Chapter 13

Many things, mostly political, changed during the twentieth century and the influences of those changes introduced new styles of art and graphics in advertisments. Cubism was started by a series by Pablo Picasso with geometric lines combined with African tribal art, as well as Paul Cezanne. Both demonstrated a new way to express feelings with abstract figures and geometric planes, mostly representational elements. Cubism was influential to the way painting and graphic design was done from then on. Filippo Marinetti was a poet that began Futurism as a movement where the arts were up against the new science and industrial age. Mostly poetry and typography was talked about in the chapter. The style was chaotic and nonharmonious. Writing took shapes and became visual designs. Some of these techniques were taken in by the Dadaists, who were rebelling against World War 1. Most of the works of this movement were meant to be shocking and held a strong negative and destructive meaning. The photomontage is credited to Dada artists that took photos and manipulated them to create new images. Surrealism and expressionism were two other big movements in Europe at the time. Surrealism was the opposite of the Dada movement with poetic faith in the spirits of mankind and humanity. Visual works were often too personal and abstract to acurately communicate an idea, but were well accepted almost because of this. Two groups of expressionists were big in Germany, "The Bridge" and "The Blue Rider". "The Bridge" expressed their emotions by working the subject matter, while "The Blue Rider" expressed their emotions through perceptions given by an object. Photography also went through some changes during the modern movement. Man Ray was a big player in how it changed. He applied Dada and surrealism to his photos by manipulating things in the darkroom or using different studio set-ups. He also started using solarization to strengthen contours in photos.
I thought that reading about Dada was the most interesting, as well as the way people started to manipulate photography to get something new. I find it fascinating to see how artists of the time reacted to the war and that people were upset by it and conveyed the anger and destruction of it in their images. I also liked seeing how photos were changing with the styles that the poets and painters were using too. I'm still confused about what surrealism actually is, so what is surrealism as a visual and poetic style?