Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series - 1940-41

Jacob Lawrence - The Migration Series No. 12. “The railroad stations were at times so over-packed with people leaving that special guards had to be called in to keep order.” - 1941 - casein tempera on hardboard - 12 x 18 in. - The Museum of Modern Art, New York.A sixty-panel series known as the Migration Series is shared between MoMA and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Artist Jacob Lawrence took as his subject the exodus of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities during and after World War I, when industry's demand for workers attracted them in vast numbers. As the son of migrants, Lawrence had a personal connection to the topic. He researched the subject extensively and wrote the narrative before making the paintings, taking seriously the dual roles of educator and artist.

Lawrence was influenced by the work of the Mexican muralists and earlier artists such as Goya, but he drew his stylistic inspiration primarily from the Harlem community in which he lived. The vivid pattern and color—created in tempera paint as Lawrence worked on all the panels at once—reflect an aesthetic that itself had migrated from the South.

Paul Cézanne: An Artist for All Time

Paul Cézanne - Mont Sainte-Victoire and Chateau Noir - 1904-1906 - Oil on canvas - 25 3/4 x 31 7/8 in. - Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo (click photo for larger image)The French painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) “who exhibited little in his lifetime and pursued his interests increasingly in artistic isolation” is now regarded as the father of modern painting. His genius lies in the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color. Cézanne was a contemporary of the French Impressionists, but he went beyond their interests in the individual brushstroke and the fall of light onto objects, to create, in his own words, “…something more solid and durable, like the art of the museums.” Cézanne’s work embodies the past, defined its present—and ours, and will continue to influence the future. The artist rented a small cottage near Bibémus quarry to the east of Aix to make it easier for him to paint in the open air. He also rented a room in the Château Noir ("black castle"), an estate, halfway to the village of Le Tholonet on the way to Mont Sainte-Victoire, where he could store his painting equipment. The Château Noir was in fact a reddish rough cast neo-Gothic building belonging to a coal merchant. This was the place where Cézanne produced many of his late paintings, surrounded by pine forests, with the ochre-colored stone of Bibémus quarry nearby and a view of the towering rock face of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Futurism: A Surging Incoherence of Forms

Umberto Boccioni Street Noises Invade the House - 1911 - 100 x 107 cm (39 1/4 x 42 in) - Sprengel Museum - Hannover - Germany (click photo for larger image)Interest in—and appreciation of—machinery was clearly in the air in the early decades of the 20th century. For a group of young Italian artists, the progress offered by machinery epitomized their increasing fascination with dynamic speed and motion. Though they translated this idea of progress into a frenetic exultation of the glory of war and the destruction of museums, their visual understanding of motion remained exciting. The Italian Futurists—like the members of Die Brücke in Germany—aimed to free art from all its historical restraints and celebrate the new beauty of the modern age. Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) and other of his contemporaries wanted to express the onrush of events in the world with pictures of motion, dynamism, and power. In the work featured here, Boccioni attempts to provide this sensation and succeeds remarkably well. Noise becomes something seen, something literally invasive of privacy. Boccioni said of the painting, “…all life and the noises of the street rush in at the same time as the movement and the reality of the objects outside.” The surging incoherence of the forms is both chaotic and ordered—a true mark of Futurism, as a movement.

Art of the Fantastic

Henri Rousseau - The Snake Charmer - 1907 - Oil on canvas - 169 x 189.5 cm - Musee d'Orsay, Paris (click photo for larger image)Between the two World Wars, painting lost some of the raw, modern energy that had characterized it at the beginning of the century. Instead, art was dominated by two rather philosophical movements, Dada and Surrealism—both of which have been treated on What About Art?. This development arose partly as a reaction to the senseless atrocities of World War I. Artists were also becoming introspective, concerned with their own subconscious dreams. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories were well known by this time, and painters explored their own irrationalities and fantasies in search of a new artistic freedom. But such art—an art of the fantastic—was practiced uninterrupted by artists from the Middle Ages forward—Hieronymus Bosch, Caspar David Friedrich, Francisco de Goya, and Gustave Moreau among them. A noteworthy practitioner of an art of the fantastic from the Modern era was the celebrated naive painter, Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). Known as Le Douanier, after a lifelong job in the Parisian customs office, Rousseau is a perfect example of the kind of artist in whom the artists of the day believed: the untaught genius whose eye could see much further than that of the trained artist. The term “art of the fantastic” quite aptly describes the oeuvre of this painter.

Mondrian: Neo-Plasticim

Piet Mondrian - Composition No. III Blanc-Jaune - 1935-42 - Oil on canvas - 101 x 51 cm - Christie’s, New York (click photo for larger image)Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) founded named the movement Neo-Plasticism. It’s a rigid form of Abstraction, whose rules allow only for a canvas to be sectioned into rectangles by horizontal and vertical lines, and colored using a very limited palette. He published a manifesto entitled Neo-Plasticism in 1920. Another member of the movement, painter Theo van Doesberg (Dutch, 1883-1931) started a journal named De Stijl in 1917, which continued publication until 1928, spreading the theories of the group. The labels “De Stijl” and “Neo-Plasticism" came to be synonymous.