Chapter 13

Question 1

Analytical Cubism

Answer 1

Developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it involves an analysis of the planes of its subject matter, often from several points of view, and using these perceptions to construct a painting composed of rhythmic geometric planes. Analytical cubism’s compelling fascination grows from the unresolved tension of the sensual and intellectual appeal of the pictorial structure in conflict with the challenge of interpreting the subject matter.

Question 2

Collage

Answer 2

A composition of elements glued onto a surface

Question 3

Synthetic cubism

Answer 3

Drawing on past observations, the cubists invented forms that were signs, rather than representations, of their subject matter. The essence of an object and its basic characteristics, rather than its outward appearance, were depicted.

Question 4

Futurism

Answer 4

A revolutionary movement in which all the arts were to test their ideas and forms against the new realities of scientific and industrial society. Its manifesto voiced enthusiasm for war, the machine age, speed, and modern life

Question 5

Manifesto

Answer 5

A public declaration of principals, policies, or intentions, such as that made by the Futurists

Question 6

Parole in Liberta

Answer 6

• “words of freedom”
• A new and painterly typographic design in which three or four ink colors and 20 typefaces (italics for quick impressions, boldface for violent noises and sounds) could redouble words’ expressive power on the page. Free, dynamic, and piercing words could be given the velocity of stars, clouds, airplanes, trains, waves, explosives, molecules, and atoms

Question 7

Patten poetry

Answer 7

The futurist concept that writing and/or typography could become a concrete and expressive visual. In the 19th century, the German poet Arno Holz reinforced intended auditory effects through such devices as omitting capitalization and punctuation, varying word spacing to signify pauses, and using multiple punctuation marks for emphasis

Question 8

calligrammes

Answer 8

Guillame Apollinaire’s name for poems in which the letterforms are arranged to form a visual design, figure, or pictograph. In 1918, a book of his calligrammes was published in which he explored the potential fusion of poetry and painting, introducing the concept of simultaneity to the time- and sequence- bound typography of the printed page

Question 9

Simultaneity

Answer 9

Concurrent existence or occurrence, such as the presentation of different views in the same work of art

Question 10

Artist’s book

Answer 10

Published by an artist as a creative expression independent of the publishing establishment

Question 11

Dada

Answer 11

Reacting against the carnage of WW1, the Dada movement claimed to be anti-art and had a strong negative and destructive element. Dada writers and artists were concerned with chock, protest, and nonsense. Chance placement and absurd titles characterized their graphic work

Question 12

Ready-made

Answer 12

sculpture such as a bicycle wheel mounted on a wooden stool, and the exhibition of found objects, such as a urinal, as art, by Marcel Duchamp

Question 13

Photomontage

Answer 13

the technique of manipulating found photographic images to create jarring juxtapositions and chance associations

Question 14

Merz

Answer 14

a nonpolitical offshoot of Dada and a one-man art movement created by Kurt Schwitters. He coined from the word “Kommerz” (Commerce), which appeared in one of his collages. Beginning in 1919, his Merz pictures were collage compositions using printed ephemera, rubbish, and found materials to compose color against color, form against form, and texture against texture

Question 15

Surrealism

Answer 15

Arising in Paris in 1924, searching for the “more real than real world behind the real”- the world of intuition, dreams, and the unconscious realm explored by Sigmund Freud. The poet Andre Breton, founder of surrealism, imbued the word with all the magic of dreams, the spirit of rebellion, anf he mysteries of the subconscious in his 1924 “Manifesto du Surrealisme”: “Surrealism, noun, masc., pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.”

Question 16

Frottage

Answer 16

A method invented by Max Ernst that used rubbings to compose directly on paper. As he looked at his rubbings, his imagination invented images in them, much as one sees images in cloud formations

Question 17

decalcomania

Answer 17

Ernst’s process of transferring images from printed matter to a drawing or painting. This enabled him to incorporate a variety of images into his work in unexpected ways. This technique has been used extensively in illustration, painting, and printmaking.

Question 18

emblematics

Answer 18

A group of surrealist painters who worked with a purely visual vocabulary. Visual automatism was used to create spontaneous expressions of inner life.

