“I believe that if it were left to the artists to choose their own labels,” observed the American artist Ben Shahn, “most would choose none.”
That may be true, but labels sure make it easier on the rest of us. They supply a language with which to engage an artwork and help identify the stronger forces propelling art through the decades. Knowledge about some of art’s big developments can go a long way toward enhancing your viewing at museums and galleries.
Summer’s most languid month offers the perfect opportunity to brush up on your arsenal of Western civilization’s art movements. Think of it as a kind of summer school before the opening of the fall exhibition season.
We selected five movements from the last 130 years not only for their original impact but also for the length of their influence on art making. We asked Chicago curators to name a work on view in the city that exemplifies each movement. Some of their choices may surprise you. Our survey kicks off with Impressionism, that bellwether of modernism, continues with Expressionism, Dada, Minimalism/Conceptualism and ends with Pop Art. There are lots of holes–Cubism, for starters–but many of art history’s seminal ideas are here.
Impressionism
“Subversive” may be the last word that comes to mind when viewing Impressionism’s much-loved sparkling landscapes and figures at play, but that’s exactly how these works were intended and received in France in the 1870s and ’80s.
Impressionists were looking to lighten up, both figuratively and literally, the art churned out in academies of the day–large, formal paintings depicting grand biblical, mythological and historic events. Impressionists did this by choosing informal, outdoor subjects, scaling down the size of their works and using loose, noticeable brushstrokes that contrasted with the minute brush technique favored by traditionalists. Heavy outlines disappeared, palettes took on brilliant hues and objects were enveloped in rather than separated from their settings.
Impressionism’s central figures included Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who in 1875 completed a painting now at the Art Institute of Chicago that Gloria Groom, a European painting curator at the Art Institute, considers a quintessential Impressionist work. Groom chose it for its open-air subject matter, its prototypical blue-and-white palette and its size. Renoir painted it just a year after the Impressionists made their formal debut under the name of “Societe Anonyme des Artistes” in an exhibition that took place in a photographer’s Paris studio.
“The painting shows the whole idea of meshing figure to the setting with these fragmented, very open strokes that were seen as sketch-like to critics, who could not understand how they could be exhibited as finished works,” Groom says. “It also has an at-a-glance kind of feeling, the appearance of having been painted quickly and on the spot. If it really was, who knows? But that sense was the hallmark of Impressionism.”
Impressionism’s renegade aesthetics had a huge impact on late 19th-century and early 20th-century art in Europe and the United States, and it presaged some of modernism’s later, more extreme breaks with the past. “The rules get broken a lot in the 20th Century, but the first significant breaking of the rules seems to be with the artists who would become known as the Impressionists,” Groom notes.
Expressionism
If Impressionism took the individual artist’s personality and response to the world out of the shadows, Expressionism put those concerns under a white-hot spotlight. It judged subjective feeling more important than objective representation, and in the process freed artists from the burden of replicating the visible world.
While the term “Expressionist” is applied to several art forms from different time periods, it most narrowly refers to a European movement that jelled around 1905. Influenced in particular by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, two groups–the Fauves (“Wild Beasts”) in France and Die Brucke (“The Bridge”) in Germany–paved the way for non-objective art by emphasizing color and angular form over ealistic depiction and valuing spontaneity in painting.
The artist usually credited with making the first purely abstract painting, in about 1910, was the fastidious, Russian-born Vasili Kandinsky, who was a member of a group called the Blaue Reiter (“Blue Rider”) in Germany. He was interested in form only as a way to express spirituality. He was enchanted by color and its relationship to music.
Above all, Kandinsky was serious and had nothing less than utopian aims for art. “For Kandinsky, art wasn’t an illustration of reality, but a way of healing a world that he saw as sick and out of balance,” says Daniel Schulman, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute. “His emphasis on art as a way of correcting the ills of the world coming right before the First World War was extraordinary . . . He was right. There was something seriously wrong with Europe that it was about to engage in this unheard-of waste of human life.”
In fact, “Improvisation 30 (Cannons),” a 1913 painting at the institute that Schulman picks as most representative of Expressionism, includes a depiction of cannons in the lower right corner. Kandinsky filled the rest of the canvas with calligraphic lines and modulated areas of vivid color. Kandinsky’s brand of abstraction has had an immense effect on artists throughout the 20th century, and on movements such as mid-20th-century Abstract Expressionism, particularly Mark Rothko’s paintings.
Pop
Claes Oldenburg, “Bat Column,”1975-76 at 600 W. Madison St.
Ironic, slick and sexy, Pop Art coalesced as a movement at roughly the same time as Minimalism and thrived through the early 1970s. Pop shared with Minimalism a debt to Dada (sometimes it is referred to as Neo-Dada) and an emotional detachment in response to what was seen as the excesses of Abstract Expressionism. But rather than follow the lofty pursuit of reducing form and color, Pop took images from consumer culture and the mass media. Comic books, advertisements, packaging, and television and film images all made their way into Pop, which took its name from “popular culture.”
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg paved the way for Pop by opening up subject matter in the mid-1950s to include targets, flags, numbers, beer cans and Coca-Cola bottles. Art critics took this as a reflection of the post-World War II, increasingly consumer-obsessed American society. Painters such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana, and most importantly, Andy Warhol, created works using commercial techniques such as silk-screening rather than the painterly approach of Abstract Expressionism. Oldenburg, the best-known Pop sculptor, gained attention for his giant sculptures of such everyday objects as a hamburger, lipstick, typewriter and washbasin.
