Today we reviewed the last three weeks of the semester.

The second quiz will be on Wednesday, October 29.

This lecture we viewed and discussed futurism and some of the more radical extensions of cubism in the work Malevich and Mondrian.

In futurism, a movement centered in Italy, we discussed how this movement was a literary one: the first of the 20th century to issue a manifesto. This would become commonplace in many of the new artistic movement of the 20th century.

Umberto Boccioni, "The City Rises" 1910

The movement was concerned (among many things) with capturing the power, speed, and dynamism of modern urban culture. Much of its imagery was influenced by cubism but also how the camera (photography) captured motion: in ways impossible to for the human eye to see.

Kazimir Malevich "Black Square" 1913

We then viewed and discussed the work of Kazimir Malevich, a Russian artist who took the cubist style, with its emphasis on geometric form, to its most extreme in a style he referred to as suprematism.

His concern was reducing the artistic image down to its most fundamental and simple shapes that could suggest a higher spiritual ideal.

We then closed the lecture with the work of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian, "Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray" 1921

Mondrian, much like Malevich, reduced his art down to its most basic: right angles, the primary colors, as well as white and black. Mondrian’s approach was much more restrictive than Malevich as he was concerned with creating a perfect equilibrium in his art.

Next class we summarize and review to prepare for the next quiz on Wednesday, October 29.

Viewings:

• Slides from Lecture 15

Readings:

• Chapter 11: Futurism, Abstraction in Russia, and de Stijl

Today we closed our discussion on cubism by viewing and discussing another form known as synthetic cubism.

Synthetic cubism was a formal experiment that was an outgrowth of analytical cubism that began with the inclusion of papier collé (stuck or pasted paper) into drawings and paintings as seen in this work by Braque.

Georges Braque, "Fruit Dish and Glass" 1912

Picasso took this a few steps further by including elements from the “real” world into his works creating what we call collage.

Pablo Picasso, "Still Life with Chair Caning" 1912

The overall effect produced is one of flatness through the inclusion of text, newspaper clippings, and other non-traditional art materials that is integrated with drawing and painting to produce what we might call mixed media. This is significant as it signals the new fact that art could be constructed out of anything and is a complete break from creating an illusion of physical reality.

We then moved on to discussing some of the outgrowths of cubism by viewing works by Juan Gris and Fernand Leger. We also looked at orphism and the work of Robert Delaunay and Frantisek Kupka.

We closed the lecture with a look at the various ways photography captured motion, showing us the world in ways that could never be seen by the human eye alone. We looked at some of the photography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey.

Eadweard Muybridge, "Galloping Horse (animated)"

We ended the lecture with Marcel Duchamp’s (in)famous work Nude Descending A Staircase.

Next class we will look at the influence of motion on cubism and the movement known as futurism.

Viewings:

• Slides from Lecture 14

Readings:

• Chapter 10: Cubism
• Chapter 11: Futurism, Abstraction in Russia, and de Stijl