Modernity as an art form emerged to reflect the dramatic shift
brought on by industrialization in the 19thC.
Roger Fry: "believed modernists were more
interested in 'the direct expression of feeling through
pictorial and plastic from', that is not through imitation
of forms in the world." (pp24)
Modernism in visual art evokes a viceral response from its
audience. Its aim is to provoke the senses and force its viewers
to engage with it on an emotional level regardless of its aestitic
appearance
DEFINITION: 'post-modernism'
CRITIQUES
CRITIQUES
1. Clement Greenberg - pp22
2. Maurice Denis pp23
3. Clive Bell and Roger Fry:
pictorial form, was the defining
feature of art; its possession was
what distinguished works of art
from other objects in the world.
On the same vein, the painter Henri
Matisse wrote "the essential character of
his subject, of purging superfluous detail in
the pursuit of an overall harmony, which
he defined as an art of balance, of purity
and serenity
EXAMPLES & CHARACTERISTICS
Camille Pissaro's "The Boulevard Monmartre at
Night" (1897), a landscape painting of a city street
at night shows blended colours and blurred
details to form and structure though the jest of the
scene is legible.
"When one crosses across a landscape... The view through
the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in
combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of
things. A modern man registers a hundred times more
sensory impressions than an 18thC artist." (pp18)
Blurred details and mixing of
colours in Pissaro's painting reflects
the perspective of someone in
motion moving at a speed faster
than a what they might have been
accustomed to and as a result
views this scene in a jumpy
unstable image.
Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1926) and Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times"
(1936) films were both set in factories and presented its characters
performing repetitive mechanistic gestures as necessary for their job. In
"Metropolis" factories workers operate and function as lifeless drones
walking in the same pace and in perfect alignment with one another; man
becomes machine. In "Modern Times" Chaplin's character falls short in
keeping up to speed with his duties on the assembly line.
These films spoke to the "sense of social alienation and
increasing mechanisation of production" that many artists felt with this new modern lifestyle (pp18)