For this lab I chose to explore the Museum of Modern Art’s Inventing Abstraction digital network. This project highlights the interconnectedness of abstract art as well as the pioneers of the art form.
Abstract art was first introduced to the world in 1912 when artists including Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia and Robert Delaunay revealed the first abstract pictures across Europe. This captivating art form developed during the years 1910 to 1925. In the five years following abstraction’s birth into the art world, it expanded rapidly with dozens of artists working in cities across Europe and the United States. Not only does the network incorporate connections between pioneers of abstraction but also tracks its modern developments.
Each node in the diagram represents a different artist who contributed to abstract art and the edges link each of the artists to each other through interaction. Edges in a darker red indicate a stronger connection within the group.
This project allows users to click on each of the nodes, bringing up a page with information about the artist. Users are provided with the artist’s lifespan, birthplace, interests and images of each of their works. Artists who are more well documented are provided with a short textual biography of their life. This network brings together a variety of abstract art forms including paintings, drawings, printed matter, books, sculpture, film and more. In addition, when a node is clicked, the user views a zoomed in diagram of the network where only connections to that specific artist are displayed. Through this physical interaction the website increases audience engagement. Users can choose whether to view abstract art from afar or explore the intricacies of each artist as well as some of their pieces. This makes the website effective in targeting a wide range of users from very knowledgeable art historians to interested civilians.
5 thoughts on “Blog 4 – Network Analysis DH Projects (Aurelia Peterson Rajalingam)”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
This network was really interesting to me! And I think you did a good job explaining it too. It’s a little unclear to me the nature of the these
“connections” between artists. Is it whether they met? Whether they shared artworks with each other? Whether their work is found in the same place/time/etc? Having poked at the website itself, they don’t make this information clear either, so it makes sense that your blog post can only do so much with that. Good analysis!
Great post and analysis! You represent the data and explain it quite well, as well as provide a nice summary of what the data referring to is actually about. When you mention viewing abstract art from afar, do you mean in a literal sense, or the figurative way of viewing these connections?
Thank you! When I mentioned that users can view abstract art from afar, I meant figuratively. To expand on this, I meant that they could view the overall connectivity of abstract art as a whole genre (from 1910-1925) through the bigger network or zoom in on particular artists they are interested in. However, I guess it’s also true that this data visualization means that abstract art can be viewed anywhere in any country.
This project looked fun to analyze. I’m slightly confused about where the connection between the edges comes in, but your analysis shows that I’m not the only one. However, I agree with what you had to say about this project. I personally think my favorite feature is clicking on a node to see the graph that comes up where everyone who is connected to the node is connected to everyone else who they are connected to in the graph. It makes looking for specific people and connections more accessible.
I also looked at this project and think you did a good job analysing it. I also at first thought that the project included the whole spectrum of abstract art, and the website does not really make this glaringly obvious, but it is actually just a digital visualization of the MOMA exhibit , Inventing Abstraction. So it’s not that the genre was only developed between 1910-25, only that the show includes works from only that short time period. I think it’s a real failure of the website to not clarify this fact in a more obvious place.