TWENTIETH-CENTURY PAINTING

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TWENTIETH-CENTURY PAINTING

PAINTING BEFORE WORLD WAR I

In our account of art in the modem era, we have already discussed a succession of "isms": Neoclassicism, Romanti­cism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Divi­sionism, and Symbolism. There are many more to be found in twentieth-century art-so many, in fact, that nobody has made an exact count. These "isms" can form a serious ob­stacle to understanding: they may make us feel that we can­not hope to comprehend the art of our time unless we immerse ourselves in a welter of esoteric doctrines. Actually, we can disregard all but the most important "isms"; like the terms we have used for the styles of earlier periods, they are merely labels to help us sort things out. If an "ism" fails the test of usefulness, we need not retain it. This is true of many "isms" in contemporary art; the movements they designate either cannot be seen very clearly as separate entities, or have so little importance that they can interest only the specialist. It has always been easier to invent new labels than to create a movement in art that truly deserves a new name.

Still, we cannot do without "isms" altogether. Since the start of the modem era, the Western world-and, increas­ingly, the non-Western world-has faced the same basic problems everywhere, and local artistic traditions have stead­ily given way to international trends. Among these we can distinguish three main currents, each comprising a number of "isms," that began among the Post-Impressionists, and have developed greatly in our own century: Expressionism, Abstraction, and Fantasy.

The primary concern of the Expressionist is the human community; of the Abstractionist, the structure of reality; and of the artist of Fantasy, the labyrinth of the individual human mind. Thus these three currents correspond to gen­eral attitudes rather than to specific styles. They are not mu­tually exclusive by any means. We shall find them interrelated in many ways, and the work of one artist may belong to more than one current. Moreover, each current em­braces a wide range of approaches, from the realistic to the completely non-representational (or non-objective). And we shall find that Realism, which is concerned with the appear­ance of reality, has continued to exist independently of the other three, especially in the United States where art has often pursued a separate course. These currents bear a shift­ing relation to each other that reflects the complexity of mod­em life. To be understood, they must be seen in their proper historical context. After 1945, it is no longer meaningful to trace the evolution of these strands separately; the art of our times has become too complex for that.

In addition, we will encounter modernism, a concept pe­culiar to the twentieth century, though its roots can be traced to Romanticism. To the artist it is a trumpet call that both asserts his freedom to create in a new style and provides him with the mission to define the meaning of his times-and even to reshape society through his art. This is a role for which the problematic term "avant-garde" (literally, van­guard) is hardly sufficient. Of course, artists have always re­sponded to the changing world around them, but rarely have they risen to the challenge as now, or with so fervent a sense of personal cause.

EXPRESSIONISM

The twentieth century may be said, so far as painting is con­cerned, to have begun five years late. Between 1901 and 1906, several comprehensive exhibitions of the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne were held in Paris. Thus, for the first time the achievements of these masters became accessible to a broad public.

THE FAUVES. The young painters who had grown up in the "decadent," morbid mood of the 1890s were profoundly impressed, and several of them developed a radical new style, full of violent colour and bold distortions. On their first public appearance, in 1905, they so shocked critical opinion that they were dubbed the Fauves (the wild beasts), a label they wore with pride. Actually, it was not a common program that brought them together, but their shared sense of liberation and experiment. As a movement, Fauvism comprised numerous loosely related individual styles, and the group dissolved after a few years.

MATISSE. Its leading member was Henri Matisse (1869-­1954), the oldest of the founding fathers of twentieth-century painting. The Joy of Life, probably the most impor­tant picture of his long career, sums up the spirit of Fauvism better than any other single work. It obviously derives its flat planes of colour, heavy undulating outlines, and the "primi­tive" flavour of its forms from Gauguin; even its subject suggests the vision of humanity in a state of Nature that Gauguin had pursued in Tahiti. But we soon realize that these figures are not Noble Savages under the spell of a native god: the subject is a pagan scene in the classical sense-a bacchanal like Titian's. Even the poses of the figures have for the most part a clas­sical origin, and in the apparently careless draftsmanship re­sides a profound knowledge of the human body (Matisse had been trained in the academic tradition). What makes the pic­ture so revolutionary is its radical simplicity, its "genius of omission": everything that possibly can be has been left out or stated by implication only, yet the scene retains the essen­tials of plastic form and spatial depth.

Painting, Matisse seems to say, is the rhythmic arrange­ment of line and colour on a flat plane, but it is not only that; how far can the image of nature be pared down without de­stroying its basic properties and thus reducing it to mere sur­face ornament? "What I am after, above al," he once explained, "is expression . . . [But] . . . expression does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face . . . The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place­ment of figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part." But what, we won­der, does The Joy of Life express? Exactly what its title says. Whatever his debt to Gauguin, Matisse was never stirred by the same agonized discontent with the "decadence" of our civilization. He had strong feelings about only one thing­ the act of painting: this to him was an experience so pro­foundly joyous that he wanted to transmit it to the beholder.

Matisse's "genius of omission" is again at work in The Red Studio. By reducing the number of tints to a min­imum, he makes colour an independent structural element. The result is to emphasize the radical new balance he struck between the "two-D" and "three-D" aspects of painting. Matisse spreads the same flat red colour on the tablecloth and wall as on the floor, yet he distinguishes the horizontal from the vertical planes with complete assurance using only a few lines. Equally bold is Matisse's use of pattern. By repeating a few basic shapes, hues, and decorative motifs in seemingly casual-but perfectly calculated-array around the edges of the canvas, he harmonizes the relation of each element with the rest of the picture. Cezanne had pioneered this integra­tion of surface ornament into the design of a picture, but Matisse here makes it a mainstay of his composition.

ROUAULT. Another member of the Fauves, Georges Rouault (1871-1958), would not have used Matisse's defini­tion of "expression." For him this had still to include, as it had in the past, "the passion mirrored upon a human face"; we need only look at his Head of Christ. But the expressiveness does not reside only in the "image quality" of the face. The savage slashing strokes of the brush speak equally eloquently of the artist's rage and compassion. (If we cover the upper third of the picture, it is no longer a recog­nizable image, yet the expressive effect is hardly diminished.) Rouault is the true heir of Van Gogh's and Gauguin's concern for the corrupt state of the world. He, however, hoped for spiritual renewal through a revitalized Catholic faith. His pictures, whatever their subject, are personal state­ments of that ardent hope. Trained in his youth as a stained-glass worker, he was better prepared than the other Fauves to share Gauguin's enthusiasm for medieval art. Rouault's later work, such as The Old King, has glowing colours and compartmented, black-bordered shapes inspired by Gothic stained-glass windows. Yet within this framework he retains a good deal of the pictorial freedom we saw in the Head of Christ, and the old king's face conveys a mood of resignation and inner suffering that reminds us of Rembrandt and Daumier.

