MODERNISM

Modernism.At the beginning of the twenty-first century our relationship to Modernism is complex. The built environment that we live in today was largely shaped by Modernism. The buildings we inhabit, the chairs we sit on, the graphic design that surrounds us have all been created by the aesthetics and the ideology of Modernist design. We live in an era that still identifies itself in terms of Modernism, as post-Modernist or even post-post-Modernist.Modernism was not conceived as a style but a loose collection of ideas. It was a term which covered a range of movements and styles that largely rejected history and applied ornament, and which embraced abstraction. Born of great cosmopolitan centres, it flourished in Germany and Holland, as well as in Moscow, Paris, Prague and New York. Modernists had a utopian desire to create a better world. They believed in technology as the key means to achieve social improvement and in the machine as a symbol of that aspiration. All of these principles were frequently combined with social and political beliefs (largely left-leaning) which held that design and art could, and should, transform society.

Caspar David FreidrichThe Watzmann, 1824-1825

Edouard Manet Le dejeuner sur l’herbe, 1863

PicassoLes Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

Georges BraqueClarinet and bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece, 1911

Claude MonetWaterlillies, 1915

MalevichAeroplane Flying, 1915

Suprematism:An art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms (squares and circles) which formed in Russia in 1915-1916.

Constructivism:an artistic and architectural movement in Russia from 1919 onward (especially present after the October Revolution) which dismissed "pure" art in favour of an art used as an instrument for social purposes, specifically the construction of a socialist system.

Tatlin’s Tower was a grand monumental building envisioned and blueprinted by the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, but never built. It was supposed to be erected in Petrograd after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as the headquarters and monument of the Comintern (the third international). Its proper name was to be The Monument to the Third International.

Aleksandr Rodchenko

(1923)

Georgia O’KeefePink and Green Mountain no.1, 1917

Piet MondrianComposition in Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1921

De Stijl (neoplasticists)

• Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white.

The Bauhaus1919 t0 1933

The Bauhaus began with an utopian definition: "The building of the future" was to combine all

the arts in ideal unity.

Laszlo Moholy Nagy

Mies van der RoheBarcelona Pavillion (1929)

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Le CorbusierVilla Savoye, 1930

Ben NicholsonWhite Relief, 1937-1938

Bill BrandtNude, London, 1957

James Joyce

Alvar AaltoPaimio Chair 1931 -32

Mark RothkoBlue and Grey, 1958

Helen FrankenthalerMountains and Sea 1952

Anthony CaroScultura Tre, 196

Eva HesseOne More Than One, 1967

Carl AndreEquivalent V111 (1966)