Although Warhol is Pop’s most famous figure, Oldenburg remains a Pop icon as well and his steel “Bat Column,” which stands more than 100 feet tall in front of the Harold Washington Social Security Center at 600 W. Madison St., is under-appreciated. “Oldenburg’s wryly comic and self-consciously critical embrace of the commodity culture as subject-matter placed him in the forefront of Pop art,” observes James Rondeau, acting director of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute. “Appropriately he has become best known as an artist working in public spaces. `Bat Column’ substitutes the ancient, classical form of the obelisk with a witty pop culture reference.”
Rondeau says that Pop has become thoroughly absorbed into the making of and looking at contemporary art. “Art’s relationship to consumer culture, film, television, fashion and the like is so pervasive now, Pop art is really less an influence per se than it is a foregone conclusion: We see and understand the world in terms of popular culture.”
Minimalism/Conceptualism
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1970 at the Museum of Contemporary Art
“What you see is what you see,” the painter Frank Stella famously said of Minimalism, and that pretty much says it all. Minimalism strove for a direct experience of art and embodied no symbolism, no messages and no personal expression. It’s often seen as a kind of end result of the modernist progression, a stripping down to almost nothing.
Minimalism, which emerged in the late 1950s and thrived in the ’60s and ’70s, was a type of abstraction that reacted against the high emotion of Abstract Expressionism, which took hold of the art world in the 1940s and ’50s. While the stereotype of the Abstract Expressionist was an angst-filled, tortured soul, his or her Minimalist counterpart (almost exclusively male) was pegged as an intellectual, coolly detached observer.
Although Minimalism also involved painting, it was most important in sculpture. As Dominic Molon, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, says, “Whereas the materials in Minimalist painting stayed the same–oil and acrylic paint–in sculpture they changed drastically.” Leading Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre, Tony Smith, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd opted for simplified, geometric forms made from industrial materials, including steel, aluminum, brick and neon tubes, rather than bronze and marble.
An archetypally Minimalist work is an untitled wall sculpture Judd completed in 1970. It’s part of the exhibition “Basic Instinct: Minimalism Past, Present and Future” on view at the MCA through Sept. 14. “Judd was integral in removing evidence of the artist’s hand and using industrial materials and colors,” says Molon. “He was the classic Minimalist artist.”
The sculpture consists of an aluminum beam under which is attached a series of decreasingly smaller horizontal forms painted violet. The work illustrates the idea of spatial and formal progression, which was an important idea in Minimalism. It also exemplifies the Minimalist concept of taking sculpture off a pedestal and moving it into the viewer’s space. Minimal art is strongly allied with Conceptual art, which refined its theoretical emphasis even further. It is seen as the endpoint of modernism. In Conceptual art, which remains in vogue to this day, the ideas that a work represents are seen as its essential component and the art object itself merely documentation. Or, as the British critic Matthew Collings put it, “Get the art out altogether. Frame up life raw.”
Dada
Suzanne Duchamp, “Broken and Restored Multiplication,” 1918-19 at the Art Institute of Chicago
In 1915 a group of young artists and writers taking refuge in Zurich from the slaughter of World War I began staging nightly entertainment in a small cabaret. The group performed simultaneous poetry readings, in which members recited poems at the top of their lungs, before a house packed with Swiss students. Their venture came to be known as Dada, and became an international anti-art movement that spoke to a generation disgusted by the war’s brutality.
While Dada in Zurich remained mostly a literary movement, as it spread to Germany after the war’s end it was manifested in art. Dada works defied accepted standards of beauty, which were seen as corrupt, and emphasized the role of chance in art making. Dadaists ditched traditional painting and sculpture for collage, ready-mades and photomontage. Dada’s nihilistic approach was largely defined by the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, who declared, “Let each man proclaim: There is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished.”
Around the same time that European Dada came into its own, another vein sprang up in New York, mainly in the activities of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. Among Dada’s most enduring legacies were Duchamp’s “ready-mades”–mass-produced articles such as a bicycle wheel that he displayed as works of art. Duchamp’s younger sister, Suzanne, an artist who formed a subgroup called Tabu Dada with her husband, the artist Jean Crotti, lived in France and is little known in the United States. Suzanne created a painting titled “Broken and Restored Multiplication” that Daniel Schulman cites as exemplifying Dada. The work presents an upside-down Eiffel Tower and includes a poem in French that snakes over the canvas.
According to Schulman, “There’s a mixing and matching of modes, which is very Dada. It’s half a poem and half a painting, and both are irrational and nonsensical. The reference to arithmetic and making that rational world irrational is a typical Dada kind of gesture. The Eiffel Tower was a symbol of progress and optimism. After it was built there was a great deal of talk of how rationality was going to save humanity, and then the First World War overturned that optimism.”
A lot of Dada philosophy, particularly its focus on techniques involving chance, fed into the later movement of Surrealism, and established an anti-art vein in modern culture. “It’s the spirit of critique and irony that’s often very useful for artists, and you can see a lot of it today. It’s become part of the artist’s toolbox,” Schulman says.
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Lectures to enhance summer art education
Brush up on a variety of art history topics at the following lectures tied to art exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), 312-443-3600, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), 312-280-2660:
Tuesday, Aug. 19, noon, Jeff Zimmerman leads a tour of his exhibition in “12×12: New Artists/New Work,” MCA.
Saturday, Aug. 30, 12-12:45 p.m., gallery talk on “Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier, 1890-1940,” Regenstein Hall, AIC.
Tuesday, Sept. 9, 4:30 p.m. “(Outsider) Art Europe,” School of the Art Institute of Chicago Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Ave., Randy Vick, associate professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
— Lisa Stein
