FInal Exam FNAR

The Figure 5 in Gold

Charles Demuth 1928 Precisionism He was influenced by Cezanne. Made up of images, words, and letters, these "posters", as he called them, were related to some of the Dadaists' symbolic portraits including Picabia's. This work was a tribute to his friend the poet Williams is based on the Great figure a poem Williams wrote after seeing a roaring red fire engine emblazoned with it. golden number. The red shows movement in the lines. Like other artists. Demuth's work influenced that of somewhat younger artists such as Stuart Davis.

A Janitor Who Paints

Palmer Hayden ca 1930 Harlem Renaissance This exemplifies his powers of observation and expression as well as his frustration with narrow-minded perceptions of African_ Americans. The painting depicts his friend and fellow artist Clyde Boykin, who, like Hayden often picked up odd jobs to support himself. Hayden represents the artist in his small apartment, executing a portrait of a woman and her baby. A trashcan rests near the painter its lid echoing the shape of Boykin's palette, linking him to the labor he needs to perform in order to survive. He created this work to show when you reinforce stereotypes this could limit them in the lives there people wanted to live.

Woman with Her Throat Cut

Alberto Giacometti 1932 Surrealism This is his most famous work. It is a bronze figure of a dismembered corpse. The woman's body is being attacked and dismembered. This work is similar to Picasso's work since it has a bit of threat in the work. There are spikes and crostations. The way they are opened it seems that the women may have been raped. We are looking at the sense of violence being done to the woman's body in the name of surrealism. He wanted this to be on the ground without a base because you need to look at it while you are standing up. The idea is that you are looking at what you have done. The way that you look at it is meant to represent fetishism. The neck of the figure is supposed to be falick in nature. The teeth-like aspects add to the fear of castration. The woman was killed because of castration. Since Freud was afraid of men.

The Steerage

Aldred Stieglitz 1907 Modernism The lower deck was where the steerage people were traveling. It is about looking at the people who were below. But he does more modern ideas by looking at this in terms of form and value. There is a round hat that is echoed below. There is an interesting sense of light and darkness in which is present at the bridge. He felt that the shapes were related in a way giving the image a sense of esthetics. he is looking at light, value, shape, and formal elements. This work is the one that shaped the rest of his works that helped shaped his career.

Satiric Dancer

André Kertész Paris, 1926 Surrealism He wanted to use the camera to catch odd fleeting moments. When you capture these strange moments that is when life is most revealed. In this photograph this is a dancer from Paris, this is posed image. This was done in a friend's studio. He posted her similar to the sculpture standing above her. This is an intimate image. This also creates a bizarre position between the women and the sculpture. This creates a sense of uncanny. He was playing with surrealist concepts. He wanted the distortion of the room to be seen as analytical cubism. We can see this based on the couch and all around. This is a distortion series. This kind of elastic distortion achieved by Picasso through sheer force of imagination opened a rich vein of possibilities for photography, equipped as this medium was with every sort of optical device. The woman posed like a human pinwheel which mimics the truncated limbs of the nearby sculpture.

Battle of Fishes

André Masson 1926 Surrealism This is an example of sand painting, which he made by freely applying adhesive to the canvas, then throwing sand and over the surface and brushing away the excess. The layers of sand would suggest forms to the artist. He also added lines and small amounts of color, sometimes directly from the paint tube, to form a pictorial structure around the sand. There are a lot of jagged lines which means that a lot of things can be caught. The fish are supposed to be battling and tearing each other apart which is what the red lines or blood is supposed to represent. This is also supposed to represent humanity and what he saw in world war 1. He made this an automatic painting by using sand and throwing it and then adjusting the shapes. We can see that through the brown. He would add lines and small amounts of color and then he would take it from the tube onto the canvas playing with change when doing that. He also takes the time to blend the colors. The fishes are anthroposophical.

Frozen Lakes and Cliffs, The Sierra Nevada, Sequoia National Park, California

Ansel Adams 1932 Modernism He is known for his photographic the western United States. There is a sense of American identity. He wanted to capture the landscape in winter. This is a close-up angle to be abstracted almost nonrepresentational. The entire frame of the lakes and cliffs. Due to how close the object looks we can see texture and the light in an interesting way.

