The Modern World and the Shattered Mirror
By the beginning of the 20th century, the camera seemed to have a monopoly on realism. That may be one reason painters turned increasingly toward abstraction. But it’s not the only reason. Following Cézanne’s example, many artists strove to simplify form (the human body, for example) into its geometrical components; that goal was partly the impetus for Cubism. The Fauves expressed emotion with color; and the Expressionists did the same thing by distorting form.
World War I slammed the door on the past for a lot of artists because the old order had caused the war — the worst in history. The so-called “anti-art” movement, Dada, was a direct reaction to World War I. If war was rational, artists would be irrational. Sigmund Freud’s theories of the role of the unconscious (the home of the irrational) inspired the Surrealists (the offspring of Dada) to paint their dreams and coax the unconscious to the surface so they could channel it into their art. Einstein’s theory of relativity (published in 1905) stimulated the Futurists to include the fourth dimension, time, in their work.
Horrendous acts of injustice during the global depression of the 1930s, racism, and World War II fired up many artists, especially photographers, to create activist art. New technology enabled photographers to capture people quickly and discreetly, showing life more “honestly” or more unposed than ever before. The cameras of pioneering photojournalists like Henri Cartier- Bresson, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White zoomed in on urban life, poverty, and war, and showed the entire world grim realities (as well as beautiful ones) that had previously been swept under the carpet.
After the Holocaust and Hiroshima, mankind seemed overdue for an appointment on the psychoanalyst’s couch. That’s exactly where some artists and thinkers went. Psychoanalysis inspired one postwar American artist to pioneer Abstract Expressionism, the first influential and imitated American art movement. Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist works look like he dropped the big one on each of his canvases — or at least a paint bomb. Actually, he just dripped, poured, and threw paint at his canvases instead of slathering it on with a brush.
Pollock’s and de Kooning’s action painting — as dripping and throwing paint came to be called — signaled that art had moved away from craft toward pure expression and creative conceptualization. Many new forms of art grew out of the notion that process is more important than product. Craft had been the cornerstone of art for millennia. But after the war, Pollock and de Kooning seemed to drop an atom bomb on art itself, to release its pure creative energy (and shatter form to smithereens). Conceptualization began to drive the work of more and more artists. However, while this trend continued in performance art, installation art, and conceptual art, some artists backtracked to representation. The Photorealists, for example, showed that painting could reclaim realism from the camera.
Postmodernism is an odd term. It suggests that we’ve hit a cultural dead end, that we’ve run out of ideas and can’t make anything new or “modern.” All that’s left is to recycle the past or crab-leg it back to the cave days. Postmodern artists do recycle the past, usually in layers: a quart of Greece, a cup of Constructivism, a pound of Bauhaus, and a heaping tablespoon of Modernism. What’s the point of that? Postmodern theorists believe that society is no longer centered. In the Middle Ages, art revolved around religion. In the 19th century, Realist art centered around social reform, and Surrealism dove into dreams and the unconscious. But since the 1970s, point of view has become fluid. Even the political left and right get mixed up sometimes. To express our uncentered or ungrounded existence, artists try to show the relationships between past eras and the present. Some critics argue that Postmodernism is a spiritual short circuit, a jaded view that separates meaning from life. You be the judge.
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