist movement through the 1909 publication of its manifesto in the French daily newspaper, Figaro, Severini was invited by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (the first manifesto's author) and Boccioni to join the group. He agreed and was a co-signatory, with Balla, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo, of two further manifestos: Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (February 1910) and Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (April 1910). Of all the modern movements, Futurism was the most fervent in its repudiation of the past. Italian culture was tied more than most other modern European countries to its ancient history and Marinetti declared that the Futurists would "free Italy from her innumerable museums which cover her like countless cemeteries" by celebrating the modern industrial world and the "beauty of speed". In one of his typically provocative statements, he went so far as to suggest that "a racing motor car [was] more beautiful than the [celebrated ancient sculpture] Victory of Samothrace".

The art historian Charles Harrison observed that "The Futurists were much taken with the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who wrote of change as the essence of reality" and that such ideas "were clearly inviting to those, like the Futurists, who were seeking stylistic forms for 'modern' sensations". Like his colleagues in Italy, Severini employed elements of Neo-Impressionism and Cubism to recreate the uniquely modern sensations of dynamism and energy; stating that, "Futurism, as an intellectual practice, created a 'poetics' based on real life, of such a creative potential as to be inexhaustible, and therefore always present to those concerned with art". Yet, as an Italian artist immersed in the culture of the Parisian avant-garde, his painting was not preoccupied with pistons and machines so much as with capturing the frivolities of metropolitan life. He had a particular penchant for painting nightclub scenes - such as the canonical Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912) - through which he sought to capture on canvas the human sensations and atmosphere of movement and sound. Following a visit to Paris in 1911, the Italian Futurists absorbed some of Severini's influence by adopting some of the humanist features of Cubism, namely the human figure in motion, as further means of expressing pictorial dynamism.

In February 1912, Severini took part in the first Futurist exhibition outside Italy at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris. The touring exhibition moved on to London (before Berlin and Brussels) where it was greeted with great public curiosity. Writing for the Burlington Magazine, Barbara Pezzini observed that by the time the exhibition opened at the Sackville Gallery, Marinetti's manifesto had gained widespread notoriety, not least for dismissing the "art of the past [as] 'a funeral urn' from which the artist would emerge 'exhausted, reduced [and] downtrodden'". It was these provocative views that made the London exhibition (featuring 35 paintings by Severini, Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo) "irresistible to press and public alike". But Severini's simmering scepticism about Futurism's credentials to be taken seriously as a radical avant-garde movement - an attitude only reinforced by his friend Apollinaire who, following the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune exhibition, had mocked the Futurists for their "provincialism" and a general ignorance of the rising currents in the French avant-garde (namely Cubism) - was already growing. Pezzini observed, indeed, that in London critics ignored the "verbal explosions of the manifestos" and rather "singled out works that portrayed the non-threatening aspects of modern life, such as Severini's Parisian nightlife scenes".

According to Pezzini, the Sackville Gallery was a "'sacred' space where works of art were meant to transcend their financial value". The Sackville had a "sister" gallery too, the Marlborough Gallery, which Pezzini likened to "a picture gallery in a stately home". It was there that Severini held his first one-man exhibition in April 1913. Pezzini continued that some modern galleries "offered their rooms to whoever paid their rent" but that the Marlborough was very much "a self-aware gallery for connoisseurs [...] that exhibited works by old masters" and that the Severini exhibition was an isolated, but significant, event in its 22 year history. Severini had loosened further his firm ties to the Futurist movement with the Marlborough exhibition, though any rise in his profile hardly eased his financial situation and, for a third time, his studio in Paris was impounded. Nevertheless, Severini, whose exhibited works revealed the various influences of Pointillism, Neo-Impressionism, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and Picasso in lively urban scenes such as The Boulevard (1913), had won over the esteemed British critic Roger Fry while he formed a new friendship with the British painter CR Nevinson. In August that year the 30-year-old Severini married Jeanne, who was just 16, at a ceremony in Paris. "I tried not to show it", he wrote, "but I was deeply moved".

Soon after his marriage, Severini succumbed for a second time to pleurisy and was ordered by medics to take time off to recuperate. The near destitute couple moved to the Italian town of Montepulciano in 1914 to live with his parents and it was while there that Jeanne became pregnant. Severini recalled mournfully "This was not a happy occasion at all. It was a tragic event that complicated everything and created terrible problems for us". Jeanne's pregnancy coincided with the outbreak of the first World War prompting the newlyweds to sell everything they owned and to move back to Paris (Severini would be spared from serving in the war due to his lung condition). The couple's daughter, Gina - "a skinny little creature but with such a vivacious, pretty little face that she immediately captivated us" - was born in January 1915. But the young family were living on just four francs a day and Severini's health continued to deteriorate. His friend Picasso put him in touch with a doctor in Spain and Severini travelled to Barcelona for treatment and then on to the Pyrenees for a period of rest and recuperation. He was shocked on his return to find Jeanne and Gina in a state of near emaciation: "They were both so thin that I barely recognized them" he recalled. In an attempt to improve their situation, the Severini's moved to Igny in the countryside outside Paris where he sought, unsuccessfully, to find paying work. In 1916 the couple had a son, Tonio, who failed the thrive and died of pneumonia; a profound loss that would reverse Severini's atheism.

Severini did allow the war to inform his painting with his war works becoming, in the words of Coen, "more solid and volumetric in treatment". In Red Cross Train Passing Village, for instance, we see a locomotive thundering through the countryside of Igny. The fractured planes, the use of signage and text and the collage-like signal-crossing all owe their debt to Cubism, while the Pointillist rendering of the roofs, trees and hills draw on Seurat's influence. It is the subject matter and the vivid palette that ties the work to the Italian Futurists. Curator Jennifer Blessing stated: "In this painting of a train moving through the countryside, Severini split the landscape in order to impart a sense of the momentary fractured images that characterize our perception of a speeding object. The clash of intense contrasting colors suggests the noise and power of the train, which the Futurists admired as an emblem of vitality and potency".

By 1916 Severini was embracing a more orderly approach to his painting; his goal being to "construct" rather than "deconstruct" the world around him. The curator Andrew Mead argued that "Severini thrived on that change of direction" since, for him, "the 'radical' Futurist works now seem[ed] rather laboured and formulaic", and that, while Futurism might have been for a time "historically significant in attempting to capture what was happening to vision in the modern world [it proved] hardly fluid enough to convey a true sensation of speed". With the new aim of bringing geometric order to his painting, Severini experimented with still-life compositions based on the collage effects of Synthetic Cubism, but with portraits such as Maternity (1916), his work was pointing towards a more conservative "Return to Order" style known otherwise as Interwar Classicism. Indeed, Coen observed that with Maternity, a "dramatic change of style" occurred in Severini's painting that saw him progress from "the decomposition of volumes [...] towards a formal purity inspired by the tradition of the Italian Renaissance".

Meanwhile, Futurism was beginning to gain traction in America where Severini exhibited with the Futurists in San Francisco at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. And, in 1917, he was invited to exhibit his Futurist paintings at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery in New York. In 1918 Severini left Paris as the German armies encroached on the capital. He took refuge in Aix-les-Bains, near Chambéry, and then at Le Châtelard in the Savoy where he produced a series of still-lifes and landscapes composed along precise geometric principles. In 1919 (after the war) the Italian signed a three-year contract with the dealer Léonce Rosenberg who was best known for his dealings with the Cubists. Severini's financial situation improved but his change in fortunes was offset by a sense of collective tragedy which started when his dear friend Apollinaire lost his life to the Spanish Flu in 1918. In 1919 Modigliani died of tuberculosis, followed quickly by his grief-stricken (and pregnant) wife Hébuterne who threw herself to her death. Severini wrote: "For a long, long time afterward, all the artists suffered profound sorrow, not visibly, but in the depths of all their hearts".

Later Period

In the early 1920s Severini divided his time between France and Italy. He received a commission to decorate the home of the Sitwell family at Castello di Montegufoni on the outskirts of Florence with his fresco, completed in 1922, featuring characters based on the theatrical tradition of commedia dell'arte. Coen observed that the Castello fresco "was the first of a long series of wall decorations painted under the stimulus of a rediscovered religious faith, strengthened by his friendship with the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain". Having gone through something of a spiritual renaissance, Severini abandoned his commitment to Futurism and aligned rather with the "Return to Order" movement; adopting a Neo-Classical approach to painting which extended to detailed studies of Giotto.

In 1921 he published a book, Du cubisme au classicisme ( From Cubism to Classicism), in which he presented his theories on mathematical rules of composition and proportion. He began to apply theories of classical balance based on the principles of the Golden Section and he exhibited to acclaim at the Rome Biennale in 1923. From 1924 Severini worked on a cycle of murals for the church of Semsales in the province of Friburg, Germany, and, in 1928, he completed frescoes for the Baroque church at La Roche, near Aigle, Switzerland. Coen writes that "In these decorations, still Cubist in spirit, he expressed his search for proportionality between subject and object [...] according to the laws of 'sensibility' and 'intelligence'". By the late twenties Severini began to incorporate elements of Roman landscapes into his repertoire and in 1926 and 1929 (in Milan and Geneva respectively) he exhibited with artists connected with the Novecento Italiano group; a group sympathetic to Fascism who formed with the aim of reviving the tradition of large format history painting and sculpture in the classical tradition.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Severini's work showed at several important exhibitions including the 1930 Venice Biennale, the Rome Quadrennials of 1931 and 1935 (when he had an entire room devoted to his work and won the first prize for painting) and the Paris exhibition of 1937. He continued to produce religious murals and provided illustrations for books by Paul Fort and Paul Valéry. But it was for his mosaics that he started to gain most notice, earning him the title, in fact, of "father of modern mosaics". In 1933 he was commissioned to produce a mosaic for the reception hall of the new Palazzo della Triennale in Milan and to decorate the church of Notre Dame du Valentin in Lausanne but later in the decade he became directly associated with Benito Mussolini's "Third Rome" project of constructing grandiose architectural monuments inspired by the Roman forums of the imperial age.

Severini produced mosaics for the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan (1936), the Palazzo delle Poste in Alessandria (1936) and mosaics and frescoes at the University of Padua (1937). As Coen observed, he "was stimulated by the ideal, current in those years, of creating a new relationship between architecture and the visual arts [and in] the late 1930s he also created numerous sets and costumes for the theatre". Perhaps the most important of the Mussolini structures were, however, the Foro Italico, a multi-venue sports complex, built to support a (failed) bid by Rome to host the 1940 Olympics, and Palazzo degli Uffici, the inaugural building of the new district of EUR, which was intended to herald the (cancelled) 1942 World Fair. Though any association with the Fascist pursuit of empire was roundly condemned within the international artistic community, the art historian Kate Flint offered mitigation when making the point that "until the late 1930s abstract art was not regarded by the majority of [Italian] Fascist officials as dissident, 'degenerate', art is in Nazi Germany" and there was thus "little scope for attacking the regime though stylistic avant-garde techniques". Nor was it the case that Severini's mosaics was specifically "pro-Fascist"; rather, "the style of the régime [...] rested on Mussolini's principle of a 'return to order'".