Nature Symbolized No. 2

Arthur G. Dove 1911 Modernism His work was nonrepresentational. He wanted to capture the spiritual force the essence of nature. This is a pastel drawing. There are curvey shapes throughout the image which are organic in nature and inspired by the natural world. He called the group of paintings the tend amendments. The group of pastels that he exhibited at 291 in 1912 were even closer to non-objectivity than contemporaneous paintings by Kandinsky, whose work Dove knew, and were probably the earliest and most advanced statements in abstract art by an American artist.

The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

Ben Shahn 1931-1932 Social Realist He was very well known for his political imagery. he wanted art to be relevant to social activism. This is his most famous work. it shows the difficulty the working people and social injustice. The image was based on a trial. The men were accused of robbery. This work was also about racism. He makes this image very eligible. The politicians hypocritical coming to their funeral had to do with the corrupt system that acted with racism and political prejudice. The passion comes from the passion of Christ and Christian martyrdom. The angular forms and shapes have very flat colors.

Church Street El

Charles Sheeler 1920 Precisionism This is representing a view looking down from a tall building in Lower Manhattan, which was based on a still from the film. In its sever, planarity, and elimination of details, Church Street El is closer to geometric abstraction than to the shifting viewpoints of Cubist painting. By cropping the photographic image, Sheeler could be highly selective in his record of the details provided by reality, thus creating arbitrary patterns of light and shadow and flat color that transform themselves into abstract relationships. At the right in this painting amidst the deep shadows and bright, geometric patches of sun, an elevated train moves along its tracks.

Self-Portrait

Claude Cahun ca 1928 Surrealism She confronted directly the psychological as well as the physical signs of sexual identity in her photographs many of which are self-portraits. The nature of gender was of particular interest to Cahun, born Lucy Schwob, who adopted a gender-neutral name and made no secret of either her lesbianism or her romantic partnership with her stepsister and collaborator Suzanna Malherbe. Her self-portraits capture an uncannily androgynous figure, often sporting the costume and accouterments of a decidedly masculine occupation: sailor, pilot, circus strongman, or dandy. This is a self-portrait of herself dressed up as a boy. This gives us a feeling that she is in the phase of exploring.

Some Roses and Their Phantoms

Dorthea Tanning 1952 Surrealism There is naturalistic surrealism that is mixed with biomorphic or abstract surrealism as well. We can see the abstract forms on the top. She mixes it with a precise reality of the tablecloth by showing the folds as if it was stored for a very long time. She has done a lot of what Salvador Dali has done because she has taken objects that we recognize and painted them so real that they become suntanning. We see extreme reality mixed with fantasy. The monstrous creature raises its head over the table is also present. This is also a still life since we can see that everything that she has painted is not meant to move or anything. It is supposed to look very realistic in our eyes.

Early Sunday Morning

Edward Hopper 1930 Modernism We can see how the shadows are being cast which tells us that it is early morning. It also gives a sense of mood. We see the deep shadows in the building and the buildings are closed. There is stillness present based on the light and this is not something that we expect because there is usually activity. This was done on purpose to give us a sense of loneliness. He is known for these types of images. It depicts a row of buildings on a deserted Seventh Avenue in New York, where a sharp, raking light casts deep shadows and a strange stillness over the whole. The flat facade and dramatic lighting also had to do with his interest in stage-set design.

Balzac- The Open Sky

Edward Steichen 1908 Modernism It is a photograph of a Rodin sculpture. He wanted Steichen to photograph the original plaster cast for the sculpture which was eventually done in bronze. It was controversial when it was done because this is presented by the author in a nightgown. Due to having to shoot it in the moonlight, he needed a longer exposure time. That gives us a sense of blurriness and timelessness in the work. The technique that he uses is a longer exposure which is the opposite of what photographers do at that moment. He does something more original due to the medium of the plaster which demanded that he do it this way. He is best known for straight photography. Not only did this technique avoid the flattening effect that direct sunlight would have had on the white material, but the long exposure that the dim light required invested the pictures with a sense of time;esmess totally unlike the stop-action instantaneity normally associated with the camera. The resulting photograph summarizes the aesthetic aims of pictorialism.

Gloria Swanson

Edward Steichen 1924 Modernism He did celebrity and fashion photos. This is a straight photograph that captures nature and abstraction. He doesn't sit there in the dark room and start manipulating the light rather he was heavenly influenced by the world of photography. It truly showed that straight photography could become even more artistic in the medium than Alfred Stieglitz had done.