Question 19

Visual automatism

Answer 19

intuitive, stream-of-consciousness drawing and calligraphy

Question 20

expressionism

Answer 20

In early 20th century art, the tendency to depict not objective reality but subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects and events. Emerging as an organized movement in Germany before WW1, color, drawing, and proportion were often exaggerated or distorted, and symbolic content became very important. Line and color were often pronounced; color and value contrasts were intensified. Tactile properties were achieved through think paint, loose brushwork, and bold contour drawing. Woodcuts, lithographs, and posters were important media for many expressionists

Question 21

Die Brucke

Answer 21

• “The bridge”
• One of two early German expressionist groups, it originated in Dresden in 1905. Die Brucke artists declared their independence in transforming their subject matter until it conveyed the own unexpressed feelings. Their figurative paintings and woodblock prints were forged with think, raw strokes, which often became bold statements about alienation, anxiety, and despair.

Question 22

Der Blaue Reiter

Answer 22

• “The Blue Rider”
• One of two early German expressionist groups beginning in Munich in 1911. Der Blaue Reiter redefined art as an object without subject matter, but with perceptual properties that were able to convey feelings. The group was led by Russian emigre Wassily Kandinsky

Question 23

Les Fauves

Answer 23

• “Wild beasts”
• In France, the Fauves, led by Henri Matisse, shocked proper French society with their jarring color contrasts and spirited drawing in the first decade of the century. Except for Georges Rouault, the Fauves were more involved with color and structural relationships than expressions of spiritual crisis

Question 24

vortographs

Answer 24

Early nonobjective photographic images of kaleidoscopic patterns invented by Alvin Langdon in 1917. He employed a microscope, explored multiple exposures, and used prisms to split images into fragments.

Question 25

solarization

Answer 25

Invented by Man Ray, this photographic process involves the reversal of the tonal sequence in the denser areas of a photographic negative or print, which adds strong black contours to the edges of major shapes. Solarization is achieved by giving a latent or developing photographic image a second exposure to light

Question 26

rayographs

Answer 26

Man Ray’s camera less prints, on which he frequently made his exposures with moving beams of light and combined experimental techniques such as solarization with the basic technique of placing objects on the photographic paper. He also used distortion, printing through textures, and multiple exposures as he searched for dreamlike images and new interpretations of time and space, applying surrealism to graphic design and photography assignments

Question 27

Pablo Picasso

Answer 27

• 1881-1973
• one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. He co-developed analytical cubism with Georges Braque

Question 28

Georges Braque

Answer 28

• 1881-1963
• an artist best known for developing analytical cubism along with Pablo Picasso.

Question 29

Juan Gris

Answer 29

• 1887-1927
• a painter key to the development of synthetic cubism. He combined composition from nature with an independent structural design of the picture space. First he planned a rigorous architectural structure using golden section proportions and a modular composition grid; then he “laid the subject matter” on this design scheme. His paintings are a kind of halfway house between an art based on perception and an art realized by the relationships between geometric planes

Question 30

Fernand Leger

Answer 30

• 1881-1955
• a French painter whose version of cubism incorporated his perceptions of the colors, shapes, posters, and architecture of the urban environment—glimpses and fragments of information—into compositions of brightly colored planes. Léger’s flat planes of color, urban motifs, and the hard-edged precision of his machine forms helped define the modern design sensibility after World War I

Question 31

Filippo Marinetti

Answer 31

• 1876-1944
• an Italian poet and founder of Futurism. In 1913 he called for a typographic revolution against the classical tradition

Question 32

Arno Holz

Answer 32

• 1863-1929
• a German poet who reinforced intended auditory effects by such devices as omitting capitalization and punctuation, varying word spacing to signify pauses, and using multiple punctuation marks for emphasis.

