Chapter 28 Art between the Wars

28.1 The Entombment of the Birds and Butterflies

Jean Arp
Also known as the Head of Tzara
1916-1917
Painted wood relief
The different shapes were determined by doodling on paper
Had carpenters cut these shapes out of wood, which he painted
and assembled into abstract compositions evoking plant and animal forms as well
as clouds, cosmic gases, and celestial bodies
Then he titled the pieces

28.2 Fountain
1917
Marcel Duchamp.
The scandalous work was a porcelain urinal
signed "R.Mutt" the company that manufactured the urinal
Submitted for the exhibition of the Society of
Independent Artists in 1917,
Fountain was rejected by the committee, even
though the rules stated that all works would be
accepted from artists who paid the fee.
Fountain was displayed and photographed at
Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published
in The Blind Man, but the original has been lost.
The work is regarded by some art historians and
theorists of the avant-garde, such as Peter Brger,
as a major landmark in 20th-century art.
Replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s are now on display in a number
of different museums.

28.3 Mechanical Head
The most famous work by Hausmann, Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist Unserer
Zeit
(The Spirit of Our Time)
c. 1920
is the only surviving assemblage that Hausmann produced
around 191920.
(found objects) Constructed from a hairdresser's wig-making dummy, the piece
has various measuring devices attached including a ruler, a pocket watch
mechanism, a typewriter, some camera segments and a crocodile wallet
28.4 Cut with the kitchen knife dad though the last Weimer beer belly cultural epoch
of Germany
Hannah Hoch
Ca. 1919
Collage
Currently in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Speaks about the agenda of Berlin Dada
Using a chaotic, cramped composition of crowds, words, machinery, and
lettering of differing sizes and styles
Hoch captures the hectic social, political and
economical intensity of the Weimer Republic
Her photomontage represents the reality captured by
photographers for the popular press
To Hoch and her dada colleagues, the camera was
another machine, related to the technological
advances and a propagandistic tool that had led to the
war
with her kitchen knife she rearranges the imagery to
create a handmade photograph thus forcing the
machine to be the subject to the human rather then
vise versa
the result is a spinning gearlike composition with a
portrait of the radical antiwar female artist kathe Kollwitz at the center

28.5 1 Copper Sheet 1 Zinc Sheet 1 Rubber Cloth
a collage with gouache, ink, and pencil
Max Ernst
1920
Collage
Currently in the Estate of Hans Arp
Made on an illustration from a 1914 book about chemistry
equipment
With a line here and a dab of paint there, Ernst transformed the
picture of laboratory utensils into bizarre robotic figures set in
a stark symbolic- filled landscape
A dreamscape
Skewed De Chirico like perspective that culminates in a mystifying square, give
this collage an elemental power, suggesting some other worldly sphere- one of the
imagination
The dreamlike quality of ernsts image endows his figures with heavy
psychological overtones
Fascinated by freud
28.6 Champs delicieux
Man Ray
1922
Rayograph gelatin silver paint
Means delightful fields
Contains the silhouettes of a brush and comb, a sewing,
pin,a coil of paper, and a string of fabric
Helps demonstrate the close relationship between the
random and defiant art of Dada and the evocative, often
sensual art of surrealism
The obejcts appears ghostlike and mysterious in a strange
environment where darks and lights have been reversed
and where a haunting overall darkness prevails
Shapes and lines more in and out of the dark shadows
Magical blend of the real and nonreal

28.7 Composition
Joan miro
1933
Oil on canvas
One of a series based on collages of on cardboard made from images cut out of
product catalogues, with the idea that the shape and even details of the objects
would fire his imagination
The setting of composition is a hazy atmospheric environmental of washes,
suggesting a kind of primeval landscape
This eerie dream world is populated by strange
curvilinear floating forms that suggest prehistoric and
microscopic creatures

28.8 The persistence of memory
is a 1931 painting
by artist Salvador Dal
one of his most recognizable works.
First shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, the painting has been in the
collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City since 1934
which received it from an anonymous donor.
It is widely recognized and frequently referenced
in popular culture
The craggy rocks to the right represent a tip
of Cap de Creus peninsula in north-
eastern Catalonia. Many of Dal's paintings were
inspired by the landscapes of his life in Catalonia.
The strange and foreboding shadow in the
foreground of this painting is a reference to
Mount Pani.
[8]

The well-known surrealist piece introduced the
image of the soft melting pocket watch
It epitomizes Dal's theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his
thinking at the time.

