Expressionism and Surrealism

Munch’s influence is often traced down to Expressionism, a school of painting strongly associated with the Weimar Republic in Germany following World War One. But alienation can also be identified as a motive in Surrealism.

Reading: Strickland, pp 123, 142, 149, 151.

Viewing: Expressionist art

• Edvard Munch, The Scream (earliest version 1893; this version 1910)
• Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait (1910)
• Otto Dix, Storm Troopers Advance under a Gas Attack (1924)
• Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926)
• Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait with Champagne Glass (1919)
• Max Beckmann, The Actors (1942)

Viewing: Surrealist art

• René Magritte, The Double Secret (1927)
• René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1929)
• Man Ray, Black and White (1926)
• Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931)
• Méret Oppenheim, Object (1936)
• Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain (1942)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point to a stylistic or thematic pattern you see in some or all of these artworks.
2. Point to a striking detail in one particular artwork.
3. Given that “anomie” is defined as the loss of social norms, point to a particular artwork and explain how it challenges or violates the viewer’s normative expectations.

Little Tramp in a Big Factory

Chaplin created his “Little Tramp” character in 1914-15 as a bumbling vagrant whose aspirations to romance and gentlemanly dignity routinely fall short. Yet he always rebounds from setbacks, ready to try again.

For class today, I’m asking you to watch the final appearance of the Little Tramp character. The 1936 movie Modern Times dates several years after the end of the silent film era (1894-1929). While it draws on the idiom of silent movies, it makes abundant use of sound effects. And at key moments characters speak aloud.

Viewing: Chaplin, Modern Times, available via: Kanopy. (If this doesn’t work, try BOB).

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Focusing on the initial sequence in the factory (00:00-19:10), point to a key detail and comment on its significance—whether political or artistic.
2. Focusing on the first part of the movie’s love story (42:00-1:00:00), point to a key detail and comment on its significance—whether political or artistic.
3. Focusing on the movie’s final sequence (1:09:00-1:27:10), point to a key detail and comment on its significance—whether political or artistic.

Collage and the Modern Age

Both scholars listed below agree on the centrality of collage to modernist art; they disagree only in how broadly they define Modernism. Greenberg focuses wholly on developments within the field of painting, while Hopkins speaks of culture in the broadest sense: literature, film, etc.

Scholarly Reading: Two Perspectives on Collage

• Clement Greenberg, “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” (1958) (Blackboard)
• Budd Hopkins, “Modernism and the Collage Aesthetic” (1997) (Blackboard)

Viewing: Analytic and Synthetic Cubism

• Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
• Georges Braque, Violin and Palette (1909)
• Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning (1911)
• Georges Braque, Homage to J. S. Bach (1911-12)
• Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass (1912)
• Juan Gris, The Table (1914)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point to ONE quality that these Cubist works share in common with the Futurist art we examined last week. Alternatively, point to something that makes them distinct.
2. Drawing on Greenberg or Hopkins—or just pointing to the art itself, should Cubist collage be classed as mimetic or expressive art? Or some third thing?

Eliot’s Crisis of Meaning

As Budd Hopkins suggests in an article linked in the preceding section, Eliot’s “Waste Land” has the formal structure of a collage. We encounter an extraordinary variety of language, fragments from classical literature, scraps of popular songs, bits from overheard conversations. These are piled together, apparently at random, in a way that suggests the breakdown of cultural coherence. As the final lines comment, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” This lack of structure forces the reader into a role ordinarily assumed by the author: that of making meaning.

Reading: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (link). Note: you may find it valuable to listen to Eliot’s poem read by professional actors Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins: YouTube. They bring to life the very different “voices” that form the patchwork of Eliot’s poem.

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. An American living in Europe (mostly London), Eliot was likely struck by the rigid class hierarchies of the old world. Where does class enter into The Waste Land?
2. Early in the poem Eliot references the loss of life in World War 1. Quote a key moment and comment as to how the poem contextualizes the war.
3. Having plundered Western European myth and literature, in the final section Eliot turns to Hindu scripture: Da, Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata. How is this similar to or different from the Orientalism we witnessed at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, dating a century before Eliot’s poem?

Collage and the Modern Age

Both scholars listed below agree on the centrality of collage to modernist art; they disagree only in how broadly they define Modernism. Greenberg focuses wholly on developments within the field of painting, while Hopkins speaks of culture in the broadest sense: literature, film, etc.

Scholarly Reading: Two Perspectives on Collage

• Clement Greenberg, “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” (1958) (Blackboard)
• Budd Hopkins, “Modernism and the Collage Aesthetic” (1997) (Blackboard)

Viewing: Analytic and Synthetic Cubism

• Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
• Georges Braque, Violin and Palette (1909)
• Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning (1911)
• Georges Braque, Homage to J. S. Bach (1911-12)
• Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass (1912)
• Juan Gris, The Table (1914)

Reading: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, parts 1 and 2 (Norton 1154-1159). Edit: you may find it valuable to listen to Eliot’s poem read by professional actors Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins: YouTube. They bring to life the very different “voices” that form the patchwork of Eliot’s poem.