Having published his autobiography, Tutta la vita di un pittore ( The Life of a Painter) in 1946, Severini returned to Paris where he worked in what might be described as a Neo-Cubist style that saw him revisit his earlier preoccupations with dancers, light and movement. He also found time to establish the School of Mosaic in Paris in 1950. Back in Rome, he completed what was arguably his most expansive mural for the 1953 International Exhibition of the Federation of Agricultural Enterprises in the grand hall at the Palazzo dei Congressi. In Rome, he also received commissions to decorate the offices of the Italian airline companies KLM and Alitalia (on flights during the 1960s, Alitalia stewards would even display small (in size) works by Severini and Balla for the "aesthetic pleasure" of its passengers). In his birthplace of Cortona, meanwhile, Severini left his lasting signature on its architecture with his Mosaic of San Marco (1961) which adorns the front-facade of the city's Church of St. Mark. Severini died in Paris on February 26, 1966, aged 82 but, according to his wishes, he was buried in Cortona.

The Legacy of Gino Severini

As an artist with one foot in two camps - French modernism and Italian classicism - Severini holds a unique place in twentieth century European art. As White put it, "Severini's most Italian qualities are also his least modernist [and] that he is only French when his work adheres to historiographical perceptions of what modernist painting can be". Though some have found him difficult to place, White's view is that his "dual heritage [...] makes Severini's practice much richer than that of many of his contemporaries". Severini's explorations into Cubism, Futurism, Neo-Impressionism, and later, mosaics, certainly made him one of the most significant Italian figures in modern art and he can take credit for showing the world that contemporary Italian art amounted to more than a fetishistic attachment to machinal structures. The art historian Ilona Jesnick insists that he was not just important to Italian modernism but "pivotal to Modernism" per se. Artists who have listed Severini among their inspirations include the Neo-Impressionists, Christopher Nevinson, Joseph Stella, and Rafael Barradas.

Severini was something of a renaissance man who moved freely from painter, to theoretician, to designer, to teacher, to mosaicist. But it is probably his contribution to the art of mosaics that truly distinguishes him from his peers. He was the driving force of mosaics in Paris (where he established a dedicated school) and, having studied the Early Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, he likened the laying of tesserae to brushstrokes of Cezanne and the Pointillism of Seurat. It was Severini, the "father of modern mosaics", who elevated the medium to new heights of appreciation as an artform.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Gino Severini

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

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Severini was one of the most progressive of all the twentieth-century Italian artists. An early and important figure within the Futurist movement, the Paris-based Severini produced unique works that, through their emphasis on urban Parisian scenes (rather than machines), broadened the thematic possibilities for the movement.

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Constructivism is the most influencial modern art movement in art in the twentieth century in Russia. The movement was conceived out in need for a new aesthetic language. Constructivism is not all by itself since it barrowed characteristics from cubism and futurism. It claimed the need to be approached as a proces of cerebral ¨Construction¨(1915 - 1930)

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/tatlin-vladimir/

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Vladimir Tatlin wanted to bend art to modern purposes and, ultimately, to tasks suited to the goals of Russia’s Communist revolution.

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/rodchenko-alexander/

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Alexander Rodchenko is perhaps the most important avant-garde artist to have put his art in the service of political revolution. In this regard, his career is a model of the clash between modern art and radical politics. He emerged as a fairly conventional painter, but his encounters with Russian Futurists propelled him to become an influential founder of the Constructivist movement. And his commitment to the Russian Revolution subsequently encouraged him to abandon first painting and then fine art in its entirety, and to instead put his skills in the service of industry and the state, designing everything from advertisements to book covers. His life's work was a ceaseless experiment with an extraordinary array of media, from painting and sculpture to graphic design and photography. Later in his career, however, the increasingly repressive policies targeted against modern artists in Russia led him to return to painting.

Biography of Alexander Rodchenko

Childhood

Alexander Rodchenko was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to a working class family. His father, Mikhail Rodchenko, was a theater props manager and his mother, Olga, a washerwoman. The family's social status did not provide much opportunity for the artistic education of talented Alexander. It is still unclear what training (if any) Rodchenko might have acquired as a child. The family moved to the city of Kazan in 1905. Two years later, Mikhail passed away, but they were able to allocate some of the family's scarce funds for Alexander's education.

Early Training

Rodchenko enrolled in the Kazan School of Art, where he studied from 1910 to 1914 under Nikolai Feshin and Georgii Medvedev. The young artist quickly absorbed the basic principles of the academic training, earning high praise from his instructors. In 1914, he met Varvara Stepanova, a fellow student. They became life-long partners and artistic collaborators.

Kazan proved to be too small and stifling for Rodchenko's emerging vision. He and Stepanova journeyed to Moscow in 1915 to acquire more meaningful exposure to the nascent Russian modernism, permanently settling there in 1916. Rodchenko attended the Stroganov Institute, where he studied drawing, painting, and art history.

In Moscow, Rodchenko was influenced by the key figures of the Russian avant-garde movement, namely Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich. He executed his first abstract drawing, reminiscent of Malevich's Suprematist compositions, in 1915. But it was not only the avant-garde artistic milieu that influenced him. Through his acquaintances with liberal thinkers such as the Futurists David Burliuk and Vasily Kamensky, Rodchenko found himself in the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Rodchenko's involvement with the Bolshevik cause was both ideological and aesthetic. As a working class young man, he witnessed firsthand the social injustice of Tsarist Russia. Rodchenko deeply believed in the power of art as a driving force of social transformation, as is detailed in many of his letters and diaries, which were only recently translated into English. Rodchenko embraced the emerging aesthetics of Russian Constructivism, becoming a leading member of the group.

Rodchenko's early years demonstrated his artistic talent and quest for innovation. From 1917 to 1918, he was mainly experimenting with flat geometric compositions. Then, in 1919, he created an entirely abstract series of Black on Black paintings, which might be read as a response to the spiritualism of Malevich's Black Square (1915). While Malevich's work seemed to herald the end of painting, it also touted a spiritualism that Rodchenko rejected. The Black on Black paintings, similarly reductive, though not as extreme as the Black Square, emphasized instead the material qualities of picture-making.

In the early years of the Soviet Republic, Rodchenko, alongside his friend and colleague Wassily Kandinsky, was actively engaged in the government reform of art collections and education. In 1917, he became secretary of the Professional Union of Artist-Painters, joining the Izo (Otdel Izobrazitel'nykh Iskusstv or the Section of Visual Arts), as one of the presiding officials the following year.

In 1920, he was appointed the Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund, a newly created agency in charge of the immense art collections transferred by the Bolsheviks from the palaces of the rich into the public domain. During his tenure, Rodchenko acquired 1,926 works of modern and contemporary art by 415 artists and established 30 public museums in Russian provinces.

Mature Period

While organizing the provincial museums, Rodchenko trained artists to serve the Communist state at the Higher Technical Artistic Studios. He taught the same principles that shaped his own artistic discourse; he rejected illusory representation as an outdated form hindered by the capitalist visual agenda, denounced painting as a domineering visual genre, preferring design, which challenged the notion of a work of art as a unique commodity, and, even more radically, promoted the idea of an artist as an engineer, a key creative force at the service of the masses.

In 1921, Rodchenko joined the Productivist movement, a group of artists devoted to the idea of incorporating artistic forms into the daily lives of common people. As a member of the group, Rodchenko designed notable utilitarian objects, including furniture, various household items, and textile patterns. More importantly, he became involved in bringing Constructivist forms into the mass visual propaganda of the Bolsheviks. His posters, such as Books (1924), became an icon of the early Soviet state and its artistic fervor. These works are still considered a pinnacle of modern graphic design today.

The ideas of Wassily Kandinsky may have been an important influence on Rodchenko in the early Soviet years, since the two were closely associated. But while Kandinsky was interested in the expressive possibilities of art, Rodchenko was increasingly interested in its potential as a laboratory for design and construction. This difference is reflected in his interest in line as an elemental component of painting. However, his final statements in painting returned to the issue of color; in 1921, he exhibited the groundbreaking triptych Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color (1921) comprised of purely monochrome panels of those colors.

In 1921, Rodchenko took a decisive, although temporary, break from painting. Instead, he concentrated on creating three-dimensional models of design objects, architectural sketches, and photography. He also created sets for film and theatre and designed furniture and clothes. From 1923 to 1925, he collaborated with the great avant-garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, illustrating some of his books and magazines for progressive Soviet writers such as LEF and NOVYI LEF.

It was through photography that Rodchenko enjoyed the most success in the 1920s. Employed as a correspondent for a number of Soviet newspapers and magazines, his photographs were exhibited all over the world. He was universally praised for his avant-garde compositions and experimental approach to focus and contrast in his photographs.

Late Years and Death

By the middle of the 1930s, Rodchenko fell out of favor with the Communist Party. The regime's visual ideology was completely transformed when Joseph Stalin came to power. The free-spirited avant-garde aesthetic was now actively suppressed by the state. Rodchenko and his wife were lucky not to perish in Stalin's Great Purges that swept through the Soviet Union and exterminated many individuals who came to prominence at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. With Social Realism becoming the official art of the U.S.S.R., Rodchenko's paintings and designs were openly condemned by the authorities for so-called "formalism."

As such, Rodchenko turned to photojournalism. His photographic images epitomized the era of High Stalinism by depicting lavish parades, immense industrial undertakings, and the decisive transformation of agriculture. Naturally, Rodchenko was explicitly forbidden to capture the horrendous human toll of this sweeping modernization. In the 1940s, he returned to painting, executing a number of powerful abstract expressionist compositions. These works, however, were never to be seen by his contemporaries, for they openly contradicted the officially sanctioned aesthetics. He continued his work as a photographer throughout the Stalin years, until his death in 1956.

The Legacy of Alexander Rodchenko

As a key figure of the Russian modernist movement, the art of Alexander Rodchenko helped redefine three key visual genres of modernism: painting, photography, and graphic design. In his paintings, the artist further explored and expanded the essential vocabulary of an abstract composition. His series of purely abstract proto-monochrome paintings were influential to artists such as Ad Reinhardt and the Minimalists of the 1960s. In the field of photography, he established unprecedented compositional paradigms, which in many ways still define the entire notion of modern photographic art. Rodchenko's involvement with the Bolshevik cause further propelled the appreciation of his art in the leftist circles of the American avant-garde.

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Rodchenko in his committment to the Russian Revolution put his skills into industry and the state, creating innovative designs and photographs.

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This movement was made up by Pablo piccaso and georges braque, both used multiple vantage points to fracture images into geometric forms. Rather than modelled forms in an illusionistic space, figures were depicted as dynamic arrangements of volumes and planes where background and foreground merged. It changed Renaissance, new artists started to use this movement and to mix it with elements of collage and various popular cultures. (1907 - 1922)

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/picasso-pablo/

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Summary of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was the most dominant and influential artist of the first half of the 20 th century. Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism, alongside Georges Braque, he also invented collage and made major contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism. He saw himself above all as a painter, yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored areas as diverse as printmaking and ceramics. Finally, he was a famously charismatic personality; his many relationships with women not only filtered into his art but also may have directed its course, and his behavior has come to embody that of the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination.

