The European Modern Art in the Period of WWI Essay Example for Free

The European Modern Art in the Period of WWI EssayThe early 20th century was a period of impetuous change. The First initiation War profoundly altered peoples understanding of their worlds. Early 20th-century fraud styles powerfully reflect this newly mind-set. It was a brutal reality of struggle that was to give abstract its edge. To those who survived the First realism War it came to embody the collapse of traditional Western culture. What had started as an exercise in honor and chivalry (for fantasts) ended as the great unwashed destruction (for protoactinium artists). Moreover, the First World War forced some(prenominal) to reconsider the kind of value system and culture that could have permitted such an savagery in the first place.As the war dragged on, more and more artists felt themselves compromised by the act of making art at least the kind of spring that seemed so much a take up of a larger, hypocrisy-hidden cultural machine. For many, to continue meant a drastic re-evaluation of the role of the art for themselves and their society. The result was a radically new way of looking at the world and at art one that survives to this day. Daringly innovatory in technical terms, movements such as Cubism and Futurism, both of which were at their top of the inning around 191013, neglected traditional painting to probe the structure of consciousness itself.Though, it is to Dada and Surrealism that we should look for the to the highest degree compelling explorations of the modern psyche, not least because both movements placed considerable emphasis on mental investigation. Dada partially saw itself as re-enacting the psychic upheaval caused by the First World War, plot the irrationalism celebrated by Surrealism could be seen as a thoroughgoing acceptance of the forces at work beneath the coating of civilization. In this work I summarize the overlapping histories of movements of Futurism and Dada, first of all, and what green features link them. Also on event examples of Boccioni and Jean Arps works I endeavor to find similarities and rests of these two movements.Futurist painting is a fascinating example of how seemingly innocuous pictorial movement can take on political and social scenerys. The Futurists were for the most part a collection of modernist Italian painters who saw the destruction of the old and the glory of the new as the hallmarks of a truly modern artist. The Futurist movement give way upon the consciousness of an astonished public in the years 1909-1910. For the first time artists crossed over the line between conventional taste and new ideas. fetching their cue from the anarchists with whom as youths they were in sympathy, the self-styled Futurists published shocking manifestoes, governing their art and thoughts, the most famous of which was the Futurist Technical Manifestonegating all bygone values, even art itself.Fighting their way towards a new liberty against apathy, nostalgia, and senti mentality, they became for a very wide public the symbol of all that was new, terrifying, and seemingly pathetic in contemporary art. As for the term Futurism, there is no mystery about its origin, nor was it a word thrust by chance upon the artists as were Fauvism, and Cubism or Dada. It was coined in the autumn of 1908 by the bilingual Italian poet, editor, and promoter of art, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, to give ideological coherence to the advanced tendencies in poetry.Because the Futurist painters early adapted to their declare use about of the formal language of Cubism, their painting has often been considered a kind of speeded up version of that classically oriented movement. However the significant difference consisted in Futurisms aim to represent motion, a goal better realized in moving pictures. Motion for the Futurist painter was not an bearing fact to be analyzed, but simply a modern means for embodying a strong personal expression.In their iconoclasm and concern for the vagaries of the mind, they had not a itsy-bitsy in common with Dada. The Italian Futurists were fighting the estrangement from the world, the lonely isolation of the individual that was not only the inheritance of the artist but a common threat to modern man. They rejected firmly the temptation to brood over mans plight, sentimentalizing over his helplessness in the way fashionable at the turn of the century. With Nietzschean trust they despised the weak and the timid, the thoughtful or hesitant, and wished to feel themselves rash, bold, and capable of infinite accomplishment. They wanted their art to restore to man a sense of daring, an assertive provide rather than submissive acceptance.Perhaps the most talented Futurist artist was Umberto Boccioni, whose work and interests included both painting and sculpture. In his The Street Enters the House (Fig. 1) of 1911 it is kinda apparent that he employed Cubist inventions for the depiction of a fractured space and the breaking down of forms across the picture plane.But to this he adds something Cubists had shied away from falsify the kind which illuminated and even decomposed forms. In this work forms, light and color melt into a frenzy of simultaneous activities, each actively pursuing the different for visual authority. The result is something like a visual noise, where each gesture or diminished form takes on the personality of a boisterous telephone in a turbulent crowd.It appears that the radical Boccionis treatment of forms was to certain extent conservative. He never completely let go of the descriptive eccentric person of his work. In his sculptural work (Fig. 2) he maintains an awkward balance between the radical character of Cubist traditions and his desire