Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)

This painting is Dali’s …¹… of the Greek myth of Narcissus. Narcissus was a youth of great beauty who loved only himself and broke the hearts of many lovers. The gods punished him by letting him see his own …²… in a pool. He fell in love with it, but discovered he could not embrace it and died of …³… . Relenting, the gods immortalized him as the narcissus (…⁴…) flower. For this picture Dali used a meticulous technique which he described as “hand-painted colour photography” to depict with …⁵… effect the transformation of Narcissus, kneeling in the pool, into the hand holding the egg and flower. Narcissus as he was before his transformation is seen posing in the background. The play with “double images” …⁶… from Dali’s fascination with hallucination and delusion.

This was Dali’s first painting to be made …⁷… in accordance with the paranoiac critical method, which the artist described as a “Spontaneous method of …⁸… knowledge, based on the critical-interpretative association of the …⁹… of delirium” (The Conquest of the Irrational, published in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, New York 1942). Robert Descharnes noted that this painting meant a great deal to Dali, as it was the first Surrealist work to offer a …¹⁰… interpretation of an irrational subject.

manner furrowed sum coif successive postmodern generation eyelids image absence background faintness

Andy Warhol – “Marilyn”

Andy Warhol’s Marilyn is illumined by …¹… intense colors. The colors and background used are concentrated in an extremely minimal manner of painting. Each of the successive colors is merged together in such a photorealistic …²… as if to create a “collage” type of effect. Instead of the use of cool colors, Warhol uses many wild and bright paints to deconstruct the original American “apple pie” construct of Marilyn Monroe.

The picture is made more photorealistic by the perfect and faint green …³… that is behind this portrait of Marilyn Monroe. By using the purest singularity of color in back, each of the polished illumined colors of Marilyn Monroe’s image is especially given emphasis.

All of the colors have the purest and highest value to keep this …⁴… anything but calm. Marilyn’s crimson lips and faint blue eye shadow are modulated to have the 1970’s appeal of a glamorous transvestite showgirl.

Her yellow hair is given the most lamp-like appearance; with her vast …⁵… sitting above her head as if it was cut and then pasted onto this image. A very faint boundary that is an obtuse …⁶… of a hairline lies between the forehead and the scalp of hair. More photorealistic shading is used in her hair, making it appear more false against the rest.

Even Marilyn Monroe’s nose, eyes, and lips are shown as if they were given equal attention like individual paintings instead of given attention as the …⁷… of the whole image. This element of making the familiar obscure and establishing advertisement as false is what makes this painting furiously …⁸… .

Monroe’s teeth are showing in gleaming white behind her thick lips, as if posturing for a toothpaste advertisement or a middle-class type of a false smile.

Her brow is not …⁹… but is instead calm and divorced from anguish, like the eyes of a pill-popping suburban housewife. Under the eyebrows her eyelashes are full and her …¹⁰… are low enough to not appear enticing, but instead half-asleep.

Her pupils are dilated against the thinnest, faintest green that is the same hue as the background “wallpaper” behind Monroe. The fullness of the pupils and the …¹¹… of the hardly noticeable iris show that she has no identity – that her eyes are hollow and vacant.

Andy Warhol has effectively taken a sex-symbol and icon from the sexually repressed 1950s and put her into the new and reckless …¹²… of the 1970s, the intense and daring era of punk-rock and disco.

Activity 5. Read the text below and complete it using the words from the box on the right in the correct form. Always check that the word you have formed is not only lexically and/or grammatically appropriate but also makes sense in the context:

Art Theft: What is New? Art theft is only a little younger than art …1… . The robbing of valuable artistic works …2… a problem since ancient times. Today, however, art theft not only involves the loss of art worth …3… of dollars but also is an issue charged with nationalism and tangled in complex …4… debates. The most basic type of art theft comes in all the familiar forms: burglary, armed robbery, shoplifting, and hijacking of shipments in transit. Since World War II, however, the world and the art market have been transformed by such factors as …5… available international air transportation and electronic mail and satellite communication. With new …6… communication and speedy travel, it is possible to arrange for the transfer of …7… art and then move it quickly over great distances. Art is also …8… than ever before, increasing the incentive for theft. Prices for fine art began to exceed the $ 1-million level in the 1970s. Thefts rose accordingly, …9… attention to the vulnerability of art. Important public collections were robbed, as well as private and …10… holdings. In one instance, an entire exhibition of Pablo …11… works was cleaned out in France. And it’s not …12… . The artist created over 6,000 paintings, …13… and sculptures. Today a ‘Picasso’ costs several million £. (Once, when the French Minister of Culture was visiting Picasso, the painter …14… spilt some paint on the Minister’s trousers. Picasso apologized and wanted to pay for them …15…, but the Minister said: “Please, Monsieur Picasso, just sign my trousers!”). So we can only be optimistic and hope that one day soon all those works of art would be returned to their rightful place.

