20th century

 Sculpture
 During the late 19th and 20th century, sculpture artists reconsidered, redefined and
reworked the very concept of the sculpture in a more profound way than it had ever
been before. The most important periods when it comes to the revolution of the
sculpture and the establishment of fundamental paradigms were the beginning of the
20th century and a period between the 1960s and 70s.
1. Guitar - Pablo Picasso, 1912
 In 1912, a few years before inventing Cubism with Georges Braque,
Pablo Picasso moved his cubist theories from the canvas to the 3D
world. He adapted his cubist rules for sculpture and produced a
cardboard guitar, one of his recurring themes at the time. It was a
striking creation at the start of a century full of artistic discoveries.
2. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space - Umberto Boccioni, 1913
 This sculpture by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni—a member of the
avant-garde Futurist movement—depicts a man walking and is designed
to illustrate movement and speed in three dimensions. The human form
merges with the shapes of a machine, another characteristic of futurist
objectives. Although this sculpture is slightly less well-known, it was a
very original piece for the time, which shows how art throughout
Europe was changing at the start of the century.
3. The Little Mermaid - Edvard Eriksen, 1913
 This sculpture from Edvard Eriksen was created in tribute to the
eponymous story by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The
artwork sits upon a rock in the port of Denmark’s capital Copenhagen
and is one of the city’s star attractions. As it is exhibited outdoors, it has
been vandalized and distorted on a number of occasions, and in 1964 its
head was even stolen. The head was never recovered and a new face
had to be sculpted for the little mermaid… Luck was not on her side it
seems, as the head was stolen again in 1998, although this time, luckily,
it was returned.
4. White Bear - François Pompon, 1923 – 1933
 In response to the very expressionist artworks of his contemporary
Rodin, sculptor François Pompon abandoned the human form and
concentrated instead on the animal world. In 1922, he unveiled his
White Bear at the Autumn Fair, attracting the attention of his peers and
the general public. His stripped-back, no-frills artworks and their soft
shapes are nonetheless very realistic.
5. Walking Man - Alberto Giacometti, 1960
 Giacometti soon began working on human forms, and his research
resulted in Walking Man in 1960. The stretched-out, skeleton-like shape
of the figure are typical of Giacometti’s sculptures. In 2010, one of ten
copies of this artwork sold for €126.83 million, making it the most
expensive sculpture ever sold at auction… A true icon!
 Dada
 Dada was a 20th-century avant-garde art movement (often referred to as an “anti-art”
movement) born out of the tumultuous societal landscape and turmoil of WWI. It began
as a vehement reaction and revolt against the horrors of war and the hypocrisy and
follies of bourgeois society that had led to it.
1. 1915 Ici, C'est Stieglitz (Here, This is Stieglitz) Artist: Francis Picabia
 Picabia was a French artist who embraced the many ideas of Dadaism
and defined some himself. He very much enjoyed going against
convention and re-defining himself to work in new ways a number of
times over a career that spanned over 45 years.
2. 1916 Reciting the Sound Poem "Karawane" Artist: Hugo Ball
 Ball designed this costume for his performance of the sound-poem,
"Karawane," in which nonsensical syllables uttered in patterns created
rhythm and emotion, but nothing resembling any known language. The
resulting lack of sense was meant to reference the inability of European
powers to solve their diplomatic problems through the use of rational
discussion, thus leading to World War I - equating the political situation
to the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel.
3. 1917 Untitled (Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance)Artist: Hans Arp
 Hans Arp made a series of collages based on chance, where he would
stand above a sheet of paper, dropping squares of contrasting colored
paper on the larger sheet's surface, and then gluing the squares
wherever they fell onto the page. The resulting arrangement could then
provoke a more visceral reaction, like the fortune telling from I-Ching
coins that interested Arp, and perhaps provide a further creative spur.
Apparently, this technique arose when Arp became frustrated by
attempts to compose more formal geometric arrangements.
4. 1917 Fountain Artist: Marcel Duchamp
 Duchamp was the first artist to use a readymade and his choice of a
urinal was guaranteed to challenge and offend even his fellow artists.
There is little manipulation of the urinal by the artist other than to turn
it upside-down and to sign it with a fictitious name. By removing the
urinal from its everyday environment and placing it in an art context,
Duchamp was questioning basic definitions of art as well as the role of
the artist in creating it.
5. 1919 LHOOQ Artist: Marcel Duchamp
 This work is a classic example of Dada irreverence towards traditional
art. Duchamp transformed a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa (1517)
painting, which had only recently been returned to the Louvre after it
was stolen in 1911. While it was already a well-known work of art, the
publicity from the theft ensured that it became one of the most revered
and famous works of art: art with a capital A. On the postcard, Duchamp
drew a mustache and a goatee onto Mona Lisa's face and labeled it
L.H.O.O.Q. 
