20th Century Arts Artist

Art

Five notable 20th century artists

The nature of 20th century art was profoundly challenged by the sudden ubiquity of apparently 'objective' media such as the motion picture, photography, and standardized graphic advertising. How could art be deployed effectively in the face of such representation? If art was no longer needed to physically capture the past, what was its use? The answer posed by the plastic arts was that art must look inward, and capture the soul of the artist, rather than objective reality. This new focus on the inwardness of art soon extended itself into other media, of performance as well as static at The rise of psychology in the popular imagination and consciousness provided the 'answer' of inwardness to this potent question possible. A new internal soul-searching had entered the common and uncommon artistic imagination. Rather than represent reality, the inner life of the artist came to the forefront. One of the first artistic movements to bring such internal life and dreams of the artist to the forefront was Surrealism. Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" illustrates an internal vision of the artist, a dream of Dali's inner self, but in a relatively realistic style.

The Persistence of Memory" as an enclosed work is cool in its emotive tone, even humorous in its mockery of capitalism and modern life's obsession with time. It depicts melting clocks in the wilds of a desert. It is a vision that both speaks to psychology's impact upon art because it is something of the artist's internal rather than external reality, yet conveys something profound about larger culture to the observer, through the use of common symbolic languages of time and desolation.

Dali's work was realistic in its style, if not in its tone. But artists were still forced to grapple, as they dealt in a physical medium, with how to better render the internal and external realities of modern life in terms of their techniques as well as their subject matters. This shift from outer to inner human life and mind required more than strange visions rendered in a realistic style. Jackson Pollack, or "Jack the Dripper," as he was known used the sprawling use of paint drippings to express his inner consciousness in non-representational fashions. Jackson Pollock's "Convergence" conveyed the confusion of modern life through a method and a painting technique suited to modern life and even had a kind of performance-like aspect to it, given the intense kinesthetic quality not only of the painting, but the actual act of painting the work. Pollock's painting technique was itself memorialized in photographs in life magazine, which showed his drippings on a glass, seen from the reverse surface of the glass. Through the use of mass media photography, ironically, Pollack, and Dali as well, became celebrities for the exuberant nature of their techniques and lifestyles, as well as the art they created itself

Performance, technique, and final artistic product began to 'converge' (to use Pollack's term) over the course of the 20th century. The Beatles, although they began performance artists, were later to produce a work, "Sergeants Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band," that functioned artistically as a collage on its album cover, and was meant to be listened to as an 'experience' of music from its beginning to its indeterminate end, the chord of "A day in the life," that goes on and on. Unlike a concert experience, listening to a music album is standardized and solitary. It is a private experience like viewing a work of art in silence, rather than a collective experience. But still, one could enter into the minds of five unique artists, through a directed and guided tour of their psyches, on one's own living rooms.

The living rooms, one might add, of individuals, over the course of the 20th century, had experienced profound changes, not due to the least of efforts of Frank Lloyd Wright's "The Kaufman House," which profoundly changed notions of space and decoration in the 20th century. Now, architecture did not use, as it did before Wright in the 19th century, outer decorations and representational carvings to create meaning and decoration. Wright used space and light and slants to convey motion and excitement in building design, creating buildings with a more awesome and yet optimistic feel through angles rather than through sheer size and monumentality -- a kinesthetic approach to architecture that complimented Dali and Pollack's use of dreams and new painting techniques to add energy and expressiveness to their works, even though Wright's stark external style, as manifested in his buildings, is not as emotional as Pollack's, and has more of the coolness of Dali in regards to modern life and the turning-inward produced by its rhythms.