Introduction to Modern Art: course description
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From the mid 1860’s to the late 1930’s, the representative movements of 20th-century art appeared in major European cities, especially in Paris. These avant-garde movements started from the strong reaction against the traditional conception of artistic representation and sometimes of Art itself, influencing each other and declining with the outbreak of the Second World War. So-called modern art not only shows development from a plastic point of view but also reflects multiple aspects of man’s condition living in modern society: loss of faith in pre-established values, experience of devastating war, hope and fear in the face of new technology and the machine age, and the difficulty of maintaining a personal spiritual world.
We will discuss major movements in modern art, taking as an example some important artists’ works and comparing diverse points of view (historical, literary and philosophical). These movements were often accompanied by manifestos and scandals. First, we will deal with the scandal caused by the French painter Manet and examine its meaning. How could this painter who had mastered traditional technique be a revolutionary artist? For him and his painter friend Degas, Italian and Japanese influences were considerable. Manet will be followed by the famous impressionist painter Monet, who devoted himself to the expression of the fugitive sensations given by light and color. We will then treat post-impressionist painters like Seurat, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, who discovered, each in his own way, the inadequacy of the impressionists’ experiments. If the first two find a lack of solid structure in the impressionists’ paintings, the latter two find a lack of emotion or of symbolic value. To sum up the matter, we can say the first reaction will bring Cubism and the second Expressionism, accompanied by a certain primitivism. And soon after the turn of the century a great change will occur in the history of art: the progressive renunciation of figurative representation; that is to say, abstract art. But this art displays less a radical discontinuity from what went before than a close relation with preceding movements. Another radical change – the renunciation of creation itself – will soon be given by an artist who practiced an idleness unprecedented in the history of Art: Duchamp.
An understanding of the history of modern art is a necessary prerequisite for learning about contemporary art and realising the meaning of the expression “the end of art”, foretold for more than twenty years.
We will also take account of the relation between European modern art and Japan: Japonism in the late 19th century, Japanese painters who worked or travelled in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, etc.
Lecture on each movement with reproductions and DVDs. The course will include Q and A time and a visit to Peggy Guggenheim museum of Modern Art (around the end of the course). No preliminary knowledge is required.
