Summary
Four Italian artists introduced a new form of art that rejected the old and the past and expressed the new Italian industrialised society with energetic images of power and speed, in Futurism. They came to be inevitably politicised in the new Fascist regime that was to lead Italy into a disastrous war alongside Fascist Germany.
Then alongside this Picasso came to introduce Cubism which was to dominate art for decades to come. The essence was of breaking up an image and reassembling it in an abstract, yet harmonious form. His work was driven by emotion, initially on the lives of women, with one famous work showing a ‘weeping woman’
These emotions and concerns led to his masterpiece ‘Guernica’ depicting the suffering of townspeople during a bombing by German planes in the Spanish Civil War. A work that was to tour the globe and became a symbol of the suffering of war, not returning to Spain until the Fascist dictatorship of General Franco was finally removed.
The Great Depression that followed the First World War, threw the Western world into great poverty and suffering. Millions of men and women were thrown out of work as money, then trade, then industry all collapsed. Economies that were not to fully recover until the Second World War, when national states borrowed to finance the materials of the next war.
The economic suffering and the deaths of the Second World War, heralded the growth of Surrealism that sought to express the unconscious or dreamlike mind described by Freud. The style gained status largely by being championed by the master of self promotion, Salvador Dali. His creativity would extend to a sub-conscious representation of everyday objects that would encourage future developments and presentations.
Artistic expression moved on from artistic works to the use of ‘readymade’ objects that started in 1917 with a toilet screwed to the wall under Dadaism. This would be taken up by ‘Pop Art’ and ‘Installation Art’ in an expression that splits opinion today.
The evolution of art and societies.
Sources of information
A BBC series ‘Civilisation’, provides a history of art and society from the middle ages to the present day, over 13 episodes