第五章
20世纪现代派绘画

1. The overall characteristics of Modernism 现代派绘画概述

《保罗·塞尚自画像》

Modernism in the 20th century is not a school of art but a general philosophy. It has an impact on the whole world, encompassing painting, literature, music, sculpture and other field. Modernism in painting covers a number of styles completely different from one another, such as Cubism, Dadaism, Fauvism, Futurism, Suprematism, etc.The most outstanding feature of Modernism is a revolt against the traditional realistic approach to subjects and an expression of subjective emotion and spirit instead.

现代主义不是一个流派，而是一种艺术思潮。它不仅表现在美术领域，而且表现在整个文

学艺术和音乐艺术领域，其影响是世界性的。绘画中的现代主义包括许多个创作倾向不完全相同的流派，比如立体派、达达派、野兽派、未来主义派、至上主义派等等。现代主义美术的共同特征是努力突破以至完全摆脱或否定西方写实美术的传统，强调表现美术家的主观精神和艺术形式方面的种种探索。

2. Post-Impressionism: the root of modern art 后印象派：现代艺术的起源

Post-Impressionism is a term to describe the development of French art derived from Impressionism in the late 19th century. Representative postimpressionist painters include Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and others.

Post-Impressionists were attracted by Impressionism but finally broke away from Impressionism and started their own way of art creation. PostImpressionism was different from Impressionism in both theory and practice.The postimpressionists were dissatisfied with the triviality of the reallife subject matter and the focus on exterior light and color of objects in Impressionist paintings. They were more inclined to express their personal feelings and experiences, to distort form for expressive effect, and to experiment with the natural use of color, form and structure representation elements.

The postimpressionists emphasized on representing the materiality, stability and inner structure of real-life objects to create visual senses of weight, volume, solidity and grandness for simple and geometric effect, which made Post-Impressionism become the primogenitor of the subsequent Cubism and Abstractionism and lead directly to the birth of Structuralism.Therefore, the postimpressionist paintings had great historical significance for the development of modern art styles.

以几何色块构成的《玩纸牌者》

《圣维克多山》（1887年）

Paul Cézanne was a Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. Cézanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials; he wanted to"treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, an apple or orange a sphere, for example).

Cézanne painted a number of paintings featuring card players. The most famous one is the Card Players . The symmetrical composition of the picture is stable and harmonious with the profile of the two men on two sides of the table taking up the whole space. A bottle of wine in the middle of the table divides the picture into two equal halves, suggesting the quiet yet intense competition of the players. The artist used large patches of bright colors to fo rm shapes a nd deep contrast among the blue and light green coats, the orange table and the dark background. It is exactly what Cézanne's philosophy to create geometric shapes with changing tones of color. His subjective treatment of colors and shapes led artists after him to paint for expressing their own feelings rather than remaining faithful to the real state of their objects. His distinctive application of color and shape can be seen in other works such as The Bathers, Still Life with Fruit Basket, Mont Sainte-Victoria , etc.

Another great Post-Impressionist, Vincent Van Gogh, focused on color and vibrancy and captured his images with the use of bold color as opposed to painting with detail. He mainly painted the rural areas in Dutch and his most famous works included Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, The Starry Night, Irises , etc. Like his easily excited emotion and swinging moods, Van Gogh's paintings are intense, overwhelming and sometimes shocking. As a reoccurring theme in his painting, the Sunflowers series captivate the mind and leave the viewers astounded in their simplistic beauty. The flowing wilted steams and the burst of lovely yellow draws ones attention around the painting. His Starry Night renders a strong impact upon the viewers with the dragon-like twisting traces of the stars and the burning dark green cypress.Everything seems blazed, stirred up, heaving, swinging and rotating, expressive of the hyper psychological status of the artist. The painting inspired the American singer Don Mclean to write the song Starry Starry Night as a tribute to the genius. The lyric of the song is soft and melancholy, an expression of the pain that Van Gogh had endured.