DIE BRUCKE. It was in Germany that Fauvism had its most enduring impact, especially among the members of Die Brucke (The Bridge), a group of like-minded painters who lived in Dresden in 1905. Their early works, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Street, Dresden, not only reflect Matisse's simplified, rhythmic line and loud colour, but also clearly reveal the direct influence of Van Gogh and Gauguin. Street, Dresden also shows elements derived from Munch, who was then living in Berlin and deeply impressed the German Expressionists.

NOLDE. One Brucke artist, Emil Nolde (1867-1956), stands somewhat apart; older than the rest, he shared Rouault's predilection for religious themes. The thickly en­crusted surfaces and deliberately clumsy draftsmanship of his The Last Supper show that Nolde rejected pic­torial refinement in favour of a primeval, direct expression in­spired by Gauguin. Ensor's grotesque masks, too, come to mind, as do the mute intensity of Barlach's peasants.

KOKOSCHKA. Another artist of highly individual talent, re­lated to Die Brucke although not a member of it, was the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). His most memorable works are his portraits painted before World War 1, such as the moving Self-Portrait. Like Van Gogh, Kokoschka sees himself as a visionary, a witness to the truth and reality of his inner experiences; the hypersensitive features seem lacerated by a great ordeal of the imagination. It may not be fanciful to find in this tortured psyche an echo of the cultural climate that also produced Sigmund Freud.

KOLLWITZ. The work of Kathe Kollwitz (1876-1945), con­sists almost exclusively of prints and drawings that parallel those of Kokoschka, whose work she admired. Her graphics had their sources in the nineteenth century. The German artist Max Klinger (1857-1920), Munch, and Klimt were early inspirations, as was her friend Ernst Barlach. Yet Kollwitz pursued a resolutely independent course, devoting her art to themes of inhumanity and injus­tice. To articulate her social and ethical concerns, she adopted an intensely expressive, naturalistic style that is as unrelenting in its bleakness as her choice of subjects. Gaunt mothers and exploited workers provided much of Kollwitz's thematic focus, but her most eloquent statements were re­served for war. World War I, which cost her oldest son his life, made her an ardent pacifist. Her lithograph Never Again War! is a visceral image of protest.

KANDINSKY. The most daring and original step beyond Fauvism was taken in Germany by a Russian, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), the leading member of a group of Munich artists called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Horse­man). Kandinsky began to forsake representation as early as 1910 and abandoned it altogether several years later. Using the rainbow colours and the free, dynamic brushwork of the Paris Fauves, he created a completely non-objective style. These works have titles as abstract as their forms; our exam­ple, one of the most striking, is called Sketch I for "Compo­sition VII".

Perhaps we should avoid the term "abstract," because it is so often taken to mean that the artist has analysed and simplified the shapes of visible reality (compare Cezanne's dictum that all natural forms are based on the cone, sphere, and cylinder). This was not the method of Kandinsky. His aim was to charge form and colour with a purely spiritual meaning (as he put it) by eliminating all resemblance to the physical world. Whistler, too, had spoken of "divesting the picture from any outside sort of interest"; he even anticipated Kandinsky's "musical" titles. But it was the liber­ating influence of the Fauves that permitted Kandinsky to put this theory into practice. The possibility was clearly im­plicit in Fauvism from the start, as shown in our experiment with Rouault's Head of Christ: when the upper third of the picture is covered, the rest becomes a non-rep­resentational composition strangely similar to Kandinsky's.

How valid is the analogy between painting and music? When a painter like Kandinsky carries it through so uncom­promisingly, does he really lift his art to another plane? Or could it be that his declared independence from representa­tional images now forces him instead to "represent music," which limits him even more severely? Kandinsky's advocates like to point out that representational painting has a "literary" content, and they deplore such dependence on another art; but they do not explain why the "musical" content of non-­objective painting should be more desirable. Is painting less alien to music than to literature? They seem to think music is a higher art than literature or painting because it is inher­ently non-representational-a point of view with an ancient tradition that goes back to Plato and includes Plotinus, St. Augustine, and their medieval successors. The attitude of the non-objectivists might thus be termed "secular iconoclasm": they do not condemn images as wicked, but denounce them as non-art.

The case is difficult to argue, and it does not matter whether this theory is right or wrong; the proof of the pud­ding is in the eating, not in the recipe. Kandinsky's-or any artist's-ideas are not important to us unless we are convinced of the importance of his pictures. Did he create a vi­able style? Admittedly, his work demands an intuitive response that may be hard for some of us; yet the painting reproduced here has density and vitality, and a radiant fresh­ness of feeling that impresses us even though we are uncer­tain what exactly the artist has expressed.

HARTLEY. Americans became familiar with the Fauves through exhibitions from 1908 on. After the pivotal Armory show of 1913, which introduced the latest European art to New York, there was a growing interest in the German Ex­pressionists as well. The driving force behind the modernist movement in the United States was the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who almost single-handedly supported many of its early members. To him, modernism meant abstraction and its related concepts. Among the most significant achievements of the Stieglitz group are the can­vases painted by Marsden Hartley in Munich during the early years of World War I under the direct influence of Kandinsky. Portrait of a German Officer is a masterpiece of design from 1915, the year Hartley (1887-1943) was invited to exhibit with Der Blaue Reiter. He had already been introduced to Futurism and several offshoots of Cubism, which he used to discipline Kandinsky's super-charged surface. The emblematic portrait incorporates the insignia, epaulets, Maltese cross, and other details from an officer's uniform of the day. The result is a compelling testimony to the militarism he encountered everywhere in Germany.

ABSTRACTION

The second of our main currents is the one we call Abstrac­tion. When discussing Kandinsky, we said that the term is usually taken to mean the process (or the result) of analysing and simplifying observed reality. Literally, it means "to draw away from, to separate." If we have ten apples, and then sep­arate the ten from the apples, we get an "abstract number," a number that no longer refers to particular things. But "ap­ples," too, is an abstraction, since it places ten apples in one class, without regard for their individual qualities. The artist who sets out to paint ten apples will find no two of them alike, yet he cannot possibly take account of all their differences: even the most painstakingly realistic portrayal of these particular pieces of fruit is bound to be some sort of an ab­straction. Abstraction, then, goes into the making of any work of art, whether the artist knows it or not. The process was not conscious and controlled, however, until the Early Re­naissance, when artists first analysed the shapes of nature in terms of mathematical bodies. Cezanne and Seurat revitalized this approach and explored it further; they are the direct ancestors of the abstract movement in twentieth-century art.

