Constructivism art

Constructivism was a movement that was active from 1913 to the 1940’s. It was a movement created by the Russian avant-garde, but quickly spread to the rest of the continent. Constructivist art is committed to complete abstraction with a devotion to modernity, where themes are often geometric, experimental and rarely emotional. Objective forms carrying universal meaning were far more suitable to the movement than subjective or individualistic forms. Constructivist themes are also quite minimal, where the artwork is broken down to its most basic elements. New media was often used in the creation of works, which helped to create a style of art that was orderly. An art of order was desirable at the time because it was just after I World War that the movement arose, which suggested a need for understanding, unity and peace. Famous artists of the Constructivist movement include Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, Olga Rozanova, Alexandra Exter, Naum Gabo, El Lissitzky, Antoine Pevsner, Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Vesnin.

Constructivism, Russian Konstruktivizm, Russian artistic and architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the “painting reliefs”—abstract geometric constructions—of Vladimir Tatlin. The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was “to construct” art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology.

Tatlin's most famous piece remains his "Monument to the Third International" (1919-20, Moscow), a 22-ft-high (6.7-m) iron frame on which rested a revolving cylinder, cube, and cone, all made of glass which was originally designed for massive scale. After the 1917 Revolution, Tatlin (considered the father of Russian Constructivism) worked for the new Soviet Education Commissariate which used artists and art to educate the public. During this period, he developed an officially authorized art form which utilized 'real materials in real space'. His project for a Monument of the Third International marked his first foray into architecture and became a symbol for Russian avant-garde architecture and International Modernism.

The constructivists believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. Tatlin was crucially influenced by Picasso's Cubist constructions (Construction 1914) which he saw in Picasso's studio in Paris in 1913. These were three-dimensional still lifes made of scrap materials. Tatlin began to make his own but they were completely abstract and made of industrial materials. By 1921 Russian artists who followed Tatlin's ideas were calling themselves Constructivists and in 1923 a manifesto was published in their magazine Lef: 'The material formation of the object is to be substituted for its aesthetic combination. The object is to be treated as a whole and thus will be of no discernible 'style' but simply a product of an industrial order like a car, an aeroplane and such like. Constructivism is a purely technical mastery and organization of materials.' Constructivism was suppressed in Russia in the 1920s but was brought to the West by Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner and has been a major influence on modern sculpture.

Other painters, sculptors, and photographers working during this time were usually involved with industrial materials such as glass, steel, and plastic in clearly defined arrangements. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern mediums, members were also called artist-engineers.

Constructivism rejected the idea of autonomous art in favor of art as a practice directed towards social purposes. Constructivism had a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic and elsewhere, before being replaced by Socialist Realism. Its motifs have sporadically recurred in other art movements since.

The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appears as a positive term in Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Alexei Gan used the word as the title of his book Constructivism, which was printed in 1922. Constructivism was a post-World War I outgrowth of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the 'corner-counter reliefs' of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. The term itself would be coined by the sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, who developed an industrial, angular approach to their work, while its geometric abstraction owed something to the Suprematism of Kasimir Malevich. The teaching basis for the new movement was laid by The Commissariat of Enlightenment (or Narkompros) the Bolshevik government's cultural and educational ministry headed by Anatoliy Vasilievich Lunacharsky who suppressed the old Petrograd Academy of Fine Arts and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1918. IZO, the Commissariat's artistic bureau was run during the Russian Civil War mainly by Futurists, who published the journal Art of the Commune. The focus for Constructivism in Moscow was VKhUTEMAS, the school for art and design established in 1919. Gabo later stated that teaching at the school was focused more on political and ideological discussion than art-making. Despite this, Gabo himself designed a radio transmitter in 1920 (and would submit a design to the Palace of the Soviets competition in 1930).

Constructivism as theory and practice derived itself from a series of debates at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow, from 1920–22. After deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky for his 'mysticism', The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Alexei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would arrive at a definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of the object, and tektonika, its spatial presence. Initially the Constructivists worked on three-dimensional constructions as a first step to participation in industry: the OBMOKhU (Society of Young Artists) exhibition showed these three dimensional compositions, by Rodchenko, Stepanova, Karl Ioganson and the Stenberg Brothers. Later the definition would be extended to designs for two-dimensional works such as books or posters, with montage and factography becoming important concepts.

Art in the service of the Revolution

As much as involving itself in designs for industry, the Constructivists worked on public festivals and street designs for the post-October revolution Bolshevik government. Perhaps the most famous of these was in Vitebsk, where Malevich's UNOVIS Group painted propaganda plaques and buildings (the best known being El Lissitzky's poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919)). Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky's declaration 'the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes', artists and designers participated in public life throughout the Civil War. A striking instance was the proposed festival for the Comintern congress in 1921 by Alexander Vesnin and Liubov Popova, which resembled the constructions of the OBMOKhU exhibition as well as their work for the theatre. There was a great deal of overlap in this period between Constructivism and Proletkult, the ideas of which concerning the need to create an entirely new culture struck a chord with the Constructivists. In addition some Constructivists were heavily involved in the 'ROSTA Windows', a Bolshevik public information campaign of around 1920. Some of the most famous of these were by the poet-painter Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vladimir Lebedev.

As a part of the early Soviet youth movement, the constructivists took an artistic outlook aimed to encompass cognitive, material activity, and the whole of spirituality of mankind. The artists tried to create works that would take the viewer out of the traditional setting and make them an active viewer of the artwork. In this it had similarities with the Russian Formalists' theory of 'making strange', and accordingly their leading theorist Viktor Shklovsky worked closely with the Constructivists, as did other formalists like Osip Brik. These theories were tested in the theatre, particularly in the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had set up what he called 'October in the theatre'. Meyerhold developed a 'biomechanical' acting style, which was influenced both by the circus and by the 'scientific management' theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Meanwhile the stage sets by the likes of Vesnin, Popova and Stepanova tested out Constructivist spatial ideas in a public form. A more populist version of this was developed by Alexander Tairov, with stage sets by Aleksandra Ekster and the Stenberg Brothers. These ideas would go on to influence German directors like Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, as well as the early Soviet cinema.

Tatlin, 'Construction Art' and Productivism

The canonical work of Constructivism was Vladimir Tatlin's proposal for the Monument to the Third International (1919) which combined a machine aesthetic with dynamic components celebrating technology such as searchlights and projection screens. Gabo publicly criticized Tatlin's design saying Either create functional houses and bridges or create pure art, not both. This had already led to a major split in the Moscow group in 1920 when Gabo and Pevsner's Realistic Manifesto asserted a spiritual core for the movement. This was opposed to the utilitarian and adaptable version of Constructivism held by Tatlin and Rodchenko. Tatlin's work was immediately hailed by artists in Germany as a revolution in art: a 1920 photo shows George Grosz and John Heartfield holding a placard saying 'Art is Dead – Long Live Tatlin's Machine Art', while the designs for the tower were published in Bruno Taut's magazine Fruhlicht.

Tatlin's tower started a period of exchange of ideas between Moscow and Berlin, something reinforced by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg's Soviet-German magazine Veshch-Gegenstand-Objet which spread the idea of 'Construction art', as did the Constructivist exhibits at the 1922 Russische Ausstellung in Berlin, organized by Lissitzky. A 'Constructivist international' was formed, which met with Dadaists and De Stijl artists in Germany in 1922. Participants in this short-lived international included Lissitzky, Hans Richter, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. However the idea of 'art' was becoming anathema to the Russian Constructivists: the INKhUK debates of 1920–22 had culminated in the theory of Productivism propounded by Osip Brik and others, which demanded direct participation in industry and the end of easel painting. Tatlin was one of the first to answer this and attempt to transfer his talents to industrial production, with his designs for an economical stove, for workers' overalls and for furniture. The Utopian element in Constructivism was maintained by his 'letatlin', a flying machine which he worked on until the 1930s.

Constructivism and Consumerism

In 1921, a New Economic Policy was set in place in the Soviet Union, which reintroduced a limited state capitalism into the Soviet economy. Rodchenko, Stepanova, and others made advertising for the co-operatives that were now in competition with commercial businesses. The poet-artist Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rodchenko worked together and called themselves "advertising constructors". Together they designed eye-catching images featuring bright colours, geometric shapes, and bold lettering. The lettering of most of these designs was intended to create a reaction, and function on emotional and substantive levels – most were designed for the state-run department store Mosselprom in Moscow, for pacifiers, cooking oil, beer and other quotidian products, with Mayakovsky claiming that his 'nowhere else but Mosselprom' verse was one of the best he ever wrote.

In addition, several artists tried to work in clothes design with varying levels of success: Varvara Stepanova designed dresses with bright, geometric patterns that were mass-produced, although workers' overalls by Tatlin and Rodchenko never achieved this and remained prototypes. The painter and designer Lyubov Popova designed a kind of Constructivist flapper dress before her early death in 1924, the plans for which were published in the journal LEF. In these works Constructivists showed a willingness to involve themselves in fashion and the mass market, which they tried to balance with their Communist beliefs.

