The Expressive Genius of Antoni Gaudí and Henri Matisse
Casa Mila (La Pedrera) 1906-10. Barcelona. Antoni Gaudí.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Modernism as a movement emerged that aim at a total renovation of the arts. So we’ll see how his character will be extended for painting, sculpture and, above all, architecture, design and printing (still very important in the development of posters and publicity). We can not forget that this is a spiritually bourgeois style, since the service of this class and pleasing looking through, inter alia, his taste for the decorative (to be given so profusely and quite random). We could also say that modernism is a decorative style.
Modernist architecture is noted for its decorative style. Use all materials, including iron, but instead of using an architecture that radically in exploiting these opportunities, solve new social needs, the use of traditional way, using only its plastic possibilities. The movement has different names depending on the country:
Art Nouveau in France and Belgium, Modernism in Spain, England and Modern Style or Sezesion stil Jugendstil in Austria in the first three countries form is characterized by the use of curved lines creating swirling and plant-inspired flat and curved spaces, which in some cases appear to develop in an almost organic way, in England and Austria are characterized by greater formal purity, more geometric, using flat planes and rationalism in the design of volumes and spaces.
While modernism is a style we can see examples all over Spain, the area where this is going to achieve more development is Catalonia, and within this, especially Barcelona, which is logical if we consider that modernism is, as we said, a style linked to the industrial bourgeoisie and the development of this class in Barcelona was much higher than in the rest of the state.
The most important architects of this style are Puig i Cadafalch, Domenech i Muntaner, who conducted the Palau de la Musica Catalana in Barcelona, and above all the figure of Antoni Gaudí.
Born in Reus (Tarragona), Gaudi’s early works reflected the eclecticism of the period, with shapes inspired by the Gothic, Moorish and Islamic architecture. From this period we can highlight the Casa Vicens in Barcelona or the episcopal palace of Astorga.
Later, his style more imaginative proposals evolve into creative and personal, fully modernist in that besides the most decorative and construction procedures in which the craft is very important (carved stone slabs ,..), develop structures and systems load-bearing structures and completely new, high technical expertise (for which he helped to rehearse ingenious models such structures). From this period are works such as reform of the Casa Batlló, Park Güell, the Casa Mila or that, despite being unfinished, is his most famous work:
The Holy Family, all in Barcelona.
The Casa Mila is a typical example of the modernist project in which architecture and decorative arts converge. Gaudí would design and oversee everything, including doors and wrought iron balconies, concierge booths, window and door joinery, furniture and lamps. When an industrialist from Barcelona, Mr. Mila Gaudi proposed to build an apartment building Gaudi had the opportunity to develop an ambitious project on a huge plot of 1000 m2, in a corner where it joins the Paseo de Gracia and the Rue de Provence is located in an area inhabited by the bourgeoisie of Barcelona,
Gaudí decided to create a chamfered front corner of the building, instead of cutting obliquely the facades of the Paseo de Gracia and Provenza Street, seems a logical and smooth them. Usually, the courtyards of residential buildings were large spaces runs. In the Casa Mila, however, the courts have rounded contours and go wider as they increase in height, as a large funnel that also absorb light and improve the natural ventilation of housing open to them. Plants the floors of the house are all different. The walls at right angles away, the forms and fluid interiors are also functional and the rooms have different heights and it seems that the house has been designed from the inside out as the facade is an undulating surface which then becomes the agency of the inside.
To achieve this, Gaudí undertook an innovative structure of columns, beams and girders that allowed any processing inside the interior space of the building and removed all of load bearing facade. This was made of stone and forms were carved in situ, based on models that required the exact shape of each block of stone that composed, creating these ripples in the viewpoints and balconies that give the appearance of stone cliff that earned him the popular nickname which is called (the quarry means the quarry in Catalan). The wrought iron balconies, also carefully craft carrying mimic plant forms, as if they were plants that sprouted between the stones. The whole facade, with its fluid forms and emphatic at a time, prefiguring looks Expressionist forms. The thick inclined columns flanking the portal seem thick elephant legs moving toward the sidewalk.
In the loft or attic, Gaudí used a beautiful structure of parabolic arches (although he had already used similar arcs Teresiano at school and also used in the Holy Family).
Other notable elements of the building are the roof and chimneys with their whimsical shapes and match tile coverings and even broken glass on the roof creating a mysterious and evocative landscape presurrealista.
A further innovation was the underground area of prefiguring the garages which years later was to be built in other housing estates.