后印象派是19世纪末法国美术史上继印象主义之后的美术现象，其代表人物有保罗·塞尚、保罗·高更、文特森·梵高等。

梵高的《向日葵》

《年轻的水手》

后印象派画家受印象派吸引，但最终又脱离印象派，走上了自己的创作道路。他们的艺术理论和实践都不同于印象派，他们不满印象派过于客观的描绘世界，停留于对物体表面光色的兴趣上。与印象派不同，在艺术表现上，他们主张表现艺术家的主观世界，认为艺术应当忠实于个人的感受和体验，以艺术家的主观情感去改造客观形象，并尝试对色彩及形体表现性因素的自觉运用。

后印象派侧重于表现物质的具体性、稳定性和内在结构，以创造形象的重量感、体积感、稳定感和宏伟感，最后达到简单化和几何化的效果，这使他成为后来的立体主义和抽象主义的始祖，直接导致了结构主义的诞生。可见，后印象派绘画对现代诸流派的发展有着重要的历史意义。

后印象派画家保罗·塞尚是19世纪和20世纪画风的过渡人物，可以说他是19世纪印象派和20世纪一系列现代流派的桥梁，对立体主义等流派的建立打下了基础。塞尚喜欢简化物体的自然状态，把它们的内在几何结构挖掘出来，他希望“用圆柱形、方形和锥形来概括自然。”（比如，树干就可以用圆柱形来表现，苹果或橘子可以用方形来表现等等。）

塞尚曾画过多幅玩纸牌者题材的画，最为著名的要算是只有两个人物的《玩纸牌者》。在这幅画上，对称的构图使得画面非常稳定和谐，相对桌子而坐的两个侧面形象，一左一右将画面占满。一只酒瓶置于桌子中间，正好是整幅画的中轴线，把全画分成对称的两个部分，从而更加突出了牌桌上两个对手的面对面的角逐。塞尚使用大块几何形状的颜色来勾画轮廓，两个人紫蓝色、黄绿色的衣服、橘红色的桌子、暗沉的背景，不同的色块在画中形成和谐的对比。塞尚其实是以所谓的“变调”来代替“造型”，即以各色域的色彩有节奏的变换来加强形象的塑造。他的这种对色彩和形状的主观处理方式影响了后来的艺术家，他们开始忽略物体原本的真实状态，而表现物体在画家头脑里形成的主观状态，以此来表达主观感受。在塞尚其他作品中，如《大浴女》、《静物：水果篮》、《圣维克多山》，也体现了他独特地运用色彩和形状的哲学。

另一位后印象派大师梵高的作品色彩及其明艳，用色大胆，不拘小节。他常居荷兰乡村，所画的画也是以乡村风物为主。他的最有名的作品包括《向日葵》系列、《星空》、《鸢尾花》等等。梵高是个很容易激动的人，他的作品也跟他的个性一样激烈、震撼。他画过很多向日葵静物，充满活力的明艳的黄色让人眼前一亮，枝条虽然枯萎了，但是向日葵喷薄而出的光和热不禁让人心绪久久不能平静。而《星空》更是使人震撼无比，星云与棱线宛如一条巨龙不停地蠕动着，暗绿褐色的柏树像一股巨型的火焰，所有的一切似乎都在燃烧、回旋、转动、起伏、摇曳，在夜空中放射绚丽的色彩。这幅作品激发了美国歌手唐·麦克林创作了歌曲《繁星点点》，敏锐地洞悉出梵高内心的苦楚，表达了对这位天才画家的深深的理解与敬意。

3. Fauvism: a smash of paint thrown in front of the audience 野兽派：“一罐颜料掼在公众的面前”

《年轻的水手》

立体派代表人物毕加索

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for "the wild beasts"), a short-lived group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. When Fauvism first appeared, some of the critique of was that the paintings were a smash of paint thrown in front of the audience. Indeed, Fauvists often applied paint directly squeezed from the tubes to the canvas.

