Nicole Altamirano
Professor Cacoilo
Art and Women
10 April 2019
Modernism vs. Postmodernism
Modernism was the era which people disregarded the old painting styles and started trying new things. Artists started getting really creative and began to break through the old norm, they wanted to create new and unseen art. They started experimenting with new vibrant colors and new painting styles. Artists had new ideas of the uses of art, it was all about reinventing art. Aside from painting, artists also began making art out of materials like fabric or photography. Art was no longer just a piece of painting. Photography became a form of modern art. Modernistic art art was for the educated and powerful. The modernism era was roughly around the 1860s to the 1970s. The modernism period was a collection of movements. The movements that make up modernism are: impressionism, post-impressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada-ism, surrealism, expressionism, and abstract-expressionism (Guerrilla Girls 59). Women artists in Europe influenced the techniques and development of modernism and the movements of abstraction, german expressionism, dadaism and surrealism and other movements in modernism by experimenting with patterns, colors, and shapes. In impressionist art, artists captured paintings of scenery and everyday life. In the other hand, futuristic art let artists get much more creative. It was more about technology, speed, and light. Modernism was not for the masses, it was very elite and those of power were the only ones to see or obtain it.
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| Gabriele Munter Portrait of Marianne Von Werefkin |
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| Nadezhda Udaltsova At the Piano |
The two paintings above represent Modernistic art even though the styles might not look the same. Gabriele Munter practiced fauvism while Nadezhda Udaltsova practiced cubism. The text states "Reducing form to simplified color shapes bounded by dark contour lines, Munter synthesized the expressiveness of Fauve color with an ordered formal organization often based on pyramidal forms" (Chadwick 255), "The work of Tatlin, Exter, Popova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova, on the other hand, was more closely tied to cubism" (Chadwick 265). These different movements aided women in not confining them to a specific painting styles.
Fauvism experimented more with vibrant colors and cubism experimented with shapes, planes, and collages. Dadaism was a movement to ridicule the meaningless to the modern world. Surrealism was the movement of the creative potential of the unconscious mind. Expressionism expressed emotional experience. Constructivism was the movement that influenced many aspects of modern architecture and design. Women were able to experiment when the painting styles that the were more comfortable with. They no longer painted religious figures or scenes, but they focused more on people, dreams, and symbolism.
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| Augusta Savage Lift Every Voice and Sing |
Postmodernism questioned the ideas and values of modernism. Modernism was focused on innovation and progression. Just like Modernism wanted to leave the principles of the past, postmodernism did the same to modernism. Postmodernism like modernism did not have a set style. Postmodernism was associated with pluralism and fragmentation. Postmodernism was open to everyone unlike modernism. Modernism was limited. Chadwick states "The fact that Postmodernism draws heavily on existing representations, rather than inventing new styles, and that it often derives its imagery from mass media or popular culture, has focused attention on the ways that sexual and cultural difference are produced and reinforced in these images" (Chadwick 380). Well known artists of this era were Cindy Sherman, Judy Baca, and Yoko Ono.
Postmodernism began around the 1960s. Postmodernism is a body of art movement. In this period everything and anything is art. Anyone can create art and all of its forms are valid. Postmodernism was about the stories that weren't being told. The things that people were leaving in the dark and artists were shedding light upon them. As the realism movement, postmodernism was all about making statements. Postmodernism deviated from social constructs, for example men no longer dominated or surpassed women or homosexuals. Ana Mendieta used her body to create art and to send messages to the masses. Chadwick states "Working from a different cultural perspective, that of a displaced Cuban living in the United States, Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) first used blood in a 1973 performance protesting against rape. Mendieta's artistic roots lay in feminism and in the anti-commodification tendencies of earth, performance, and process work in the 1970s" (Chadwick 373). While some pieces sent messages, other post-modernistic art educated people. Annie Sprinkle in her piece A Public Cervix Announcement, invites her audience to take a look at her cervix. She does this to educate (mainly the males) about the female anatomy. After viewing her piece online, I was surprised because I never knew that the cervix looked like a circle with a dot.
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| Annie Sprinkle A Public Cervix Announcement |
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| Ana Mendieta Untitled |
Many artists used themselves to promote their own experiences. Cindy Sherman photographs herself to let the world know that she can reveal all the things that people are not addressing. In her piece Untitled Film Still #30, we can infer that this piece is about domestic abuse. Chadwick states "Cindy Sherman's photographs reveal the instability of gender, and challenge the idea that there might be an innate, unmediated female sexuality... In 1978, she began placing her own body in the conventions of advertising and film images of women. Many of them were drawn from the 1950s and 1960s; their use unable her to act out the psychoanalytic notion of femininity as a masquerade- that is, as a representation of the masculine desire to fix the women in a stable and stabilizing identity. Sherman's work denies this stability" (Chadwick 383). Postmodernism focuses on activism and politics. Today it is still a difficult concept because we don't where postmodernism ends. From periods behind many believed that art was the work of men but this eventually changed in postmodernism when anyone from anywhere created art and told their story or the stories that needed to be told.
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| Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still #30 |
Links : https://americanart.si.edu/artist/augusta-savage-4269
http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-postmodernism-20791
Works Cited
The Guerrilla Girls' beside Companion to the History of Western Art. 1998.
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition. Thames & Hudson, 2007.
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