Cliff Dwellers

George Bellows 1913 Aschan School His works represent the essence of the Ashcan schools when he is doing the work of the lower and working classes. He is well known for creating boxing mesh scenes. Forced from their apartments by stifling summer heat, the residesnt carry on their lives on stoops and sidewalks, seemingly trapped within the walls of the tenement walk-ups. Bellows published a preparatory drawing for this work on The Masses, a radical socialist magazine for which Sloan also worked, and assigned it a satirical caption. "why don't they all go to the country for vacation" The idea behind this is representing the class division that was happening at that time.

Cow's Skull with Calico Roses

Georgia O'Keefe 1931 Modernism Despite the variety of her strategies for exploring abstraction, op'keefs remains best known for the colorful painting suggestive of flowers, and critics still tend to focus on their supposed sexual connotations as opposed to the enormous influence she exerted on the first wave of American abstract artists. She perhaps more than any of her contemporaries, pointed the way to a distinctively American approach to abstraction.

American Gothic

Grant Wood 1930 Regionalism This painting is a national icon. He was initially drawn to the nineteenth-century Carpenter Gothic house that is depicted in the portrait's background. The gothic revival style is present in the window. The models for the farmer couple (not husband and wife but two unrelated individuals) were actually his sister and an Iowan dentist. The marriage of a miniaturist, deliberately archaizing style with contemporary, homespun, Puritan content drew immediate attention to the painting. He used them as props. The tones of the flesh were combined with a puritan midwestern subject. The subjects were painted out of affection rather than ridicule. The details of the wrinkles of the face and the tones of the face he combined with a western subject. There is an issue with the message he was trying to express here. Was he honoring the midwest or did he not like it? He did not really mention this and is a huge debate.

Doll

Hans Bellmer 1935 Surrealism These were adolescent female manikins that he would dismember and then put them back together which were strange erotic and disturbing. He does it to his liking. Then he would photograph these objects. He was tapping into his subconscious. This is a spacious landscape, nudes wandering about, each lost in her own dreams; clothed male figures, with here a partly disrobed young man studying a large plan; here also a pair of embracing female lovers and a bowler-hatted gentleman reading his newspaper while walking. The chief source seems to be a fifteenth-century painting, translated into Delvaux's peculiar personal fantasy. Delvaux's dreamworld is filled with nostalgic sadness that transforms even his erotic nudes into something elusive and unreal.

Reclining Figure

Henry Moore 1939 Surrealism He is best known for images of reclining figures done in various sizes and all go back to the reclining female form. The form is organic and so is the material. The artist reveals his interest in the void. He has allowed negative space in the masses of the sculpture. He believed that each material had its own meaning. With his wooden sculptures, he wanted to draw attention to the grain of the wood. This work of art is an example if Chacmoools which influenced his work. Chacmools are a distinctive type of stone sculpture, associated with the tenth-twelfth century Toltec culture of central Mexico, they represent the blockiness of Moore's figure stems from a passionate devotion to the principle of truth to materials; that is, the idea that stone should look like stone, not flesh. There is a suggestion for biomorphic surrealism since there is a human form but this is not exactly how a human form looks. This has to do with the subconscious looking at primitive sculptures. However, this is not just about surrealism it is also supposed to be an earth mother form. He wanted the wood to give a sense of nurturing. This is also supposed to evoke landscapes.

Five Cents a Spot Lodging House Bayard Street

Jacob August Riis ca 1889 Ashcan School Many of his photographs were taken at night or in dark spaces, so the self-taught Riis used as a flash in order to document the scenes. This technique results in images with tremendous immediacy and candor. His role as a police reporter led Riis to say of his camera, "I had use for it and beyond that, I never went" To the dismay of New York society, he used his pictures to expose the poverty and starvation that he felt were direct results of the Industrial Revolution. His book became a classic reference for subsequent social documentary photographers. In this image, he wanted to depict poverty. He changes people into machines. There are a bunch of people that are crammed into a tiny living space as they cannot afford their own places. They still have nothing to show for working long hours at the factories. There was a human expense to everything they did during the revolution. There is a lack of comfort and you can tell these men are exhuasted. This is the reality of what is happening around us.

