A beam of light passed through a prism breaks into bands of color—the colors of the spectrum.

A beam of light passed through a prism breaks into bands of color—the colors of the spectrum.

Colors of the Spectrum: Red Orange Complementary Colors: Yellow • Red & Green Green • Yellow & Purple Blue • Blue & Orange Indigo (Note: Indigo + Violet Violet = Purple) Color Wheel: Neutral Colors: Black, White, Gray Primary Colors: Red, Yellow, Blue Secondary Colors: Orange, Green, Purple R P O B Y G

FAUVISM The first new movement of 20th-century art. Derives from the French word fauve, meaning “wild beast.” Originally applied in a derogatory sense to a group of artists, led by Matisse, who exhibited together in 1905. Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905

FAUVISM Initial reviews of the first Fauvist exhibition referred to “color madness,” to “unspeakable fantasies,” to “the barbaric and naïve sport of a child who plays with a box of crayons he just got as a Christmas present.” Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905

Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905 Gauguin, Self-Portrait, 1889 Post-Impressionist roots of Fauvism

Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905 Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889 Post-Impressionist roots of Fauvism

Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man Matisse, Woman with a Hat

Matisse, Woman with a Hat Rubens, Portrait of His Wife

Matisse, Woman with a Hat Detail

Matisse, The Joy of Life (Le Bonheur de Vivre), 1905-06

Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905-06 According to a contemporary account, the painting, when first exhibited, was greeted by “an uproar of jeers, angry babble, and screaming laughter.” Yet Matisse was really striving for effects that were pleasing, warm, and gracious—images of ease and well-being. As he wrote in 1908, he aspired to an art “of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be . . . a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair, which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905-06 Gauguin, The Day of the God, 1894 Post-Impressionist roots of Fauvism

Matisse, The Joy of Life Detail

Matisse, The Joy of Life With its warm, lush setting, and its figures intoxicated with love, music, dance, and nature, the painting evokes a timeless, mythic age—a “golden age”—in which men and women lived in harmony with nature and with each other: a primitive Paradise-on-earth.

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM Nolde was a member of a German art group called Die Brücke (“The Bridge”), which formed in Dresden in 1905 and disbanded in 1913. The name “Bridge” reflected the artists’ youthful eagerness to cross into a new future. Unlike Matisse’s emphasis on pleasant, gracious effects, Nolde and other German Expressionists sought dissonant, disturbing effects suggesting intense emotional states of anxiety and anguish. Emil Nolde, The Last Supper, 1909

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM Space seems claustrophobic, pressing in on all sides. . . . Faces are blocky, chunky, and crude, with jagged, angular edges. . . . The surface is thickly encrusted with slabs of paint. . . . Colors are intense, garish, sour, acidic, glowing, radioactive. . . . Emil Nolde, The Last Supper, 1909

The painting represents Picasso’s “Blue Period.” Picasso, The Old Guitarist, 1903

Picasso, The Old Guitarist, 1903 Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905, representing the artist’s “Rose Period”

Picasso, 1905 Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (“The Young Women of Avignon”), 1907 (Note the anagram “Vile Meaningless Doodles”!)

The painting at MoMA (Size matters . . . ) Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon

“With this painting we bid farewell to all the paintings of the past,” wrote one contemporary. According to another, “it seemed to everyone something mad or monstrous.” Picasso himself referred to it as his “exorcism painting.” Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon

Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905-06 Matisse vs. Picasso Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

Cézanne, Bathers, 1899-1906 Post-Impressionist background to Picasso Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

19th-century French Demoiselles d’Avignon

Model posing, from Victoria’s Secret catalog Demoiselles d’Avignon

Detail Demoiselles d’Avignon

Ancient Egyptian Demoiselles d’Avignon

Ancient Egyptian Detail of Demoiselles d’Avignon

Detail of Demoiselles African mask

The Origins of Cubism Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

An Early Form of Cubism Picasso, Landscape with a Factory at Horta de Ebro, 1908 Georges Braque

Cézanne, c. 1900 Picasso, 1908 Another example of the relationship between Picasso and Cézanne

Cézanne, c. 1900 Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1910

Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1910 Cézanne, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1899

“Analytic” Cubism (or “High” Cubism) This type of Cubism is usually called Analytic Cubism because it sort of fits the definition of “analysis” as the breaking up of something complex into its various simpler elements; and also in order to differentiate it from a later form of Cubism called Synthetic Cubism, which supposedly follows the opposite process. However, we will not concern ourselves with these terms in this class. Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1910

Voids seal over, becoming solid, while solids flatten out and fragment. . . . This type of Cubism is characterized by its overlapping, intersecting, interpenetrating planes . . . and by the integration of the forms with the space around them. . . . Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1910

Matisse, 1905 Nolde, 1909 Picasso, 1910 Cubism compared with Fauvism and German Expressionism

A beam of light passed through a prism breaks into bands of color—the colors of the spectrum.