Concrete art

Concrete art and design or concretism is an abstractionist movement that evolved in the 1930s out of the work of De Stijl, the futurists and Kandinsky around the Swiss painter Max Bill. The term "concrete art" was first introduced by Theo van Doesburg in his "Manifesto of Concrete Art" (1930) published in the first and only issue of magazine Art Concrete:

1. Art is universal;

2. The work of art must be entirely conceived and shaped by the spirit execution. It does not receive data from the formal nature, or sensuality, or the sentimentality. We want to exclude lyricism, dramatism, symbolism, etc;

3. The canvas is to be built entirely with purely visual elements, his plans and colors. A pictorial element has no meaning other than "himself" in the canvas the consequence is "himself";

4. The construction of the canvas, also controllable visually;

5. The technique should be mechanics, anti-impressionist;

6. Effort to absolute clarity.

In his understanding, this form of abstractionism must be free of any symbolical association with reality, arguing that lines and colors are concrete by themselves.

Ever since the cave age, man has been painting still lives, landscapes, and nudes. These artists do not wish to copy nature. They do not wish to reproduce but to produce. But then nothing is less abstract than Abstract art. This is why Van Doesburg and Kandinsky have suggested that Abstract art should called Concrete art.

Artists should not sign their works of Concrete art. These paintings, sculptures, objects should remain anonymous and form part of nature’s great workshop as leaves do, and clouds, animals, men. Yes, once again become part of nature. These artists should work communally as did the artists of the Middle Age.

The Swiss artist Max Bill later became the flag bearer for Concrete art organizing the first international exhibition in Basle in 1944. He stated that the aim of Concrete art is to create 'in a visible and tangible form things which did not previously exist to represent abstract thoughts in a sensuous and tangible form'. In practice Concrete art is very close to Constructivism and there is a museum of Constructive and Concrete art in Zurich, Switzerland.

The movement came to fruition in Northern Italy and France in the 1940s and 1950's through the work of the groups Movement of art concrete (MAC) and Space.

Abstraction in Poland

In neighboring Poland, where we saw waving a current avant-garde, expressionist and "formists" constructivism led to the creation of the group "Blok" (1924-26), inspired by M. Szezuka that evolved from Suprematism Constructivism commitment to communism. The group's magazine Praesens "(which, with its" Unism "resume line malevitchean purified), would, in 1929, the group "RA" ("revolutionary artists"), with H. Stazewski and the sculptor K. Kobro, a new way by profit, while H. Berlewi was engaging in an online "Mecano-making, " the study of optical vibrations. In all this turmoil has resulted, in 1931, creating the first museum of abstract art and avant-garde in Europe, in Lodz, which might last.

Abstraction in U.R.S.S.

These were years of ferment within the framework of the Soviet revolution in plant heritage by baking a politicized before, we observe - as we have seen its impact on architecture. The Department of Plastic Arts of the People's Commissariat for Education, IZO, Lucacharsky excited by the workshops free Svonsas, which replaced the Academy of St Petersburg in 1918 and professed where Malevich, as in the UNOVIS Vitebok, Institutes of Culture Arts, here in Moscow, the Inkhuk where Kandinsky taught in 1920, passing away To the "Bauhaus" since losing its tendency, and Suprematism and Constructivism where doctrines were necessary, the Vikhutein, Technical Institute of Moscow, dominated by Tatlin that there, rather monotonously made many disciples, among them the brothers G. and V. Stenberg and K. Medunetsky - were so many bodies active propaganda of an art, or an "agit-prop" in the theater, with its sets, played an important role, as the poster and the most graphic arts, abstract formulations which would otherwise also took to the streets in festive decorations, or in trains (and boats) that advertising across the vast country. In 1922, an exhibition of Soviet avant-garde in Berlin, was to some extent, the swan song of such action.

In reality, the USSR, beyond its immediate turmoil, the abstraction was not more than an accident, between the naturalist tradition more or less a modernized neoplasticism popular, nationalist, and his recovery as early as 1920, scholars adhering to the new political , which eventually annihilate, soon, the revolutionary vanguard.

Vitatline Vladimir (1885-1953)

In 1919, Vitatline (1885-1953) declared that Suprematism was "the sum of all the mistakes of the past", it expresses its opposition to personal and ideological Malevich. Disciple Larianov, marked by a structured and whose colorful expressionism was not unconnected with the interest in traditional icons. Tatlin had an adventurous youth who took him to Paris in 1913, there admiring the buildings raised by Picasso, based on their own "counter-reliefs" which, with experiences of materials and applications in the corners of rooms, modifying its spatiality, created the constructivist movement in 1927, enriched by a new flying machine invented organic, "Latatlin" - but especially in 1919-20, the project of the monument to the Third International, we already know helical construction of a fleeting expression "Komfuturism. Artistic animator, teacher, victorious defender of the principle of "production art" against the "art lab" (which represented Suprematism) a "productivist" politicized, proclaimed in 1921, with rejection of easel painting, and that led to his craft, poster, the theatrical decor already practiced in youth (and who was prominent field of action of his movement, thanks primarily to the enactments (V. Mayerhold) - none of this prevented the misfortune of Tatlin, compared to the realism in the official 30 years. The his part, Mr Rodechenko (1881-1956), coming more or less of futurism, the author of geometric designs consisting of animated games curves made in step, methodically (1915-16), and a painting "Black on black," presented polemically against Malevich in 1919, he practiced construction surprises, mobile and linear metal with which participated in 1917, with Tatlin and the disciple of G. Yakulov at the famous Coffee Pitoresque decor, lively artistic center of Moscow, in these years fermentation. Reduced, like Tatlin, applied arts and design, "he devoted himself to photomontage and typesetting. In these areas stood out El Lissitzky (1890 - 1941), engineer and architect, for that matter, a disciple of Malevich, who went from Suprematism to constructivism, the "History of two squares" (1922) and their "prouns”, geometric constructions in space, originally painted. In large photomontage, made the decoration of the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition of Printing, Cologne, 1930 - and so too, as in 1920-24, the famous “Lenin Tribune”, we have seen, represented the dictator of an imaginary construction of the high iron. In 1926, El Lissitzky wrote the interior architecture of the "abstract case" to the International Exhibition in Dresden, which he considered his major work. Schwittors friend and collaborator and Arp, and V. Doesbourg, related to the "Bauhaus", as we know, it was for you to connect more regularly between the Russian and the current world West over the years 20.

Kazimir Malevitch (1878-1935)

K. Malevich (1878-1935), from Impressionism and Symbolism and Art Nouveau, Cezanne, Matisse and Derain's, national painter of rustic scenes, composed in 1911-12 figures in a geometric cylindrical, cube-futurist ("Grinder” , 1912-13, Yale University, USA), influenced by Léger, to the ends of abstractization of geometric bodies of revolution, painted with careful modeling in 1912-13, the year he adopted a cubist imagery to a syntactic "transnational "(" Zaorum ", as we saw), or" alogic, compositions, not without humor confused with the spirit "given" ("An Englishman in Moscow, 1913-14, Amsterdam," Partial Eclipse with Mona Lisa " 1914, col. part. Leningrad). But in 1915, Malevich said he made the first works "suprematists," based on the elementary forms of square, circle and cross vertical-horizontal rectangles. The famous "square black on white" (Tretyakov Museum, Moscow), shown in 1915, is emblematic of this phase, possibly marked the work of decorating the Futurist opera "Victory Over the Sun" (1913), with music by M. Matinchine, translator of "Du Cubisme" of Gleizer - which would, in 1917, the painter of "realism in space," in large colored bands, interested in psycho-physiological research on the art visible.

The "Suprematism" as a supreme aesthetic state "monumental", "not objective" deduction based on a conceptual level, is rooted in the philosophical thought of the post-Kantian metaphysics P. D. Ouspenki (“Tercium Organum”, 1911) who, referring to a" higher form of existence" and announcing a "language of the future”, regardless of the real world, exercise (perhaps through Matinchine) great influence on the painter, also interested in "the fourth dimension" (Ouspenki, 1908, on "space-time continuum" of mathematics of Minkowski, 1908) - and still fascinated by the symbolist rhetoric inherent in that thought. "All they're ready to lose all hold new findings (Ouspenki, 1913) applies to the diligence of whom Malevich" Black Square "was" a flat-surface alive, now even born "(" From Cubism and Futurism and Suprematism, a new pictorial realism, 1916); test would be resumed in 1920, as we know, in From Cezanne to Suprematism, the first semantic unit building free pair of systems "flat surfaces" in space, unconditional freedom of movement (cf. A. B. Nakov, 1975) - "zero," which since 1915 has defined its pictorial experience, was a full, equal to the infinite and absolute, the "harmony, rhythm and beauty" (Mirror Suprematist, 1923 ), not the end of a speech earlier aesthetic, a kind of nillyism (cf. D. Valle, 1967). It always defended Malevich, a work that has consistently been to the "square white on white" (1918, MAM, New York), after three or four years of multiple compositions that have the volume, as those architectural possible, the "planitis ". Numerous texts by Die Welt Gegentandslose ("The world has no purpose," published by the Bauhaus, 1927), proclaim or defend a polemical aesthetic and philosophical doctrine that the painter was able to teach in Vitebsk, against the wishes of Chagall, and won, the group UNOVIS, which created in 1920-21, and within two years, the Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad - but that already attacked in 1919 by the Constructivists was supposed by idealism, contrary to official line aesthetic and hardly tolerated, as in 1927. Since 1930, the year he was arrested by secret police, conducted a Malevich painting figurative landscapes and portraits that are not without bitter irony - and, in 1935, was buried in a coffin suprematist that he had intended, causing painted on a white background a circle and a black square.

Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964)

The Russian avant-garde, extremely varied and controversial, early Cubism fascinated adapted to a cube-Futurism, as seen, produced the first abstract works in 1910-11, with M. Larionov (1881-1964) and N. Gontacharova (1881-1962), the movement of "Lucism” ("Rayonnism" – "rayonisme" in French), presented in 1913 as a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, controversy and paradoxically organized against Western culture - although Apollinaire to defend his Paris show in the following year. The forms are painted "spatial forms obtained by the crossing of reflected rays of various objects"; located "outside of time and space", want a "fourth dimension" that had met the Cubist more speculative. The career of pictorial Larionov, coming a expressionist painting, popular and anecdotal, for ideological nationalism, and past, as seen by profuse decanted and pioneering activities in the founding of the groups "Jack of Diamonds" (1910), "Donkey Tail" (1912) and "The Target" (1913), ended in 1915, leaving Russia to integrate, set designer and costume designer as brilliant in the company of Diaghilev. Gontacharova, he followed his destiny, though, around 1955, he was reminded in Paris, retracing screens "Rayonnist" of recent cosmic inspiration.

But two other abstract movements, and violently opposed, would occupy more significantly the scene Soviet and then Russia since 1915: the "Suprematism" of Malevich (and Leporskaia A., V. Ernrolaeva, L. Khidekel, N. M. Suetine, G. Kluza, IG Ghaschuik, I. Kliuns, I. Puni, M. Menkov and futuristic O. Rezanov), as manifest in that year published, and "constructivism" of Tatlin and Rodchenko (and Yakulov G., J. Annenkov , W. Ermilov, V. Stepanova and earlier Cubist and Suprematist Vdaltsova and L. N. Popova, as Klium Vernine architects and brothers) and, between two situations (besides A. Exter, coming from the cube-futurism ), the movement "proun" Ed Lisitzky since 1919. Also in this range of options (and parties) realistic Manifest of Prevsner and Galv, in 1920 came forward, constructivist side, a proposal that would have more lasting effect on the sculpture.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

The simultaneity of the abstract Delaunay discs in 1912 (and the "timing" of his disciples), the compositions of varied root cubist and futurist Picabia in 1912-13, the practice of "force-lines" of the Futurists and their "states soul" in Boccioni, Balla and Severini, provide many other situations aesthetic that integrate abstraction, as historically necessary conclusion. And if, "in the background, the Cubist movement and was wanted on a referral to abstraction" (L. Degand, 1953), this can be thought of experimentalism, from Van Gogh to Kandinsky. W. Kandinsky (1866-1944), lawyer qualified in its native Russia, was soon attracted by the folk art that made him "get into the paint and in 1896 went to Munich where the new art attracted him in the "Phalanx " who founded (1901-04) and in which he created his own school, a practice remembered pictorial color in landscapes of Moscow and "romantic paintings, something Symbolists (" Lancer in the landscape”, 1906; “Scream", 1907). Was through that landscape, improvising, Kandinsky activated your palette by Fauve and expressionist influence, coming from Jawlensky, his companion in Murnane where he settled in 1908, and which soon abandoned, to found "Der Reiter Blane" with F. Mara, in 1911. It was here that the painting Kandinsky developed into the abstract, through an ever greater uncertainty and a formal tone in color ("Landscape with bell tower”, 1909, MAM, Paris; "Improvisation on auburn”, 1910, MAM, Paris).

Kandinsky's influence was decisive in the evolution of German painting in Munich from his essay Uber geistig in der Kunst ("On the Spiritual in Art", written in 1910) defined a new aesthetic that situation anthroposophy R. Steiner scored. The artwork is a "living being" with an "inner life" from an "inner necessity of the soul expressed through the symbolic meaning of shapes and colors and communicating the arrival of the "Kingdom of the Spirit" on "time of great spirituality". For these statements, the author has prepared a new chance in artistic creation that a first abstract watercolor, composition of blemishes and fine calligraphy (MAM, Paris), proposed in 1910 - not without that, this year, and until 1913 in "Improvisations" and "Compositions", reference figuratively landscaping continued alternately present. In "With the black bow" (1912, MAM, Paris) in his great shock of ways, where "chaotic cosmos is born", Kandinsky made a definitive work that in 1914, "Table with a Red Spot" (MAM, Paris), "Escape" (Guggenheim Museum, New York), and the four panels made for a collector of New York ("Compositions" which have been designated by the names of four seasons, 1914, MAM, New York and the Guggenheim Museum, No. 1) complete, in its vigorous and colorful forms of conflict euphoric. That same year, with the war, Kandinsky left Munich to Moscow, leaving there his former student and colleague G. Munter (donation to the Municipal Museum in Munich), whose art influenced, along with Jawlensky. A new period of its production took place there, rather fruitful given the difficulties of war and occupation officials after they had as a teacher, founder of a foiled Institute of Artistic Culture (1919) and an Artistic Academy of Sciences in 1921, the year left Russia for Germany. Kandinsky's participation in the Soviet artistic policy was, however, enthusiastic, by temperament more isolated, that remained on the sidelines of a vanguard of committed groups and, in a revolutionary and Berlin Dada, its activity was also reduced. The "Bauhaus", appeared to him as a solution and there was an invite to assume there teaching, along with Klee that was already there. Since 1921, but the painter made frames where strict geometric shapes were articulated with others, calligraphy and free spots ("White Background", 1920, Leningrad, "Red Spot II", 1921, Basel, "Chess", 1921, Guggenheim Museum, New York), on what it was intended to mark constructivist view, to some extent acceptable, but of which the art of Kandinsky defended by denial of the mechanistic principle (cf. W. Grohmann, 1958). It was, rather, an investigation into the relationship between figures and background, located beyond the romanticism of the Munich period. And in this way the painter had to follow in subsequent years.

The encoding of a "new aesthetic that could only score when the signs become symbols", now under pure geometric shapes, circles, straight lines crossed and serpentine curves and distinct from each other within a determined color, reflected the renewed commitment of Kandinsky observation of structural forms in their relations or their "laws of supply". A new test, Punk und Linie zu Flach, "published in 1926, now notes on 1914, reflecting on these" preliminary problems, a science of art, "notes a number of pleadings that served the school professed in the "Bauhaus" however transferred to Dessau, it is also an "organic continuity" test of 1912. The pictures painted then continue to put the problem of space through various combinations of formal, more stringent or more flexible, from key figures used, circle, triangle and square, in a game serious or gay, between "The black circle" (1923, col. part., Paris) and 'Quiet Tension" (1924, MAM, Paris), "Some circles" (1926, Guggenheim Museum, New York) and "Yellow, Red, Blue" (1925, MAM, Paris).

In 1923, the Nazis closed the “Bauhaus" Kandinsky and forced into exile in Paris-Neville, where he died. ”Development in brown" (1933, MAM, Paris) was the last painting in Germany, sad in his allusion; Relations, 1934, (col. part. New York), with its fairy-like joy, is already a framework in Paris, a new period in which, amid considerable difficulties, because his art, then isolated, was met with reluctance and the painter has innovated a greater sense of "baroque exuberance " (W. Grohmann, 1958) that "Composition IX" (1936, MAM, Paris) is a noted example in its profusion of dancing figures on diagonal bands of colored light, or "dominant Curve" (1936, Museum Guggenheim , New York), or "Medium accompanied" (1937, col. part., Paris) in scenes that played at the end of his work, are subject to flight and the rise in spiritual symbolism. "The last frames are the echo of a transitory and transparent world" (W. Grohmann, 1958), which resemble primitive pre-Columbian so married to the memory of Russian folklore itself. The last frame done, "Enthusiasm tempered" (MAM, Paris), makes sail in a pink background, strange life forms, the life of an embryo again.

The "end of theory" that Kandinsky explained in his essay of 1926 was actually of his painting, "1. Find life, 2. Make visible your pulse, 3. Establish the laws that govern life." This organic phase showed a romantic source of Abstract Expressionism to near 1920, and phase equilibrium in a constant and wisdom never denied that, at its points of contact with the art of Klee, does not give up as a spiritualist convention does not forget folk art of his country, received the first invitation to the adventure of painting.

History of Western Art (1750-2000)

The Abstraction

Developing in parallel to cubism and futurism, expressionism and Dada, and surrealism as well, receiving inflows of them revolutionary, a new aesthetic situation is defined, between 1910 and 1917, in Western art that dominate long, sooner or later : the abstraction.

