Re-Viewing the Twentieth Century

The art of the twentieth century offers clues to understanding the art of the present and carries the seeds of the art that is yet to be made. This exhibition has been conceived to test ways in which RISD's collections might provide viewers with an overview of the seminal artistic ideas of the past century. It intentionally leads visitors backwards in time through selected works of art that often embody responses to social change.

In order to slice through a period rich in stylistic and intellectual invention, the curators have organized the exhibition's galleries by posing four questions about twentieth-century art. Why is it art? addresses definitions and expectations. Who are we? seeks to identify the makers and consumers of art. What happened to art? illustrates the wide range of styles that changed the way art looked during the twentieth century. How did we get there? deals with the innovations that propelled art from the realism of the nineteenth century into the abstraction of the twentieth.

Please visit Re-Viewing the Twentieth Century often, as the selection of artworks will change over the course of the exhibition.

Viewers' comments and suggestions about all aspects of this show are welcome. Your responses will influence the way in which twentieth-century art will be presented in the Museum's new galleries opening in 2008.

Why is it art

The appearance of works of art changed dramatically throughout the twentieth century, as artists continued to question tradition and challenge the definition of art. In the 1960s, the boundaries between art and everyday life were eroded in exciting new ways: sculpture was taken off the pedestal and placed directly on the floor; ready-to-use industrial materials (Dan Flavin's fluorescent lights or Richard Artschwager's Formica) replaced marble and bronze; commercial processes such as photography and screenprinting, which produced multiple images, were favored by Andy Warhol and other Pop artists. Ideas became more important than material form or individual technique to conceptualists like Sol LeWitt.Some artists may reject art of the past, but at the same time they extend its traditions and are indebted to it. All artworks take some physical form (no matter how abstract or minimal) and are meant to be experienced visually, even if they are generated by theories. All artists make decisions about basic components such as color, shape, material, and scale that determine an artwork's appearance as well as its content. Beauty and emotion may or may not be relevant to an artist, depending on his/her intellectual position and aesthetic interests. How and where a piece is presented may significantly affect the way it is experienced. With repeated viewing, artwork that might at first seem incomprehensible may become stimulating, even profound. Some pieces in this gallery are immediately recognizable as works of art, whereas others stretch the concept of art to the limit. Think back to the skeptical response to Impressionism in the late nineteenth century, a movement that is now widely embraced. Today's maverick may be tomorrow's classic. | [C8-- Who are we?]In the United States during the 1960s and 70s, assassinations, riots, and social activism that included the antiwar movement, the struggle for civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights were defining events that had a lasting impact on American identity and consequently on the art produced in this country. This was an extremely fertile period for creative development, and New York came to be recognized as the center of the art world. Many artists gravitated to that city, such as the Argentinean Jorge de la Vega, who was drawn to the New York's energized political and artistic culture.For New York artist Philip Guston, who had been a prominent Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s and 60s, distress over the war in Vietnam and erupting violence in the U.S. caused a major shift in his work toward figuration in the 1970s. While he did not create literal depictions of current events, the crudeness and occasional brutality of his cartoon-like imagery captured the spirit of the times. Andy Warhol, in contrast, sometimes took for his subject specific contemporary tragedies, such as the 1963 race riots in Birmingham, Alabama. The image in the painting on view was taken from a series of photographs by Charles Moore that ran in Life magazine. By appropriating popular press illustrations, Warhol refocused attention on images so numbing that they were in danger of becoming invisible. Political activism in the 1960s and 70s was central to the recognition of minority artists and the importance of their subject matter. It was not until the Feminist movement of the 1970s that artists such as Alice Neel, who had been painting portraits since the 1930s, gained recognition and were seen as role models for other women artists. Encouragedby these developments, Ree Morton quickly gained a reputation for using domestic subject matter in works that bridged painting and sculpture. Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of provocative nudes from the 1980s, particularly those of gay men, caused a passionate debate about the use of public funds in the form of arts grants for exhibitions of these photographs. The self-portrait on view is one of the many personas Mapplethorpe created for the camera. In the last decades of the twentieth century, many African-American artists explored race relations and the history of slavery in America. Glenn Ligon's print series, Runaways, 1993, takes its format from nineteenth-century broadsides that described slaves who had escaped from their masters. By using texts about himself provided by his friends without knowing what purpose they were to serve, Ligon demonstrates how history continues to inform our constructions of identity. | [C9 -- What happened to art?]