Accomplishments

It was a confluence of influences - from Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau, to archaic and tribal art - that encouraged Picasso to lend his figures more structure and ultimately set him on the path towards Cubism, in which he deconstructed the conventions of perspective that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. These innovations would have far-reaching consequences for practically all of modern art, revolutionizing attitudes to the depiction of form in space.

Picasso's immersion in Cubism also eventually led him to the invention of collage, in which he abandoned the idea of the picture as a window on objects in the world, and began to conceive of it merely as an arrangement of signs that used different, sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to those objects. This too would prove hugely influential for decades to come.

Picasso had an eclectic attitude to style, and although, at any one time, his work was usually characterized by a single dominant approach, he often moved interchangeably between different styles - sometimes even in the same artwork.

His encounter with Surrealism, although never transforming his work entirely, encouraged not only the soft forms and tender eroticism of portraits of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter, but also the starkly angular imagery of Guernica (1937), the century's most famous anti-war painting.

Picasso was always eager to place himself in history, and some of his greatest works, such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), refer to a wealth of past precedents - even while overturning them. As he matured he became only more conscious of assuring his legacy, and his late work is characterized by a frank dialogue with Old Masters such as Ingres, Velazquez, Goya, and Rembrandt.

The Life of Pablo Picasso

"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them." Said Picasso, and whether he was partnering with Braque on Cubism or spending time with the poets he admired, or the muses he loved and craved, he was finding new ways to see, and represent what he saw. His life is a virtual progression of modernism.

Important Art by Pablo Picasso

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

This painting was shocking even to Picasso's closest artist friends both for its content and its execution. The subject matter of nude women was not in itself unusual, but the fact that Picasso painted the women as prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was novel. Picasso's studies of Iberian and tribal art is most evident in the faces of three of the women, which are rendered as mask-like, suggesting that their sexuality is not just aggressive, but also primitive. Picasso also went further with his spatial experiments by abandoning the Renaissance illusion of three-dimensionality, instead presenting a radically flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric shards, something Picasso borrowed in part from Paul Cézanne's brushwork. For instance, the leg of the woman on the left is painted as if seen from several points of view simultaneously; it is difficult to distinguish the leg from the negative space around it making it appear as if the two are both in the foreground.

The painting was widely thought to be immoral when it was finally exhibited in public in 1916. Braque is one of the few artists who studied it intently in 1907, leading directly to his Cubist collaborations with Picasso. Because Les Demoiselles predicted some of the characteristics of Cubism, the work is considered proto or pre Cubism.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Maquette for Guitar

Picasso's experiments with collaged elements such as those in Still Life with Chair Caning encouraged him to reconsider traditional sculpture as well. Rather than a collage, however, Maquette for Guitar is an assemblage or three-dimensional collage. Picasso took pieces of cardboard, paper, string, and wire that he then folded, threaded, and glued together, making it the first sculpture assembled from disparate parts. The work is also innovative because it is not a solid material surrounded by a void, but instead fluidly integrates mass and its surrounding void. Picasso has translated the Cubist interest in multiple perspectives and geometric form into a three-dimensional medium, using non-traditional art materials that continue to challenge the distinction between high art and popular culture as he did in Ma Jolie (1911-12).

Paperboard, paper, thread, string, twine, and coated wire - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Three Women at the Spring

Picasso made careful studies in preparation for this, his most ambitious treatment of what is an old classical subject. It makes reference to earlier pictures by Poussin and Ingres - titans of classical painting - but it also draws inspiration from Greek sculpture, and indeed the massive gravity of the figures is very sculptural. Critics have speculated that the subject appealed to him because of the recent birth of his first son, Paulo; the somber attitude of the figures may be explained by the contemporary preoccupation in France with mourning the dead of the First World War.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Large Nude in a Red Armchair

When Picasso's work came under the influence of the Surrealists in the late 1920s, his forms often took on melting, organic contours. This work was completed in May 1929, around the same time the Surrealists were preoccupied with the way in which ugly and disgusting imagery might provide a route into the unconscious. It was clearly intended to shock, and it may have been influenced by Salvador Dalí - and Joan Miro. It is thought that the picture represents the former dancer Olga Koklova, whose relationship with Picasso was failing around this time.

Oil on canvas - Musée National Picasso, Paris

Biography of Pablo Picasso

Childhood

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born into a creative family. His father was a painter, and he quickly showed signs of following the same path: his mother claimed that his first word was "piz," a shortened version of lapiz, or pencil, and his father was his first teacher. Picasso began formally studying art at the age of 11. Several paintings from his teenage years still exist, such as First Communion (1895), which is typical in its conventional, if accomplished, academic style. His father groomed the young prodigy to be a great artist by getting Picasso the best education the family could afford and visiting Madrid to see works by Spanish Old Masters. And when the family moved to Barcelona so his father could take up a new post, Picasso continued his art education.

Early Training

It was in Barcelona that Picasso first matured as a painter. He frequented the Els Quatre Gats, a café popular with bohemians, anarchists, and modernists. And he came to be familiar with Art Nouveau and Symbolism, and artists such as Edvard Munch and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. It was here that he met Jaime Sabartes, who would go on to be his fiercely loyal secretary in later years. This was his introduction to a cultural avant-garde, in which young artists were encouraged to express themselves.

During the years from 1900 to 1904, Picasso traveled frequently, spending time in Madrid and Paris, in addition to spells in Barcelona. Although he began making sculpture during this time, critics characterize this time as his Blue Period, after the blue/grey palette that dominated his paintings. The mood of the work was also insistently melancholic. One might see the beginnings of this in the artist's sadness over the suicide of Carlos Casegemas, a friend he had met in Barcelona, though the subjects of much of the Blue Period work were drawn from the beggars and prostitutes he encountered in city streets. The Old Guitarist (1903) is a typical example of both the subject matter and the style of this phase.

In 1904, Picasso's palette began to brighten, and for a year or more he painted in a style that has been characterized as his Rose Period. He focused on performers and circus figures, switching his palette to various shades of more uplifting reds and pinks. And around 1906, soon after he had met artist Georges Braque, his palette darkened, his forms became heavier and more solid in aspect, and he began to find his way towards Cubism.

Mature Period

In the past critics dated the beginnings of Cubism to his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). Although that work is now seen as transitional (lacking the radical distortions of his later experiments), it was clearly crucial in his development since it was heavily influenced by African sculpture and ancient Iberian art. It is said to have inspired Braque to paint his own first series of Cubist paintings, and in subsequent years the two would mount one of the most remarkable collaborations in modern painting, sometimes eagerly learning from each other, at other times trying to outdo one another in their fast-paced and competitive race to innovate. They visited each other daily during their formulation of this radical technique, and Picasso described himself and Braque as "two mountaineers, roped together." In their shared vision, multiple perspectives on an object are depicted simultaneously by being fragmented and rearranged in splintered configurations. Form and space became the most crucial elements, and so both artists restricted their palettes to earth tones, in stark contrast with the bright colors used by the Fauves that had preceded them. Picasso would always have an artist or a group he collaborated with, but as Braque biographer Alex Danchev wrote: Picasso's "Braque period" was "the most concentrated and fruitful of his whole career."

Picasso rejected the label "Cubism," especially when critics began to differentiate between the two key approaches he was said to pursue - Analytic and Synthetic. He saw his body of work as a continuum. But it is beyond doubt that there was a change in his work around 1912. He became less concerned with representing the placement of objects in space than in using shapes and motifs as signs to playfully allude to their presence. He developed the technique of collage, and from Braque he learned the related method of papiers colles, which used cutout pieces of paper in addition to fragments of existing materials. This phase has since come to be known as the "Synthetic" phase of Cubism, due to its reliance on various allusions to an object in order to create the description of it. This approach opened up the possibilities of more decorative and playful compositions, and its versatility encouraged Picasso to continue to utilize it well in the 1920s.

But the artist's dawning interest in ballet also sent his work in new directions around 1916. This was in part prompted by meeting the poet, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Through him he met Sergei Diaghilev, and went on to produce numerous set designs for the Ballets Russes.

For some years Picasso had occasionally toyed with classical imagery, and he began to give this free rein in the early 1920s. His figures became heavier and more massive, and he often imagined them against backgrounds of a Mediterranean Golden Age. They have long been associated with the wider conservative trends of Europe's so-called rappel a l'ordre, (return to order), a period of art now known as Interwar Classicism.

His encounter with Surrealism in the mid 1920s again prompted a change of direction. His work became more expressive, and often violent or erotic. This phase in his work can also be correlated with the period in his personal life when his marriage to dancer Olga Khokhlova began to break down and he began a new relationship with Marie-Therese Walter. Indeed, critics have often noted how changes in style in Picasso's work often go hand in hand with changes in his romantic relationships; his partnership with Khokhlova spanned the years of his interest in dance and, later, his time with Jacqueline Roque is associated with his late phase in which he became preoccupied with his legacy alongside the Old Masters. Picasso frequently painted the women he was in love with, and, as a result, his tumultuous personal life is well represented on canvas. He was known to have kept many mistresses, most famously Eva Gouel, Dora Maar, and Françoise Gilot. He married twice, and had four children, Claude, Paloma, Maia, and Paulo.

In the late 1920s he began a collaboration with the sculptor Julio González. This was his most significant creative partnership since he had worked alongside Braque, and it culminated in welded metal sculptures, which were subsequently highly influential.

As the 1930s wore on, political concerns began to cloud Picasso's view, and these would continue to preoccupy him for some time. His disgust at the bombing of civilians in the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War prompted him to create the painting Guernica, in 1937. During World War II he stayed in Paris, and the German authorities left him sufficiently unmolested to allow him to continue his work. However, the war did have a huge impact on Picasso, with his Paris painting collection confiscated by Nazis and some of his closest Jewish friends killed. Picasso made works commemorating them - sculptures employing hard, cold materials such as metal, and a particularly violent follow up to Guernica, entitled The Charnel House (1945). Following the war he was also closely involved with the Communist Party, and several major pictures from this period, such as War in Korea (1951), make that new allegiance clear.

Late Years and Death

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Picasso worked on his own versions of canonical masterpieces by artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Diego Velázquez, and El Greco. In the later years of his life, Picasso sought solace from his celebrity, marrying Jacqueline Rogue in 1961. His later paintings were heavily portrait-based and their palettes nearly garish in hue. Critics have generally considered them inferior to his earlier work, though in recent years they have been more enthusiastically received. He also created many ceramic and bronze sculptures during this later period. He died of a heart attack in the South of France in 1973.

The Legacy of Pablo Picasso

Picasso's influence was profound and far-reaching, and remarkably, many periods of his life were influential in their own right. His early Symbolist pieces remain iconic, while innovations in pioneering Cubism established a set of pictorial problems, devices, and approaches, which remained important well into the 1950s. Even after the war, even though the energy in avant-garde art shifted to New York, Picasso remained a titanic figure, and one who could never be ignored. Indeed, even though the Abstract Expressionists could be said to have superseded aspects of Cubism (even while being strongly influenced by him), The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been called "the house that Pablo built," because it has so widely exhibited the artist's work. MoMA's opening exhibition in 1930 included fifteen paintings by Picasso. He was also a part of Alfred Barr's highly influential survey shows Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936-37). Although his influence undoubtedly waned in the 1960s, he had by that time become a pop icon, and the public's fascination with his life story continue to fuel interest in his work.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Pablo Picasso

Documentaries and Overviews:

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Picasso Paintings & Sculptures, Bio, Ideas

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Picasso pioneered Cubism, invented collage, and contributed to Surrealism and Modern Sculpture. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Guernica, and more iconic art.