Mental attitude and sensitivity whose roots lie in the Neolithic as the Romanesque art of the steppes and in the western Irish twists of the illuminations of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance rhythmic concerns, under Pythagorean lesson, she realizes that a spirit of abstraction to figuration spirit offers compensation, but the historical alternation, responding to cultural and indexes at the beginning of the nineteenth century erupted in mutation, in favor of an extreme evolution of contemporary aesthetic discourse - and already we've seen of Impressionism in the divide, but deny themselves fundamentally naturalism figurative earlier.
Reflection on the colors of Goethe (Zur Farbenlehre, 1810) unwelcome at the time, its psychological effect against the physical theories of Newton, the theory of pure visuality K. Fiedler (who died in 1895, with only collected writings in 1914: Shriften uber Kunst) adopted H. Hilderbrand (Problem der Form, 1893), with recovery of the sense "formal" non-free of classic criterion, and the thesis W. Worringer on Abstraktion und Einfühlung, prepared in German cultural circles in Munich especially (but not the French, who ignored such works), an awareness of the problems posed by an artistic creation "tautogoric" (Schlegel) - only to itself, contrary to due diligence "allegorical" of all figurative formulation. Or an awareness of the infinite as opposed to a finite implies that the naturalistic representation. The abstraction would thus be an "antifiguration" (C. P. Brue, 1955) that is sufficient in itself without external boundaries.

The aesthetic and philosophical speculations such must be added, in Germany, too, in the context of theorizing psychologistic call school in Berlin, around 1912, the influence of "Gestaltheorie" (theory of form, structure) with works of M. Wertheimer, K. Koffka and W. Kohler (Gestaltpsychology, published in the United States in 1929) that, opposed to analytical psychology, define the behavior of the set, in correspondence organized and interdependent components, which are just formal expression and formalizing in the field of aesthetics.

If Cézanne, in 1904, reported in the treatment codable geometric models of nature, and M. Denis, already in 1890, remembered that a framework is a priority, "a flat surface covered with colors" on it pointing to the fundamental situation of abstract painting to Worringer, the "abstraction" reflected the desire of separating hostile nature, and not "communion" in an anguished isolation or changed, that intellectual and sensitively, defended himself, as alien to the everyday world, but it also tended to "access to the underlying archetypal forms that random variations introduced the world today (H. Read, 1955 ), imparting a sense of this, through a pedagogical action. The demand thus rendered metaphysics leads, finally, amid a crisis mythology of the Western world, an "ultramitologie" (J.-A. France, 1959) of perfect geometric expression by one of two major ways in which art abstract was stabilized.

The other is located in, exacerbation of feelings - and its root expressionist (or surrealistic) Cubist corresponds to the root (or cube-futurist) of the first.

The names, descriptive or controversy, which received the abstraction, sometimes reflect their own rootedness, now a timing of steps walked or aesthetics than formulated. The "abstract expressionism" or "lyrical abstraction" marking the first situation to the borders of "informality" (M. Tapio, 1951) or "action painting" ("action painting" or "gestural") and "gesturalism "H. Rosenberg, 1952) or "tachisme" (from tache, "spot, C. Estienne, 1954). But theoretical situations or particularistic movements of geometric abstraction rooted in Cubist, are the names of Russian constructivism "and" Suprematism, "or the Dutch" neoplasticism "and" elementarism "- but they joined a new concept of Concrete "(TV Doesbourg, 1951), which sought to oppose the abstraction, considering it" over the period of research and experience speculative.” For G. Mathieu (1951), these situations (also known as "cold abstraction" as opposed to the expressionistic embellishments) fit into the generic term "aformalism. Later, around 1960, an art-based optical effects will take the name of American "op'art" while investigations led to the mechanical "kinetic art", and another in a geometric framework or formalistic.

The classification of "non-figurative" rather vague, sought to oppose the type geometric abstraction, ignoring the "figures" of this geometry and only thinking about the nature of what we thought were not well founded their own experiences. In the immediate postwar period, however, a new school of Paris "has adopted this name, rooting on her accepting an impressionist, retained by the emotion of the original natural subject. "No goal", for its part, label was proposed by H. Rebay, the United States in 40 years, a recovery that had not fortune.

In the two trunks herd of abstraction we thus define themselves both situations, a sentimental expression and expression of mental or other geometric, with that priority, immediately taken up in 1910 and 1920 by Kandinsky, after long experience figurative expressionist, while the second is exemplified in Malevich and Mondrian in 1913-14, in 1917 - both coming from Cubism to Suprematism or the neoplasticism, respectively.

The larger or more charismatic historical importance of Mondrian is the exemplary logic of his diligence as much of their persistence, one possible action that cannot benefit Malevich in the Stalin Soviet Union s. The forwarding logic of both objected to the accident that lies at the base of the abstraction of Kandinsky, unable to read figuratively a "Meda" Monet in 1895, and, surprised by a suddenly seen his own composition instead, leaning against a wall of his studio in 1908.

But beyond the current two or more channels of abstraction, it should be noted, with a focus on time (although other relations of reading should be made in various artists), the interpretation of a musical inspiration in visual terms of a universe of sounds, rhythmic affinity. In 1942 the Czech F. Kupka (1871-1957) exhibited in Paris (where he installed in 1895) a screen titled "Disks of Newton" with, by caption, "Amorphous, escape in two colors" (Prague), probably 1910. Then the painter traveled a long way to Fauvism and symbolism to expressionism, influenced by bright, dynamic, having illustrator acerbic humor ("L'Assiette au Beurre") and also attended the group's "Golden Section". The series of their "vertical planes" in 1912-13 (MAM, Paris, etc...), also represents a planned museum already detectable in "piano keys – the "lake of 1909 (Prague) with its vertical listing “planes of color." In the '30s, Kupka inspire would jazz ("Jazz-hot No. 1, 1935, MAM, Paris), a work illegally in many curiosities that changed the cosmic sciences such as music and led the test Creations dans les arts plastiques (1923), in a situation of isolated pioneer. In a similar musical inspiration can subscribe to the Lithuanian painter and composer M. K. Ciurhouris, who died in 1911, working in S. Petersburg since 1906, abstract compositions that mark since 1904, with arabesques of geometric shapes in the "Sonatas of stars, allegro and andante" (1908, Kaunas, Lithuania) took a diluted symbolic figuration, mentioned above. The Russian S. Charchouse, in turn, come and experience "given", he also drew on Bach or Beethoven, to compositions of fine monocronism, a painting so that the symbolism lurks.

Mirror of the world: a new history of art

Julian Bell, himself a painter, interprets art from the standpoint of the creator, trying to establish a rapport between the viewer and the artist. Its purpose is to encourage the viewer to, first, look at the artwork, and only then, equate the essence and meaning. Challenge us here to look at art as a reflection - mirror - the human condition.

Mirror of the World traces the evolution of visual arts through time and space, breaking down boundaries between tribes, nations and religions, giving us an analysis - and cross-cultural - the diversity of works of art and how these may relate to from or even rooted in each other and in their social and political contexts.

Humans tell stories, and humans make objects to dazzle the eyes. Sometimes, these stories relate to those objects. This kind of narrative, which is called history of art, born from the desire to imagine how someone would live in another time, and be amazed at what these hands have done. Art historians have also tried to explain why objects are made of different ways, depending on the time and place. That is what this book intends to do.

But a report of this type has an inherent difficulty. A work of art seeks to capture and hold our attention: a story of art pushes forward, paving the way through the territories of the imagination. In an art history of general scope, like this, the voltage can be constant. At each step, the narrator and the listener will feel the desire to have a little more and look longer.

Why then insist on this model? We live smothered by images. Worldwide, streets and screens offer a diverse jumble of visual information and rambling. We are confronted with an amalgam of quotes art - Japan century. Nineteenth-century France, Thirteenth-century Rome XVI, Aboriginal Australia - and it would be good to know the vocabulary where it came from what. And it would be good to understand your grammar. How they interact images? How are rooted in the experience of others? What we have in common with the perpetrators?

Questions like these lead stories, not scientific certainty. The story below is told by someone in England in the early twenty. XXI, which tries to encompass thousands of items of clothing on six continents, hoping that on this basis, the reader can continue their own stories. It's more a general introduction to objects and subjects of art history than a comprehensive set of conclusions about them. Do not want to define or redefine what constitutes art, but describes its range of content commonly accepted. The aim is more amplitude than the depth, the opening than be precise.

However, the method of this work could be considered to be relatively thorough. The narrative is woven around objects that have a large reproduction seems good result on the page. The art is not just a question of image compact and easy to fit, although the reader may have that impression here. In this respect, I must admit a personal bias.

I undertook this task after a lifetime of painting. As such I have a habit of being in a room before a given subject that I hope will have a life and stick to a speech of their own. In this work, I see the images the same way: the kind of art on which it focuses less on what is around us - an environment, buildings, decorations, utensils, clothes, jewelry - than what we face, from painting up to the statues and monuments. The immobility of each image introduces another limitation to the discussion.

In writing this report, I worked under three general rules. First, if there is no way to show one thing, it is better not to refer. Choose something like three hundred and fifty works to encompass the history of world art means a difficult balancing act. Many will be disappointed with what was left out, others upset that I mention too many names, without giving them a face. When necessary proved to mention the name of some important figure or phenomenon that cannot be illustrated, I opted for a policy of "looks a lot like". In other cases, preferred to ignore what I cannot offer.