Pop Art and the Sixties

Pop Art is an international movement that energetically embraced forms and techniques from advertising, illustration, product styling, and popular culture. Identifiable in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and design, it flourished between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, capturing the imaginations of the post-war "baby-boomers." British artist Richard Hamilton defined its components as popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and big business.

Modern technology came into play with Pop Art, as exemplified by Andy Warhol's screenprinted and painted photographic images (see his Cow Wallpaper on the walls of the Museum's Farago Entry Gallery ramp) and Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of the benday dot screens used in commercial printing. Familiar objects, such as the palm tree in David Hockney's Plastic Tree Plus City Hall or the American flag (see Jasper Johns's painting in the adjacent gallery) were lifted from their ordinary settings and made the focus of art.

Connections between fine and applied art were used by designers to address the desires of a prosperous post-war world. In advertising, posters were among the most exciting products of twentieth-century design, delighting consumers with hip images that knowingly referenced Pop Art. Austrian-born Ettore Sottsass tapped into ergonomic concerns as well as color symbolism with his lightweight portable "Valentine" typewriter, designed in 1969 for Olivetti as a fresh departure from the conventional office machine.

Even at the height of the Pop Art phenomenon, many artists continued to explore new approaches to abstraction. Color-field, hard-edge, optical, and gestural painters pursued the nonrepresentative course of earlier Abstract Expressionists. Results ranged from Ellsworth Kelly's flat, curved forms to Cy Twombly's mesmerizing blackboard scribbles to Joan Mitchell's luxuriant washes of pigment. Artistic Minimalism was also emerging throughout this dense and productive period and would make its presence strongly felt during the final quarter of the twentieth century.

New York School Abstraction

In 1949, American artist Robert Motherwell coined the phrase "New York School" to describe the group of Abstract Expressionists who were working in Manhattan after the Second World War. These artists abandoned representational painting in order to pursue new styles characterized by the use of gestural brushwork and flattened abstract forms.

There was no academy associated with the New York School, just a variety of downtown studios, bars, and coffee shops at which artists gathered and exchanged ideas. Some were American-born, some had emigrated from Europe, and many eventually rejected the social realism of the previous generation. The art that replaced it celebrated the two-dimensional surface through personalized, often aggressive, paint application.

Several New York School painters continued to explore figural motifs, but a majority of the artists in this loose association moved even further away from recognizable content, Mark Rothko being an important example. Earlier German Expressionist painting and both Cubist and Surrealist art were among the sources for their work, which found expression through photography, pictographs, collage, loose patterning, and color/mood studies.

Surrealism and Dreams

In 1917, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term "Surrealism" to suggest a form of artistic expression that exceeded realist effects and seemed to spring from the artist's subconscious. In memory, madness, childhood experience, automatic writing, and gesture, Surrealist artists tapped levels of the imagination that were free of rationalism and utilitarian considerations. Encouraged by Sigmund Freud's study of dreams and Carl Jung's examination of archetypes of the collective unconscious, few movements had such international resonance during the first half of the twentieth century. Joseph Cornell's curious assemblages, Claude Cahun's startling juxtapositions in photomontage, Alexander Calder's floating shapes, and Jackson Pollock's drip paintings all tap into Surrealist ideas.

Influenced by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam created his own synthesis of the dreamlike qualities of Surrealism, incorporating images of Afro-Cuban deities and symbols from the Caribbean's Santería religion. Other, generalized aspects of Surrealist construction continued to appear as crucial elements of artistic expression into the 1950s through references to biomorphic forms and the use of emotionally charged content, color, and line.

