AH2071 FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE

Barnett Newman, Onement, 1948

.Barnett Newman, "Onement", 1948 Newman is a colleague of Rothko. He was very much inspired by Jewish mysticism, the oral tradition of the Jewish faith, that was aspirational towards esoteric truths. Truths that could not be written down, but only transmuted orally. This work is meant to allude to the act of creation itself, defined by a vertical stripe, that bifurcates the picture into two halves. Newman imagined that this was similar to light parting the darkness at the beginning of the creation of the world. The edge her is jagged, in an effort to avoid precision.

Aaron Douglas, Song of the Towers, 1934, one of a series of works for the New York Public Library in Harlem

Aaron Douglas, "Aspects of Negro Life; Song of the Towers", 1934 This is about the migration of African Americans from the south into northern cities. They are leaving agrarian life in the south, and coming to industrial life in the north. There is a fluid lines streaming from the center of the painting, almost smoke-like, sinister, is the incense of the new church. There is a figure seated on the bottom left, appearing to be very much the victim of poverty, ill-health, the smoke is kind of creating a fog over his head. There is an allusion to Jazz here, an improvisational feel, it recognizes the contributions of African Americans to this art form. There is a central figure holding a saxophone, placed right above the statue of liberty seen vaguely in the distance. The statue alludes to immigrants moving north, coming to America, and a belief in a sense of hope.

Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, NYC

About Cole, follower of Cole, Hudson River School artists.

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Race Riots were very Numerous all over the North, White Workers were Hostile toward the Migrant who had been Hired to Break Strikes, Panel 50, 1940-41

Alludes to African Americans coming north to cities and facing a new kind of hardship, rather than true liberation. There is an allusion to Irish workers, with a red haired figure and tones of green in the painting. This emphasizes that one oppressed group is being pitted against another; evokes the idea of how the Native American tribes were pitted against each other in order to be totally conquered. Who benefits from this subjugation but the corporate managers? Lawrence is showing here that moving North is not utopia, it is not an escape from racism and economic repression.

Frederic Church, Niagara Falls, 1857, NYC

Also Hudson River School artists, followers of Cole. One of the most famous and dramatic paintings in American art-there is horizontality. Church was a student of Cole's, This painting was influenced by the panoramic art industry that seems eventually to have evolved into animation and filmmaking. There's no real foreground for the viewer to stand upon, making it seem like you are on the falls levitating in mid-air. There is also a dead branch looming ominously, pointing to the abyss, with white water swirling around it and signifying energy and power. Church renders water with an almost photographic realism.

John Trumbull, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, 17 June 1775, (1786)

An example of history painting being used for nationalist, patriotic purpose, at a very early point in the founding of America. This is much more heroic and points to the glory of war.

Charles Demuth, Incense of a New Church, 1921

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, God, 1917 An industrial assemblage of plumbing pipes. It is not pristine, but looks really like a piece of waste; it has a very phallic shape, flacid. Due to the title, it suggests a deflation of God. This piece is purposefully blasphemous. This woman was widowed when her German husband was killed in WWI, she lived in Greenwich Village for many years, essentially on the streets, most likely also as a prostitute. She would collect trash and rags from the street and create costumes from them, she lived truly on the fringes of society and rejected middle class consumerism entirely. She was a Dadaist. Charles Demuth, Incense of a New Church, 1921 Part of a group of American painters who were a bit more optimistic than the largely European dadaists scorning society after WWI. Demuth also represents the precisionists, who aimed to capture the art of machines, geometry, cubism, futurism, etc. He depicts here a steel factory in his native Pennsylvania, which is dominated by large smokestacks rising up to the top of the picture. Out of them come a stream of smoke. The whole painting of this industrial landscape almost looks like a stained glass window, such as those found in churches. The geometry of the factory becomes married to a kind of religious architecture, that the factory is deemed to be a new kind of cathedral. The incense refers to the pollution of the factory, in a moment of dark humor. The sky is made up of a vivid heavenly blue that is purposefully fractured to resemble stained glass.

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962

Became famous in the early 1960s, he began his career professionally first doing billboards in advertising. But, he then became inspired by art culture in California and Britain. He creates a series of works that feature commodities, which show representations of products. Instead of resisting the commodity, it is as if he's immersing himself in the commodity. There is an irony here that gives echoes of Duchamp; he is choosing ready made images from Madison Avenue or whoever is doing the package design for these soup cans. Warhol himself is this kind of sphynx-like figure whose life became a performance piece; he would hire impersonators of himself to show up at events, to insinuate that he too can be reproduced. He is immersing himself in capitalism while subtly critiquing it. He once said the US and the Soviet Union are both totalitarian, with the only difference being the Soviet Union uses force while in America everyone acts the same voluntarily. During the Cold War, one of the things that was stressed was American bounty, the idea that the US had all of these things once could buy.

Charles Sheeler, Criss-cross Conveyors, Ford Plant, 1927

Charles Sheeler, "Criss-Crossed Conveyors", Ford Plant, 1927 photo This appeared in Vanity Fair magazine with a caption from Mathew 7:20: "By Their Works Ye Shall Know Them". This was not meant to be ironic, this was emblematic of the way that Henry Ford promoted himself as a genius among businessmen. The conveyors form a kind of cross shape, the perspective of the viewer is below, insinuating to a kind of Christian-like reference. Ford created Fordism, the idea of harmonizing the motions of the human body to those of the assembly line. Everything could function seamlessly in harmony with the machine. This is also associated with Frederick Taylor and Taylorism, who performed studies to increase productivity and efficiency of the worker. Ford was sympathetic to Hitler, the KKK, was a Freemason, was quite sympathetic to white supremacy. He has less ironic and more celebratory view than the other Charles.

