News Art Blog

When people say that an art movement or school “died out,” they usually don’t mean it literally. In the case of the Italian Futurists, however, you can specify the day the movement “died”—August 17, 1916, the day that artist Umberto Boccioni succumbed to injuries at the age of 33 after falling from a horse and getting trampled during Italian Army cavalry training for World War I. Boccioni exemplified the best parts of an art movement that celebrated modern technology aesthetically. His death registers today as another senseless death among millions during the “Great War.” In a different sense, however, Italian Futurism “lived on” for another three decades and one more world war in the person of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the movement’s chief manifesto maker and warmonger. The Guggenheim Museum’s new exhibition Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, which runs through September 1, 2014, resurrects the good, the bad, and the ugly truths of an art movement that died in the culture and wars of the past yet still lives on, zombie-like, in our modern ones. How did Italian Futurism become the undead art movement? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Italian Futurism: The Undead Art Movement?"

When Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque first brought Cubism onto the modern art scene in the first decade of the 20^th century, the initialreviews were mixed. Like-minded artists and art lovers embraced Cubism as a startling new way of seeing breaking violently with the representational art of the past. Many others, however, saw only madness and perhaps a little fraud in these images taking everyday objects and representing them from every angle simultaneously. Preferences for modernism or classicism certainly played a big role in responses. But what if we could wipe away those preferences? Would an unprejudiced viewer accept and maybe even enjoy Cubist paintings? A team of researchers recently tackled that question by testing whether art novices shown a series of Cubist works expressed a liking for the works and if detectablility—whether or not the viewer could visually reverse engineer the image back to its everyday source—played a role. Their results not only suggest that Cubism can be enjoyed by the novice, but that more difficult (but not too difficult) works to untangle tickle the pleasure zones of the mind. Are our minds wired to enjoy Cubism? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Are Our Minds Wired to Enjoy Cubism?"

Georges Braque once said that he and Pablo Picasso were “roped together like mountain climbers” during the formative years of Cubism—1910 through 1912. Picasso and Braque scaled the mountain of Western art tradition and then turned the mountain upside down through their artistic gamesmanship that took every aspect of what we knew of art up to then and made it look like child’s play. Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912, which runs at the Kimbell Art Museum through August 21, 2011, studies the aesthetic chess match the two artists played in tandem for those two years and allows viewers today to play and experiment along on their iPads. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Picasso and Braque Play Games With Your Eyes, and Now Your iPad."

[Image: Screen shot from the iCubist app for the iPad designed and produced by Reza Ali for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum.]

[Many thanks to the Kimbell Art Museum for providing me with the image above and a review copy of the catalog to Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912, which runs through August 21, 2011.]

“[I]n La Ruche you either came out dead or famous,” Marc Chagall said of the Parisian refuge of bohemian artists from Eastern Europe that he called home during his first Paris period. French for “the beehive,” La Ruche buzzed both with creativity and camaraderie during Chagall’s time there. The circle of friends Chagall formed around himself influenced not only his art but widened his spirit as he witnessed a world far bigger than the Vitebsk village he left behind. In Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, visitors gain access to Chagall’s circle of friends and get a sense not of a “hive mind,” but rather of a unity born of diversity sharing the same hardships and passions. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Circle of Friends."

[Image: Marc Chagall, French (born Belorussia), 1887-1985. Paris Through the Window, 1913. Oil on canvas, 53 1/2 x 55 3/4 inches (135.8 x 141.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.438. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.]

[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing me with a review copy of the catalog to, the image above from, and other press materials for Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle, which runs through July 10, 2011.]

[A REQUEST AND A CONTEST: Please consider making a donation to help the people of Japan. Some of the organizations doing good in that terrible situation are Doctors Without Borders and The Red Cross. Please consider helping in some way. And if you do send a donation, mention it in the comments to this or any other post and I’ll put your name in a contest to win a copy of See/Saw: Connections Between Japanese Art Then and Now by Ivan Vartanian and Kyoko Wada (my review here). Honor rules apply, so you do not need to send “proof” of a donation. Also, the contest is open only to U.S. residents (but anyone can donate, of course). Contest ends at midnight EDT on April 1, 2011 and a name will be pulled from a hat the next day.]