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the Impressionists (after…no painter): *
After 1886 the Impressionist movement split & a succession of movements & styles emerged: Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Social Realism & Surrealism to name a few
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Impressionism: Monet was the founder of this school, the most consistent & prolific practitioner of its philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting
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Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875
painted en plein air & quickly, probably in a few hours, capturing a moment of a stroll on a windy summer's day. Monet's light, spontaneous brushwork creates splashes of colour. Mrs Monet's veil is blown by the wind, as is her billowing white dress; the waving grass of the meadow is echoed by the green of her parasol. She is seen from below, with a strong upward perspective, against fluffy white clouds in an azure sky. Their son is placed further away, concealed behind a rise, visible only from the waist up, creating a sense of depth. This is a genre painting of an everyday family scene, not a formal portrait
Post-Impressionism: a French movement, 1886-1905, active from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism; a reaction against Impressionism & their concern for the naturalistic depiction of light & colour; led by Cézanne, who (like the Impressionists) rejected traditional, historical & academic forms & conventions but who emphasised more subjective personal visions, abstract qualities & symbolic content; included Van Gogh (1853-90) Gauguin (1848-1903) & Seurat (1859-91), owing to its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content it has much in common with later modern work.
The Card Players, 5 oil paintings by Cézanne, 1894-95
depicts Provençal peasants immersed in their pipes & playing cards eyes cast downward, intent on the game; models for the paintings were local farmhands, some who worked on the Cézanne family estate; adapted from 17th-century Dutch & French genre paintings which usually illustrated heightened moments of drama, with drink & money prominently displayed; here however we see a quiet scene with a lack of drama sans the conventional characterization
Expressionism: emerged from Post-Impressionism from 1905; characterized by the presentation of art solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas; it expresses the meaning of emotional experience rather than a replication of optical or physical reality; originally 3 distinct groups:
Die Brucke (Bridge) group 1905-13 Dresden
group of German expressionist artists active 1905-13; included F. Bleyl (1880-1966), K. Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976), E. Kirchner (1880-1938) & E. Heckel (1883-1970); inspired by the Fauves they had interests in primitivist art & the expression of extreme emotion with high-keyed colours (usually non-naturalistic); their drawing technique was crude; they avoided total abstraction. However Die Brücke artists were more extreme than the Fauves, with emotionally agitated paintings of city streets and sexually charged events transpiring in country settings; large impact on modern art
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IMAGE LEFT Under the Trees, Max Pechstein (1881-1955), 1911, oil on canvas,
Fauvism (Wild Beasts) 1905-1907 Paris
French art movement, "the wild beasts", 1904-1910, 3 Paris exhibitions; their work emphasized painterly qualities & strong colours above the representational or realistic values which had been retained by Impressionism; it was characterized by wild brush work and strident colours while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction; led by André Derain (1880-1954) & Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
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IMAGE LEFT Woman with a Hat, 1905. Matisse oil painting
Der Blaue Reiter group (Blue Rider) 1911-14 Munich
organization of artists (chiefly Russian emigrants) in Germany; neither a movement or a school with a definite program, rather a loosely knit group of artists who organized shows between 1911 & 1914; prominent members were W. Kandinsky, G. Münter & F. Marc (1880-1916); all had a common interest in free experimentation & spiritual expression which took the form of lyrical abstraction
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IMAGE LEFT The Large Blue Horses, Marc, 1911
vividly coloured blue horses look down on a landscape of rolling red hills, characterized by bright primary colours; the powerful simplified & rounded outlines of the 3 horses is echoed in the landscape, uniting to create a vigorous & harmonious organic whole; the curved lines emphasize a sense of harmony, peace & balance; the artist gave an emotional meaning to the colours, blue represented masculinity & spirituality; Marc was a founding member of the group.
Cubism: Europe, 1908-1914, avant-garde art movement, revolutionized European painting & sculpture, while inspiring related movements in music, literature & architecture; the artist analyzed objects which are broken up & reassembled in an abstracted form; instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context; invented by Braque & Picasso, both influenced by the grid-like landscapes of Cezanne & in Picasso's case by African imagery.
IMAGE LEFT Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), oil on canvas, Picasso, 1910,
Surrealism: Europe, 1924 onwards; influenced by several disparate sources, notably Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), Freud & Jung & the art movements Cubism & Dada; it aimed to fuse the unconscious (the human mind where memories and instincts are stored) with the conscious, creating a new "super-reality"; last art movement associated with the Ecole de Paris, from where it spread across Europe, to become the most influential school of avant-garde art
IMAGE LEFT The Persistence of Memory,1931, Salvador Dalí (1904-89)
Spanish surrealist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsman ship, and the striking & bizarre images in his work; the artist uses the exactitude of realist painting techniques to depict imagery more likely to be found in dreams than in waking consciousness; it introduces the image of the soft melting pocket watch which reflects Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness", central to his thinking at the time; a human figure is portrayed in the middle of the composition, this “figure” Dalí used in several contemporary pieces to represent himself & reappeared frequently in his work; it was based on a figure from the Paradise section of Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, which Dalí had studied;the orange clock at the bottom left of the painting is covered in ants (for Dalí a symbol of decay); fly sits on the watch next to the orange watch, it appears to be casting a human shadow as the sun hits it; the craggy rocks on the right represent a tip of Cap de Creus peninsula NE Catalonia & in the foreground the strange & foreboding shadow is a reference to Mount Pani.
New Objectivity aka Magic Realism, 1925-40, German, influenced by Surrealism, part of the “Return to Order” trend which occurred in post-war Europe of the 1920s; their paintings were executed in a realistic style in contrast to the Expressionists & reflect the post-war mood of resignation & cynicism in Germany; a 1925 exhibition in Hartlaub displayed the works of the members of this group to include George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann.