Second, keep the chronological sequence. This directive advantageous for the reader not always proved possible at all, because the analysis varies from one country to another, but I hope that, if working, have a perspective of contrasts from region to region, as well as the affinities between cultures.

My title, Mirror of the World, suggests a third of my premises. I understand the history of art as a frame within which we continually reflected universal history in all its breadth - and not as a window that opens to an independent aesthetic realm. I admit that the records of the changes are related to artistic records of social changes, technological, political and religious, however reversed or reconfigured show that these reflections.

The mirrors can only work with the light they receive, although they may show us things in a different way. My title also indicates what I believe - that the works of art can reveal otherwise invisible realities and act as frames of truth. However, it is mostly the way these objects are made, not its final status, which will dominate the story. The main reason why I got interested in the history of art is the fact that she seemed to make me closer to some extraordinary things and the people who made them.

Questions, confluences

Europe, 1909-1914

Because in reality, the art consists of objects created so refined, is not it? Objects that demonstrates its intrinsic value: that is not what the market wants? Thus, any artist should create a niche for professional products, whatever their mode of expression.

The "imitation of nature", an old European recipe for paint, no longer relevant.

The doctrines of the "new era" gained momentum and visibility with the arrival of the century. XX. By 1910, several raids were on the march in pure visual music, the "abstraction," among the artists of Eastern and Western Europe - the Czech and Lithuanian Frantisek Kupla Mikalojus Ciurlionis, to mention just two. The moment of rupture of Kandinsky, as he describes it, occurred when he entered the studio one night and saw a bridge over the "image of elusive and glowing beauty who posed no identifiable subject." Did not recognize one of his vibrant landscapes, which was on its side. From that moment on, filed Kandinsky, the painting could go without representation. The visual elegance that pervades composition VII his masterwork of 1913, undoubtedly inspired by the Russian folk ornaments, with its lovely colors, however, he insisted, all the elements dictated by the spirit, and were filled with symbolic intent.

The visible world is not simply evaporated in the new art. Their essences had been distilled and freed, as formulas with which one could build a new pictorial universe. They were not only those things that the eye loves to do: recognize contrasts discern images and limited ways, wander, focus and twist, dip in intensity of color, rush and jump to the side. During a concentrated period of four days, the brush of Kandinsky raged on the huge canvas of three meters, with the joyful innocence of a bee to explore a flower.

Short of sight, beyond sight

Europe, USA, 1920-1940

So then, these were some of the tears of the world's leading artists after traumatic wars and revolutions of the 1910s: a series of new - and mostly "harder" and leaner - colors, meaning open. The hypnotic power of what came to be known as the "culture industry": Hollywood, advertising, photojournalism, etc. Plans progressive reduction of visual, the idea of revolution of the masses on the Left, the uncompromising desire to break with all previous forms of human experience. And in contradiction with this, or blending with it, the yearning for stability, restoration and tradition. In this part and the following will make a visit to the ways in which a few artists and groups have made their way through all these pressures.

Other initiatives of the twenties reflected the Russian constructivism. In the Netherlands, formed a group of avant-garde design around the magazine De Stiff in 1917, while in Germany Walter Gropius created the seminal progressive and social design when he founded the school known as the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1912. In both projects participated painters. Piet Mondrian was one of the most important members of the Dutch group, like many visitors to Paris for ten years, this landscape and theosophy had been inspired by the experiments of the Cubists. Than Picasso and Braque had done suggested one could systematically examine the clues that gave us the vision. Was willing to cut the components of the images of landscapes such as Brancusi silhouetted their figures, and with similar intent: the closer one is its simplicity, is closest to a spiritual ideal. In 1920, he was with an absolutely minimal signs of grammar: vertical lines, horizontal lines and primary colors. The sequence of the holdings that led to this abstraction seemed to proceed with an inexorable logic reduction.

Piet Mondrian, Composition I: with red, black, blue and yellow, 1921

From that moment the only way forward was to start building again. In Composition I: with red, black, blue and yellow, 1921, Mondrian asked the eye that has focused in their own ability to judge the relationships and balances, and their own desire for clarity. Initially, the exercise seems vigorous, fresh, stunningly cold (like this old Dutch resurfaces by austerity that we saw earlier in Vermeer). And then slyly begins to conquer. The closed rectangle in the center and its larger cousin in the upper left of the address space to dance, and everything seems to revolve around him, as if they were catalyzing a chemical reaction, an explosion of order. The red, black and yellow open to the world beyond the edge of the frame, projecting through redesigned the dream that you liked De Stijl was undefined spaces that are out. Perhaps the abstraction was in fact a parallel with the newly created figurative painting, a more potent to induce illusions.

The Bauhaus in Germany, had hoped to get an honest progressive and established standards for a clean design lines, ergonomically efficient than would be replicated across the world. However its internal history, over 12 years of operation and change of location, varied because of the excruciating tension between the charismatic host of innovators who were there. One was Vasily Kandinsky, who joined them with a friend who had met in Munich before the war, Paul Klee. Klee - a dry and obstinate presence personnel - carried out a visual investigation honored with enormous implications. Would give the democratic aspirations of the school a whole new level of resilience.

Paul Klee, Twittering machine, 1922

Like Kandinsky, Klee mattered to him relate the painting to music, but brought a more analytical intelligence to the subject. Like Mondrian, Klee separated and isolated the fundamental components of conducting a painting. But in your hands is converted in a box of playthings. Played by testing many things without limits. In his drawings and watercolors, logical thinking academic stretched a hand and communed with the anomalies of the imagination alone, who discovered the dignity and scribbles a resonant power in the fragile and wobbly. Klee's investigations were on par with those of psychology, a science that was expanding. From 1900 onwards, the researchers had opened his eyes to the children's art and the mentally ill. A kind of empathy turns the charm of a crazy experiment, pen and watercolor as machine chatter: in a sense, anyone take a chance to put their imagination on paper, whether skilled or not, is venturing into the absurd. The title contains that Klee had found himself doing: a device that geometric flowers organically, by clicking on a song. In fact, this sheet of 1922 is installed with a reciprocity between the hard and soft that it had begun to resonate through the field of "advanced" art. It is a masterpiece of innocent echo much wider and infinitely cooler than the absurd sexual mechanical Duchamp devoted his ingenuity between 1915 and 1923, called the Large Glass, one of the great black hole that absorbs all of the interpretation of modern art.

Klee and Mondrian, with his desire to re-educate the eye, seem to cast doubt on any possibility of painting based on observation.

Universal Art History of the XIX and XX century

The abstraction will definitely be the great achievement of the XX century sculpture. Abstract art, without any specific meaning, shaped in three dimensions, allowing your gaze total, around, in all its facets and perspectives, turning on its axis, allowing the sculpture will develop a variety of ways and possibilities, and full fruit - except for color, which will be replaced by the type of material, although in some cases the paint is applied to the sculpture as a termination. The abstract sculpture, very similar to the architectural modules of the XX century, but without the functionality and size, the scale is much smaller, space conquest also the basis of the combination of modules and elements predominantly geometric, with density, design and related volumes, concatenated, which will show the actual value solidified material, standing in a vacuum, denser air, settling in an allegorical space in the same way that the paint adheres to the tissue. It thus suggesting a sculpture full of strength and attraction, eminently tactile, woven with metallic materials, organic or inorganic.

In short, for Ana Maria Preckler, XX century sculpture, results rich and varied, a large fertility and creativity, following the vanguard found their own paths, such as abstraction, where you find and hold its majority, a total and absolute fulfillment.

The Second Half XX Century

The Abstract Sculpture

Abstraction was the great achievement of the XX century, movements that constituted the historical vanguards brought the greatest creation, originality, and artistic innovation, changing its structures, proceeding to the moral destruction of traditional art and his amazing reinvention. Starting from Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, which were the pillars upon which it is impressive artistic change, this set of avant-garde movements had to be shut down and formulated in Fauvism and its anti-conventional variety of colors in Cubism, and rupture of the fragmented reality; in Futurism, which shaped the sequence, the dynamics and movement, Expressionism, which had a print man's spirit, in Dada, who idolized the absurd and the object of desire; in Surrealism, who played the subconscious the pictorial way, and abstraction, which broke even more.

Louise Bourgeois (1911 -)

Coming from France, Louise Bourgeois is the North American nationality, a country that arrived in 1938. His artistic training happens in Paris, his birthplace, the Ecole du Louvre, The Academy of Fine Arts and The Academy Julian. He began his work in painting in the decade to reach the forty to sculpture, which unfolds his true vocation, acquiring great fame in his adopted country. His style evolved from the enlarged sculpture, with notes surreal, preferably in painted wood, up to inconcrets forms, anthropomorphic and reports on matters more solid as bronze and stone, which unleashes your imagination and fantasy. From its first production: Spring, 1946-48, bronze painted in white, enlargement and bulbous forms Sleeping Figure, 1950, wooden, primitive, semiabstract.

Richard Serra (1939 -)

Abstract sculptor North American close of minimal art by the grandeur of his compositions, which usually includes a sculpture in her surroundings, turning it into a part of the architecture or nature in which it lies. In its production, uses industrial materials, we highlight: Right Angle, 1969, his series of Prop, quadrangular lamina in vertical construction on the terrace of a wall in the center of which juxtaposes a tape at a right angle with rounded edges.

