This painting blends deep piety with scientific observation. Both its architecture and figures were radically new.
Just published
A new Smarthistory book — download, print, or order a bound copy.
Guide to Ancient Greek Art
Rembrandt's enigmatic self-portrait at Kenwood House is an apt example of the artist's long career in self-exploration.
Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Two Circles
A new Smarthistory book — download, print, or order a bound copy.
AP® Art History volume 1
Building the American dream in the California desert.
Stéphane Couturier, Fenetre, Eastlake Greens, San Diego
Cats, gossip, and laundry — a view of Los Angeles during the Great Depression.
Millard Sheets, Tenement Flats
The traditional naturalistic style, which merely imitates the surface appearances of nature, is inadequate to elucidate the deep underlying mysteries of the universe. There are truths inaccessible to the scientific method, and a meta-reality beyond the reach of human perception.
Abstract art and Theosophy
“The Bauhaus believes the machine to be our modern medium of design and seeks to come to terms with it.”
The Bauhaus: Marcel Breuer
Today, Bauhaus designs are so familiar and so simple that they don’t seem to have required a designer, but they were as radical in their time as they are commonplace now.
The Bauhaus, an Introduction
When female applicants at the Bauhaus threatened to equal or even outnumber male applicants, the masters at the school agreed to channel women into the pottery, bookbinding, and weaving workshops.
The Bauhaus: Marianne Brandt
The Constructivists worked to establish a new social role for art and the artist in the communist society of 1920s Soviet Russia.
Constructivism, Part I
Constructivist Kiosks, rubber overshoes, textile designs and posters — all aligned with the ideology of communism and contributing to the creation of a new society.
Constructivism, Part II
The Russian avant-garde adapted European modernist techniques to depict specifically Russian subjects.
Kasimir Malevich and Cubo-Futurism
The elements of De Stijl are the artist’s equivalent of the physicist’s building blocks: protons, neutrons, and electrons. With a bucket of each of these you could make anything in the universe.
De Stijl, Part I: Total Purity
"If one conceived of these forms as increasingly simple and pure, commencing with the physical visible forms of appearance, then one passes through a world of forms ascending from reality to abstraction. In this manner one approaches Spirit, or purity itself."
De Stijl, Part II: Near-Abstraction and Pure ...
De Stijl believed its utopian aspirations would be achieved by creating total environments, over which the designer (not the inhabitant) had complete control.
De Stijl, Part III: The Total De ...
We may never know who created the first abstract painting. A more interesting question might be: why did abstraction emerge at about the same time in so many places across Europe?
Who created the first abstract artwork?
Early 20th century Russian modernism is filled with contradictions—it engages with some of the most radical trends of European modern art, but reflects on traditional Russian subjects and themes.
Russian Neo-Primitivism: Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov
“I transformed myself in the zero of form . . . I destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring that confines the artist and the forms of nature.”
Suprematism, Part I: Kasimir Malevich
Malevich believed art would help to usher in a new spiritual era of immateriality.