Artists and the Call for Social Change
Avant-garde artists like Picasso, Kandinsky & Duchamp responded to the chaos of impending war by challenging the art of the past with new styles
This section of works reflect artists making direct statements about WWI
- Matisse & the Fauves liberated color from its descriptive function of replicating nature
- With Cubism, Picasso and Braque liberated art form from its representational function
- Seeing art as a vehicle to express emotion, the German Expressionists moved toward abstraction
- Duchamp and the Dadaists called into question the whole nature of art
- Bauhaus and the International Style sought a universal style of art production free of historical and nationalistic references
This section of works reflect artists making direct statements about WWI
- In Italy, Boccioni and the Futurists embraced the modern industrial age, speed and war, proposing the complete destruction of traditional institutions was the path to progress
- Working in Berlin before the war, American Marsden Hartley was fascinated by the modern metropolitan city and military pageantry; Very early in the war he begins a series of paintings memorializing his dear friend, and highlighting the tragedy of war
- While Hartley painted life in Berlin at the beginning of the war, Grosz is most famous for his works produced after the war, in the 1920s. After brief military service (twice), Grosz became radically opposed to German nationalism and work from this period is ascerbically critical of the Weimar Republic. While Boccioni celebrated the machine age, Grosz condemned it.
- Unlike Boccioni, Hartley and Grosz who where expressing personal reactions to the war to be consumed by a select public familiar with art, American illustrator James Flagg created iconic propaganda for a broad audience in support of the war effort