Constructivism and The Machine

Taking its cue from Cubist theory around 1914, an artistic utopian movement developed in Russia and received an idealistic boost in 1917 following the Communist Revolution. Dubbed "Constructivism" in 1921, its importance was felt internationally, but most particularly in Germany throughout the spectrum of design, painting, graphics, architecture, furniture, and fashion. Russian theorist El Lissitzky's writings were influential in Western Europe, as was his series of geometric images entitled Prouns, a union of painting and architecture. Constructivism was very important for the German Bauhaus school, which promoted close cooperation between the fine and applied arts, for the Dutch De Stijl group, and to a lesser extent for the French Art Deco style. It was also key in advertising and typographic design-exemplified by Hugo Laubi's 1920 Café Odeon poster-and in the pared-down Modernist styles of the 1930s.

In Church at Gelmeroda, XII, Bauhaus painter Lyonel Feininger portrayed the medieval structure as if it were composed of transparent geometric planes. Even more austere in its use of geometry was the furniture of Gerrit Rietveld, a Dutch designer and architect whose Zig-Zag chair is a radical simplification of form and function. In the hands of master couturiers, geometry served to integrate cut and function. The angular seaming found in 1930s designs by Madeleine Vionnet and Elizabeth Hawes is not merely decorative, but integral to the way a garment falls on the body.

The simplified forms evident in the clean lines of machines found their way into art in modes other than pure geometry. After an early interest in Cubist abstraction, Fernand Léger developed a machine-inspired style in which he conveyed strength and power through the use of mechanical components. His 1920 composition Flowers includes the densely packed tubular elements and bright colors that became his trademark. Many artists saw relationships between nature and the streamlined machine, interpreting botanical forms as abstract compositions or finding poetic abstraction in aspects of industrial tools.

Expressionism

Expressionism in the fine arts addressed man's spiritual condition at the beginning of the twentieth century. Reacting to both academic art and Impressionism, it counted among its stylistic influences the Symbolist art of Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch (on view in the adjacent gallery) and the emotional drawing and colorism of Vincent Van Gogh.

German and Austrian artists were in the vanguard of Expressionist representation, attempting through assertive forms, violent colors, and suggestive lines to communicate thoughts about man's relationship to his own world. Franz Marc belonged to a group of Munich artists who called themselves Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) and who shared a desire to express spiritual truths through their art. Frequently depicting subjects from nature, Marc also explored symbolic associations of color.

Expressionist portraits, such as Oskar Kokoschka's 1913 Portrait of Franz Hauer frankly revealed the human condition by exposing man's vulnerability. Kokoschka's manner of handling paint has much in common with Egon Schiele's nervous mark-making. Both Austrian artists developed personal, expressive "handwriting" that infuses their subjects with energy and pathos. In contrast to their highly charged imagery is the work of designer Josef Hoffmann, with whom Kokoschka had participated in the turn-of-the-century break from academic style known as the Vienna Secession. Hoffmann's 1906 "Seven Ball" side chair represents a transition between sinuous Art Nouveau naturalism and the simpler proto-Modernist aesthetic he developed as a founder of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop).

The cultural anarchy of Expressionist styles was later perceived as a threat to social order. Under the Third Reich, the art of nearly all the artists who participated in the Expressionist movement was condemned as degenerate and banished from public collections.

Cubism

Cubism refers to an artistic style in which subjects are depicted as if viewed simultaneously from multiple vantage points. Coined by a French art critic in 1908, the name derives from a comment made by Henri Matisse about the "little cubes" that comprised a painting by Georges Braque. Cubism appropriated its subject matter from both observed reality and from the imagination. Its sources included the prismatic fragmentation of nature in Cézanne's late works, as well as the philosophical concept of the passage and mutual perspectives of time. Its proponents utilized a variety of techniques that included faceting of mass, erasure of contour, layering of flattened shapes, and the use of geometric components in the construction of forms.

In the decade that followed the naming of the new style, a wide circle of painters and sculptors pushed its possibilities. Fragments of textiles and paper were glued to the surfaces of paintings, or their textural effects were mimicked with paint, as in Braque's 1918 Still Life. Picasso fashioned Seated Woman with Book, 1910, by moving color across and around prism-like elements (on view in the adjacent gallery). Marcel Duchamp exploded the figure into a cascade of blades in Nude Descending a Staircase, no. 2, 1913 (see reproduction in Duchamp's Boîte, Série E in the adjacent gallery). In contrast, sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon based a curvy, gilded Seated Woman, 1914, on the uniformly turned components of a jointed artist's mannequin. | [C7 -- How did we get there?]

