AP Art History - Chapter 29 & 30 - Modernism and Postmodernism in Europe/America

Harlem Renaissance

A cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York, spanned the 1920's.

Cantilever

A long, projecting bean or girder fixed at only one end, used chiefly in bridge construction.

Biomorphism

A painted, drawn, or sculpted free form or design suggestive in shape of a living organism.

Collage

A piece of art made by sticking various different materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric onto a backing.

Regionalism

American realist modern art movement that included paintings, murals, lithographs, and illustrations depicting realistic scenes of rural and small town America primarily in the Midwest and Deep South.

• The Chavin cultured developed in the northern highlands of Peru • spread through the coast region. • The culture is now seen as a culmination of developments that began elsewhere 2,000 years earlier. • The Old Temple of Chavin de Huantar dates to the first millennium BCE and was an important pilgrimage sit • Constructed in a U-shape, • it was a stone-faced structure with wings up to 83 yards long • faced east between two rivers. • The complex faced east, between two rivers. • It appeared to be a solid structure, but was a labyrinth shrine. • It had no windows, so there was no natural light in the interior spaces. • It was assumed to be home to secret and scared torch-lit ceremonies. • In front of the temple are sunken courts.

Chavin de Huantar Northern highlands, Peru, Chavin 900-200 BCE Stone

• The temple complex that stands today is comprised of two building phases: • the U-shaped Old Temple, built around 900 B.C.E., • the New Temple (built approximately 500 B.C.E.), • which expanded the Old Temple • and added a rectangular sunken court. • Construction: • The majority of the structures used roughly-shaped stones in many sizes to compose walls and floors. • Finer smoothed stone was used for carved elements • From its first construction, the interior of the temple was riddled with a multitude of tunnels, called galleries. • While some of the maze-like galleries are connected with each other, some are separate. • The galleries all existed in darkness—there are no windows in them, although there are many smaller tunnels that allow for air to pass throughout the structure. • Archaeologists are still studying the meaning and use of these galleries and vents • , but exciting new explorations are examining the acoustics of these structures, and how they may have projected sounds from inside the temple to pilgrims in the plazas outside. • It is possible that the whole building spoke with the voice of its god.

Chavin de Huantar: Lanzon Stela Northern highlands, Peru, Chavin 900-200 BCE Granite

• The serpent motif seen in the Lanzón is also visible in a nose ornament in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (above). • This kind of nose ornament, which pinches or passes through the septum, is a common form in the Andes. • The two serpent heads flank right and left, with the same upward-looking eyes as the Lanzón. • The swirling forms beneath them also evoke the sculpture's eye shape. • An ornament like this would have been worn by an elite person • to show their wealth and power • their allegiance to the Chavín religion. • Metallurgy in the Americas first developed in South America before traveling north, and objects such as this that combine wealth and religion are among the earliest known examples. • This particular piece was formed by hammering and cutting the gold, but Andean artists would develop other forming techniques over time.

Chavin de Huantar: Nose Ornament Northern highlands, Peru, Chavin 900-200 BCE Hammered gold alloy

• The Chavin site is famous for its extensive stone carvings, • consisting of low relief on panels, cornices and columns, • with only rare instances of free-standing sculpture. • The images were composite creatures, combining feline, avian, reptilian and human features. • The carvings are made with shallow, linear incisions. • An oracle cult image once stood in the center of the oldest part of the temple. • The heads of mythological created pegged into exterior walls are some of the few examples of sculpture in the round.

Chavin de Huantar: Relief Sculpture Northern highlands, Peru, Chavin 900-200 BCE Granite

• Mondrian Created a new style based on a single ideal principle. • "The style" reflected Mondrian's confidence that this style revealed the underlying internal structure of existence. • These artists reduced their artistic vocabulary to simple geometric elements. • Time spent in Paris, just before World War I, introduced Mondrian to Cubism and other modes of abstraction. • However, as his attraction to theological writings grew, he sought to purge his art of every other reference to individual objects in the external world. • He initially favored the teachings of Theosophy, • a tradition basing knowledge of nature and the human condition on knowledge of the divine nature or spiritual powers, • the same path followed by Kandinsky. • Mondrian quickly abandoned the strictures of Theosophy and turned toward a conception of nonobjective design - "pure plastic art". • He believed this expressed a universal reality. • He eventually moved beyond cubism because he felt it did not except the logical consequences of its own discoveries • "it was not developing toward its own goal, the expression of pure plastics". • Mondrian spent World War I in Holland, developing his theories for what he called neoplasticism. • This for him was the "pure plastic art". • He believed all great art had polar but coexistent goals, • the attempt to create universal beauty • and the desire for "aesthetic expression of one's self". • The first goal is objective in nature, • where the second is subjective, existing within the individual's mind and heart. • To create a universal expression, an artist must communicate quote a real equation of the universal and the individual. • To express this vision, Mondrian eventually limited his formal vocabulary to • the three primary colors -- red blue and yellow--, • the three primary values - black white and gray - • and the two primary directions - horizontal and vertical. • He concluded primary colors and values are the purest colors and therefore are the perfect tools to help an artist construct a harmonious composition. • Using this system, he created numerous paintings locking color planes into a grid of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines, as in Composition with Red Blue and Yellow. • In each of these paintings, he altered the grid patterns in the size and placement of the color planes to create an internal cohesion and harmony. • He also worked to maintain a dynamic tension in his paintings from the size and position of lines, shapes, and colors.