The leader of the movement is Henri Matisse.Matisse' works are marked by bright colors, unfettered brush strokes and simple subject matter of the artwork, which appear wild, free and animal like in its nature. Matisse's exploration of the purity of color and desire to simplify art, to make it just color and shape can be argued to be where Modern art began. He said, "Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate nature, but so that we can express our own emotions." This was a revolutionary concept, which would become an important notion in the art of the 20th century.

Matisse painted two versions of The Young Sailor , and the second version is more well-known for the man's contours have been sharpened, the forms are more defined, and the colors have been reduced to large, mostly flat areas of bright green, blue, and pink.Matisse also drastically altered the sailor's mood and expression, a masklike expressionof savvy cunning from which a touch oflicentiousness seems not absent. The sailor's the atrical looks and his colorful costumeset against the pink candy-colored ground, combine to make this work one of Matisse's most decorative portraits in the Fauve manner. Red Room , which shows Matisse's own works strewn about his studio, the walls painted a striking shade of red, The Snail , consisting of pieces of paper painted with gouache and then torn and arranged in the rough shape of a snail onto the background are some other highly recognizable Matisse' works.

野兽派的名称来源于法语中“野兽”一词，是20世纪初一个短暂的流派，但是却意义重大。该流派强调技术，喜用浓烈的色彩，不像印象派那样注重作品的象征意义。当野兽派作品初次展出时，有人评价就像“一罐颜料掼在公众的面前”。的确，野兽派画家经常直接挤出颜料来作画。

亨利·马蒂斯是野兽派最重要的代表人物。他喜欢用纯正的颜色和简洁的构图，标志着现代绘画的开始。他说：“世界上之所以有颜色，并不是为了让我们分毫不差地模仿自然，而是为了表达我们自己的感情。”这是一种革命性的理论，是20世纪的艺术所遵循的逻辑。马蒂斯画过两个版本的《年轻的水手》，第二个版本最为有名。在这幅画里，水手的轮廓更加明晰，线条更加清楚，使用大块的鲜绿色、蓝色和粉色。马蒂斯还使得人物的个性更鲜明，面具一样的脸庞下隐藏着一丝狡猾和叛逆。水手戏剧性的表情和五彩的衣服放在粉色的背景里，成为马蒂斯最具代表性的野兽派作品。他的描绘自己工作室里四处悬挂的作品的《红色画室》，用撕碎的彩纸拼凑的《蜗牛》。

4. Cubism: seeing life in geometry 立体主义：用几何的眼光解构生活

《亚维农少女》

Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement pioneered by Pablo Picasso that revolutionized European painting and sculpture and has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century.A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of threedimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne. In Cubist artworks, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form-instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.

Pablo Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. The painting features five naked women (who are actually prostitutes of the city of Avignon), but their bodies seems broken and then pieced together. Picasso has destroyed the organic integrity and proportion of human body, the consistence of shapes and lines, and the classical elegant posture of women. But at a closer look, there's a certain degree of order in the destruction: the human figures and the background are divided into angled geometric shapes. The artist has reduced the subjects into the most basic elements and their vulgar postures present their wild, savage and primitive characteristics. Plus, the dimension of these women is confusing. The central figures face towards the viewers yet their noses are pointing sideways. The left one appears in a profile but her eyes are looking straight ahead. Such kind of revolt against normal experiences completely goes against the 500-year line of perspective technique starting from the Renaissance.

The most well-known Cubist work is probably Guernica . It was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a village in northern Spain by German and Italian warplanes at the behest of the Fascist Spanish government during the Civil War. Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. It contains a number of bloody scenes of the war: a woman falls down from a blazing house, a mother and her dead child, the corpse of a soldier, a spear sticking through a horse, and a hand reaching into a window and lighting the whole scene with a lamp. The painting created a sensation after its exhibition and brought the Spanish Civil War to the world's attention. It was said that when a German officer saw the painting and asked Picasso: "Did you paint this?" The artist said: "No, you painted this."

