Unit 4. 20th century painting

What do you know about the peculiarities of 20^th century painting? Why did the younger generation of artists want to change their pictorial language? Do you know any spectacular examples of their approach to our sensory perception of the world? Are you able to mention the most important art movements of the 20^th century? Do you know any famous and influential 20^th century painters and their works of art? Now, read about different trends and movements in the art of painting of the period and learn more about its history and distinctive qualities.

Read texts A-J. Try to guess the meaning of the underlined words from the context. Then use your dictionary to check them.

Text a. Introduction

The 20^th century was ushered in by a wealth of inventions in the technical and industrial sphere, and by vital new discoveries in psychology and the sciences. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Freud’s development of psychoanalysis, the discovery of X-rays, or even the splitting of the atom, demanded new, more abstract ways of thinking.

The most recent discoveries had clearly shown that “reality” consisted of much more than what was immediately visible. Faith in the eye’s comprehensive capacity for perception was now definitively a thing of the past. While the Impressionists had still believed that they could capture the world in a single “moment”, their superficial realism was now strongly criticized by the younger generation of artists. The younger artists wanted to tear the veil of visible appearance from reality and, as they put it, “look behind the appearance of things”, in order to achieve a more authentic image of the world. To do this, they required a new pictorial language.

This was all the more true in that sensory perception had itself undergone very important changes, since the invention of the automobile and the flying-machine, the transmission of messages by telegraph and many other things had given a new dynamism to everyday life. Speed and time were immediately apparent as new dimensions, and required accelerated ways of perception. How new, how different the world looked from the window of a speeding car, if you were used to the pace of the pedestrian or the hackney carriage!

But these revolutionary discoveries after 1900 were greeted with much less euphoria by the younger generation of artists than the innovations of the Impressionists thirty years previously. The other side of modernisation – alienation, isolation and de-individualisation – could, particularly in the large cities, no longer be ignored. The torn sense of life of a generation in search of new values, not only in everyday life, but in art as well, also encouraged a pessimistic world view about the decline of the world and utopian visions of a new one. Passionately seeking to improve the world, and wanting to destroy the ruling order, the artists were in search of a “new art for the new man”. Emotion-charged paintings were to seize the viewer by his innermost emotions. With a style of painting that took its bearings from van Gogh and Gauguin, impelled by feelings and ideas, they wanted to reactivate the wasted needs of man, which civilisation had deprived him of, and thus point the way to a better future.

It was not always sublime artistic goals and shared visions that brought painters together, however, but often simple psychological and economic necessity – since the life of independent artists, increasingly subjected to the laws of a profit-oriented art market, was often difficult. So the community not only provided a moral backbone, but also supplied quite pragmatic assistance: contacts, communal studios, opportunities for exhibitions – and, not least, the certainty that a handful of artists would attract more attention than one artist on his own.