Max Bill (1908-1994)

Architect, abstract painter and sculptor Max Bill was born in Switzerland in Zurich and studied first at the School of Arts and Crafts, and shortly thereafter the German Bauhaus Dessau, where it relates to Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, Klee and Albers, receiving his rationalist influence. It also has a relationship with the Dutch Neoplasticism by Mondrian and Vantongerloo, belonging to the group "Abstraction-Creation" of Paris, in which he focuses his entire artistic career to the constructivist geometric abstraction. It is considered a pioneer of abstract sculpture, performing with great freedom and without regard to rigid structural frameworks, using motion and curved line on some sculptures. In 1951 he obtained the Prize for Sculpture Biennial. Among his sculptures are: Endless Loop, 1947-49, corrugated tubular shape, simple and elegant.

Minimal Sculpture

Minimal Art was a form of sculptural and painterly geometric abstraction of such monumental despite their main condition of sculpture can enjoy themselves with their authors in the section of the Latest Trends in Contemporary Art in the general context of the painting, since these currents latest trends and extremes produces a differentiation between the sexes.

The Abstract Sculpture in Spain

As with abstract painting in Spain produces a real outbreak of sculptors in the chain, some of which may be termed extraordinary. Only Spain alone could fill the pages of the history of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, such is its richness, variety and originality, no wonder the principles Picassian Cubists were the origins of abstraction, but also the Hispanic print, the force of race, the fertile artistic streak Spanish accumulated over the centuries that shaped the early twentieth century, in virtually all styles and avant-garde, a distinctive art. Abstract sculpture in the second half of the century not just schools, only independent individual figures that stand out for themselves, and surprised by how many different shapes and styles that each of these artists can give a unique art as abstract as arid and austere at times.

Some of the most significant abstract sculptors of the generations that occur in the second half of the century, as a show of abstract sculpture of two types: the one corresponding to the first generation of abstract sculptors, artists were created in the first third of the century, and works in which matter However the following form and sculptural tradition, changing the nature of figurative to abstract, and the sculpture of the second generation, whose artisans are born in the second third of the century, in which matter is multiplied, and introducing new combinations of all sorts of elements (with abundance of organic material), and the way it expands in space, breaking the previous formal unity, sometimes doing architecture, sometimes air suspensions and other installations of great complexity whose pieces spread through soil, and some other inconcret morphologies of nature, pseudo-organic, a versatile and imaginative variety.

Enbil Jorge Oteiza (Orio, Gipuzkoa, 1908 - Donostia, Gipuzkoa, 2003) was a famous sculptor, designer, painter and writer Basque, born in the region of Navarra.

Modernist declared, in 1962 published the book Quosque tandem, which dealt with the prehistoric art in the Basque Country, during which much was inspired.

Of great importance to Spain and ultimately to the Basque Country, his works can be seen in the best museums of your country and Europe. The disarrangement of the space, for example, one of his best known works, is now exposed at the Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.
At their inception, Oteiza makes figurative work in which one perceives the influence of Henry Moore, for his return from Spain introduces herself completely in the path of geometric abstraction, with a free personal creation, influenced by the Master of Suprematism, Malevich .

Palazuelo Pablo de la Peña (Madrid, 6th October 1916 - Galapagar, Madrid, 3 October 2007)

Palzuelo, another large abstract sculpture of geometric forms that his work of great beauty of line and modeling, in the most advanced of its kind and poetic. The clean geometric lines, elegant and soft, finely drawn, modernity and beauty of great design, the basic geometric forged steel plates in laminar, with angles, plans, sections and meetings of great simplicity and play of light and shade; blades gently curved and the modules in L; Interception of plans found are some of the predominant characteristics of his sculptural work.

Eduardo Chillida (San Sebastián, January 10, 1924 - San Sebastian, August 19, 2002) was one of the most famous sculptors and engravers Spanish modernists. Along with Jorge Oteiza, Chillida is considered the most prominent sculptor in the twentieth century.

The tradition of Pablo Picasso, after abandoning his studies, he entered into a drawing course and starts, finally, to carve iron.

In 1948 he moved to Paris, where he became friends with Pablo Palazuelo, who influenced him deeply in his career, giving him a taste for abstraction.

Chillida sculptural abstraction applies to maximum strength, strength, structure and free expression, and in contrast, the maximum beauty, delicacy and poetry, which has already done since their early days in their beautiful titles. Large structures Chillida, full of poise and strength, rise up as volumes in space of freedom, the embrace solidified with air. Its buildings, never rigid in form, always free and moved about linear design, the alternate geometric compositions of lines and curves, projecting into the void and changing all laws of gravity, with the boldness of the sculptor poet who in his desire to sublimate the material, make it light enough to skim the intangible. Chillida is one of the greatest sculptors abstract Hispanics, emerging only in his climb to the impossible, in his work has a lot of poetry, a poetry that could link with the German poet of the sublime and the impossible was Rainer Maria Rilke, and much of musicianship that he had composed another superb German, Bach, with which the sculptor is identified, as has much of the thinking, perhaps by her attraction to Goethe and Heidegger.

Earlier in his career he used materials like wood and iron. But when he begins to explore abstract art, begins to concern itself with the most diverse materials as stone and light.

Six years later held his first solo exhibition, this being the first show of abstract sculpture held in Spain. After this exhibition, is invited by architect Ramón Vázquez Molezún to participate in the Triennial of Art in Milan, Italy, receiving then the Diploma of Honor.

Participated in 1959 in the second Documenta in Kassel.

In the 1970s, Chillida is dedicated to observe nature in search of information about the shapes and colors of plants and inspiration, and since the 1980s, begins to reconcile his art with natural areas, and minority, urban.

In 1987, it is academic of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and two years before his death, one realizes their dream, opening a museum dedicated to him, the Museo Chillida-Leku.

Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (Modern Art: Practices and Debates)

This book was originally published in 1993 by Yale University Press in association with the Open University.

This is the second in a series of four books about art and its interpretation from the mid-nineteenth century until the late twentieth century. As a series, composes the main texts of an Open University course, modern art: practices and debates. They represent a variety of approaches and methods characteristic of the contemporary debate about the art history.

The chapters in this book consider aspects of visual and artistic culture of Europe from 1900 until the late 1920s. Though organized chronologically, each chapter investigates a period or art movement of the early twentieth century in relation to theoretical issues and broader issues of interpretation. In developing questions are raised about research and historical methodology, as well as on the status of "art."

In chapter three, Charles Harrison considers some problems of interpretation and evaluation made by specific examples of abstract art, exploring some of the relationships and differences between forms of figurative and abstract painting. He discusses the need to give attention to specific historical building on the career of Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, while the work of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian is considered in relation to the analysis of valuation.

Abstraction, figuration and representation

Abstract and abstraction

This essay deals with primarily the emergence of forms of abstract art in Europe during the second decade of the century, and some problems of interpretation and evaluation that they raise. Talk about "emergence" is affirming that these were somehow new forms of art. To understand the significance of some claims made on behalf of abstract art, we must first assess what is involved in a particular moment in history, in meeting the terms "abstract" and "art."
The term "abstract" is now widely used, and since the beginning of the XX century was applied as a label for many different art forms. When writing about art, the related term "abstraction" tends to be used in two related but distinct senses: to refer the case of certain works of art, the property of being abstract or "non-figurative" and to refer to the process by which certain aspects of themes or motifs are emphasized in works of art over others.

156, Vasily Kandinsky, Painting with Red Spot, 1914, Musée National d' Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

The illustrations 156-159 show examples of abstract art in the 1910s to 1920, produced by artists of Russian-speaking Czech, Dutch and Swiss. In describing these works as abstract implying that, whatever its appearance, the thing that they seem not to be explained by reference to a theme represented. Despite some obvious differences, they have that in common.

157, Hans Arp, Collage, 1916, Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel.

In fact, although in everyday use we refer to works with "abstract" in the absence of any obvious similarity with the world, might happen to be seen as an abstract work not because it does not look like anything, but because its theme or subject is difficult to identify. And this may occur because a process of abstraction led to the suppression of certain easily recognizable characteristics of the original theme. In 1932, the English painter Paul Nash referred to Picasso as "the greatest of all abstract painters." We call this a sense of "weak" of abstraction, since, according to the most stringent criteria to be applied in this test, no one could say that Picasso did not even an abstract painting during his long activity as a painter. Moreover, the processes of abstraction that he practiced on his themes were often those that made it difficult to understand exactly how these issues were represented in his paintings. It is easy to see that a Picasso painting as Fiddler, the summer of 1910, could be understood as an abstract in the weak sense (illustration 159). By comparison, the work shown in the figure 158 could be called the abstract sense of the term that means it is a work that has no apparent desire to be part of a scene or person. She introduces herself simply as a "composition".

158, Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1916, Guggenheim Museum, Nova York.

As we shall see, and like Picasso Fiddler helps to show the weak and strong senses of abstraction are linked both practically and in terms of art history.