Composition with Red, Blue & Yellow Piet Mondrian 1930 C.E. Oil on canvas

Ferroconcrete

Concrete strengthened by a core or foundation skeleton of iron or steel bars, strips, etc.

• In Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park, hundreds of characters from 400 years of Mexican history gather for a stroll through Mexico City's largest park. • But the colorful balloons, impeccably dressed visitors, and vendors with diverse wares cannot conceal the darker side of this dream: • a confrontation between an indigenous family and a police officer; • a man shooting into the face of someone being trampled by a horse in the midst of a skirmish; • a sinister skeleton smiling at the viewer. • In the spirit of Surrealism, this is a complex dream. • For Surrealists, like Salvador Dalí, dreams were the principal subject matter. • Since dreams are so personal and strange, this allowed artists to juxtapose unrelated matter, like clocks and ants for Dalí. • Though Rivera never officially joined the Surrealists, he uses this approach in Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park • he cobbles together a scene composed of disparate historical personages. • Hernán Cortés (the Spanish conqueror who initiated the fall of the Aztec Empire), • Sor Juana (a seventeenth-century nun and one of Mexico's most notable writers), a • nd Porfirio Díaz (whose dictatorship at the turn of the twentieth century inspired the Mexican Revolution). • Perhaps the most striking grouping is a central quartet featuring Rivera, the artist Frida Kahlo, the printmaker and draughtsman José Guadalupe Posada, and La Catrina • "Catrina" was a nickname in the early twentieth century for an elegant, upper-class woman who dressed in European clothing. • This character became infamous in Posada's La Calavera de la Catrina (The Catrina Skeleton), 1913. • Here, the renowned printmaker depicted La Catrina as a skeleton in order to critique the Mexican elite. • In Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park, Rivera reproduces the original Posada print and adds an elaborate boa—reminiscent of the feathered Mesoamerican serpent god Quetzalcóatl—around her neck.

Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park Diego Rivera 1947-1948 C.E. Fresco

Abstract

Existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.

• The most influential American architect of the 1930s, as during the opening decades of the century, was the ever-inventive Frank Lloyd Wright. • Wright's universally acclaimed masterpiece of this period Is the Kaufman house, • which he designed as a weekend retreat at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, for Pittsburgh department store magnate, Edgar Kaufmann, Sr. • Perched on a rocky hillside over a small waterfall, the house, nicknamed Fallingwater, has become an icon of modernist architectural design. • Wright sought to find a way to incorporate the structure fully into it site in order to ensure a fluid, dynamic exchange between the interior of the house and the natural environment outside. • Rather than build the house overlooking or next to the waterfall, Wright decided to build it over the waterfall, • because he believed the inhabitants would become desensitized to the waterfall's presence and power if they merely overlooked it. • In Fallingwater, he took the blocky masses characterizing his earlier Robie House and extended them in all four directions. • To take advantage of the location, he designed a series of terraces that extend on three levels from a central core structure. • The contrast and textures among concrete, painted metal, and natural stones in the house's terraces and walls enliven it's it shapes, as does Wright's use of full length strip windows • stunning interweaving of interior and exterior space. • The implied message of this new architecture was space not mass - • space designed to fit the patron's life and enclosed and divided as required. • Wright took special pains to meet his clients requirements, often designing all the accessories of the house. • In the late 1930s, he acted on a cherished dream to provide good architectural design for less prosperous people by adapting the ideas of his Prairie houses to plans for smaller, less expensive dwellings with neither attics nor basements. • These residences became templates for suburban housing developments in the post-World War II housing boom. • Frank Lloyd Wright's influence in Europe was exceptional, however for any American artist before World War II. • But in the decades following that global conflict, American painters, sculptors, and architects often took the lead in establishing new styles artist elsewhere quickly emulated.

Fallingwater Pennsylvania, U.S Frank Lloyd Wright 1936-1939 C.E. Reinforced concrete, sandstone, steel and glass

• Marcel Duchamp was the most influential Dadaist • He became the central artist of the NY Dada movement but was also active in Paris.. • Duchamp created the concept of Ready-mades - • found objects or mass produced objects that were "rectified" by modification or combining the with another object. • DuChamp insisted the creation of ready-mades was free from taste considerations, good or bad. • These were qualities shaped by a society that Dada found aesthetically bankrupt. • The Fountain is his most outrageous ready-made. • The signature refers to the the Mott plumbing company in combination with the Mutt and Jeff comic strip. • The "art" or ready-mades lay in the choice of the object, which had status of art conferred upon it and forced viewers to see it in a new light.