Question 33

Stephane Mallarme

Answer 33

• 1842-98
• the French symbolist poet who published the poem “Un coup de dés” (“A Throw of the Dice”) (Fig. 13–17), composed of seven hundred words on twenty pages in a typographic range: capital, lowercase, roman, and italic. Rather than surrounding a poem with white, empty margins, Mallarmé dispersed this “silence” through the work as part of its meaning. Instead of stringing words in linear sequence like beads, he placed them in unexpected positions on the page to express sensations and evoke ideas. He was successful in relating typography to a musical score—the placement and weight of words in type paralleling intonation, stress, and rhythm in oral reading.

Question 34

Guillaume Apollinaire

Answer 34

• 1880-1918
• the inventor of calligramme poems through which he explored the potential fusion of poetry and painting, introducing the concept of simultaneity to the time- and sequence-bound typography of the printed page.

Question 35

Antonio Sant’Elia

Answer 35

• 1888-1916
• writer of “The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,” in which he called for construction based on technology and science and for design that addressed the unique demands of modern life (Fig. 13–21). He declared decoration to be absurd and used dynamic diagonal and elliptic lines because their emotional power was greater than horizontals and verticals.

Question 36

Fortunato Depero

Answer 36

• 1892-1960
• applied futurist philosophy to graphic and advertising design to produce a dynamic body of work in poster (Fig. 13–22), typographic, and advertising design. In1927, Depero published his Depero futurista (Figs. 13–23 and 13–24), a compilation of his typographical experiments, advertisements, tapestry designs, and other works. Depero futurista is a precursor of the artist’s book, published by an artist as a creative expression independent of the publishing establishment.

Question 37

Hugo Bal l

Answer 37

• 1886-1927
• a poet who opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, as a gathering place for independent young poets, painters, and musicians. This led to the spontaneous development of the Dada literary movement, which would later branch into the visual arts.

Question 38

Tristan Tzara

Answer 38

• 1896-1963
• a Paris-based Romanian poet who edited the periodical DADA beginning in July 1917. Tzara joined Hugo Ball, Jean Arp, and Richard Huelsenbeck in exploring sound poetry (Fig. 13–26), nonsense poetry, and chance poetry. He wrote a steady stream of Dada manifestos and contributed to all major Dada publications and events.

Question 39

Jean (Hans) Arp

Answer 39

• 1887-1966
• explored chance and unplanned harmonies in works such as Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance. His biomorphic forms and open composition were incorporated into product and graphic design, particularly during the 1950s.

Question 40

Marcel Duchamp

Answer 40

• 1887-1968
• the Dada movement’s most prominent visual artist. Earlier, cubism had influenced his analysis of subjects as geometric planes, while futurism inspired him to convey time and motion. To Duchamp, Dada’s most articulate spokesman, art and life were processes of random chance and willful choice

Question 41

Raoul Hausmann

Answer 41

• 1886-1977
• a Dada artist who contributed greatly to photomontage.

Question 42

Hannah Hoch

Answer 42

• 1889-1978
• a Dada artist who contributed greatly to photomontage

Question 43

Kurt Schwitters

Answer 43

• 1887-1948
• the creator of the offshoot of Dada called Merz.His complex designs combined Dada’s elements of nonsense, surprise, and chance with strong design properties. Between 1923 and 1932, Schwitters published twenty-four issues of the periodical Merz (Fig. 13–30),whose eleventh issue was devoted to advertising typography.

Question 44

John Heartfield

Answer 44

• 1891-1968
• the English name adopted by Helmut Herzfelde as a protest against German militarism and the army in which he served from 1914 to 1916. A founding member of the Berlin Dada group in 1919, Heartfield used the harsh disjunctions of photomontage as a potent propaganda weapon and introduced innovations in the preparation of mechanical art for offset printing

Question 45

Wieland Herzfelde

Answer 45

• 1896-1988
• a poet, critic, and publisher who edited the journal Neue Jugend (New Youth), which was designed by his brother, John Heartfield (Fig. 13–42). After being jailed in 1914 for distributing communist literature, Wieland started the Malik Verlag publishing house, an important avant-garde publisher of Dada, left-wing political propaganda, and experimental literature.

Question 46

George Grosz

Answer 46

• 1893-1959
• a painter and graphic artist who attacked a corrupt society with satire and caricature (Fig. 13–43) and advocated a classless social system. His drawings project the angry intensity of deep political convictions against what he perceived to be a decadent, degenerate milieu.

