CRITICAL DISCOURSES

2024-2025
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1. A New World:
The seed of abstract art and the break with the audience
The painter highlights the chromatic mist.

Admiration for the reflections and the fog.

The boundaries of objects blur.

J. M. W. Turner,
Rain, Steam and Speed,
1844.
 Turn of the Century or the Seed of Abstract Art

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Nietzsche:
• He questions the foundations of Western metaphysics, proposing a
radical critique of traditional morality, Christianity, and the idea of absolute
truth, which inaugurates a relativistic and perspectivist outlook.
• His notion of the "Übermensch" (superman) and the "will to power"
anticipate existential debates and the crises of meaning characteristic of
modernity.
• His diagnosis of "nihilism" as a cultural horizon decisively influences the
philosophical and artistic currents of the 20th century.
Plato is pointing up, to the world of ideas.

The absolute truth.

Plato’s allegory of the cave.

Raffaelo Sanzio da Urbino,

Rain, Steam and Speed,
1844.
 Turn of the Century or the Seed of Abstract Art

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Nietzsche:
• He questions the foundations of Western metaphysics, proposing a
radical critique of traditional morality, Christianity, and the idea of absolute
truth, which inaugurates a relativistic and perspectivist outlook.
• His notion of the "Übermensch" (superman) and the "will to power"
anticipate existential debates and the crises of meaning characteristic of
modernity.
• His diagnosis of "nihilism" as a cultural horizon decisively influences the
philosophical and artistic currents of the 20th century.
 Turn of the Century or the Seed of Abstract Art

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Nietzsche:
• He questions the foundations of Western metaphysics, proposing a
radical critique of traditional morality, Christianity, and the idea of absolute
truth, which inaugurates a relativistic and perspectivist outlook.
• His notion of the "Übermensch" (superman) and the "will to power"
anticipate existential debates and the crises of meaning characteristic of
modernity.
• His diagnosis of "nihilism" as a cultural horizon decisively influences the
philosophical and artistic currents of the 20th century.

Wagner:
• He developed the idea of the "total work of art" (Gesamtkunstwerk), as
the integration of all arts into a unified experience, where music, poetry,
theater, and visuality combine to deeply engage the spectator. This ideal
aimed to express universal and emotional narratives with an almost
religious aesthetic force, transforming opera and modern theater.
• The concept of Gesamtkunstwerk influenced the Bauhaus by inspiring the
integration of various artistic and technical disciplines into a unified,
functional, and aesthetic creation. The school embraced this idea to
combine art, design, and architecture into a total project.
Walter Benington,
Among the Housetops, 1903
Vienna of the early century

Sigmund Freud
Arthur Schnitzler • The fourth largest metropolis in Europe.
Gustav Klimt
• The capital of the dual monarchy formed by Austria and
Richard Strauss Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian or Habsburg Empire.
Gustav Mahler
• The intellectual and cultural center of Europe.
Theodor Hertzl
Adolf Loos • Vienna was flourishing, though for the last time.
After World War I, the Habsburg Empire collapsed (1918).
Arnold Schönberg
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Friedrich Hayek
Rainer Maria Rilke
Camillo Sitte
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Stonborough House, 1928
 Resalta la bruma cromática

Admiración por los reflejos y la niebla

Los límites de los objetos se desdibujan

Otto Wagner, (1841-1918) y Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867-1908), 1899

Sezessionsstil
In parallel, in Berlin...

Rejection of the fin-de-

siècle aesthetic.

Peter Behrens (1868-1940)

Turbine Factory,
1908-10, Berlin, Berlín, 1908
 RADICAL WIEN
Architecture

If we want architecture to be
functional, why waste technical
advances on ornamentation?

Is this experimental art?

Adolf Loos, 1870-1933

 RADICAL WIEN
Architecture

If we want architecture to be functional,

why waste technical advances on
ornamentation?

Is this experimental art?

Looshaus, Michaelerplatz Does experimental art provoke anger

Adolf Loos, 1870-1933 and rejection from the public?

Satire of the Looshaus

published in 1911:

"Where did Adolf Loos get the

idea to design this house? By
looking at a sewer!"
 RADICAL WIEN
Painting

There is an art that is not

comfortable but instead seeks out
the shadows of the world.

Is this experimental art?

Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

Self portrait2
 RADICAL WIEN
Painting

There is an art that is not

comfortable but instead seeks out
the shadows of the world.

Is this experimental art?

Egon Schiele
Gustav Klimt in a blue painter's coat, 1913
The work of Egon Schiele emerges
at a time of cultural crisis and
artistic renewal, reflecting the
tension between the desire for
individual introspection and the
disintegration of traditional
norms in an environment shaped
by psychoanalysis and modernism.