Gaudi abandon the project of the Casa Mila shortly before its completion because he wanted to decorate the building with a series of sculptures dedicated to the Virgin and Archangels and see that the model proposed by the developer, Mr. Mila who named the building, not liked it.
Since then, despite some initial misunderstanding, the Casa Mila has been admired as one of the projects is where Gaudi’s creative genius in innovative structures and forms which, as already mentioned, foreshadow subsequent architectural and artistic styles.
In the first decade of the twentieth century will emerge in Europe Expressionist movements. The term expression is used to designate these art forms in which the image will sacrifice the verismo like about the model, to improve the transmission of the author’s own feelings through artistic resources as the gesture of the brushstroke, the texture of the pictorial surface, the expressive use of line and formal simplification.
Obviously, expressionism does not come from nowhere. Already in 1861, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé proposed that the artist must deal unless the object representing that the “effect produced.
We can consider Van Gogh, Gauguin and Redon and Symbolist predecessors of these trends. But in addition, the influences of so-called primitive arts, to the colonies from Africa and Oceania came to the metropolis, and the interest in painting from the High Middle Ages were instrumental in the development of style.
Although the expression of an intense emotional state not inevitably require the removal of objective representation, the fact is that by 1909, the desire for the expression of this and the approach to a spiritual state, lead to the Expressionist Kandinsky to eliminate all vestiges of reference the natural world, so we can say that budgets will contain the germ expressionist abstract art.
“Fauve” in French means “beast” and this is the epithet with which a critic disparagingly called a group of painters who exhibited at the Salon d’Automne de1905, among which were Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. These painters departed in some aspects of post-impressionist painters: the gestural brushwork and distortions of Van Gogh, the color was not descriptive and decorative style of Gauguin, the pointillism of Seurat and Signac and modeling by color planes of Cezanne. Fauve expressionism sought to investigate the formal problems of pictorial design.
Among all the Fauve painters Henri Matisse who is stressed along with Picasso, one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. His contribution to art has been fundamental, not only for their own work but the influence it has had on many later artists.
In his early works as “luxury, calm and pleasure”, combined an invoice thicker pointillist brush strokes of color with a freer interpretation. Gradually, this, the color, will be distributed on the surface in planes larger playing with violent contrasts of complementary colors, the thick impasto of paint, and the absence of precise contours. Later, his work evolved to acquire a subtlety and elegance unmatched in images that tell us of some joy of living, a pleasant world, tidy, quiet (and, why not? Bourgeois), where the forms will be denuded of all accessories, playing with the elegance of line and the masses of flat colors arranged according to a rate about “musical”.
In his work we can highlight pictures like “The green line (Portrait of Mme. Matisse)”, “The Joy of Living”, “La Musique”, “Dance” which we will discuss below, “The Piano Lesson” “Door Window at Collioure”, “The Romanian blouse” or the extraordinary collage end of the series “Jazz”.
The danza.1909-1910. From this table, Matisse made two versions. This is a large oil on canvas 260x 391cm. The large format used by Matisse seeks to create a monumental image that endows it represented an almost sacred.
Matisse It uses only four colors: green and blue background and the color brown meat and contouring of the figures.
Matisse seems to solve this and other works on the question of the primacy of drawing over color or vice versa. Here it seems to reconcile the dilemma between the line (to which he is associated with more rationalistic tendencies of art) and color (which usually emparienta the more “emotional”) is an image that reason and emotion, line and color at a time.
In the image Matisse seems to get rid of anything superfluous. If the theme is classic and more common in academic painting of the nineteenth century, the treatment is not at all.
Disappear anatomical correction, the conventional representation of the volume through the twilight like the space by means of perspective.
Matisse, guided by an extraordinary sense of rhythm and lyrical as well as an infallible instinct for color harmonies converts the movement of dance in an elegant and expressive pace of wavy lines where all the superfluous: shades of color, and lifelike anatomical correction is sacrificed for evoked by the painting that musical rhythm and sensual dance.The total success of Matisse is never a painting with such economy of pictorial means had evoked so powerfully sensuous rhythm, seductive and almost sacred dance. The figures are converted into and roll gesture, the movement of the line is paramount. The painting evokes all the dances, the most significant and those that emerge in the memory of Matisse as the festivals of his youth and who saw sardanas stays in Collioure.
Matisse made this picture for a Russian aristocrat who was one of the great collectors of his art. After the revolution of this wonderful collection was requisitioned and noble would go to the Soviet state that would expose it to the Hermitage museum. Matisse’s work, already known before the expropriation, would thus have a huge influence on Malevich Russian artists as they would have learned from Matisse that color line and should be released around naturalist mimicry.