Fountain (second version) Marcel Duchamp 1950 C.E. Readymade glazed sanitary china with black paint

• Goldfish were introduced to Europe from East Asia in the 17th century. From around 1912, goldfish became a recurring subject in the work of Henri Matisse. • They appear in no less than nine of his paintings, as well as in his drawings and prints. • Goldfish, 1912 belongs to a series that Matisse produced between spring and early summer 1912. • However, unlike the others, the focus here centers on the fish themselves. • The goldfish immediately attract our attention due to their color. • The bright orange strongly contrasts with the more subtle pinks and greens that surround the fish bowl and the blue-green background. • Blue and orange, as well as green and red, are complementary colors and, when placed next to one another, appear even brighter. • This technique was used extensively by the Fauves, including Matisse. • Although he subsequently softened his palette, the bold orange is reminiscent of Matisse's fauvist years, which continued to influence his use of color throughout his career. • But why was Henri Matisse so interested in goldfish? • One clue may be found in his visit to Tangier, Morocco, where he stayed from the end of January until April 1912. • He noted how the local population would day-dream for hours, gazing into goldfish bowls. • Matisse would subsequently depict this in The Arab Café, a painting he completed during his second trip to Morocco, a few months later. • In a view consistent with other Europeans who visited North Africa, Matisse admired the Moroccans' lifestyle, • which appeared to him to be relaxed and contemplative. • For Matisse, the goldfish came to symbolize this tranquil state of mind and, at the same time, became evocative of a paradise lost, a subject—unlike goldfish—frequently represented in art. • Matisse was referring back to artists such as Nicolas Poussin (for example, Et in Arcadia ego), and Paul Gauguin (who painted during his travels to places like Tahiti).

Goldfish Henri Matisse 1912 C.E. Oil on canvas

• Robert Venturi's New Castle County House offers a modest but instructive example of the Post-Modern style set in rural north Delaware. • An influential teacher and theorist, • Venturi studied architecture at Princeton University and attended the American Academy in Rome during the mid-1950s, • where he developed a "partiality" towards post- Renaissance architecture, particularly works built during the Mannerist and Baroque periods in Italy. • In 1966, The Museum of Modern Art in New York published his first book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. • Written while he was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, • it contains dozens of small black-and-white photographs of Western architecture from ancient times to the present day, • as well as examples of the architect's early work. • Venturi used the first chapter, sub-titled "A Gentle Manifesto," to express his strongly held belief that orthodox Modern architecture and city planning had run its course. • Rather than continue in the disciplined austere footsteps of European architects Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, he highlighted historic structures that exhibit a "messy vitality over obvious unity" • Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was well-received by contemporary critics, particularly Yale University professor Vincent Scully, • who wrote in the introduction that Venturi presented a fresh approach to looking at architecture, preferring complexity and contradiction over abstraction and what Venturi called the "fairy stories" of modernist purity. • His follow-up, the marvelously-titled Learning From Las Vegas, co-authored in 1972 with his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown and partner Steven Izenour, highlighted the way buildings are experienced from a distance while traveling along the gaudy Sunset Strip. • For Venturi, how buildings look, and are perceived, was far more important than the techniques, systems, and theories used to plan and construct them. • The New Castle County House dates to an important period in Venturi's career and Post Modernism.

House in New Castle County Delaware, U.S Robert Venturi, John Rauch, Denise Schoot Brown 1978-1983 C.E. Wood frame and stucco

• After the First World War, artists in Germany and the Soviet Union began to experiment with photomontage, the process of making a composite image by juxtaposing or mounting two or more photographs in order to give the illusion of a single image. • A photomontage can include photographs, text, words and even newspaper clippings. • Russia had for centuries been an absolute monarchy ruled by a tsar, but between 1905 and 1922 the country underwent tremendous change, • the result of two wars (World War I, 1914-18 • and Civil War, 1917-22) • and a series of uprisings that culminated in the October Revolution of 1917. • The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR) was established in 1922 under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. • The young communist state was celebrated by many artists and intellectuals who saw an opportunity to end the corruption and extreme poverty that defined Russia for so long. • The Russian avant-garde had experimented with new forms of art for decades • in the years after the Revolution, photomontage became a favorite technique of artists such a • El Lissitzky, • Alexander Rodchenko and • Varvara Stepanova. • a talented painter, designer and photographer. • She defined herself as a constructivist and focused her art on serving the ideals of the Soviet Union. • She was a leading member of the Russian avant-garde • later in her career, she became well known for her contributions to the magazine USSR in Construction, a propagandist publication that focused on the industrialization of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, a ruthless dictator who took power after Lenin's death and who's totalitarian policies are thought to have caused suffering and death for millions of his people. • The public targeted by USSR in Construction was mostly foreign.