28.9 Object (Luncheon in fur)
1936
sculpture
by the surrealist Mret Oppenheim,
consisting of a fur-covered teacup, saucer and spoon.
The work, which originated in a conversation in a Paris
cafe, is the most frequently-cited example of sculpture
in the surrealist movement.
It is also noteworthy as a work with challenging themes of femininity.

28.10 Lobster Trap and fish tail
a mobile
by American artist Alexander Calder
is located at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,
New York, United States
It is one of Calder's earliest hanging mobiles and "the first to
reveal the basic characteristics of the genre that launched his
enormous international reputation and popularity
The sculpture was commissioned by the Advisory Committee for the stairwell of
the museum when the new building opened in 1939
Fabricated in Roxbury, Connecticut, the painted steel wire and sheet aluminum
sculpture
8' 6" (260 cm) x 9' 6" (290 cm) in diameter
The sculpture suggests the movement of underwater life

28.11 Recumbent
Henry Moore
1938
Green Hornton stone
This is one of the earliest works in which
Moore shows the female figure
undulating like the landscape
It was commissioned by the architect
Serge Chermayeff to stand on the terrace
of his home on the Downs
Visually, the figure would have acted as
a bridge between the rolling hills and the
ultra-modern house
Moore, like others, used many native British stones at this time. This Hornton
stone came from a quarry near Banbury in Oxfordshire.
28.12 Project for Momument to the third international
Vladmir Tatlin
Tatlins Tower, or the project for the Monument to the Third
International
191920
was a design for a grand monumental building by the Russian
artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, that was never built
It was planned to be built in Petrograd after the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917, as the headquarters and monument of the
Comintern (the third international).
Wood, iron, and glass

28.13 composition no II
Piet Mondrian
Oil on canvas
One of the most minimal of Mondrian's canvases, this painting consists only of
two black, perpendicular lines and a small triangular form, colored blue.
The lines extend all the way to the edges of the canvas, almost giving the
impression that the painting is a fragment of a larger work.
Although one is hampered by the glass protecting the painting, and by the toll that
age and handling have obviously taken on the canvas, a close examination of this
painting begins to reveal something of the artist's method
Mondrian's paintings are not composed of perfectly flat planes of color, as one
might expect
Brush strokes are evident throughout,
although they are subtle, and the artist
appears to have used different
techniques for the various elements.
The black lines are the flattest elements,
with the least amount of depth
The colored forms have the most
obvious brush strokes, all running in one
direction. Most interesting, however, are
the white forms, which clearly have been
painted in layers, using brush strokes
running in different directions.
This generates a greater sense of depth
in the white forms, as though they are
overwhelming the lines and the colors,
which indeed they were, as Mondrian's paintings of this period came to be
increasingly dominated by white space.

