Major
MODERN ART from 1870 to 1920
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1870
Impressionism
People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love. ” - Claude Monet
Impression: Sunrise
by Claude Monet, 1872
On 28 April, politician and art critic Jules Antoine Castagnary...in the newspaper Le Siècle: ‘They are impressionists in the sense that what they depict is not the landscape itself but the effect or sensation that the landscape produces on us. The word itself has passed into their lexicon: it is not landscape that is used to describe Monet’s Impression, sunrise in the catalogue, but impression. In this way, they leave reality behind and enter into pure idealism’. - Jane Kinsman
1880
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Neo-Impressionism
SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE ISLAND OF LA GRAND JATTE
by Georges Seurat, 1886
In the Grande Jatte, [Seurat] addressed himself directly to certain issues and obliquely or subliminally to others. The painting is evidently about the Sunday visitors to the island and also implicitly about the make-up, or chemistry, of that temporary population. It was surely intended as a picture with a point of view, an argument. To convey this, Seurat seems to have made use of imageries and codes that already existed in late nineteenth-century Paris for an artist to deploy or develop, for the spectator to comprehend, spurn, or misconstrue. - Richard Thompson
“Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.� - Georges Seurat
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1890
Post-Impressionism
AT THE MOULIN ROUGE
by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892
Throughout his short but exceptional career, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was seized by what he characterized as furias - brief but intense periods of fascination with certian subjects, performers, or locales. In the grip of a furia, Lautrec would compulsively document the object of his obsession until he was either satisfied or lost interest. - Mary Weaver Chapin
“Everywhere and always ugliness has its beautiful aspects; it is thrilling to discover them where nobody else has noticed them.� - Toulouse Lautrec
“I have the gift of neither the spoken nor the written word, especially if I have to say something about myself or my work. Whoever wants to know something about me -as an artist, the only notable thing- ought to look carefully at my pictures and try and see in them what I am and what I want to do.” - Gustav Klimt
1900
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Art Nouveau
The Kiss
by Gustav Klimt, 1907-1908
The scene is both wonderfully enchanting and somehow sinister, and while there is something open and carefree about it, it seems also clandestine, our viewing almost voyeuristic. This is very much the result of the ambiguity in the subject matter of the painting, for it is unclear even what exactly the viewer is witnessing. On one level the description seems simple: a man and a woman, kneeling, embrace. But is it an act of extreme intimacy and tenderness, or of violence and victimization, a moment of pleasure or pain? The woman’s tilted head, closed eyes, and arching hands suggest a sort of ecstasy, but perhaps equally repulsion. Does she hold her left arm folded close to her body, her hand resting on the man’s, to draw him closer to her, or to protect herself, poised to pull his hand away from her face? And do his large hands express coercion and force, or do they deny their apparent strength in an act of gentleness? The expression on the woman’s face, as well as the position of the two bodies, also enhances this ambiguity. - Bas C. van Fraassen and Jill Sigman
1910
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German Expressionism: Die Brücke
THE BRIDE OF THE WIND (THE TEMPEST) by Oskar Kokoschka, 1914 (Kokoschka) met Alma Mahler, widowed after the death of Gustav Mahler, in 1912, and first asked her to marry him within 24 hours of their initial meeting. Though Alma Mahler refused to marry him, they engaged in a passionate affair, inspiring some of Kokoschka’s best-known works. Critics almost immediately associated her with the high point of Kokoschka’s career; no one believed this more fully than Kokoschka’s himself. -Bonnie Roos
True dreams and visions should be as visible to the artist as the phenomena of the objective world. - Oskar Kokoschka
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1920
Cubism
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. - Pablo Picasso
Three Musicians by Pablo Picasso, 1921
A composition of three figures in the rigorous technique of synthetic Cubism was a feat Picasso had not attempted before. The flat coloured shapes, simple and rectilinear in form, are arranged so that everywhere their significance is legible. - Roland Penrose
Art Work Curated by Virginia Anne Ruckert Layout Design by Virginia Anne Ruckert © 2019