by Jeanne Willette | Jun 16, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) The Photomontage Poster Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), formally a painter, retired from painting in 1921 and became a designer of posters that became iconic of the brief period of favoritism and freedom. A patriot, loyal to this new...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 9, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Russian Avant-Garde and Agit-Prop Posters Out of “Art” and into the Revolution In 1917, the Russian Empire, assaulted from within and without, finally crumbled under its own anachronistic weight, bending under the burden of the unheard demands of a...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 2, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
French Artists at the World’s Fair The Last of Cubism, Part Three For Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the opportunity to decorate two buildings, one dedicated to airplanes and the other featuring trains, was too good to refuse. Both artists had long been painting...
by Jeanne Willette | May 26, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
French Artists at the World’s Fair The Last of Cubism, Part Two Although the 1925 exposition, the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, introduced a style for modern design, later known as “art deco,” was enormously...
by Jeanne Willette | May 19, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
French Artists at the World’s Fair The Last of Cubism, Part One In 1929, the French Chamber of Deputies, fresh off their success with the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts of 1925 decided to repeat the fair in a decade. However,...
by Jeanne Willette | May 12, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Delaunays and Modern Life Paris Between the Wars, In 1889, the year that France celebrated the centenary of the Revolution, is best known for the shock of the new tower rising from the Champs de Mars, the Eiffel Tower, but that year was also the year that the...
by Jeanne Willette | May 5, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Cubism After Cubism Part Two: Orphism Between the Wars At 4:35 a.m on a chill and cloudy day in July, on the 25th day of the year 1909, a daring French aviator Louis Blériot (1872-1936), took off in an airplane of his own making, rising above Calais on the coast and...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 28, 2017 | Other
Cubism After Cubism Part One: Theories of Pre-War Orphism Before the Great War, there were camps occupying various terrains within the art movement called “Cubism.” The name, as is well-known, was a bon mot coming either from Henri Matisse or Louis...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 21, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Cubism After Cubism Paris Coming to Order, Part Two There was a second life for Cubism after the Great War. This lingering phase, a further development of an important art style was carried on by the so-called “Salon Cubistes,” who, although they had been away at...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 14, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Cubism After Cubism Paris Coming to Order, Part One What happened to Cubism? Before the Great War broke out, the movement seemed to be dominant, even hegemonic in Paris, but after the War was over, Cubism was history. In other words, the Great War nothing would ever...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 7, 2017 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Weissenhof Experiment in Stuttgart Neues Bauen in 1927 The Nazis, newly in power and early simmering with racist hatred for all things un-German, didn’t know what to make of the shining white city on the hill. So utterly alien to the fascists was the...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 31, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Master’s Houses Walter Gropius, Junkerswerke, and Modern Architecture Today the architecture of Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and his series of Bauhaus designed domestic dwellings for the Masters, the “Meisterhäuser,” at the art school are considered jewels in the...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 24, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Portraiture Reborn George Grosz as “Hanswurst” Even thought Dada dissolved in Berlin and the Dada perpetrators went their separate ways, one of the former members, George Grosz (1893-1959) never lost his disgust for Germany and for the German people. His...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 17, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
PORTRAITURE REBORN The Likeness as Blank Parody Portraiture had its greatest days in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries–think of Thomas Gainsborough’s proud aristocrats and of Thomas Romney’s posed nobility–consider the...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 10, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
THE CONSTRUCTION OF INFORMATION The PhotoEssay in the Weimar Republic In 1919 Austrian artist Raoul Haussmann (1886-1971) found an image in the Berlin Illustrated News (Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung), a seemingly innocuous photographic portrait of the defense minister...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 3, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
AFTER THE GREAT WAR John Heartfield: The Social Critic One might ask, if there was a Third Reich, when were the first two Reichs and where does the Weimar Republic fit in? It’s an interesting question because in answering it, one comes to realize that the...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 24, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
AFTER THE GREAT WAR Otto Dix and the Broken Soldiers To understand the Treaty of Versailles, everyone should read Magaret MacMillian’s Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. If reading a very long book on a treaty written one hundred years ago does not...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 17, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
AFTER THE GREAT WAR Artists in Germany: George Grosz and John Heartfield in Dada Georg Groß was so horrified at the idea of doing his patriotic duty for the Kaiser and country that he went quite mad. The idea of descending into the hellish landscape of what would be...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 10, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
GERMAN ARTISTS AT WAR The Good Soldier, Part Two A battlefield is not an artist’s natural habitat. Fighting in combat is not an artist’s métier. But Franz Marc (1880-1916) wrote very militant and martial tracts for the Blue Rider Almanac. In 1912 he said...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 3, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
GERMAN ARTISTS AT WAR Part One The Art of Lying In 1928 Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, wrote on a newly significant topic–Propaganda. Bernays was well acquainted with his uncle’s theories of human psychology and injected tools of...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 27, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
British Propaganda and Women The Psychology of Posters Warfare, especially modern war, has had a strange impact upon men. It is assumed that war and combat is the ultimate event of masculinization, completing the identity of the male. Traditionally, the equation of...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 20, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
British Propaganda The Psychology of Posters When the Great War began in August of 1914, Great Britain was at a distinct disadvantage. Although it was expected that Germany would be aggressive at some point, this was not a war the English wanted. The British Isles...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 13, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Dada Émigrés in Exile The Disintegration of Kultur, Part Two Today the city is called Leuven but one hundred years ago, the university town was called “Louvain,” and it was the site of an atrocity, a war crime against property, against culture, against...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 6, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Dada Émigrés in Exile The Disintegration of Kultur, Part One On the one hundredth centenary of Dada, the gesture and the non-movement, distance and time has allowed for a new examination of what is are a conglomeration of confusing and contradictory groups of...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 30, 2016 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp in New York The Americanization of Dada, Part One In an interview with Pierre Cabanne, decades after the Great War, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) explained how he became an artist and how it was that he came to be exempted from military...
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