Oneself Be Billion Culture Ready Instant Steal Valuable Draw Commerce Picasso Surprise Draw Accident Clean

Activity 6. Use these word combinations speaking about your favourite painters of the 20^th century and their famous works of art:

To be ushered in; to tear the veil of visible appearance from reality; to require a new pictorial language; to seize the viewer by his innermost emotions; to reactivate the wasted needs of man; to achieve a poetic energy through intense and violent colours; to be represented through a pictorial arrangement; to make an indivisible unit; to dismantle and reassemble objects; to reduce objects to their stereometrical fundamental elements; to depict an object from multiple perspectives; to present an emotional experience in its most compelling form; to break up the picture surface into facet-like fragments; to underscore the irrationality of humanity; to penetrate the realms of the unconscious; to juxtapose objects and images in irrational ways; to embrace the environment of everyday life; to reflect the materialism and vulgarity of modern mass culture; to create powerful spatial illusions; to dramatize the power of static forms and colours.

 Developing Conversation Skills

Activity 1. Read through the documents of the epoch given below and comment on them. Say more about the artists' life, style and manner of painting.

Manifesto of the Futurist Painters

Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini

TO THE YOUNG ARTISTS OF ITALY!

The cry of rebellion which we utter associates our ideals with those of the Futurist poets. These ideals were not invented by some aesthetic clique. They are an expression of a violent desire which boils in the veins of every creative artist today.

We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.

Comrades, we tell you now that the triumphant progress of science makes profound changes in humanity inevitable, changes which are hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of past tradition and us free moderns, who are confident in the radiant splendor of our future.

We are sickened by the foul laziness of artists, who, ever since the sixteenth century, have endlessly exploited the glories of the ancient Romans.

In the eyes of other countries, Italy is still a land of the dead, a vast Pompeii, whit with sepulchers. But Italy is being reborn. Its political resurgence will be followed by a cultural resurgence. In the land inhabited by the illiterate peasant, schools will be set up; in the land where doing nothing in the sun was the only available profession, millions of machines are already roaring; in the land where traditional aesthetics reigned supreme, new flights of artistic inspiration are emerging and dazzling the world with their brilliance.

Living art draws its life from the surrounding environment. Our forebears drew their artistic inspiration from a religious atmosphere which fed their souls; in the same way we must breathe in the tangible miracles of contemporary life—the iron network of speedy communications which envelops the earth, the transatlantic liners, the dreadnoughts, those marvelous flights which furrow our skies, the profound courage of our submarine navigators and the spasmodic struggle to conquer the unknown. How can we remain insensible to the frenetic life of our great cities and to the exciting new psychology of night-life; the feverish figures of the bon viveur, the cocette, the apache and the absinthe drinker?

We will also play our part in this crucial revival of aesthetic expression: we will declare war on all artists and all institutions which insist on hiding behind a façade of false modernity, while they are actually ensnared by tradition, academicism and, above all, a nauseating cerebral laziness.

We condemn as insulting to youth the acclamations of a revolting rabble for the sickening reflowering of a pathetic kind of classicism in Rome; the neurasthenic cultivation of hermaphodic archaism which they rave about in Florence; the pedestrian, half-blind handiwork of ’48 which they are buying in Milan; the work of pensioned-off government clerks which they think the world of in Turin; the hotchpotch of encrusted rubbish of a group of fossilized alchemists which they are worshipping in Venice. We are going to rise up against all superficiality and banality—all the slovenly and facile commercialism which makes the work of most of our highly respected artists throughout Italy worthy of our deepest contempt.

Away then with hired restorers of antiquated incrustations. Away with affected archaeologists with their chronic necrophilia! Down with the critics, those complacent pimps! Down with gouty academics and drunken, ignorant professors!

Ask these priests of a veritable religious cult, these guardians of old aesthetic laws, where we can go and see the works of Giovanni Segantini today. Ask them why the officials of the Commission have never heard of the existence of Gaetano Previati. Ask them where they can see Medardo Rosso’s sculpture, or who takes the slightest interest in artists who have not yet had twenty years of struggle and suffering behind them, but are still producing works destined to honor their fatherland?

These paid critics have other interests to defend. Exhibitions, competitions, superficial and never disinterested criticism, condemn Italian art to the ignominy of true prostitution.

And what about our esteemed “specialists”? Throw them all out. Finish them off! The Portraitists, the Genre Painters, the Lake Painters, the Mountain Painters. We have put up with enough from these impotent painters of country holidays.

