EUROPE, 1900 to 1920
❚During the early 20th century, avant-garde artists searched for new definitions of art in a changed
world. Matisse and the Fauves used bold colors as the primary means of conveying feeling. German
Expressionist paintings feature clashing colors, disquieting figures, and perspectival distortions.
❚Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque radically challenged prevailing artistic conventions with Cubism,
in which artists dissect forms and place them in interaction with the space around them.
❚The Futurists focused on motion in time and space in their effort to create paintings and sculptures
that captured the dynamic quality of modern life. The Dadaists celebrated the spontaneous and
intuitive, often incorporating found objects in their artworks.
AMERICA, 1900 to 1930
❚The Armory Show of 1913 introduced avant-garde European art to American artists. Man Ray, for
example, embraced Dada’s fondness for chance and the displacement of ordinary items, and Stuart
Davis adopted the Cubist interest in fragmented form.
❚The Harlem Renaissance brought African American artists to the forefront, including Aaron Douglas,
whose paintings drew on Cubist principles. Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Precisionists
used European modernist techniques to celebrate contemporary American subjects.
❚Photography emerged as an important American art form in the work of Alfred Stieglitz, who
emphasized the careful arrangement of forms and patterns of light and dark. Edward Weston
experimented with photographs of segments of the human body that verge on abstraction.
EUROPE, 1920 to 1945
❚World War I gave rise to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in Germany. “New Objectivity” artists
depicted the horrors of war and explored the themes of death and transfiguration.
❚The Surrealists investigated ways to express in art the world of dreams and the unconscious. Natural
Surrealists aimed for “concrete irrationality” in their naturalistic paintings of dreamlike scenes.
Biomorphic Surrealists experimented with automatism and employed abstract imagery.
❚Many European modernists pursued utopian ideals. The Suprematists developed an abstract style to
express pure feeling. The Constructivists used nonobjective forms to suggest the nature of space-
time. De Stijl artists employed simple geometric forms in their search for “pure plastic art.”
❚Sculptors, including Hepworth and Moore, also increasingly turned to abstraction and emphasized
voids as well as masses in their work. Brancusi captured the essence of flight in Bird in Space, a
glistening abstract sculpture that does not mimic the form of a bird.
AMERICA, 1930 to 1945
❚Although Calder created abstract works between the wars, other American artists favored figural
art. Lange and Shahn chronicled social injustice. Hopper explored the loneliness of the Depression
era. Lawrence recorded the struggle of African Americans. Wood depicted life in rural Iowa.
❚Mexican artists Orozco and Rivera painted epic mural cycles of the history of Mexico. Kahlo’s power-
ful and frequently autobiographical paintings explored the human psyche.
ARCHITECTURE
❚Under Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus in Germany promoted the vision of “total architecture,” which
called for the integration of all the arts in constructing modern living environments. Bauhaus
buildings were simple glass and steel designs devoid of “romantic embellishment and whimsy.”
❚In France, Le Corbusier used modern construction materials in his “machines for living”—simple
houses with open plans and unadorned surfaces.
❚The leading American architect of the first half of the 20th century was Frank Lloyd Wright, who
promoted the “architecture of democracy,” in which free individuals move in a “free” space.
Fallingwater is a bold asymmetrical design integrating the building with the natural environment.
THE BIG PICTURE
AFTER EUROPE AND AMERICA
1900 TO 1945
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,
1907Weston, Nude, 1925Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1924Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939Wright, Fallingwater, 1936–1939