The Museum of Modern Art(MoMA) website has dedicated some of its webpages to showing the period in which a handful of artists brought to life what we today call Abstraction. The exhibition is called “Inventing Abstraction”. That period was between 1915 and 1920. Of particular interest to us the students in the “Hacking the Humanities” course directed by Austin, is the network that the website shows which connects the artists to one another. Such network analysis provides a quick and efficient way of seeing who were the most influential artists in this revolutionary time lapse. The network can be found here.
In this network, the nodes represent the artists who have been known to be involved in art work of this type in this time lapse, and the edges connecting them indicate their relationship with the other artists. It is worth noting that some of these artists were not merely painters , but also sculptors, literary scholars, teachers, founders of art institutions, among others. For instance, Aleksandr Smirnov was a Russian literary scholar who admired the work of Sonia Terk and therefore spread the word about the former’s work in St. Petersberg. The graph puts two different colors for the nodes to distinguish between those artists who are professionally related to more than 24 others (orange), and those with fewer than 24 connections(black). Upon clicking on a node, one is able to get some information about the artist such as “places worked”, “birth place”, “works”, and “interests”. Descriptions are included for those artists who have many connections. One can select a particular work and analyze it if one wants to. The webpage also has links that enable the user to listen to music from the time period 1910-1925, read about that particular exhibition, join a community of bloggers who share a passion for these artists, and read see what artists today have to say about the proponents of “Inventing Abstraction”. Finally, the webpage mentions the people who collaborated to realize this diagram.
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I love this project so much! I wish I had analyzed this project. It reminds me of a movie I watched many times called Loving Vincent. The main character tries to find the truth about Vincent van Gogh’s death by visiting and interviewing all the acquaintances Vincent had before he passed away. One unique thing about the movie is that all the acquaintances in the film were drawings of Vincent.