German artists emphasized which of the following

The Nazi leaders who came to power in January wanted more than just political authority. Jews and persons deemed to be politically unreliable were purged from cultural institutions and their works removed from galleries, cinemas, libraries, and theaters.

In , Nazi Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels began the synchronization of culture, by which the arts were brought in line with Nazi goals. The government purged cultural organizations of Jews and others alleged to be politically or artistically suspect. The works of leading German writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Alfred Kerr were thrown into the flames in a book burning ceremony in Berlin.

Nazi aesthetics emphasized the propagandistic value of art and glorified the peasantry, the "Aryan," and the heroism of war.

This ideology stood in stark contrast to modern, innovative art, such as abstract painting, denounced as "Degenerate Art," as well as "art bolshevism" and "culture bolshevism. In architecture, the Nazis constructed monumental edifices in a sterile classical form meant to convey the "greatness" of their political movement. In literature, they promoted the works of writers such as Adolf Bartels and Hitler Youth poet Hans Baumann, and established a "black list" to facilitate the removal of "unacceptable" books from public libraries.

Aside from peasant literature and historical novels centering on the Volk people , German cultural authorities promoted war novels in order to prepare the population for conflict. German "art cultivation" a term for all measures aimed at promoting artists and the arts also extended to film. Heavily subsidized by the state, the motion picture industry was an important propaganda tool.

Adolf Hitler regularly attended the operas at the Bayreuth Festivals held in honor of the composer Richard Wagner. The challenge and reward of creating such scenes was so great that the most ambitious artists continually returned to them, even when they were free to choose their own subjects. Michelangelo, for example, repeatedly portrayed the crucified Christ in drawings e. Sorabella, Jean.

Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Burn, Barbara, comp. Scribner, Christiansen, Keith. Paoletti, John T. Art in Renaissance Italy. New York: Abrams, Visiting The Met? Madonna and Child Duccio di Buoninsegna.

Bauhaus : Built on the influences of Expressionism, Neoplasticism, Constructivism among others , the Bauhaus—exemplified here in the work of Herbert Bayer and Marcel Breuer—was a revolutionary new take on the traditional art school model, bringing the fine arts painting, sculpture, and architecture and the applied arts typically, design fields like furniture, stained glass, woodworking, printmaking, and so on under one roof and one curriculum.

Constructivism : usually divided into two camps Russian and International , Constructivist art was made possible by new, industrial forms and materials wed to geometric forms and an idea that the artist should also be an engineer, constructing a new and radical modern world.

It is exemplified here in the performance of Hugo Ball and the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. As such, it stands as a sort of antidote to nineteenth-century French Impressionism, which sought to recreate outward sensations.

Fauvism : a semi-abstract movement in early twentieth-century mostly French art—exemplified here in the work of Henri Matisse—that used bright, often unmixed colors in an effort to create a direct means of expression separated from earlier naturalistic trends. Neoplasticism also known as De Stijl : an abstract movement founded during the interwar period in the Netherlands—exemplified here in the work of Piet Mondrian—that proposed simplicity, order, and functionality built on the most basic geometric forms horizontal and vertical lines and the most basic colors the three primary tones, black, gray, and white toward the possibility of reaching universal values in art.

Purism : a semi-abstract movement in interwar France—exemplified here in the work of Le Corbusier—that proposed geometry and simplicity as underlying principles of art, proposing the need for originality and creation based upon these orderly bases. Primitivism : a trend within Modernism wherein Western artists either a.

The Works Progress Administration WPA : a program in the United States under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt that provided work for a number of artists during the Great Depression, most notably on government-funded mural projects for federal, state, and municipal buildings. The hard outlines around his female figures emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas while contrasting visually with the passage of color from one form to another.

It is clear, for example, that certain brushstrokes move from one figure to another across what should be their outline.

In The Joy of Life , yellow, blue-green, and pink nudes dance, sing, and frolic in an untouched, multicolored Eden. By alternately exaggerating and simplifying forms, Matisse made artistic choices that emphasized the canvas as a two-dimensional support for the harmonious juxtaposition of color rather than any sort of accurate representation of nature. Above all, I do not create a woman, I make a picture. A simple and telling exercise: ask your students to make two columns, one for adjectives describing The Joy of Life , and one for adjectives describing Street, Dresden.

