These are just, like, my opinions.
There's a lot of postmodernist stuff, but I'm just gonna focus on the purple things here.
Rembrandt
Self-portrait
Rembrandt's self-portraits represented, uh, Rembrandt.
Rembrandt
Self-portrait
I just think this one is funny.
Vermeer
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Just an aside, but I think it's really creepy how close they got with this movie.
Monet
Water Lilies
Seurat
Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte
Wren
St. Paul's Cathedral
English Baroque
For example, St. Paul's Cathedral is super Churchy. It's not easily mistakable for anything else. It represents a Church. It takes all these older Church idioms and decorations, and updates them (for its time) into this really definitive style, called English Baroque.
Wren
St. Paul's Cathedral
English Baroque
Wren
St. Paul's Cathedral
English Baroque
Boullée
Newton's Cenotaph
Architecture parlante
Boullée was super weird and ahead of his time. But you can still think of his work as representational: Newton's monument was directly informed by Newton's mathematics.
Reed and Stern
Grand Central Terminal
Beaux-Arts
Reed and Stern
Grand Central Terminal
Beaux-Arts
Reed and Stern
Grand Central Terminal
Beaux-Arts
Brancusi
Bird in Space
(Pure) Abstract
So, this is clearly not a bird. Is it the artist's idea of a bird? Some proto-bird? The flight path of a bird?
Dali
The Persistence of Memory
Surrealism
Picasso
Guernica
Surrealism; Cubism
Picasso
The Old Guitarist
Just an aside: Picasso wasn't exclusively weird stuff.
Duchamp
Fountain
Dadaism (arguably Postmodern)
Dadaism was about nonsense (the name is mostly onomatopoeic) but this piece in particular was literally just Marcel deciding an old urinal was art, and signing his name to it. It was the beginning of art only being art with intent. Super abstract!
Mondrian
Composition C No. III in Red, Yellow and Blue
De Stijl
Dutch as hell.
van Doesburg
Contra-Composition XVI in dissonances
De Stijl
Theo van Doesburg was hugely influenced by Piet Mondrian, and they were initially friends and peers, but they eventually had a falling-out: Mondrian couldn't accept diagonals (Neo-Plasticism) and van Doesburg loved 'em (Elementarism). Literally a friendship ruined by 45°.
Corbusier
Villa Savoye
Early Corbusier is basically seminal modern architecture, which was about rejecting decoration and classical forms, and building structurally, or tectonically. Think: lines and surfaces, bare/pure materials. "Form follows function" as opposed to "Function imposed by form." It's hard to live in an abstract house, but modern architecture was like modern art in that they both stripped away ornamentation.
Wright
Fallingwater
The modernist ethos is kind of that people are functional entities that need things: light, air, space. Buildings are therefore machines for living. Drawing on the commercial/industrial age, buildings became somehow sleek, machine; a kind of functional cleanliness that demanded everything be in its right place. Not only in the building itself: residential, commercial, industrial must all be separate.
Wright
Guggenheim Museum
Corbusier
Domino House
This is more of a general idea than a specific building. Open interior plan, external stair, structural support via columns around the perimeter.
Mies
Seagram Building
Mies
Neue Nationale Gallerie
Lichtenstein
Reflections
Postmodern is actually an umbrella term to cover several distinct movements that happened at the same time. In painting, postmodernism reintroduces representation. Sometimes, very direct representation.
Warhol
Campbell's
Campbell's
Letter to Andy Warhol
This is just an aside, but I found it pretty funny. Could this happen today? I'm pretty sure it would be printed on a lawyer's letterhead.
Christo + Jeanne-Claude
Surrounded Islands
Land art became kinda popular along with the other postmodernist stuff. I'm not really sure how postmodernist it is. I guess this is the part of the presentation I should have worked a bit longer on.
Smithson
Spiral Jetty
Koons
Balloon Dog
Hirst
For The Love Of God
Venturi
The Decorated Shed
Postmodern architecture rejected the minimalism of modern architecture as totally boring. It's often about an attempt to conceive a narrative. That is, think of a building not as walls + floors + roof, but as something else altogether.
Venturi
The Duck
No, really. This stuff is a joke. In the best way.
Loos
Chicago Tribune Tower competition
This guy Loos entered a competition to design the next skyscraper for the Chicago Tribune with this building that looked like a column, on the left. The entry on the right would be the modernist take, by Walter Gropius (Bauhaus guy).
I.M. Pei
Landau Building
This guy's probably most famous for the entrance pyramid to the Louvre, but he also did some really depressing buildings on the MIT campus, like this one, on the left. (It's shaped like a 30-60-90 triangle.) If you're ever in Boston and having a nice time, check out the Wiesner Building (aka. "the inverted bathroom") to knock things down a notch.
Gehry
Guggenheim Bilbao
Bonus: postmodernist art in the courtyard! That's a Spider Sculpture by Louise Bourgeois.
Gehry
Gehry House
Postmodern architecture also reacted negatively toward the idea of modernist functional separation. Homes distinct from shops—suburbs!—what a terrible idea!
Rossi
Bonnefanten Museum
Rossi
Alessi Steel Kettle
Postmodernist stuff tends to use super-basic forms, and then do something funny, like put a little ball on top. Whee!
Rogers + Piano
Pompidou Center
This is postmodern because it's a sort of "decorated shed"—it uses its mechanical systems as an exterior representation of itself.
Corbusier
Notre Dame du Haut (Ronchamp)
Postmodernism means architecture can be fun again.
Premodern |
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Representative |
Modern |
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Not representative |
☞ Postmodern |
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Representation is fun again |