Early 20th Century

Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red





E.L. Kirchner, Artist With Model, German Expressionism






Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907





Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie, Cubism








Wassily Kandinsky, Painting with Black Lines

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, Dada

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, Surrealism

El Lissitzky, "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge!", poster, Russian Avant Garde

Walter Gropius and others, The Bauhaus campus, Dessau, Germany, Bauhaus

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, Abstract Expressionism




EARLY 20TH CENTURY ART


Henri Matisse
--fauvism
Die Brücke (The Bridge)
--E.L. Kirchner
Picasso
--Cubism
Wassily Kandinsky
--abstraction
Dada
--Marcel Duchamp
Surrealism
--Salvador Dali
The Russian Avant Garde
--El Lissitzky
The Bauhaus
--Walter Gropius
Abstract Expressionism
--Jackson Pollock


Metropolis

Director Fritz Lang's 1927 epic movie Metropolis was history's first science fiction blockbuster.  Set in an immense city in the year 2026, the movie shows a struggle between exploited workers forced to live underground who their superiors regard as more disposable than the machines they toil over, and a privileged elite who live high above in the great city.  Though the movie was a huge hit throughout Europe, it was so expensive to make that even with sell out shows, the production company was forced into bankruptcy.  Metropolis is the grandfather of all the science fiction epics that come out every summer from Star Wars to Blade Runner to The Matrix to Star Trek.

Metropolis still has devoted fans around the world, and Kino-Lorber, the company that now owns it, is cracking down on YouTube postings of this movie.  So here is the official trailer for their new fully restored release of the movie from a few years ago.  You get a glimpse of a lot of the cool parts.

Twentieth Century art is an art of great expectations and great anxieties, and both of those come together in this spectacular movie.