Though these women address the viewer, their eyes are blackened, implying an inability or unwillingness to make basic human connections. A concern over the effects of modernity and the city on the human psyche was a leitmotif of Expressionist thought.

Der Blaue Reiter The Blue Rider was formed in in Munich and focused on the possibility of pure abstraction art without recognizable objects. The leader of Der Blaue Reiter , Wassily Kandinsky wrote an influential treatise entitled On the Spiritual in Art in that, among other things, argued that abstraction offered a universality that representation could not, and that color acted autonomously from form as a carrier for spiritual values thought to be lost in the experience of modernity.

If, as Kandinsky suggests, color could exist outside of form, what would it look like? Kandinsky and his followers were fond of comparing visual art to music. Music, in the eyes of the Expressionists, was the perfect metaphor for abstract art; though it has form and tone, though it can be felt and heard, its forms cannot be seen. They can , however, be written, notated, and visualized.

Bach comes to mind , or the Futurists or Dadaists who followed them, for that matter. This is how, for example, it is possible to see the women he represented both frontally and in profile. The visual innovations of Cubism and Expressionism catalyzed artists across Europe who sought to express the modern age in their art.

In Italy and later, Russia , Futurism embraced modernity, specifically seeking to incorporate advances from science and industry into their multifaceted production. Simultaneous Visions encapsulates many of the major themes of Futurism.

Spurred on by the maddening pace of modern life, the Futurists believed in the concept of simultaneity: that time happened all at once, rather than as a series of discrete moments, and that forms—as a result—were also unbound, interpenetrating and exerting force on each other. Here, a woman looks from a staggering height off of her balcony onto the city street below. His Unique Forms of Continuity in Space attempted to do exactly that, showing the development of a figure striding in forward motion.

Though the upright figure has powerful legs that cut the air, creating swirling vortexes, its face and chest are largely caved in, suggesting the forces resisting its progress. Was it a modern man-machine, ready to leap into battle? While it embraced modern art, then—Cubist and Expressionist paintings were exhibited at the Cabaret Voltaire, and Futurist sound poems and manifestos were declaimed—Dada agitated for the destruction of the commercial art institution, using performance to create art that could not be commodified.

Dada stood for an embrace of the irrational and original versus traditional concepts of reason and tradition. Written in a nonsense language meant to mimic certain African dialects an unfortunately racist, if well-intentioned attempt to reach for inspiration beyond the Western canon , Ball created Karawane to be spoken aloud rather than read silently, and he thus emphasized the phonetic qualities of the words rather than their meaning.

His performance of Karawane , then, should be read as much as a celebration of modern art as it is a takedown of the hallowed Western intellectual bastion of reason, which—for the Dada group—was not worth much, when it ultimately created machine guns, tanks, bombs, and other devices to more efficiently kill millions in a devastating war.

As an idea, Dada spread quickly, spawning factions across the globe. Marcel Duchamp was an artist whose work was closely associated with Dada who worked between Paris and New York. His artistic maneuvers—often meant to directly question the most basic assumptions of art itself—placed him among the most important artists of the twentieth century.

He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object. What is a work of art? Who gets to decide? If the artist gets to decide what a work of art is, then is choosing a work of art significantly different than creating it?

Can an idea—not an object—be a work of art? World War I had a devastating effect on Europe and on the psyches of every man, woman, and child that it reached. In the arts, there was a decided shift following World War I toward concepts of order, harmony, and beauty to counteract the chaos, division, and ugliness of the war machine.

Another was reconciliation: Europe needed to come together and heal after the war, rather than slipping into factions based on wartime alignments. If links could be made, say, to a shared Greco-Roman past exemplified artistically in notions of order, proportion, and beauty , then that might enable Europeans to see each other once more on common ground.

A third reason could be described as follows to really drive the point home for students: after witnessing 16,, deaths and 20,, more wounded and disfigured , some early abstractionists deemed it inhumane—even barbaric—to represent the human body as distorted or fragmented in the way that prewar Cubism and Expressionism did.

Indeed, there was even a feeling among a small set of intellectuals that World War I was something akin to divine punishment for the decadence of modernity, and that abstraction in the arts was symptomatic of that decadence.