28.14 Schroder House
Gerrit Rietveld
Utrecht, Hlland
1924
Built onto end of existing row houses
Floating rectangles and lines on faade
Cantilevered roof
Wall to ceiling sliding panels allowing for a restructuring of the interior space
28.15 Furniture for a living room in one of two houses designed by walter Gropius for
the werkbund housing development
Marcel breur
o Balhaus student
o Faculty member 1925
o Headed furniture workshop
Am weissenhof, Stuttgart, Germany
1927
Furniture and lighting
o Geomectric
o Modern materials
o Easily mass produced
o Wassily armchair
Polished, nickelplated tubular
steel
Cotton fabric
28.16 Shop Block
Main building
o 3 l shaped wings coming off a central hub
Shop block
Workshop wing
Walter Gropius
The Bauhaus
1925-26
Dessau, Germany
Looks like an empty glass box
o Glass curtain wall on two sides
continued around sides and flush
with the parapet above and the
socle below
Setback halfbasement
Bauhaus
o Weimar, Germany
o 1919
o Walter Gropius
o School
o Goal: design modern high quality production line products
o More utopian, less commercial
o Means house of building
o Wanted a mixture of art and technology
o Design ethic: the living environment of machines and vehicles
o only primary forms and colours
o standard types for all practical commodities of everyday use as a social
necessity
28.17 Villa Savoye
Le Corbusier
o Swiss
o Five points of a new architecture
1. No ground floor, house raised on pilotis
2. Flat roof that doubles as a garden terrace
3. Open floor plan with partitions slotted between supports
4. Free composition of the exterior curtain walls
5. Ribbon windows
1928-9
Poissy sur seine, france
Main floor has an open space plan facing into court from which a ramp leads up
to the roof
Perfect box
Cylindrical windscreens protect the terrace
28.18 The Voice of the City, New York Interpreted
Joseph Stella
o Italian immigrant
o
1920-2
Oil and tempera on canvas
5 panels
8 feet high
Centre panel
o Abstraction of cities towers
o Famous flatiron building in foreground
o Surrounded by real and fictituos buildings
Panels 2 and 4
o Great white way
o Broadway
o Bbastraction of colour and light
far left panel
o harbour on the Hudson river on the west side of lower mnhattan
right panel
o Brooklyn ridge on the east side
Pallete is deeply saturated
Colour is encased in heavy blackline drawing
Looks like a stained glass window
28.19 Wire Wheel
Paul strand
1917
Platinum print from enlarged negative
High contrast, sharp focus
Model t ford wheel
Rejects painterlyness of picgtorial
photography
28.20 Fort Peck Dam
Margaret bourke white
Montana
From life magazine
o Cover of firt issue
1936
Cropped to look like it continues forever
28.21 Black Iris III
Georgia OKeefe
o 1916 small minimalist watercolours
o 1920 close up of flowers
She was in love with paul strand
Compositional device forced viewer to see flowers light she did
o Characterised as oversexual
Did a series of skyscraper paintings to show she can paint like a
man
Flowers morphed into vaginas
1926
Oil on canvas
28.22 American Gothic
Grant Wood
o From cedar rapids, iowa
1930
Oil on board
Window into Midwest world
Fictitious father and spinster daughter
Carpenter gothic house
God-frearing subjects
Harsh lines
No modernity
Woman looks away warily
28.23 The Migration of the Negro Seires, number
58: in the north the negro had better educational
facilities
Jacob Lawrence
1940-1
Casein tempera on hardboard
New negro movement
o Aka harlem renaissance
o Alain locke
o black is beautiful
Migration series
o 60 images
3 girls write on a blackboard
No faces no individuals
Suggests elevtion through education
Brighty coloured dresses = happiness
Jagged hair impart energy
28.24 The Arsenal (Distributing Arms)
Diego Rivera
o Lived in Europe and was a
cubist
o Communist
o 125 frescoes for secreetria de
educacion publica in mexico
city
Top floor of the court of fiestas
Other artists are visible within the
piece
Left foreground soviet soldier with
rifle
Background- red banner with soviet
hammer and sickle
~1928
Fresco
Murals were proclaimed the true art of the people
o Especially popular in US
28.25 Early Sunday Morning
Edward Hopper
o Based in new york
1930
Oil on canvas
Uncannily quiet and empty
Each window depicts a different story
Harsh morning light seems theatrical
28.26 Migrant Mother
Dorothea Lange
California
1936
Gelatin silver print
Social realism
o Focused on poverty, labour
oppression, suffering of workers,
alienation, racism
Government put artists to work
o Works project admin
Photo went with news story
Lange exaggerated stories
28.27 Guernica
Pablo Picasso
1937
Oil on canvas
April 26 1937
o Hitler used saturation bombing to attacfk basque, gurernica
Black, grey, white
No airplanes or boms
Mother and dead child
Woman with lamp =
statue of liberty
Not antifacist