Illustration from The Results of the First Five-Year Plan Varvara Stepanova 1932 C.E. Photomontage

• Vasilly Kandinsky was one of two founding members of Der Blaue Reiter along with Franz Marc. • He was born in Russia, and moved to Munich in 1896. • His style is spontaneous, aggressively avant-garde and expressive. • He was one of the first artist to explore complete abstraction, • and believed in elimination of representational elements through Theosophy - • a belief system based on a wide range of religious tenets and science. • Kandinsky was a true intellectual, widely read on the new scientific theories of the era. • Exploration of atomic structure convinced him that material objects had no structure, and he wrote about it in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. • He believed artists could express their feelings through manipulation of color, form, and line space. • He saw abstraction as an evolving blueprint for a more enlightened and liberated society emphasizing spirituality.

Improvisation 28 (second version) Vassily Kandinsky 1912 C.E. Oil on canvas

• African masks present, a large inspiration. • Wanted the viewer to be looked at from all different angles, back, side, frontal. • This opened door to a radical way to represent form in space. • Broken into shapes. • Numerous emotions, quiet in the left three women, wild in the right two. • The viewer is the customer, wanted to give off the dangerous/sexual vibe. • Distortion of the face.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Pablo Picasso 1907 C.E. Oil on canvas

• Claes Oldenburg created Pop art in sculptural form. • He was the son of a Swedish diplomat that moved to US in 1936, and was a Yale graduate. • His early works were plaster reliefs of food and clothing items constructed with layers of plaster over chicken wire and muslin and painted with cheap house enamel. • His later works focused on the same subjects but as large scale stuffed sculptures of sewn vinyl or canvas. • He exhibited them as a show called "The Store", an appropriate comment on the function of art as a commodity in consumer society. • However, he is best known for his massive outdoor sculptures. • Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks was funded by a group of graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture who called themselves the Colossal Keepsake Corporation. • The sculpture was created in secret and Oldenburg received no fee. • This was his first monumental public sculpture. • It was installed across from the university president's office, the site of many protests during Vietnam War. • It reflects both phallic and militaristic imagery. • There is a double irony of in that the Phallic symbol is woman's cosmetic item. • The Caterpillar tracks (construction ) evoke those of a military tank (destruction). • The work was to be a speaker's platform for protesters. • Originally the red tip was to be a red drooping balloon the speaker would have to inflate - another sexual innuendo. • Vandalism and exposure to elements damaged the work as the original tracks were plywood. • It was reconstructed in metal and fiberglass. • Yale formally accepted the controversial and unsolicited repaired work as gift in 1974, and it has a permanent home in the college courtyard,

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks Claes Oldenburg 1969-1974 C.E. Corten steel, steel, aluminum and cast resin; painted with polyurethane enamel

• Andy Warhol was the quintessential American Pop artist. • He spent his early career as a commercial artist and illustrator, so he understood the visual language of advertising. • His subjects were often icons of American consumerism like Coca Cola and Hollywood celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. • "America started this tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke and just think you can drink Coke too. .....No amount of money can get you a better Coke." • Warhol used a printing method that reinforced the image's connection to the consumer culture: silk screen. • In this way the image could be presented endlessly, although he did alter them slightly. • The repetition and redundancy reflects the saturation of the product in American homes- and is reflective of predella in Christian art (small groups of paintings or reliefs over altars). • Warhol was so immersed in the culture of mass production that he would do numerous canvases of the same image. • In fact, he called his studio "The Factory". • Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962. In the following four months, • Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. • Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: • death • and the cult of celebrity. • By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. • The contrast of vivid color with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star's mortality.

Marilyn Diptych Andy Warhol 1962 C.E. Oil, acrylic, and silkscreen enamel on canvas

• In the political turmoil after the First World War, many artists turned to making prints instead of paintings. • The ability to produce multiple copies of the same image made printmaking an ideal medium for spreading political statements. • German artist Käthe Kollwitz worked almost exclusively in this medium and became known for her prints that celebrated the plight of the working-class. • The artist rarely depicted real people, though she frequently used her talents in support of causes she believed in. • This work, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht was created in 1920 in response to the assassination of Communist leader Karl Liebknecht during an uprising of 1919. • This work is unique among her prints, and though it memorializes the man, it does so without advocating for his ideology. • From the end of the First World War in late 1918 to the founding of the Weimar Republic (the representative democracy that was the German government between the two World Wars) in August 1919, Germany went through a period of social and political upheaval. • During this time, Germany was led by a coalition of left-wing forces with Marxist sympathies, • the largest of which was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). • Other, more radical groups were grappling for control of Germany at the same time, • including the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD). • The Socialists and Communists both wanted to eliminate Capitalism and establish communal control over the means of production, • but while the Socialists believed that the best way to achieve that goal was to work step by step from within the Capitalist structure, • the Communists called for an immediate and total social revolution that would put governmental power in the hands of the workers. • In this spirit, the KPD staged an uprising in Berlin in January 1919.

