Mile 8 ...

It's a beautiful moonlit night by the lake, and around the campfire the conversation is lively! Although I love the comfort of the fire and good company, I must continue my journey. The trail is becoming increasingly steep and difficult to traverse. But you've been helping me all the way, so I think I'll make it to the end - mile 10.

Yesterday, I left the trail in the Early 20th Century, a time when art theory became increasingly important and a number of "isms" rapidly increased. First, Futurism, and next Cubism. The geneology of influences that led to Cubism is interesting: Courbet to Cezanne to Picasso and Braque. Although the artists that were associated with Cubism at this time had differing opinions about what it meant, Picasso and Braque were recognized as the leaders. Most of us are very familiar with their work - right, Peggy? Pablo Picasso was the son of an academic painter, and so he learned traditional techniques. When he moved to Paris in 1903, he embraced Expressionism for awhile and then developed a cubist style by 1910. Georges Braque was the son and grandson of a house painter and decorator, and learned the trade. Later, he studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and also apprenticed with a decorator to become certified in 1902. Eventually, he fell under the influence of the Fauves and adopted their style. But, this didn't last long and his association with Cezanne, a major influence, led him to cubism around the same time as Picasso.

Braque explained that the aim of Cubism was not to reconstitute anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact... There is no certainty in what the mind conceives. Critic and poet Guillaume Appollinaire put it another way: Cubism differs from the old schools of painting in that it is not an art of imitation, but an art of conception which tends toward creation. Cubists altered lighting. They adjusted it for a more sublte and equal distribution. They also "correct" perspective. And, Picasso's further innovation was to pierce the closed form so that the painting no longer needed to represent the "skin" of objects. Those of you who are adherents to cubism can better explain this. Here are two examples of their work, Picasso (left) Braque (right):

Eventually, Picasso and Braque began to construct collages using every day objects (Carolyn ... your roots!) Collage opened up a new kind of exchange between art and life by suggesting that art isn't creation from nothing, but rather a form of improvization. This development complicated the previously established division between the "artist" and the "worker." The collage below top is attributed to Picasso, and on the bottom to Braque.

As an art student in the 1960's through 80's we were taught cubism to a certain extent, and also utilized the collage to practice design. The influence of these two men on my own work and training is enormous. While I didn't adopt the style of cubism, I learned a great deal from it.

Piet Mondrian, a Dutch Cubist, really pushed the envelope. He moved beyond an art form devoted to objects to one devolted to the relations between objects. Eventually, he explored only the relations between vertical and horizontal. This is a move away from the traditional use of "form." Here's a good example by Mondrian:

Again, in college we drew upon Mondrian's ideas to explore relationships in a non-objective way. Another influence on my development.

Before I leave Cubism, I'll acknowledge that there's a lot more to it and I'm certain some of you will fill in the gaps. Cubism had political affiliations and has changed form over time to include Analytical and Synthetic Cubism. This is not the road that I took as an aspiring artist.

World War I gave rise to new artistic movements as the war shook all of Europe. Dada and Surrealism emerged from the rubble of disrupted creative life in Paris, which had displaced writers and artists to places like Zurich, New York, and Barcelona. Dada and Surrealism were more than artistic movements, they were highly rationalized forms of counter-reason that became comprehensive strategies for living.

Dada began in a Zurich nightclub in 1916 that was set up to be an art gallery and experimental theater. The term "dada" means "wooden horse" in the sense of a child's toy. But, In French, it means a recurrent idea or obsession. The founders of this movement, Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara later claimed that they randomly chose the name from a dictionary. Hey, why not?? They avoided tacking on "-ism" because they thought it was pretentious. The art and performances at this nightclub were radical and emotive. Here's an example from the visual arts: Jean Arp made collages by just dropping pieces of paper onto another paper on the floor and gluing them where they fell. Dada eventually spread throughout parts of Europe. In Berlin, the group of artists rejected traditional art and the social system. They adopted collage as their style. In Paris at the end of the war, followers of Dada claimed we recognize no theory...Dada is rooted in disgust with the agressive and complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits.