PICASSO'S DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON. It is difficult to imagine the birth of modern abstraction without Pablo Pi­casso. About 1905, stimulated as much by the Fauves as by the retrospective exhibitions of the great Post-Impressionists, he gradually abandoned the melancholy lyricism of his Blue Period for a more robust style. He shared Matisse's enthusi­asm for Gauguin and Cezanne, but he viewed these masters very differently; in 1907 he produced his own counterpart to The Joy of Life, a monumental canvas so challenging that it outraged even Matisse. The title, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ("The Young Ladies of Avignon"), does not refer to the town of that name, but to Avignon Street in a notorious section of Barcelona. When Picasso started the picture, it was to be a temptation scene in a brothel, but he ended up with a composition of five nudes and a still life. But what nudes! Matisse's generalized figures in The Joy of Life seem utterly innocuous compared to this savage aggressiveness.

The three on the left are angular distortions of classical figures, but the violently dislocated features and bodies of the other two have all the barbaric qualities of ethnographic art. Following Gauguin's lead, the Fauves had discovered the aesthetic appeal of Afri­can and Oceanic sculpture and had introduced Picasso to this material; yet it was he, rather than they, who used prim­itivist art as a battering ram against the classical conception of beauty. Not only the proportions, but the organic integrity and continuity of the human body are denied here, so that the canvas (in the apt description of one critic) "resembles a field of broken glass."

Picasso, then, has destroyed a great deal; what has he gained in the process? Once we recover from the initial shock, we begin to see that the destruction is quite method­ical: everything-the figures as well as their setting-is bro­ken up into angular wedges or facet~; these, we will note, are not flat, but shaded in a way that gives them a certain three-dimensionality. We cannot always be sure whether they are concave or convex; some look like chunks of solidified space, others like fragments of translucent bodies.

They constitute a unique kind of matter, which imposes a new integrity and continuity on the entire canvas. The Dem­oiselles, unlike The Joy of Life, can no longer be read as an image of the external world; its world is its own, analogous to nature but constructed along different principles. Picasso's revolutionary "building material," compounded of voids and solids, is hard to describe with any precision. The early crit­ics, who saw only the prevalence of sharp edges and angles, dubbed the new style Cubism.

ANALYTIC CUBISM. That the Demoiselles owes anything to Cezanne may at first seem incredible. Nevertheless, Pi­casso had studied Cezanne's late work with great care, finding in Cezanne's abstract treatment of volume and space the translucent structural units from which to de­rive the faceted shapes of Analytic (or Facet) Cubism. The link is clearer in Picasso's portrait of Ambroise Vollard, painted three years later; the facets are now small and precise, more like prisms, and the canvas has the balance and refinement of a fully mature style.

Contrasts of colour and texture, so pronounced in the Dem­oiselles, are now reduced to a minimum (the subdued tonal­ity of the picture approaches monochrome), so as not to compete with the design. And the structure has become so complex and systematic that it would seem wholly cerebral if the "imprismed" sitter's face did not emerge with such dra­matic force. Of the "barbaric" distortions in the Demoiselles there is no trace; they had served their purpose. Cubism has become an abstract style within the purely Western sense. But its distance from observed reality has not significantly increased-Picasso may be playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with nature, but he still needs the visible world to challenge his creative powers. The non-objective realm held no appeal for him, then or later.

SYNTHETIC CUBISM. By 1910, Cubism was well estab­lished as an alternative to Fauvism, and Picasso had been joined by a number of other artists, notably Georges Braque (1882-1963), with whom he collaborated so intimately that their work at that times is difficult to tell apart. Both of them-it is not clear to whom the chief credit belongs-in­itiated the next phase of Cubism, which was even bolder than the first. Usually called Synthetic Cubism because it puts forms back together, it is also known as Collage Cubism, after the French word for "paste-up," the technique that started it all. We see its beginnings in Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912. Most of the painting shows the now-familiar facets, except for the letters; these, being already abstract signs, could not be translated into prismatic shapes, but from beneath the still life emerges a piece of im­itation chair caning, which has been pasted onto the canvas, and the picture is "framed" by a piece of rope. This intrusion of alien materials has a most remarkable effect: the abstract still life appears to rest on a real surface (the chair caning) as on a tray, and the substantiality of this tray is further em­phasized by the rope.

Within a year, Picasso and Braque were producing still lifes composed almost entirely of cut-and-pasted scraps of material, with only a few lines added to complete the design. In Le Courrier by Braque we recognize strips of imitation wood graining, part of a tobacco wrapper with a contrasting stamp, half the masthead of a newspaper, and a bit of newsprint made into a playing card (the ace of hearts). Why did Picasso and Braque suddenly prefer the contents of the wastepaper basket to brush and paint? Because, wanting to explore the new concept of the picture-as-a-tray, they found the best way was to put real things on the tray. The ingredients of a collage actually playa double role; they have been shaped and combined, then drawn or painted upon to give them a representational meaning', but they do not lose their original identity as scraps of material, "outsiders" in the world of art. Thus their function is both to represent (to be a part of an image) and to present (to be themselves). In this latter capacity, they endow the collage with a self-sufficiency that no Analytic Cubist picture can have. A tray, after all, is a self-contained area, detached from the rest of the physical world; unlike a painting, it cannot show more than is actually on it.

The difference between the two phases of Cubism may also be defined in terms of picture space: Analytic Cubism retains a certain kind of depth, the painted surface acting as a window through which we still perceive the remnants of the familiar perspective space of the Renaissance. Though fragmented and redefined, this space lies behind the picture plane and has no visible limits; potentially, it may contain objects that are hidden from our view. In Synthetic Cubism, on the contrary, the picture space lies in front of the plane of the "tray"; space is not created by illusionist devices, such as modeling and foreshortening, but by the actual over­lapping of layers of pasted materials. When, the apparent thickness of these materials and their distance from each other is increased by a bit of shading here and there, this does not affect the integrity of the non-perspective space. Synthetic Cubism, then, offers a basically new space concept, the first since Masaccio: it is a true landmark in the history of painting.       

Before long Picasso and Braque discovered that they could retain this new pictorial space without the use of pasted ma­terials; they had only to paint as if they were making collages. World War I, however, put an end to their collaboration and disrupted the further development of Synthetic Cubism, which reached its height in the following decade.

FUTURISM. As originally conceived by Picasso and Braque, Cubism was a formal discipline of subtle balance ap­plied to traditional subjects-still life, portraiture, and the nude. Other painters, however, saw in the new style a special affinity with the geometric precision of engineering that made it uniquely attuned to the dynamism of modern life. The short-lived Futurist movement in Italy exemplifies this attitude; in 1909-10 its disciples, led by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, issued a series of manifestos violently rejecting the past and exalting the beauty of the machine.

