Modern life is rubbish?: Revolutionising the Image.--lecture notes
What exactly do we mean when we talk about styles and movements in the
history of art or design?
The Canon Doryphoros (The Spear Bearer). A theoretical work which comprises a set of aesthetic principles governing the work’s proportions, meaning ‘rule’. The proportionally ‘perfect’ work of art. A yardstick a measure of what they believed art ‘should’ be, the quintessential embodiment of ‘good’ art.
The Western art historical canon denotes a body of books, music and art that have
been traditionally accepted by Western scholars as the most important and
influential in shaping Western culture. Idea of the celebrity artist or designer and the masterpiece.
Canonised – accepted into the canon.
Survey text – characterised by key individuals who represent styles andmovements.
What is ‘style’?
A definition:
Specific rather than simply a methodology. A particular kind, sort, or type, as with reference to form,
appearance, or character e.g. the baroque style. Or…
A particular, distinctive, or characteristic mode of construction or execution in any work of art/design.
A way of doing something, especially one which is typical of a person, group of people, place or period (in the style of...).
Used to classify and to describe e.g. when, where or when something was created/developed. Used to group and match works. When
we study the style of something we are looking to place it in a relationship of similarity (and difference) with other works.
How do we categorise and name works /movements in art and design? – Shared characteristics.
Styles or movements are dialogical – meaning that they come about as part of a dialogue or conversation with previous styles – either
embracing or reacting against elements of those styles.
If something is stylised, it is represented with an emphasis on a particular style.
Style was described by Meyer Schapiro as ‘a system of forms with a quality, through which the personality of the artist and the outlook
of a group are visible’.
The End of Art Nouveau?
With that critical perspective in mind, we returned to looking at movements and styles in graphic
design/visual communication...
As discussed last week, even in its prime Art Nouveau faced criticisms for betraying the ideologies it
claimed to uphold. It had been seen as a sort of artist’s utopia where hierarchies were diminished and
the alienating, developing industrial world could be left behind to pursue the hand made and the
subjective. By 1914, the start of the First World War, it was essentially finished as a movement (although it later became revisited – think about the examples from 1960s we looked at last week and remains popular today particularly in its stylised realisation.
Why did it ‘end’? (Think critically – [how] does a movement in art/design ‘end’?
Changing fashions and ideologies - too decorative for the ‘modern’ aesthetic.
Changing customer base for graphic design (in which a significant proportion of the movement was manifested), moving beyond the entertainment industry (and its associated products )-
Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972)
A then amateur designer, born in Stuttgart, Germany. He went to art school in Munich and where he was exposed to the then popular Art Nouveau movement, and the emerging work of the Beggarstaff Brothers.
The Beggarstaff brothers were William Nicholson and James Pryde - Reductive Abstractio
Sachplakat - plakatstil
Bernhard contributed significantly to the development of modern design, advertising and culture in the early 20th century.
His design for the Priester match company; the winning poster for a competition, saw him utilising an ethos of ‘addition by subtraction’, removing any elements which competed with the poster’s main meaning. His reductive compositions marked a dramatic change in German poster design, and bhe chose to include only the company name and a simplified image of the product no metaphor was used, no complicated iconological reading was required, no sense of movement or time or other complex techniques were employed, just a declarative message.
This iconic style became known as an ‘object poster’ or Sachplakat, and was part of a larger movement called plakatstil – ‘poster style’ where nothing obscures the product within the design message. It presented a direct rejection of the ornamental complexity which had gradually become associated with Art Nouveau – despite its initial ideology which embraced simplicity.
Cubism
Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
Georges Braque, Large Nude,
1908,
The name ‘Cubism’ may derive from Louis Vauxcelles’ comment that Georges Braque’s paintings exhibited in Paris in 1908 showed everything reduced to ‘geometric outlines’ and ‘cubes’.
Paul Cezanne
Cubism was partly influenced by the late work of Paul Cezanne in which he explored representations of reality, the illusionism of perspective and the challenges of Issue of how to creating images of three-dimensional objects on a two dimensional surface. See Cezanne’s Doubt Maurice Merleau Ponty.
Analytic Cubism:
The earlier stage. More austere, muted colour palette, sense of kinetic treatment of the image, rigidly geometric.
Synthetic Cubism
Latter stage - 1913-1920s. Incorporated college and used objects such as
newspaper clippings, music scores, tickets, labels , even cigarette ends. Questioning
the role and quality of ‘painting’, moving beyond the frame and the flat surface.
Cubism in Literature
Cubism was a revolution in the visual arts and its influence extended to other artistic fields, outside painting and sculpture. See the written work of Gertrude Stein, the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Salmon and Pierre Reverdy and others.
‘Cubism began a new artistic tradition and way of seeing that challenged the four-hundred-year Renaissance tradition of pictorial art... By developing a new approach to visual composition, cubism changed the course of painting and to some extent graphic design as well. Its visual inventions became a catalyst for experiments that pushed art and design toward geometric abstraction and new attitudes toward pictorial space.’ (Philip B. Meggs/Alston W. Purvis).
Artists continued to seek new ways of expressing modern life. In Italy, during and towards
the end of Cubism came another influential movement
Futurist Manifesto
Read by Charles bernstein,
American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. The manifesto voiced enthusiasm for war, the machine age, speed, and modern life. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane and the industrial city. The Futurists looked towards a new Italy; ‘out with the old, in with the new’. Marinetti asserted ‘we will free Italy from her innumerable museums which cover her like countless cemeteries, proposing art should embrace industry and technology: ‘We declare … a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing
motor car … is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’ (the celebrated ancient Greek sculpture in the Louvre museum in Paris). Incorporating elements of Cubism and other movements including Neo-Impressionism, the Futurist style suggested dynamism and energy.
