Back in 1943 Wright had been asked to design a museum in New York City to house the vast collection of non-objective paintings amassed by the copper king Solomon R Guggenheim. ibid.
In the twentieth century something strange happened to art. Traditions that had held good for centuries suddenly felt badly out of date. And a new breed of artists emerged to smash them to pieces. Great Artists in Their Own Words I: The Future is Now 1907–1939, BBC 2013
Picasso: It was an expression purely of the moment and the age. ibid.
Magritte: ‘We are all a mystery.’ ibid.
Picasso’s cubist paintings shattered the laws of perspective. His portraits reached new levels of intensity. ibid.
[Henri] Matisse’s new works were great hymns to harmony and tranquillity. ibid.
Matisse: ‘I was happiest when I couldn’t sell my paintings.’ ibid.
Matisse: ‘Without hard work, talent is not enough.’ ibid.
As well as his Fountain, Duchamp selected other ordinary objects, signed them and declared them to be works of art. ibid.
Duchamp’s Fountain had begun a revolution that would become known as conceptual art. ibid.
[Max] Ernst had become deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud: Men Shall Know Nothing of This. ibid.
With films like Emak-Bakia, Man Ray brought his restless experimentation and visual brilliance to bear on this still young medium. ibid.
L S Lowry was born in Manchester in 1887 ... Coming From the Mill & Going to the Match ... ‘I spend the whole of me life wondering what it all means – I can't understand it at all.’ ibid.
Salvador Dali: ‘One of the most important artists of the twentieth century.’ ibid.
You may think our modern world was born yesterday. But it wasn’t, not even the day before yesterday. Democracy in the streets and the rise of people power. The raw passion of national belonging. Good and bad. Our obsession with the self and our own psychology and the dark recesses of the human mind. Even our love of nature, our concern for the future of the planet, all of this was the creation of the Romantics: a generation of artists living and working two hundred years ago around the time of the French revolution. Their art was created over nearly a century of upheaval and change. And it speaks to us now with as much ferocious power as it did then. The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama, BBC 2020
The Romantics lived hard, worked feverishly, and many of them died young. ibid.
If you’ve ever been on a march for whatever cause, you’ve experienced one of the great inventions of the Romantics brought into the modern world … A new religion of insurrection and agitation in which everyone can take to the streets to fight for freedom, equality and justice. ibid.
Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Delacroix: It’s been a focal point of intoxicated devotion ever since … Delacroix was born into an age of revolutions in which the monarchy and aristocracy was under siege from the ideals of liberty, equality and the rights of man. ibid.
Delacroix’s image had its most famous resurrection during the Paris Uprisings of 1968 when students and workers came together on the barricades to break apart the rigid conservatism of French society under [Charles] de Gaulle. ibid.
The students took over the most prestigious art school and covered Paris in revolutionary slogans, poetry and street art. ibid.
William Blake: His head swam with visions. As he walked through the streets of his city he saw angels in the trees and amongst the haymakers in the fields. He was always reaching for that bit of heaven and he sees everyone as potentially wonderful. ibid.
Perhaps the most surprising or at least the bravest was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1792, fired up by the revolution, Mary had written A Vindication of the Rights of Women … And so she arrived in Paris. ibid.
Over the next two years Mary witnessed the worst excesses of the Jacobean government. ibid.
You could see how the will of the people and the language of liberty became increasingly debased into the propaganda slogans of unlimited state power. ibid.
In 1811 while he was a student at Oxford, Shelley wrote and published a series of anonymous texts in defence of atheism and the freedom of the press. ibid.
He gets thrown out of Oxford and elopes with a 16-year-old. ibid.
Shelley: The Masque of Anarchy (1819): ‘As I lay asleep in Italy, There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me, To walk in the visions of Poesy.’ ibid.
Romanticism was born looking for trouble. Some airy change in taste: what many of the Romantics wanted was to change the world by revolution if it came to it. But what happened … when the romance of revolution ended in political failure and bloody disenchantment? The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama II: The Chambers of the Mind
Long before the invention of psychology, it was the Romantics who became the first explorers of the darker deeper regions of the human mind. ibid.
We go with Coleridge into this deeply penetrating world of the creative mind … Coleridge believed that it was in our dreams assisted by opium that our true self was revealed to us. ibid.
It gets you every time doesn’t it … It was the Romantics who gave us this intense passion for the nation. Who in their poetry, music and art transformed the sentimental fondness we all feel for our place of birth into something bigger and deeper – the secular devotion of national belonging. The Romantics & Us III: Tribes
Nationalism is above all the emotion of longing to go back or stay where you came from. ibid.
In 1900 Paris was capital of the world … Everywhere French innovation, invention and ingenuity was celebrated; salons were abuzz with literary and intellectual life whose influence was felt far and wide. Foreign painters, sculptors, writers, poets and musicians cross paths here in Paris, the city of lights, the freest in the world. The Adventurers of Modern Art I: Bohemia 1900–1906
Off the beaten path and far from this excitement, a little village awoke to the dawning of a new century: Montmartre. ibid.
The [Picasso’s] style reflected the poverty and despair in which the small community of Montmartre had been living. ibid.
A new art-form was taking its first steps: Cubism. ibid.
In Montmartre at the beginning of the last century, hedonist artists lived carefree and tumultuous lives. The Adventures of Modern Art 1906–1916 II: Picasso & His Gang
Picasso had a rival: the painter Henri Matisse. ibid.
Until Les Demoiselles d’Avignon few had criticised Picasso’s works. His studio was like a laboratory where ideas, points of view and innovations were exchanged in an extraordinary spirit of artistic camaraderie. ibid.
The most audacious of the bunch was certainly Marcel Duchamp. ibid.
The Bohemian days gave way to a period of separations. ibid.
Everyone was eager to see the Cubists come to auction. ibid.
In 1911 the Mona Lisa vanished from Le Louvre …. Picasso was called in for questioning. The Adventures of Modern Art III: Paris: Capital of the World 1916–1920 III
In this hive of artists, [Marc] Chagall lived like an exile before, he worked late, always alone, and received few visitors. ibid.
Modigliani was Jewish: he was even known occasionally to punch an anti-Semite … For a long time Modigliani struggled through his bouts of illness, seeking to achieve his dream – the one and only thing that truly mattered to him – to be a sculptor but stone was too expensive … The dust from striking the stone was making its way its his way painfully into his lungs. Modigliani carved and he coughed … His health prevented him from being the sculptor he dreamed of being. So he turned to painting. ibid.
Picasso penned the diary of his life with a paintbrush. The Adventures of Modern Art IV: Paris: Capital of the World IV
Everything was still Dada … A new type of show blending music, painting, poetry, dance and percussion. ibid.
Dada and its manifesto had crossed the borders of Europe to join the ranks of other publications. ibid.
The small band of Surrealists took part in the post-war Dada scandals. ibid.