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Hanging Construction

Alexander Rodchenko, Hanging Construction, 1920 - believed the idea that the artist could serve the revolution through a practical application of art in engineering, architecture, theater, and industrial and graphic design. made of concentric circles, which move slowly in currents of air IT WAS ONE OF THE FIRST SCULPTURES THAT EMPLOYED MOVEMENT. -. The shapes, cut from a single piece of plywood, could be collapsed after exhibition and easily stored. Rodchenko also made versions (none of which survives) based on a triangle, a square, a hexagon, and an ellipse. -This creation of a three-dimensional object with planar elements reveals the Constructivists' interest in mathematics and geometry.

read books

Alexander Rodchenko, Read Books, 1925 -turning more and more to the idea that the artist could serve the revolution through a practical application of art in engineering, architecture, theater, and industrial and graphic design. -Rodchenko was ardently committed to the Soviet experiment. After 1921 he devoted himself to graphic, textile, and theater design. His advertising poster from 1924 (fig. 9.37) typifies the striking typographical innovations of the Russian avant-garde. --Rodchenko constructed a composition of sharp diagonals, light-dark contrasts, and asymmetrical patterns. Given the time and the place in which it was made, Rodchenko's photograph seems a metaphor for a new society where outdated perspectives have given way to dramatic new ones.

The Steerage

Alfred Stieglietz, The Steerage, 1910 -he began his long and distinguished career as a photographer and launched his crusade to establish photography as a fine art -Because Stieglitz maintained a strict "truth to materials" position, creating highly expressive images without the aid of darkroom enhancement, he was an important forerunner of so-called "STRAIGHT" photography. The straight photographer exploits the intrinsic properties of the camera to make photographs that look like photographs instead of imitations of paintings or fine-art prints. -The Steerage (fig. 15.7). Avoiding even the slightest Pictorialist sentiment or anecdote, Stieglitz provided a straight document of the scene, which he said was not merely a crowd of immigrants but "a study in mathematical lines . . . in a pattern of light and shade."

O'Keeffe Hands and Thimble

Alfred Stieglitz, O'Keeffe Hands and Thimble, 1920 he biomorphic, Kandinsky-like abstractions in charcoal that she made in 1915-16 so impressed Stieglitz that he soon gave her an exhibition. The two artists married in 1924. Before he put away his camera for good in 1937, Stieglitz made more than 300 photographs of O'Keeffe (fig. 15.15), contributing to her almost cult status in the art of the twentieth century.

Exquisite Corpse

Andre Breton, etc, Exquisite Corpse, c. 1930 -When this method of COLLABORATIVE CHANCE was adapted for collective drawings (fig. 14.1), the surprising results coincided with the Surrealist love of the unexpected. The elements of chance, randomness, and coincidence in the formation of a work of art had for years been explored by the Dadaists. Now it became the basis for intensive study for the Surrealists -FOUNDING FATHER OF SURREALIST -SURREALISM SURREALISM, noun, masc., pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.

Battle of Fishes

Andre Masson, Battle of Fishes, 1930 -ndré Masson (1896-1987). Among the first Surrealists, Masson was the most passionate revolutionary, a man of vehement convictions who had been deeply spiritually scarred by his experiences in World War I. --Battle of Fishes (fig. 14.15) is an example of Masson's sand painting, which he made by freely applying adhesive to the --canvas, then throwing sand over the surface and brushing away the excess. The layers of sand would suggest forms to the artist, "although almost always irrational ones," he said. He then added lines and small amounts of color, sometimes directly from the paint tube, to form a pictorial structure around the sand. Here the imagery is aquatic, though the artist described the fish as anthropomorphic -EXPERIMENTS WITH ANTHROPOMOPHIC SHAPES AND CHANCE

