Spiritual Father:
Cézanne.
Salient Features:
The demise of perspective, shading, and the rest of the standard amenities; dislocation and dismemberment; the importance of memory as an adjunct to vision, so that one painted what one knew a thing to be; collage; analytic (dull in color, intricate in form, intellectual in appeal), then synthetic (brighter colors, simpler forms, “natural” appeal); the successful break with visual realism.
Keepers of the Flame:
Few; this half century has gone not with Picasso but with antiartist and master debunker Marcel Duchamp. FUTURISM
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)
Headquarters:
Milan.
Life Span:
1909–1918.
Quotes:
“A screaming automobile is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” “Burn the museums! Drain the canals of Venice!” —Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
Central Figures:
Marinetti, poet and propagandist; Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, painters; Umberto Boccioni, sculptor and painter; Antonio Sant’Elia, architect.
Spiritual Fathers:
Georges Seurat, Henry Ford.
Salient Features:
Dynamism, simultaneity, lines of force; vibration and rhythm more important than form; exuberant, optimistic, anarchic, human behavior as art. Had an immediate impact bigger than Cubism’s—on Constructivism, Dada, and Fascism.
Keepers of the Flame:
Performance artists (who likewise stress the theatrical and the evanescent), conceptualists. CONSTRUCTIVISM
Naum Gabo, Column (1923)
Headquarters:
Moscow.
Life Span:
1913–1932.
Quotes:
“Engineers create new forms.”—Vladimir Tatlin.
“Constructivism is the Socialism of vision.”—László Moholy-Nagy.
Central Figures:
Tatlin, sculptor and architect; Aleksandr Rodchenko, painter and typographer; El Lissitzky, painter and designer; Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, sculptors.
Spiritual Fathers:
Kasimir Malevich, Lenin, Marinetti.
Salient Features:
Art as production, rather than elitist imaginings, and squarely in the service of the Left; abstract forms wedded to utilitarian simplicity; rivets, celluloid, and airplane wings; the State as a total work of Art.
Keepers of the Flame:
None: The State ultimately squashed it. DE STIJL (“THE STYLE”)
Piet Mondrian, Composition 7 (1937–1942)
Gerrit Rietveld, armchair (c. 1917)
Headquarters:
Amsterdam.
Life Span:
1917–1931.
Quote:
“The square is to us as the cross was to the early Christians.”—Theo van Doesburg.
Central Figures:
Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, painters; Gerrit Rietveld and J. J. P. Oud, architects.
Spiritual Father:
Kandinsky.
Salient Features:
Vertical and horizontal lines and primary colors, applied with a sense of spiritual mission; Calvinist purity, harmony, and sobriety; purest of the abstract movements (and Mondrian the single most important new artist of the between-the-wars period); say “style,” by the way, not “steel.”
Keepers of the Flame:
Minimalists. DADA
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)
Headquarters:
Zurich (later Berlin, New York, and Paris).
Life Span:
1916–1922.
Quotes:
“Like everything in life, Dada is useless.” “Anti-art for anti-art’s sake.”—Tristan Tzara.
Central Figures:
Zurich: Tzara, poet, and Jean Arp, painter and sculptor. New York and Paris: Marcel Duchamp, artist; Francis Picabia, painter; Man Ray, photographer. Berlin: Max Ernst, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters.
Spiritual Father:
Marinetti.
Salient Features:
Anarchic, nihilistic, and disruptive; childhood and chance its two most important sources of inspiration; the name itself a nonsense, baby-talk word; born of disillusionment, a cult of nonart that became, in Berlin, overtly political.
Keepers of the Flame:
Performance artists, “happenings” and “assemblages” people, conceptualists. SURREALISM
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Headquarters:
Paris (later, New York).
Life Span:
1924–World War II.
Quote:
“As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”—Comte du Lautréamont.
Central Figures:
André Breton, intellectual; Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, writers; Jean Cocteau, writer and filmmaker; Luis Buñuel, filmmaker. Abstract wing: Joan Miró, painter. Explicit wing: Salvador Dalí, Yves Tan-guy, Max Ernst, René Magritte, painters.
Spiritual Fathers:
Sigmund Freud, Giorgio de Chirico, Leon Trotsky.
Salient Features:
Antibourgeois, but without Dada’s spontaneity; committed to the omnipotence of the dream and the unconscious; favored associations, juxtapositions, concrete imagery, the more bizarre the better.
Keepers of the Flame:
Abstract expressionists, “happenings” people.
Thirteen Young Turks
Well, not all that young. And certainly not Turks. In fact, the Old World has nothing to do with it. For the last forty years, it’s America—specifically, New York—that’s been serving as the clubhouse of the art world. Now shake hands with a dozen of its most illustrious members. That’s Jackson Pollock in the Stetson and Laurie Anderson in the Converse All Stars. JACKSON POLLOCK (1912-1956)
Jackson Pollock’s One (1950)
Don’t settle for the “cowboy” legend, in which Pollock—the most talked-about artist of the last half century years—blows into New York City from Cody, Wyoming, riding his canvases like broncos and packing his frontier image like a six-gun. The man had a rowdy streak, it’s true, spattering, flinging, and dripping paint by day and picking fights in artists’ bars by night, but his friends always insisted that he was a sensitive soul; inspired by the lyricism of Kandinsky and steeped in the myths of Jung, all he wanted was to be “a part of the painting,” in this case “all-over” painting, with no beginning, no end, and no center of interest. Some nomenclature: “Action painting” is what Pollock (alias “Jack the Dripper”) did, a particularly splashy, “gestural” variant of Abstract Expressionism, the better-not-hang-this-upside-down art turned out by the so called New York School. MARK ROTHKO (1903-1970)
Declaring that he painted “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” Rothko was pleased when people broke down and cried in front of The Work—and withdrew from an important mural commission for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant because he couldn’t stand the idea of them eating in front of it. Here we’re in the presence of Abstract Expressionism’s so called theological wing (which also sheltered Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still), typified by—in addition to a fondness for monasticism and bombast—large, fuzzy-edged rectangles of color, floating horizontally in a vertical field. Renunciation is the keyword. In a sense, minimalism begins here, with Rothko. WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)
The other “action” painter, and the most famous New York School artist (even if he was born in Holland) after his Wyoming colleague. De Kooning never totally lost faith in recognizable imagery—most notably, a gang of big-breasted middle-aged women (of whom he later said, “I didn’t mean to make them such monsters”)—and never tossed out his brushes. But he did paint in the same hotter-than-a-pepper-sprout fever, allowing paint to dribble down the canvas, as soup down a chin, and he did reach beyond where he could be sure of feeling comfortable. DAVID SMITH (1906-1965)