by Jeanne Willette | Oct 16, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
There is no question that the most famous of the Berlin photo-montages today, made by Hannah Höch (1889-1978), is Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany. A photomontage, which is unusually large for a collage and...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 11, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
When collage was revived, under a new name after the Great War, the mood among the artists was decidedly different. The Great War had been, for artists, a time of disillusionment and despair. For some of these artists, especially the German-speaking ones, the conduct...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 4, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
From the final layout of the design for Schröder House, it is possible to deduce the philosophy of Truss Schröder on how a child could be prepared for adulthood. The mother and her two sons had their own rooms and the two daughters shared a room. Each room had a sink...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 27, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Mondrian returned to Paris in 1919 to continue his search for purity and abstraction, but the other Dutch artists stayed behind in Holland to pursue what was becoming a new and unique style in architecture that developed independently of the Bauhaus and of Le...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 20, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
It has been said that it is always darkest before the dawn, and so it was with Frank Lloyd Wright, for it was in the year 1911 that Europeans came calling. The Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1836-1934) visited the Chicago area and visited buildings by...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 13, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Today those who live on the American coasts think of the Midwest as “Flyover Country,” but it was here in the very middle of the map in a suburb just outside of Chicago that an architect, early in his career, revolutionized domestic architecture. The name of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 6, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
In his excellent book, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, Michael White explained the struggle Mondrian went through during the War years. “What we think of as the first properly Neo-plastic painting were not made until after Mondrian returned to Paris in 1919. The war...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 30, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Trapped in Holland, Piet Mondrian joined an artist’s colony in Laren where he joined forces with painter Bart van der Leck and the leader of the De Stijl movement, Theo van Doesburg. Van Doesburg was an old friend who had praised Mondrian’s 1915 almost abstract work,...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 23, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
During the Great War, Holland, a territory also called “The Netherlands,” was neural. Like Belgium, its neutrality was historic. but a principled or pragmatic stance on the part of a small weak nation was actually in the hands of the stronger nations that would use...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 16, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Like many artists of the Parisian avant-garde, Delaunay was disrupted by the sudden eruption of hostilities that totally changed the art world. Delaunay decided to not serve in the military and went to a neutral nation, Spain. For four years, he and Sonia...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 9, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
There is nothing like the passage of time to cover rebellion with the warm patina of capitalism. Cubism, once unacceptable to the conventional art audience, Cubism glowed with the baptism of “history.” Due to its intellectualism and because of the tireless efforts of...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 2, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The pre-war discourse on Cubism had been written by artists, such as Gleizes and Metzinger, and by art critics, like Guillaume Apollinaire, and this pre-war body of work was developed from the perspective of those “present at the creation.” The seeds of the linking of...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 26, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
During the disruptive years of the Great War, Picasso and Matisse continued their work, enjoying an uninterrupted stretch of creative development. Both Picasso and Matisse moved beyond Cubism and Fauvism, running ahead of the artists who were away at war. When the War...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 19, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Great War had shaken French society and had upended its culture. The wartime losses for the nation had been staggering and the psychological blow of the German advance as far as the Marne was searing. Women had left their god-given domestic places to work in...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 12, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Until 1914, the words “cubism” and “avant-garde” seemed to be synonymous, but there were definite differences among the Cubist artists themselves. In the pre-war era, the Salon Cubists responded in a relatively cautious fashion to the examples of Paul Cézanne, while...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 5, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
By the 1920s, a new character emerged in America, specifically in New York, in the uptown neighborhood of Harlem. The “New Negro” made his and her debut. These New Negroes as the term went were often members of the “talented tenth,” or the highly gifted and...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 28, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
After the Great War, the young men, just coming of age, turned away from the fashions of their fathers and fashioned themselves in their own image. The idea was to look young and fit and glamorous like a male movie star from Hollywood. It is at this point that the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 21, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The term “Ivy League” in reference to sports wasn’t coined until 1933 by a sportswriter Stanley Woodward, who said, “A proportion of our eastern ivy colleges are meeting little fellows another Saturday before plunging into the strife and the turmoil.” Woodward had...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 14, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Who was the New Man who emerged after the Great War? He was young, untouched by fear, unwounded by trauma; he cast a wary eye towards authority and he disdained the mores and styles of his elders. And, it must be said, he invented his style, apparently putting himself...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 7, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
After the Great War, the returning soldiers and that generation that had lived through and understood the war encountered what was termed “a crisis in masculinity.” This crisis was the result of a War that weakened the dominance of the male, and war-weary men were...
by Jeanne Willette | May 31, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Coco Chanel, like her customers, invented herself, remade herself on her own terms and used striking fashion designs to bring about this transformation. A chic outfit can disguise many character flaws and one of the remarkable aspects of Chanel was what she had to...
by Jeanne Willette | May 24, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
It was in the 1920s that Coco Chanel perfected her distinctive line for her timeless and simple clothes for women—long and lean, like Paul Poiret’s silhouettes to be sure, but her outlines were scrupulously hard-edged, offset with ropes of peals and studded with...
by Jeanne Willette | May 17, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
How does Fashion become modern, take that step away from the past and stride confidently into the future? As theorist and philosopher, Roland Barthes noted, fashion changes when events shift so decisively in the present that there is no going back to the past. The...
by Jeanne Willette | May 10, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
“My time was ready for me, waiting, all I had to do was come on the scene,” said Coco Chanel. As her biographer, Linda Simon pointed out in 1913, changes in women’s fashions had progressed from the avant-garde world of the Wiener Werkstätte and its artists and...
by Jeanne Willette | May 3, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
In 1919, the French poet and intellectual, Paul Valery, wrote two letters in which he contemplated the end of the Great War. In his website, The History Guide, Steven Kreis noted that these famous letters were actually of English origin: “The Crisis of the...
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