Memorial Sheet for Karl Liebknecht Käthe Kollwitz 1919-1920 C.E. Woodcut

• Today there are few female artists who are more visible to a wide range of international audiences than Yayoi Kusama, who was born in 1929 in Japan. • Kusama is a self-taught artist who now chooses to live in a private Tokyo mental health facility, while prolifically producing art in various media in her studio nearby. • Her highly constructed persona and self-proclaimed life-long history of insanity have been the subject of scrutiny and critiques for decades. • Art historian Jody Cutler places Kusama's oeuvre "in dialogue with the psychological state known as narcissism," as "narcissism is both the subject and the cause of Kusama's art, or in other words, a conscious artistic element related to content." • It is within this context that we examine Kusama and her infamous Narcissus Garden (narcissism is, in part, the egotistic admiration of one's self). • Kusama arrived in New York City from Japan in 1958 and immediately approached dealers and artists alike to promote her work. • Within the first few years she began to exhibit and associate herself with seminal artists and critics, such as Donald Judd, Joseph Cornell, Yves Klein, and Lucio Fontana who later was instrumental in her realizing Narcissus Garden. • In 1965, she mounted her first mirror installation Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli's Field at Castellane Gallery in New York . • A mirrored room without a ceiling was filled with colorfully dotted, phallus-like stuffed objects on the floor. • The repeated reflections in the mirrors conveyed the illusion of a continuous sea of multiplied phalli expanding to its infinity. • This playful and erotic exhibition immediately attracted the media's attention. • The pinnacle of her succès de scandale culminated in the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966

Narcissus Garden Yayoi Kusama Original installation and performance 1966 C.E. Mirror balls

• Sculpture especially appealed to the surrealist because it's concrete tangibility made their art all the more disquieting. • Object by Swiss artist Meret Oppenhein, captures the incongruity, humor, visual appeal, and often, eroticism characterizing surrealism. • The artist presented a fur-lined teacup inspired by a conversation she had with Picasso. • After admiring a bracelet she had made from a piece of brass covered with fur, Picasso noted anything might be covered with Fur. • When her tea grew cold, she responded to Picasso's comment by ordering "a little more fur", and the sculpture had its genesis. • The sculpture takes on an anthropomorphic quality, animated by the quirky combination of the fur with a functional object. • The sculpture also captures the surrealist flair for alchemical, seemingly magical or mystical, transformation. • It incorporates a sensuality and eroticism - seen here in the seductively soft, tactile fur lining in the concave form - that are also components of much of surrealist art.

Object (Le Déjeauner en fourrurue) Meret Oppenheim 1936 C.E. Fur covered cup, saucer, and spoon

Readymade

Ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what Marcel Duchamp called "retinal art".

Mobile

Sculptural works in which motion is a defining property.

• Much of post-war architecture followed the tenet of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe --"less is more". • The Seagram building in New York is the purest example of corporate skyscrapers with minimalist tendencies expressing a powerful presence in an urban landscape. • It was built in the mid 1950s in the center of Manhattan. • Van der Rohe carried the designs for steel and glass from Louis Sullivan even further. • The style became a familiar sight in the world cities, and became the norm for postwar commercial high rise buildings • It was deliberately designed as a thin shaft, and the front quarter of its Midtown site is a pedestrian Plaza. • Glass walls surround the recessed lobby. • The tower appears to rise from the pavement. • The recessed structural elements make it appear to have a glass skin, all the interrupted by strips of bronze that anchor the windows. • Architects even designed the interior and exterior lighting to make it impressive both day and night.

Seagram Building New York City, U.S Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson 1954-1958 C.E. Steel frame with glass curtain wall and bronze

• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Self-Portrait As a Soldier is a masterpiece of psychological drama. • The painting shows Kirchner dressed in a uniform • but instead of standing on a battlefield (or another military context), he is standing in his studio with an amputated, bloody arm and a nude model behind him. • It is in this contrast between the artist's clothing and studio space that we can read a complicated coming of age for an idealistic young artist. • In 1905, Kirchner, together with several other young artists from Dresden founded the German Expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge). • Kirchner created their manifesto, • a woodblock print that was to be widely disseminated as a call to arms: • "We call all young people together, and as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established forces." • Spurred on by their confidence and their belief that they lived in an age of great change, the Brücke artists set about creating an entirely new way of being artists. • Kirchner was a great admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. • Nietzsche's book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra uses the bridge as a metaphor for the connection between the barbarism of the past and the modernity of the future. • The Brücke artists considered themselves the inheritors of this idea, and created art that looked to the past and the future at once.