14.3 Head with Three Annoying Objects (lecture 17)

Jean (Hans) Arp 1930 Surrealism He executed in plaster, Arp's preferred medium for his first sculptures in the round. The objects were meant to be moved around by the spectator introducing yet another element of change in his work. A large biomorphic mass and three smaller forms are on top of it. The mustache, mandoline, and a fly. They were not attached to the main sculpture. The title and idea came from a story that he wrote even though he did not identify the objects since he wanted an open-ended meaning in their subconscious thoughts. He called these sculptures human concretions.

Carnival of Harlequin

Joan Miró 1924-1925 Surrealism This is one of the first Surrealist pictures where Miro's playful sense of caprice has been given full rein. He loved the rok of Matisse and Picasso. He did use cubism as a way to represent what he was trying to communicate. He was drawn to Dadaism and wanted to represent his work through imagination rather than nature. His space the suggested confines of the grayish-beige room teems with life of the strangest variety. At the left is a tall ladder to which an ear has been attached along with, at the very top, a tiny dismantle was a favorite Surrealist theme. To the right of the ladder is a man with a disk-shaped head tache who stares sadly at the spectator. At his side, an insect with blue and yellow wings pops out of a box. Surrounding this group is every sort of hybrid organism, all having a fine time. His unreal world is painstakingly rendered and remarkably vivid. Even intimate objects have eager virtuality. The creations that he has created are spread equally across the entire surface of the painting, so our eyes do not alight in on a central place. He mapped his compositional organization with red lines arranged in a diagonal grid that can be detected through the paint layer. There's a lot of sense of life and movement. This is supposed to be playful.

Object

Joan Miró 1936 Surrealism The object consists of a wooden cylinder that holds a high-heeled, doll-sized leg in its cavity, the fetishistic nature of which typifies Surrealist eroticism. The cylinder is surrounded by other found objects, including a stuffed parrot from whose perch is suspended a little cork ball. The whole construction sits on a base made of a bowler hat; in its brim "swims" a red plastic fish. The surrealist juxtaposition of disparate objects was meant to evoke surprise and trigger further associations in a viewer's mind. He uses a froid idea through this sculpture.

Hairdresser's Window

John Sloan 1907 Ashcan School He was a professional illustrator. He liked the idea of the special people who would gather together to watch the hairdresser work. he painted this scene from memory. We see the subject matter which is an everyday scene. We see him showing the Ashcan through the colors that he uses. There is an ashy grayness in the architecture and all the signs. He did not completely paint it from memory but did add some of his own ideas here. He was encouraged by Henri to take up painting and portraying what was most familiar to him. As he was on his way to see Henri in New York, that is when he stumbled upon this crowd that was standing outside of the hairdresser's shop.

Monsieur Cactus I (Cactus Man I)

Julio González 1939 Cubism It is very abstract in nature. We get the sense of a cactus based on the spikes coming off it in various places. It is supposed to look aggressive and bristly. He is trying to communicate someone's personality and their response to a major event. There is a metal sculpture that we can see all although this is the bronze version. The bronze is linked to anger which is linked to the artist specifically. Though the distortion and dislocation of anatomical features make positive identification difficult, with the aid of the drawings one can read a raised arm joined to the hip, its five fingers spread like a cluster of cylindrical cactus stems. While the synthesis of human beings and cactus may reflect the identification of the Spanish peasant with the land, the metamorphic figure may more generally personify the republican cause. At the end of 1938, Franco launched a major offensive against Catalonia, González's native province, and was to take its capital, Barcelona, in January of 1939, signaling the end of republican hopes.

Self-Portrait (The White Horse Inn)

Leonora Carrington 1936-1937 Surrealism This is closely tied to Celtic mythology and memories of her childhood. These are themes that she explored in her literary works: in two of her short stories, the protagonists befriend, respectively, a hyena and a rocking horse, both of which have magical powers. Carrington who apparently kept a rocking horse in her Paris apartment created a lead character in one of the stories who is capable of transforming herself into a white horse. In the painting, Carrington wearing her white jodhpurs reaches out to a hyena-like creature heavy with milk, while at the same time a hobby horselevitates inexplicably above her head. There is a mix of reality and fantasy. You can tell that the hyena is a female. Given the subject of Carrington's own fable, the galloping white horse seen through the window becomes a kind of liberated surrogate self. In a larger conext this arresting painting abounds with classic Freidoman dream imagery, in which horses are sumbols of sexual desire.