Pasiphae

Andre Masson, Pasiphae, 1940 -The classical myth of the Minotaur provided one of his recurrent themes in the 1930s and 40s. (It was he who named the Surrealist review after this part-man, part-bull beast from Greek mythology.) Because she displeased the sea god Poseidon, Pasiphaë was made to feel a passionate, carnal desire for a beautiful white bull. Following her union with the bull she gave birth to the monstrous Minotaur. Masson said he wanted to represent the violent union of woman and beast in such a way that it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. -MYTHOLOGICAL AND PHYSCOLOGICAL SURREALIST EXPRESSIONISM

genesis- the break

Barnett Newman, Genesis-The Break, 1950 By 1946, however, in canvases such as Genesis—The Break (fig. 16.21), the forms become more abstract and begin to shed their biological associations, although the round shape here is a recurring seed form. - "the division between heaven and earth." -While Newman did not seek out the atmospheric effects that Rothko achieved in his mature works, he was capable of brushed surfaces of tremendous beauty and nuance.

church street el

Charles Sheeler, Church Street El, 1920 Sheeler photographed skyscrapers—double exposing, tilting his camera, and then transferring these special effects and the patterns they produced to his paintings. -sheeler's 1920 painting Church Street El (fig. 15.24), representing a view looking down from a tall building in Lower Manhattan, was based on a still from the film. In its severe 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.

Rolling Power

Charles Sheeler, Rolling Power, 1930 The relationship between Sheeler's camera work (he stopped making strictly commercial photographs in the early 1930s) and his canvases seems to have been virtually symbiotic, as can be seen in the painting known as Rolling Power, which is based on a photograph taken by the artist as a preparatory study for the work (fig. 15.25). At first glance, the work in oil comes across as an almost literal transcription of a photograph. -- But Sheeler altered the composition and suppressed such details as the grease on the engine's piston box, all in keeping with Precisionism's love of immaculate surfaces and purified machine imagery.

Detroit Industry

Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry, 1930 (in the Detroit Institute of Arts) -oremost among his surviving works in the United States is a narrative fresco cycle for the Detroit Institute of Arts on the theme of the evolution of technology, culminating in automobile manufacture (fig. 15.46). Rivera toured the Ford motor plants for months, observing the workers and making preparatory sketches for his murals. The result is a tour de force of mural painting in which Rivera orchestrated man and machine into one great painted symphony. "The steel industry itself," he said, "has tremendous plastic beauty . . . it is as beautiful as the early Aztec or Mayan sculptures." -- In Rivera's vision, there is no sign of the unemployment or economic depression then crippling the country, nor the violent labor strikes at Ford that had just preceded his arrival in Detroit. At the same time, Rivera reveals criticism of capitalism's potential effects. Even though he portrays the workers with dignity, it is important to note that they are rendered in a dehumanized fashion.

flower day

Diego Rivera, Flower Day, 1925 -Rivera began to receive important commissions for monumental frescoes from the Mexican government. He attempted to create a national style reflecting both the history of Mexico and the socialist spirit of the Mexican revolution. - In the murals, Rivera turned away from the abstracting forms of Cubism to develop a modern Neoclassical style consisting of simple, monumental forms and bold areas of color. This style can also be seen in his occasional easel paintings, such as Flower Day, 1925 -While the subject of this work relates to an enormous mural project that Rivera undertook for the Ministry of Education in Mexico City, the massive figures and classically balanced composition derive from Italian art, as well as the Aztec and Mayan art that he consciously emulated.