At first they used techniques developed from Post-Impres­sionism to convey in otherwise static compositions, still de­pendent upon representational images, the surge of industrial society. But by adopting the simultaneous views of Analytic Cubism in Dynamism of a Cyclist, Um­berto Boccioni (1882-1916), the most original of the Futur­ists, was able to communicate the look of furious pedalling across time and space far more tellingly than if he had actu­ally depicted the human figure, which could be seen in only one time and place in traditional art. In the flexible vocabu­lary provided by Cubism, Boccioni found the means of ex­pressing the twentieth century's new sense of time, space, and energy that Albert Einstein had defined in 1905 in his Special Theory of Relativity. Moreover, Boccioni suggests the unique quality of the modern experience. With his pulsating movement, the cyclist has become an extension of his envi­ronment, from which he is now indistinguishable.

Futurism literally died out in World War I; its leading art­ists were killed by the same vehicles of destruction they had glorified only a few years earlier in their revolutionary man­ifesto. But strong echoes of Futurism appear in Brooklyn Bridge, by the Italian-American Joseph Stella (1880-1946), with its maze of luminescent cables, vigorous diagonal thrusts, and crystalline "cells" of space.

CUBO-FUTURISM. As its name implies, Cubo-Futurism, which arose in Russia a few years before World War I as the result of close contacts with the leading European art centres, took its style from Picasso and based its theories on Fu­turist tracts. The Russian Futurists were above all modernists. They welcomed industry, which was spreading rapidly throughout Russia, as the foundation of a new society and the means for conquering that old Russian enemy, nature. Unlike the Italian Futurists, however, the Russians rarely glorified the machine, least of all as an instrument of war.

Central to Cubo-Futurist thinking was the concept of zaum, a term, which has no counterpart in the West: in­vented by Russian poets, zaum was a trans-sense (as opposed to the Dadaists' non-sense) language based on new word forms and syntax. In theory, zaum could be un­derstood universally, since it was thought that meaning was implicit in the basic sounds and patterns of speech. When applied to painting, zaum provided the artist with complete freedom to redefine the style and content of art. The picture surface was now seen as the sole conveyer of meaning through its appearance; hence, the subject of a work of art became the visual elements and their formal arrangement. However, because Cubo-Futurism was concerned with means, not ends, it failed to provide the actual content that is found in modernism.

Although the Cubo-Futurists were more important as the­orists than artists, they provided the springboard for later Russian movements. The new world envisioned by the Rus­sian modernists led to a broad redefinition of the roles of man and woman, and the finest painter of the group was Liubov Popova (1889-1924). It was then, in Russia, that women emerged as artistic equals to an extent not achieved in Eu­rope or America until considerably later. Popova studied in Paris in 1912 and visited Italy in 1914. The combination of Cubism and Futurism that she absorbed abroad is seen in The Traveler. The treatment of forms remains es­sentially Cubist, but the painting shares the Futurist obsession with representing dynamic motion in time and space. The jumble of image fragments creates the impression of ob­jects seen in rapid succession; across the plane the furious interaction of forms with their environment threatens to ex­tend the painting into the surrounding space. At the same time, the strong modeling draws attention to the surface, lending it a relief like quality that is enhanced by the vigorous texture.

SUPREMATISM. The first purely Russian art of the twen­tieth century, however, was that of Suprematism. In one of the greatest leaps of the symbolic and spatial imagination in the history of art, Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) invented the Black Quadrilateral. How is it that such a disarmingly simple image should be so important? By limiting art to a few elements-a single shape repeated in two tones and fixed firmly to the picture plane-he empha­sized the painting as a painting even more radically than had his predecessors. At the same time, he transformed it into a concentrated symbol having multiple layers of meaning, thereby providing the content missing from Cubo-Futurism. The inspiration for Black Quadrilateral came in 1913 while Malevich was working on designs for the opera Victory over the Sun, a production that was one of the important collab­orations in the modern era. In the context of the opera, the black quadrilateral represents the eclipse of the sun of West­ern painting and of everything based upon it. Further, the work can be seen as the triumph of the new order over the old, the East over the West, humanity over Nature, idea over matter. The black quadrilateral (which is not even a true rec­tangle) was intended to stand as a modern icon, superseding the traditional Christian trinity and symbolizing a "supreme" reality, because geometry is an independent abstraction in itself: hence the movement's name, Suprematism.

According to Malevich, Suprematism was also a philo­sophical color system constructed in time and space. His space was an intuitive one, having both scientific and mys­tical overtones. The flat plane replaces volume, depth, and perspective as a means of defining space; each side or point represents one of the three dimensions, the fourth side stand­ing for the fourth dimension, time. Like the universe itself, the black surface would be infinite were it not delimited by an outer boundary which is the white border and shape of the canvas. Black Quadrilateral thus constitutes the first sat­isfactory redefinition, visually and conceptually, of time and space in modern art. Like Einstein's formula E=mc2 for the theory of relativity, it has an elegant simplicity that belies the intense effort required to synthesize a complex set of ideas and reduce them to a fundamental "law." When it appeared for the first time, Suprematism had much the same impact on Russian artists that Einstein's theory had on scientists: it unveiled a world never seen before, one that was unequivo­cally modern.

Later, Malevich began to tilt his quadrilaterals and sim­plify his paintings still further in search of the ultimate work of art. Malevich's efforts culminated in Suprematist Compo­sition: White on White, his most famous compo­sition, which limits art to its fewest possible components. It is all too tempting to dismiss such a radical extreme as a reductio ad absurdum; seen in person, however, the canvas is surprisingly persuasive. The shapes, created by the sub­tlest nuances of texture, have a revelatory purity that makes even Black Quadrilateral seem needlessly complex.

The heyday of Suprematism was over by the early 1920s. Reflecting the growing diversity and fragmentation of Rus­sian art, its followers defected to other movements, above all to the Constructivism led by Vladimir Tatlin.

FANTASY

The third current, which we term Fantasy, follows a course less clear-cut than the other two, since it depends on a state of mind more than on any particular style. The one thing all painters of fantasy have in common is the belief that imag­ination, "the inner eye," is more important than the outside world. And since every artist's imagination is his own private domain, the images it provides for him are likely to be equally private, unless he subjects them to a deliberate process of selection. But how can such "uncontrolled" images have meaning to the beholder, whose own inner world is not the same as the artist's? Psychoanalysis has taught us that we are not so different from each other in this respect as we like to think. Our minds are all built on the same basic pattern, and the same is true of our imagination and memory. These belong to the unconscious part of the mind where experi­ences are stored, whether we want to remember them or not. At night, or whenever conscious thought relaxes its vigi­lance, our experiences come back to us and we seem to live through them again.