Child Carolina Cotton Mill

Lewis W. Hine 1908 Ashcan School Like Riis, Hine used the camera to produce "incontrovertible evidence" that helped win the passage of laws protecting children against industrial exploitation. Hine, like his predecessor Mathew Brady in Civil War images, often directed his subjects and skillfully composed his images better to make his case. With Hine, However, the careful management of lighting, pose, and setting can result in images of such an alluring aesthetic character that the grim realities of the labor practices he aims to expose recede into the overall seductiveness of the photograph. His photos were supposed to represent social reform. They were supposed to be seen by white audiences. He is most well known for his work when he worked for the national child labor comity. They would work long hours and be given some fairly dangerous tasks. They sometimes had to stick their hands whereas adults were not able to stick their hands. He was trying to explain that the children could get hurt doing this. He would take time to pose his subjects with the most dramatic and esthetic effects for people to have emotional reactions when they would look at these images.

Observatory Time, The Lovers

Man Ray 1936 Surrealism A model pose wearing a couture beach robe against the backdrop of this image, thereby grafting onto this elegant scene of high fashion a hallucinatory image of eroticism and Freudian association so revered by the Surrealists. He is putting two things together to create this surrealist work.

Laughing Mannequins

Manuel Álvarez Bravo Ca 1932 Surrealism He was a self-taught photographer whose works became really important renaissance work. His work shows the cultural influences of Mexico including its traditions. He never saw himself as a surrealist photographer. However, some of his photographs tend to show Freudian ideas. This is a group of mannequins that are modeling the clothing that is for sale. They are looking at the audience. We see that the Mannequins are looking at the camera however, the real people are oblivious to the camera. Mannequins were favorite Surrealist subjects that to their uncanny resemblance to human beings, a resemblance that can trigger momentary but dizzying disorientation. The smiling cardboard mannequins in this image, themselves merely mounted photographs, repeat the same women's face,w which, unlike its real counterparts below, meets the viewer's gaze.

Portrait of a German Officer

Marsden Hartley 1914 Modernism He would use imagery derived from flags, and military insignias. He saw a lot of symbols and flags which were acting as unconscious propaganda for the citizens. This is his most famous work. This is a personal style that no other American stylist had done. This is cubist-influenced. This is cosmic cubism. This is very specific to him. This is about wartime influence. He is doing what other modernized artists would have done by seeing the workaround and repainting it. But this work was also very personal. He had a lover at the time and this person was in the military and it was about Karl. This has a sense of a head and body in it. Although there are some specific symbols specific to Karl as it has his symbols and the number 24 which is how old he was when he was killed in battle. There is a cursive e which stood for his regiment. He is putting his lover into this which is not obvious unless you knew all this information. Synthetic cubism is the heaviest influence here. There are flattened planes that are collaged onto the surface. This is 100% a painting that is not collaged at all. He wanted the work to look like an abstract pattern with the flaps, initials, and symbols.

Disasters of Mysticism

Matta 1942 Surrealism His work has had a huge impact on American experimental artists. There is a Masson influence here because it doesn't seem like he had a plan when was painting this. Although it goes above Masson's painting. There is automatic work present here. He wanted to reach his subconscious. The work like it is nonrepresentational because it is hard to figure anything out. Although this has some roots in the work of Masson and Tanguy, it is a powerful excursion into uncharted territory. In its ambiguous, automatism flow, from brilliant flame-light into deepest shadow, it suggests the ever-changing universe of outer space.

Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale

Max Ernst 1924 Surrealism This has dada assembalance. The cage is something that you can swing open. The pieces of wood that were attached were meant to represent his house. You are having a dream and seeing it through a window where the frame is the window. This is playing with a renaissance concept that reality is something you should be seeing through the window. Then the window is how you are seeing the world. The artist uses an atmospheric perspective. The figures are in black and white which is a dream concept. The work that is supposed to be contained in the window is being spilled outside with the projection of the pieces, the button in the frame, and the gate, which is a disruption to the renaissance. There is also a label of the work which is another disruption. He is also putting his own subconscious into this since he did it in his own handwriting. It looks irrational. There are also two girls where one has collapsed on the ground, and the other is running and brandishing a knife because they are frightened by a tiny bird.