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Four important characteristics of Cubism are the application of multiple perspectives, the use of geometric shapes, a monochromatic color palette, and a flattened picture plane. Cubism's novel handling of form, color, and perspective signaled a shift from the existing conventions of European modernist painting.

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/braque-georges/

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"[Braque was] a model of everything that is skill, serenity, and reflection."

Summary of Georges Braque

Georges Braque was at the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism. Braque's work throughout his life focused on still lifes and means of viewing objects from various perspectives through color, line, and texture. While his collaboration with Pablo Picasso and their Cubist works are best known, Braque had a long painting career that continued well beyond that period.

Accomplishments

Though Braque started out as a member of the Fauves, he began developing a Cubist style after meeting Pablo Picasso. While their paintings shared many similarities in palette, style and subject matter, Braque stated that unlike Picasso, his work was "devoid of iconological commentary," and was concerned purely with pictorial space and composition.

Braque sought balance and harmony in his compositions, especially through papier collés, a pasted paper collage technique that Picasso and Braque invented in 1912. Braque, however, took collage one-step further by gluing cut-up advertisements into his canvases. This foreshadowed modern art movements concerned with critiquing media, such as Pop art.

Braque stenciled letters onto paintings, blended pigments with sand, and copied wood grain and marble to achieve great levels of dimension in his paintings. His depictions of still lifes are so abstract that they border on becoming patterns that express an essence of the objects viewed rather than direct representations.

Biography of Georges Braque

Although Braque and Picasso were very close for a period, the two art giants were almost polar opposites. Braque stayed married with one woman, fought in World War I, and was reserved and tall.

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"[Braque was] a model of everything that is skill, serenity, and reflection." Georges Braque was at the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism. Braque's work throughout his life focused on still lifes and means of viewing objects from various perspectives through color, line, and texture.

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Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. (1905 - 1933)

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/klee-paul/

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Summary of Paul Klee

Paul Klee, a Swiss-born painter, printmaker and draughtsman of German nationality, was originally associated with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, and subsequently taught at the Bauhaus, the widely influential German art school of the interwar period. Klee's diverse body of work cannot, however, be categorized according to any single artistic movement, or "school." His paintings, which are at times fantastic, childlike, or otherwise witty, served as an inspiration to the New York School, as well as many other artists of the 20 th century.

Accomplishments

Klee was fundamentally a transcendentalist who believed that the material world was only one among many realities open to human awareness. His use of design, pattern, color, and miniature sign systems all speak to his efforts to employ art as a window onto that philosophical principle.

Klee was a musician for most of his life, often practicing the violin as a warm-up for painting. He naturally saw analogies between music and visual art, such as in the transient nature of musical performance and the time-based processes of painting, or in the expressive power of color as being akin to that of musical sonority. In his lectures at the Bauhaus, Klee even compared the visual rhythm in drawings to the structural, percussive rhythms of a musical composition by the master of counterpoint, Johann Sebastian Bach.

Klee challenged traditional boundaries separating writing and visual art by exploring a new expressive, and largely abstract or poetic language of pictorial symbols and signs. Arrows, letters, musical notation, ancient hieroglyphs, or a few black lines standing in for a person or object frequently appear in his work, while rarely demanding a specific reading.

Klee greatly admired the art of children, who seemed to create free of models or previous examples. In his own work he often strove to achieve a similar untutored simplicity, often by employing intense colors inspired by an early trip to North Africa, and by line drawing in the unstudied manner of an everyday craftsman.

Klee constantly experimented with artistic techniques and the expressive power of color, in the process often breaking traditional or "academic" rules of painting in oils on canvas. Klee also applied paint in unusual ways, such as spraying and stamping during his years at the Bauhaus. Keeping his work within the realm of the "ordinary," Klee also painted on a variety of everyday materials, such as burlap, cardboard panel, and muslin.

The Life of Paul Klee

When the Swiss-born Paul Klee visited Tunisia in 1914, he was looking in part for his "oriental" roots. The walls of the city of Kairouan so impressed him that standing in front of them, he famously said, "color possesses me..the color and I are one." Shortening his visit, he quickly returned to Europe to paint the works for which he became celebrated.

Important Art by Paul Klee

Winged Hero (Der Held mit dem Flugel)

Klee was first a draughtsman before becoming a painter. The etchings in his early series, Inventions, demonstrate Klee's ability to manipulate line and tonal value to create a figure with strange and grotesque limbs. An artist's inscription in the bottom right corner of the picture explains the underlying concept: "Because this man was born with one wing, he believed he could fly. His attempts, of course, have only resulted in crashes and a broken left arm and leg." The strange creature could very well represent a kind of self-portrait of the typical progressive artist at the turn of the 20 th century, perpetually pursuing his full potential while repeatedly struggling against public incomprehension or apathy.

Etching with drypoint on zinc - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Hammamet with Its Mosque

The bright light of Tunisia inspired Klee to create pictures of colorful watercolor washes. The upper half of the painting is representational, while the composition of the lower half follows Robert Delaunay's proposal to use color and its contrasts to expressive purposes- here a juxtaposition of red and green patches in the manner of a folk textile, or other such popular craft tradition. Klee suggests that color, shape, and the faintest suggestion of a subject are enough to powerfully re-create in the eye of the viewer the actual feeling of repose that the artist experienced in the original landscape.

Watercolor and pencil on paper - Berggruen Klee Collection, New York

Affected Place [Betroffener Ort]

Created in Klee's early Bauhaus years, this piece shows a scene of ambiguous signs and symbols over a background of modulated purples and oranges. The various strips of color hint at a horizon, their horizontal emphasis counteracted only by the boldly painted arrow, which abruptly suggests something as ordinary as a road sign. Like the many gradations of color, the arrow generates movement, compelling the viewer's eye to the center of the picture. The influence on Klee of Cubist still lifes, such as those of Picasso and Braque, is clearly apparent: Klee suggests a motif painted from nature while also cancelling it, as though to remind us that this is no window but a kind of abstract sign system.

Ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper; top and bottom strips with watercolor and ink, mounted on cardboard - Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne

The Twittering Machine [Die Zwitschermaschine]

The title alludes to a kind of child's toy or domestic ornament, four mechanical birds resting on a hand crank, ready to sing when the crank is turned. In their still state, they give an intimidating impression, their gaping, menacing beaks the only sign that these are birds in the first place. Dadaist and proto-Surrealist fantasy and a sense of alarm in the face of the most ordinary item of every life is underlying this little, otherwise playful inscription. Klee used an innovative technique to create this mixed-media piece: he drew on top of a sheet of paper that had been first covered in black oil pigment, which resulted in the blurred lines and black marks of the background.

Oil transfer and watercolor on paper, framed in watercolor and ink, on cardboard - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mr. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Purchase Fund

Highway and Byways [Hauptweg und Nebenwege]

Klee visited Egypt in 1928, inspired by the North African country to create brightly colored abstract works. Yet, like many of his others, this painting is not quite fully divorced from its real world subject. Narrow blue rectangles at the top of the canvas suggest the sky, while uneven rectangles and trapezoids create paths leading one's eye from the bottom of the page to the elevated horizon. Broad trapezoids painted pale hues are arranged down the center of the canvas to suggest a main road. Thus Klee manipulates color, shape, and line to create a sense of real-world depth and movement.

Oil on canvas on canvas stretcher - Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Death and Fire

The German word for death, Tod, makes up the features of the white face in the center of the picture, so powerfully, yet simply reminiscent of a human or an animal skull. "Tod" may be found again in the "T" shape of the figure's raised arm, the golden orb in its hand, and the D shape of its face. Perhaps a minimally described man walks toward Death, or perhaps towards the glowing sun held in Death's hand. The image juxtaposes the cold white with the warm reds and yellows, perhaps symbolic, like a kind of cave painting, of the creation of man and the image of his sad mortality. Inspired by Klee's interest in hieroglyphics, Death and Fire suggests that abstraction and representation have been mutually accommodating, or otherwise complementary means of expression, since time immemorial.

Oil and colored paste on burlap - Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Biography of Paul Klee

Childhood

Paul Klee was born to a German father who taught music at the Berne-Hofwil teacher's college and a Swiss mother trained as a professional singer. Encouraged by his musical parents, he took up violin at age seven. His other hobbies, drawing and writing poems, were not fostered in the same way. Despite his parents' wishes that he pursue a musical career, Klee decided he would have more success in the visual arts, a field in which he could create rather than just perform.

Early Training

Klee's academic training focused mostly on his drawing skills. He studied in a private studio for two years before joining the studio of German symbolist Franz von Stuck in 1900. During his studies in Munich, he met Lily Stumpf, a pianist, and the couple married in 1906. Lily's work as a piano instructor supported Klee's early years as an artist, even after the birth of their son, Felix, in 1907.

Klee remained isolated from the developments of modern art until 1911, when he met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke of Der Blaue Reiter. He participated in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912 and saw there the work of other avant-garde artists such as Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. Klee visited Delaunay's studio in Paris that same year. His experiments with abstraction began at about this time.

Klee's trip to Tunisia in 1914 changed his relationship with color. "Color and I are one," he declared in his diaries. "I am a painter." Traveling with August Macke and Louis Moilliet, he drew and painted watercolor landscapes of Tunis, Hammamet, and Kairouan. After Klee's return, he created several abstract works based on his Tunisian watercolors.

Mature Period

Klee's views on abstract art were influenced by Wilhelm Worringer's thesis Abstraction and Empathy (1907), which hypothesized that abstract art was created in a time of war. World War I broke out only three months after Klee had returned from Tunisia. Klee was called to duty in 1916, but was spared the front. Meanwhile, he enjoyed financial success, especially after a large exhibition in Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. Klee was reserved in his opinions against the war, but when a communist government was declared in Munich in November 1918, he enthusiastically accepted a position on the Executive Committee of Revolutionary Artists. The November Revolution failed soon thereafter and Klee returned to Switzerland.

Klee accepted an invitation to teach at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. The Bauhaus was an influential school of architecture and industrial design that aimed to provide students with a grounding in all of the visual arts. Klee taught at the school for ten years, moving with the Bauhaus from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. He taught workshops in book binding and painting stained glass, but his influence as a teacher was most noted in his series of detailed lectures on visual form ( Bildnerische Formlehre).

In 1930 Klee left the Bauhaus for the art academy in Düsseldorf, but this brief period of calm ended on January 30, 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. Klee was denounced as a "Galician Jew" and a "cultural Bolshevik," and his work derided as "subversive" and "insane." His house in Dessau was searched, and in April 1933 he was dismissed from his teaching position. Klee and his wife returned to Berne in December.

