Transcript 08_The_Avantgarde_COMBINATION.ppt

11 The Avant-garde
Avant-garde
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In French means front guard, advance guard, or vanguard. People often use the term in French
and English to refer to people or works that are experimental or novel, particularly with respect to
art, culture, and politics.
According to its champions, the avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the
norm within definitions of art/culture/reality.
The origin of the application of this French term to art can be fixed at May 17, 1863, the opening of
the Salon des Refusés in Paris, organised by painters whose work was rejected for the annual
Paris Salon of officially sanctioned academic art. Salons des Refusés were held in 1874, 1875,
and 1886.
The vanguard, a small troop of highly skilled soldiers, explores the terrain ahead of a large
advancing army and plots a course for the army to follow. This concept is applied to the work done
by small bands of intellectuals and artists as they open pathways through new cultural or political
terrain for society to follow. Due to implied meanings stemming from the military terminology,
some people feel the avant-garde implies elitism, especially when used to describe cultural
movements. The term may also refer to the promotion of radical social reforms, the aims of its
various movements presented in public declarations called manifestos.
Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with art for art's sake,
focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic experience, rather than with wider social
reform. In our context the avantgarde will cover the avantgarde'ist movements of the early 20th
century that specifically focused on visual communication design and/or implemented it as a
modus operandi.
Especially influential against ornament was the Adolf Loos
1908 essay,"Ornament and Crime," in which he declares
ornament merely an embellishment with superfluous deceit.
In Loos's estimation ornament is criminal because it ties an
object to a style and when the style is obsolete, so then is the
object.
He believed the time wasted on ornament held certain
cultures back from advanced development, especially
cultures that practiced tattooing.
Loos influenced many 20th century designers, including 'less
is more' Mies van der Rohe.
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In 1915 Kazimir
Malevich introduced an
abstract, non-objective
geometric painting style
he named
Suprematism.
Malevitch's explorations
of Impressionism and
Cubo-Futurism (also a
fascination with aerial
landscape photography)
inspired his 1915
manifesto From Cubism
to Suprematism.* (Black
Square,1915)
Paintings by
Constructivist Kasimir
Malevich (1878 - 1935)
Constructivism
• Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement in Russia
from 1914 onward, and a term often used in modern art today, which
dismissed "pure" art in favour of art used as an instrument for social
purposes, namely, the construction of the socialist system.
• The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by
Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in
1917.
• Constructivism first appears as a positive term in Naum Gabo's
Realistic Manifesto of 1920.
• Kazimir Malevich also worked in the constructivist style, though he is
better known for his earlier suprematism and ran his own competing
group in Vitebsk.
• The movement was an important influence on new graphic design
techniques championed by El Lissitzky.
• As a part of the early Soviet youth movement,
the constructivists took an artistic outlook aimed
to encompass cognitive, material activity, and
the whole of spirituality of mankind.
• The artists tried to create art that would take the
viewer out of the traditional setting and make
them an active viewer of the artwork. Most of the
designs were a fusion of art and political
commitment, and reflected the revolutionary
times.
The Constructivist culture, from
fashions to theater...
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky
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(1890 – 1941), better known as El
Lissitzky, was a Russian artist,
designer, photographer, teacher,
typographer, and architect. He was
one of the most important figures of
the Russian avant garde, helping
develop suprematism with his friend
and mentor, Kazimir Malevich. trained
as an architect but started his career
illustrating Yiddish children's books.
In 1919 he met and was greatly
inspired by Malevitch and the
Suprematist style while they were
both teachers at the People's Art
School.
El Lissitzky adopted the reductive
geometric style, producing in
1920 his famous poster Beat the
Whites with the Red Wedge
(right)
El Lissitzky: Self portrait
El Lissitzky's extraordinary typographic work: page spreads for a book of poems by
Mayakovsky
El Lissitzky's extraordinary typographic work: page spreads for a book of poems by
Mayakovsky
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Lissitzky went on to develop his own
variant of Suprematism, Proun (an
acronym for "Project for the Affirmation
of the New)
Proun was Lissitzky's exploration of the
visual language of Suprematism but
with 3D elements, existing half-way
between painting and architecture,
utilizing shifting axes and multiple
perspectives.
Prouns, initially paintings, were later
expressed as fully dimensional works.
In 1920 he moved to Berlin as an
artistic ambassador for Russian art,
bringing the language of Constructivism
and Suprematism to Europe.
He began experimenting heavily in
typographic design and photographic
montage.
The "Proun"s. This was years before the invention of digital 3D...
Lissitzky's used his art to promote his beliefs in
the political and social issues of the turbulent
early 20th century. His revolutionary typographical
layouts were a synthesis of the composition of the
Proun style and his understanding of page layout
in his earlier book designs.
In 1920 he created The Story of Two Squares, a
symbolic narrative in which the protagonists are a
red square and a black square, the setting is the
earth (a red circle), and the enemy is chaos (a
jumble of geometric shapes).