Schiele develops a deeply

expressionist aesthetic, where the
distortion of the human body,
intense colors, and provocative
compositions capture a sense of
vulnerability and existential
anxiety. His figures, charged with
eroticism and spirituality,
challenge the moral and aesthetic
conventions of his time.

Egon Schiele,
Woman sitting with bent leg,1917
In dialogue with the rise of abstract art and
symbolism, Schiele maintains a deeply
subjective figurative representation, using
the body as a vehicle to explore the
psychological and emotional, turning each
stroke into a confession of the fragility and
complexity of human experience.

Egon Schiele,
Self-portrait in orange jacket, 1913
 RADICAL WIEN
Literature

• Viennese context in which a sensitivity to

alienation, depersonalization, and absurdity
emerges.

• His works are characterized by the intersection of

the everyday and the fantastic, creating a literary
experience that questions the boundaries of
logic and reality.

• Parallel to the development of abstract art, which

sought to express the universal through essential
and non-figurative forms, Kafka pushes literature
toward a symbolic stripping-down: his texts do
not explain but suggest; they do not conclude
but open spaces for existential and
Franz Kafka, 1983-1924
philosophical interpretation.
Die Verwandlung, 1912
Der Process, 1914
Das Schloss,
 RADICAL WIEN
Music

Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951)

“Music should not embellish

but be true”
 The Slap Concert

Conducted by Arnold Schoenberg and held on March 31, 1913.

A break with the audience,

“causing anger and irritation among attendees.”

Experimentation and public incomprehension.

Does experimental art provoke anger

and rejection from the public?

Caricature of the famous Skandalkonzert (March 31,

1913), published in Die Zeit on April 6, 1913.
In the cartoon, Schoenberg is shown conducting
helplessly as musicians are in the midst of a dispute with
the disgruntled audience.

Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea-LslaT_QQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea-LslaT_QQ
 Adolf Loos and Arnold Schönberg maintained a deep and
lasting friendship, set against the cosmopolitan and decadent
atmosphere of early 20th-century late-imperial Vienna.

Loos secretly financed some of the performances from

Schoenberg's circle, including the Skandalkonzert
(the slap concert).

Both advocated for an aesthetic of disembellishment, in

both music and architecture.

"When I die, tell Schoenberg that he was my best friend,"

Adolf Loos to his disciple Heinrich Kulka.
 Adolf Loos and Arnold Schoenberg maintained a deep
and lasting friendship, set against the cosmopolitan and
decadent atmosphere of early 20th-century late-imperial
Vienna.

Loos secretly financed some of the performances from

Schoenberg's circle, including the Skandalkonzert
(the slap concert).

After attending a Schönberg concert in Munich in 1911,

Kandinsky, impressed by the atonal and illogical structure
of the Austrian composer's music, sent him a letter and a
folder of prints. From then on, they became friends.

Impression III (concert), 1911, Kandinsky Kandinsky captured the feelings he experienced at
Schönberg's concert in the painting Impression III.
Is art a permanent transgression of its own statement?
 Is art a permanent transgression of its own statement?
Art is in a constant state of change, continually redefining and transcending its own boundaries and definitions.
Is art a permanent transgression of its own statement?
KANDINSKY AND THE AVANTGARDE
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Cubism
For the avant-garde, art is a laboratory, it deserves to be explored.

Cubism was born in France in 1907.

The avant-garde, by definition, is accompanied by a theoretical

foundation (manifesto), so Cubism cannot be considered an avant-
garde in the strictest sense.

It is a way of painting, as Picasso rejected any discourse surrounding

pictorial skills.

Picasso,
Le Sacré-Coeur, 1909
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Cubism
For the avant-garde, art is a laboratory, it deserves to be explored.

Cubism was born in France in 1907.

The avant-garde, by definition, is accompanied by a theoretical

foundation (manifesto), so Cubism cannot be considered an avant-
garde in the strictest sense.

It is a way of painting, as Picasso rejected any discourse surrounding

pictorial skills.

It destroys reality with a scalpel to let us see through it other things.

A reality that multiplies the point of view,
that does not want to submit to the tyranny of the laws of vision.

Georges Braque,
Le Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre,
1910
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Cubism
For the avant-garde, art is a laboratory, it deserves to be explored.

Cubism was born in France in 1907.

The avant-garde, by definition, is accompanied by a theoretical

foundation (manifesto), so Cubism cannot be considered an avant-
garde in the strictest sense.

It is a way of painting, as Picasso rejected any discourse surrounding

pictorial skills.

It destroys reality with a scalpel to let us see through it other things.