159, Pablo Picasso, The guitarist, 1910, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

On the other hand, it is important to bear in mind that while cubism arose in the context of a Parisian avant-garde, most of the first developments in abstract art occurred some distance from the French capital in Germany, Austria, Holland and Russia. Abstract art was not simply a continuation of that form of modern tradition that had its center in Paris during the previous half century. Rather, the idea of painting a "pure" or pointless tended to invest predominantly against the direction of modern French painting, whose strength lies in its sophisticated exploration of the problems of realism and self-consciousness in figurative representation. Certainly, this tradition was an indispensable resource for all artists involved, but it was extended, diversified and changed under different historical conditions and intellectuals of northern and eastern Europe. The resolution of this process, coinciding with the period of I World War marked the beginning of the end of French dominance on the visual forms of modern. While Paris remained an important center until the beginning of II World War in the early 1920s the idea of modern art and design had been associated in many minds with the possibility of a universal aesthetic, and therefore internationally to which forms of abstract painting would provide prototypes and examples.

Abstraction and meaning

The process of abstraction typically emphasizes those aspects of painting that we see as formal. The artist Theo van Doesburg offered a schematic demonstration of the process of abstraction in his book The Principles of New Plastic Art Illustration 160 shows the stages by turning a photographic picture of a cow in a sort of abstract composition - presumably to highlight aspects individually and emphasizing its "essential." There is something patently absurd in the contrast between the first and last image of Van Doesburg. This absurdity was intended or not, the contrast serves to demonstrate an important point about abstract art in general and the possible ways in which it could be interpreted or regarded as significant. In the clash with traditional forms of painting, we are accustomed to being able to compare certain images with the world, to see where they match or not the appearance (or our expectations), and understand types of intention in the resulting similarities and differences. Given the sequence of illustrations of Van Doesburg, we can actually participate in a similar way of comparison. If we are informed of the stages involved, we can quite easily "understand" abstract painting referred to as "cow". This means that we can reconstruct the painting for a casual kind of story that begins, first with a real cow in the world and, secondly, with a set of intentions by the artist. The process of abstraction is, so to speak, the sequence of effects that these intentions have on the image "original" cow is thus implicitly reconstruct a chain of causes, intentions and effects, however strange they might have been.

160, Theo van Doesburg, aesthetically transformed Subject, 1917, Bauhaus-Archive, Berlin.

But if we were confronted only with the last image of the sequence (illustration 161), as could well occur in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he is now painting? Possibly it could see a pattern like a cow, but in no doubt that his title would take much to persuade us that our perception was accidental How else, then we might find meaning in the painting? The question has obvious relevance for the interpretation of abstract art as a whole. In fact, the sequence of Van Doesburg case presents a deceptively sharp. The illustration 158 can be seen as illustrating a similar process of abstraction, and, guided by the example of Van Doesburg, would therefore seem reasonable to assume that Mondrian's Composition in Line for 1916-1917 is in some sense a painting of the sea. But suppose this would imply a continuous connecting it to earlier paintings. This assumption is not that we can do it safely. In the years 1909-14 Mondrian also drew pictures of trees, windmills and church towers. A different sequence of illustrations would seem to connect the last painting a different reason naturalist.

161, Theo van Doesburg, The Cow, 1917, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

If we have to give up information that a sequence of illustrations appears to provide, we should seek another way to repackage an abstract painting to the world of things, and so understand how it was shaped by the artist's intentions? Or should we instead seek meaning in relationships within the painting itself, given the differences between forms and colors the way we hear the words of an unknown language, not to convert them immediately in terms of our own language, but to achieve that form of understanding that must accompany any act of translation as such, an understanding of grammar relevant? Instead of seeking to establish the meaning of the painting by placing it in a system of causes and effects, we consider the meaning as part of that formal system is that painting?

It is true that all types of human representation can be viewed as ordered according to some system. Indeed, call an object of our experience of a form of representation is to say that we perceive it in a form of a more intentional, i.e., an order form that is meaningful and significant human design in human terms. "Human Terms" are inescapably terms of human language. But it does not follow necessarily that the forms in art are like words or words as they are ordered, or that they are in a correspondence with a given word. They are not subject to the same kind of grammatical rules or the same principles of consistency in use and not come together to form language statements or propositions.

Essence, expression, spirituality

As the example of Van Doesburg suggests the idea of abstract as a process tends to involve a kind of essentialism: up at least half of the XX century, joining the trend in modern art abstract - at least in its more clearly geometric - tended to lead to the belief that a more pure, higher or deeper reality is revealed by eliminating the accidental aspects and "inessential "things. This kind of essentialism derives its justification from the Platonic idea that there are universal or fundamental entities of which the things we encounter are simply examples of imperfect or impure. The work of abstract art was, therefore, associated by many of its early practitioners and advocates a kind of "see through", the idea that the artist is the one that penetrates the veil of material existence to reveal a spiritual reality underlying and essential.

In the early years of this century, Kandinsky and Mondrian were both attracted by the ideas of the Theosophists, who taught that human beings evolve in levels of physical existence to the spiritual, and that certain fundamental laws, hidden from the mass of humanity, are revealed to the initiated as philosophers, founders of religions and - perhaps - the artists. By 1915, Mondrian was also strongly affected by Neo-Platonism theories of mathematician Dr Schoenmaekers published that year. Meanwhile, in Russia, Malevich was interested in pseudo-scientific speculation about the fourth dimension.

It is not difficult to see how the development of Mondrian's work may seem to an essentialist search a gradual that universal reality that is supposedly hidden in the accident. In a footnote to his first published essay on art, Mondrian himself explicitly characterized the artist as a kind of medium for the expression of the universal.

If this view is attributed to the artist a kind of prophetic role, it also gives it a special responsibility. Your practice should be exemplary and in tune with the highest degree. The circulation of such ideas (no matter how eccentric they may seem) in the early years of the century may help explain the powerful sense of mission that is transmitted by the writings of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Given the usefulness of the analogy between abstract composition and grammar, and grammar as they rely on the basic condition is to invoke a rational expression, we must not forget that each of the major artists involved in the initial development of abstract art was involved in some period of their training Neo-Platonism and mystical ideas - which means not rational. (We should be warned by the example of choice of Van Doesburg. Why a cow? "What a cow over a set of illusions Neo-Platonism should result in abstract painting is not, after all, a rational idea.)

Style and Meaning

Of course, not all forms of abstract art that presuppose an initial point of view or Neo-Platonism theosophical plausible. Nor is this view that a work of abstract art as necessarily commits itself to essentialism. Is not to exclude all other interests with what the work looks like or how she came to look like it has, nor is it necessarily deny that there may be other categories in which certain abstract works could be located in a more fruitful. Often is more informative look to material differences between the abstract works considered to realize that avoidance of figurative reference that they may have in common. If we want to discriminate between those works that meet the requirements of abstract, we need a range of appropriate subcategories in which to situate them, as well as labels for these categories.

The pictorial space is something we learn to understand, and we do so by reference to other forms of pictorial space. The history of painting in Western culture is largely a history of relevant forms of learning and the ways that learning was made. In his essay "A. And Pangeometry "written in 1925, El Lissisky said" The new optical experience has taught us that two surfaces of different intensity must be conceived as having a variable ratio of distance between them, even though they may be in the same plane ", the" new optical experience "he had in mind had been provided by the work of Malevich and Mondrian.

Another point to note is that the concept of non-figuration as a deliberately assumes that the figurative is what is normally expected. The consequence is that abstract painting depends for its status as art, the expectations created by paintings that are paintings, i.e. paintings by that, because of its resemblance to other things in the world can be seen as representations or illustrations of these things. It follows that the possibility of being seen as abstract paintings (i.e., as potential forms of high art) depends upon our tendency to look at their surfaces as other than purely flat - looking at them, in fact, potentially figurative. As the Greenberg noted, "The first mark made on the surface destroys its virtual plan" ("Modern Painting"), the effect of reading this mark is to split the screen visually and conceptually in "figure" and "bottom", and therefore , so to speak, to create space for any type of content or meaning (even though, again in the words of Greenberg, is not an illusion "in which someone can imagine yourself walking ... (it) is an illusion in which one can only look, just go with the eye. "To this point stating otherwise, it can be said that not only" see "the surface of a painting, we" see inside "surface of this evidence of some kind of intentional activity.

It is the invocation by the abstract paintings of this experience to "see inside", I think, that most strongly distinguished ornament. Abstract art assumes a critical position in front of figurative art, and the actual prevalence in European art and descriptive narratives of those functions that the procedures of figuration help facilitate and develop. But in order to establish this critical position, and to entertain the viewer to experience the real, the abstract work of art must first invoke and implement those same functions that you want to discredit. While we see the plan as Mondrian, we see it as meaningless (or, it may be said, see it as "pure design"). On the other hand, if we see something resembling the world, their identity and purpose as art are compromised. An abstract painting is something that is in place a framework which, however, is not a picture of anything.