However, the unconscious mind does not usually repro­duce our experiences as they actually happened. They will often be admitted into the conscious part of the mind in the guise of "dream images"-in this form they seem less vivid, and we can live with our memories more easily. This digest­ing of experience by the unconscious mind is surprisingly alike in all of us, although the process works better with some individuals than with others. Hence we are always interested in imaginary things, provided they are presented to us in such a way that they seem real. What happens in a fairy tale, for example, would be absurd in the matter-of~fact language of a news report, but when it is told to us as it should be told, we are enchanted. The same thing is true of paintings-we recall The Dream by Henri Rousseau.

But why, we may ask, does private fantasy loom so large in twentieth-century art? We saw the trend beginning at the end of the eighteenth century in the art of Fuseli and Goya; perhaps they suggest part of the an­swer. There seem to be several interlocking causes: first, the cleavage that developed between reason and imagination in the wake of rationalism, which tended to dissolve the heri­tage of myth and legend that had been the common channel of private fantasy in earlier times; second, the artist's greater freedom-and insecurity-within the social fabric, giving him a sense of isolation and favouring an introspective atti­tude; and, finally, the Romantic cult of emotion that prompted the artist to seek out subjective experience, and to accept its validity. In nineteenth-century painting, private fantasy was still a minor current. After 1900, it became a major one.

DE CHIRICO. The heritage of Romanticism can be seen most clearly in the astonishing pictures painted in Paris just before World War I by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), such as Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. This deserted square with endless diminishing arcades, nocturnally illuminated by the cold full moon, has all the poetry of Ro­mantic reverie. But it has also a strangely sinister air; this is an "ominous" scene in the full sense of that term-every­thing here suggests an omen, a portent of unknown and dis­quieting significance. De Chirico himself could not explain the incongruities in these paintings-the empty furniture van, or the girl with the hoop-that trouble and fascinate us. Later, after he had returned to Italy, he adopted a conserva­tive style and repudiated his early work, as if he were em­barrassed at having put his dream world on public display.

CHAGALL. The power of nostalgia, so evident in Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, also dominates the fantasies of Marc Chagall (1887-1985), a Russian Jew who came to Paris in 1910. I and the Village is a Cubist fairy tale, weaving dreamlike memories of Russian folk tales, Jewish proverbs, and the look of Russia into one glowing vision. Here, as in many later works, Chagall relives the experiences of his childhood; these were so important to him that his imagination shaped and reshaped them for years without their persistence being diminished.

DUCHAMP. In Paris on the eve of World War I, we encoun­ter yet another artist of fantasy, the Frenchman Marcel Du­champ (1887-1968). After basing his early style on Cezanne, he initiated a dynamic version of Analytic Cubism, similar to Futurism, by superimposing successive phases of move­ment on each other, as in multiple-exposure photography. His Nude Descending a Staircase, done in this vein, caused a scandal at the Armory Show of modem art in New York in 1913.

Very soon, however, Duchamp's development took a far more disturbing turn. In The Bride, we will look in vain for any resemblance, however remote, to the human form; what we see is a mechanism that seems part motor, part distilling apparatus; it is beautifully engineered to serve no purpose whatever. Its title, which cannot be irrelevant (Duchamp, by lettering it right onto the canvas, has empha­sized its importance), causes us real perplexity. Did he intend to satirize the scientific outlook on humanity by "analysing" the bride until she is reduced to a complicated piece of plumbing? If so, the picture may be the negative counterpart of the glorification of the machine, so stridently proclaimed by the Futurists.

REALISM

THE ASH CAN SCHOOL. In America, the first wave of change was initiated not by the Stieglitz circle but by the Ash Can School, which flourished in New York just before World War I, although it was soon eclipsed by the rush to­ward a more radical modernism set off by the Armory Show in 1913. Cantering on Robert Henri, who had studied with a pupil of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy, and consisting mainly of former illustrators for Philadelphia and New York newspapers, this group of artists was fascinated with the teeming life of the city slums. They found an endless source of subjects in the everyday urban scene, to which they brought the reporter's eye for colour and drama. Despite the socialist philosophy that many of them shared, theirs was not an art of social commentary, but one that felt the pulse of city life, discovering in it vitality and richness while ignoring poverty and squalor. To capture these qualities they relied on rapid execution, inspired by Ba­roque and Post-Impressionist painting, which lends their canvases the immediacy of spontaneous observation.

BELLOWS. Although not a founding member of the Ash Can School, George Bellows (1882-1925) became a leading representative of the group in its heyday. His masterpiece, Stag at Sharkey's, shows why: no painter in Amer­ica before Jackson Pollock expressed such heroic energy. Yet Stag at Sharkey's reminds us of Eakins' William Rush Carv­ing His Allegorical Figure, for it continues the same Realist tradition. Both place us in the scene as if we were present, and both use the play of light to pick out the main figures against a dark background. Bellows' paintings were fully as shocking as Eakins' had been. Most late-nine­teenth-century American artists had all but ignored urban life in favour of landscapes, and compared with these, the sub­jects and surfaces of the Ash Can pictures had a disturbing rawness.

PAINTING BETWEEN THE WARS

PICASSO. The end of World War I unleashed an unprece­dented outpouring of art after a four-year creative lull. We begin with Picasso, whose genius towers over all others of the period and transcends categorization. As a Spanish na­tional living in Paris he was not involved in the conflict, un­like many French and German artists who served in the military and even sacrificed their lives. This was a time of quiet experimentation that laid the foundation for Picasso's art over the next several decades. The results did not become fully apparent, however, until the early 1920s, following a phase of intensive cultivation. Three Musicians shows the fruit of that labour. It utilizes the "cut-paper style" of Synthetic Cubism so consistently that we cannot tell from the reproduction whether it is painted or pasted.

By now, Picasso was internationally famous. Cubism had spread throughout the Western world; it influenced not only other painters, but sculptors and even architects. Yet Picasso was already striking out in a new direction. Soon after the invention of Synthetic Cubism, he had begun to do drawings in a painstakingly realistic manner reminiscent of Ingres, and by 1920 he was working simultaneously in two quite sep­arate styles: that of the Three Musicians, and a Neoclassic style of strongly modelled, heavy-bodied figures such as his Mother and Child. To many of his admirers, this seemed a kind of betrayal, but in retrospect the reason for Picasso's double-track performance is clear: chafing under the limitations of Synthetic Cubism, he needed to resume contact with the classical tradition, the "art of the museums." The figures in Mother and Child have a mock-monumental quality that suggests colossal statues rather than flesh-and ­blood human beings, yet the theme is treated with surprising tenderness. The forms, however, are carefully dovetailed within the frame, not unlike the way the Three Musicians is put together.