A reality that multiplies the point of view,
that does not want to submit to the tyranny of the laws of vision.

What influence does this pictorial laboratory have on architecture?

Fernand Léger,
Les Toits de Paris, 1912
Nature morte à le pile d’assiettes.
(Still life with a stack of plates)

Le Corbusier, 1920
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Futurism

Umberto Boccioni,
La città que sale, 1910
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
This is the supreme imbecility of modern architecture, Futurism
which repeats itself with the mercantile complicity of the
academies, prisons of intelligence, where young people Programmatic and Propositional Movement
are forced to conquer it like the world. The classics,
instead of opening their minds in search of the limits and
the solution to the new and pressing problem: "The
Futurism is dazzled by the advances of scientific and
Futurist House and City." The house and city that are technological modernity.
spiritually and materially ours, in which our turbulent
existence can unfold without seeming like a grotesque
anachronism.
A manifesto that bets on the future and rejects everything
that came before.
The problem of Futurist architecture is not a problem of
linear recomposition. It is not about finding new
moldings, new window and door frames, substitutes for
A call for architecture that responds to modern life, but
columns, pilasters, cornices, cartouches, gargoyles. It is the question arises: is it meant to be ostentatious with these
not about leaving the facade with bare bricks, or cladding advancements, or to use them for the greater good?
it, or covering it with stone, nor about establishing
formal differences between new and old buildings. It
is about creating the Futurist house from scratch,
building it with all the resources of science and
technology, satisfying to the fullest all the demands of our
way of life and our spirit, rejecting everything that is
grotesque, annoying, and foreign to us (translated, style,
aesthetics, proportion), establishing new forms, new lines,
a new harmony of profiles and volumes, an architecture
whose reason for being is based solely on the special
Manifesto of Futurist Architecture
conditions of modern life, whose aesthetic values are in
perfect harmony with our sensibility. This architecture Marinetti and Sant'Elia, 1914.
cannot be subject to any law of historical community. It
must be as new as our state of mind is new.
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Futurism
Programmatic and Propositional Movement

Futurism is dazzled by the advances of scientific and

technological modernity.

A manifesto that bets on the future and rejects everything

that came before.

A call for architecture that responds to modern life, but

the question arises: is it meant to be ostentatious with these
advancements, or to use them for the greater good?

The reasons for the break are many. Painting is static,

why not give it the dynamism that cinema has? Which is
becoming a success.

Umberto Boccioni,
Forze di una strada, 1911
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
The search for abstraction. Kandinsky.

Escape from figurative art in favor

of abstract art.

Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
The search for abstraction.
Kandinsky.

Kandinsky transitions to
abstraction in a very
progressive way.

Abstraction is more of an
escape, a fleeing, rather than
recognizing the figure.

Kandinsky,
Winter sun, 1901
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
The search for abstraction. Kandinsky.

Kandinsky accompanies the pictorial revolution with an inner revolution.

He paints images closely linked to Impressionism, to French art,

which he gradually begins to separate from.

In painting, he seeks something that appears every time he begins to paint

and that he doesn't understand, allowing himself to be carried away by
the destruction of the object.

Kandinsky,
Munich-Schwabing with the
Church of St. Ursula, 1908
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
The search for abstraction. Kandinsky.

Progressively, we find three types of works in Kandinsky:

Impressions

Kandinsky, Impression,
Murnau Church, 1910
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
The search for abstraction. Kandinsky.

Progressively, we find three types of works in Kandinsky:

Impressions
Improvisations

Kandinsky, Improvisation 7,
1910
 Kandinsky ,
Composition VI,
1913
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
The search for abstraction. Kandinsky.

Progressively, we find three types of works in Kandinsky:

Impressions
Improvisations
Compositions

aquel objeto
Kandinsky manages to set aside the servitude of painting > non-objectual art

Painting has been left without an object.

 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Neoplasticism or Dutch
Constructivism

Spiritual similarities

An artistic movement started in the Netherlands in 1917

by Piet Mondrian.

Neoplasticism

Parallelism with Soviet Constructivism.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)

 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Neoplasticism or Dutch
Constructivism

Escape towards a spiritual

universe.

He practiced Theosophy, a
common belief among artists in
the early 20th century.

He had seen the first X-rays and

believed that it was something
supernatural.

Mondrian, Duna, 1909-1910

 Mondrian,
Still life, 1911-1912
 Mondrian, composition
nº XV in Yellow and Grey, 1913
 Composition with Yellow, Red, Black,
Blue, and Gray by Piet Mondrian, 1920.
Mondrian, Composition in blue, 1935
 THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

In 1905, Einstein formulated the

theory of relativity.

