Fragmentation and Repetition - CSUS碎片和重复性及.docVIP

Note to students: Kirk Varnedoe (US 1946-2003) was an influential art historian and chief curator of painting at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This selection from his book about “what makes modern art modern” asks us to compare the use of fragmentation and repetition – formal elements considered essentially modern – by motion photographers Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge with Edgar Degas’ use of them in painting and Auguste Rodin’s in sculpture. What is Varnedoe’s thesis and how does he establish it? Be able to compare the works illustrated here on the basis of the meaning of fragmentation and repetition. What is so “modern” about the way these artists deployed these forms? From: Varnedoe, A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern (New York: Abrams, 1990) pp.102-143. Fragmentation and Repetition (The 19th Century) Kirk Varnedoe Modern art is often taken to be a matter of form. In the late nineteenth century, the forms of paintings and sculptures become independently assertive, and content—in the traditional sense of recognizable things and figures composed in ordered scenes or legible stories — seems to become secondary. We may admire artists of that time for their incisiveness about social facts, or their expanded range of emotion, but studying them as pioneer modernists, we often focus instead on innovative aspects of their spatial structure or composition: the way Degass figures are cut in half, for example, or the way Rodin reuses identical casts of the same figure to form a triad (figs. 97 and 99). These formal innovations provide points of comparison between modern arts beginnings and its later developments — affinities between Mondrian and Degas, for example, in regard to segmentation of motifs (figs. 97 and 98), or between Minimalist sculptors and Rodin, because of the use of modular parts. Such lineages of resemblance appear to have evolved, more or less independent of subject matter, across the decades. And a certain vision of mo