Bird In Space Analysis

1925, Brancusi, Constantin, Romanian, Bird in Space

TXT: “From the 1920s to the 1940s, the theme of a bird in flight preoccupied Brancusi. He concentrated on the animal’s movement, rather than their physical attributes. In Bird in Space, the sculptor eliminated wings and feathers, elongated the swell of the body, and reduced the head and beak to a slanted oval plane. Balanced on a slender conical footing, the figure’s upward thrust appears unfettered. This sculpture is part of a series that includes seven marble sculptures and nine bronze casts.”

CLS: The sharpness can be a beak, a side of a wing or a bring gliding.

1914*, Klee, Paul, Swiss, Hammamet with Mosque

TXT: “On April 14, 1914, Klee visited Hammamet, a small town on the Mediterranean

northwest of Tunis. He captured a view of the city in Hammamet with Its Mosque, a watercolor painted from outside the city walls. As happens so often in Klee's works, the picture consists of representational as well as nonrepresentational elements. The upper part shows the mosque surrounded by two towers and gardens; the lower area is made up of translucent color planes, following Robert Delaunay's (1885–1941) example of making pure color and its contrasts the sole subject of a picture.”

CLS: He created this while they visited the city and enjoyed seeing the beautiful architaecture.

1914, Hartley, Marsden, American, Prtr German Officer

TXT: “Hartley painted his most startlingly advanced abstractions during the first years of World War I while living in Berlin (March 1914–December 1915). The War Motifs, his German military series, are intensely powerful canvases in an Expressionist vein; they reflect not only his revulsion at the wartime destruction, but also his fascination with the energy and pageantry that accompanied the carnage.Portrait of a German Officer, painted in November 1914, shows Hartley's assimilation of both Cubism (the collage-like juxtaposition of visual fragments and the hieratic structuring of geometric shapes) and German Expressionism (the coarse brushwork and the dramatic color). The condensed mass of images (badges, flags, medals) evokes a collective psychological and physical portrait of the officer. There are also specific references to Hartley's close friend Karl von Freyburg, a young cavalry officer who had recently been killed in action: K.v.F. are his initials, 4 was his regiment number, and 24 his age.”

CLS: Hartley created this painting after his lover, the german officer was killed.

1913, Kandinsky, Wassily, Russian, Composition VII

TXT: “An early champion of abstract painting, Wassily Kandinsky is known for his lyrical style and innovative theories on non-figurative art. In his 1910 treatise Concerning the Spiritual In Art, Kandinsky made famous his belief that abstract colors and forms can be used to express the “inner life” of the artist. Kandinsky taught this and other lessons at the Bauhaus, the historic Weimar institution that brought together artists including Joseph Albers, Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, and Piet Mondrian, amongst others. Kandinsky had a strong interest in the relationship between art and classical music, this theme apparent in his orchestral Composition VI (1913), where colliding forms and colors move across the canvas. In 1911 Kandinsky played a central role in organizing Der Blaue Reiter, a group of artists named in part after Kandinsky’s favorite color, blue.”

CLS: Full of bright colors, abstract painting, an amazing influential Russian painter and art theorist.

1913, Kirchner, Ernst L., German, Street, Berlin, German Expressionist

TXT: “This exhibition brings together German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's renowned Street Scenes series, created between 1913 and 1915. Considered by many to be the highpoint of Kirchner's career as a whole, this series of seven paintings is showcased with sixty related prints and drawings.”

CLS: This imagine was to describe the prostitute back in Berlin. He implied how they were in the famous streets. He was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke

1913*, Delaunay, Robert, French, Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon

TXT: “Delaunay was fascinated by how the interaction of colors produces sensations of depth and movement, without reference to the natural world. In Simultaneous Contrasts that movement is the rhythm of the cosmos, for the painting's circular frame is a sign for the universe, and its flux of reds and oranges, greens and blues, is attuned to the sun and the moon, the rotation of day and night. But the star and planet, refracted by light, go undescribed in any literal way. "The breaking up of form by light creates colored planes," Delaunay said. "These colored planes are the structure of the picture, and nature is no longer a subject for description but a pretext." Indeed, he had decided to abandon "images or reality that come to corrupt the order of color."

