Our cultural perspectives shape how we perceive art, including who we see as contributing to its most important movements. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll get to the truth behind the creation of modernism and bust the myth of its European beginning. We’ll show how modernism was a truly global movement, in which far-flung artists responded to a rapidly changing world.
Crash Course Art History #15
Introduction: “The Comedian” 00:00
How Modernism Started 00:54
Modernism’s Influences 04:10
Decentering Europe 06:55
Multiple Modernisms 09:23
Review & Credits 10:47
Image Descriptions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ETiCxe4GrVzFii7dBhF42oHx1EUCCh5y12wbtUjsH8A/edit
Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GW2NKzhpMNMmRyAFJVhFJG9cSfUOMRL-QrcWuHcWcIA/edit?usp=sharing
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This is “The Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. And yeah, it is exactly what it looks like. A banana, bought from a supermarket, duct taped to a wall. When asked about the work’s meaning, Cattelan said simply, “The banana is supposed to be a banana.”
00:20:And people went bananas when it debuted at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in 2019. And it enraged plenty who balked at its $150,000 price tag and the fact that anyone would call it “art” to begin with. Artists have always innovated, but when did they start bucking tradition entirely?
01:42:Hi, I’m Sarah Urist Green, and this is Crash Course Art History. In most areas of your life, “modern” is going to mean what you think it does–current, or related to the present. But when it’s used to describe art, “modern” usually indicates it’s from the past.
01:06:And associated with a historical movement called Modernism, which describes a phenomenon–beginning in the late 19th and early 20th Century–when artists started to reject traditional styles, ideas, and subjects. This rejection has become such a big part of today’s
01:23:culture that it’s hard to imagine life without it. Like, the banana was surprising but not really, because bucking artistic tradition has become an artistic tradition. But it wasn’t always that way! To understand the shift, let’s jump back in time.
02:40:Picture this: it’s the turn of the 20th Century, and the world around you is changing fast. New technologies, like railroads and phone lines, are transforming how people work, travel, and communicate. Cities are growing larger, and fewer people are living in small towns.
02:57:Religion is playing a less central role in society, and fields like psychology are emerging. All of a sudden, you have to worry not just about whether you got enough sleep, but about what your dreams mean. Seriously though, when am I going to stop having stress dreams about being late to class?
02:14:At the same time, former European colonies, like Cuba and Indonesia, are fighting for — and winning — their independence. Which is inspiring artists in those countries to break from traditional European ideas of art. And then there are the World Wars.
02:29:One after another redefines not only political boundaries, but what war can look like and how widespread it can get. With so much change, the old ways of making art weren’t gonna cut it anymore. Why follow the rules of the strict art academies when the world around you is falling apart?
03:48:I mean, when your world changes, don’t you want your music, movies, and culture to reflect that? Likewise, artists of the time searched for new ways to communicate the chaos and confusion of their rapidly changing world.
03:02:And one major thread was to create art that represented abstract things — inner thoughts, feelings, and ideas, using lines, shapes, and colors. Rather than representing concrete things the way they look in the “real” world.
03:17:Instead of a horse looking like this, they started looking more like this. The same goes for the night sky, a woman at a tram stop. This kind of art, where artists try to evoke rather than recreate, is called abstraction. The shift from representational art to abstraction marks the place and time
04:37:most scholars agree “modern” modern art began. And even now, many official records will tell you it all started in Europe with three guys named Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. But that’s like saying that Elvis invented rock and roll…. it doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.
04:56:For one thing, there were others exploring abstraction before them, like the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. There’s also the reality that abstract forms have been part of many cultural traditions around the world, for as far back as we can trace!
04:11:And many European artists were drawing inspiration from other cultures, incorporating elements of South Asian philosophies, and the work of African artists, as well as indigenous peoples from Australia and the Pacific Islands. Like, take a look at Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,” from 1907.
04:28:It depicts five nude women, a subject not at all unfamiliar to European art. But it does break from tradition, and not only because of the geometric shapes that form the women’s bodies. Picasso loved African art; he first came across it in a collection of masks he saw at a museum in Paris.
05:47:And you can see this influence very directly in the shapes and colors that make up the women’s faces. Picasso had even started to collect African masks by the time he made this work. And this wasn’t just a Picasso thing. During the 19th century, France was a major colonial power in Africa,
05:05:meaning they had taken control of many African countries. Art dealers would plunder, or, er, steal, works and sell them to the cultural elite back home. Artists, collectors, and curators tended to overlook the specific uses and cultural
05:21:significance of these works, focusing mostly on their designs and patterns. And that led folks like Picasso to imitate these artistic styles in relatively simplistic ways, completely detached from their original contexts. Art historians today would call this kind of appropriation primitivism.