A wide range of contemporary artistic styles were available to artists in the early years of the twentieth century. At the 1913 Armory Show in New York, the European selections ranged from Impressionist paintings by Monet and Renoir to Symbolist works by Munch and Redon. Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin were represented, as were younger artists including Nadelman, who had expatriated to the United States, Delaunay, and Dufy. In 1910, Dufy created woodcuts to illustrate Guillaume Apollonaire's poem "La Bestiaire." They won the admiration of fashion designer Paul Poiret, who provided Dufy with a studio in which to print textile designs. The floral design exhibited here shows Dufy's characteristic spontaneity and vigor in its lines and layout, so emblematic of his approach to Modernist design.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, known as The Armory Show, was an art-world "happening" in which recent American art was shown in the context of cutting-edge European Modernism. The press called the exhibition "intellectual warfare" and designated the art of Henri Matisse and Francis Picabia as its lethal weapons. But the artist who most enraged the public was Marcel Duchamp, a 26-year-old Frenchman whose painting Nude Descending a Staircase, no. 2 was likened to rush hour in the subway. On the eve of World War I, the exhibition "dropped like a bomb" on the art world. Symbolized by Duchamp's Nude, it was a visual metaphor for the destruction of political and artistic order.

Arthur B. Davies, one of the driving forces behind the 1913 Armory Show, was a great admirer of Cézanne. Davies's 1912 painting Clothed in Dominion reflects his interest in contemporary dance, but it also pays homage to Cézanne's paintings of bathers. Davies became an advisor to Miss Lizzie P. Bliss, one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Although modern art was deplored by some American critics as immoral and "effete," they praised George Bellows, another Armory show exhibitor, for style and subjects that were considered "virile." In Rain on the River, Bellows slices the urban landscape diagonally to emphasize movement, acknowledging a then-popular theory known as "dynamic symmetry."

In the years surrounding the Armory Show, American artists fashioned their own responses to Modernism through themes that reflected contemporary life. Popular culture, urban and rural scenes, work, transportation, and architecture were among the subjects that were transformed by stylistic invention into American Modernist art. A new generation of artists confronted European influences head on, applying their own visions to subjects that resonated with meaning for American audiences.

Photographer and critic Alfred Stieglitz played a key role in promoting new art, featuring both emerging American artists as well as European Modernists in his publication Camera Work and in a sequence of galleries he directed in New York. He championed the work of Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne in his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, and in 1917 showed his support of Duchamp by photographing that artist's Fountain (urinal) when it was rejected from the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Elie Nadelman, and Charles Demuth were among the core members of the Stieglitz circle, whose work received critical attention when exhibited at his An American Place and Intimate Gallery spaces during the 1910s and 20s.

During the twentieth century, transformations in the appearance and meaning of art took place at breakneck speed. Traditions were abandoned, techniques reinvented, and materials revolutionized. New modes of transportation and communication-the car, the airplane, the telephone, the radio-propelled the multiplication of artistic form. They found their way into the imagery of the new century, declaring their importance in murals, advertising art, and photography. Charles Sheeler's Precisionist portrait Yankee Clipper was made to extol the power of flight on the cover of Fortune magazine. Joaquín Torres-García used a steamship to represent the means of transportation that brought new people and ideas to the Americas. James Van Der Zee associated the automobile with urban sophistication and upwardly mobile American society. Photography asserted itself as an art form, championed by practitioners such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, and was pushed in new directions by artists who had been traditionally excluded from academic circles.

The art of the twentieth century embraced a wide array of ideas and techniques that responded to social change. Its seeds were planted amid political turmoil in nineteenth-century Europe, when realist painters abandoned academic styles to focus more instinctively on the world around them. Their experiments culminated in the work of the Impressionists, whose flattened compositions, personalized brushstrokes, and original conceptions of color and light provided a new vocabulary for the representation of nature.

Paul Cézanne, who had exhibited with the Impressionists, was known only to a small group of admirers until his paintings were shown in an 1895 exhibition in Paris. At that time a new generation of artists discovered his manner of revealing form through the placement of faceted patches of graduated color. Within Cézanne's pictorial vision lay elements that would serve as building blocks for Modernist painters and sculptors.