McKim, Mead, and White, Pennsylvania Station, original view of the concourse, 1909, demolished

Cubism, or the breaking apart of figures into parts, also the juxtaposition of different strips or pieces that create a kind of labrynth of form, a kind of push and pull of energy throughout the work, showing the dynamism of the new age. Think of all the inventions of the 20th century, the car, the airplane, the cinema, skyscrapers, the use of steel and glass, the building of the subway, and all of this street energy.

Joe Jones, American Justice (White Justice), 1933

Diego Rivera, Zapatista Landscape, 1915 Representation of Emiliano Zapata Salazar, leading figure in the Mexican Revoluion of 1910. Joe Jones, American Justice (White Justice), 1933 The problem of lynchings was very pronounced during the great depression. Jones was a self-taught painter from St. Louis, Missouri. He was a political radical, a leftist, associated with the American Communist Party. He did this painting as a condemnation of the KKK and white supremacy. It shows a half-nude African American woman on the ground, covered partly by a white sheet that ironically connects with the coverings of the KKK behind. The implication here is of gang rape. There is a noose in the background as well. There is also a house burning in the background. This is an eerie nocturnal scene. The difference in scale makes her body appear monumental in scale compared to the figures in the middle ground. Next to her is a dog who seems to be barking or howling. The light from the fire reflects on a skeletal tree. Jones taught art classes to the unemployed. He wanted to use his paintings to promote political change.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861. There is a sketch and a completed mural installed in the U.S capitol in 1862

During the Civil War, the U.S Congress commissioned this piece from a German-American. He was born in Germany and had tremendous sympathy for immigrants, and saw America as a land of opportunity. Leutze was a liberal, strongly opposed to nativism or the fear of others, was an abolitionist. This painting shows common people moving West. Something in the mural but not on the sketch is is an African-American man leading a donkey with an Irish woman and child on it. Represents Madonna and the child imagery, the children of Israel moving into the promised land, and all sorts of biblical allusions. Does exclude Native Americans. Has oxen, which are symbols of civilization. Below are some sub-scenes of where they are going, one at the bottom possibly showing San Francisco. Pioneer Daniel Boone and either Lewis or Clark in the circles at the bottom. At the top there are the 3 wise men, a Viking ship. Hercules, Christopher Columbus, Moses, etc. All alluding to the idea of America as a land of destiny, al figures who foreshadow Western expansion. Painting alludes to a poem about manifest destiny by George Berkeley where he talks about the golden sky and the empty land just waiting to be taken. Idea of racial inclusiveness, and the idea of Americans as the chosen people. Also the inclusion of Irish Catholics, idea of ethic mixing.

Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943, NYC

From Wyoming, spent a lot of his life in the West, loved Native American art and the Mexican muralists, worked with David Siquieros, a very leftist artist involved in labor issues. Pollock's earliest paintings are about the American west and are very energetic. He is going in the direction of abstract art, but he still believes that art needs content, meaning. Interested in the unconscious, but not interested in idolizing the unconscious as Gorky is; just believes it is something we need to be aware of to be self-aware/self-critical. Sees art as a way to heal what has been damaged. He loved the traditional values of Native American art because it was so associated with physical and spiritual healing. So, in sand art, the ill person would be placed in the center while a shaman would create designs around them; thought there was a meditative, therapeutic value. Thus, art is perceived as a ritualistic, performative thing. There is a traditional worship between art and medicine, Pollock would have known what pigments were traditionally used as medicines. Pollock lived a difficult life, diagnosed alcoholic early on and went to psychotherapists. His therapist was a follower of Carl Jung, he went through Jungian therapy. Jung believed in applying the language of alchemy to psychology. He thought about a kind of spiritual alchemy, out of which came chemistry. One form of alchemy was medical, and was the attempt to create elixirs to heal things and extend life. This is the subliming of raw nature. Color is important to alchemy because it indicates something is changing. Through the sublimation of nature, you are also subliming yourself. So, to pursue alchemy was to pursue higher degrees of occult knowledge. Analogy with the political world --> always striving to get to the next degree of awareness. To exist is to act within the world. Jung believed in the collective unconscious. This would not be defined by nationalism, or politics. In this work there is a wolf figure, wolves are mythic (history of Rome), famous for their acute senses. There are totemic looking figures on either side that suggest sand painting. Iconic = likeness, indexical = a mark, like a foot print, which is an index of your foot. The indexical can be related to your handwriting. The indexical mark is in some ways more authentic than a photo, because you can always change how you look. Pollock likes indexical because they are assured to be an affirmation of the individual in an age of mass production. In this work, the chaos spills over the boundaries, indicating that boundaries/conventions are meant to be violated, relates to the American idea of collectivity.

Arshille Gorky, The Liver is the Cock's Comb, 1944

Gorky was someone who pioneered a style imbued with surrealist technique, also influenced by cubism. This is his most famous painting, painted during WW2. The liver in myth, was supposed to be the seat of human emotions/desire. Thus, the title is more understandable if you know the myth of Prometheus. You see these organic forms kind of pulsating. The paint seems to be laid on with a sense of immediacy and juiciness, there is a sense her of a controlled accident. Automatic drawing is kind of like the Freudian slip of art, where you draw instinctively and release things that may be otherwise repressed. The idea here is to free up the self to become aware of one's self through automatism. Forms kind of emerge out of the chaos; this is the process of creation. This is a reaction against the assembly line, the machine age, uniformity. There is no uniformity here, this is spontaneity, free association, and improvisation. These types do not attempt to escape politics, but rather, believe that art is in line with liberty. You see phallic forms and egg shapes, both feminine and masculine images of breasts and penises, in a very fluid dynamic.

Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al., "Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System", as of May 1, 1971, 1971 A series of photos he did of real estate holdings of members of the board of the Guggenheim Museum. He was going to show this at the Guggenheim Museum itself. The show was of course cancelled. Haacke was interested in using this concept to undercut the art institution itself. He is demonstrating that art is an industry. Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972 Influenced to a certain degree by pop art, echoes of Warhol's tomato soup cans. In the back you see pancake mix boxes repeated. This uses found objects within the art itself, such as a racist cookie jar, transformed into a fighting figure, an expression of black power, grasps a broom in one hand and rifle in the other that harkens back to "American Gothic" painting. This is an affirmation of the black power movement, of attempting to take control and fight back.

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899

Harkens back to Watson and the Shark but has a very different kind of message relating to social darwinist theories of race, and Supreme Court decisions such as Plessy v Ferguson. Homer painted this in the wave of the Plessy v Ferguson decision, part of a series of sailors of African descent in the West Indies. A sailboat mast has been blown off by a typhoon in the distance, presumably there was another person on the boat who has since fell off and been eaten by sharks. Bleak painting, not much hope. But, there are little flying fish on the right hand side, representing hope. Idea here of metamorphosis, of being able to imagine flight and escape even in the most dire of situations. A sense here of overcoming any sense of biological determinism. The man has a sense of defiance on his face and is demonstrating a will to live.

The Great Seal of the United States, 1770-82

Has this Egyptian style pyramid, capped by this all-seeing eye. Although it is not actually designed by a Freemason, you could still be influenced by Masonic imagery. Masonic imagery was very public. Evokes the idea of building a nation, building a constitution, tripartite branches of government, ideas of balance and order and symmetry. This puts the idea of nation building and temple building together. In the bible, you know that Moses was educated in Egypt, which is alluded to here. It implicitly evokes the idea of chosenness, that America can be thought of as a new Israel coming out Egypt, just like Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt after learning in Egypt. God is smiling upon their endeavors with his all-seeing eye. Thus, it is important to realize you have a group of Jews in Belshazzar's feast.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 1876-77, with gilded lattice work designed by Thomas Jeckyll, initially installed in a London mansion owned by Frederick Leyland

Henry Clay Frick Mansion, Upper East Side, Manhattan, 1913. Became the Frick Museum of Art Has one of the greatest collections of art in the world. Frick was from Pittsburgh, he founded a company that manufactured coke from coal, which was used to make steel. His company partnered with the Carnegie Steel Company. All of these industrialists would then become philanthropists, which built their reputations. Frick inspired Pittsburgh Andrew W. Mellon to begin collecting art, which formed the nucleus for the National Gallery of Art in Washington. So think, how could this private collection become national? The art was gathered through an economic system of exploiting workers. So now, we have the Walmart family making collections of American art as well. It is a very common practice for private collectors to turn their pieces into a public museum; this is one way to enhance one's reputation and public image. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, "Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room", 1876-7, with gilded lattice work designed by Thomas Jeckyll, initially installed in a London mansion owned b Frederick Leyland. There was a question of how does art fit into this newly industrialized world? In the gilded age, there was an arts and crafts movement where people looked back to handmade, pre-industrial items. One of the artists who is interested in the arts and crafts and decorative arts is Whistler. Wanted to think about an expanded world of art objects that would include crafted objects. Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Attended West Point for a time, wanting to be a cartographer. He dropped out, resisting military life, and given his drawing talent he decided to go to Europe and lived there as an expat for most of his career. He had a tremendous influence on European and American art. He had a major dispute with Leyland over money; Whistler did much more and was extremely lavish when designing this dining room. It was meant to display Leyland's porcelain. Whistler did not quite follow directions, and he created a very lavish use of gold leaf, fantastic peacocks. There is a clear influence of Asian art in this work. This says something about the relationship between the patron and artist; Whistler contends that art cannot be defined by money. He sells Leyland two portraits but he does not regard them as being Leyland's property, but rather, believes that art is property of the whole world. He is refusing to let go of the works that he is producing.

Winslow Homer, Snap the Whip, 1872

Homer's paintings remain figural but there is a greater degree of painterly, formal awareness. Kind of a melancholy look back at pre-industrial America, doesn't show any hint of the industry that certainly was present in the North at this time. Landscape could be Western Massachusetts, upstate New York, young group of boys playing, there are flowers in the foreground in front of the boys while behind them the trees are beginning to change for fall, a sense that everything is in transition. Their faces look deadly serious. The two boys on the left lose their grip and fall towards two girls, one with a hoop, and a husband and wife waving at the boys. This suggests the stages of life coming out of boyhood. There is a sense of regeneration, repopulation, after the loss of life of the Civil War. The ideal of marriage and childbirth is implicit here.

Leon Golub, Vietnam II, 1973, one of a series of paintings alluding to My Lai massacre of 1968

In contrast to Trumbull, this historical painting is used as a critique of state power, imperial power, as a political criticism rather than showing the heroic death of General Warren. This piece is anti-heroic, not showing the glory of war, but instead the brutality and injustice of war. This is informed by expressionistic technique, informed by modernist ideas, but it is figural expressionism (meaning the human figure is there so it isn't quite abstract). Golub treats the canvas as if it's human flesh; he cuts it, he used a meat cleaver to move around the paint. He uses a kind of brutalist technique to suggest the brutality of the Vietnam War. There is a spacial gap between the firepower of the Americans and the weakness of the unarmed civilians. This is based on the My Lai massacre, perpetrated by American soldiers. It was documented well and the soldiers were put on trial. So the images you see are actually based on photographs. Golub would also used magazines published for right-wing militia groups, American gun culture (NRA propaganda), as inspiration. He did a series also called Napalm in which the figures have burned flesh from chemical warfare which also took place in Vietnam. This art was part of the protest movement in the 60s and 70s against the Vietnam War. He was a contemporary of Pollock, yet he worked in Chicago, but he differed from Pollock in his interest in the human figure. He was interested in ancient Roman sculpture and he compared Roman Empire to the American Empire. He did eventually move to New York, which is where this work was done.

Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist (Number 1), 1950

Jackson Pollock, "Number One (Lavender Mist)", 1950 Was a communist, was associated with the Mexican muralists, many of whom were Marxists. As talked about earlier, when Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler many American communists became disillusioned and kind of dropped out. Asserting political freedom became a kind of important act for the abstract expressionists. If Pollock had an agenda, it was the affirmation of the individual self in an age of conformism and mass production. Pollock pressed his hand several times into the paint to make an indexical impression. His style here changed to an 'all over' style, covering every inch of the canvas with paint. This painting was laid on the study floor like a sand painting. He thus immersed himself in the space of the painting; he used house paints rather than oil like the Mexican muralists. He used a can of paint and a stick and would dance around the canvas. This has an element of accident about it but it isn't a doodle, there is an elegant laciness about it. With this type of art you can adjust rather than erase. There is almost color vibration here with your eye mixing the sensations. This is an intense engagement with the material. He doesn't want you to think he is in control though. This should be seen as a record of a period of time in the artist's life. This is the rise of the Cold War, TV, mass conformism. His work is meant to be anti-commercial. Pollock was attacked by Congress as a communist, abstract expressionism seen as anti-American. But the US gov eventually promoted this type of art as opposite to the Soviet art and it became symbolic of American freedom.

Levittown, Long Island, NY, 1954

Levittown, Long Island, pre-fabricated single family homes designed by developer William J. Levitt, 1954. Supported by Federal Housing Administration despite being segregated until 1960. This kind of suburban tract housing became popular for white middle class families, especially during the post WWII baby boom generation. This was a way for whites to escape from the cities and get away from African-Americans and immigrants. Suburbia was supported by freeways, shopping malls, freeways which cut through cities and destroyed old neighborhoods. Cars cut down public transportation. All of this created a counter culture reaction; a famous song composed by Malvina Reynolds "Little Boxes", about how each of the little houses all look just the same. The lyrics are critiquing mass conformism of the white middle class. Pete Seeger sang this song in D.C to Eleanor Roosevelt and a racially integrated audience in 1944. This was at the opening celebration of the United Federal Labor, Congress of Industrial Organizations. The fact that this was segregated was a huge slap in the face to the African Americans who served in WWII. Remember the critiques from singers and counter-culture beat poets of this consumerism, materialism.

Mark Rothko, Green and Maroon, 1953, NYC

Mark Rothko, "Green and Maroon", 1953 Rothko committed suicide. His later work is non-figurative, going away from myth, to a more abstract style. This style is called color field painting. Often abstract expressionism is divided into two groups: those who are the action artists, and those who are the color field painters. There are large rectangular clouds of color that are stacked on top of each other in a two dimensional fashion. The color has some parts that are more radiant while others are more shadowed. There is an atmospheric quality that is inspired by landscape paintings. They very carefully avoid machine precisionism, as the edges are ragged. The rectangles seem to float against a blue ground. There is a sense of the ethereal, spiritual, transcendent, the sublime (the aspiration for something beyond the physical world). The abstract expressionists are not too much into what we call beautiful, but rather what we call sublime. These artists are working in the aftermath of WWII, in the growing dimensions of the Holocaust, also in the aftermath of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is a reckoning with the ability of humans to completely obliterate themselves. These are pictures of the post WWII atomic age, and the realization that human evil seemingly knows no limits.

Marsden Hartley, Warriors, 1913

Marsden Hartley, "Warriors", 1913 American painter, painted just prior to WWI. He painted it in Berlin, and it depicts a military parade in which all of these German soldiers are dressed in ceremonial garb. He employs the use of vivid color. This is a combination of interest in cubism and German expressionism's use of color. Hartley had a homosexual relationship with a high ranking German military officer; this man died very early on in the war. In the photograph of the fountain, it is placed directly in front Hartley's painting. It has a similar shape to that which is in the painting, of an Eastern religion, perhaps Buddha-like figure. The fountain overshadows the painting completely; it is perhaps a critique of painterly painting and WWI. Duchamp did not care for painters, because to be a painter was to be doomed to be aesthetic, too tied to the art religion, too delusional, too detached with the current problems of life.

Winslow Homer, Veteran in a New Field, 1865

Moving out of the Hudson River School, even though he worked in New York, he is working more with the style of Paris Impressionism, still working with somebody who is into Christian symbolism. Relate to Gardner/Sullivan photograph. This depicts a veteran farmer scything a field with his union army jacket and musket laying on the ground next to him. A continuation of the minute man theme, a civilian who takes up arms and then returns to the field. We only see the figure's back in a field of golden wheat, much more painterly and less photographic than Cole/Church. The scythe and the wheat are symbols: wheat=bread=body of Christ. Intense melancholy of the isolated veteran. There is a mix of optimism/melancholy suggested by the title. The title suggests regeneration for the veterans.

Carl Andre, Steel and Magnesium Plain, 1969

Now we are going into minimalism. Comprised of 36 separate square plates placed together; there are 18 steel and 18 magnesium to create a kind of checkerboard patterning. This is another anti-heroic kind of sculpture that Andre encouraged people to walk upon. Andre worked on the Pennsylvania Railroad, thus had access to industrial materials. He thought a physical connection with art, such as by walking on it, would provide more of an experience of the materials. He was interested in the sound the materials made when walked upon. He made the piece become not a fixed and closed off piece of artwork, but rather a part of the environment itself. Andre was interested in materials rather than the transcendental. Associated with Robert Frank, who traveled America and took photographs of different things.

Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836

Of Mass, but he lived in NY. He traveled throughout New England, probably did sketches of the site.

Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955

Rauschenberg is responding to Pollock and is clearly influenced by people like Duchamp. This is a sort of synthesis between abstract expressionism and the Dada tradition. Assemblage with artist's bed, dripped paint, toothpaste, and fingernail polish. Artist was influenced by composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, and Jackson Pollock. Makes use of found objects. Paired with Jasper Johns "Target.." because the two artists were lovers. They had a close relationship professionally and privately. They both came out of the Black Mountain School of Art. This was a very experimental school of art which included visual arts, music, and dance performance. Cage was also a figure at Black Mountain, as was his lover Cunningham. Both Cage and Cunningham were creative people very influenced by eastern thought, such as Zen Buddhism, so that their art (such as Cage's compositions) included everyday sounds, ambient noise, an openness to accident and chance, using things that one does not normally think of as musical instrument. Cage would do things like hold concerts and sit at the piano in silence so that the audience's murmurs become the composition. Rauschenberg is doing a spin-off of abstract expressionism here; combining drip technique with Duchamp notions of found objects. The dripping feels accidental, reminding one of Pollock. It is a very personal work, in which he is altering the ready made material, and in choosing his own bedding, he literalizes the notion of exploring the unconscious, but choosing the place where we dream. The bed is also a sexual space as well, this is a painting about realizing one's sexuality and an evoking of eroticism, the spilling of bodily fluid mirrored in the spilling of paint. Beds can also be deathbeds, becoming a space of tragedy. Beds are a place of conception/birth, and death. It summarizes the voyage of life defined by fluid. They make their work feel more anti-heroic with the use of found objects. But there is still a more serious meditation going on here; there is an embrace of the real materials of life. This piece is about the here and the now, not an aspiration towards transcendence.

Gordon Parks, American Gothic (1942)

Relates to Grant Wood.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912

Represents earlier chromatography, with a single figure moving dynamically through space. There is a fluidity here, quicksilver, that gives the picture a quality of action. Relates to the invention of the cinema, automobile, airplane, the era of the transportation revolution. The satire of this painting which appeared in the New York Evening Sun in 1913, "Rude Descending the Staircase", just added to the notoriety of Duchamp. Eventually Duchamp rejected painting altogether, rejected the idea of making art, of craft. This is a recognition of the power of human ingenuity to create machines that revolutionized the industrial world. This is a kind of machine looking figure, Duchamp's version of cubism becomes blended with a futuristic machine aesthetic, influenced again by motion photography. There is a sense of here of something biological becoming something alien, the idea of the human being taken over by the machine. This makes the creative artist all the more important from a cultural point of view, if you fear that machinery is going to make everything the same.

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907, photo taken aboard the S.S Kaiser Wilhelm, on a voyage from NYC to Germany

Represents poor European migrants who make a living by going back and forth between US and Europe in search of work. The poorer folk went in the steerage. Stieglitz purpose was not to be a documentarian, though he found the working class inspirational; he was a richer leftist who romanticized the working class as energetic, as striving for life. He was not an activist though, but an artist. There is an idea here of catching movement, dynamism, to suggest action in a still snapshot. Stieglitz rejected the earlier style of painterly photos and instead wanted to take imaged with a sharp, complex, focused image. John Sloan's "Hairdresser's Window" reflects this, as well as calls attention to the fact that the working class had no true privacy and were considered dirty by some.

Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, PA, 1863, from "Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War"

The Civil War saw the coming of age of photography as a real legitimate medium. This photographers in this era had to carry chemicals with them in wagons to develop the photos, Civil War photogs could not capture motion, only still scenes. These kinds of photos helped to demythologize war and bring the stark reality of it to the public. When these opened in galleries they were very popular. This was something people had never seen before, and there was an apparent realness. The title equates to Father time with a scythe cutting down men in their youth, the grim reaper, their blood moistens the land. There is an idea of renewal here, as though the spring will bring something new. The horizon is blurry, becoming ephereal, this brings a sense of spiritualism to this realistic medium.

Meta Warrick Fuller, The Awakening of Ethiopia, 1914-1921

The sculpture is of a woman, almost resembling an Egyptian mummy. Also remember that Ethiopia in the past was used as a term for all of Africa. The artist here is an African-American woman, she became part of the Harlem Renaissance, the Renaissance of African American art, after WWII, also represented the dawning of the civil rights movement and the AfAm political consciousness. Also refers to the history of Ethiopia as a country. Her legs are bound, as though she is being resurrected from the dead. Refers to the Battle of Adwa in Ethiopia, where they fought against Italy and Ethiopia won, representing a surprising dominance over a colonial power. Was made relevant once again in the WWII era when Ethiopia was threatened again by Mussolini.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), 1875

The title of this painting connects the idea of music and aestheticism once again. There is a kind of connection between transcending the everyday to make connections with the spirit world. It is an unconventional kind of religious practice. His painting became more abstract the further he went into his career.