Late Period and Death

Two years after returning to Switzerland, Klee fell ill with a disease that would later be diagnosed as progressive scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that hardens the skin and other organs. The artist created only 25 works the year after he fell ill, but his creativity resurged in 1937 and increased to a record 1,253 works in 1939. His late works dealt with the grief, pain, resilience, and acceptance of approaching death.

Several of Klee's works were included in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition staged by the National Socialists in Munich in 1937. The accusations against Klee's character and politics that had been waged against him in Germany complicated his application for Swiss citizenship in 1939. While he had been born in Switzerland, his father was German, which according to Swiss law meant that Klee was a German citizen. Klee died on June 29, 1940 in Locarno, Switzerland, before his final application could be approved.

The Legacy of Paul Klee

Klee's artistic legacy has been immense, even if many of his successors have not referenced his work openly as an apparent source or influence. During his lifetime, the Surrealists found Klee's seemingly random juxtaposition of text, abstract signs, and reductive symbols suggestive of the way the mind in dream state recombines disparate objects of everyday and thus brings forth new insights into how the unconscious wields power even over waking reality.

In European art after the 1940s, artists such as Jean Dubuffet continued to reference the art of children as a kind of untutored, expressive ideal. Klee's reputation grew considerably in the 1950s, by which time, for instance, the Abstract Expressionists could view his work in New York exhibitions. Klee's use of signs and symbols particularly interested the artists of the New York School, especially those interested in mythology, the unconscious, and primitivism (as well as the art of the self-trained and that of children). Klee's use of color as an expressive medium of human emotion in its own right also appealed to the Color Field painters, such as Jules Olitski and Helen Frankenthaler. Finally, American artists maturing in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ellsworth Kelly owed a debt to Klee for his pioneering color theory during the Bauhaus period.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Paul Klee

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

Similar Art

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Paul Klee was an expressionist with the Der Blaue Reiter, and taught at the Bauhaus making fantastic, childlike, or witty works.

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/kirchner-ernst-ludwig/

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Kirchner was a key Expressionist who was motivated by fears about humanity’s place in the modern world and the loss of spirituality and authenticity.

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It was somehow meant to encompass not only the work of painters who filled their canvases with fields of color and abstract forms, but also those who attacked their canvases with a vigorous gestural expressionism. Still Abstract Expressionism has become the most accepted term for a group of artists who held much in common. (1943 - 1966)

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/pollock-jackson/

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Summary of Jackson Pollock

In its edition of August 8 th, 1949, Life magazine ran a feature article about Jackson Pollock that bore this question in the headline: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Could a painter who flung paint at canvases with a stick, who poured and hurled it to create roiling vortexes of color and line, possibly be considered "great"? New York's critics certainly thought so, and Pollock's pre-eminence among the Abstract Expressionists has endured, cemented by the legend of his alcoholism and his early death. The famous 'drip paintings' that he began to produce in the late 1940s represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century. At times they could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man's entrapment - in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world.

Accomplishments

Pollock's tough and unsettled early life growing up in the American West shaped him into the bullish character he would become. Later, a series of influences came together to guide Pollock to his mature style: years spent painting realist murals in the 1930s showed him the power of painting on a large scale; Surrealism suggested ways to describe the unconscious; and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space.

In 1939, Pollock began visiting a Jungian analyst to treat his alcoholism, and his analyst encouraged him to create drawings. These would later feed his paintings, and they shaped Pollock's understanding of his pictures not only as outpourings of his own mind, but expressions that might stand for the terror of all modern humanity living in the shadow of nuclear war.

Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.

The Life of Jackson Pollock

Important Art by Jackson Pollock

Biography of Jackson Pollock

Childhood

Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, the fifth and youngest son of a family of Irish-Scottish extraction. Pollock was only ten months old when the family moved to San Diego. His father's work as a surveyor would force them to move repeatedly around the Southwest in subsequent years, until, when Pollock was aged nine, his father abandoned the family, only to return when Jackson himself had left home. Although Pollock had a tough upbringing, but he grew to love nature - animals and the expanse of the land - and while living in Phoenix in 1923 he discovered Native American art.

Early Training

Pollock attended the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where he befriended Philip Guston, and where he was also introduced to theosophical ideas which prepared him for his later interests in Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Two of Pollock's older brothers, Charles and Sanford, also pursued careers as artists, and it was their encouragement which lured him to New York in 1930, where he studied under Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League.

In New York Pollock was attracted to the Old Masters and began to study mural painting. He posed for Benton's 1930-31 murals at the New School for Social Research, and he met the prominent Mexican Muralist José Clemente Orozco. He later spent a summer observing Diego Rivera paint murals at the New Workers School, and in 1936 he joined the Experimental Workshop of another muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, where he learned to employ unorthodox painting techniques. Pollock's own canvas, Going West (1934-35), blends many of these influences and is typical of his style at this time. In 1937, he was assigned to the Easel Division of Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project.

During much of the 1930s Pollock lived with his brothers in Greenwich Village, and was at times so poor that he had to work as a janitor and steal food to survive. In 1932, however, he was invited to participate in the 8 th Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels and Drawings by American and French Artists at the Brooklyn Museum, his first exhibition.

Mature Period

In 1936, Pollock briefly met Lenore ("Lee") Krasner. In time, their relationship would bring some of the few spells of calm and happiness that Pollock ever knew. But the two did not meet again until 1941, after which they became romantically involved and married in 1945. Meanwhile, Pollock's alcoholism - which had been a problem since his adolescence - drove him into treatment as early as 1938, and by 1939 he was receiving Jungian psychoanalysis. His analyst encouraged him to produce drawings to aid his recovery, and the methods and motifs in these drawings - albeit shaped by Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jose Clemente Orozco and the theories of John Graham - soon found their way into works such as Guardians of the Secret(1943).

Despite his personal problems, Pollock remained bullishly confident in his art. Krasner was impressed when she saw his work in the early 1940s and introduced him to her teacher, Hans Hofmann. Hofmann was similarly enthusiastic, and the meeting blossomed into an enduring friendship between the two men. Hofmann is said to have remarked that Pollock needed to work more from nature, to which Pollock famously replied, "I don't paint nature, I am nature."

The WPA came to an end in 1943 and Pollock was forced to find work on his own. Along with various odd-jobs he became a custodian at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum), and it was there that he met Peggy Guggenheim, who invited him to submit work to her new gallery, The Art of This Century. Eventually, Guggenheim put Pollock on a contract, and in 1943 she gave him his first solo exhibition, which was well received. The critic Clement Greenberg noted with approval that Pollock had absorbed and transcended Mexican mural painting, Picasso and Miró. The pictures still carried much figuration, although the references remained concealed - as Pollock said, "I choose to veil the imagery."

At the same time, Peggy Guggenheim also commissioned a painting for the entry hall of her New York apartment. The resulting work was Mural (1943), which would prove important in Pollock's transition from a style shaped by murals, Native American art and European modernism towards his mature drip technique. And it was Guggenheim who again helped Pollock when he needed a down-payment to secure an old farmhouse in the town of The Springs on Long Island. He and Krasner bought the farmhouse in the fall of 1945 and married in October. Krasner hoped that distance from the struggles and temptations of the city would offer a great opportunity for both of them to pursue their painting in seclusion and peace.

Exactly how Pollock came upon his drip technique has been a matter of long and inconclusive scholarly argument, but his work was already taking steps towards it in the mid-1940s. He began to lose the symbolic imagery of his earlier pictures and looked for more abstract means of expression. His experience of painting Mural for Guggenheim's apartment was also important in spurring him on, and in 1945 he painted There Were Seven in Eight, a picture in which recognizable imagery was thoroughly suppressed and the surface was knitted together by a vivid tangle of lines. In the following years his style became more boldly abstract still, and he produced works like Shimmering Substance (1946). The following year he finally hit on the idea of flinging and pouring paint, and thus found the means to create the light, airy and apparently endless webs of color that he was reaching towards. Masterpieces such as Full Fathom Five (1947) were the result. Pollock had carried out another stylistic somersault and arrived at a method that synthesized Impressionism, Surrealism and Cubism.

Shimmering Substance led on to works like Number 1A (1948), a larger canvas than Pollock was familiar with, and dense with a dazzling web of color. He found he was best able to approach works such as this by positioning the canvas flat on the floor, moving around it and applying the paint from all sides. By dipping a small stick, house brush or trowel into the paint and then rapidly moving his wrist, arm and body, he allowed it to drip and fall in weaving rhythms over the surface. The technique - the epitome of what critic Harold Rosenberg would call Action Painting - rarely permitted the brush to directly touch the canvas. "On the floor I am more at ease," he said. "I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting." Pollock's work thus became as much about process as they were about product. They became a record of the performance of painting - his play in and around the canvas, where he could enter them as a participant and hover above them as their creator. "There is no accident," Pollock once said, "just as there is no beginning or end.. Sometimes I lose a painting, but I have no fear of changes, of destroying the image, because a painting has a life of its own."

Critics were quick to recognize the power of Pollock mature work. Greenberg, who would be his staunchest and most powerful supporter, wrote at the time, "[His] superiority to his contemporaries in this country lies in his ability to create genuinely violent and extravagant art without losing stylistic control." But when Pollock's pictures reached a wider public, through coverage in magazines such as Vogue and Life, the response was a mixture of shock and incredulity. Nor was he widely collected at first, having only a small circle of supporters. Commercial success would soon come, but even at its height - after Art of This Century Gallery had closed and gallery owner Betty Parsons had taken over Pollock's contract - the painter was still being treated for alcoholism.

Pollock supposedly stayed dry from mid-1948 to late 1950, and during these years he lived primarily in Long Island, only occasionally coming into the city. In 1950, he had a successful solo exhibition, and, along with Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, was selected by MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., for the Venice Biennale. But a year later he was drinking again.

Late Period and Death

Pollock's radical abstraction seemed to herald an incredible new freedom for painting, yet semblances of recognizable imagery continued to hover in the background of his pictures. The vast expanse of Blue Poles (1952) is knitted together with the aid of diagonal lines. And One: Number 31 (1950) retains a strong sense of rhythmically dancing figures, amidst its remarkable diversity of effects. Pollock might have abandoned the realism of his youth, but he still managed to make his paintings eloquently metaphorical. Like many of his canvases from this time, One evokes a mood of grandeur which ties it to the tradition of sublime landscape which stretches back into the 18 th century. It also glistens as if it were dappled with light in the manner of Monet's canvases, and many critics have speculated on whether Pollock was influenced by the French Impressionist.

Pollock never really lost his interest in figurative imagery - as he once put it, "I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge." As early as the late 1940s, figuration showed signs of resurfacing in his work. By 1950, whilst his drinking increased, he returned to drawing, resurrecting some of his old motifs, and producing a series of mainly black and white poured paintings. Some, like Yellow Islands (1952), incorporate touches of color and are highly abstract; some, like Echo (Number 25, 1951), are calligraphic in style and only residually figurative; others bear clear images of heads. They were badly received when Pollock first exhibited them, but he continued to work on them right through 1953, his last productive year of work.