Migrant Mother

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1940 -depicts mother with three of her children in a migrant worker camp (fig. 15.39). This unforgettable and often-reproduced image has been called the Madonna of the Depression. Considered the first "documentary" photographer, Lange redefined the term by saying, "a do

Harold Rosenberg #3

Elaine de Kooning, Harold Rosenberg #3, 1955 Her portrayal of art critic Harold Rosenberg (fig. 16.16), one of the champions of Abstract Expressionism, shows how she brought the gesturalism of the New York School to bear on figurative subjects. -With her depiction of Rosenberg, De Kooning participates in a tradition of portraying critics that goes back at least as far as Édouard Manet's painting of Émile Zola (see fig. 2.22). - The fraught relationship between artist and critic involves mutual dependence and vulnerability: a sympathetic critic can further an artist's career, and a successful artist can confirm a critic's perspicacity and prestige. In this way, portraits of critics are as much about art world relationships as they are about individuals. -Portraits of critics can also provide an opportunity for a statement of aesthetic commitments. Here, De Kooning depicts Rosenberg using precisely the approach he had championed in The American Action Painters: "It is to be taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever be or be not in it, will be a tension." -Indeed, the oil paint applied in broad strokes to the canvas competes with and ultimately conquers the ostensible subject of the canvas. Rosenberg appears placid, enervated by the energized passages of color around him.

Ideal

Francis Picabia, Ideal, 1915 (a machine portrait of Alfred Stieglitz) In New York in 1915, he collaborated with Marcel Duchamp in establishing the American version of PROTO DADA and, in the spirit of Duchamp, took up machine imagery as an emblematic and ironic mode of representation. -MACHINARY AS A FORM OF EXPRESSION. In this "mechanomorphic" style, Picabia achieved some of his most distinctive work, particularly a series of Machine Portraits of himself and his key associates in New York. Thus, he saw Stieglitz (fig. 10.15) as a broken bellows camera, equipped with an automobile brake in working position and a gear shift in neutral, signifying the frustrations experienced by someone trying to present experimental art in philistine TRADITIONALISM America -FUNCTIONLESS MACHINE

Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace, 1940 -When André Breton visited Kahlo and Rivera in Mexico in 1938, he claimed Kahlo as a Surrealist and arranged for her work to be shown, with considerable success, in New York. Breton also promised Kahlo a Paris show, which opened in 1939 thanks to Duchamp's intervention. Soon thereafter she and Rivera divorced (they remarried a year later), and Kahlo made several self-portraits documenting her grief. In Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace (fig. 15.50) she assumes the role of martyr, impaled by her necklace from which a dead hummingbird (worn by the lovelorn) hangs.

Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the US,

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the US, 1930 intimate autobiography through an astonishing series of self-portraits. In an early example (fig. 15.49), she envisions herself in a long pink dress surrounded at the left by the cultural artifacts of Mexico and, at the right, the industrial trappings of the North. The hieratic and miniaturist technique she employs in this small painting on metal is in the folk tradition of Mexican votive paintings, which depict religious figures often surrounded by fantastic attributes.

Republican Automatons

George Grosz, Republican Automatons, 1920 applies the style and motifs of De Chirico and the Metaphysical School to political satire, as empty-headed, blank-faced, and mutilated automatons parade loyally through the streets of a mechanistic metropolis on their way to vote as they are told. In such works as this, Grosz comes closest to the spirit of the Dadaists and Surrealists.

Music-Pink and Blue II,

Georgia O'Keeffe, Music-Pink and Blue II, 1920 is a breathtaking study in chromatic relationships and organic form. The title suggests the lingering influence of Kandinsky's equation of color with music and, ultimately, with emotion. --Typically ambivalent, the forms resemble an enlarged close-up of the flowers that O'Keeffe painted in the 1920s, although some have interpreted them as implicitly sexual. --The persistence of interpretations linking O'Keeffe's abstractions to female genitalia or sexuality speaks to the distinctions critics and art historians have drawn between O'Keeffe's work and that of her male contemporaries, whose works are rarely subjected to such biological essentialism.

