Chapter 6&7 Flashcards
Modernism
is the loose term given to the succession of styles and movements in art and architecture which dominated Western culture from 19th Century up until the 1960’s. Movements associated with Modern art include Impressionism, Cubism, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Futurism, Pop Art and Op Art.
Modernism
- appears in art literature music etc.
- was a masculine aesthetic - favoured detached, hard , abstract work
- modernism was inhospitable to women
- modernism is subjective intuitive, rebellious
- can give any interpretation
- began in the latter part of the 19th century
- a movement or style in the arts.
Modernism
- Another important factor in the development of Canadian pictorial modernity was the fact that artists no longer directed or dictated the audiences response to the image by using obvious emotional or anecdotal motifs.
- The audience’s reaction to the image was tied to the painter’s specific visual strategies colour, composition, space to grab the viewers attention and to supplant a literal meaning of the image
- these considerations are primary concerns of what has been loosely defined as modernism.
artists that belong to modernism
- Canadian group of painters
- Prudence Heward
- Paraskeva Clark
- Yvonne McKague
- John Lyman
- CAS
THE 1920S IN CANADA
- Female suffrage
- prohibition laws bans the sale of alcohol & consuming in public places
- mother’s allowance, minimum wage legislation
- low wages, repressive working conditions, high cost of living
- class conflict following the war
- 1929 stock market crashes - beginning the great depression
1930s
- 1929 NY stock market crashed world was in depression
- Canada many people lost their jobs/farmers faced bankrupcy
- nothing to back you up except welfare - long process to get welfare
- Canada relied on export of products - oil
- no market for Canadian products.
1920s 1930s & Group of 7
- work by group of 7 heavily criticized
- lawren harris evolved into a modernist painter
- decided to expand their exhibition beyond the group invited other painters
- Canadian Group of Painters
members that were exhibiting with Group of 7 & later joined Canadian Group of Painters
- Emily Carr, Prudence Heward, H. Habel May, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Kathleen Munn, Yvonne McKague, Bess Housser, Doris Mills, along with L.L. Fitzgerald, George Pepper, Thoreau Macdonald, and Bertram Brooker.
The Canadian Group of Painters
- official name given to 28 artists across Canada who came together as a group in 1933.
- English speaking artists
- focus of the group was Toronto
- Lawren Harris was the first president
The Canadian Group of Painters2
- two objectives: should be closer co-operation & communication between between Canadian artists and to cultivate distinctly Canadian art.
- membership came from the whole of Canada
- more modern ideas & techniques are encouraged
- landscape is the first subject matter of the group
Isabelle McLaughlin 1937
- Born in 1903 Oshawa
- Father was a prominent art collector
- studied at OCA trained by Lismer
- studied in Paris & Italy
- early paintings very decorative.
artists that modernist representational painting
- James Wilson Morrice
- David Milne
- Carl Shaefer
- LeMoine Fitzgerald.
Inhabited Landscape
- From the late 1920s onward there was a renewed desire by Canadian modernists to emphasize the landscape as a site of human habitation and cultivation.
- In one type of inhabited landscape a large single structure or a cluster od buildings is contained within its own spatial plane.
- The Buildings are usually frontally positioned placed toward the upper range of the painting and often at a distince distance.
examples next slide.
LEMOINE FITZGERALD (1890-1956), SUMMER AFTERNOON, 1921
Farmer’s Daughter, c. 1938 Prudence Heward
Prudence Heward 1896 - 1947
- another member of the group
- studied with Brymner
- studed in Paris
- friend of Isabelle M.
- makes her name as a portrait painter
Inhibited Landscape 2
- the theme of the inhabited landscape takes on another identity when architectural structures become the dominant design.
- an emotive sense of the largeness of domestic buildings is often accomplished by positioning the structure against a background of an expansive sky and a comparatively limited foreground.
- this design was frequently used by Carl Shaefer
- the architecture frames nature, thereby suggesting that its unseen inhabitants have disrupted the natural environment and that economic and social needs take priority.
Farm House by the Railway, Hanover
1939
- making a statement about how important farming and and is
- farming area settled in 19th century
- wheat field
Carl Shaefer 1903 - 1995
- enrolled in OCA
- instructed by Macdonald & Lismer
- knew Harris & Jackson
- painted in the style of group of 7
- member of the Canadian painters group
Ann Savage
- Montreal artist
- discovered by Barbeau
- landscape painting
ANNE SAVAGE, THE PLOUGH, C. 1932
- stylistically influenced from the group of 7
- made the plow the focus of the painting the landscape is a backdrop.
Modernism & The Landscape
- Landscape is the only theme in representational art in which the picture can never be as large as the subject.
- Canadian modernist landscape images continued to be framed within a horizontal or more often a square format.
- As modernism developed across the country, landscape pictures became increasingly a matter of more freely arranged groupings of simplified elements and corresponded more closely to the way we physically encounter the world.
Landscape
- modern perspectives allowed nature to become a metaphor for aesthetic experimentation
- modernism defined the landscape as a neutral place and not the intstrument for a national narrative.
- modernist motifs of nature could be found equally in a wilderness or a pastoral site farmland or rural village
- The realism of modernist landscapes lies in its accomodation of natures specificity but the painter is free to deny or manipulate topographical truths.
LEMOINE FITZGERALD, DOC SNYDER’S HOUSE, 1931
David Milne
- strongly contributed to the new visual vocabularies and democratization of subject matter that was essential to Canadian modernist painting.
- worked in New York and in rural Ontario
- IN milne’s oils, watercolours and prints he blurs the distinction between painting and drawing, object and setting;
- illustrated typical modernist definitions of landscape painting.