Photo By Gail
Vorticism was a short-lived, but radical movement founded by Wyndham Lewis in London just before the First World War. It proposed an art which responded to the energy of the modern world. In Workshop (1914–15), Lewis celebrates the industrial landscape with angles and diagonal lines.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Workshop By Wyndham Lewis
Photo By Gail
The quintessential painter of the machine age, Fernand Leger observed the effects of modern technology in the trenches as a soldier in the French army during World War I. Featuring workers whose bodies appear to be assembled from standardized industrial parts, The Builders (1920) exemplifies the style he developed after the war. Unlike the toiling laborers of Thomas Hart Benton’s mural, America Today, the builders here fuse seamlessly with the scaffolding and gears around them, as though they are part of one, harmonious machine. In the 1930s and 1940s. Leger would go on to make his own murals, featuring abstracted images of industry and machine power.
Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
I first became acquainted with Marcel Duchamp’s very famous sculpture, Fresh Widow (1920), when I was studying art in college. Constructed by a carpenter in accordance with Duchamp’s instructions, Fresh Widow is a small version of the double doors commonly called a French window. Duchamp was fascinated by themes of sight and perception; here, the expectation of a view through windowpanes is thwarted by opaque black leather, which Duchamp insisted “be shined everyday like shoes.” Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh Widow