Red & Blue Chair,

Gerrit Rietveld, Red & Blue Chair, 1920 -His Red and Blue Chair (fig. 12.15) is among the most succinct statements of de Stijl design. -The simple, skeleton-like frame clearly discloses its structure, which, like all of Rietveld's furniture, eschews any sense of the luxurious or highly crafted object, for it was intended for mass production (which never took place). - The tilted planes of the seat and back, which have parallels in the linear structures of some of Van Doesburg's paintings (see figs. 12.5, 12.6), convey less a sense of classical balance than of dynamic equilibrium. -"The construction," the artist wrote, "is attuned to the parts to insure that no part dominates or is subordinate to the others. In this way the whole stands freely and clearly in space, and the form stands out from the material." -Fundamental to de Stijl philosophy WAS THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE WHOLE TO ITS PARTS. Rietveld's influence was keenly felt at the Bauhaus art school, whose director Walter Gropius shared his commitment to aesthetic unity and pointed to his designs as exemplary models for students

Schröder House exterior

Gerrit Rietveld, Schröder House exterior, 1920 -Rietveld used detached interlocking planes of rectangular slabs, joined by unadorned piping, to break up the structure, giving the whole the appearance of a Constructivist sculpture (fig. 12.13)

Schröder House interior

Gerrit Rietveld, Schröder House interior, 1920 -WHOLE IN RELATIONSHIP TO ITS PARTS. empolyed modernist elements -. The large corner and row windows give ample interior light; cantilevered roofs shelter the interior from the sun; and, according to Mrs. Schröder's requirements, sliding partitions created open-plan spaces for maximum flexibility of movement (fig. 12.14). -- The rooms are light, airy, and cool, thus planned to create a close relationship between the interior spaces and exterior nature. --OPEN FLOOR PLAN EMPHASIZED BY INTERCHANGING PARTITIONS

Cut With the Kitchen Knife

Hannah Hoch, Cut With the Kitchen Knife . . . 1920 The dizzying profusion of imagery here demonstrates how photomontage relies on material appropriated from its normal context, such as magazine illustration, and introduces it into a new, disjunctive context, thereby investing it with new meaning. Höch here presents a satirical panorama of Weimar society. She includes photographs of her Dada colleagues, Communist leaders, dancers, sports figures, and Dada slogans in varying typefaces. The despised Weimar government leaders at the upper right are labeled "anti-Dada movement." At the very center of the composition is a photo of a popular dancer who seems to toss her out-of-scale head into the air. --political satire mocking gluttony of authoritarians

.. .. At the Cabaret Voltaire

Hugo Ball, .. .. At the Cabaret Voltaire, 1920 DADA --Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, was the first important center in which an art, a literature, and even a music and a theater of the fantastic and the absurd arose. In 1915 a number of artists and writers, almost all in their twenties and in one way or another displaced by the war, converged on this city --Thrown together in Zurich, these young men and women expressed their reactions to the spreading hysteria of a world at war in forms that were intended as negative, anarchic, and destructive of all conventions. Dada was a means of expressing outrage at the war and disaffection for the materialist and nationalist views that promoted it. -In Dada there was a central force of wildly imaginative humor, one of its lasting delights—whether manifested in free-word-association poetry readings drowned in the din of noise machines, in absurd theatrical or cabaret performances (see fig. 10.2), in nonsense lectures, or in paintings produced by chance or intuition uncontrolled by reason. Nevertheless, it had a serious intent: the Zurich Dadaists were engaging in a critical re-examination of the traditions, premises, rules, logical bases, even the concepts of order, coherence, and beauty that had guided the creation of the arts throughout history and remained central to the enterprise of high-minded, utopian modernism. -Hugo Ball, a philosopher and mystic as well as a poet, was the first actor in the Dada drama. In February 1916, with the nightclub entertainer Emmy Hennings, he founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich as a meeting place for these free spirits and a stage from which existing values could be attacked -COSTUMES AND EMBRACE OF ARTISTS AND CHAOS

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

In 1950 Newman made Onement, I (fig. 16.22), which he regarded as the breakthrough picture that established his basic formula: a unified color field interrupted by a vertical line—a Zip as he called it—or, rather, a narrow, vertical contrasting color space that runs the length of the canvas. The nature of the Zip varied widely, from irregular hand-brushed bands to uninflected, straight edges made possible with the use of masking tape, but the impression is usually of an opening in the picture plane rather than simply a line on the surface.

