Wild Beasts! Les Fauve (wild beasts) is what one critic called the brilliant expressive canvases of Matisse and other artists who exhibited together in 1905. This tutorial traces the work of Henri Matisse from his early Fauvist work with its jarringly bright colors to the stricter geometries he introduced during the First World War. It also tracks Expressionist developments in Germany and Austria with videos on Kirchner, Kandinsky and Jawlensky, artists who adopted a rough, “primitive” style, and on Egon Schiele’s taut, sexually charged paintings from Vienna.

The Spaniard Picasso changed the way we see the world. He could draw with academic perfection at a very young age but he gave it up in order to create a language of representation suited to the modern world. Together with the French artist George Braque, Picasso undertook an analysis of form and vision that would inspire radical new visual forms across Europe and in America. This tutorial explains the underlying principles of Cubism and the abstract experiments that followed including Italian Futurism, Russian Suprematism, and the Dutch movement, de Stijl.

Do we know who we really are? What parts of our mind do we know and what parts are hidden from us? Should art only focus on the rational, the conscious, or should we also pay attention to the irrational, the uncanny, the powerful impulses that remain unarticulated and just beyond the reach of our awareness. Dada was born during WWI when poets, artists, and actors, sickened by the violence around them, chose to celebrate the irrational. They created an anti-art that challenged the cultural assumptions that they felt supported the ruling elite that had, in turn, caused the war. In the years after the war, Dada gave way to Surrealism which reinstituted traditional forms of art-making but focused on Freud’s theories of the unconscious.

Germany was defeated and exhausted in 1918 at the end of WWI. The equally exhausted victors imposed harsh terms on Germany. It was forced to forfeit its overseas colonial possessions, to cede land to its neighbors, and to pay reparations. As demobilized troops returned, German cities filled with unemployed, often maimed veterans. The Socialists briefly seized power and by the early 1920s hyperinflation further destabilized the nation. Neue Sachlichkeit or the New Objectivity cast a cold sharp eye on Modern Germany’s hypocrisy, aggression, and destitution even as extremists on the political right consolidated power. The National Socialists or Nazi Party won the chancellorship in 1933 and quickly used art and architecture as a means build the myth of a pure German people shaped by the land and unsullied by modern industrial culture. This tutorial looks at the ways that competing political ideologies each used art for its own purposes.

Towers of glass and steel from the mid-20th Century suggest, for many people, the rationalization of urban space that dehumanized our cities with empty plazas, rigorous geometries and uniformity. But International style architecture was born of the utopian idea that innovative design could improve the lives millions and its forms recall the clarity and harmony of ancient Greek architecture. This tutorial treats the late work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gordon Bunshaft, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Art had never been especially important in America. Before the Civil War, many of America’s best artists went to Europe and stayed. Even after the war, American artists found little enthusiasm for their work unless it was directly informed by European precedents. By the first years of the 20th Century, a small group of American artists began to paint the gritty streets of New York and were called the Ashcan School for their portrayal of life in the tenements. In 1913 however, the Armory Show exhibited advanced American and European art and helped to create a market for the work of Georgia O’Keeffe and other members of modern galleries like Alfred Steiglitz’s 291 and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century. During the Great Depression artists such as Grant Wood portrayed rural life in the south and midwest and became known as regionalists while other realists such as Edward Hopper rendered the alienation of the modern city. Meanwhile, Surrealist ideas infused a younger generation of artists’ work in Mexico and the US which would result, by the end of WWII, in the first internationally important American art movement, Abstract Expressionism.