How Artists Reacted to the War

Pre-WWI Art (1800’s)

Which one of the MAIN causes of WWI can you identify?

Jacques Louis David

Beauxs Art

School in Paris that taught a specific style of architecture involving a mix of classical, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo – mostly focusing on a lot of sculptural decoration

Palais Garnier (1861-74) Musee D’Orsay (1900)

Art Nouveau

Searching for a modern movement that would break from the past

1892 to 1902 is the climax of the movement

Futurism

Art movement founded in Italy 1909

Glorification of the machine, speed, noise, cities, pollution and technology

Umberto Boccioni - Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913

Manifestos Galore!

The Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni1882-1916 wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Painters in 1910 in which he vowed:

We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.

Manifesto of Futurism1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. 2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. 3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish

insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. 4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose

hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit. 6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial

elements. 7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must

be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man. 8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the

mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

Umberto BoccioniDynamics of a Footballer 1913Oil on canvas, 197x201 cm

Futurist PoetrySleepy old carillonEvoking once again among faded tapestriesAnd the fetor of withered chrysanthemumsNaïve epics of distant epochs

Tearful bigot mumbling your rosaryOf regrets,Candle eternally guttering At the bier of lost days,

Grotesque, streaked motion-picture filmFluttering on the screen of memory

Poor, shattered mirror, whose glint of splintered reminiscencesWe catch from time to time,Like a lure we grasp at with ape-like gestures,The arabesque of some dream that had

furrowed our brow

The PastBy Libero Altomare from the Futurist Poets, 1912

War Artists in Canada

Munitions Heavy Shells

1919 Dorothy

Stevens Print

Artistic Reactions during the war

Alfred Kubin, Die Kriegsfackel (The Torch of War), 1914

A change in tone: by December 1914, Kubin (1887-1959) a major symbolist artist, had lost faith in a "fresh and joyous war" or in a quick victory. Above the burning houses rises up the sinister allegory of death that Kubin had already drawn on many previous occasions, denouncing human cruelty, mixing the sarcastic and the macabre. Throughout the war - in which he took no part - he obsessively drew skeletons, witches and ghosts, to give shape to his fears.

Artists reacting to WWI

Egon Schiele, Heinrich Wagner, Leutnant i. d. Reserve (Portrait of Reserve Lieutenant Heinrich Wagner), 1917, black chalk and opaque color on paper, Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna

A survivor after three years of war, he had been decorated; there are two medals on his tunic, but his face, eyes and joined hands indicate the weariness and the indifference of this prematurely old man. Schiele (1890-1918) portrays him in the same way as he had formerly depicted the Russian prisoners he guarded - with the same coldness and objective acuteness. The absence of the bust, uniform and any setting aggravates this feeling of loss and isolation. This could also be a depiction of Schiele's own loneliness

Post WWI – The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus school, founded in Germany in 1919, consciously rejected history and looked at architecture as a synthesis of art, craft, and technology.

Buildings that flaunted their construction, exposing steel beams and concrete surfaces instead of hiding them behind traditional forms, were seen as beautiful in their own right.

Dada – Marcel Duchamps

Movement began during WWI in Zurich and lasted to 1920

Anti-aesthetic creations, anti-war, anti-art, protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I

Marcel Duchamps, LLOHQ 1919. When read quickly in French it sounds like “she has a hot butt”. In English it appears as “look” and refers to her ‘perverted smile’

Marcel Duchamps – The ready made

Dada: Hannah Hoch

Cut With The Kitchen Knife 1919 Photomontage Combines images from

newspapers in Berlin at the time and recreated it

War as chaos, the world has gone mad

War is craziness and destroying humanity

Dada melted into Surrealism

Fur Lined Tea Cup

Meret Openheim

1936 Dada artist

(Considered Surrealist)

Modernism in the making Key architects worked to reject

virtually all that had come before, trading handcrafted details and sentimental historic forms for a machine-driven architectural geometry made possible by the Industrial Revolution.

Be honest in form and not cover architecture in ornament

Pure geometric forms

Barcelona Pavilion Built in Barcelona, Spain in

1928-1929 Example of modern architecture

and the free plan Steel frame with glass and

polished stone

Mies van der Rohe

Tugendhat House

Mies van der Rohe Czech Republic 1930