Down with all marble-chippers who are cluttering up our squares and profaning our cemeteries! Down with the speculators and their reinforced-concrete buildings! Down with laborious decorators, phony ceramicists, sold-out poster painters and shoddy, idiotic illustrators!

These are our final conclusions:

With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will:

1. Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.

2. Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation.

3. Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent.

4. Bear bravely and proudly the smear of “madness” with which they try to gag all innovators.

5. Regard art critics as useless and dangerous.

6. Rebel against the tyranny of words: “Harmony” and “good taste” and other loose expressions which can be used to destroy the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin...

7. Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past.

8. Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science.

The dead shall be buried in the earth’s deepest bowels! The threshold of the future will be swept free of mummies! Make room for youth, for violence, for daring!

Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting

Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini

On the 18th of March, 1910, in the limelight of the Chiarella Theater of Turin, we launched our first manifesto to a public of three thousand people—artists, men of letters, students and others; it was a violent and cynical cry which displayed our sense of rebellion, our deep-rooted disgust, our haughty contempt for vulgarity, for academic and pedantic mediocrity, for the fanatical worship of all that is old and worm-eaten.

We bound ourselves there and then to the movement of Futurist Poetry which was initiated a year earlier by F. T. Marinetti in the columns of the Figaro.

The battle of Turin has remained legendary. We exchanged almost as many knocks as we did ideas, in order to protect from certain death the genius of Italian Art.

And now during a temporary pause in this formidable struggle we come out of the crowd in order to expound with technical precision our program for the renovation of painting, of which Futurist Salon at Milan was a dazzling manifestation.

Our growing need of truth is no longer satisfied with Form and Color as they have been understood hitherto.

The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself.

Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.

All is conventional in art. Nothing is absolute in painting. What was truth for the painters of yesterday is but a falsehood today. We declare, for instance, that a portrait must not be like the sitter, and that the painter carries in himself the landscapes which he would fix upon his canvas.

To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere.

Space no longer exists: the street pavement, soaked by rain beneath the glare of electric lamps, becomes immensely deep and gapes to the very center of the earth. Thousands of miles divide us from the sun; yet the house in front of us fits into the solar disk.

Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitiveness has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of the medium? Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving results analogous to those of the X-rays?

It will be sufficient to cite a few examples, chosen amongst thousands, to prove the truth of our arguments.

The sixteen people around you in a rolling motor bus are in turn and at the same time one, ten, four, three; they are motionless and they change places; they come and go, bound into the street, are suddenly swallowed up by the sunshine, then come back and sit before you, like persistent symbols of universal vibration.

How often have we not seen upon the cheek of the person with whom we are talking the horse which passes at the end of the street.

Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it.

The construction of pictures has hitherto been foolishly traditional. Painters have shown us the objects and the people placed before us. We shall henceforward put the spectator in the center of the picture.

As in every realm of the human mind, clear-sighted individual research has swept away the unchanging obscurities of dogma, so must the vivifying current of science soon deliver painting from academism.

We would at any price re-enter into life. Victorious science has nowadays disowned its past in order the better to serve the material needs of our time; we would that art, disowning its past, were able to serve at last the intellectual needs which are within us.

Our renovated consciousness does not permit us to look upon man as the center of universal life. The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp, which, with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heartrending expressions of color. The harmony of the lines and folds of modern dress works upon our sensitiveness with the same emotional and symbolical power as did the nude upon the sensitiveness of the old masters.

In order to conceive and understand the novel beauties of a Futurist picture, the soul must be purified; the eye must be freed from its veil of atavism and culture, so that it may at last look upon Nature and not upon the museum as the one and only standard.

As soon as ever this result has been obtained, it will be readily admitted that brown tints have never coursed beneath our skin; it will be discovered that yellow shines forth in our flesh, that red blazes, and that green, blue and violet dance upon it with untold charms, voluptuous and caressing.

How is it possible still to see the human face pink, now that our life, redoubled by noctambulism, has multiplied our perceptions as colorists? The human face is yellow, red, green, blue, violet. The pallor of a woman gazing in a jeweler’s window is more intensely iridescent than the prismatic fires of the jewels that fascinate her like a lark.

The time has passed for our sensations in painting to be whispered. We wish them in future to sing and re-echo upon our canvases in deafening and triumphant flourishes.

Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight compared with deepest night.

We conclude that painting cannot exist today without Divisionism. This is no process that can be learned and applied at will. Divisionism, for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.

Our art will probably be accused of tormented and decadent cerebralism. But we shall merely answer that we are, on the contrary, the primitives of a new sensitiveness, multiplied hundredfold, and that our art is intoxicated with spontaneity and power.

We declare:

1. That all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified.

2. That it is essential to rebel against the tyranny of the terms “harmony” and “good taste” as being too elastic expressions, by the help of which it is easy to demolish the works of Rembrandt, of Goya and of Rodin.