Surrealism and Painting

Max Ernst 1942 Surrealism Of all the menageries and hybrid creatures that Ernst invented, he most closely identified with the image of the bird, eventually adopting one of his inventions, named loplop, as a kind of surrogate self-image. This is also the title of a book by Breton, which shows a bird-like beast made of smoothly rounded sections of human anatomy, serpents, and birds' heads. The monster painted in delicate hues is composing an abstract painting perhaps automatically. He engaged in the partially automatic process to create the paintings by swinging paint over the canvas from a hole in a tin can which is present within the painting of the painting. The image looks dreamlike. By taking it to another level is what halped him become famous.

The Horde

Max Ernst Surrealism 1927 It is forttage here. The idea was to use child techniques of placing a piece of paper on a textured surface and rubbing over it with a pencil. He combined frottage with graftage scraping which made this painting an increasingly ominous mood. The monstrous, tree-like figures are among the many frightening premonitions of the conflict that would overtake Europe in the next decade. It was supposed to represent somewhat of what is to happen in world war II. Not to mention, there is also the figure being trampled which is present on the bottom. This is made to make us feel uneasy since this is about chance.

Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure).

Meret Oppenheim Surrealism 1936 A cup, plate, and spoon covered with the fur of Chinese gazelle. The idea for this "fur-lined tea cup," which has become the very archetype of the Surrealist object germinated in a café conversation with Picasso about Oppenheim's designs for jewelry made of fur-lined metal tubing. When Picasso remarked that one could cover just about anything with fur, she quipped. "even this cup and saucer." She was trying to represent humor and visual appeal. She has made functional objects nonfunctional. This represents a surprise which was her goal. They thought this was a vaginal because of the circle which was not her intention at all. In Oppenheimes hands, this emblem of domesticity and the niceties of social intercourse metamophosed into a hairy object that is both repellent and erotocized, the consummate fetish. Conjuring both desire and dread, her revels in Fredian erotic ambivalence and sexual anxiety

Woman in the Garden

Pablo Picasso 1929-1930 Cubism This is an open construction in which the figure consists of curving lines and organic-shaped planes, is one of the most intricate and monumental examples of direct metal sculpture produced to that date. The woman's face is a triangle with strands of windswept hair and the by-now familiar gaping mouth. The bean-shaped form in the center stands for her stomach, while the disk below it is one of Picasso's familiar signs for female genitalia. The original version of this work was made of welded and painted iron. Picasso commissioned González to make a bronze replica.

Girl Before a Mirror

Pablo Picasso 1932 Cubism Picasso here assimilates classical repose with Cubist space in a key painting of the 1930s/. This is a model and one of his mistresses. This is a woman looking into the mirror. Such moments of summation from Picasso alternate with cycles of the fertile and carried experiment. There is a patterned background along with negativity being present. There is cubist space in the fractured planes. Through the curving forms, there is sexuality present. She is not seeing her reflection but rather a reverse reflection. Rapt in contemplation of her mirror image, the girl sees not merely a reversed reflection but some kind of mysterious alter ego. In the mirror, her clear blonde features become a disquieting series of dark, abstract forms, as though the woman is peering into the depts of her own soul. It seems that this is also showing how he is scared of woman as we mentioned before.

Seated Bather

Pablo Picasso Early 1930 Cubism The realists loved this. This looked like bone forms when he began and these were always images of women. We can identify that based on the breasts. The images were supposed to be erratic and sexualized but there is also an underlying sense of fear and anxiety. This woman looks like she was made out of wood and someone carved out random abstract parts and started sticking them together which makes the figure monstrous. The teeth are present again. This is supposed to be a woman sitting outside in the sand. But this image was supposed to represent something terrifying for women. This image reminds people of prayer mentasus. The realists were fascinated by this because he used the praying mantis as a way of representing his anxiety about women. There is a sense of threat. The praying mantis sometimes devours the male after mating, it was seen as a particularly apt metaphor for the threatening feminine of Freudian theory.

Large Nude in Red Armchair

Pablo Picasso May 5, 1929 Cubism This is a timeless subject- a figure set in a red chair draped in fabric and set against green flowered wallpaper (these saturated houses persisted in Picasso's work of the 1930s). But the woman's body is pulled apart as though made of rubber. With knobs for hands and feet and black sockets for eyes, she throws her head back and not in sensuous abandon but in a toothy wail, resulting in what Breton called "conclusive" beauty. She looks like a howling animal but scholars believe that it has to do with the many relationships he had with various women.