Number 1A,

Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1945 By 1947 Pollock had begun to experiment with "allover painting," a labyrinthine network of lines, splatters, and paint drips from which emerged the great drip or poured paintings of the next few years. -Number 1A, 1948 (fig. 16.8) is an early realization of his distinctive approach to drip painting. Its intricate web of oil colors mixed with black enamel and aluminum paint asserts and then subverts the viewer's attempt to interpret the image -dynamism -a sequence of overlapping webs or as a sort of veil obscuring an underlying subject. Thin lines of dripped pigment commingle with broader strokes and even handprints in the upper right quadrant, while smudges of red-pink punctuate the lower left portion of the composition, asserting the possibility of a distinct foreground before dissolving into the play of colors across the plane of the canva

The Migration Series,

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, 1940 -historical documentation -- he made sixty panels on the theme of the migration by black men and women from the rural South to the industrial North during and after World War I (fig. 15.35). Lawrence thoroughly researched his subject and attached his own texts to each of the paintings, outlining the causes for the migration and the difficulties encountered by the workers in the new labor force as they headed for steel mills and railroads in cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. --unified the panels by establishing a common color chord of red, green, yellow, and black and a style of boldly delineated silhouettes

Carnival of Harlequin

Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1925 Carnival of Harlequin, 1924-25 (fig. 14.10), is --one of the first Surrealist pictures where Miró's playful sense of caprice has been given full rein. His space, the suggested confines of a gray-ish-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, disembodied eye. -- To the right of the ladder is a man with a disk-shaped head who sports a long-stemmed pipe beneath a tendriled mustache and 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. --Miró's unreal world is painstakingly rendered and remarkably vivid; even his inanimate objects have an eager vitality. He derived his imagery from many sources beyond his own fertile imagination. --While some are based on forms in nature, others may stem from medieval art or the paintings of his fellow Surrealists. -- As they float in the air or cavort on the ground, his creatures are spread equally across the entire surface of the painting, so our eyes do not alight in one central place

Constellations

Joan Miro, Constellations, 1940 Between January 1940 and September 1941 he worked on a series of twenty-three small gouaches entitled Constellations (fig. 14.14), which are among his most intricate and lyrical creations. In the sparkling compositions the artist was concerned with ideas of flight and transformation as he contemplated the migration of birds, the seasonal renewal of butterfly hordes, and the flow of constellations and galaxies. Miró dispersed his imagery evenly across the surface

Dog Barking at the Moon,

Joan Miro, Dog Barking at the Moon, 1925 -Barking at the Moon (fig. 14.11). Again we find the ladder, for Miró a symbol of transcendence and a bridge to another, unearthly realm. But it is now a player in a depopulated nocturnal landscape, a dark and alien place that resembles a scene from a dream.

Lower Manhattan (from Top of Woolworth Building),

John Marin, Lower Manhattan (from Top of Woolworth Building), 1920 -an explosion of buildings erupts from a black circular form containing a sunburst center, a cut-out form that Marin attached to the paper with thread. He reinforced the transparent, angular strokes of the watercolor with charcoal, creating a work of graphic force that vibrates with the clamor and speed of the city. -EMPHASIZES AN AMERICAN CUBIST STYLE

Installation phot of 0-10 exhibtion

Kazimir Malevich, Installation photo of 0-10 exhibtion, 1915 -Included in the exhibition was the painting Black Square, hung high across the corner of the room in the traditional place of a Russian icon. -This emblem of Suprematism, the most reductive, uncompromisingly abstract painting of its time, represented an astonishing conceptual leap from Malevich's work of the previous year. -In his volume of essays entitled The Non-Objective World, the artist defined Suprematism as "the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art." "To the Suprematist,"

