Battle of the Fishes Was With What Art Movement?

Unit 6 Lesson four

Modernistic Landscapes

INTRODUCTION

During the interwar period, the European and American Landscape was transformed by several factors, including the lingering ravages of war (in Europe) and the increased industrialization of rural and urban areas. Industrialization created an increased sense of individualism and isolation in urban centers and contributed to increasingly urbanized landscapes. Artists made photographs, prints, paintings, and drawings that documented the touch on of war on the land and the industrialization of the mural throughout Northward America and Europe. The works in this lesson reflect several artistic responses to the changing landscape during the interwar period.

LESSON OBJECTIVES

• Students will hash out the means paintings and prints created during the interwar years reflect changes to the landscape.
• Students will visually analyze landscape images, using such terms as background, foreground, middle ground, medium, and limerick.
• Students will consider the dissimilar ways artists responded to the changing landscape.

INTRODUCTORY DISCUSSION

André Masson: Battle of the Fishes, sand, gesso, oil, pencil and charcoal on sail, 362×730 mm, 1926 (New York, Museum of Modern Art); © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, courtesy of The Museum of Modernistic Fine art, New York

• Allow your students a few minutes to closely examine the image of Boxing of Fishes, by André Masson, without telling them the title.
• Ask your students to draw what they come across in this image, paying particular attending to the artist's pick of materials, colors, and subject matter.
• Enquire your students to describe the organization of this landscape. Tin can this mural exist discussed in the conventional terms of foreground, center ground, and background?

Inform your students that Masson created this painting in 1926, when he was a member of the Surrealist movement. Masson was specially interested in a facet of Surrealism known every bit automatism, in which artists created artworks without conscious idea or intention. For Masson, this was achieved through automatic drawing. He would begin by putting a pencil to a slice of paper without whatsoever specific discipline in heed, and let his hand to movement freely, believing that in doing then he was tapping into his subconscious thoughts. Only subsequently a significant number of lines were made would he allow himself to develop images. However, he found information technology difficult to attain automatism in his paintings, and in 1926 he began to apply pigment directly from the pigment tube and use glue and sand.

• Inquire your students to brainstorm what techniques and materials they think Masson may have used to create this artwork, giving examples from the painting.
• Inform your students that the title of this painting is Battle of Fishes. Ask your students if the title seems appropriate.
• Inquire your students to imagine that they had the opportunity to rename Masson'southward painting. What title would they requite this work? Ask them to explain their reasons based on visual examples from the image.

Prototype-BASED DISCUSSION

Inform your students that Masson fought in Earth State of war I and suffered a serious injury that left him emotionally unstable. Masson recounted the furnishings of his time injured on the battlefield:

"The indescribable dark of the battleground, streaked in every direction by bright ruby-red and green rockets, striped by the wake and the flashes of the projectiles and rockets—all this fairy-tale-like entrenchment was orchestrated past the explosions of shells which literally encircled me with earth and shrapnel. To see all that, face upward, 1'southward body immobilized on a stretcher, instead of head down as in the fighting where one burrows like a domestic dog in the beat craters, constituted a rare and unwonted situation."

[André Masson, quoted in William Rubin and Carolyn Lanchner, André Masson (New York: The Museum of Modern Fine art, 1976), 30.]

• Inform your students that many people believe that these and other wartime experiences emerge in Masson'south automatic drawings. Ask your students if there is whatsoever evidence in this painting that Masson's wartime experiences influenced his artistic do. Ask your students to support their responses with examples from the painting.
• Have your students create 2-minute automatic drawings. Then have them spend another ii minutes transforming their webs of lines into scenes. Have them share their final images with the entire group and discuss the types of scenes that they created. Do they agree that meanings can sally from such drawings?

Otto Dix: Near Langemarck (February 1918) [Bei Langemarck (Februar 1918)] from The War (Der Krieg), etching and drypoint from a portfolio of fifty carving, aquatint and drypoint, 244×299 mm, 1924 (New York, Museum of Modernistic Fine art); courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Show your students the image of Otto Dix's print bei Langemarck (Februar 1918) (Near Langemarck (February 1918)) from Der Krieg (The State of war).
• Inquire your students what they think the impress depicts, making certain that they support their interpretations with visual prove from the image.
• Ask your students to compare and contrast this image with Boxing of Fishes.

Inform your students that Dix was a High german creative person and a volunteer machine-gunner in World War I. During his time in the war, Dix witnessed much fighting, including trench warfare, and documented these experiences in over 6 hundred drawings. This print, Nearly Langemarck (February 1918), is part of a graphic series titled The State of war, created past Dix six years after the war concluded. The series consists of 50 etchings in which the artist employed a realistic mode to depict images of the war. To create the series, Dix drew on such resources as anatomy classes, visits to his local morgue, his wartime drawings, and many newspaper photographs documenting the horrors of the state of war.

• Ask your students whether this information reinforces or changes their initial interpretations of Dix's work.
• Ask your students to annotate on the type of bulletin the image communicates about the war. Do you retrieve the creative person wanted to create an image that celebrated war or was critical of it? Ask your students to explicate their responses in terms of the image.
• Read your students the following quote by the artist. After reading the quote, ask them to share their thoughts.

