by Jeanne Willette | May 13, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
AMERICAN MODERNISM The Significance of Alfred Stieglitz American Modernism dates approximately from the first half of the Twentieth Century. For the sake of convenience and to take note of a key figure, it is possible to roughly date this period in relation to the...
by Jeanne Willette | May 6, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE ART AND REVOLUTION 1896 – 1930 The story of Russian Avant-Garde art is the story of the journey by rail from Moscow to Paris and back again. Art flowed from Paris to Moscow and artists traveled from Moscow to Paris. From 1896 there were...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 29, 2011 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Podcasts, Contemporary Culture, Podcast, Postmodern
New Voices in Painting Although the sixties is usually thought of as the decade of Civil Rights, the final expression of equality was the Women’s Movement of the seventies. The art world, which had attempted to ignore the prevailing political events was suddenly...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 29, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
The Search for the Absolute: The Architecture of De Stijl Beyond the paintings of Piet Mondrian, the other manifestation of De Stijl that has imprinted the memory of the art world is its distinctive architecture. Indeed, it was architecture that caused the most...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 22, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
PIET MONDRIAN (1872-1944) Although Mondrian’s painting and his artistic convictions evolved in France, his art is most closely identified with the Dutch movement, “De Stijl.” Mondrian spent most of his life in Paris where he lived and worked and developed his...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 15, 2011 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Podcasts, Contemporary Culture, Podcast, Postmodern
Painting in the Seventies The 1970s presided over the widely publicized “end of painting.” What the phrase really means is the Modernist painting came to an end. One one hand, the object itself disappeared, swallowed up into Conceptual Art. On the other...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 15, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
DE STIJL 1917-1931 Between 1914 and 1918 it became clear to any thinking person that an old world had died in an agonizing spasm and that a new world was desperately needed to take the place of a graveyard of discredited ideals. De Stijl or “The Style”...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 8, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
FUTURISM AS THE AVANT-GARDE Futurism was the first movement to aim directly and deliberately at a mass audience, principally an urban audience. In its concern with equating art with life, Futurism aimed at no less than transforming the political mentality of...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 1, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
FUTURISM AND THE MACHINE Futurism was an Italian art movement, mostly centered in the larger Italian cities, principally in the northern city of Milan, the most industrialized city in Italy at that time. “Announced” as a phenomenon and as a state of mind...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 1, 2011 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Podcasts, Contemporary Culture, Podcast, Postmodern
Andy Warhol and “Decorative Art” Andy Warhol played many roles in the art world of the sixties. Although he produced more films than paintings and sculptures, he re-defined “painting” and “sculpture,” bringing these traditional...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 25, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
THE SPIRITUALISM OF DER BLAUE REITER PAINTING General Characteristics From 1911 it could be said that European avant-garde art was divided between two needs: the need for individual subjective expressiveness and a striving for order in a time of pending chaos. ...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 18, 2011 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Podcasts, Contemporary Culture, Podcast, Postmodern
Pop Art and Popular Culture Pop Art was essentially an American phenomenon that included European responses to the imagery of the post-war consumer culture pioneered in New York ad agencies. Like Neo-Dada, Pop Art exposed the limits of Modernism and the prevailing...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 18, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
THE EXPRESSIONISM OF DER BLAUE REITER Brief History Located in a small village just outside of Munich, Munchen, the southern German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter, was broader in scope and more sophisticated than Die Brücke. Der Blaue Reiter was a more...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 11, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
THE AGNST OF DIE BRUCKE Context of Expressionism According to Seth Taylor in his book, Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism, 1910-1920, the term “expressionism” originated in France “in order to differentiate Matisse…from the Impressionists,”...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 4, 2011 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Podcasts, Contemporary Culture, Podcast, Postmodern
Neo-Dada and anti-Moderism It is one of the ironies of art history that at the very moment Abstract Expressionism began to gain traction in the art world, that a major challenger would emerge to steal the spotlight. Neo-Dada, somewhat indebted to Marcel Duchamp, was a...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 4, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
German Expressionism Before the Great War Compared to French Expressionism, German Expressionism was more involved with the relationships between art and society, politics and popular culture. While the Fauves were able to work somewhat independently from the state,...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 25, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
ORPHISM: ART AS MUSIC Art and Time The last great body of art that reflected the pomp and circumstance of measureless and atemporal time was the nostalgic view of Paris created by the photographer of Old Paris, Eugène Atget. Paris lies before his camera, silently...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 18, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Clement Greenberg and Modernist Aesthetics Clement Greenberg was a rare character in history: the right person in the right place at the right time, writing the right things to the right people. A New York intellectual and art critic, Greenberg was uniquely positioned...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 18, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
COLLAGES, CONSTRUCTIONS, AND COLOR Synthetic Cubism eliminated mimetic representation in favor of using direct materials directly. The parts of a Cubist collage are large and visible, distinct and separate. The design is stressed nakedly and subject matter is...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 11, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
ANALYTIC CUBISM One could ask the question, when did “Cubism” begin? Some art historians consider a single painting of 1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as the beginning. But that would be assuming that Picasso was the most important Cubist artist. The problem...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 4, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
THE CUBISTS AND THEIR CIRCLE Today Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) are considered to be the “True Cubists,” to borrow a phrase from art historian, Edward Fry. But at the time Cubism was famous or infamous with the Parisian public,...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 28, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
CUBISM AND ITS CONTEXT Perhaps more than any other major art movement of the first half of the Twentieth Century, Cubism is both transitional and Janus-faced in its response to the decades of changes of the Nineteenth Century. On one hand, the Cubist artists shared...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 28, 2011 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Modernism in New York City Why and How did the impetus for Modernist painting move from Paris to New York? This podcast traces the historical and artistic reasons that resulted in New York becoming the center of avant-garde painting the Fifties. The presence of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 21, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
The Question of “Primitivism” and the Fauves Today, “primitivism” is considered a derogatory term, connoting the Twentieth Century Western attitude towards the presumed “inferiority” of non-Western art. “Primitivism” refers to the abiding belief that non-Western...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 14, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Art Between the Wars Although art history usually passes over this inter-war period quickly, pausing only for Dada and Surrealism, these decades were significant for the continued development of painting. After decades of avant-garde art, Europeans began to...