Washington Allston, Self-Portrait, 1805, painted in Rome during Napoleonic Wars

There is a fascination with light, shade, shadows here. There is an interest in Leonardo Da Vinci, bringing order out of chaos. In the Rothko, there are geometric forms, which still have ragged, ambiguous edges to them. In Allston, there are no sharp edges either. Both paintings are very atmospheric, rather ethereal, almost transcendental, sublime. There is also this idea of the accidental nature of shapes, forms, that Allston reading Leonardo (who talked about the accident and the oddity of different kinds of mold/cloud/ember formations), there is an interest in the accidentally chaotic nature of things, and that out of that chaos the artist has a meditative projection of the self into that formation. Out of that projection of the self, into the visual there comes form. So people like Allston and Rothko are not interested in painting nature with any kind of iconic or illusionist realism. They are more interested in evoking that which is invisible. Through this kind of evocative use of color, light, shadow, it evokes the spiritual in some fashion. Something that is sublime which goes beyond the beauty of nature. Obviously, Allston is still painting the human figure while Rothko has gone towards complete abstraction. But Rothko did have some figural art (Antigone), both men were interested in ancient myth. This interest in ancient wisdom is apparent in the Phi Beta Kappa key that Allston places at the bottom of the picture. This is a symbol of the love of wisdom. Wisdom is often personified as a feminine force/figure, who becomes a kind of muse for the artist. And so the painting by Allston has a kind of androgynous quality, and there is a close relationship between light and color, which is also a kind of androgyny (color is associated with nature, but color must be controlled by light/dark relationships, nature is feminine and light is masculine, especially if you think of the biblical idea of light controlling color). Both of these painters come from a Romantic tradition that wants to mix opposites, like light/dark, masculine/feminine, in a mysterious spiritual fashion. There is a desire to transcend the biological and the material world in doing so. Allston loved to create glazes of paint, in which you would take a thick pasty base and then over that place turpentine-heavy, very thin and transparent glazes. He would allow each layer to dry, and then paint over that with another layer of glaze. He would build up his paintings in this way to allow the colors from the earlier layers to shine through, giving his paintings a kind of subtle inner glow that would suggest a kind of spiritual light, the idea that light comes from within. A painting is meant to be a window, so the idea of glassiness was coveted, the idea that you see through the paint to some kind of other reality. The idea of the use of tone in painting relates to the art of tone in music in speech. Clergymen were experts on tone; sermons could be modified greatly with the use of tone. They believed that how you say something is almost more important than what you say. This is also true for politicians. Tone is emphasized in this painting by Allston calling attention to his throat; he wanted his painting to speak. Portraits are supposed to bring to life that which is absent. There are all kinds of gothic horror stories about portraits that come to life. There is a sense of portrait-making as a practice of necromancy (the art of bringing the dead back to life). So portraiture is a kind of black magic. Artists seem to communicate with the dead and call to life ancestral presences.

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Female Workers were the Last to Arrive North, Panel 57, 1940-41

This evokes folk art, the tradition of quilting that African-American women influenced profoundly. This painting is evocative of nonprofessional artists.

Thomas Eakins, Motion Study: George Reynolds nude, pole-vaulting, 1885

This is a chronophotograph, or a motion photograph. Borrowed technique from French photographer Etienne-Jules Marey, technique is spinning a disc in front of the camera lens, creating quick successive exposures able to capture objects as they move through space. Eakins was influential as an artist but also as a teacher.

Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955

This is a reaction against abstract expressionism and the rise of a neo-Dada movement. Gives us a ready made image, in that a target is like a sign, there is no original composition that you can analyze aesthetically. It's as if he took down a stop sign. This is meant to be seen as anti-heroic and anti-aesthetic, as it's just a conventional sign. But beneath the paint, he has pasted newspaper on the surface of the target. The paint has been mixed with wax too, an ancient technique. He uses this kind of pant because it creates a kind of lumpy, thick, pasty surface. Therefore, it defeats the Impressionistic brush stroke. There is no dripping and no gesture, but an overall sameness. It has a purposely impersonal look to it. At the top of the target are a series of wooden boxes with lids to them. Within the boxes, there are body parts made out of plaster and painted. These body parts make the body become voyeuristically fetishized. There is a penis painted a lurid green; there is no hierarchy to the parts of the body, meaning there is no dominance of the phalis over everything else. There is an idea here that the entire body is erotic. This is an implicit contestation of bougie middle class ideas of sex as constrained to genitalia for the purposes of reproduction. Thus, this is a secret expression of gay values here. The target takes on some greater degree of meaning; it suggests a targeting of homosexuals and others who are out of the mainstream. Pulling the lids over the body parts is like keeping the closet closed.

Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al., "Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System", as of May 1, 1971, 1971

This is conceptualism. A series of photos he did of real estate holdings of members of the board of the Guggenheim Museum. He was going to show this at the Guggenheim Museum itself. The show was of course cancelled. Haacke was interested in using this concept to undercut the art institution itself. He is demonstrating that art is an industry. Relate this to the idea of anti-commodification and consumerism of art.

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930, Iowa

This is the work that is being parodied by Aunt Jemima work during the black power movement in the 1970s.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, and installed in his gallery in NYC.

