Pablo Picasso: during the early years of the 20th century, Picasso was fascinated by African arts. This new interest led him to start exploring new ideas and creating new works. But he was not alone...

Constantin Brâncuși

Constantin Brâncuși (1876 – 1957) was a Romanian sculptor, painter, and photographer who built his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. He grew up as an artist first in Bucharest, then in Munich, completing his education at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometric lines. Brâncuși sought inspiration from non-European cultures as a source of primitive exoticism, as did Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and others. Influences from Romanian folk art and echoes of Byzantine and Dionysian traditions are remarkable in his work.

Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1884–1920) was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by the surreal elongation of faces, necks, and figures, which were not appreciated during his lifetime. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance. In 1906, he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with artists such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. In 1912, Modigliani exhibited highly stylized sculptures with the Cubists of the Section d’Or group at the Salon d’Automne. His work was recognized as one of the most influential examples of modern art only after his death. Working mainly as a sculptor between 1909 and 1914, he died of tubercular meningitis at the age of 35 in Paris.

From expressionism until abstractism

Paul Klee

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art, including expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who deeply experimented with color theory, writing about it extensively. His lectures, Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as The Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, former artists of the “Die Blaue Reiter” (The Blue Rider) artists' movement, were both teachers at the Bauhaus school of art, design, and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor, his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as the pioneer of abstract art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated from Grekov Odessa Art School. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia)—Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching, and anatomy) at the age of 30. In 1896, Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe’s private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky was not comfortable with the materialism of Soviet society and left to return to Germany in 1920. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most prominent art. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944, three days before his 78th birthday.

Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1879–1935) was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist whose pioneering work and writing had a profound influence on the development of non-objective or abstract art in the 20th century. Assimilating the movements of Impressionism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and after visiting Paris in 1912, Cubism, Metaphysics, and also Italian Futurism, he gradually simplified his style. He developed an approach with key works consisting of pure geometric forms and their relationships to one another, set against minimal backgrounds.

From expressionism until magic realism (a.k.a. new objectivity)

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was a Norwegian painter. His best-known work, The Scream, has become one of the iconic images of world art. His childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement, and the dread of inheriting a mental condition that ran in the family, who urged him to paint his own emotional and psychological state ("soul painting"). From this suffering, life emerged his distinctive style. Traveling to Paris, he learned much from Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, especially their use of colour. In Berlin, he met the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, whom he painted, as he embarked on his major canon The Frieze of Life, depicting a series of deeply felt themes such as love, anxiety, jealousy, and betrayal, steeped in atmosphere.

The Scream was conceived in Kristiania. According to Munch, he was out walking at sunset when he "heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature." The painting's agonized face is widely identified with the angst of the modern person. Between 1893 and 1910, he made two painted versions and two in pastels, as well as a number of prints. As his fame and wealth grew, his emotional state remained insecure. His later years were spent working in peace and privacy. Although his works were banned in Nazi Germany, most of them survived World War II, securing him a legacy.

Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking (including etching, lithography, and woodcuts), and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War, depict the effects of poverty, hunger, and war on the working class. Despite the realism of her early works, her art is now more closely associated with Expressionism. Kollwitz was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts and also received honorary professor status. In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste, and her work was removed from museums. In July 1936, she and her husband were visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp: Kollwitz was by now a figure of international note, and no further action was taken. She lived her final months as a guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony. Kollwitz died just 16 days before the end of the war.

George Grosz

George Grosz (born Georg Ehrenfried Groß 1893–1959) was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity groups during the Weimar Republic. He immigrated to the United States in 1933 and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. Abandoning the style and subject matter of his earlier work, he exhibited regularly and taught for many years at the Art Students League of New York. In 1959, he returned to Berlin, where he died shortly afterward.

Otto Dix

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (1891–1969) was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the New Objectivity.

Christian Schad

Christian Schad (1894–1982) was a German painter and photographer. He was associated with the Dada and New Objectivity movements. Considered as a group, Schad’s portraits form an extraordinary record of life in Vienna and Berlin in the years following World War I. Despite his entire oeuvre being condemned by the Nazis, a number of paintings were saved because his style was considered traditional.