CLS: He was a French artist who cofounded the Orphism art movement. He is known for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee.
1913, Balla, Giacomo, Italian, Speed of an Automobile

TXT: “In late 1912 to early 1913 Giacomo Balla turned from a depiction of the splintering of light to the exploration of movement and, more specifically, the speed of racing automobiles. This led to an important series of studies in 1913–14. The choice of automobile as symbol of abstract speed recalls Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's notorious statement in his first Futurist manifesto, published on February 20, 1909, in Le Figaro in Paris, only a decade after the first Italian car was manufactured: "The world's splendor has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. . . . A roaring automobile . . . that seems to run on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."

CLS: It was a futuristic painting with many shapes.

1912, Picasso, Pablo, Spanish, Guitar, Sheet Music, Wine

TXT:"In Guitar and Wineglass, Picasso assembled his collage from seven pieces of paper, cut and pasted to a wallpaper ground. Each of these pieces of paper remains a discrete representational element within the composition, which as a whole represents a guitar hanging on a wall. The formal antinomies are repeated in the small drawing of the glass, again with the curved profile appearing at the left and the straight-edged at the right.

CLS: Adding words, adding random words and thoughts in the painting. Adding the special name of Le Jou that he adds in a few other painting.

1912*, Picasso, Pablo, Spanish, Guitar

TXT:”Sometime between October and December 1912, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) made a guitar.

Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire, materials that he cut, folded, threaded, and glued, Picasso’s silent instrument resembled no sculpture ever seen before.”

CLS: This sculpture has a lot of unique shapes and stands out because of how 3D he made it.

1912, Kandinsky, Wassily, Russian, Blaue Reiter Almanac

TXT: “Der Blaue Reiter was formed in 1911 in Munich as a loose association of painters led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. They shared an interest in abstracted forms and prismatic colors, which, they felt, had spiritual values that could counteract the corruption and materialism of their age. The flattened perspective and reductive forms of woodcut helped put the artists, especially Kandinsky, on the path toward abstraction in their painting.”

CLS: The Blaue Reiter was a group of artists that united in rejection of the München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and Gabriele Münter. They considered that the principles of the München, a group Kandinsky had founded in 1909, had become too strict and traditional.They lasted from 1911 to

1914.

1912, Kandinsky, Wassily, Russian, Garden/Love/Improv. #27

TXT:”He became one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), a loose association of artists formed in 1911 to promote a new art, one that would reject the materialist world in favor of the world of emotion and the spirit. The following year, when he painted The Garden of Love, Kandinsky also published his influential book, On the Spiritual in Art. In accordance with his belief in the primacy of the inner, spiritual world, Kandinsky's art was abstract, meant to express our preconscious selves, before the intervention of reason.”

CLS: When Kandinsky started to put his feelings and expressions into his work and also enabled him to put more color and shape. When he created this, he intended to put more of a biblical story of Paradise and the Garden of Eden. Kandinsky adds in this imagination on how he feels heaven looks. Bright yellow, red and black in the painting showing to have a primary colors.

1911, Matisse, Henri, French, Red Studio

TXT: “"Where I got the color red—to be sure, I just don't know," Matisse once remarked. "I find that all these things . . . only become what they are to me when I see them together with the color red." This painting features a small retrospective of Matisse's recent painting, sculpture, and ceramics, displayed in his studio. The artworks appear in color and in detail, while the room's architecture and furnishings are indicated only by negative gaps in the red surface. The composition's central axis is a grandfather clock without hands—it is as if, in the oasis of the artist's studio, time were suspended.” 121-124

CLS: This picture is a lot of symbolism, a lot of hidden messages Matisse is trying to send.