A few years later the two tracks of Picasso's style began to converge, making an extraordinary synthesis that was to be­come the basis of his art. The Three Dancers of 1925 shows how he accomplished this seemingly impossible feat. Structurally, the picture is pure Synthetic Cubism; it even includes painted imitations of specific materials-pat­terned wallpaper and samples of various fabrics cut out with pinking shears. But the figures, a wildly fantastic version of a classical scheme (compare the dancers in Matisse's The Joy of Life), are an even more violent assault on convention than the figures in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Human anatomy is here simply the raw material for Picasso's incredibly fertile inventiveness; limbs, breasts, and faces are handled with the same sovereign freedom as the fragments of external reality in Braque's Le Courrier. Their original identity no longer matters-breasts may turn into eyes, profiles merge with frontal views, shadows become sub­stance, and vice versa, in an endless flow of metamorphoses. They are "visual puns," offering wholly unexpected possibil­ities of expression-humorous, grotesque, macabre, even tragic.

Three Dancers marks a transition to Picasso's experiment with Surrealism. Because he did not practice automatism, he never developed into a true adherent of the movement. Nevertheless, the impact of his fellow Spaniard Joan Miro can be seen in the biomorphism of his mural Guernica. Picasso did not show any interest in politics during World War I or the 1920s, but the Spanish Civil War stirred him to ardent partisanship with the Loyalists. The mural executed in 1937 for the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Paris International Exposi­tion, has truly monumental grandeur. It was inspired by the terror-bombing of Guernica, the ancient capital of the Basques in Northern Spain. The painting does not represent the event itself; rather, with a series of powerful images, it evokes the agony of total war.

The destruction of Guernica was the first demonstration of the technique of saturation bombing which was later em­ployed on a huge scale in the course of World War II; the mural was thus a prophetic vision of doom-the doom that threatens us even more in this age of nuclear warfare. The symbolism of the scene resists precise interpretation, despite its several traditional elements: the mother and her dead child are the descendants of the Pieta, the woman with the lamp recalls the Statue of Liberty, and the dead fighter's hand, still clutching a broken sword, is a fa­miliar emblem of heroic resistance. We also sense the con­trast between the menacing, human-headed bull, surely intended to represent the forces of darkness, and the dying horse.

These figures owe their terrifying eloquence to what they are, not to what they mean; the anatomical dislocations, frag­mentations, and metamorphoses, which in the Three Danc­ers seemed willful and fantastic, now express a stark reality, the reality of unbearable pain. The ultimate test of the valid­ity of collage construction (here in superimposed flat "cut­outs" restricted to black, white, and gray) is that it could serve as the vehicle of such overpowering emotions.

ABSTRACTION

Picasso's abandonment of strict Cubism signaled the broad retreat of abstraction after 1920 because the utopian ideals associated with it had been largely dashed by "the war to end all wars." The Futurist spirit nevertheless continued to find adherents on both sides of the Atlantic.

LEGER. Buoyant with optimism and pleasurable excite­ment, The City by the Frenchman Fernand Leger (1881-1955) conjures up a mechanized utopia. This beau­tifully controlled industrial landscape is stable without being static, and reflects the clean geometric shapes of modern machinery.-In this instance, the term "abstraction" applies more to the choice of design elements and their manner of combination than to the shapes themselves, since these (ex­cept for the two figures on the staircase) are "pre-fabricated" entities.

DEMUTH. The modern movement in America proved short-lived. One of the few artists to continue working in this vein after World War I was Charles Demuth (1883-1935). A member of the Stieglit.z group, he had been friendly with Duchamp and exiled Cubists in New York during World War I. A few years later, under the impact of Futurism, he developed a style known as Precisionism to de­pict urban and industrial architecture. We can detect influences from all of these movements in I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, but the dynamic treatment of the back­ground most directly recalls Joseph Stella's Brooklyn Bridge. The title is taken from a poem by Demuth's friend William Carlos Williams whose name-as "Bill," "Carlos," and "W. C. W."-also forms part of the design. In the poem the figure 5 appears on a red tire truck, while in the painting it has become the dominant feature thrice repeated to rein­force its echo in our memory as the tire truck rushes on through the night.

MONDRIAN. The most radical abstractionist of our time was a Dutch painter nine years older than Picasso, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). He came to Paris in 1912 as a ma­ture Expressionist in the tradition of Van Gogh and the Fauves. Under the impact of Analytic Cubism, his work soon underwent a complete change, and within the next decade Mondrian developed an entirely non-representational style that he called Neo-Plasticism (the movement as a whole is also known as De Stijl, after the Dutch magazine advocating his ideas). Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow shows Mondrian's style at its most severe: he restricts his design to horizontals and verticals and his colours to the three primary hues, plus black and white. Every possibility of representation is thereby eliminated. Yet Mondrian some­times gave to his works such titles as Trafalgar Square, or Broadway Boogie Woogie, that hint at some degree of relationship, however indirect, with observed reality. Un­like Kandinsky, Mondrian did not strive for pure, lyrical emo­tion; his goal, he asserted, was "pure reality," and he defined this as equilibrium "through the balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions."

Perhaps we can best understand what he meant if we think of his work as "abstract collage" that uses black bands and coloured rectangles instead of recognizable fragments of chair caning and newsprint. He was interested solely in re­lationships and wanted no distracting elements or fortuitous associations. But, by establishing the "right" relationship among his bands and rectangles, he transforms them as thor­oughly as Braque transformed the snippets of pasted paper in Le Courrier. How did he discover the "right" relationship? And how did he determine the shape and num­ber for the bands and rectangles? In Braque's Le Courrier, the ingredients are to some extent "given" by chance; Mondrian, apart from his self-imposed rules, constantly faced the dilemma of unlimited possibilities. He could not change the relationship of the bands to the rectangles without chang­ing the bands and rectangles themselves. When we consider his task, we begin to realize its infinite complexity.

Looking again at Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, we find that when we measure the various units, only the proportions of the canvas itself are truly rational, an exact square; Mondrian has arrived at all the rest "by feel" and must have undergone agonies of trial and error. How often, we wonder, did he change the dimensions of the red rectan­gle to bring it and the other elements into self-contained equilibrium? Strange as it may seem, Mondrian's exquisite sense for non-symmetrical balance is so specific that critics well acquainted with his work have no difficulty in distinguishing fakes from genuine pictures. Designers who work with non-figurative shapes, such as architects and typogra­phers are likely to be most sensitive to this quality, and Mondrian has had a greater influence on them than on paint­ers.

