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The Shock of the New |
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Somehow managed to miss out on art appreciation during my education, so when a friend introduced me to Modernism it was a real eye-opener. And I can't praise Robert Hughes' book The Shock of the New highly enough. Besides having loads of brilliant pictures, it sets it all in the context of the time, and brings to life the impact it had then. Postmodernists must hate it ! |
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"With its hacked contours, staring interrogatory eyes, and general feeling of instability, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, is still a disturbing painting after three quarters of a century, a refutation of the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fashion, must necessarily wear off. No painting ever looked more convulsive. None signalled a faster change in the history of art. Yet it was anchored in tradition, and its attack on the eye would never have been so startling if its format had not been that of the classical nude; the three figures at the left are a distant but unmistakable echo of that favourite image of the late Renaissance, the Three Graces." |
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"It is hardly possible for us, nearly sixty years later, to expect what Lissitsky expected from art: it was, to him, nothing less than an instrument of the millennium. Only against the background of such fervid belief can one grasp the meaning of his poster, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919... "Constructivism is the Socialism of vision"... Its essence is veshch, the "thing in itself", art declaring itself to be material-plus-work." |
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"In 1913, Franz Marc, soon to die at Verdun, had painted a vision of apocalypse overwhelming innocent life entitled The Fate ot the Animals. This tragic vision of matter - the earth and its plants no less than the forms of animals - sundered and broken by implacable shafts of energy now seems truly prophetic, a German equivalent to Wilfred Owen's question from the trenches: "What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?" |
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