Marcel Duchamp associated himself with Dada after rejecting Cubism. He wrote: I was interested in ideas - not merely visual products. He had been excused from military service due to a mild heart condition and spent the war in New York. At one point he began creating sculptures from found objects, which he dubbed "readymades." The most famous story is his sculpture "Fountain" which was a urinal that he signed "R. Mott" for a 1917 exhibition in New York. The urinal was completely unaltered, and when challenged, Duchamp claimed that as an artist he CHOSE the object and then created a new thought for it, thus making it art. This threatened the art world because it challenged the barrier between "art" and "life" completely. When you think about it ... what would happen if any one of us decided to do this today?

I honestly don't know what effect Dada has had on my development as an artist, except that it did expand my notion of the range of what may be called "art."

By 1924, Andre Breton and his associates broke with Dada and began a new movement in art: Surrealism. The theory behind this movement is the mobilization of the imagination and the use of the non-rational resources of the mind to create art. These artists attempted to reconcile dream with reality to create "surreality," which taps into Freud's notion of the unconscious. In fact, Surrealism is a refinement of Symbolism. Because most of us are very familiar with this movement, I'll just list some of the artists: Andre Masson, Joan Miro, Picasso (on occasion), Giorgio DeChirico, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, etc. Those of you who have better knowledge of this movement and its artists can inform us.

Here's one of my favorites by Dali:
Personally, I'm fascinated by Surrealism and have made several attempts to use it. I'm not as successful as Mark, but I'm working on it!

Time to move on to American Modernism. Around the time of World War II many European artists migrated to the United States, especially to New York. These artists engaged in discussions similar to our own - except in person. The first star to rise among the American Modernists was Jackson Pollock. By the 1940's he was in contact with the Surrealists who influenced his work to a point, until he developed non-objective "drip paintings." If you've never seen one of these in person, do so. The power and rhythm is overwhelming. His innovation was in distributing the viewer's attention over the surface as a whole and emphasizing its indivisibility. The work was spontaneous and deliberate. Art critic, Harold Rosenberg, described Pollock and his imitators as "action painters." They didn't create images as much as they created events. Again, we see a tearing down of the distinction between art and life (the artist's life).

The action painters were actually part of the newly emerged Abstract Expressionism. Barnett Newman, a notable Abstract Expressionist, provided us with this definition: Here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty. We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. OK ... this theory definitely contributed to my development as an artist. Newman's work has been described as "compositionless," where a single uniform color is broken by only a few slender vertical lines.

The dominant art critic from this period was Clement Greenberg (1909-94). He argued that visual art was finally liberated from the dominion of literature and music to become autonomous. This liberation lead to multiple inventions in art. He also pointed out that, over time, paintings were moving toward increasing flatness. The succession of flatness looks like this:

Manet - Cezanne - Matisse - Cubists - Abstract Expressionists.

By the 1950's, Abstract Expressionism was being overshadowed by new trends in art:

• Neo-Dada- Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns



• Environments - Allan Kaprow's installations and "happenings"



• Pop Art - Claes Oldenberg



• Non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective - Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella



• Post-Painterly Abstraction - Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler



• Minimalism - (1960's) Donald Judd, Robert Morris

I'll end this sprint through the 20th Century with Conceptual Art, a child of the 60's. According to Sol Lewitt: the idea or concept is the most important part of the work. Such art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories, it is intuitive. In other words, conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes art.

Conceptual Art is less a movement and more of a fundamental redefinition of art. It had enormous range and moved from the borders of America to Europe and beyond. And, the enormity of this movement reaches beyond my time and words in this blog. At this point in my journey, it's enough to know what it is.

Next time ... Postmodernism. Two miles more to go. Boy, am I tired! Where's my sleeping bag?