A fourth dimension is conceived in

the mathematical order.

The fourth dimension,

counterintuitive, was explained at
that time in a didactic manner.

Science is advancing, and art tries

to capture some of these
advancements.

Bragdon, 1913, The fourth dimension Suprematist drawing, 1913-1915

 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Suprematism. Malevich

Kasimir Malevitch (1878-1935)

0,10 Exhibition
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Suprematism. Malevich

Mondrian and Kandinsky sought for painting

to lead towards a plane of emotions.

Malevich is much more dreamlike.

His paintings convey a desire for

transcendence.
Cow and violin,
1912

Composition,
1913
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Suprematism. Malevich

The black square is the final point.

He has been accused of being
Hegelian for this.

Hegel believed that art should transcend its

material form and evolve into a pure expression
of idea / spirit.

“End of art” = absolute abstraction,

no representation of the material world

But Malevich closes one cycle to open another;

the black square blinds the world because it wants
to see beyond.

The black square as an icon.

Black square,
1913.
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Suprematism. Malevich

Suprematism was, for Malevich,

the beginning of a new world.

With the white square on a white

background, he extinguishes this
reality, dispersing it with light.

White on white,
1918.
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Suprematism. Malevich

And then will come his architecture (Planits, Architectones...)

Suprematism, 1915
 Suprematism, 1916

Suprematism, 1915
 Suprematismo, 1916

Suprematism, 1915 1913

 Suprematismo, 1916 1915

Suprematism, 1915 1913

 Are the paths of art irreversible?

What is left after Malevich?

If painting delves into abstraction, will it lose its critical power?

 ABSTRACTION:

There are no objects that imitate reality in the work, only form and color.
But, is the history of abstraction as it was told to us?
Hilma af Klint
Paintings for the temple. 1907, 1906 y 1915
WORLD WAR I
The Italian Navy general Douhert,
theorist of aerial warfare, had
written around 1918:

"I find it acceptable and even

highly recommended to attack
inhabited cities with gas bombs;
not because I take sadistic pleasure
in mass murder, but because this
type of attack, thanks to its material
and moral effects, is decisive for
victory."

( v. Rolf-Dieter Müller, La muerte

caída del cielo, p. 36).
 THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE
Surrealism

André Breton (1896 – 1966)

After the Great War,
"We must change life" was joined with Karl
Marx's statement:
"We must transform the world."

Louis Aragon (1897-1982)

Max Ernst,
Cormorants, 1920

Upon the clouds

advances midnight,
above midnight flies
the bird, higher than
the bird grows the
ether, and the walls and
ceilings float.
1920
 Joan Miró,
Painting, 1927
 How to think after World War I?

Hope and transformation in and of architecture.

What about art?

What about thought?

Arbeitsrat magazine,
"Frülicht"
Bruno Taut, chain of
crystal, letters from
the participants.
Texts: "An Alpine
Architecture", 1919;
Die Stadtkrone,
1920; "The
Disaggregation of
Cities", 1920.
 Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Adolf Behne, Arbeitsrat für Kunst. Bruno Taut: Architekturprogramm, 1918.
Text by Gropius:
"Artists, let us finally tear down the walls built between the arts by our deforming academic education and become,
once again, builders... Today, there are still no architects. All we do is prepare the way for the one who will one day
deserve this title, because architect means master of the art, who will make gardens bloom in the desert and raise
wonders to the sky.“

The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in Wagnerian terms.

Arbeitsrat magazine,
"Frülicht"
Bruno Taut, chain of
crystal, letters from
the participants.
Texts: "An Alpine
Architecture", 1919;
Die Stadtkrone,
1920; "The
Disaggregation of
Cities", 1920.
 Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Adolf Behne, Arbeitsrat für Kunst. Bruno Taut: Architekturprogramm, 1918.
Text by Gropius:
"Artists, let us finally tear down the walls built between the arts by our deforming academic education and become,
once again, builders... Today, there are still no architects. All we do is prepare the way for the one who will one day
deserve this title, because architect means master of the art, who will make gardens bloom in the desert and raise
wonders to the sky.“

The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in Wagnerian terms.

Arbeitsrat magazine,
"Frülicht"
Bruno Taut, chain of
crystal, letters from Le Corbusier, Domino System, 1915.
the participants. Basic structural system for the reconstruction of housing after
Texts: "An Alpine the war.
Architecture", 1919; "Mass production leads to perfection."
Die Stadtkrone, "The principle of the serial house demonstrates its moral
1920; "The value: a certain common bond between the homes of the
Disaggregation of rich and the poor, a decency in the dwelling of the rich."
Cities", 1920.