Self-Portrait as a Soldier Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1915 C.E. Oil on canvas

• Robert Smithson was a pioneering environmental artist who used industrial construction equipment to manipulate vast quantities of earth and rock on isolated sites. • Spiral jetty is his best known work. • It is a 1500 foot long coil of the salt, limestone rocks, and earth extending out into the great Salt Lake in Utah. • Driving past the site, Smithson saw abandoned mining equipment - a company tried and failed to extract oil from the site. • This was a testament to the enduring power of nature and the inability of humans to conquer it. • Smithson decided to create an artwork in the lake that ultimately became a monumental spiral curve running 1500 linear feet into the water. • He insisted on designing a work in response to the location itself. • He did not want any artist to impose an unrelated concept on the landscape, demonstrating his arrogance. • The spiral came out of his first impression of the location. • When he researched the Great Salt Lake, he discovered that the molecular structure of the salt crystals coating the rocks at the waters edge is spiral in form. • The construction was filmed in the movie describing the forms and life of the whole site. • Environmental fluctuations often place this underwater. • Smithson died at age 35 in a plane crash while surveying a site for a new work in Texas.

Spiral Jetty Great Salt Lake, Utah, U.S Robert Smithson 1970 C.E. Earthwork; mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks and water coil

• In color field painting, diluted paint is poured onto an unprimed canvas and the pigment is allowed to soak in. • The appearance is spontaneous and seems accidental. • Helen Frankenthaler was the daughter of a New York State Supreme Court Justice who studied at the Dalton school in New York. • She stayed in New York nearly her entire career.

The Bay Helen Frankenchaler 1963 C.E. Acrylic on canvas

• When Wifredo Lam painted The Jungle (1943), Cuba had already spent over four decades at the mercy of United States-interests. • Wifredo Lam remains the most renowned painter from Cuba • The Jungle remains his best known work • and an important painting in the history of Latin American art and the history twentieth-century modernism more broadly. • In the 1920s and 30s, Lam was in Madrid and Paris, • but in 1941 as Europe was engulfed by war, he returned to his native country. • Though he would leave Cuba again for Europe after the war, key elements within his artistic practice intersected during this period: • Lam's consciousness of Cuba's socio-economic realities; • his artistic formation in Europe under the influence of Surrealism; • and his re-acquaintance with Afro-Caribbean culture. • This remarkable collision resulted in the artist's most notable work, The Jungle. • The Jungle, currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, • has an undeniable presence within the gallery • the cluster of enigmatic faces, limbs, and sugarcane crowd a canvas that is nearly an 8 foot square. • Lam's bold painting is a game of perception. • The artist haphazardly constructs the figures from a collection of distinct forms • crescent-shaped faces; • prominent, rounded backsides; • willowy arms and legs; • and flat, cloddish hands and feet. • When assembled these figures resemble a funhouse mirror reflection. • The disproportion among the shapes generates an uneasy balance between the composition's denser top and more open bottom • —there are not enough feet and legs to support the upper half of the painting, • which seems on the verge of toppling over. • Another significant element within Lam's game of perception is how he places the figures within an unorthodox landscape. • Lam's panorama excludes the typical elements of a horizon line, sky or wide view; • instead this is a tight, directionless snapshot, • with only the faintest sense of the ground. • One part of the flora in this scene—sugarcane—is alien to the jungle setting suggested by the painting's title • Sugarcane does not grow in jungles but rather is cultivated in fields. • In 1940s Cuba, sugarcane was big business, requiring the toil of thousands of laborers similar to the cotton industry in the American South before the Civil War. • The reality of laboring Cubans was in sharp contrast to how foreigners perceived the island nation, namely as a playground. • Lam's painting remains an unusual Cuban landscape compared to the tourism posters that depicted the country as a destination for Americans seeking beachside resorts. • While northern visitors enjoyed a permissive resort experience, U.S. corporations ran their businesses, including sugar production. • Though Cuba gained independence from Spain at the end of nineteenth century, the United States maintained the right to intervene in Cuba's affairs, which destabilized politics on the island for decades.

The Jungle Wifredo Lam 1943 C.E. Gouache on paper mounted on canvas

• Not a truth for a moment but a truth for all time. • The Fin de Seicle (End of the Century) saw a spirit of dissolution and anxiety that characterized the European work of late 1800's, especially in Austria. • This was an intense preoccupation with sexual drives, powers and perversions---an immersion in the exploration of the unconscious.. • Gustave Klimt was a Viennese artist. • His work, The Kiss, illustrated the flamboyance of the period with unsettling undertones. • A couple is locked in an embrace in an ambiguous setting. • The embrace is only evident through seeing a small segment of each body, and almost nothing of the man's face. • The rest of the canvas is flat patterning, demonstrating ties to Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement. • The work invokes the contrast of depicting both two and three dimensions in the same work like Degas. • The patterns signify gender contrasts: rectangles for the men's garment, circles for the woman's. • The patterning also unites the two lovers into a single formal entity and emphasizes their erotic union.