His personal troubles only increased in his later years. He left Betty Parsons Gallery, and, his reputation preceding him, he struggled to find another gallery. He painted little in 1954, claiming that he had nothing left to say. In the summer of 1956, Krasner took a trip to Europe to get some distance from Pollock, and soon after the painter began a relationship with 25 year old artist Ruth Kligman, who he had met at the Cedar Bar. Then, on the night of August 11, 1956, while Pollock was drunk and out driving with Kligman and her friend, Edith Metzger, he lost control of the car, killing himself and Metzger, and seriously injuring Kligman.

The Legacy of Jackson Pollock

Pollock's immediate legacy was certainly felt most by other painters. His work brought together elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism, and transcended them all. Beside that achievement even greats such as de Kooning, who remained closer to Cubism, and hung on to figurative imagery, seemed to fall short. And the best among subsequent generations of painters would all have to take on his achievement, just as Pollock himself had wrestled with Picasso.

And as early as 1958, when pioneering performance artist Allan Kaprow explicitly addressed the question of his legacy in an article for Art News, some were beginning to wonder if Pollock might even have opened up possibilities outside of the realm of painting. To borrow critic Harold Rosenberg's words, Pollock had re-imagined the canvas not as "a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object.. [but as] an arena in which to act." And it was a short step from this realization to interpreting Pollock's balletic moves around the canvas as a species of performance art. Since then, Pollock's reputation has only increased. The subject of many biographies, a movie biopic, and major retrospectives, he has become not only one of the most famous symbols of the alienated modern artist, but also an embodiment for critics and historians of American modernism in its finest hour.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Jackson Pollock

Similar Art

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Pollock's innovative abstractions evoke the power of nature, but also suggest man's entrapment in an anxious mind and body, and in the frightening modern world.

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/frankenthaler-helen/

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Summary of Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was among the most influential artists of the mid-20 th century. Introduced early in her career to major artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline (and Robert Motherwell, whom she later married), Frankenthaler was influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting practices, but developed her own distinct approach to the style. She invented the "soak-stain" technique, in which she poured turpentine-thinned paint onto canvas, producing luminous color washes that appeared to merge with the canvas and deny any hint of three-dimensional illusionism. Her breakthrough gave rise to the movement promoted by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg as the "next big thing" in American art: Color Field Painting, marked by airy compositions that celebrated the joys of pure color and gave an entirely new look and feel to the surface of the canvas. Later in her career, Frankenthaler turned her attention to other artistic media, most notably woodcuts, in which she achieved the quality of painting, in some cases replicating the effects of her soak-stain process.

Accomplishments

While creating Mountains and Sea (1952), Frankenthaler arrived at her innovative variant of Jackson Pollock's pouring technique, in which she likewise poured paints onto enormous canvases placed on the floor. But while Pollock used enamel paints, which remain on the surface of the canvas when dried, Frankenthaler poured oil paints that she had thinned with turpentine that then soaked into the fabric of the canvas. Frankenthaler's soak-stain process created luminescent, misty compositions dominated by large areas of color that seemed to have emerged onto the canvas naturally and organically.

Frankenthaler's work influenced Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who recognized works like Mountains and Sea as a mode of abstract painting that moved beyond Pollock's textured, psychologically fraught canvases to compositions almost entirely based on color. On the basis of the soak-stain technique and the color wash, Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland went on to develop Color Field Painting. In such works, the entire space of the picture is conceived as a "field" that appears to spread beyond the edges of the canvas; figure and ground became one and the same, and three-dimensional illusionism is completely jettisoned.

In another major departure from first-generation Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler was an abstract artist for whom the natural landscape - rather than the existential confrontation with the canvas or search for the sublime - served as the major focus and inspiration. Her pared-down forms were often informed by her impressions of nature, be they the arid terrain of the American Southwest; a mulberry tree seen in upstate New York; or the Long Island Sound, viewed from the artist's home in Darien, Connecticut.

Frankenthaler applied her breakthrough soak-stain technique to other painterly media, most notably, watered-down acrylic, which she used in place of turpentine-thinned paint starting in the 1960s. Subsequently, she also sought to replicate the method's effects in printmaking, creating woodcuts that not only resembled paintings, but also achieved the misty, watercolor-like quality of her color washes.

Important Art by Helen Frankenthaler

Mountains and Sea

This canvas is the artist's landmark piece in which she first pioneered her soak-stain process. Despite its large size (7 x 10 feet), it is a work of quiet intimacy. Painted on the artist's return from Nova Scotia, Mountains and Sea retains the artist's impressions of the Cape Breton environs; as she famously described, the region's landscapes "were in my arms as I did it ... I was trying to get at something - I didn't know what until it was manifest." Here, color takes on a new, primary role, with washes of pink, blue, and green defining the hills, rocks, and water, the forms of which are sketchily outlined in charcoal. Following their encounter with Mountains and Sea and other works by Frankenthaler produced by means of the soak-stain technique, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland promptly embraced the method and, together with Frankenthaler, launched the "next big thing" in American art: Color Field Painting.

Oil on canvas - Collection Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. (on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Canyon

The topographical features of the landscape often served as inspiration for Frankenthaler's abstract imagery. With its brilliant red wash filling most of the canvas, Canyon reflects the change in Frankenthaler's artistic practice introduced several years earlier, when she began replacing turpentine-thinned oil with watered-down acrylic poured in larger stains and blots. The painting's gentle luminosity evokes the art critic Nigel Gosling's 1964 description of Frankenthaler's work, written in connection with the artist's London gallery exhibition of that year: "If any artist can give us aid and comfort, Helen Frankenthaler can with her great splashes of soft color on huge square canvases. They are big but not bold, abstract but not empty or clinical, free but orderly, lively but intensely relaxed and peaceful."

Acrylic on canvas - The Phillips Collection

Savage Breeze

Depicting an open space above a mountain-like divide, Savage Breeze was Frankenthaler's first foray into the medium of woodcut. Her concern in this work with achieving the same vibrant color and amorphous forms as her painting resulted in a major technical innovation for this art form. The artist cut a thin sheet of plywood into separately inked shapes and then, in collaboration with ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions), the Long Island studio that printed the work, devised a special method for eliminating the white lines between them when printing. The newly designed technique - hailed by one writer as "a departure so profound that virtually all subsequent woodcuts incorporated the thinking it embodied" - had a major impact on subsequent printmaking. Indeed, Savage Breeze is far removed from the graphic appearance of the traditional woodblock print, giving the appearance of painted, rather than carved, wood.

Woodcut

Desert Pass

With its minimally defined forms and earthy palette, Desert Pass is an excellent example of the ways Frankenthaler responded to the natural landscape. Inspired by a trip to the American Southwest, the painting captures the colors and forms as well as the climate of the region. Among them: yellow-gold, evoking sand as well as the desert's aridity and intense light and greenish-blue, suggesting the form and color of cacti.

Acrylic on canvas - Smithsonian American Art Museum

Essence Mulberry

An eight-color woodcut, Essence Mulberry consists of a large bluish gray area containing orange markings, framed by two broad stripes of rich red. The print's palette had sources in both art history - the faded colors of 15 th-century prints Frankenthaler encountered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - and nature: a mulberry tree located outside Kenneth Tyler's printmaking studio in New Bedford, New York. Using mulberry juice to capture the tree's rich red, the artist achieved the quality of painting - defying the graphic nature and helping expand the possibilities of the medium. Printed by Tyler Graphics, Essence Mulberry was the first of Frankenthaler's many collaborations with the master printer occurring over a roughly twenty-five year period.

Woodcut composition - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Madame Butterfly

Although the central white shape suggests a butterfly, this print evokes rather than depicts its subject, with a sense of delicacy appropriate for the Japanese heroine of Puccini's tragic opera of the same name. Frankenthaler's final collaboration with Tyler Graphics, Madame Butterfly is an incredibly complex work, involving 106 colors, 46 woodblocks, and measuring 6' in length. Both its subject and the manner in which the print was created, using traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e carving techniques, reflect the artist's sustained engagement with Asian art and culture. With its color washes, floating forms, and watercolor-like effect, Madame Butterfly is reminiscent of works like Mountains and Sea - a seeming realization of the soak-stain technique in the medium of woodcut.

Woodcut

Biography of Helen Frankenthaler

Childhood

Helen Frankenthaler was born and raised in a wealthy Manhattan family with her two older sisters. Her parents recognized and fostered her artistic talent from a young age, sending her to progressive, experimental schools. The family took many trips in the summertime, and it was during these trips that Frankenthaler developed her love of the landscape, sea, and sky. Her father was a judge on the New York State Supreme Court and died of cancer when she was eleven years old. The loss affected her deeply, sending Helen into a four-year period of unhappiness during which time she suffered from intense migraines.

Early Training

At fifteen, Frankenthaler was sent to the Dalton School in New York and began to study under the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. By the time she was sixteen, she decided to become an artist, enrolling in Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied under Paul Feeley, who was fundamental in arranging exhibitions of Abstract Expressionists.

Mature Period

In 1948, Frankenthaler moved back to New York. Two years later, she met the prominent art critic Clement Greenberg (19 years her senior) at an exhibition she organized for Bennington alumnae. They began a romantic relationship that would last for several years, in that time Greenberg introduced her to several leading Abstract Expressionists artists, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. Greenberg also prompted Frankenthaler to study under Hans Hofmann in 1950. 1952 was the breakthrough year for Frankenthaler; upon returning home from a trip to Nova Scotia, she created Mountains and Sea, a groundbreaking canvas where she pioneered her "soak-stain" technique. Working on a large canvas placed on the floor, Frankenthaler thinned her oil paints with turpentine and used window wipers, sponges, and charcoal outlines to manipulate the resulting pools of pigment.

The following year, Greenberg brought the painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to Frankenthaler's studio to see Mountains and Sea; their excitement over the work led to their experimentation with Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique and to the development, with Frankenthaler, of Color Field Painting. Louis would later declare that Frankenthaler's work was the "bridge from Pollock to what was possible". The achievement is also noteworthy given that Frankenthaler was just 24 years old at the time, while Pollock and de Kooning were in their 40s and 50s, and struggled many years before achieving recognition.

In the years that followed, Frankenthaler continued using the new method she had developed, drawing on her abiding love of landscape for inspiration. In 1957, she met fellow artist Robert Motherwell, another leading Abstract Expressionist painter, and the following year they began their thirteen-year marriage, marking a period of mutual influence in their artwork. Since Motherwell and Frankenthaler had both come from privilege, the two aroused jealousy among other, cash-poor Abstract Expressionist artists and were famously nicknamed "the golden couple."

In the 1960s, Frankenthaler began to use acrylic paint in place of oil. She achieved large washes of bright color in acrylic paintings like Canyon (1965), which reveal the possibilities of this new material. In 1964, her work was included in an exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Identifying this new strain of painting that emerged out of Abstract Expressionism, Greenberg titled the show Post-Painterly Abstraction - his preferred title for the style of painting developed by Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland, which is more generally referred to as Color Field Painting. Frankenthaler also began to show her work internationally, exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and at the United States Pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal. She simultaneously began to develop her proficiency in other artistic media; in particular, she embraced printmaking, creating woodcuts, aquatints, and lithographs that rivaled her painting in their inventiveness and beauty.