NICHOLSON. Mondrian nevertheless did produce a num­ber of followers among the painters. By far the most original was the English artist Ben Nicholson (1894-1982). A rig­orous Abstractionist, he bent Mondrian's rules without breaking them in his painted reliefs, which also show the inspiration of his wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The overlapping shapes violate the integrity of the rectangle and overcome the tyranny of the grid maintained by Mondrian. The geometry is further enlivened by the introduction of the circle. Yet his work, too, relies on the delicate balance of elements. The effect is enhanced by the subdued palette and matte finish, which create harmonies of the utmost refinement. Indeed, compared to Nicholson's, Mondrian's primary colours seem astonishingly bright and exuberant.

FANTASY

DADA. Out of despair over the mechanized mass killing of World War I, a number of artists in New York and Zurich simultaneously launched in protest a movement called Dada (or Dadaism), which then spread to other cities in Germany and France. The term, meaning "hobbyhorse" in French, was reportedly picked at random from a dictionary, and as an infantile, all-purpose word, it perfectly fitted the spirit of the movement. Dada has often been called nihilistic, and its declared purpose was indeed to make clear to the public at large that all established values, moral or aesthetic, had been rendered meaningless by the catastrophe of the Great War. During its short life (c. 1915-1922) Dada preached nonsense and anti-art with a vengeance. Marcel Duchamp once "im­proved" a reproduction of Leonardo's Mona Lisa with a moustache and the letters LHOOQ, which when pronounced in French, make an off-colour pun. Not even modern art was safe from the Dadaists' assaults; one of them exhibited a toy mon­key inside a frame with the title "Portrait of Cezanne." Yet Dada was not a completely negative movement. In its calcu­lated irrationality there was also liberation, a voyage into un­known provinces of the creative mind. The only law respected by the Dadaists was that of chance, and the only reality, that of their own imaginations.

ERNST. Although their most characteristic art form was the ready-made, the Dadaists adopted the collage technique of Synthetic Cubism for their purposes: figure 1020 by the German Dadaist Max Ernst (1891-1976), an associate of Duchamp, is largely composed of snippets from illustrations of machinery. The caption pretends to enumer­ate these mechanical ingredients, which include (or add up to?) "1 Piping Man." Actually, there is also a "piping woman." These offspring of Duchamp's pre-war Bride stare at us blindly through their goggles.

ARP. Hans (Jean) Arp (1887-1966), another early member of the movement, invented a new kind of collage whose elements-collared pieces of paper that had been shaped by tearing rather than by cutting-were arranged "according to the laws of chance." Arp started these compo­sitions by dropping the bits of paper on a larger sheet, and then cautiously adjusted this "natural" configuration. The artist's task, he believed, was to "court the Muse of Chance," eliciting from her what he called "organic concretions" (he disliked the term "abstraction," which implies discipline and conscious purpose, not reliance on the happy accident).

SURREALISM. In 1924, after Duchamp's retirement from Dada, a group led by the poet Andre Breton founded Dada's successor, Surrealism. They defined their aim as "pure psy­chic automatism. . . intended to express. . . the true process of thought. . . free from the exercise of reason and from any aesthetic or moral purpose." Surrealist theory was heavily larded with concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis, and its overwrought rhetoric is not always to be taken seriously. The notion that a dream can be transposed directly from the un­conscious mind to the canvas, bypassing the conscious awareness of the artist, did not work in practice: some degree of control was simply unavoidable. Nevertheless, Surrealism stimulated several novel techniques for soliciting and exploit­ing chance effects.

ERNST'S DECALCOMANIA. Max Ernst, the most inven­tive member of the group, often combined collage with "frot­tage" (rubbings from pieces of wood, pressed flowers, and other relief surfaces-the process we all know from the children's pastime of rubbing with a pencil on a piece of paper covering, say, a coin). In La ToiLette de La Mariee, he has obtained fascinating shapes and textures by "decalcomania" (the transfer, by pressure, of oil paint to the canvas from some other surface). This procedure is in es­sence another variant of that recommended by Alexander Cozens and Leonardo da Vinci, and Ernst cer­tainly found, and elaborated upon, an extraordinary wealth of images among his stains. The end result does have some of the qualities of a dream, but it is a dream born of a strik­ingly Romantic imagination.

DALl. The same can be said of The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali (1904-1989). The most notori­ous of the Surrealists, Dali used a meticulous verism to render a "paranoid" dream in which time, forms, and space have been distorted in a frighteningly real way.

MIRO. Surrealism, however, has a more boldly imaginative branch: some works by Picasso, such as Three Dancers, have affinities with it, and its greatest exponent was also Spanish, Joan Miro (1893-1983), who painted the strik­ing Composition. His style has been labelled "bi­omorphic abstraction," since his designs are fluid and curvilinear, like organic forms, rather than geometric. Actu­ally, "biomorphic concretion" might be a more suitable name, for the shapes in Miro's pictures have their own vigorous life. They seem to change before our eyes, expanding and con­tracting like amoebas until they approach human individu­ality closely enough to please the artist. Their spontaneous "becoming" is the very opposite of abstraction as we defined it above, though Miro's formal discipline is no less rigorous than that of Cubism (he began as a Cubist).

KLEE. The German-Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879-1940), too, had been influenced by Cubism; but ethnographic art, and the drawings of small children, held an equally vital in­terest for him. During World War I, he moulded from these disparate elements a pictorial language of his own, marvellously economical and precise. Twittering Machine, a delicate pen drawing tinted with watercolour, dem­onstrates the unique flavour of Klee's art: with a few simple lines, he had created a ghostly mechanism that imitates the sound of birds, simultaneously mocking our faith in the miracles of the machine age and our sentimental appreciation of bird song. The little contraption (which is not without its sinister aspect: the heads of the four sham birds look like fishermen's lures, as if they might entrap real birds) thus condenses into one striking invention a complex of ideas about present-day civilization.

The title has an indispensable role; it is characteristic of the way Klee worked that the picture itself~ however visually appealing, does not reveal its full evocative quality unless the artist tells us what it means. The title, in turn, needs the picture-the witty concept of a twittering machine does not kindle our imagination until we are shown such a thing. This interdependence is familiar to us from cartoons; Klee lifts it to the level of high art without relinquishing the playful char­acter of these verbal-visual puns. To him art was a "language of signs," of shapes that are images of ideas as the shape of a letter is the image of a specific sound, or an arrow the image of the command, "This way only." But he also realized that in any conventional system the sign is no more than a "trig­ger";' the instant we perceive it, we automatically invest it with its meaning, without stopping to ponder its shape. Klee wanted his signs to impinge upon our awareness as visual facts, yet also to share the quality of "triggers."