Morning in the Village After a Snowstorm

Kazimir Malevich, Morning in the Village After a Snowstorm, 1910 -russian constructivist -took Cubist geometry to its most radical conclusion -cylindrical figures of peasants move through a mechanized landscape, with houses and trees modeled in light, graded hues of red, white, and blue. The snow is organized into sharp-edged metallic-looking mounds. The resemblance to Léger's earlier machine Cubism is startling

Suprematist Composition: White Square on White

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White Square on White, 1915 -Malevich established three stages of Suprematism: the black, the red or colored, and the white. -In the final phase, realized in monochromatic paintings of 1917 and 1918 (fig. 9.29), the artist achieved the ultimate stage in the Suprematist ascent toward an ideal world and a complete renunciation of materiality, - white symbolized the "real concept of infinity." This example displays a tilted square of white within the canvas square of a somewhat different shade of white—a reduction of painting to the simplest relations of geometric shapes. -drew heavy inspiration from architecture -developed a vocab of expressive geometry/

Untitled

Lee Krasner, Untitled, 1945 ). Throughout the 1940s and 50s, she gradually moved away from Cubist-based forms to a concern for spontaneous gesture and large-scale allover compositions, while remaining committed to a Mondrianesque sense of structure. A painting from 1949 (fig. 16.10) shows a web of elusive forms whose vertical organization suggests a deliberate, readable order, leading the viewer to anticipate decoding the marks as some form of language. The promised linguistic coherence fails to materialize, though, and the forms maintain their manic mystery. The rhythm of colors and lines endows the piece with a dynamism as the figures appear to struggle against the grid underlying the composition.

Dancing Fans

Man Ray, Dancing Fans, 1920 -No less ingenious in his ability to devise Dada objects than to photograph them was Man Ray -paintings made with an airbrush, which he called Aerographs. Normally reserved for commercial graphic work, the airbrush made possible the soft tonalities in the dancing fans and cones of Seguidilla (fig. 10.16). The artist was delighted with his new discovery. "It was wonderful," he said, "to paint a picture without touching the canvas."

Gift

Man Ray, Gift, 1920 spirit of Duchamp's slightly altered or "assisted" readymades. With characteristic black humor, Man Ray subverted an iron's normal utilitarian function by attaching fourteen tacks to its surface, transforming this familiar object into something alien and threatening. The work was made for the avant-garde French composer Erik Satie, hence its title.

UNTITLED

Man Ray, Untitled, 1920 (Rayograph) (photogram) invented cameraless photographic images that he called Rayographs. These were made by placing objects on or near sensitized paper that was then exposed directly to light, technically akin to Anna Atkins's cyanotypes of the previous century (see fig. 2.5). In the proper Dada manner, the technique was discovered accidentally in the darkroom. By controlling exposure and by moving or removing objects, the artist used this "automatic" process to create images of a strangely abstract or symbolic character (fig. 10.18).

3 Standard Stoppages

Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages, 1915 -. In a spirit that mocked the notion of standard, scientifically perfect measurement, Duchamp dropped three strings, each one meter in length, from a height of one meter onto a painted canvas. The strings were affixed to the canvas with varnish in the shape they assumed to "IMPRISON FORMS OBTAINED THROUGH CHANCE" -hese sections of canvas and screen were then cut from the stretcher and laid down on glass panels, and three templates were cut from wooden rulers in the profile of the shapes assumed by the strings. SO THEN THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT OF CHANCE COULD BE REPRODUCED OVER AND OVER

bicycle wheel

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, original 1915 -READYMADE -SPOTENIETY, REMOVAL OF CHOICE BY THE ARTIST. ABSURDIST ASSUALT ON TRADITION -He stressed that it was in the very nature of the readymade to lack uniqueness, and since readymades are not originals in the conventional sense, a "replica will do just as well."