This was the year the U.S entered WWI. Everyone thought the war would be short, but it turned into a catastrophic imperial struggle. This was incredibly disillusioning, because prior to the war, there was an idea that civilization was making steady progress, that technology and reason would lead us to utopia; the war caused a loss of trust in reason, and the machine. There was a movement in the art world called Dada, an anti-art movement, a belief that to see something aesthetically was to believe in transcendence of the everyday. Many artists believed we had to start facing reality. They were arguing that the aesthetic movement was a narcotic, and that they had been mistaken to see art as religion. So, Duchamp made the "ready made", where one would take something mass-produced, an ordinary object, and transform it into a piece of art, by manipulating the system of the art world. So, Duchamp signs it as R. Mutt and submits the fountain to an art exhibition, where it was rejected. His argument here is that it does not matter if Mutt made it with his own hands, but that he chose it, and inspired new thought about it. Stieglitz accepted it into his gallery unknowingly. In his photo of it, he aestheticizes it; it becomes aesthetic once you take away its utility and put it into a new environment, and it takes on the quality of disinterestedness. It almost takes on a Buddha shape, or the Virgin Mary in a shroud. Could represent a vagina, Duchamp is interested in psychoanalytic theories, of breaking through gendered mores. Stieglitz took up the cause of Mutt and decided to enter the piece into his gallery, the whole time not knowing that Duchamp is the artist. He is playing around with ideas about functions of the body here, by titling a urinal "Fountain". Funnily enough, as a Frenchman, Duchamp was very appreciative of American plumbing. Duchamp is demonstrating that art is a conceptual activity, having to do more with ideas than with handicrafts. The signature is paramount, It personalizes an impersonal object. Duchamp was a fan of wordplay in addition to visuals. This work relates to surrealism, which relates to Freud. Surrealism is about exploring the unconscious, dreams, sexual symbolism, etc. The idea here is that these sexual drives and symbolism get repressed by civilization, because for civilization to advance one must repress their desires into labor and productivity. Surrealism can be a critique of WWI; it demonstrated that productivity does not always mean advancement or a better civilization. André Breton was a French poet, leader of the surrealists in France. Breton synthesized Freudian theory with Marxist theory. He argued that liberating oneself from enslavement by reason/the state/corporate world, and coming to terms with our deep need for sexual freedom, would contribute to a social movement that would demand basic socio-economic rights. The surrealists did not think of themselves as merely artists but rather explorers. Remember to talk about the ready-made in relation to what art is. Duchamp transforms our notion of what art is with the readymade by showing that anything can be art so long as it exists within the institution of art, by titling it, and placing it within a gallery setting. He signed it Mutt because it was a play on the fact that Mott was the company that produced it. Art is contextual, not absolute/essential.

Gilbert Stuart, George Washington (Lansdowne type), 1796

Though he appears much more like a statesman here, he is being compared to Biblical Noah, through the rainbow in the background, the inkwell shaped like an arc, the silver inkwell representing Noah's arc reminds us of free-masonic imagery. Reminds us that GW was the leading freemason in the U.S at this time; he layed the cornerstone for the U.S capitol in a great freemasonic ceremony. The district was laid out by designers who were closely associated with freemasonry. Freemasons loved the art of surveying as well due to their interest in geometry.

Thomas Anshutz, The Ironworkers' Noontime, 1880

Was a student of Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia. Anshutz was from Wheeling, WV, where iron factories lined the Ohio River. This painting shows a lunch break from an iron factory; some men are washing up. You can see the ash that has created kind of a dirty carpet on the ground just outside of the factory; the ash is deep, as footsteps are leaving prints in it. Even though its a bright sunny day there is a sense of a polluted and unhealthful environment. The artist wants you to notice the ash, as it takes up a huge amount of the foreground. The workers are not idealized; in contrast to Eakins "Swimming Hole". This painting is far from idyllic, they seem a bit confrontational. They are frowning at the viewer, appearing suspicious, they know the artist is not working for them but for the privileged capitalist elite. Part of the idea here is to show the dignity of the working class, that they have an interest in washing themselves and being not dirty. There was a rarity of working-class subject matter, especially when the subjects are shown to be on the rougher side. With P and G, shows how this more unsettling subject matter can be appropriated for a consumerist purpose.

Washington Allston, Belshazzar's Feast, 1817-1843, painted in London/Boston/Cambridge

We should know that it is a biblical subject, but it is metaphorical as well, meant to be an allegory of America with meaning for the formation of the national American identity as the new Israel. The fact that it is not finished is part of the significance of the painting. From Allston's point of view, no painting can be perfected while living upon earth. He believed that man lives in a fallen state. He began the painting as a celebration of the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, a warning against American Bonapartes (Andrew Jackson), and a critique of the French Revolution. They feared populist appeal. Belshazzar in relation to the 50th anniversary of the American Revolution. Related to the anti-Masonic movement which made him wary of doing biblical subjects like this, because it is related to the idea of temple building. This theme of temple building is very Masonic and generally the theme of this painting is very Masonic. Remember that Allston is not a freemason, but as a member of Phi Beta Kappa he was very closely associated with them. From the late 1820s (Morgan affair). Here is where you could talk about how this painting is a reaction against Emerson's transcendentalist rejection of Christianity. The technique of the painting should not be ignored because it has this coloristic luminosity which golden russet tones. The style recalls Rembrandt.

John Trumbull, General George Washington at the Battle of Trenton, 1792

We talked about GW imagery and how some portrayals of him were more acceptable for the public than others. This has to do again with what kind of power is being bestowed upon the president by the U.S constitution, and how GW is in some way being compared to some kind of god-like figure, such as in Trumbull, or as more of a statesman, like in the Stuart.

Max Weber, New York, 1913

Weber is trying to give you a picture that evokes the immediacy that is being barraged with urban, modern life. It evokes Penn Station's original steel frame construction with lots of glass that allows for transparency, the way that interiors are penetrated by exterior space, demonstrating how figures are not static, there is no distinction between matter and energy. Atoms are not really stable. The whole idea of nature being fixed is out the window, there is no fixed nature, no stable nature. The world is much more dynamic, and the way we see things is very dynamic. We have the idea of binocular vision, so that each of our eyes gets a slightly different image that we then mix together.