The Kiss Gustave Klimt 1907-1908 C.E. Oil and gold leaf on canvas

• This version of The Kiss is one of the few works that Brancusi made in response to a specific commission. • It was requested by John Quinn, Brancusi's patron in New York, who admired the small plaster version of The Kiss in the collection of the artist Walter Pach. • Pach, who was serving as Quinn's intermediary with Brancusi, wrote the sculptor that Quinn wondered about "the original version" of The Kiss • A subsequent letter on March 3, 1916, confirmed Quinn's order for a new stone version, presumably after Brancusi replied that the "original" stone version, which had been given to Victor Popp in 1910, was unavailable. • This sculpture was long assumed to date from either 1908 or 1912, based on the dates published in the catalogues of exhibitions during the 1920s • . As a work of 1916, it represents not a first effort at direct carving, as manifest in The Kiss of 1907-8, but a sophisticated adaptation of it. • Constantin Brancusi's series of works titled The Kiss constitutes one of the most celebrated depictions of love in the history of art. • This version is the fourth and perhaps most sophisticated of the several sculptures Brancusi created around the theme. • Utilizing a limestone block, the artist employed the method of direct carving to produce the incised contours that delineate the male and female forms. • This sculpture is the most geometric of all Brancusi's variations on the theme. • The tall block of stone is vertically separated down the • the woman distinguished from the man by her rounded breast and the long hair falling down her back. • But otherwise the forms are fused: • the overall regularity of the stone, • the couple's arms and hands are flattened almost to fit into the block itself, • the joined mouths, • The two eyes, each half-seen in profile, combine to make one cyclopean, almond-shaped eye. • and the single arc of the two hairlines present a unified whole far more powerful than the two individuals within. • The juxtaposition of smooth and rough surfaces paired with the dramatic simplification of the human figures, which are shown from the waist up, may suggest Brancusi's awareness of "primitive" African sculpture and perhaps also of the Cubist works of his contemporaries.

The Kiss (1916 Version) Constantin Brancusi Original 1907-1908 C.E. Stone

• Jacob Lawrence was an African-American artist who moved to Harlem, New York in 1927 while still a boy. • There he came under the spell of the African Art and the African-American history he found in lectures and exhibitions, and in the special programs sponsored by the 135th St. branch of the New York public library, which had outstanding collections of African-American art and archival data • . Inspired by the politically oriented art of Goya, Daumier and Orozco, he was also influenced by the many artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance whom he met, including Aaron Douglass. • Lawrence found his subjects in the every day life of Harlem and in African-American history. • In 1941, he began a 60 painting series titled The Migration of the Negro • in which he defined his vision of the continuing African-American struggle against discrimination. • Unlike his earlier historical paintings depicting important figures in American history, such as the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, This series called attention to a contemporaneous event - the ongoing exodus of black labor from the southern United States. • Disillusioned with their lives in the south, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans migrated north in the years following World War I, • Seeking improved economic opportunities • and a more hospitable political and social environment. • But the conditions African-Americans encountered both during their migration and in the north were often is difficult and discriminatory as those they had left behind. • Lawrence do from his own experience • : " I was part of the migration, as was my family, my mother, my sister, and my brother... I grew up hearing tales about people "coming up, "another family arriving... I didn't realize what was happening until about the middle of the 1930s, and that's when The Migration series began to take form in my mind." • Lawrence's paintings provide numerous vignettes capturing the experiences of the African-Americans who had moved to the north. • Often, a sense of the bleakness and degradation of their new life dominates the images. • Number 49 of this series bear's the caption "They also found discrimination in the North although it was much different from that which they had known in the South."

The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 49 Jacob Lawrence 1940-1941 C.E. Casein tempera on hardboard

• Georges Braque was a Fauve painter who found the style challenging and rethought his painting style. • His work exemplifies Analytic Cubism. • The subject is a Portuguese musician from the artist's memory. • Braque dissected the man and his instrument, then placed the forms in an interaction with the space around them. • Cubists used subdued hues, • and Braque used solely browns here. • It is difficult to discover clues to the subject from the artist's breakdown of form. • There is a suggestion of the form of a man and guitar, but the shapes interpenetrate and hover. • Light and dark represent both transparency to see through levels and chiaroscuro modeling . • The solids emerge to almost be cancelled. • Braque added stenciled numbers and letters. • These help the painter play with the viewer's perception of two and three dimensional planes. • The shading and shapes of colors seem to flow behind and underneath them. • This example of Cubism is a disconcerting excursion into ambiguity and doubt, disrupting the expectations of the viewer