Ranches de Taos Church

Paul Strand New Mexico, 1931 Modernism Applying the same principles he initially explored in his abstract still life from 1916, Strant created compositions that explored the formal elements of the subject by using shape, mass, texture, and light as defining properties. In his repetitive photography of the landscape and architecture, he essentially created a sense of the place. It is an example of American artwork that could not be replicated in Europe. The unique setting of New Mexico allows Strand's work to exemplify the importance of art that was being created outside of the European lens. The artist wanted to transform the public view of photography from the manipulative process in a dark room to objective art that expressed what was depicted and how it exists at the moment. It was built to provide spiritual support to a remote outpost of New Spain.

The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images

Rene Magritte 1928-1929 Surrealism We see a pipe here so what does that mean? He was more on the intellectual side but stepped back from his work compared to other surrealist artists. It portrays a briar pipe so meticulously that it might serve as a tobacconist's trademark. Beneath rendered with comparable precision, is the legend "this is not a pipe." This delightful work confounds pictorial reality and underscores Magritte's fascination with the relationship of language to the painted image. It undermines our natural tendency to speak of images as though they were actually the things they represent. His work tends to be irony and uncanny. This is one of his famous works. This is a painting of a pipe meaning this is not realistic. He is playing with language. This is not about the window onto the world.

Persistence of Memory

Salvador Dali 1931 Surrealism DalÍ shared the Surrealism antagonism to art that defined itself in terms of formal qualities rather than content. It is a denial of every twentieth-century experiment in the abstract organization. Its miniaturist technique (the painting is only just over a foot wide) goes back to fifteenth-century Flemish art, and its sour greens and yellows recall nineteenth-century chromolithography. This shows still life because there is no movement it shows that time has stopped. We don't know what time of day it is so it represents time is ending. The picture's fame comes largely from the presentation of recognizable objects-watches- in an unusual context, with unnatural attributes, and on an unexpected scale. This represents a figure that is asleep based on the watches. The fly and the ants are supposed to be associated with death. When you bury someone in the ground and you don't put them in metal then the bodies would be destroyed. The tree looks dead but is supposed to be growing from concrete. This is a prime example of naturalistc surrealism. What he has done is put every detail into everything that it looks like it is some kind of relaity that he may have encountered.

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonitions of Civil War

Salvador Dalí 1936 Surrealism In Paris in 1936, on the eve of the Spanish Civil war. It is a horrific scene of psychological torment and physical suffering. A gargantuan figure with a grimacing face is pulled apart, or rather pull itself apart, and other body parts are strewn among the excretory beans along the ground. Despite the anguish expressed in this painting, Dalí reacted to the civil war in his native country as he did to fascism in general-with the characteristic of self-interest. The beans could be taken really literally as that's what the Spanish would eat representing the civil war. The work was painted very realistically very highly polished surfaces with luminous colors representing reality. there is a box which represents all the bodies balancing on it and raises the question of what could be in side the box. It is the same people from the same country fighting one another is what is depicted here. The idea of you tearing apart your own nation which is represented in the women's body. We can see it by the tearing of the breast the head is aabsolutely in pain and other body parts being ripped apart.

City Building, America Today

Thomas Hart Benton 1930 Regionalism This represents heroic workers who are seen against a backdrop of New York construction sites. Benton turned to the sixteenth-century art of Michelangelo and El Greco for the sinewy anatomies and mannered poses of his figures. The bodies are muscular and you can see this in Michaelangelo's work as well. They used elongation because it allowed for expression. We can see that they are common people that are working hard. We do see some African American figures as well. We see exactly what American society looks like.

Miner's Home, West Virigina

Walker Evans 1935 Depression Era Photography He believed in straight photography. The way that the objects are laid out is way that objects were laid out is how he saw and photographed them. but each photograph had layers of meaning in it. The images of the happy people, the child. and happy people were supposed to show the aspiration to the middle-class life that would always be out of reach for minors. They also act as a very sharp contrast to reality based on Santa, women, and the child. When we look at the boy, he shakes like home, it is not anything like the prosperity of the United States was seen.