Washington Allston, Elijah in the Desert, oil paint and milk on canvas, 1818, London

When you think about Allston (concerning about the self-portrait too), remember the kind of techniques he used. He liked tertiary colors (olive in the self-portrait). In this work, olive is present in the clouds and russet in the landscape, as well as citrine. Why are the tertiary colors so important? For Allston, but also Thomas Cole, and other American painters of the early 19th century as well. Recall "Chromatics" by George Field. All three primary colors are present in a tertiary color, but one of those primaries is more dominant than the other two. So in olive, blue is dominant, in russet, red is dominant, in citrine, yellow dominates. The point with the tertiary colors for Allston and Field, there are three colors present in each, alluding to the Holy Trinity. They are exploring nature down to the granular level of color and minerals that you use to make pigments. You use this earthly matter that is then transformed into something that seems to be transparent, you transform that which is opaque into something translucent. Neither Allston nor Rothko wanted to think of art as a commodity. When Allston painted a portrait he never sold it, but gave it away. He did not think portraits should be marketed; he thought it should be an act of friendship or familial love. Art then has a kind of aura about it that transcends material gain. Remember how to read this landscape symbolically, in relation to biblical text and Milton's "Paradise Lost". The use of milk is inspired by the Bible, St. Peter says you should become nursing babes again, born again, drinking the milk of the word of God, if you so wish to be saved. This whole painting has a relation to the idea of ingesting the body and blood of Christ.

Alfred Stieglitz, Spring Showers-New York, 1900, appearing in "Camera Work" in 1911

Whistler had an impact on photography as seen here. It is kind of an atmospheric photography. Later Stieglitz photography changed; this was talked about in relation to Picasso, in which the form of the figure is merged into the surrounding space, to create a kind of compositional unity. This could be compared with Elijah in the Desert, where the tree is very powerful, sermonizing, oratorical tree. This tree does not have that same kind of rhetorical, symbolic performance. There is no documentary photography here, this is meant to be photography as a fine art, trying to make photography less real and more artistic. Less obvious realist and more about making you aware of the photographer manipulating things for aesthetic purposes. But at a certain point, Stieglitz realized this is a type of photograph which is too much like painting. He thought this made it so photography was not really being true to itself as a medium. Stieglitz then made his later work sharp focus, in order to best embrace what made photography stand out as a medium. So, then you have more clarity and more linearity. He is very self-conscious about how the picture is composed though.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Gray and Black (Portrait of the Artist's Mother), 1871

Whistler is part of the movement that emphasized the values of aesthetic beauty, no matter what the subject matter is. He believes subject matter is of no importance. He thinks art should have nothing to do with devotion, patriotism, love, but rather the pure aesthetic beauty of it. Refer to the excerpt of Whistler speaking about this painting in the powerpoint. Does not think the subject matter is as important as the art itself. But regardless, this image became a kind of icon of motherhood. He would have been appalled at this kind of sentimentality, as he was not interested in that. He thought devotion, patriotism, pity, love, were not supposed to be involved in art. The emotion associated with Whistler should instead be the aesthetic, he was involved in the aesthetic movement. There is something called the aesthetic emotion, aestheticism. Don't necessarily link Duchamp with Whistler because Duchamp is different in being a part of the Dada movement, which is an anti-art movement, while aestheticism is all about art, often associated with art for art's sake. Aesthetic has to do with the philosophy of the beautiful, can include other dimensions such as the sublime. The great theorist of this is Kant. The word associated with Whistler is DISINTERESTED. The aesthetic emotion is one that is totally disinterested, without self-interest. It cannot be used for the self, it is an abandonment and a letting go of the ego. It wants art to be that particular object which has no use value to you. It has no other purpose except to be art. This is important because you are rising above your everyday cares, and art is something you are then able to share with anyone who appreciates aesthetics, transcending any kind of historical context with a universal ideal of beauty. And because there is no self-interest, you can have a common response. The thing to realize is that aestheticism itself is an ideological historical construct, coming to power during the Enlightenment when there was an increased interested in universal truth and beauty. It makes art into a kind of religion by making it into a thing that allows you to transcend everyday life. The idea for Whistler is to emphasize the arrangement of how things are composed within this 2-D space, not the ideal of motherhood. It is a painting about painting. It isn't trying to be something else other than a painting. There is a notion that painting, music, poetry, literature, are all united by the voice and presence of the artist.

Proctor and Gamble Advertisement, 1883

Without Anshutz approval, P&G co-opted his painting for an ad. One of their major products was ivory soap. Here, the workers are smiling, happy, better fed, there is a bit of congenial camaraderie going on here. They politically neutralized the work, and it becomes assimilated for capitalist marketing. This reality becomes a common concern among artists. The leaders of P&G become cultural leaders in the arts and patronage of architecture.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #3, black and white photo, 1977

You see a second wave feminism here, different from Judy Chicago's Dinner Party with the biological imagery. The second wave of feminist art gets away from that kind of imagery and instead engages in the kind of art that strongly suggests that gender roles are not determined by biology, but that they are culturally inculcated. This is a self-portrait, and she is posing in a kind of performance. She is dressed like a kind of coquettish housewife and it appears as a film still from a melodrama, she looks as though she doesn't quite belong in that kitchen, here eyes are staring off as if she's looking to get the heck out of the kitchen. It plays upon gendered stereotypes in order to disrupt them.

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875, exhibited in 1876 in Philadelphia for the centennial of American independence

attended surgeries, places himself seated in middle right drawing with a pen and paper. Dr. Gross is a famous Jewish doctor, man of learning, placed in center, looking much like an old testament Jewish prophet. Light gleams off his forehead. There is one single woman in the picture, maybe the mother of the boy being operated on, with a frozen clawed hand covering her face, indicating she can't look, women are too emotional. Gross's hand, dripping with blood, is right next to hers; he is a man of knowledge who puts his skills to practical use. This is an experimental surgery, performed then on a boy of the lower class. This manipulates light and dark well. Was deemed socially unacceptable, too gross. When compared to the Cindy Sherman painting, it would be a discussion about societal constructions of gender roles. The woman's hand is inoperative in contrast to her operational hand.