Expressionist artists were primarily concerned with the psychological and social drama of life. They expressed their feelings in symbolic and personal ways. Artists working with abstraction were mainly concerned with the design on the canvas – the composition.
Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921
Cubism: subject is broken apart and reassembled in an abstract form, emphasizing geometric shapes.
Joseph Stella, Brooklyn Bridge, 1918‐20
Cubism was begun in 1907 by Pablo Picasso, who was joined shortly by his good friend, Georges Braque. They used Cezanne’s ideas and his way of building up the surface with small squarish brushstrokes . Like other abstract art, Cubism is concerned with surface design, not emotion and personal feelings.
Picasso, Kahnweiler, 1910
Braque, Still Life: The Table, 1928
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Futurism occurred during the first decades of the 1900s in Italy. Futurists were interested in the mechanized advancement of all society and the destruction of all symbols of the past (museums, academies, large cities) because they saw them as holding up progress. They wanted to show the “dynamism” and “lines of force” that characterized various objects. Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras, 1913‐14
Umberto Boccioni, The Noise of the Street Penetrates the House, 1911
Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913
De Stijl (The Style) A coldly intellectual approach to design was pioneered by another Dutch artist, Piet Mondrian. He led this nonrepresentational style with reliance only on design and the elimination of all feeling and emotion. Mondrian, Composition in Line and Color, 1913
Mondrian, Tree, 1912
Piet Mondrian, Diagonal Composition, 1921
Composition, 1925
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2, 1912
This painting, exhibited in New York in 1913, brought Duchamp quickly to public attention. One critic called it “an explosion in a shingle factory” and the general public couldn’t connect with the “new” art. Duchamp fractured the movement of a figure as it descended stairs, and the shapes show a result like a stop‐action or strobe‐light photograph, depicting motion. Today, we can see what he was attempting, but the public at that time was unfamiliar with this idea.
Constantin Brancusi, Mademoiselle Pogany, 1912
“What is real, is not the external form but the essence of things,” and this essence he found in subtle shapes of deceptive simplicity, approaching those of an egg, the wave‐worn pebble, and the blade of grass. Some traces of African sculpture may be discerned in the bulging eyes but the spiral of the composition comes from a study of the inner rhythm of the dancer’s pose: a delicate suggestion of movement.