After her divorce from Motherwell in 1971, Frankenthaler traveled to the American Southwest. Two trips she made in the mid-1970s resulted in Desert Pass (1976) and several other works capturing the colors and tones of the Southwestern landscape.

Late Period

Frankenthaler continued making art during the 1980s and 1990s, up through the last years of her life. In addition to her work in painting and printmaking, she experimented with a variety of other media, including clay and steel sculpture, even designing the sets and costumes for England's Royal Ballet. Several years after being honored at the prominent gallery Knoedler & Company in New York with the exhibition Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades, Frankenthaler died in 2011 at her home in Darien, Connecticut.

The Legacy of Helen Frankenthaler

Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique gave rise to the Color Field movement, having a decisive impact on the work of the other artists associated with this style, such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. In addition its striking departure from first-generation Abstract Expressionism, Color Field art is often seen as an important precursor of 1960s Minimalism, with its spare, meditative quality.

The canvases of Frankenthaler and her fellow Color Field painters also resonated with the theories of the movement's biggest promoter, Clement Greenberg. Their lack of illusionistic space embodied what Greenberg articulated as modernist painting's logical end result: an increasing embrace of medium's intrinsic quality, which for him was the concept of 'flatness,' or the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. Eventually, the movement and Greenberg's ideas lost their popularity and succumbed to the stronger forces of Pop art and Minimalism.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Helen Frankenthaler

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

Similar Art

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Helen Frankenthaler was among the most influential artists of the mid-20 th century. Introduced early in her career to major artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline (and Robert Motherwell, whom she later married), Frankenthaler was influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting practices, but developed her own distinct approach to the style.

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Dadaism is a movement in art and literature based on deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values.(1916 - 1924)

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/duchamp-marcel/

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Summary of Marcel Duchamp

Few artists can boast of having changed the course of art history in the way that Marcel Duchamp did. By challenging the very notion of what is art, his first readymades sent shock waves across the art world that can still be felt today. Duchamp's ongoing preoccupation with the mechanisms of desire and human sexuality as well as his fondness for wordplay aligns his work with that of Surrealists, although he steadfastly refused to be affiliated with any specific artistic movement per se. In his insistence that art should be driven by ideas above all, Duchamp is generally considered to be the father of Conceptual art. His refusal to follow a conventional artistic path, matched only by a horror of repetition which accounts for the relatively small number of works Duchamp produced in the span of his short career, ultimately led to his withdrawal from the art world. In later years, Duchamp famously spent his time playing chess, even as he labored away in secret at his last enigmatic masterpiece, which was only unveiled after his death.

Accomplishments

Coined by Duchamp, the term "readymade" came to designate mass-produced everyday objects taken out of their usual context and promoted to the status of artworks by the mere choice of the artist. A performative act as much as a stylistic category, the readymade had far-reaching implications for what can legitimately be considered an object of art.

Duchamp rejected purely visual or what he dubbed "retinal pleasure," deeming it to be facile, in favor of more intellectual, concept-driven approaches to art-making and, for that matter, viewing. He remained committed, however, to the study of perspective and optics which underpins his experiments with kinetic devices, reflecting an ongoing concern with the representation of motion and machines common to Futurist and Surrealist artists at the time.

A taste for jokes, tongue-in-cheek wit and subversive humor, rife with sexual innuendoes, characterizes Duchamp's work and makes for much of its enjoyment. He fashioned puns out of everyday expressions which he conveyed through visual means. The linguistic dimension of his work in particular paved the way for Conceptual art.

Biography of Marcel Duchamp

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Few artists can boast of having changed the course of art history in the way that Marcel Duchamp did. By challenging the very notion of what is art, his first readymades sent shock waves across the art world that can still be felt today.

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/picabia-francis/

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"[Picabia's career is] a kaleidoscopic series of art experiences."

Summary of Francis Picabia

Once known as "Papa Dada," Francis Picabia was one of the principle figures of the Dada movement both in Paris and New York. A friend and associate of Marcel Duchamp, he became known for a rich variety of work ranging from strange, comic-erotic images of machine parts to text-based paintings that foreshadow aspects of Conceptual art. Even after Dada had been supplanted by other styles, the French painter and writer went on to explore a diverse and almost incoherent mix of styles. He shifted easily between abstraction and figuration at a time when artists clung steadfastly to one approach, and his gleeful disregard for the conventions of modern art encouraged some remarkable innovations even later in his career, from the layered Transparency series of the 1920s to the kitsch, erotic nudes of the early 1940s. Picabia remains revered by contemporary painters as one of the century's most intriguing and inscrutable artists.

Accomplishments

In the 1910s, Picabia shared the interests of a number of artists who emerged in the wake of Cubism, and who were inspired less by the movement's preoccupation with problems of representation than by the way the style could evoke qualities of the modern, urban, and mechanistic world. Initially, these interests informed his abstract painting, but his attraction to machines would also shape his early Dada work, in particular his Mechanomorphs - images of invented machines and machine parts that were intended as parodies of portraiture. For Picabia, humans were nothing but machines, ruled not by their rational minds, but by a range of compulsive hungers.

Picabia was central to the Dada movement when it began to emerge in Paris in the early 1920s, and his work quickly abandoned many of the technical concerns that had animated his previous work. He began to use text in his pictures and collages and to create more explicitly scandalous images attacking conventional notions of morality, religion, and law. While the work was animated by the Dada movement's rage against the European culture that had led to the carnage of World War I, Picabia's attacks often have the sprightly, coarse comedy of the court jester. They reflect an artist with no respect for any conventions, not even art, since art was just another facet of the wider culture he rejected.

Figurative imagery was central to Picabia's work from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s, when he was inspired by Spanish subjects, Romanesque and Renaissance sources, images of monsters, and, later, nudes found in soft porn magazines. Initially he united many of these disparate motifs in the Transparency pictures, complexly layering them and piling them on top of each other to provoke confusion and strange associations. Some critics have described the Transparencies as occult visions, or Surrealist dream images, and although Picabia rejected any association with the Surrealists, he steadfastly refused to explain their content. Picabia always handled these motifs with the same playful and anarchic spirit that had animated his Dada work.

Picabia learned early on that abstraction could be used to evoke not only qualities of machines, but also to evoke mystery and eroticism. This ensured that abstract painting would be one of the mainstays of his career. He returned to it even in his last years, during which he attributed his inspiration to the obscure recesses of his mind, as he had always done.

Important Art by Francis Picabia

Portrait de Mistinguett

The style of this portrait, with its simplified forms and flat color, blends aspects of Symbolism and Fauvism and is typical of Picabia's maturing style as he began to try his hand at different approaches. Painted at a time when he was slowly building a conventional, successful career as an Impressionist, it might be taken as a sign of Picabia's frequent later habit of striking out in new and surprising directions. The model for the picture, Mistinguett, was a successful actress and singer, and was one of Picabia's first famous friends from the entertainment industry (she was at one time the lover of Maurice Chevalier). Independently wealthy, Picabia enjoyed the life of the bon viveur and was often drawn to music halls, nightclubs, circuses, and the cinema. He met Mistinguett during one of his visits to the Parisian revues. Instead of painting a realistic portrayal of her, he was much more interested in revealing the mood of the time by using dramatic color and composition.

Oil on canvas - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Collection

Dances at the Spring (La Danse a la Source)

Picabia met Marcel Duchamp around 1911, and Dances at the Spring, which echoes Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), points to the important impact this meeting would have on him. It is considered one of the best examples of Picabia's abstract art, expressing his inner experience through geometric forms. Picabia with particularly interested in representing motion on canvas, celebrating dancing on the surface. He sought to represent the balance between the figurative and abstract, the static and dynamic. Using vivid colors and fragmented angular planes, he painted the motion and the excitement of a peasant dance while he was on his honeymoon in the countryside of Italy. Two versions of the picture were painted, but one is lost; this version was exhibited at the important Armory Show in New York in 1913.

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Très rare tableau sur la terre (Very Rare Picture on the Earth)

After World War I broke out, Picabia became fascinated with the idea of industrial objects as a pictorial source. He once wrote that "the machine has become more than a mere adjunct of life. It is really a part of human life...perhaps the very soul...I have enlisted the machinery of the modern world, and introduced it into my studio." His goal, he said, was to invent a "mechanical symbolism," and this piece is one of his most important examples, since critics have read it as an image of a sexual act rendered in mechanical terms. Although, at first glance, it might be hard to read so, Picabia may well have been inspired by his friend Marcel Duchamp to bury sexual references in images of machines. This work is also significant in that it is Picabia's first known collage (hence, as the title suggests, "very rare") since it contains two mounted wooden forms, and the frame is integral to the piece.

It stands to remember that Picabia loved machines, an in particular cars. He is said to have had a collection of over 100 automobiles. So here he is depicting the insides of his passion. Although he may be making fun of mankind, he may also, in true modernist fashion, be connecting technology and progress to human lives.

Oil and metallic paint on board, and silver and gold leaf on wood, including artist's painted frame - Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

Ici, C'est Stieglitz (Here, This is Stieglitz)

Artist: Francis Picabia

At first Picabia worked closely with Alfred Stieglitz, who gave him his first one-man show in New York City. But later he criticized Stieglitz, as is evident in this "portrait" of the gallerist as a bellows camera, an automobile gear shift, a brake lever, and the word "IDEAL" above the camera in Gothic lettering. The fact that the camera is broken and the gear shift is in neutral has been thought to symbolize Stieglitz as worn out, while the contrasting decorative Gothic wording refers to the outdated art of the past. The drawing is one of a series of mechanistic portraits and imagery created by Picabia that, ironically, do not celebrate modernity or progress, but, like similar mechanistic works by Duchamp, show that such subject matter could provide an alternative to traditional artistic symbolism. In 1918, Picabia would make a portrait of his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. These kind of objectified portraits would be utilized by artists for years to come, one example out of the many that exist is the American modernist Arthur Dove and his Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry (1924).

Ink, graphite, and cut-and-pasted painted and printed papers on paperboard - Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Parade Amoureuse (Love Parade)

Picabia's mechanomorphic pictures suggest analogies between machines and the human form. To contemporary viewers they were scandalous in their rejection of the idea of the human soul and their emphasis instead on instincts and compulsions - both often erotic. In this work, Picabia blended male and female; the upper part in red might be considered female and the lower part in blue, male. The viewer can imagine the sound of hammering and the idea of a "sonorous sculpture," or a musical instrument. Of course, the most famous example of the male and female mechanized forms going through their motions and yet forever separated is Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-1923) - on of the most important artworks in all of modern art.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Adam et Eve (Adam and Eve)

This enigmatic painting is part of Picabia's Transparency series, whose dream-like quality derives from layers of imagery that faintly suggest strange narratives. Though the title of this painting is Adam and Eve, it was inspired by Orestes and Electra, a classical Greek sculpture in the Museum of Naples, which portrays Electra and her brother considering revenge on their mother and stepfather for the murder of their father, Agamemnon. Classical subjects such as this were popular in the interwar period, yet most artists attempted to give new life to Classicism by adapting it to modern times. Picabia refuses this temptation, instead leaving the statue enigmatically layered with a smiling face and leaving us with a mystery. This clash of imagery from apparently different sources would be a major inspiration for later artists such as Sigmar Polke.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Deux femmes nues au bulldog (Women and Bulldog)

Picabia always had a fascination with popular imagery, often employing it as a means to undermine the grave seriousness and formal concerns of modern art. In this painting, part of a notorious series of realistic and erotic nudes that he painted in the early 1940s, he used pin-ups from 1930s "nudie" magazines. Though many believe they were painted for money (they were sold through an agent in Algiers), his close friends have maintained that Picabia always painted what he wanted and that they cannot be dismissed as anomalies in his career. Curators after the war often did put them aside in favor of celebrating Picabia's Dada years, yet since the 1980s these pictures have been an important influence on artists ranging from David Salle to John Currin, who have been fascinated by their early embrace of kitsch.