The Story of Two Squares is a powerful
demonstration that art could be used as a graphic
means of communication. When it was first
published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 [Squares]
presented a radical rethinking of what a book
was, demonstrating a new way of organizing
typography on a page and relating it to visual
images. It marked the beginning of a new
graphic art and is among the most important
publications in the history of the avant-garde
in typography and graphic design.
See all of the pages of The
Story of Two Squares on
ibiblio.org
http://www.ibiblio.org/eldr
itch/el/pro01.html
Victory Over the Sun, 1923
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Performed in 1913, the "first CuboFuturist opera" Victory over the Sun was
the basis for the a 1923 German
commission for a series of lithographic
prints.
Lissitzky analyzed the text as a
celebration of man's technological
capabilities: 'the sun as the expression of
old world energy is torn down from the
heavens by modern man, who by virtue of
his technological superiority creates his
own energy source.'
The cover sheet is composed with a
compositional arrangement of bold and
light type aligned on a grid. Horizontal and
vertical bars are balanced with the type in
a vocabulary of space and organizational
relationships that will be emulated by
many designers in the following decades.
Program sheet,
Victory over the Sun,
1923
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Lissitzky's Influence in
Europe
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Lissitzky's fluency in German
helped him advance his theories
in Europe through lectures,
articles, and commercial graphic
design.
Dada artist Kurt Schwitters
commissioned Lissitzky to work
on a special issue of the Dada
journal Merz.
His work had a great deal of
influence over the Bauhaus
school through his relationship
with Walter Gropius and the
New Typography of Jan
Tschichold.
He also influenced the De Stijl
movement.
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• Lissitzky fell ill to tuberculosis
in 1923 and went to
Switzerland for treatment.
• He financed his recovery by
designing advertisements for
Günther Wagner's Pelikan
division, an office supply
company.
• With this assignment he
combined his new typographic
techniques with Proun spatial
composition to create a new
visual vocabulary for
advertising
Designing Communism
• Lissitzky aligned his art with the social
and political goals of state—the core
purpose of the Russian
Constructivist Style. He promoted his
country's optimism for social welfare
and Communism via print and
exhibition design.
• His designs for USSR in Construction,
a propaganda magazine begun by
Maxim Gorky, featured the Stalinist
Constitution, Soviet Georgia, and the
Red Army.
• Published in several languages, it
provided foreign audiences with
information about Soviet industry,
economy, and culture.
Lissitzky's poster above,
designed for the Russian
Exhibition in Zürich in 1929,
depicts the egalitarian
status of women and men
in the new society. His
photomontage style featured
startling juxtapositions of real
objects with naturalistic and
abstract forms.
Alexander Rodchenko (1891 - 1956)
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One of the most versatile
Constructivist artist/designers to
emerge after the Russian Revolution.
He worked as a painter and graphic
designer before turning to
photomontage and photography.
His photography was socially
engaged, formally innovative, and
opposed to a painterly aesthetic.
Concerned with the need for
analytical-documentary photo series,
he often shot his subjects from odd
angles - usually high above or below to shock the viewer and to postpone
recognition.
He wrote: "One has to take several
different shots of a subject, from
different points of view and in different
situations, as if one examined it in the
round rather than looked through the
same key-hole again and again."
Futurism 1909
• According to art historian Irina D. Costache,
Futurism (largely an Italian movement) sought
more than a stylistic change but rather to
redefine art.
• At the core was a desire to transform the arts
into a process rejecting the value of individual
objects and instead emphasizing a harmonious
fusion of the modern environment and man.
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The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti was the first to produce a
manifesto of Futurist philosophy in
his “Manifesto del futurismo” (1909),
first released in Milan and published
in the French paper Le Figaro.
Marinetti summed up the major
principles of the Futurists, including
a passionate loathing of ideas from
the past, especially political and
artistic traditions. He and others
also espoused a love of speed,
technology, and violence.
The Futurists explored every medium of
art, including painting, sculpture, poetry,
theatre, music, architecture and even
gastronomy. Futurists dubbed the love
of the past passéisme.
The car, the plane, the industrial town
were all legendary for the Futurists,
because they represented the
technological triumph of people over
nature.
Fortunato Depero was a Futurist
painter who brought the Futurist vision
to graphic design in posters and
magazine design. He is most
recognized for his "Bolted Book," a
publication bound with metal bolts to
link the work to the industrial age.
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Futurism influenced many other twentieth century art movements, including
Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism and Dada.
Futurism as a coherent and organized artistic movement is now regarded as
extinct, having died out in the 1944 with the death of his leader Marinetti,
and Futurism was, like science fiction, in part overtaken by 'the future'.
Nonetheless the ideals of futurism remain as significant components of
modern Western culture; the emphasis on youth, speed, power and
technology finding expression in much of modern commercial cinema and
culture.
Ridley Scott consciously evoked the designs of Sant'Elia in Blade Runner.