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. An American living in Europe (mostly London), Eliot was likely struck by the rigid class hierarchies of the old world. Where does class enter into The Waste Land?
2. Eliot’s poem is a challenging one—quote a line you find confusing. Then take a shot at making sense of it.

Photography and Motion

English photographer Eadweard Muybridge began his pioneering work into the study of motion in 1878. Using multiple cameras with high-speed film, Muybridge established for the first time the stride of a galloping horse, as well as a host of other motions too fast for the eye to follow. He changed the way we see the world. And, by breaking motion down into a series of static frames, his work beckoned the way to re-animation of static sequences as movies.

Around the same time, French photographer Étienne-Jules Marey perfected a method for superimposing multiple moments on a single photograph, as for example the image of a pelican landing.

Both photographers’ influence can be seen in one of the most famous works of Modernist Art, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, as well as Futurist works like Giacomo Balla’s 1912 Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash.

• Muybridge, Horse’s Gallop (1878)
• Marey, Pelican landing (1882)
• Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)
• Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)

Loving the Machine

In the years leading up to World War I, a group of Italian artists came together under the banner of Futurism. Whereas Art Nouveau sought compromise with modernity, reshaping metal and glass in soft organic curves, the futurists welcomed the hard edges and high speeds of machinery.

When conflict broke out in 1914, it was greeted with enthusiasm across Europe, but for most that excitement gave way to horror as reports filtered back from the front lines of the meat grinder of trench warfare. Paradoxically, the era’s powerful technologies—machine guns, artillery shells—produced stalemate rather than speedy victory. But while this experience left many determined to make the “Great War” the “War to End All Wars,” the Futurists remained enamored of both machinery and armed conflict, believing that violence could reenergize Italy. Unsurprisingly, in the years after the war’s end in 1918, they allied themselves with the National Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini.

Reading: “The Futurist Manifesto,” published in 1909 by Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the Parisian daily Le Figaro (Blackboard).

Viewing: examples of Futurist art:

• Luigi Russolo, The Revolt (1911)
• Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of an Car (1913)
• Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)
• Gino Severini, Memories of a Journey (1911)
• Gino Severini, Armored Train in Action (1915)
• Filippo Marinetti, In the Evening, Lying on Her Bed, She Reread the Letter from Her Artilleryman at the Front (1919)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point out a key contrast OR continuity in the Futurist art featured above.
2. Point out a key contrast OR continuity between Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto and one of the Futurist artworks.

The Painter and the Camera

In The Annotated Mona Lisa, Carol Strickland positions her chapter on the French Impressionists immediately after a section in early photography. While she doesn’t discuss the influence of photography on the Impressionists in particular, several recent museum exhibits have done just that, arguing for “the crucial role of early photography in inspiring [not only] Impressionist iconography, but also, and more emphatically, Impressionist style and particularly its strategies of asymmetry, cropping and the blurring of motion” (source).

Reading:

• Strickland, pp 92-96, 99-103, 106, 108.
• Elena Martinique, “How Did Photography Influence The Impressionists?” (link).

Viewing 1, some representative Impressionists:

• Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863)
• Édouard Manet, Un bar aux Folies Bergère (1882)
• Edgar Degas, The Dance Class (1874)
• Mary Cassatt, Young Mother Sewing (1893)

Viewing 2, a close study of Claude Monet’s Houses of Parliament (1899-1904):

Monet created this exquisite series during a series of visits to London. Fascinated with the city’s fog and other atmospherics, he positioned himself across the river, in front of St. Thomas’ Hospital. The paintings were begun on site, then completed at his home in Giverny with the aid of photographs. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society showed that the paintings are sufficiently accurate as to provide a useful empirical record of London’s fogs—a phenomenon caused by urban pollution and consigned to history following the passage of environmental legislation in 1956 (source).

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point to a stylistic or thematic pattern you see in some or all of these paintings.
2. Point to a striking detail in one particular painting.
3. Point to a painting that strikes you as betraying the influence of photography’s “way of seeing.”

War of the Worlds

H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds between 1895-97, while living in Surrey, southeast of London. The story was serialized in both Britain and the US in 1897, and published as a standalone novel in 1898. Writing in a breathless journalistic style, Wells drew upon his intimate familiarity locations in both London and its southeastern suburbs to fill the story with realistic detail. As this user-made map demonstrates (link), anyone familiar with London would likely feel a chill as they read descriptions of the Martians’ attack and its aftermath.

Reading: H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds. (If you didn’t buy the book, you can find it online at Project Gutenberg).

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. A notable futurist, Wells foresaw the development of many 20th-century technologies. Focusing on a particular technology employed by his Martians, how does it compare to the way technology played out in the real world?
2. Wells got his start as a social critic, famed for his embrace of socialism under the banner of the Fabian Society. Focusing on a particular passage, explain how it functions as a critique of English society—or British Imperialism.
3. Using the map linked above, visit a location described in the book. Upload a photograph along with your impression of how the site corresponds with Wells’ description. (Regents’ Park is a particularly good location for this assignment, not far from your Soc Sci classroom.)