Cubism, futurism and De Stijl

Cafe Society
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I’ve got a few thoughts I’d like to explore about early 20th century art movements.

Thales of Miletus sought to explain the world using one fundamental element, he chose water. He was wrong about water, but the approach was a good one. Biology made great progress when it focused on the cell, chemistry on the molecule and physics on the atom. It seems that cubism, De Stijl and futurism each attempted to do this with painting.

With the development of photography in the 19th century, painting lost one of its main functions which was to accurately portray what could be seen in the way it was commonly seen. E.g.: If you wanted a portray of a guy, it was usually more efficient to just take a picture.

As photography got better and painting tried different approaches like impressionism and expressionism, it turned inward and looked at what constituted images. Cubism, futurism and De Stijl also began around 1910 and ended in the 20s and 30s.

For example, De Stijl (http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/161/1/7/De_Stijl_by_poeticbullet.jpg ) concentrated on the basic components of images; the lines, shapes and tones/colors. The 3 colors Mondrian chose were yellow, red and blue which are the three primary colors in substractive color theory which is the relevant one when painting.

You can see what Mondrian does with a tree here: http://www.wetcanvas.com/Community/images/22-Jun-2011/959549-Mondrian,_Trees_to_abstraction_2.jpg
Computer graphics works much the same way; you have lines, flat surfaces which are typically triangles or rectangles and the three primary colors in additive color theory. Vertices are also used but they are not visible on their own, only through the lines, shapes and colors they compose. From those visual elements, every, nearly every computer graphic is made.

Cubism also sought to break down objects and scene into their basic forms which they considered to be perspectives and planes. In much the same way, computer graphics now chiefly rely on polygons which are flat planes although not arranged in the same way that the cubists did.

Futurism broke painting down in terms of time and movements like this: http://c300221.r21.cf1.rackcdn.com/depero-futuristi-depero-futurism-and-more-1356762719_b.jpg

  1. So, I’d like to know if I’ve pretty much got it right on the fundamental aspects of these movements.

  2. Why was Cubism so much more popular than De Stijl and why is Futurism pretty much forgotten?

  3. They all sought to break down images into their constituent parts and their paintings are very much demonstrations of how an image or scene can be broken down into planes, lines, shapes, primary colors, moments and movements. But beyond showing that images could be broken down, they do not seem to have taken the next step of using building something new with it. These art movements seem to be about analysis but without synthesis.

It’s like a chemist showed how a substance could be broken down into molecules, showcased every molecule and its arrangements but then didn’t make a new substance with it. When I look at a cubist painting, all I can think is: “Yeah, neat, you could take visual input from different perspectives and lay them all on the same plane.” It makes me realize that this is another way of breaking down images but I’m not seeing how it then takes that understanding to make something of it.

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You forgot the Russian painter Malevich and his Suprematism paintings. :wink: Kandinsky, Gorky, Stuart Davis - lots of good stuff!

Bottom line is that I think you are headed in the right direction. Photography freed painting up to…do something different. Painters started “breaking rules.” Pointellist painters seemed to break rules and portray light and color in their component parts, which coincided with similar “granular” explorations in music, and the atomic model in physics.

It all went down hill from there :wink: (jk; I love much of this art…)

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You do have a pretty good hold on the concepts behind these movements. Although Futurism was a more all-encompassing idea going beyond just the visual representation of things, and was pretty extreme. “Man vs. Nature: The Path to Victory” wouldn’t have been a joke title to them.

I don’t have anything to back this up, but Picasso was a tireless self-promoter. Similar to how Dali is the best known surrealist, but is not necessarily the most important one.

De Stijl’s adherents moved on to other things. Futurism was kind of co-opted and absorbed by Mussolini, and some of its famous adherents had already moved on to other things, too.

Well, each of the painting styles are trying to come up with a justification to continue painting. To some extent, the fact that they could represent things in ways that a camera was incapable of was an end in itself. That said, even though they changed how things were represented in fine art, they still used it to represent things with meaning to them. For example, Guernica uses the cubist technique to show the horrors of war.

Perhaps I don’t actually understand what you’re getting at here. What would they synthesize from their work in experimental ways of rendering other than a new way of painting?