06:40:Essentially, European culture-makers viewed art from colonized or formerly colonized countries like you might view art by a talented child. It was considered underdeveloped and inferior, but still intriguing and impressive.
06:55:It was worth copying, but not really deserving full credit in its own right. This perspective has garnered a lot of criticism in more recent decades. Like, in 1984, the Museum of Modern Art in New York displayed Picasso’s work and that of other European artists alongside
06:13:objects and artifacts from Indigenous American, Oceanic, and African groups. And while the exhibit was trying to acknowledge the influence of indigenous works on European art, critics argued the two weren’t placed on equal footing — because the non-European
06:29:works were presented without much context. The exhibit didn’t include the dates they were made, their cultural functions, and so forth. So they couldn’t be understood in their own right, only as stepping stones to what the European modernists were doing.
07:43:One critic, Thomas McEvilley, called it a demonstration of, quote “Western egotism still as unbridled as in the centuries of colonialism and souvenirism.” Woof. Critiques like these have pushed art historians and curators to decenter Europe in art history.
07:02:And to explain what that means, it’s helpful to look at a map. Most world maps used today are based on what’s called the Mercator projection, which puts Europe more or less at the center of things. But that’s not the only way to see the world.
07:17:Like, take “Inverted America,” drawn by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García in 1943. He flips South America on its head, so now his country is at the center. In this way, he shows us that map-making is selective.
08:33:Just as he prioritized his cultural identity, the makers of the Mercator did the same. After all, Earth is a sphere in space. Which way is up totally depends on your perspective. So, to decenter Europe from art history would mean imagining it
08:49:not as the central hub of art, from which everything else emanates. But instead, as part of a swirling network of influences. And that’s a key aspect of modernism. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the world became more connected than it had ever been
08:06:before, and that showed in the ways that cultures overlapped and blended in art. Like, Wifredo Lam’s work incorporates influences not only from Cuba, where he was born, but also the Afro-Caribbean culture he experienced there, as well as his travels in Europe.
08:25:Here are two of his paintings that are similar in composition — with figures among stalks of sugarcane representing thousands of Cuban laborers who worked on sugar plantations. But this later work is made up of even more abstract lines and shapes,
09:41:as Lam blended his style with elements he liked from European abstraction. Zia Pueblo artist Velino Shije Herrera also intentionally melded cultures in “Design, Tree and Birds,” made in 1930. In order to make his work more accessible to non-indigenous audiences, he combined
09:60:abstract symbolism from his culture with a more modernist look popularized by European artists. He created his own distinct style, while also responding to a moment in history when a market for indigenous art was growing. No matter that American schools were forbidding indigenous
09:18:students from speaking their languages or expressing their cultures, but I digress. So when we look at modern art from a wider perspective, we see a web of influences begin to take shape–multiple modernisms emerging from cultural moments all over the world during the 20th century.
10:36:And many of those modernisms emerged out of postcolonial countries that were newly independent from European rule. Artists created works that rejected European identities and sought to define their own. Take Indian artist Gaganendranath Tagore’s painting of a Kolkata bazaar from the early 1920s.
10:56:He was fascinated by modernist works that relied on geometric shapes and showed multiple perspectives at once, a style called cubism. You can see how he fragments the colorful architecture and awnings of the marketplace. But he and other Indian artists worked together to
10:13:develop a unique modernism that reflected modern Indian life. Rather than trying to be realistic, Tagore’s experiment in cubism captures the essence of a bazaar through shape and color. In many ways, Tagore’s work encapsulates the complexity of modern art.
10:30:An Indian man, in a former British colony, paints a local bazaar, in a style popularized by Europeans, that was itself heavily influenced by Indigenous American, African, and Oceanic artists. Globalism and modernism are delightfully intertwined. So, modernism isn’t just one thing from one place.
11:52:It’s countless responses to moments in history when the world became a whole lot smaller. And that shrinking of geography — thanks to advances in communication and transportation, but also war— helps explain why nearly every modernist artwork has cross-cultural influences.
11:11:And that’s not just the impact of Europe reaching the world; it’s the impact of the world reaching the world. The closer we look at the whole canvas of art history, the clearer it becomes that artistic influence knows no borders. And great art can come not just from anywhere — but from everywhere.
12:33:Next time, we’ll explore the deliciously thorny topic of public art, looking at monuments, memorials, and memory. I’ll see you there. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the Indianapolis
12:47:Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these thoroughly modern people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
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