April 2013
23 posts
1 tag
Last day of Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925
Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 closes today April 15th, 2013 and this concludes our series of daily tumblr posts. Over the course of three and a half months we have uploaded a lot of materials that supplement the exhibition, its catalog and website. We hope this tumblr will remain as a useful resource for anyone interested in early abstraction.
With best wishes to all our followers,
The...
5 tags
3 tags
AN EXHIBITION
El Lissitzky, New Man, from the portfolio Figurines, plastic representations of the electromechanical production entitled ‘Victory over the Sun,’ 1923
At the end of 1921, the Russian artist El Lissitzky traveled to Berlin, with support of the new Soviet government. There he participated in the organization of the First Russian Art Exhibition at the Galerie Van Diemen, which...
2 tags
Tonight on Charlie Rose
You can watch an interview with Leah Dickerman about Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925.
The video will subsequently be uploaded here.
3 tags
Ai Wei Wei, Fountain of Light, 2007
This steel and glass structure, illuminated from the inside, is the contemporary Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s reinterpretation of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. It was exhibited at Tate Liverpool in 2007.
5 tags
Arnold Schoenberg in the courtyard of the St.Petersburg Philarmonic, 1912
In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky introduced Arnold Schoenberg’s musical theory to Russia by publishing his own translation of the composer’s groundbreaking Theory of Harmony in a 1911 exhibition catalog of the International Art Salon, which traveled to several major cities in Russia. In the winter of 1912 Schoenberg was invited...
4 tags
An installation photo with a visitor in front of Morgan Russell’s 11 foot painting Synchromy in Orange: to Form (on the right)
Another great photo of this monumental painting in Inventing Abstraction appeared in The New York Times review of the exhibition in December 2012.
3 tags
Morgan Russell, Synchromy in Orange to Form, 1914 In this painting, Russell models the rhythm of space through the juxtaposition of saturated colors, which form bands that buckle and fold over a monumental surface, spilling onto the painted frame. “I always felt the need to impose on color the same violent twists and spirals that Rubens and Michelangelo imposed on the human body,” Russell wrote...
6 tags
Sonia Delaunay-Terk and a companion wearing clothing of the artist’s design and with a Citroen B12 decorated by her. 1925
Sonia Delaunay produced works according to the principles of simultaneous painting along the entire spectrum of the fine and the applied arts: from paintings, drawings and book bindings to clothing, decorative objects for the home and even cars.
5 tags
THE CAFE
Sonia and Robert Delaunay, 1923 In the summer of 1913, the Russian literary scholar Aleksandr Smirnov visited Robert and Sonia Delaunay in France. Returning to his native St. Petersburg, Smirnov spread the word of the new art he had seen, lecturing at the famous Stray Dog café, an avant-garde gathering place, on the Delaunays’ latest work and their theory of simultaneous contrasts. He brought...
3 tags
Here is a bibliography of art historical charts →
compiled by our librarian Jennifer Tobias.
The diagram we created for Inventing Abstraction is part of this larger tradition.
And here are some earlier posts about charts.
4 tags
Mikhail Larionov, Glass, 1912
In the autumn of 1912, Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova developed a new visual language they called Rayism, in which, inspired by the discovery of x-rays and radioactivity, they claimed to depict not objects but rays of light or energy these objects reflected. “I established the convention,” Larionov wrote in 1913, “of depicting a ray on canvas as a...
3 tags
Emilio Pettoruti, Dynamic Expansion, 1914 In this work Pettoruti aims to convey the synchronicity of movement, light and rhythm with arching curves and shadows created from the subtle tonal range of charcoal on paper. This work is among this artist’s earliest forays into abstraction, made a year after he moved from his native Argentina to Italy where he was introduced to Futurist art.
4 tags
Here is another photograph of visitors in the galleries of Inventing Abstraction. The free-standing wall in the middle is dedicated to artists’ study of color. This wall includes August Macke’s Colored Squaresdiscussed in an earlier post today. To the left are Vaclav Nijinsky’s drawings, to the right the sections dedicated to abstract film and technological abstraction in...
1 tag
Join Masha Chlenova, of the curatorial team, for a public tour of Inventing Abstraction tomorrow, Friday April 5th at 12:30 pm. Meet at the entrance of the exhibition near the audio guide desk.
2 tags
August Macke, Colored Squares, 1913 Color is the primary subject of Macke’s abstract works. In this painting he arranged triangles in a grid in a systematic progression from warm to cool hues. Adjacent colors make individual shapes flicker through their complementary and contrasting effects, guiding our gaze to isolate shapes and relate them to each other.
