A field guide to the century when painting forgot to be a window, architecture forgot the column, and design tried to redesign the human being.
1907–1914
1909–1918
1919–1933
1924–1966
For four hundred years — from Brunelleschi's perspective box to Manet's Olympia — a painting was a window. You stood on this side; the world was on that side. Modernism is the moment painters give up on the window and admit the painting is a flat surface covered in marks, and decide that's interesting.
Manet's flat black skirt in Olympia (1863). Cézanne's tilted apples that refuse single-point perspective. Picasso and Braque's Cubist guitars dissected from six angles at once. Kandinsky's first non-objective watercolour in 1910. Malevich's Black Square in 1915. Mondrian's red-blue-yellow grids. Pollock's drip floor.
Each step, a thing the picture used to do gets thrown overboard. By 1965 you can hang a fluorescent tube on a gallery wall and call it sculpture, and people will agree.
After Mondrian / after Malevich / after Albers
1907. Pablo Picasso, age 26, paints five women in a Barcelona brothel: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Two of them have African masks for faces. The picture plane fractures. He shows it to his friends; Matisse calls it a hoax, Derain says Picasso will be found hanged behind it.
By 1909 Picasso and Georges Braque are working "like two mountaineers roped together," dismantling guitars, bottles, newspapers, into ochre-and-grey planes. They sign each other's canvases. They invent collage by gluing oilcloth onto a canvas in 1912. They make the most radical art of the century out of the contents of a Parisian café table.
After "Ma Jolie" / Picasso / 1911–12
1909–1912. Object dismantled into translucent planes. Palette restricted to ochre, grey, brown. Picture becomes nearly unreadable.
1912–1914. Collage enters. Newspaper, wallpaper, faux-bois pasted in. Color returns. Object reassembled from signs.
February 1909. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti publishes the Futurist Manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro. "A racing car is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace." He wants to burn the museums and pave over Venice. He gets some of his wishes; the First World War kills several of his friends.
Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) is a striding bronze figure whose surfaces ripple as if frozen mid-stride at thirty miles an hour. Giacomo Balla paints a dachshund's twenty legs blurring along a leash. Antonio Sant'Elia draws a futurist city of tiered concrete and aerial bridges. He dies at the front in 1916, age twenty-eight.
A figure in motion / after Balla & Boccioni
"WE WILL GLORIFY WAR — THE WORLD'S ONLY HYGIENE."
— Marinetti, Manifesto, 1909. The hygiene came; he survived to regret it.
"The ultimate aim of all artistic activity is the building." — Walter Gropius, founding manifesto, Weimar, April 1919.
WEIMAR
Founding. Itten's Vorkurs. Klee, Kandinsky, Schlemmer on the staff. Expressionist phase.
DESSAU
New Gropius-designed building. Functionalist turn. Breuer's tubular steel chair. Albers, Moholy-Nagy.
BERLIN
Mies van der Rohe takes over. Closed by the Nazis April 1933. Diaspora to Chicago, Tel Aviv, Black Mountain.
Itten's preliminary course paired each primary shape with a primary colour: triangle = yellow, square = red, circle = blue. The system was meant to be elemental, learnable, universal. It became the visual grammar of the twentieth century.
Itten / Kandinsky elemental forms — Bauhaus Vorkurs
The teaching that came out of this little diagram: every visible thing can be reduced to geometric units; the designer's job is to recombine them honestly, with attention to material. Concrete should look like concrete. Steel should look like steel. The chair you sit on should not pretend to be a Louis XV chair.
When the Nazis closed the school in 1933, the faculty scattered. Albers ended up at Black Mountain College, then Yale. Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Mies designed Crown Hall at IIT. The school lasted fourteen years and reorganised global design education forever.
Holland, 1917. Theo van Doesburg founds a journal. Piet Mondrian, returning from Paris, slowly removes everything from his paintings until only horizontal and vertical black lines remain, dividing white planes interrupted by occasional rectangles of red, yellow, or blue. He calls it Neo-Plasticism. He believes it is the visual equivalent of universal harmony.
Gerrit Rietveld translates Mondrian into furniture: the Red and Blue Chair (1923), where every plane is a separate colour and every joint is celebrated. Then he builds the Schröder House in Utrecht (1924), the only true De Stijl building, where interior walls slide so the upper floor can become one open room.
Mondrian dies in New York in 1944, having made Broadway Boogie Woogie — a grid of yellow taxis and red lights pulsing against blue. The Manhattan grid had always been waiting for him.
After Mondrian / Composition / c. 1930
Zürich, Cabaret Voltaire, 5 February 1916. Hugo Ball reads sound poetry in a cardboard cylinder. Tristan Tzara cuts up newspapers and pulls phrases from a hat. The world is butchering itself in the trenches; art replies with nonsense, glue, and a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool.
Marcel Duchamp signs a urinal "R. Mutt" and sends it to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists in New York. They reject it; the photograph survives. He has just invented the readymade and most of conceptual art for the next century.
