The Second historical Avant-gardes (1914-39)

The advent of World War I (1914-1918) greatly influenced the emergence of new artistic movements that started as a reaction to the horrors of the conflict. However, before this tragic event took place, had begun the Futurism, a pictoric and literary movement which started through the impetus of Filippo T. Marinetti and the publication of the Manifesto of Futurism in the parisian journal Le Figaro on February 29, 1909. In that paper were defended the agressiveness, the arrogance, the mortal leap, the slap, the punch and the war... a whole argument in favor of rebellion, a rebellion against what these artists and intellectuals clearly defined as a world in crisis, mistakenly anchored in the past and its traditions. To break with this traditionalism that constricted the society, they proposed a culture where the frenzy noise of modern life, the machines, sports, wars and the vehicles moving become the principal axes. That is why the pictures of G. Balla, G. Severini, L. Russolo o C. Carrà breathe velocity and movement through the dematerialization of objects and multiplication of images. However, when these artists defended the turmoil of war they didn't know the magnitude it would reach later. Only in that sense we can say that the war contributed to culture. But their though would not leave indifferent the artistic world since it gave way immediatly to the Dada and Surrealism movements.

G.Balla, Dinamism of a dog in a leash, 1912

After the war, there were many generations of artits an intellectuals who chose to reflect their work throught the traumas lived, with harshness and no hesitation. This was the case of the called as New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an artistic movement born in Germany in the early 20's that predicted and represented the horror of the war and the Nazi regime. To do this, the artits used for personal gain the formal possibilities offered for the various avant-garde movements. In fact, the New Objectivity was part of a bigger trend in Europe and North America oriented to more moderate and precise forms. For a while, Berlin was at the front of the modernist culture, a fact that completely changed in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the seixure of power by the Nazis. The dominant influence in many works of the Neue Sachlichkeit, as it happens in the Surrealism, was Giorgio de Chirico, even if were other artist like George Grosz (1893-1959), Max Beckmann (1884-1950) and Otto Dix (1891-1969) who became the most important creators of that art.

G.Grosz, Metropolis, 1916

In other cases, the attitude of rejection towards the war was expressed by movements that pull out the anti-artistic and countercultural spirit of many artists and intellectuals, as Dadaism do.  This current first emerged in Zurich, where in 1915 a group of pacifist artists created the “Cabaret Voltaire”, which became the headquarter of the Dada movement until 1920. In this place, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings read poems or  made various actings, always against the established order. Subsequently, the Dada ideology spread to other cities (New York, Paris, Berlin, Cologne or Hannover), but in all its forms it always started on the same principles: the desacralization of the artwork – that can be seen in the works of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters or Man Ray–, the wild freedom of the artists, and the adoption of a nihilistic actitude towards live, where chance had much to do.

M.Duchamp, Fountain (urinary), 1917

J.Heartfield, Sunny land, 1919

 

Closely linked to the Dada movement, it cames out in Paris the Surrealism, a literary and artistic movement that began to take shape in the decade of the 20's around the personality of the poet André Breton. In the first definition of the Surrealist Manifesto   (1924), it was defined as “Noun, masculine. Psychich automatism in tis pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functionning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercises by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern”. The painting is only mentioned in a note at the end of the page, however there are defended the two main roads  open to the surrealist painters: the automatism and the trompe-l'oeil. Among the decades of 1920-30 various artists are incorporated to the movement, like Miró and his pure-psychic automatism, Dalí – who used images taken of the dreams throught the paranoiac-critical method – or  André Masson, also attracted by the psychic automatism. The International Surrealist Exposition in Paris in 1938 set the apogee of this movement before the war and offered a taste of what Surrealism had produced in the manufacture of objects rather than in painting. The importance lies in the “found objects”, transformed, assembled, which is able to work in a symbolic form, something especially visible in the work of Magritte and Dalí.

S.Dalí, The great masturbator, 1929

R.Magritte, The red model, 1937

Another important artistic school emerged after the World War I was the Bauhaus, which developed between 1919 and 1933 in Germany and found in Weimar (1919-1924) and Dessau (1925-1932) its main focus of diffusion  (in Berlin it would onli survive for six month). Founded by the architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus (translatable as “House of Construction”) became the most famous school of design, art and architecture in Germanu trought the merger of the Weimar Academy of Fine Art and the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts. The institution's mission was to seek a teaching bases on a solid preparation for the trades, encouraged on the knowlodge of materials, their use and the language of shape. Its two main objectives were, on the one hand, to reach a total integration of the different genres of art and craft sectors under a certain supremacy of architecture and, on the other hand, to bring aesthetic production to the needs of  large segments of population, which means bringing the arts closer to the people, in line with the principles advocated in the nineteenth century by british artists of the Arts & Crafts, such as William Morris o John Ruskin. They pretended, as last term, to achieve a perfect balance between form and function of the work, respecting the principles of geometry, funcionality and straigh lines. In Weimar's school converged artits and teachers from different crafts guilds who contributed to the pedagogical renovation of art schools, dominated until that moment by the academicism. Thereby, were importants the contributions of the Architecture Workshop  (W. Gropius, L. Moholy-Nagy), the Pottery Workshop (Th. Begler), the Textil Workshop (G. Stözl), the Furniture Workshop (J. Albers y M. Breuer), the Metal Workshop (M. Brandt) and the Sculpture and Carving Workshop.

W.Gropius, Bauhaus building in Dessau, 1923-5

Following the relocation of the Bauhaus headquarter to Dessau (1925), the school will still work, developing new designs and makins interesting contributions to the typography. But with the upgrade of the National Socialism and Hitler's rise to power, the Bauhaus was endangering its continuity and, after a short period of six months in Berlin, was forcef to close their doors under Nazi pressure, which had intensified with the fall of the Weimar Republic. In response to this situation, many artits emigrated to America, where they continued their carrers (J. Albers, H. Hoffmann...) quite fortunately. Any way, this was only one of the consequences of the rise of power of an ideology that would inhibit many fredooms, finish with a lot of lifes and plunge the german country in a war with global impications.