Oil on cardboard - Collection Centre Pompidou

Biography of Francis Picabia

Childhood

Francis Picabia was born in 1879 in Paris, the only child of a Cuban-born Spaniard, Francisco Vicente Martinez Picabia, and a Frenchwoman, Marie Cecile Davanne. Both his parents came from prominent European families, and Picabia was raised in an affluent household. Throughout his life, the family fortune allowed him to study, travel, and enjoy a luxury lifestyle. However, at the age of seven, his mother passed away of tuberculosis, and the following year his grandmother died. These losses ensured that Picabia's childhood would be a lonely one, and he was left in the care of his father, the chancellor to the Cuban Embassy, his uncle, Maurice Davanne, a curator of the Bibliotheque Sainte Geneviève, and his maternal grandfather, Alphonse Davanne, a wealthy businessman. Their house was known as the house of quatre sans femmes (four without women).

His uncle was an art lover and collector, who facilitated young Picabia's interests by surrounding him with works by classical French painters such as Fèlix Ziem and Ferdinand Roybert. His grandfather, a devoted amateur photographer, taught Picabia about photography, and Picabia would later use a camera to aid his work.

Early Training

In 1895, Picabia started attending the prestigious École des Arts Decoratifs, where recent alumni included Vincent van Gogh and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. He studied under Fernand Cormon, Ferdinand Humbert, and Albert Charles Wallet for two years. He then worked at Cormon's studio with his classmates Georges Braque and Marie Laurencin for the next four years. During this time, he produced mostly watercolors and exhibited only once at the Salon des Artistes Francais. He quickly left painting traditional watercolors and transitioned towards Impressionism, influenced by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. He believed that "paintings should not represent nature, but the emotional experience of the artist," and that Impressionism was a tool to represent his ideals.

Picabia held his first solo show in 1905 at the Galerie Hausmann in Paris. The show exhibited 61 landscape paintings and received substantial acclaim. After the show, he became widely popular in the art scene, showing solo in Paris, London, and Berlin. However, in 1909, he abandoned the style that brought him initial success and moved towards more avant-garde styles, including Fauvism. This caused a break with his representation at the Galerie Hausmann. In the same year, he married Gabrielle Buffet, a musician, who brought music into his life. Through her, he saw the possible link between art and music. She also encouraged his interest in more avant-garde styles.

From 1909 to 1913, Picabia once again struggled to find the style best suited to express his developing concerns for the emotional and the intellectual, as well as the inner experience and the outer form. He jumped from one style to another, experimenting with Fauvism, Cubism, and abstract art. The attention from the art world that used to surround him decreased dramatically during his exploration. Despite his unstable prospects as an artist, Picabia and Gabrielle started a family, having their first child in 1910 and a second the following year. Picabia and Gabrielle joined the Sociètè Normande de Peinture Moderne, which met to foster and promote the theory of correspondance and the interdisciplinary relationship between all arts. It held annual exhibitions and other events, creating opportunities to network and socialize with other artists. In 1911, Picabia met Marcel Duchamp, beginning a long friendship that played a major role in both their lives and careers. Picabia also befriended the famous American writer Gertrude Stein who was supporting and spending time with modern artist in Paris. Stein tellingly said of him "that although he has in a sense not a painter's gift he has an idea that has been and will be of immense value to all time."

Mature Period

By 1912, Picabia shifted to the more radical style of Cubism, painting from his memories and experiences rather than drawing inspiration from nature. Showing at the seminal 1913 Armory Show in New York, he presented Danses à la source I (1912), Souvenir de Grimaldi (1912), La Procession Seville (1912), and Paris (1912). His works received mixed reviews, with some journalists dismissing his "color harmonies" as "a hoax." Despite the criticism in America, he overstayed his two-week visit and acquainted himself with Alfred Stieglitz and his Gallery 291.

When World War I broke out, Picabia left France to seek refuge first in Barcelona, then in New York, and later in the Caribbean. The war pushed him to find yet another style that would represent the era of industrialization. He showed the first of his machine paintings, his mechanomorphs, in 1916 at the Modern Gallery in New York. His relationship with his wife began to fall apart when he met Germaine Everling in 1917. His mental and physical health deteriorated into depression.

During his recuperation, Picabia shifted his focus from painting to writing. He published his poems in 1917 under the title Cinquante-deux miroirs (52 Mirrors) and began publishing a review, titled 391 after Stieglitz's 291 Gallery. 391 became Picabia's outlet for Dadaist writings and visual representation of its ideals, although he also contributed to other Dadaist publications, like André Breton's Litterature and the Dada revue, and published three volumes of poetry, Poèmes et dessins de la fille neé sans mère (1918), L'athlète des pompes funèbres (1918), and Rateliers platoniques (1918). In 1919, Picabia and Buffet officially separated. By this time, his machinist style paintings were already well known through the avant-garde publications. In 1920, Dada reached its peak and the visions of Dadaist "events", exhibitions, books, articles, and magazines became more defined.

After years of promoting itself as a movement of anti-art, Picabia felt Dada had become just another system of established ideas. In 1921, he attacked other Dadaists in a special issue of 391, Phihaou-Thibaou. After the break from Dada, he focused on exhibiting his paintings again. And in 1922, he had a show at Salon d'Automne of his machinist paintings alongside more figurative pictures inspired by Spanish themes. After leaving his colleagues of the past ten years, and in the search of new life with his new common-law wife, he left Paris for the south of France in 1925 and stayed on the Cote d'Azur for twenty years. Germaine and Picabia settled into a home in Cannes and hired a governess for their son, Lorenzo. Picabia fell in love with the governess, Olga Mohler, and left Germaine soon after. They officially split in 1933.

Late Period

In 1928, Picabia presented his Transparency paintings at the Galerie Theophile Briant. Film critic Gaston Ravel called them "sur-impressionism" as the paintings were said to have the neo-romantic look of superimposed film images. The Transparency series received warm acclaims from his peers, especially Duchamp. His then art dealer, Leonce Rosenberg, described it as "the association of the visible and the invisible... It is this notion of time added to that of space which precisely constitutes the doctrine of your art. Beyond the instantaneity towards the infinite, such is your ideal."

While living in Cannes he was quite the celebrity with the locals, receiving frequent visits from his famous friends, Jacques Douchet, Marthe Chenal, Pierre de Massot, and Marcel Duchamp. Picabia also enjoyed his wealth during this time, taking pleasure in throwing lavish parties, gambling, and collecting luxury cars and yachts.

When World War II started in 1939, the devastation reached Picabia and his lifestyle became quite modest. For the first time in his life, his primary source of income was from the sale of his paintings. In 1940, Picabia and Olga Mohler married. As it did whenever a major event occurred in his life, his painting style transformed once again. Many say that his paintings from the 1940s were purely for commercial value. He painted popular imagery from "girlie" magazines of movie stars and romanticized couples in a realistic style.

After the war, Picabia with briefly arrested by the French authorities for allegations that he was friendly with the Vichy (French Nazi) government during the war. He was release and never convicted but his reputation suffered, and Picabia never returned to France after 1945. There were various statements made by Picabia during the war that could be considered fascist, but as Picabia was ever the joking and anti-establishment personality, it is his hard to properly ascertain his position at that time.

At the end of his long career, Picabia once again changed directions, painting in abstract forms. He continued to exhibit his work in prominent Parisian galleries and published his writings until 1951, when he suffered from arteriosclerosis and could no longer paint. Prior to his death in 1953, he referenced Nietzsche writing "Where art ends, where life begins, I am the poet of my life".

The Legacy of Francis Picabia

Picabia did much to define Dada in Paris and New York, and his reputation as one of the movement's father figures has stayed with him. But it is perhaps the spirit that the movement encouraged in him - his anarchic spirit and his disrespect for conventional abstract modern art - that has yielded his greatest legacy. It is this spirit that shaped the Transparency series of the 1920s and the erotic nudes of the 1940s, both of which have proved hugely influential - the former on artists such as David Salle and Sigmar Polke, the latter on figures such as John Currin. When many artists thought abstract and figurative art should be separated, Picabia seemed to combine them. When others felt that the nude should remain a noble subject, he debased it. Picabia seems to have had a light-hearted and often cynical attitude to art-making, and while this put him at odds with many of his more serious peers, it is this attitude that seems so resonant to contemporary artists who not only have less faith in art's ability to change the world, but also have an attitude to museums and galleries that sways between the tolerant and the skeptical.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Francis Picabia

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

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"[Picabia's career is] a kaleidoscopic series of art experiences." Once known as "Papa Dada," Francis Picabia was one of the principle figures of the Dada movement both in Paris and New York. A friend and associate of Marcel Duchamp, he became known for a rich variety of work ranging from strange, comic-erotic images of machine parts to text-based paintings that foreshadow aspects of Conceptual art.

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Valuing freedom, spontaneity and personal expression, the movement naturally produced a variety of technical and aesthetic innovations. In general, however, Abstract Expressionism can be clustered around two major tendencies: action painting and color field painting

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Some characteristics of Dadaism's most profound characteristics include humor, whimsy, artistic freedom, emotional reaction, irrationalism, and spontaneity. Invaluable created a fun, educational infographic that details some of the elements of Dada literature, and it includes writing prompts to help master each.

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So for this first drawing i have chosen to use futurism as my movement, i know that its a pretty rough sketch but i swear the final product will be three times better. I choose for this first one to do a ferrari dino, since it resembles an older era for ferrari, the start of a new buisness which later on would become one of the famous brands ever. For this three pieces of art it is going to be kind of different angles as if they were racing or about to, now for the background it is like distorted for every drawing.

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So for this second drawing i will also use futurism as my main movement. Now this is like an old but present era so like mid 1900 to 2000s, this is a ferrari f40 one of the most recognized cars from all over the world, it represents the advancements into more modern cars from this unique car manufacturer and i have chosen to do it for my past since it is such a unique icon in the car industry, now yet again it has a distorted background about to start a race, and it uses the movement to distort the whole image using pretty similar colors all arround.

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For this third drawing i have chosen a more futuristic ferrari one that resembles the sf90, the future of cars, this can be compared to the older ferraris which can also mean the advancements financially and economically for ferrari. It is the end of an era but the start of a new one. Now this ferrari is the third in the lineup before the race it also carries a distorted background which represents the futuristic movement.