3. That the art critics are useless or harmful.

4. That all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed.

5. That the name of “madman” with which it is attempted to gag all innovators should be looked upon as a title of honor.

6. That innate complementariness is an absolute necessity in painting, just as free meter in poetry or polyphony in music.

7. That universal dynamism must be rendered in painting as a dynamic sensation.

8. That in the manner of rendering Nature the first essential is sincerity and purity.

9. That movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.

We fight:

1. Against the bituminous tints by which it is attempted to obtain the patina of time upon modern pictures.

2. Against the superficial and elementary archaism founded upon flat tints, and which, by imitating the linear technique of the Egyptians, reduces painting to a powerless synthesis, both childish and grotesque.

3. Against the false claims to belong to the future put forward by the secessionists and the independents, who have installed new academies no less trite and attached to routine than the preceding ones.

4. Against the nude in painting, as nauseous and as tedious as adultery in literature.

We wish to explain this last point. Nothing is immoral in our eyes; it is the monotony of the nude against which we fight. We are told that the subject is nothing and that everything lies in the manner of treating it. That is agreed; we too, admit that. But this truism, unimpeachable and absolute fifty years ago, is no longer so today with regard to the nude, since artists obsessed with the desire to expose the bodies of their mistresses have transformed the Salons into arrays of unwholesome flesh!

We demand, for ten years, the total suppression of the nude in painting.

What is Black Square?

Black Square is a spirit of sensation which pervades everything

“When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, “Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!”

“The square seemed incomprehensible and dangerous to the critics and the public... and this, of course, was to be expected.”

“The contours of the objective world fade more and more and so it goes, step by step, until finally the world “everything we loved and by which we have lived” becomes lost to sight.”

“But this desert is filled with the spirit of nonobjective sensation which pervades everything.”

“But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the “desert,” where nothing is real except feeling... and so feeling became the substance of my life.”

Black Square is a feeling

“This was no “empty square” which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of nonobjectivity.”

“I realized that the “thing” and the “concept” were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea.”

“Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of “things.”

“But the nature and meaning of artistic creation continue to be misunderstood, as does the nature of creative work in general, because feeling, after all, is always and everywhere the one and only source of every creation.”

“The emotions which are kindled in the human being are stronger than the human being himself... they must at all costs find an outlet they must take on overt form they must be communicated or put to work.”

Black Square is a void

Black square on white field, carrying abstraction to its ultimate geometric simplification. Called a “dead square” and a “void” by the critics, as well as “the greatest by far among the fairground tricks of instant culture.” To Malevich, however, this square symbolized a “full void,” in that it showed how painting could fulfill itself unaided by any reference to a specific external reality. For him the square represented only Suprematism: “the supremacy of pure feeling” in and of itself. Malevich removes specific subject matter by shifting away from representation and mimesis and towards the purity of mathematical geometry. “The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling.”

The Black Square is not quite as simple as it looks: even by taking art to degree zero as Malevich does here, he creates a stressed reading of figure that reads two ways, either a black square on top of a white ground or a black hole surrounded by a white border. Every object has a static facade and an inner dynamic.

Black Square is God

“I search for God, I search within myself for myself. God is all-seeing, all-knowing, all powerful a future perfection of intuition as the oeumenical world of supra-reason. I search for God, I search for my face, I have already drawn its outline and I strive to incarnate myself. And my reason serves me as a path to that which is drawn by intuition.” The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism.

Black Square is an icon

“The image is the final path, the image is something that bares the exit, by means of the image the further path is interrupted, everything which has paths converges toward the image, all paths lead to the image particularly if it is holy, hence I see the justification and true significance of the Orthodox corner in which the image stands, the holy image as opposed to all other images and representations of sinners... The corner symbolizes that there is no other path to perfection except for the path into the corner.”

Black Square is zero of painting

Malevich proclaimed his work as the “zero” of painting, that there was nothing other than painting presented, no positioning, no certain conventional imaging. A meta painting - more - a painting that has no opposite in representational painting, no painting to its anti-painting. For representational painting must deal with particulars of sorts, whereas 'not-painting' is a general relation englobing the rest of the universe.

Black Square is painting beyond painting

Malevich saw the square as being that work that would necessarily maintain a spiraling triad into the fourth dimension by being a painting, by negating painting, by bringing painting into a new context, painting beyond painting. Malevich hung a black square in the centre of the world of meaning.

Activity 2. Give a talk on a reproduction of any famous work of art created in the 20^th-21^st centuries. Describe its technical aspect and comment on its subject.

Activity 3. Give a talk on

• the development of new genres and new techniques in the 20^th century;

• the most representative painters of the period.