Abstraction, design and decoration

Now we are better able to address an issue raised in the opening paragraph. Despite the universal and explicit assumptions of many of the artists themselves, the historically and culturally specific character of abstract art is emphasized when we consider how the two constituents - "abstract" and "art" - depend on each other. It may be useful to consider some counter examples. For example, in Islamic culture in which that less priority to the representative functions of art and more priority to the significance of the pattern or ornament, an art "abstract" does not in itself remarkable. Neither has she deserved any special attention in a culture that had no substantial basis for distinguishing paintings and sculptures from other forms of design and decoration. It is pertinent that theoretical pre-modernists like John Ruskin and William Morris, who wrote in the mid and late in the XIX century, have idealized the medieval period as one in which art and design were indistinguishable with respect to its statutes and aesthetic interests. To these critics, the realization of an abstract art - an "art" that is categorically distinct from "design" - could only have appeared as the realization of his worst predictions. This means that they probably would have seen as an extreme form of that tendency to isolate the "aesthetic" and "utility" which they saw as a negative consequence of industrialization.

In contrast, the modern theory of abstract art by Greenberg assumes that, for better or for worse, the practices of art and design are distinct but not really incompatible. A tension and a growing difficulty in relations between the concepts of art and design, respectively, are revealed in varying critical fortunes of the term "decoration". In the late 1880s, the Symbolists used the concept of decoration to refer to those who saw positive aesthetic values as independent of the requirements description and imitation. For Matisse, writing in 1910, the decorative aspect of painting coincided with its expressive function, in pursuit of which every single component was critically adjusted. In 1910, when presenting his translation of the article about Cézanne from Maurice Denis, Roger Fry wrote of "a new courage to experiment in painting that direct expression of imagined states of consciousness, which has long been relegated to music and poetry." He saw this trend as associated with a "new lease of art, in which decorative elements predominate to the detriment of the representative." Clearly the emphasis was thus placed in a decorative way to affirm the relative autonomy of art forms as vehicles of expression. With the beginnings of practical interest in the development of abstract art, on the other hand, the realization of "mere" decoration became the hallmark of aesthetic failure - or the failure to establish that promise of intellectual and emotional depth that was associated with painting as art form.

The intention to produce abstract art was then an intention to present works not as non-figurative forms of "mere" decoration or ornament, but as forms of modern art - that is, as forms of representation. In reviewing its development in 1913, Kandinsky wrote about the "frightening depth of issues, charged with responsibility," he thought he had before him. "And most importantly, what should replace the lost object?" The danger of ornamentation was clear, the death of alleged stylized could only drive me away. “As we shall see, the intention to produce abstract art was not made suddenly or by an individual who acted alone. She has developed, I think, as a partial consequence of those long-term changes in the relations between "art" and "design", and both with the "figuration," which we can follow along the nineteenth century - changes that are themselves associated, in some theories of modernism, the inception of the modern period in art. That is, the emergence of abstract art was specific to a modern European world in which the mainstream of economic and industrial development was to boost the distinctions between art and design, and between higher and lower forms of art, in which the meaning of high art was usually associated to figuration, and in which the paintings and sculptures were candidates to the status of high art, while examples of design and ornament were not.

A note on abstract art in his time

As noted, the evidence is that the problem of the value of abstract art was a pertinent question in particular the practice of European art at the beginning of the XX century. Why then? Some clues to an answer may extract from the previous discussion, namely, examining the relationship between abstraction and non-figuration. At the end of the century. Century, the practice of critical configuration - the critique of illusion and all that the techniques used to provide the illusionistic art salons and academies in Europe - often tended towards abstraction. The emphasis on "purity" of the potential form was both a means to challenge the traditions in their own merits classicizing Neo-Platonism, as a means to depreciate the superficially descriptive, anecdotal and the imitative. Coincidentally, the idea of a universal reality and the underlying served as a kind of symbolist contrast critical to the burdensome requirement of truth in appearances. Meanwhile, the idea of a spiritual truth served by some as a light which revealed what they saw taking the generally materialistic values of the contemporary world. The initial justification of abstract art not only resorted to criticism well exercised in the traditional way, but also a varied literature of thought "anti-materialist," to which the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Wagner the composer, the poet Malarmé, mystics and Ouspensky Madame Blavatsky and many others had contributed in various ways, although not equally. In the early years of this century has won a feature utopian anti-materialism. This means that he was associated with a positive ideal of human potential and human society. In a decade that includes World War, a failed revolution in Germany and a successful in Russia, the new art forms were associated with optimistic forms of opposition to the prevailing political and social order, although not usually organized to socialism.

The idea of abstract art - the vision of a universal aesthetic potential and its extension to the "daily life" - was part of the conceptual apparatus by which certain persons, individually and in groups, have tried in the early XX century imagine your way to a better world. That is, the intention to produce abstract art, though an artistic intention, and was formed in a world that was not simply a world of art.

Geometric abstraction

The book Contemporary Art: Splendor and Agony; of Ilda Rodriguez Prampolini, was written for students of Art History and Contemporary Art at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the Autonomous University of Mexico. With this text they would know the art history of the XX century. Starting, of course, to understand his development, with the Impressionists and the approach to historical problems, artistic, aesthetic and moral relevance.

When in 1916, the Dadaists launched his cry of defiance from the Cabaret Voltaire were probably not aware of the profound transformation that began in the artistic production of the western world

In this book, the author focuses on the history of Dadaism, as well as the different artistic movements that preceded and followed it. This work offers a critical appreciation of the evolution of art from the end of the XIX century (Impressionists and Expressionists) to the mid XX century (Surrealists and Abstractionists) in an exhaustive attempt to cover the “entire panorama of contemporary art”.

It is the Abstractionists that we will point out, since they relate to the content of this blog.

The line is a reference for understanding the drawing Manuel Pereira da Silva. You know it creates pure, simple, without flourishes, or waste analytical, full of substance, serious. Manuel Pereira da Silva has the power to simplify the synthesis features and shapes. Easily dominates the formal elements-building: stylistic symmetry, harmony, poetic, aesthetic balance, where the white paper is part of imaginary architecture.

The early modernist sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva emerged in the sculptural abstraction of the pioneers in Portugal, admittedly played from the late '40s, in Porto, by Arlindo Rocha, Fernando Fernandez and even a few years later by Aureliano Lima, after their removal to this city. These facts confer the production of abstract Manuel Pereira da Silva, held up with obvious stylistic analogy; in the same period and situation of those living with sculptors, unquestioned framework generation, must be credited.

In fact in the period immediately following World War II, in precisely that which started the career of Manuel Pereira da Silva, there were changes, important in the world of art controversies, including the two largest urban centers in Portugal: the quarrel " classical and modern, "added the debate between supporters of modernity - the neo-realists, surrealists and abstractionists - but was almost always in the studio that some modesty, very few, sculptors restless, rehearsed new avenues for his art, in productions sparsely that became public, and that, beyond a narrow elite, long ignored.


The Abstract Art

Geometric abstraction and constructive

The reconstruction of the world through painting has rarely been a problem so aware, confident and confessed to a series of artistic events that arose at the end of World War I.

No doubt the artists as they embark on the table abstraction, they were driven by a utopian need for spiritual life

Socrates had already stated these issues, the ideal of beauty through the representation of non-living beings, but of solid and plane figures created through the line, circle, etc..:

"Why should I maintain that these figures are not like other beautiful by comparison, but they are always beautiful in themselves and by their nature they seek certain pleasures that belong to them and have nothing in common with the pleasures produced by sensory stimuli."

It is through these signs of unchanging beauty that some artists try to rise above nature and themselves, to recover the art make it the expression in the service of higher ideals.

The 1930 and 1945 seem to be the triumph of geometric art with his Constructivist tendencies of abstract art trends lyrical and spontaneous. Numerous journals are created to disclose the geometric, continuous exposures at galleries welcome artists, exhibiting in legal proliferating, and the art of constructivism seems to oppose their closed forms or "concrete" composed in endless constellations to highbrow games subconscious screaming by the Surrealists absurd.

The Syndicate of Antique Dealers in Paris (1925), the exhibition also Circule et Carré in Paris, the publication of the single issue of Art Concrète performed by Van Doesburg, the group Abstraction-Creation and numerous magazines in various countries are evidence of the emergence of this new ideal language that comes with authentic validity. One of the pioneers of this art seeks to link up with the architecture is, without doubt, the wife and collaborator, the sculptor Jean Arp, painter Switzerland-Arp Sophie Trauner, whose simplified forms rigorous and fair voluntarily come to some niceties powerful proportions wisely experienced and highly intellectual.

In England, the emergence of The Circle, in 1937, organized by the sculptor Naum Gabo, the painter and architect Well Nicholson Leslie Martin marks the impact that the country, heir to the tradition of William Morris, had this constructive formalism, which addressed re-engage the work of art to life and enjoy the new language to speak universally. This crucial sense of communication through universal formulas (abstract and geometric) and not individuals is the impact of constructivist theory adopted by the same Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner in Russia 17 years earlier. The intention to establish an art of "pure" form goes beyond perfect aestheticism of "art for art" since the first case; it is the dynamic principle that moves the artist to "rebuild" the world and second to separate not at first, but the purpose of art that drowns itself.

We could hardly exhaust the review of all the artists that are somehow linked to the geometric art. One of the most extreme cases is the Felix de Marle, for whom art collective team and subordinate to architecture is the only position that justifies saving the artist, he shall be given by an art that must collaborate in the streets, cities, joy to live, not an elite, but all men.