Bottle Rack and Fountain

Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Rack and Fountain, 1920 Duchamp's most outrageous and far-reaching assault on artistic tradition by far was his invention in 1913 of the "READYMADE," defined by the Surrealist André Breton as "manufactured objects promoted to the dignity of art through the choice of the artist." Duchamp said his selection of common "found" objects, such as a bottle rack (fig. 10.8), -was guided by complete visual INDIFFERENCE, or "anaesthesia," and the absence of good or bad taste. The readymades demonstrated, in the most irritating fashion to the art world of Duchamp's day, that art could be made out of virtually anything, and that it required little or NO THOUGHT

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1910 During 1911 Duchamp also painted the first version of Nude Descending a Staircase, a work destined to become notorious as a popular symbol of modern art. In the famous second version, 1912 (fig. 7.46), the androgynous, mechanized figure has been fragmented and multiplied to suggest a staccato motion. --HEAVILY INSPIRED BY THE MODER DEVELOPEMENTS OF FILM --RELIES ON TRADITIONAL CUBIST WOODEN TONES

Passage From Virgin to Bride,

Marcel Duchamp, Passage From Virgin to Bride, 1910 -Subsequently in Munich the artist pursued his fantasies of sexualized machines in a series of paintings and drawings, including The Passage from Virgin to Bride -Although these works suggest anatomical diagrams of the respiratory, circulatory, digestive, or reproductive systems of higher mammals, in each Duchamp abandoned the physicality of the human body. The organic becomes mechanized, and human flesh is supplanted by tubes, pistons, and cylinders. The term "MECHANOMORPHIC" was eventually coined to describe Duchamp's distinctive grafting of machine forms onto human activity. -REFERENCES TRADITIONALIST SYMBOLS SUCH AS THE CONSUMMATION OF A BRIDE SUBVERTING THEM INTO SOMETHING LESS HUMAN AND MORE MACHINE

Fort Peck Dam

Margaret Bourke White, Fort Peck Dam, 1940 -documentary photographer//professional photo journalist -the same publisher launched Life in 1936, BourkeWhite's photograph of Fort Peck Dam appeared on the cover of the first issue (fig. 15.41), for which she also wrote the lead article. - Bourke-White favored the monumental in her boldly simplified compositions of colossal, mainly industrial, structures. While emphasizing the accomplishments of the country in a time of faltering confidence -her first major body of work documented the construction of the New York City skyscrapers in the early 1930s as the Depression began—she also focused her camera on human subjects. Some of her most compelling images depict farmers in the drought-stricken Midwest during the Depressio

untitled

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1950 in 1935 formed an independent artists' group with Gottlieb called The Ten. In 1940, in search of more profound and universal themes and impressed by his readings of Nietzsche and Jung, Rothko began to engage with ancient myths as a source of "eternal symbols. Rothko first made compositions based on classical myths and then, by the mid-1940s, painted biomorphic, Surrealist-inspired, hybrid creatures floating in primordial waters. These forms began to coalesce at the end of the decade into floating color shapes with loose, undefined edges within larger expanses of color (fig. 16.18). By 1949 Rothko had refined and simplified his shapes to the point where they consisted of color rectangles floating on a color ground (fig. 16.19). He applied thin washes of oil paint containing considerable tonal variation and blurred the edges of the rectangles to create luminous color effects and a shifting, ambiguous space. Over the next twenty years, he explored this basic compositional type with infinite and

1 Copper Plate 1 Zinc Plate

Max Ernst, 1 Copper Plate 1 Zinc Plate . . . , 1920 (transition from Dada to Surrealism) he produced collages and photomontages that demonstrated a genius for suggesting the metamorphosis or double identity of objects, a topic later central to Surrealist iconography. In an ingenious work from 1920 (fig. 10.25), Ernst invented his own mechanistic forms as stand-ins for the human body. As he frequently did during this period, the artist took a page from a 1914 scientific text illustrating chemistry and biology equipment and, by overpainting certain areas and inserting his own additions, he transformed goggles and other laboratory utensils into a pair of hilarious creatures before a landscape. The composition bears telling comparison with Picabia's mechanomorphic inventions

