Expression, Fantasy, and Abstraction...... + more

Three Main Currents

The art historian H.W. Janson sees three main currents in art, beginning near the start of the century,Three Main Currents

The art historian H.W. Janson sees three main currents in art, beginning near the start of the century, Expression, Fantasy, and Abstraction.

Expression deals with feelings, and the concern with the human community. These artists stress their emotional attitude towards the world. Imagination and fantasy explore the the labyrinth of the mind, and Abstraction stresses order and the formal structure of the work.

The best works have all three:
  Without feeling we are unmoved.
  Without imagination, we are bored.
  Without order, we see chaos

In each of these, works have been made ranging from realistic to non-representational (non-objective). In this unit we are going to examine non-representational abstraction; in particular, geometric abstraction.

What is Geometric Abstraction

Starting around the turn of the century there was a complete rejection of literary academic art - artists didn't want to just make a copy of a real object - the newly-invented camera could do that faster and better. They didn't want to make an an illustration for a story. They rejected Alberti's istoria or history painting in which part of the painting's power came from the story it illustrated. The phrase storybook realism became a term of derision

The idea now was that one doesn't paint about anything - one just paints.

The old visions were worn out. Artists wanted to create something that did not exist before, to see the world in new ways, to talk about their inner world, to grapple with large ideas that were universal and utopian.

Abstract art is an attempt to analyze and simplify what we see, to pick and choose. But a work can be abstract, like Brancusi's Kiss, and still be representational, while the Mondrian shown at the start of this unit is completely non-representational.

Let's try to trace the steps that took us from the impressionist landscapes of the late 19th century to total geometric abstractions of the twentieth.

Art isn't created in a vacuum. It usually reflects what is going on elsewhere in a culture.

One thing that was happening at the start of our century was a scientific revolution.

It appears that at the start of the our century science and art once more were ready for new concepts of space and time.

 Some new space concepts came in geometry with the Non-Euclidean Geometries of Bolyai, Lobachevski, and Riemann in the mid ninteenth century. New time concepts came with Einstein's theories, the special theory of relativity, 1905 and the general theory of relativity, 1915.

Influence of photography

About 1883, American inventor George Eastman produced a film consisting of a long paper strip coated with a sensitive emulsion. In 1889 Eastman produced the first transparent, flexible film support, in the form of ribbons of cellulose nitrate. The invention of roll film marked the end of the early photographic era and the beginning of a period during which thousands of amateur photographers became interested in the new process.

In the early 20th century, commercial photography grew rapidly, and improvements in black-and-white photography opened the field to individuals lacking the time and skill to master the earlier, more complicated processes. The first commercial color-film materials, coated glass plates called Autochromes Lumière -- after the process developed by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière -- became available in 1907. During this period, color photographs were produced with the three-exposure camera.

This prompted a move away from representation and realism and towards abstraction. If you can capture a scene with the snap of the shutter then why sit there for hours copying it in paint.

Muybridge, Eadweard (1830-1904), English-American photographer and motion picture pioneer, known for his photographs of animals and people in motion. In 1877 he demonstrated through photographs that when a horse runs, there is a moment when all of the animal's feet are off the ground, and that the feet are tucked beneath the animal at that moment. In 1881 he invented the zoopraxiscope, a device by which he reproduced on a screen horse races, the flights of birds, and athletic contests. He wrote The Horse in Motion (1878) and Animal Locomotion (11 vol., including 100,000 photographic plates, 1887). Portions of the latter work were published under the titles Animals in Motion andThe Human Figure in Motion (1901).

Through Pictures such as these people became used to seeing figures or parts of figures at the same time

Expression deals with feelings, and the concern with the human community. These artists stress their emotional attitude towards the world. Imagination and fantasy explore  the labyrinth of the mind, and Abstraction stresses order and the formal structure of the work.

The best works have all three:
  Without feeling we are unmoved.
  Without imagination, we are bored.
  Without order, we see chaos

In each of these, works have been made ranging from realistic to non-representational (non-objective). In this unit we are going to examine non-representational abstraction; in particular, geometric abstraction.

 Marcel  Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912

Some works that show a time element include those by the Italian Futurists, who sought means of expression compatible with the modern industrial world, and Nude Descending a Staircase, nicknamed "Explosion in a Shingle Factory." In the Armory Show in 1913, it needed to be protected by guards.

The Fourth Dimension

There seemed to be a lot of fascination with the fourth dimension early in this century, but it meant different things to different people:

• Time is often considered the fourth dimension in the space-time continuum with three space dimensions and one time dimension.
• Color has been described as a dimension.
• For some artists the fourth dimension appears to have been a metaphor for liberation from the conventions of linear perspective.
• To some philosophers it was a physical reality to which we have limited access.
• To many mathematicians, the fourth dimension simply means an abstract space  described in terms of four mutually perpendicular axes.

Hypercube

OT 5: Hypercube, Manning p. 240

One four-dimensional object is the hypercube, shown here in an illustration from a textbook on geometries of higher dimensions. It shows how a hypercube can be folded from 8 cubes, just as a regular cube can be folded from 6 squares.

OT 6: Salvador Dali: Corpus Hypercubicus, 1955

Here the artist Salvador Dali has used an unfolded hypercube as a cross.