IMAGE LEFT The War, a monumental 4 panel triptych, Otto Dix,1929-32
explored the theme of the WW I; left panel- troops setting off at daybreak; central panel-the battlefield as a place of death; right panel- soldiers returning from the hell of battle and predella -fallen soldiers resting in peace in a dugout; Dix (1891-1969) was the pre-eminent German war artist who produced art reflecting the horror of the conflict, in oil and drawings; his work is anti-war & rejected the idea of a heroic war
IMAGE LEFT Eclipse of the Sun, Grosz, 1926, oil on canvas
George Grosz (1893 –1959) was a German artist famous for his satire & caricature of Berlin life in the 1920s; a Communist & harsh critic of Weimar he was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada & New Objectivity groups during the 1920s.
This painting is showing an eclipse (the dollar sign) which darkens the sun, a symbol of life, the artwork critiques the greed and violence of Germany’s military, politicians & industrialists; the instability of Weimar is reflected in the tilted perspective, dissonant colour & ambiguous sense of space; mindless bureaucrats in a grim setting surround the decorated general Paul von Hindenburg, president of the Weimar Republic; an industrialist carrying weapons whispers in Hindenburg’s ear; a donkey representing the German people stands near a bloody sword and listens with big ears, yet wears blinders of ignorance; confined and stepped on, the fearful face of a youth juxtaposed with a skeleton warns of the fate of future generations.
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Wagner (after…no musician): *
19th century German Romanticism was a great period for Western music with such notable composers as Brahms (1833-97) Liszt (1811-86), Mendelssohn (1809-47), Schumann (1810-56) & perhaps the greatest, Wagner (1813-83). He introduced new ideas in harmony, the leitmotif & operatic structure. With Tristan and Parsifal he explored the limits of the traditional tonal system, pointing towards atonality. His impact was immense. Bruckner, César Franck, R Strauss, Mahler were heavily influenced. The music of Debussy & Schoenberg contain examples of tonal & atonal sounds.
Tristan chord
specifically refers to the opening phrase of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, part of the leitmotif relating to Tristan. In general, it can be any chord that consists of these same intervals: augmented fourth, augmented sixth, and augmented ninth above a bass note
ATONALITY
Music without a tonal key (e.g. A#) is atonal; such music does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies characterizing European music from the 17th century; it is a salient feature of Modernism. This revolution was led by Schoenberg & the Second Viennese School. Their music reflects the late 19th century "crisis of tonality" arising due to the increasing use of ambiguous chords, improbable harmonic inflections, unusual melodic & rhythmic inflections. The first atonal works involved a conscious attempt to avoid traditional diatonic harmony. The leader of the Second Viennese School (often referred to as Expressionists) was Schoenberg. He was one of the last Romantics & his early works (e.g. Verklärte Nacht) are clearly influenced by Wagner. However early in the new century he abandoned the traditional keys & began experimenting with atonality. His first explicitly atonal piece was composed in 1908. He wrote a series of atonal pieces over the next 5 years (e.g. Pierrot Lunaire in1912).
Der Dandy (The dandy) from Pierrot lunaire (Pierrot in the Moonlight), 1912, Schoenberg
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a melodrama, 21 selected poems from Giraud's cycle of the same name; for flute, clarinet, violin, cello & piano with standard doublings and in this case with the addition of a vocalist; premiered in Berlin 1912; the music is atonal, but does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.
12 TONE TECHNIQUE
A second salient feature of Modernism is the 12 tone composition technique. After WW I there were further attempts to abandon tonality. Again it was Schonberg who famously developed his 12-tone technique (1923). This became the main avenue of composing for the Second Viennese School. Examples of music of the post-war include A. Berg's operas Wozzeck (1924), Lulu (1937) and Lyric Suite, Schoenberg's Piano Concerto (1942), his oratorio Die Jakobsleiter (1917-22) & his last 2 string quartets (1942, 1946). Atonality was condemned by the Nazis in the 1930s who banned it after 1933.
The Lyric Suite, Berg, 6 movement work for string quartet 1925-26
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composed using Schoenberg's 12 tone technique, Berg arranged 3 of the movements for string orchestra in 1928; it was dedicated to Alexander von Zemlinsky (from whose Lyric Symphony it quotes).
SERIALISM
A technique used since WW I, a serial pattern repeats over & over for a significant stretch of a composition; Schoenberg devised the serial ordering of musical tones but other elements of music were also serialized, such as pitch (the actual tones sounded), rhythm, dynamics (volume levels) & attack (how notes are struck & released).
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Anton Webern (1883-1945), Austrian composer and conductor; taught by Schoenberg & Berg, he was a core member of the Second Viennese School. In 1924 Schoenberg formulated the 12-tone method of composition. Webern adopted this system that same year, employing the serial technique thereafter for all further compositions and developing it with severe consistency to its most extreme potential. An exponent of atonality & the twelve-tone technique he exerted influence on contemporaries & younger musicians, to include serial composers such as Messiaen & Pierre Boulez. His music was among the most radical of its milieu, in its concision & rigorous and resolute apprehension of twelve-tone technique. His innovations in schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and melodic contour.
The Symphony, Op. 21, 2 short movements 1928 Webern
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a work of severe economy & restrained expression; it has a symmetrical structure & pointillistic texture, scored for clarinet, bass clarinet, two horns, harp, first and second violins, viola, and cello; like his other 12-tone works, it is based on a single series dominated by semitones; remarkable symmetry, in several forms, from the work's palindromic series to the canonic variations that work in both directions, from the exact centre of the piece outwards.