 Surrealism
 Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain
forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the
disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms
and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
 Surrealism and Reality - The way artists approach reality is part of their visual toolbox:
Artists may depict much of what they see in the physical world, they may alter
appearances, or they may invent forms that no one has seen. Breton initially had a
group of writers in his small group of Surrealists, but eventually several visual artists
were accepted into the group. The following are several prominent Surrealist artists and
examples of their work.
 André Breton, French (1896 - 1966). André Breton was the founder and chief theorist of
the Surrealist Movement. Through his study of medicine and work with the insane, he
became interested in irrational imagery. After serving as a medical auxiliary during the
First World War, he discovered the work of Sigmund Freud. The subjects of psychiatry,
the illogical and the unconscious mind appealed greatly to the Surrealists. By 1924,
Breton had become a prominent figure in the Parisian avant garde and had gathered
around him a group of poets and artists interested in exploring the subconscious. The
Surrealist Movement was launched that year with Breton's 'Manifesto of Surrealism'.
 René Magritte, Belgian (1898 - 1967). Magritte was born in Belgium and, apart from a
few years spent in Paris in the late 1920s, lived there all his life. Unlike many Surrealists,
Magritte did not subscribe to the view that the unconscious could be expressed through
chance or 'automatic' techniques.
 Salvador DalíSalvador Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the
world. He relished courting the masses, and he was probably better known, especially in
the United States, than any other 20th-century painter, including even fellow Spaniard
Pablo Picasso. He loved creating a sensation, not to mention controversy.
 Max Ernst - A key member of first Dada and then Surrealism in Europe in the 1910s and
1920s, Max Ernst used a variety of mediums—painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture,
and various unconventional drawing methods—to give visual form to both personal
memory and collective myth. By combining illusionistic technique with a cut-and-paste
logic, he made the incredible believable, expressing disjunctions of the mind and shocks
of societal upheavals with unsettling clarity

 Primitivism
 Primitivism, which was a 19th-20th century artistic movement developed by prominent
European artists: Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, to name a few, was
marked by European artists breaking away from traditional western artistic conventions
in favor of the curving, geometric, and/or flattened forms attributed to some African,
Oceanic and Native cultures. As a graduate student, the topic fascinated me. Heavily
focused on the study of the art and visual culture(s) of Africa and diaspora, my graduate
experience centered on the deconstruction of traditional notions developed during
 periods marked by racism and colonialism. The Primitivism exhibit explored in this essay,
for example, illustrates a contemporary manifestation of age-old perceptions of the
African, afro-diasporic and indigenous domains.
 Dufy
 Raoul Dufy was a French artist and designer whose paintings and prints portrayed
leisure activities and urban landscapes. He created airy washes of light and shade, into
which he would draw bold calligraphic brushstrokes. The artist's experimental use of
color was influenced both by Claude Monet and his Fauvist peer Henri Matisse. “Blue is
the only color which maintains its own character in all its tones it will always stay blue,”
the artist mused. “Whereas yellow is blackened in its shades, and fades away when
lightened; red when darkened becomes brown, and diluted with white is no longer red,
but another color—pink.”
 Utrillo
 Maurice Utrillo was a French artist noted for his naïve yet picturesque cityscapes.
Rendered in thickly troweled paint, the artist portrayed the winding streets and
alleyways in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. “On a particularly boring day, I had
a clever but unfortunate inspiration,” he reflected. “I seized a piece of cardboard, some
tubes of tint and petroleum base—since I lacked real oil—and, confronting a typical
Montmartre street corner, I suddenly found myself a practitioner of this difficult and
thankless art of painting.” Born Maurice Valadon on December 26, 1883 in Paris, France,
his mother was the painter and artist’s model Suzanne Valadon.
 Picasso and Beckmann
 Picasso needs no introduction; he has long enjoyed a fame that’s universal in scope. This
doesn’t mean that his work is universally understood, however: In Picasso’s case, it has
often meant the opposite. What many people think they know about Picasso has far
more to do with his public persona-his sex life, his politics, his longevity, his fecundity in
creating a variety of styles in a variety of media, and his unembarrassed love of the
limelight-than with his artistic achievements. Such has been his celebrity that his name
is now synonymous with the very idea of the artist-genius, even among people who
remain baffled by his work
 Max Beckmann, on the other hand, has never enjoyed a celebrity on this scale, even in
America, where he lived and worked as an émigré in the last years of his life and as a
teacher, first in St. Louis and then in New York, influencing an entire generation of
American painters. Moreover, Beckmann’s private life, which was centered on a long
and happy marriage, remain private, and his politics-insofar as he can be said to have
had any-were limited to his opposition to the Nazi regime in his native Germany, which
famously declared art of his persuasion degenerate.