4 tags
3 tags
3 tags
Vladimir Tatlin, Composition, 1916
Vladimir Tatlin made and exhibited three-dimensional abstract reliefs in 1914 and 1915. In this work he revisits two-dimensional form, as if to reflect on the roots of his abstract practice. The media of this work - painted in tempera on wood - refer to medieval Orthodox Christian icons, which inspired many avant-garde artists in Russia. At the same time,...
3 tags
Yesterday AICA - USA (International Association of Art Critics) awarded Inventing Abstraction its first prize for the Best Historical Museum Show Nationally. The awards are granted by vote of AICA - USA members, which include over 400 critics, curators, scholars and art historians working throughout the United States.
AICA announces the 2012 awards
6 tags
The Scout
Alfred Stieglitz, ca. 1909 Photographed by Edward Steichen
Marius de Zayas, “Femme! (Elle)” in 291 no. 9 (November 1915)
Francis Picabia, “Voila Elle” in 291 no. 9 (November 1915)
Searching for European artists to exhibit at his 291 gallery in New York, Alfred Stieglitz deputized the Mexican artist Marius de Zayas, who was living in Paris in 1914, as a scout....
2 tags
Frantisek Kupka, Localization of Graphic Motifs II, 1912-13
On Friday April 5th at 12:30 pm join Masha Chlenova, of the curatorial team, for a public tour of Inventing Abstraction. Meet at the entrance of the exhibition near the audio guide desk.
3 tags
Hans Arp published his first book of sound poetry, Wolkenpumpe, in 1920. It included poems he wrote over several preceding year, may of which were recited at Dada soirees and previously published in Dada periodicals. Arp’s design for the cover of his book is closely related to his poems; both are printed without conventional spacing or punctuation, inviting the reader to participate in...
March 2013
38 posts
5 tags
4 tags
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tumb, 1912
Zang Tumb Tumb is Marinetti’s first published collection of parole in liberta (words in freedom), a form of poetry that is both verbal and visual. Conceived in 1912 and published in 1914 it is an account of Marinetti’s experience of the battle of Adrianople (now Edirne in Turkey) during the Balkan War of 1912. The title of the...
4 tags
A 1913 chronological chart for the Armory Show
The Armory Show, a celebrated modern art exhibition held in New York in 1913, was conceived in a historical way, intended to trace recent developments in modern art from its roots in the nineteenth century. To this end the artist Arthur B. Davies, then president of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, created a chronological chart “showing the growth of modern art.” He...
4 tags
A Futurist on the Road
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, ca. 1914 The Italian poet and editor Filippo Tomasso Marinetti arrived in Russia in 1914 to publicize Futurist achievements. There he lectured to (and debated) an audience of Russian avant-garde artists and poets. At one of Marinetti’s evenings, a heated exchange took place between the Italian poet, the painter Mikhail Larionov, and the linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson...
3 tags
3 tags
Fernand Leger, Contrast of Forms, 1912
In 1912 Fernand Leger announced his programmatic turn to abstraction in two public lectures he gave at the drawing studio and artists’ meeting place - the Academie Wassilieff on Montparnasse. “Pictorial contrasts used in their purest sense (complementary colors, lines and forms)” Leger stated, “are henceforth the structural basis of...
4 tags
5 tags
A Good Review
Robert Delaunay, Window, 1912
In July 1912 Robert Delaunay showed his work at an exhibition of the Moderne Bund (Modern League) in Zurich, a venue for experimental art, at the invitation of Bund co-founder Hans Arp. Arp in turn had obtained Delaunay’s address from Vasily Kandinsky. The Swiss artist Paul Klee, who saw Delaunay’s show, decided to review it, proclaiming it to be an entirely new...
6 tags
Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara, Cinema Calendrier du Coeur Abstrait, Maisons (Cinema Calendrier of Abstract Hearts, Houses), 1920 This book is a collaboration between a Dada artist and poet. Tzara collages elements of language into unexpected associative strings, while Arp uses the organic forms of his woodcuts to evoke the unceasing transformations of language.
5 tags
4 tags
Kazimir Malevich, Architecton (Gota), 1923 (reconstructed in 1978, incorporating original elements)
In 1919 Kazimir Malevich announced that the future of Suprematism, the abstract pictorial style he invented four years prior, lay in three-dimensions. In 1923 Malevich made his first architectons, visually austere but compositionally complex structures built of small blocks of plaster. Gota,...