The Portuguese Georges Braque 1911 C.E. Oil on canvas

• During this time between the two wars, photography emerged as a respected branch of the fine arts. • The person most responsible for elevating the stature of photography was Alfred Stieglitz. • He took the camera everywhere he went and photographed whatever he saw around him, • from the bustling streets of New York City, • to cloudscapes in upstate New York • and the faces of friends and relatives. • He believed in making only "straight, and manipulated" photographs. • He exposed and printed his work using basic photographic processes, without resorting to techniques such as double exposure or double printing • that would add information absent in the subject when he released the shutter. • Stieglitz said he wanted the photographs he made to "hold a moment, to record something so completely that those who would see it would relived an equivalent of what had been expressed." • Stieglitz specialized in photographs of his environment, and saw the subject in terms of arrangements of forms and of the "colors" of his black-and-white materials. • His static approach crystallized during the making of The Steerage, • taken during a voyage to Europe with his first wife and daughter in 1907. • Traveling first class, Stieglitz rapidly grew bored with the company of the prosperous passengers in his section of the ship. • He walked as far forward on the first class level as he could, when the rail around the opening into the lower deck brought him up short. • This level was for the steerage passengers the US government sent back to Europe after refusing them entrance into the country.

The Steerage Alfred Stieglitz 1907 C.E. Photogravure

• Frida Kahlo, married to Diego Rivera, Born to a Mexican mother and German father. • Art historians offer consider her of surrealist due to the psychic, autobiographical issues she dealt with in her art. • She herself however rejected any association with the surrealists. • used the details of her life as powerful symbols for the psychological pain of human existence • She began painting seriously as a young student, during convalescents from an accident that tragically left her in constant pain. • Her life became a heroic and tumultuous battle for survival against illness and stormy personal relationships. • The Two Fridas is typical of her long series of unflinching self-portraits, one of the few large-scale canvases she produced. • The twin figures sit side-by-side on the little bench in a barren landscape under a stormy sky. • The figures suggest different sides of the artist's personality, inextricably linked by the clasped hands and by the thin artery stretching between them, joining their exposed hearts. • The artery ends on one side and surgical forceps and on the other in a miniature portrait of her husband as a child • Her deeply personal paintings touch sensual and psychological memories in her audience. • However to read her painting solely as autobiographical overlooks the powerful political dimension of her art. • She was deeply nationalistic and committed to her Mexican heritage. • Politically active, she joined the Communist Party in 1920 and participated in public protests. • The Two Fridas incorporates her commentary on the struggle facing Mexicans in the early 20th century and defining their national cultural identity • The figure on the right, representing indigenous culture, appears in a Tehuana dress, the traditional costume of Zapotec women. • The figure on the left, representing imperialist forces, wears a European-style white lace dress. • The heart, depicted here in such dramatic fashion, was an important symbol in the art of the Aztecs, whom the Mexican nationalists idealized as the last independent rulers of their land. • This work represents the artist's personal struggles and the struggles of her homeland

The Two Fridas Frida Kahlo 1939 C.E. Oil on canvas

Frottage

The technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art.

Documentary Photography

Used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life.

• Villa Savoye, designed by La Courbusier, was a country house located near Paris. • It sits at the center of a large plot of land cleared of trees and shrubs • windows on all sides and the villas roof terrace provide the residents with broad views of the surrounding landscape. • The exterior colors - originally a dark green base, cream walls, and a rose and blue windscreen on top, were a deliberate analogy for the colors in the machine inspired Purist style of painting. • The structure has only a partially enclosed ground floor, • originally containing • a three car garage, • bedrooms, • a bathroom, • and utility rooms. • Today the ground floor includes • a ticket counter • and small gift shop for visitors. • The major living rooms are on the second floor, wrapping around an open central court. • Strip windows running along the membrane like exterior walls provide a illumination to the rooms as well as views out to nature. • From the second floor Court, a ramp leads up to the roof terrace and an interior garden protected by a curving windbreak along the north side. • The Villa has no traditional façade. • The ostensible approach to the house does not define an entrance. • Visitors must walk around and through the house to comprehend the layout, • which incorporates several changes of direction • and spiral staircases. • Space and masses inter penetrate fluidly • - inside and outside space intermingle. • Le Corbusier inverted traditional design practice. • By placing heavy elements above and light ones below, • and by refusing to enclose the ground story of the Villa with masonry walls,

Villa Savoye Poissy-sur-Seine, France Le Corbusier (Architect) 1929 C.E. Steel and reinforced concrete

• Dutch born Willem De Kooning's work is rooted in figural art, but shows an energetic application of pigment. • Women I depicts a ferocious looking woman was staring eyes and heavy breasts. • Her smile was inspired by an ad for Camel cigarettes, but it is more of a grimace. • This is one of the series inspired by female models on the billboard. • It suggests fertility figures, a satire of Venus the goddess of love. • He worked on this for almost 2 years-- • he would paint the image, then scrape it away the next day and start again. • His wife Elaine estimated he did this about 200 times. • He also created nonrepresentational works with large areas of pigment that were raw and intense. • His dealer said sometimes he brought in canvases with holes in them, where the works had been too vigorously over painted.

Woman, I William de Kooning 1950-1952 C.E. Oil on canvas