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Mont Sainte-VictoirebyCézanne






Cé zanne introduced a radical innovation in works such as his Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-1904): The edge of the mountain opens up to allow areas of sky to penetrate the otherwise solid mountain. With this simple device, Cé zanne decisively changed the course of art history. Two physical entities—earth and sky—believed to be distinct and separable were now made interchangeable. The world as it is seen and experienced, Cé zanne seemed to say, is not as important as the laws of picture making. After Cé zanne's example, the world of reality and the world of art began to drift apart.

IV   MODERN ART’S FIRST DECADES

Cultural historians have related the fragmentation of form in late-19th- and early-20th-century art to the fragmentation of society at the time. The increasing technological aspirations of the industrial revolution widened the rift between the middle and the working classes. Women demanded the vote and equal rights. And the view of the mind presented by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, stipulated that the human psyche, far from being unified, was fraught with emotional conflicts and contradictions. The discovery of X rays, physicist Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, and other technological innovations suggested that our visual experience no longer corresponded with science's view of the world.

Not surprisingly, various forms of artistic creativity reflected these tensions and developments. In literature, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf experimented with narrative structure, grammar, syntax, and spelling. In dance, Sergei Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, and Loie Fuller experimented with unconventional choreography and costume. And in music, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky composed pieces that did not depend on traditional tonal structure.

Music not only took its place among the most experimental of the arts, but it also became a great inspiration for visual artists. Many art critics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were influenced by German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, who had proclaimed that music was the most powerful of all the arts because it managed to suggest emotions directly, not by copying the world. Many painters of the late-19th-century symbolist movement, including Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, tried to emulate music’s power of direct suggestion. By including abstract forms and depicting an imaginary, rather than an observable, reality in their paintings, Redon and the symbolists paved the way for abstract art.

A   Fauvism

The idea that art could approximate music is reflected in Henri Matisse's Red Room (Harmony in Red) (1909), a painting whose subtitle is borrowed from musical terminology. From Gauguin, Matisse borrowed large areas of unvaried color, simplified shapes, and heavy contour lines. The simplicity of Matisse’s drawing style relates to Gauguin's fascination with the art of non-Western cultures. Matisse also employed the abstract designs of carpets and textiles, reinforcing the flatness of the painting rather than attempting to create the illusion of depth. His interest in these designs demonstrates the influence of forms of creativity not often associated with fine art.

Although Red Room was intended as a pleasing image of middle-class domesticity, Matisse’s manner of depiction was considered highly revolutionary, especially in the way he assigned intense colors to objects arbitrarily and not according to their appearance in nature. A scandalized contemporary critic declared Matisse and his fellow artists—André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Braque (of France), and Kees van Dongen (of the Netherlands)—to be fauves (French for “wild beasts”). This derogatory term became the name of their movement. Fauvism lasted only from about 1898 to 1908, but it had an enduring impact on 20th-century art.

 

Red Room (Harmony in Red)

Red Room (Harmony in Red) was painted by the French artist Henri Matisse in 1908 and 1909, toward the end of his Fauvist period. The use of intense and unnatural color may have been influenced by the work of artists such as Gauguin and van Gogh. In this piece Matisse chose to use simplified, flat shapes, and he altered the perspective to achieve a childlike quality. The painting is in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

B   Cubism

Pablo Picasso, a friend and rival of Matisse, also invented a new style of painting, focusing mainly on line rather than color. Picasso's art changed radically around 1907, when he decided to incorporate some stylistic elements of African sculpture into his paintings. Unlike Matisse's pleasant image of a middle-class interior, Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) does violence to the human form by means of radical simplifications, arbitrary and harsh color combinations, and extreme distortions of human anatomy and proportions. The painting’s space, moreover, does not conform to the logic of perspective, the traditional system for portraying depth in a picture, and is so fragmented that it is difficult to read clearly.

The violence inherent in Picasso’s Demoiselles, however, gave way by about 1912 to his more meditative paintings, such as Ma Jolie (1912, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). In this and other examples of analytical cubism, the subject, usually a portrait or still life, is fragmented into a series of intersecting and interpenetrating geometric planes. Cé zanne’s influence can be felt in this fragmentation, as can Picasso’s love of ambiguity and merging of opposites. Solid and void, figure and environment, background and foreground interpenetrate in defiance of both the logic of traditional painting and the logic of everyday experience. Ma Jolie is painted in muted tones of gray and brown; this lack of color also is characteristic of analytical cubism, as is the incorporation of lettering. The words MA JOLIE (French for “my pretty one”) appear at the bottom of the painting, referring to a popular song of the time and reinforcing the link between modern art and popular culture.

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