Surrealism is Dada with a couch. André Breton publishes the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. The aim: liberate the unconscious through automatism, dream imagery, and chance. René Magritte paints a pipe and writes Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Dalí melts watches over a Catalan beach. Max Ernst rubs frottage from floorboards. Meret Oppenheim covers a cup, saucer, and spoon in Chinese gazelle fur.
The movement's politics — Trotskyist, anti-fascist — collapse under the war. The aesthetic survives in advertising and music videos forever.
Serge Guilbaut's title is provocative but accurate. By 1948 Paris is rubble; the surrealists have spent the war in Manhattan; the Federal Art Project has paid Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Krasner enough to keep going. Life magazine asks "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" with a photo of Pollock standing over a canvas, cigarette in mouth.
Pollock had stopped using the easel in 1947. He laid raw canvas on the floor of his Long Island barn and dripped, poured, flung enamel and house paint from sticks and basting syringes. The picture had no top, no bottom, no figure, no ground. Critic Clement Greenberg called it "all-over." The painter called it "energy and motion made visible."
After Pollock / "Number 1, 1948"
Concrete, glass, steel — the modern city, photographed.
Modernism was never only painting. It was a way of building, dressing, eating, and reproducing children. The International Style spread Le Corbusier's five points — pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon windows, roof garden — to every city. Brasilia, Chandigarh, the United Nations Headquarters. The hospital you were born in. The school you went to. The apartment you live in now, almost certainly.
Kazimir Malevich exhibits Black Square in Petrograd in December 1915. He hangs it across the corner of the gallery, in the place where Russian Orthodox icons traditionally hang. He calls it the "zero of form." It is a flat black square on a flat white ground. Modern art has its endpoint and its starting point in the same picture.
After the Revolution, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova throw themselves into Constructivism: posters, magazine layouts, textile designs, theatre sets, all built from the geometry of the new state. Lissitzky's Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) is a triangle attacking a circle. The whole twentieth century of poster design is in that diagram.
After Lissitzky / 1919
"LESS
IS
MORE."
Mies van der Rohe, repeating Robert Browning. The slogan of the International Style; later, the slogan of every minimalist architect who ever billed by the hour. Robert Venturi will reply, in 1966, "less is a bore."
Both men are correct.
Modernism wrote everything down before it built anything. Each movement opened with a manifesto, usually printed on cheap paper, often shouted from a stage.
Histories that stop at "Picasso, Braque, Pollock" miss half the story. Modernism was made by women who, for a long time, were billed as wives of, lovers of, or muses of the men in the catalogues.
After Hilma af Klint / "The Ten Largest"
From 1949 until his death in 1976, Albers painted the same composition over a thousand times: three or four nested squares of different colours, slightly off-centre. Each version proves that colour is the most relative medium in art — the same yellow looks bright next to violet and dirty next to green. He had figured this out at the Bauhaus, taught it at Black Mountain, codified it at Yale, and published Interaction of Color in 1963. It is still the textbook.
Homage to the Square — four variations
Le Corbusier published them in 1923. The Villa Savoye outside Paris, finished 1931, is the perfect demonstration of all five.
"A house is a machine for living in." Most of his clients did not enjoy the leak.
Read the manifestos on page 13 in any order and you will find roughly the same list of demands. They are recognisably the demands of the technological age.
A clean break with the academy, the salon, the Beaux-Arts. Make it new, even if "new" is uglier than what came before.
Materials show themselves. Concrete is concrete. The structure is the ornament. No fake columns, no fake history.
Forms that work in Tokyo and São Paulo. The international style. Esperanto for the eye.
Faith that the future will be more rational, more equal, better lit. Modernism was, deep down, an optimism.
By the 1970s the same things modernism wanted had become problems. The international style produced cities that looked the same in Brasilia, in Tehran, in Detroit. Public-housing slabs collapsed (Pruitt-Igoe, dynamited 1972). Pollock's heroic individualism was, in retrospect, very white, very male, and CIA-funded. Marinetti loved Mussolini. Heidegger joined the Nazi party. Le Corbusier fl irted with Vichy.
Postmodernism — Venturi, Jencks, Stern — arrived to make fun of it all, put the columns back, paint everything pink, and start quoting history again.
But modernism's real children are not in postmodernist office parks. They are in your phone, in your IKEA bookcase, in the chair you are sitting in, in the sans-serif on your screen. We still live inside its premises, even when we mock its slogans.
A short modernism viewing list. Watch one before bed.
On the way Cubism builds an object from time, not space.
Search "Vox abstract art history" — the eight-minute primer on Kandinsky, Mondrian, and the long argument about whether a square can mean anything.
Walkthroughs of the Dessau building and the Masters' Houses, restored to original Bauhaus colours.
Pick the century's most reproduced images. Black Square. Mondrian's grid. Klein's IKB monochrome. Reinhardt's near-black squares. Albers's nested squares. Judd's plywood box. Rothko's two-bar field. The square is to modernism what the cross is to Christianity.
It says: begin again. From this.
Malevich / Albers / Newman / Klein
Set in Archivo Black, Space Grotesk, and DM Mono — modern descendants of the geometric sans-serifs of the Bauhaus. Designed for the Claudedeck Encyclopedia, Volume IV. Less is more; more is more; both are correct.