6 tags
Sophie Taeuber dancing at the Cabaret Voltaire
Since 1916 Sophie Taeuber has been studying dance with Rudolf von Laban who advocated creative freedom of movement. In April of that year Taeuber and another student of Laban, Mary Wigman (who would go on to become a prominent modern dancer), began performing at the Dada Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, dressed in costumes designed by other Dadaists. At...
4 tags
Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, Duo collage, 1916
This collaborative collage, made using a paper cutter rather than scissors, signaled the artists’ desire to abolish individual emotional expression. Instead, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber employ the impersonal structure of a grid, a predetermined arrangement of regular horizontal and vertical units, which would become a device widely used in...
3 tags
4 tags
Mardsen Hartley, Painting, Number 5, 1914-1915
Mardsen Hartley, Berlin Abstraction, 1914-1915.
Hartley’s abstract paintings of 1914 reflected the mounting tensions of war in Berlin. His friend Karl von Freyburg, whom Hartley loved, was killed in combat in October 1914. These paintings, which he made beginning in November, serve as abstract memorial portraits to the young cavalry...
5 tags
TRAVELING PHOTOGRAPHS
Christian Schad, Schadograph, 1918
In early 1920, Christian Schad, a German artist working in Swiss Dada circles, sent his tiny abstract cameraless photograms to the Dada impresario Tristan Tzara, who was then living in Paris. Tzara reproduced one of these works in his magazine Dadaphone, and he showed them to Man Ray, who had moved to Paris from New York and lived in the same hotel. In early...
3 tags
Reinventing Music by WQXR radio
Robert Delaunay, The Three Windows, the Tower and the Wheel, 1912
In conjunction with Inventing Abstraction, New York’s classical music radio WQXR has created a musical program, entitled Reinventing Music, 1910-1925. You can hear it in a specially designed music chamber in the exhibition as well as on WQXR’s website.
4 tags
Born in France, composer Edgard Varese divided his time between Berlin and Paris before moving to New York in 1915, where he continued to maintain close ties with many artists and composers on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Dadaists Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. One of Varese’s most innovative compositions is Hyperprism of 1923, written for nine wind instruments...
4 tags
A PARTY
Mikhail Larionov, Sunny Day (pneumo-rayist colored structure), 1913-14
In April 1914 Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova left Russia for Paris by train to work for the balletmaster Sergei Diaghilev. En route, they stopped in Rome to organize a conference comparing Russian and Italian Futurism. Once they reached the French capital, the gregarious poet Guillaume Apollinaire was quick to...
3 tags
Here is Umberto Boccioni’s version of the development of modern art - Dall’ impressionismo al futurismo (From Impressionism to Futurism). It was published in Dinamo Futurista in June 1933, preceding Alfred Barr’s chart by three years. Boccioni’s geneology starts with Eduard Manet, then divides artists into two columns of those preoccupied with color and those dealing with form,...
3 tags
Giacomo Balla, Compenetrazione Iridescente (Iridescent Interpenetrations), 1912
Balla’s series of Iridescent Interpenetrations distill the sensation of seeing into radiant, prismatic colors, and interplaying geometric forms. These works evoke the artist’s interest in scientific diagrams and theories of vision. He drew shapes with a compass, ruler and square, but balanced these...
4 tags
Sonia Delaunay, Electric Prisms, 1913
Along with her husband Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay developed a practice called simultaneous painting. In her work, the idea of simultaneity evoked the visual experience of a city dweller, shaped by electric as much as by natural light. She described the electric lamps that were newly installed on the streets of Paris: “Halos were making colors and...
4 tags
Reinventing Music →
On the website of Q2 Music, the blogger David Patrick Stearns analyzes the form-changing musical innovations of the period 1910-1925.
4 tags
3 tags
5 tags
Vasily Kandinsky, Sounds, late 1912 or 1913
In late 1912 or 1913 Vasily Kandinsky produced a volume, in which he paired thirty-eight of his poems with woodcuts. He declared: “I wanted to create nothing but sounds,” and called the book Klange (Sounds). In these poems, written between 1907 and 1909, Kandinsky emphasized the physiological impact of the sonic quality of language, often...
4 tags
Vaclav Nijinsky, Untitled (Arcs and Segments: Lines), 1917-18
Vaclav Nijinsky, Untitled (Arcs and Segments: Planes), 1917-18
The celebrated ballet dancer Vaclav Nijinsky also made drawings, a select group of which are on view in Inventing Abstraciton, generously lent by the Foundation of John Neumeier, the Artistic Director of The Hamburg Ballet. In these works Nijinsky echoed the movement of...