立体主义是20世纪初由西班牙画家毕加索带领的先锋艺术形式，在绘画和雕塑中都有很大的影响，被称为是20世纪最具影响力的流派。后印象派画家保罗·塞尚的三维画法给立体主义奠定了基础。立体主义并不从一个角度来看事物，而是将物体解构成抽象的形式，并且把不同视角看到的物体形象放在一个平面里。

毕加索1907年的《亚维农少女》是立体主义的开山之作。这幅画画了五个裸体的女人（她们其实是亚维农的妓女），她们的身体似乎被拆开然后又拼在一起。毕加索破坏了许多东西，人体的完整和比例，形状和线条的连续性，和传统的表现女性肉体之美的造型。静下心来再看，便开始发现，那种破坏却是相当地井井有条。所有的东西，无论是形象还是背景，都被分解为带角的几何块面。将物体和人体减少到它们最原始的元素后，原始艺术的野性特质就流露出来了。同时，画面的视角也是混乱的，画面中央的两个形象脸部呈正面，但其鼻子却画成了侧面；左边形象侧面的头部，眼睛却是正面的。这种画法，彻底打破了自意大利文艺复兴之始的五百年来透视法则对画家的限制。

最有名的立体主义作品恐怕要数毕加索的《格尔尼卡》了，这幅作品是西班牙内战时法西斯政府利用德国和意大利战机轰炸了一个叫做格尔尼卡的村庄后画的，表现了战争给普通人带来的巨大伤害。画中右边有一个妇女从着火的屋上掉下来，左边一个母亲与一个死孩，地上有一个战士的尸体，画中央一匹老马被一根由上而下的长矛刺杀，上边右面有一从窗口斜伸进的手臂，手中掌着一盏灯，发出强光，照耀着这个血腥的场面。作品一出即引起轰动，世界的目光同时投向西班牙内战。据说，有一位德国军官看到这幅画后问毕加索：“这是你画的吗？”毕加索冷冷地回答：“不，这是你们画的。”

表现西班牙内战之残忍的《格尔尼卡》

5. Surrealism: a trip into the sub consciousness 超现实主义：潜意识之旅

Surrealism is a cultural movement and artistic style that was founded in 1924. Influenced by the psychoalytical work of Freud and Jung, Surrealism style uses visual imagery from the subconscious mind to create art without the intention of logical comprehensibility.

Salvador Dali is the most recognizable Surrealism artist. He promoted a process called critical paranoia. It was defined as a way to enter a delirium state on purpose. Critical paranoia allowed the artist to look past conventional perceptions and see unfiltered reality. The Persistence of Memory is his most famous work.

The well-known surrealistic piece introduces the image of the soft melting pocket watch. The metal seems softened under with the passage of time. It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange "monster" that Dali used in several period pieces to represent himself-the abstract form that looks something like a horse with a human's face. The orange clock at the bottom left of the painting is covered in ants, which was often used by the artist as a symbol for anxiety or death. It was said that Dali used to visit asylums trying to understand the mental state of the lunatics, which, in his opinion, was most true to life itself.His paintings offer a chance for the ordinary people to move one step away from what's considered normal and have a look at the sub consciousness of spirit. It is like cruising through a dream when looking at his works. His other well-known works include The Temptation of Saint Anthony , Premonition of the Civil War , Sleep , The Labyrinth , etc.

达利名作《永恒的记忆》

《圣安东尼的诱惑》

超现实主义是1924年形成的一种艺术流派，受到弗洛伊德和荣格的心理学影响，超现实主义展现了一幅超脱逻辑的潜意识画面。

西班牙画家萨尔瓦多·达利是超现实主义最重要的代表人物。他创造了一种“偏执狂临界状态”，指挖掘潜意识境界的一种执拗的思维方式。画家把毫不相干的事物硬凑在一起。《永恒的记忆》是达利最有名的代表作。