Toward the end of his life, he immersed himself in the study of ideographs of all kinds, such as hieroglyphics, hex signs, and the mysterious markings in prehistoric caves ­"boiled-down" representational images that appealed to him because they had the twin quality he strove for in his own graphic language. This "ideographic style" is very pro­nounced in Park near Lucerne. As a lyric poet may use the plainest words, these deceptively simple shapes sum up a wealth of experience and sensation: the innocent gaiety of spring, the clipped orderliness peculiar to captive plant life in a park. Has it not a relationship, in spirit if not in fact, with the Romanesque Summer Landscape in the manuscript of Carmina Burana? Shortly before his death, Klee's horror at World War II led him to abandon this light-hearted vein in favour of a bleakly pessimistic manner that drew close to Miro's darkest fantasies of the same time.

EXPRESSIONISM (GERMAN)

GROSZ. The experience of World War I filled German artists with a deep anguish at the state of modern civilization, which found its principal outlet in Expressionism. George Grosz (1893-1959), a painter and graphic artist, studied in Paris in 1913, then joined Dadaism in Berlin after the end of the war. Inspired by the Futurists, he used a dynamized form of Cubism to develop a bitter, savagely satiric style that expressed the disillusionment of his generation. In Germany, a Winter's Tale, the city of Berlin forms the kalei­doscopic-and chaotic-background for several large figures, which are superimposed on it as in a collage: the marionettelike "good citizen" at his table, and the sinister forces that moulded him (a hypocritical clergyman, a general, and a schoolmaster).

BECKMANN. Max Beckmann (1884-1950), a robust de­scendant of the Brucke artists, did not become an Expres­sionist until after he had lived through World War I, which filled him with a deep despair at the state of modern civili­zation. The Dream is a mocking nightmare, a tilted, zigzag world crammed with puppetlike figures, as dis­quieting as those in Bosch's Hell. Its evocatively powerful symbolism, however, is even more difficult to inter­pret, since it is necessarily subjective.

How indeed could Beckmann have expressed the chaos in Germany after that war with the worn-out language of tradi­tional symbols? "These are the creatures that haunt my imagination," he seems to say. "They show the true nature of the modern condition-how weak we are, how helpless against ourselves in this proud era of so-called progress." Many elements from this grotesque and sinister sideshow recur more than a decade later in the lateral panels of Beckmann's triptych Departure, completed when, under Nazi pressure, he was on the point of leaving his homeland. In the hindsight of today, the topsy-turvy quality of these two scenes, full of mutilations and meaningless rit­uals, has acquired the force of prophecy. The stable design of the centre panel, in contrast, with its expanse of blue sea and its sunlit brightness, conveys the hopeful spirit of an em­barkation for distant shores. (After living through World War II in occupied Holland, under the most trying conditions, Beckmann spent the final three years of his life in America.)

EXPRESSIONISM (AMERICAN)

DOVE. After 1920 in the United States, most of the original members of the Stieglitz group concentrated on landscapes, which they treated in representational styles derived loosely from Expressionism. Alone among them, Arthur G. Dove (1880-1946) consistently maintained a form of abstraction based on Kandinsky's expressionistic style. The difference between the two artists is that Dove sought to reveal the inner life of nature, whereas Kandinsky tried to rid his im­ages of readily recognizable subject matter. Dove's paintings possess a monumental spirit that belies their typically mod­est size. Foghorns exemplifies the intelligence and economy of his mature landscapes. To evoke the diffu­sion of sound, Dove utilized the simple but ingenious device of irregular concentric circles of colour that grow paler as they radiate outward.

EXPRESSIONISM (MEXICAN)

OROZCO. During the 1930s, the centre of Expressionism in the New World was Mexico. The Mexican Revolution began in 1911 with the fall of the dictator Porfirio Diaz and continued for more than two decades; it inspired a group of young painters to search for a national style incorporating the great native heritage of Pre-Columbian art. They also felt that their art must be "of the people," expressing the spirit of the Revolution in vast mural cycles in public buildings. Although each developed his own distinctive style, they shared a common point of departure: the Symbolist art of Gauguin. This art had shown how non-Western forms could be integrated with the Western tradition, and the flat, deco­rative quality was moreover particularly suited to murals. The involvement of these artists in the political turmoil of the day often led them to overburden their works with ideo­logical significance.

The artist least subject to this imbalance of form and sub­ject matter was Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), a pas­sionately independent artist who refused to get embroiled in factional politics. The detail from the mural cycle at the Uni­versity of Guadalajara illustrates his most power­ful trait, a deep humanitarian sympathy with the silent, suffering masses.

REALISM (AMERICAN)

O'KEEFFE. The naturalism that characterized American art as a whole during the 1920s found its most important representative in Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986). Throughout her long career, she covered a wide range of subjects and styles. Like Arthur Dove, she practiced a form of organic ab­straction indebted to Expressionism; she also adopted the Precisionism of Charles Demuth, so that she is sometimes considered an abstract artist. Her work often combines aspects of both approaches; as she assimilated a subject into her imagination, she would alter and simplify it to convey a personal meaning. Nonetheless, she remained a realist at heart. Black Iris III is the kind of paint­ing for which she is best known. The image is marked by a strong sense of design uniquely her own, yet the flower is deceptive in its decorative treatment. Observed with detach­ment, it is a thinly disguised symbol of female sexuality.

AMERICAN SCENE PAINTING. The 1930s witnessed an even stronger artistic conservatism than the previous decade's, in reaction to the economic depression and social turmoil that gripped both Europe and the United States.

The dominance of realism signalled the retreat of progres­sive art everywhere? In Germany, where it was known as the New Objectivity, realism was linked to the reassertion of traditional values. Most American artists split into two camps, the Regionalists and the Social Realists. The Re­gionalists sought to revive idealism by updating the Amer­ican myth, defined, however, largely in Mid-western terms. The Social Realists, on the other hand, captured in their pictures the dislocation and despair of the Depression era, and were often concerned with social reform. But both movements, although bitterly opposed, drew freely on the Ash Can School.

HOPPER. The one artist who appealed to all factions alike, including that of the few remaining modernists, was a former pupil of Robert Henri, Edward Hopper (1882-1967). He fo­cused on what has since become known as the "vernacular architecture" of American cities-store fronts, movie houses, all-night diners-which no one else had thought worthy of an artist's attention. Early Sunday Morning distils a haunting sense of loneliness from the all-too-familiar elements of an ordinary street. Its quietness, we realize, is temporary; there is hidden life behind these facades. We al­most expect to see one of the window shades raised as we look at them. But apart from its poetic appeal, the picture also shows an impressive formal discipline; we note the strat­egy in placing the fireplug and barber pole, the subtle variations in the treatment of the row of windows, the precisely calculated slant of sunlight, the delicate balance of verticals and horizontals. Obviously, Hopper was not unaware of Mondrian.