Modernism, the Avant-garde and the Early 20th Century
Modernism, the Avant-garde and the Early 20th Century tests your ability to tell movements apart by their premises rather than their look: what each group thought art should do, and which convention it attacked.
Before 1914
- Art Nouveau and Modernisme: organic line and total design (Gaudí); Vienna Secession (1897).
- Fauvism (1905): colour freed from description, as in Matisse.
- Cubism: analytic phase (1909-11, faceted monochrome, multiple viewpoints), then synthetic phase (from 1912, collage, papier collé, stencilled letters).
- Expressionism: Die Brücke (1905), Der Blaue Reiter (1911), Kandinsky's move toward abstraction.
- Futurism: Marinetti's manifesto (1909, Le Figaro), speed, simultaneity, and a politics that belongs to the content.
War and after
- Dada (Zurich, 1916): anti-art, chance, photomontage; Duchamp's readymades, Fountain (1917).
- Surrealism (Breton's manifesto, 1924): automatism versus veristic dream imagery (Dalí, Magritte, Ernst).
- Constructivism, De Stijl and the Bauhaus (1919-1933): art as design for life.
The Aragonese thread
Luis Buñuel, born in Calanda (Teruel) in 1900, made Un chien andalou (1929) with Dalí, the manifesto of Surrealist cinema built on dream logic and shock. Ramón Acín (Huesca, 1888-1936) carried avant-garde ideas into Aragonese painting, sculpture and education.
Worked example
A question presents a work with pasted newspaper, a stencilled word and overlapping flat planes. Do not answer Cubism and stop. Identify the phase from evidence: legible fragments, collage and flat colour indicate synthetic Cubism (1912-14), whereas broken, monochrome, all-over faceting around 1909-11 is analytic. Then add context: collage borrows from mass print culture, so the work comments on art's relation to mechanical reproduction.
Traps
- Equating avant-garde with abstraction; Dada and Surrealism are largely figurative or object-based.
- Confusing Dalí's paranoiac-critical method, which is deliberate and systematic, with automatism.
- Dating Dada only to Paris; it begins in Zurich in 1916.
- Treating Futurism as a style only, when its politics are part of the content.