to maintain a likeness. In this case, the cull looks like an icon to motion and progress and ironically discloses disdain for the whole history of figurative sculpture. Perhaps the greatest irony was the artists have to the First Worl d War as a cleansing of culture. When the war was declared, he, like many of Futurists immediately enlisted and shortly after he was killed. Thus, with the horrors of the First World War, Futurism died too.Chronologically, the Dada movement (1915-1922) followed the Cubist style, from which it borrowed the papier coll technique2, and preceded the Surrealist movement for which it laid a foundation. Dada artists dismissed the canons of the traditional arts as well, considering their work to be non-art and, in some instances, even anti-art. More than anything else, Dada was an avant-garde movement. The term avant-garde, which was first employed by the French utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon in the 1820s, initially had soldiery connotations, but came to signify the advanced socio-political as well as aesthetic position to which the modern artist should aspire3.By the early 20th century, several winder art movements such as Futurism in Italy, Constructivism in Russia or De Stijl in Holland, as well as Dada and Surrealism were pledged to contesting any separation between art and the contingent experience of the modern world. Appearing almost simultaneously in Zurich, new-sprung(prenominal) York, and Paris, the Dada movement did not represent a particular style of art as much as an intellectual rebellion of artists against the war and a general rejection of the formal traditions of culture and society. The term Dada was selected for the movement by opening a dictionary at random and arbitrarily selecting a word. This use of chance as a factor of determination and purpose making would become systemized by the Dadaists in their work.The main practitioner of the art of chance was Jean (Hans) Arp, a Dada artist less inclined to heroic gesture than on establishing a liberating, and thus in his opinion moral, work method for his art. The result can be seen in his Collage Arranged accord to the Laws of Chance (Fig. 3). In this particular case, the actual work m ethod is perhaps more noteworthy than the image it produced, and it hints at much larger issue in later art making the supposed unlocking of the unconscious. Arp strongly believed that the unconscious existed and could be triggered, but revealing it required a radically different approach to art making.To produce this image, Arp simply dropped pieces of torn paper in a random manner onto a field of background color, and then glued the shapes down barely where they fell. Such a method denies all possibility of craft concerns technical skills or even the simplest discretionary gesture on the part of the artist. All aspect of its production are left to chance. These pieces are seen as triggering mechanism to the unconscious, an activity in harmony with nature. The importance of Arps work lies in its acceptance of an rebellious event as at least as real as all of the intellectual conventions on which the European tradition was grounded. And at the time when many of these intellectual and cultural ideas were shattered by war, the unconscious might have seemed like the only place to hide.So we can conclude that both movements agree each other in their striving to abandon conventional artistic approach and methods. However, in terms of art, Dada could be said to have had the most wide-ranging post-war impact, a fact which is paradoxical given Dadas anti-art inclinations. Dada committed itself to the deconstruction of lethal culture and its reconstruction according to more humane principles. Its mastery was constituted in the intensity and scope of its critique.The attitude towards the war of each of the movement was considerably predetermined by the period of their existence. Unlike Dada artists who survived the horrors of the war and under this experience reconsidered their understanding of art, Futurist artist believed in positive effect of the war. The analysis of the two artists works, representatives of both movements, displays the most striking difference extant between Futurism and the Dada movement, that is, art vs non-art forms.Figure 1. Umberto BoccioniThe Street Enters the House 1911Oil on canvas(100100.6 cm)Sprengel Museum, HanoverFigure 2. Umberto BoccioniUnique Forms of Continuity in Space 1913 tanHeight 110.5 cmCollection, The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkFigure 3. Jean ArpCollage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance 1916-17Torn and pasted paper(48.634.5 cm)Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkBibliography Braun, Emily. Futurist modality Three Manifestoes. Art Journal. Vol. 54. 1995 34-49Hopkins, David. Dada and Surrealism. Oxford Oxford University Press, 2004Papier coll. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2005. Retrieved on December 16, 2005 fromhttp//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papier collTaylor, Joshua C. Boccioni. New York Double Company, Inc1 Emily Braun in the article Futurist Fashion Three Manifestoes presents a profound insight of Futurists manifestos.2 Papier coll (French pasted paper) is a painting techni que and type of collage. With papier coll the artist pastes pieces of flat material (paper, oil cloth and the like) into a painting in much in the same way as a collage, except the shape of the pasted pieces are objects themselves. (Wickipedia)3 David Hopkins in his book Dada and Surrealism gives detailed survey of the historical, political and social backgrounds of Dada and Surrealism, as well as examines their relation to other movements that emerged at that period, 2.