Echoes of Marinetti's thought, especially his "dreamt-of metallization of the
human body", are still strongly prevalent in Japanese culture, and surface in
manga/anime and the works of artists such as Shinya Tsukamoto, director
of the "Tetsuo" (lit. "Ironman") films.
Further reading
The typographic revolution
Dada or Dadaism
• A cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich,
Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916
to 1920.
• The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature
(poetry, art manifestoes, art theory), theatre, and graphic
design, which concentrated its anti war politic through a
rejection of the prevailing standards in art through antiart cultural works.
Dada periodicals. Page layouts and typography: "391"
Publisher and designer: Francis Picabia
Dada periodicals. Page layouts and typography: "391"
Publisher and designer: Francis Picabia
Dada". Publisher
and designer:
Tristan Tzara
One of the
most beautiful
periodicals
ever designed,
Merz was
published and
designed by
Kurt
Schwitters:
Merz. Issue 1.
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According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was "anti-art". Dada sought to fight art with art.
For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite.
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Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least
an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning — interpretation of Dada is
dependent entirely on the viewer.
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If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend. It is perhaps then ironic that Dada became an
influential movement in modern art.
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Dada became a commentary on order and the carnage they believed it wreaked.
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Through this rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy traditional culture
and aesthetics. Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what
many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide.“
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Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of
the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything
in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became
nothing but an act of sacrilege."
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Reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war; the only route to salvation was to reject
logic and embrace anarchy and the irrational.
Raoul Hausmann
(1886-1971)
Reminds of surrealism.
Raoul Hausmann
(1886-1971)
John Heartfield / Helmut Herzfeld (1891-1968).
John Heartfield / Helmut Herzfeld (1891-1968).
John Heartfield / Helmut Herzfeld (1891-1968).
Bauhaus
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The common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and architecture school in
Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933 and briefly in the United States from 19371938 and for the approach to design that it developed and taught.
The most natural meaning for its name (related to the German verb for "build") is
Architecture House.
Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture.
The foundation of the Bauhaus occurred at a time of crisis and turmoil in Europe as a
whole and particularly in Germany.
Its establishment resulted from a confluence of a diverse set of political, social,
educational and artistic shifts in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Art
nouveau had broken the preoccupation with revivalist historical styles that had
characterised the 19th century.
In the first decade of the new century however, the movement was receiving criticism;
impelled by rationalist ideas requiring practical justification for formal effects.
Nonetheless, the movement had opened up a language of abstraction which was to
have a profound importance during the 20th century.
One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology.
The machine was considered a positive element, and therefore industrial and product
design were important components. Vorkurs ("initial course") was taught; this is the
modern day Basic Design course that has become one of the key foundational
courses offered in architectural schools across the globe.
There was no teaching of history in the school because everything was supposed
to be designed and created according to first principles rather than by following
precedent.
Maybe add a modern
version of the typeface!
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The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United
States and Israel in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled or were
exiled by the Nazi regime. Both Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design and worked together before their professional split in 1941. The Harvard School
was enormously influential in the late 1940s and early 1950s, producing such students as Philip
Johnson, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.
Herbert Bayer
(1900-1985) was an Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer, and architect. In the spirit of
clean simplification, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted an all-lowercase and sans
serif typeface for all Bauhaus publications. Bayer is also credited with designing the custom
geometric sans-serif font, universal. In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of
Vogue magazine's Berlin office. Ten years later, he settled in New York City where he had a long
and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts.
László Moholy-Nagy
(1895 – 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus
school. He was highly influenced by constructivism. He was a strong advocate of the integration of
technology and industry into the arts. In 1923, he replaced Johannes Itten as the instructor of the
preliminary course at the Bauhaus. This effectively marked the end of the school's expressionistic
leanings and moved it closer towards its original aims as a school of design and industrial
integration. The Bauhaus became known for the versatility of its artist and Moholy-Nagy was no
exception. Throughout his career he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography,
typography, sculpture, painting, and industrial design. One of his main focuses was on
photography. He coined the term "the New Vision", for his belief that photography could create a
whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. His theory of art and
teaching was summed up in the book The New Vision, from Material to Architecture.
DeStijl 1917-1931
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This Dutch nonfigurative art movement
was also called neoplasticism.
In 1917 a group of artists, architects, and
poets was organized under the name de
Stijl, and a journal of the same name was
initiated.
The leaders of the movement were the
artists Theo van Doesburg and Piet
Mondrian.
They advocated a purification of art,
eliminating subject matter in favor of
vertical and horizontal elements, and the
use of primary colors and noncolors.
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
Posters and flyers by
Paul Schuitema,
Dutch grachic artist
1920's
Posters and flyers
by Paul Schuitema,
1920's
Posters and flyers by Paul Schuitema, 1920's
Posters and flyers by Paul Schuitema, 1920's
Posters and flyers by Paul Schuitema, 1920's