11th November
MODERNITY & MODERNISM
Modernist project - 1760 – 1960----------> postmodern world
Modernise- to improve
Forward thinking
(new labour)
(tate modern)
Artists in 1851- called the Moderns, but were not modernists. They had a traditional syle.
Paris 1900, the first modern city. Urbanisation – made it dense, quicker.
L’expositon in 1889, invited the world to see different exhibitions – to show off the new, including Eiffel Tower. All buildings just tryng to be new- in terms of industrial
Enlightenment = period in late 18th century when scientific/ philosophical thiking made leaps and bounds--------> Secularism - A secular society
Urbanisation, the city is new for their lives, different from rural work to factory work, work in shifts
Communication networks, meet new people. -Railway
No standard world time, shift from the impact of the railway
Shopping, cinema- revelling in the new. Everyone who lives there is living in the new
Enlightenment – embrace new knowledge and science
New thinking and reject old views, including religion
Impressionist painting – ‘Paris on a rainy day’ 1877
For artistic movement, painting this new urbanisation – who love the city. The subject is less about the people , but experience of every day, the modern streets, umbrellas, lampposts , the floor.
Haussmanisation
Paris 1850’s on = new Paris
It was old, medieval- narrow streets and run down housing. Riffled with crime.
Napoleon hired Haussman to rebuild the city, knock it down and start afresh. New large boulevards, long streets - Easy to police, to control. It as a city can now house modernity. Shown in paintings, impressionist.
All people living the sums were kicked out, literally forced into the outskirts of the city.
Painting more subject of the city, not the people in the painting. But only showing them gazing at the city itself.
1893. Scientists worried the new fast life of modernity would send people crazy. They did tests, shows there was a real concern.
Class division of modernity. If rich just stroll around the city, showing your wealth. New Fashion started. People become a communicator, a status symbol- something important.
Lives revolve around work.
Degas 1876, L’absinthe. Drinking in a dive bar, social rejection. Left behind and hates her work. Modern style of painting - like photographs, idea of cropping style
Kaiserpanorma 1883 -Sit in seats, that is this round block, show slides- of the world, even erotica.
Technology becomes fetishised, watch the world rather than actual experience
Lumiere brothers
First films,
Eiffel tower
Trains going past.
Modernism in Design
Anti-historicism – not to look back, have to be new or showing new thinking or styles. –To replace.
-Truth to materials, all modernists like to let the materials of their trade speak for themselves.
Eiffel tower looks completely industrial because it is. They revel in it.
Form follows function. The beauty comes out just at the end of how the product works.
Technology is embraced.
Internationism – modernism a neutral language, everyone understands these new objects- skyscrapers, square chairs. Accessible to all.
Bauhaus cutlery- for follows function, no design. There is just truth to the materials.
Subjective experience- the experience of the individual in the modern world.
New York – Flatiron Building, 1903. Alfred Stieglitz
New York building on the system of grids. Its systematic, there is a science to it.
George Grosz and John Heartfield DADA, bombarded by information. Instructed – media becomes increasingly important.
Gacoma Balla, 1912 ‘speed of a motor car’. Abstract sense of a experience of the modern world.
Futurist Tpography, new systems
Onomatopoeia MARINETTI
‘Ornament is crime’ – Adolf Loos
Would be backward thinking. Simple geometric forms appropriate to materials
Bauhaus building- concrete, modern. Truth to materials. Whole wall is glass. New thinking and functional.
Interdisciplinary, everyone taught everyone. Futura, invented in the Bauhaus. Sans Serif.
New materials- concrete, new technologies of steel, plastics, aluminium, reinforced glass.
Products to be made quicker and need to be cheaper – Marcel Breuer – chair
Skyscrapers- the ultimate of the modernist- form following function – not decorative.
Le Corbusier LC2 chair.
Failed modernist buildings, estates- new slums.
As they ignore the human, the interaction.
Internationalism
A language of design that could be recognised and understood on an international basis. Utopian Aspect- should be international, anyone can use the objects.
Harry Beck, London Underground system 1933. Neutrality to its internationality.
Herbert Bayes – ditch capitals.
Times New Roman, Stanley Morrison 1932. Most definitely not modernist, but historicist. British empire and roman empire. Imagined version of the two. Nationalist.
Fraktur font, medieval and gothic. Reference to German superiority.
Modernity 1750- 1960. A social and cultural experience.