"War is something animal-like: hunger, lice, slime, these crazy sounds. . . . War was something horrible, just withal something powerful. . . . Under no circumstances could I miss it! It is necessary to see people in this unchained condition in social club to know something about man."

[Otto Dix, quoted in Otto Dix, 1891–1969 (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 1985), 280.]

• Compare Dix'south reaction to state of war with Masson's, as evidenced in their work.

Inform your students that the next paradigm they will run across is chosen American Landscape. Take the class brainstorm what they recall a painting with this championship might depict. Encourage your students to consider how an image with this title made today would differ from a painting with the same title that was made in the 1930s.

Charles Sheeler: American Landscape, oil on canvas, 610×788 mm, 1930 (New York, Museum of Modern Fine art); courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Bear witness your students the prototype of American Landscape, by Charles Sheeler. Ask them how it relates to what they imagined a work with this title would depict.
• Ask your students to briefly compare and contrast the landscape depicted in this work with the mural in Battle of Fishes, paying particular attention to the limerick, lines, materials, and scene.

Tell your students that Sheeler painted American Landscape in 1938 when he was commissioned by Ford Motors to document the River Rouge Establish, a new Ford Model T product plant exterior Detroit. Sheeler visited the institute for six weeks, documenting information technology through thirty-two official photographs that were subsequently printed in Vanity Fair, Time, and other magazines. He ofttimes used photographs as source material for paintings, including American Landscape. The realistic style he painted in came to be known equally Precisionism. Of his piece of work, Sheeler said,

"My interest in photography, paralleling that in painting, has been based on admirations for its possibility of accounting for the visual world with an exactitude not equaled by any other medium. The departure in the way of arrival at their destination—the painting being the event of a composite image and the photograph being a single image—prevents these media from being competitive."

[Charles Sheeler, quoted in Mary Jane Jacob and Linda Downs, The Rouge: The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Fine art, 1978), 12.]

• Inquire your students how American Landscape differs from a photo. What elements might you look to see in a photo of this scene that are non present in this epitome?

To Sheeler, manufacture was an important subject for gimmicky art:

"Every age manifests the nature of its content by some external course of evidence. In a period such as ours, when just a few isolated individuals give evidence of religious content, some grade other than that of the Gothic Cathedral must be found for our authentic expression. Since manufacture predominantly concerns the greatest number, finding an expression for it concerns the creative person.

[Ibid., 11.]

• Ask your students how they think the artist felt well-nigh the increasing industrialization of the American Landscape, given this quote and the visual evidence of the painting.
• Ask your students if they can detect a human figure in this image. Students may notice the i very pocket-sized figure in the foreground of the image, on the railway tracks. Ask your students how their interpretation of this image would change if there were a greater number of people depicted, keeping in mind the work's composition and mood.
• How does Sheeler'due south response to the environment differ from Masson'southward or Dix's in terms of style?

ACTIVITIES/PROJECTS

ane. Create a Postcard

Brandish all three images from this lesson. Give each student a sheet of paper. Ask your students to cull i artwork and imagine that they are visiting the place in the epitome. Have each student write an imaginary postcard from that place, telling a friend or relative what it is like, what happens there, how it feels, and if they are having a good time. Have each educatee give his or her completed postcard to the person at the side by side desk. Ask each educatee to judge which painting the postcard is most.

2. Enquiry Another Creative person

Painter Diego Rivera, role of the Mexican Muralist movement, also created images of the Ford Motor River Rouge Plant. Accept your students research the artwork Rivera created in response to the industrial landscape of North America. As a class, talk over how the two artists' responses differed and were similar.

3. Write a Scenario

Edward Hopper: Night Shadows, etching, from a portfolio by various artists, Six American Etchings, plate 176×207 mm, canvass 240×286 mm, 1921; published 1924 by The New Republic, New York, and printed by Peter Platt, New York, edition of c. 500 (New York, Museum of Modernistic Fine art); courtesy of The Museum of Mod Art, New York

Show your students Edward Hopper's print Nighttime Shadows. Ask each student to write downwards several words to depict the mood of this paradigm. Hopper was oftentimes interested in capturing the fleeting moment in his artworks, as he has in Nighttime Shadows. Ask your students to imagine what would happen next in the scene if the epitome were to come up to life. Have each student write a scenario for the image that would come later on Night Shadows, using and calculation to the words they initially wrote down to express the mood of the print. Accept each student create an epitome that visually expresses their written descriptions. Create a classroom exhibit of the students' visual and written responses, and encourage students to take note of the differences among their responses to the epitome.

Go to Art Between the Wars: For farther consideration →

GROVE ART ONLINE: Suggested Reading

Below is a listing of selected articles, which provide more information on the specific topics discussed in the lesson.

• Mural Painting: Historical survey, 20th century
• André Masson
• Otto Dix
• Etching: Materials and techniques
• Charles Sheeler
• Precisionism
• Edward Hopper

Unit 6: Art Between the Wars

• Lesson I: Identity
• Lesson Two: Mod Movements
• Lesson Three: Action/Reaction: Art and Politics
• Lesson 4: Modernistic Landscapes
• Art Betwixt the Wars: For Further consideration

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Source: https://www.oxfordartonline.com/page/1317

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