Question 47

Andre Breton

Answer 47

• 1896-1966
• The founder of surrealism, he imbued the word with all the magic of dreams, the spirit of rebellion, and the mysteries of the subconscious in his 1924 “Manifesto du Surrealisme”

Question 48

Giorgio de Chirico

Answer 48

• 1888-1978
• a member of the short-lived Italian metaphysical school of painting, he painted hauntingly empty vistas of Italian Renaissance palaces and squares that possess an intense melancholy (Fig. 13–44). Vacant buildings, harsh shadows, deeply tilted perspectives, and enigmatic images convey emotions far removed from ordinary experience. Breton declared him the first surrealist painter.

Question 49

Max Ernst

Answer 49

• 1891-1965
• a restless German Dadaist, he used a number of techniques that have been adopted in graphic communications. Fascinated by the wood engravings in nineteenth-century novels and catalogues, Ernst reinvented them by using collage techniques to create strange juxtapositions. He invented the printing techniques of frottage and decalcomania

Question 50

Rene Magritte

Answer 50

• 1898-1967
• a Belgian surrealist who used jolting and ambiguous scale changes, defied the laws of gravity and light, created unexpected juxtapositions, and maintained a poetic dialogue between reality and illusion, and truth and fiction (Fig. 13–46). His prolific body of images inspired many visual communications.

Question 51

Salvador Dali

Answer 51

• 1904-89
• This theatrical Spanish painter influenced graphic design in two ways. His deep perspectives inspired designers to bring vast depth to the flat, printed page; his naturalistic approach to simultaneity (Fig. 13–47) has been frequently imitated in posters and editorial images.

Question 52

Joan Miro

Answer 52

• 1893-1983
• Part of a group of surrealist painters known as the emblematics, he explored a process of metamorphosis through which he intuitively developed motifs into cryptic, organic shapes

Question 53

Kathe Schmidt Kollwitz

Answer 53

• 1867-1945
• A German expressionist, she documented the plight of the working poor in figurative drawings, prints, sculpture, and posters of great emotional power. Her posters convey great empathy for the suffering of women and children

Question 54

Wassily Kandinsky

Answer 54

• 1866-1944
• Russian émigré Kandinsky led the German Der Blaue Reiter group and became the leading advocate of art that could reveal the spiritual nature of people through the orchestration of color, line, and form on the canvas. Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910) was an early argument for nonobjective art capable of conveying emotions from the artist to the observer through purely visual means, without subject matter or literal symbols. Kandinsky compared color and form to music and its ability to express deep human emotion. This belief in the autonomy and spiritual values of color led to the courageous emancipation of his painting from motifs and representational elements

Question 55

Paul Klee

Answer 55

• 1879-1940
• A Swiss artist, he synthesized elements inspired by all the modern movements as well as children’s and naive art, achieving intense subjective power while contributing to the objective formal vocabulary of modern art (Fig. 13–51). His subject matter was translated into graphic signs and symbols with strong communicative power. Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925) defined the elements of art, and their interaction, motion, and spatial depth. His published lectures are the most complete explication of modern design by any artist.

Question 56

Henri Matisse

Answer 56

• 1869-1954
• led the fauvist art movement, which shocked proper French society with jarring color contrasts and spirited drawing in the first decade of the century.

Question 57

Francis Bruguiere

Answer 57

• 1880-1945
• began to explore multiple photographic exposures in 1912, pioneering the potential of light recorded on film as a medium for poetic expression. In his photographic abstractions, the play of light and shadow becomes the subject

Question 58

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Answer 58

• 1882-1966
• a photographer who extended his vision into the realm of pure form. By 1913 his photographs of rooftops and views from tall buildings focused on the pattern and structure found in the world instead of depicting objects and things (Fig. 13–53). Coburn’s kaleidoscope patterns, which he called vortographswhen the series began in 1917, are early nonobjective photographic images. Coburn praised the beautiful design seen through a microscope, explored multiple exposure, and used prisms to split images into fragments