The Italian metaphysic: between magic realism and tradition

Felice Casorati

Felice Casorati (1883–1963) was an Italian painter, sculptor, and printmaker. The paintings for which he is most noted include figure compositions, portraits, and still lifes, which are often distinguished by unusual perspective effects. The works he produced in the early years of his career were naturalistic in style, but after 1910, the influence of the symbolists and particularly of Gustav Klimt turned him toward a more visionary approach.

In 1918, “intrigued by the decadent atmosphere of Turin with its sinister views,” he settled there with his mother and two sisters. His works of the next decade typify, in their emphasis on geometry and formal clarity, the “return to order” then prevalent in the arts as a reaction to the war. Although many critics found his work cold, cerebral, and academic, Casorati achieved international recognition as a leading figure in this movement. Casorati drew inspiration from his study of Renaissance masters, especially Piero della Francesca, as in his 1922 portrait entitled Silvana Cenni.

Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the metaphysical art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His most well-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace.

After 1919, he became a critic of modern art, studied traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work.

Carlo Carrà

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. Also a master of metaphysics and often in rivalry with Giorgio de Chirico for this position. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.

Art and architecture under Italian fascism and German national-socialism

Italy

After the establishment of a dictatorship in Italy led by Benito Mussolini and his party in 1925, Europe was overwhelmed by other reactionary movements in France, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Germany. This last nation, which was heavily devastated by the post-war penalties following the Versailles Conference at the end of WWI, developed frustration, anger, and a desire for revenge that enforced the National Socialist Party led by Adolf Hitler. All artistic expressions were placed under the steady control of the dictators. Modern art was prohibited, or in the case of Italy, conducted to reach the aims of those tyrant regimes.

Germany

Germany's Nazi regime was different. While Italian fascism was indulgent to some forms of modern art and absolutely supported Futurism, Adolf Hitler prohibited any form of modern art and prosecuted German modern artists with a heavy hand, violence, and sometimes with ravage. Names with international awards like Grosz, Kirchner, Klee, Kandinsky, and film directors like Lang, Pabst, Weidt (among others) were forced to leave Germany. The Nazi art was directed to illustrate the foolish and criminal projects of Hitler, including an exaggerated and distorted interpretation of the German mythology. And more... those artworks were supposed to exalt the “Aryan” race: blonde people, body-built figures, aggressive subjects.

The fascist architecture

As mentioned earlier, the German Nazi regime was different from Italy in the application of its projects. While the German architects like Albert Speer faithfully interpreted Hitler’s delirium, Italian architects were left to embrace a sort of modernism with some important good results, as we will see in the next pages.

The rise of modern rationalism inside the fascist architecture

Giovanni Michelucci

Giovanni Michelucci, an Italian architect, urban planner, and designer, was born in Pistoia, Tuscany, on 2 January 1891 and died on the night of 31 December 1990, two days before his 100th birthday, at his studio-home in Fiesole, in Florence’s hills, now the headquarters of his Foundation. He had the good fortune to live a long life almost entirely within the span of the twentieth century, giving us a valuable witness through his work with innovative architectural vernaculars and proposals, from his understanding of the complexity of events, transformations, and ideas that animated the twentieth century.

He was one of the major Italian architects of that century, known for famous projects such as Florence’s Santa Maria Novella railway station and the San Giovanni Battista church on the Autostrada del Sole (Sunshine Highway). “Santa Maria Novella Railway Station in Florence” (1933–1934): A rare and great victory of modern rationalism over the oppressive fascist concepts. Although a new building, the wise use of bricks and stones similar to the ancient Florence monuments gave this masterpiece a perfect insertion in the surrounding urban texture.

Giuseppe Terragni (With references to Giuseppe Pagano and Gino Levi Montalcini)

Giuseppe Terragni (1904–1943) was an Italian architect who worked primarily under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and pioneered the Italian modern movement under the rubric of rationalism. His most famous work is the Casa del Fascio (House of Fascist) built in Como, northern Italy, which was begun in 1932 and completed in 1936; it was built in accordance with the international style of architecture and frescoed by abstract artist Mario Radice. In 1938, at the behest of Mussolini’s fascist government, Terragni designed the Danteum, an unbuilt monument to the Italian poet Dante Alighieri structured around the formal divisions of his greatest work, the Divine Comedy.