The Horde

Max Ernst, The Horde, 1930 -The 1927 canvas The Horde (fig. 14.6) expresses the increasingly ominous mood of his paintings. The monstrous, tree-like figures are among the many frightening premonitions of the conflict that would overtake Europe in the next decade. In 1941, Ernst fled World War II in Europe and settled in New York City, where his presence, along with other Surrealist refugees, would have tremendous repercussions for American art. -utilizing a child like rubbing technique -political surealism

Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightengale

Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightengale, 1920 -surrealist imagery with dadaist assemblage -a 1924 dream landscape in which two girls—one collapsed on the ground, the other running and brandishing a knife—are frightened by a tiny bird. The fantasy is given peculiar emphasis by the elements attached to the panel—the house on the right and the open gate on the left. A figure on top of the house clutches a young girl and seems to reach for the actual wooden knob on the frame. -titles the work after its created

Chinese Restaurant

Max Weber, Chinese Restaurant, 1915 -UNIQUE CUBIST DECONSTRUCTED LANGUAGE IN he 1915 Chinese Restaurant (fig. 15.10) is his response to a friend's suggestion that he make a painting about the conversations they had had over dinners in New York City's Chinatown. --The wealth of colorful patterns suggests fragments of curtains, tile floors, and figures—colliding visual recollections of a bustling, urban interior and analogs for the rapid exchange of new ideas. Toward the end of World War I, the artist abandoned Cubism for a form of expressionist figuration related to that of Chagall and Soutine.

Object: Luncheon in Fur,

Meret Oppenheim, Object: Luncheon in Fur, 1940 a cup, plate, and spoon covered with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. The idea for this "fur-lined tea cup," which has become the very archetype of the Surrealist object - In Oppenheim's hands, this emblem of domesticity and the niceties of social intercourse metamorphosed into a hairy object that is both repellent and eroticized, the consummate fetish. Conjuring both desire and dread, Oppenheim's Object revels in Freudian erotic ambivalence and sexual anxiety (see Fetishism, p. 298). PHYSCO SEXUAL FREUDIAN DOMESTICITY

Guernica

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1940 (Cubism) --1937 during the spanish civil war german bombers flying for the spanish fascist leader GENERAL FRANCO executed the worlds first intentional mass bombing of civilians killing 1,600 people and shocking the world. PICASso painted the hallucinatory nightmare GUERNICA in response to the brutality of war. (often compared to goya's The 3rd of May). -synthetic cubism however it breaks the sythetic cubist standard of using bright color, its in black and white. -newspaper image, a response to how you would find out about horrible news -the bull a symbol of mascolinity, strenth, anger, matador subdues the evil bulll -BULL SYMBOLIZES EVIL (GENERAL FRANCO//SPAIN), DOVE SYMBOLIZES PEACE, THE CANDLE REPRESENTS THE LIGHT OF TRUTH, AND THE LIGHTBULB ABOVE REPRESENTS THE BOMBS BEING DROPPED ABOVE, ALSO THE FLASH OF A CAMERA CAPTURING THE EVENT innocentcivillians dying, dead baby held by mother (la pieta) and woman jumping out of window. -composition vaguely like the pediment of a greek temple (elivating the severity of the attack to that of greek war) -text like marking inside of figures represnts newspaper -massacred animals, struggle against reaction and the death of art. the lightbulb can also be interpreted as a bomb, evil eye, bare bulb in a tortures cell. -USING MODERN ART TO DISCUSS MODERN ISSUES.

A Janitor Who Paints,

Palmer Hayden, A Janitor Who Paints, 1950 His painting A Janitor Who Paints (fig. 15.28) 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 Cloyde Boykin, who, like Hayden, often picked up odd jobs to support himself. Hayden represents the artist at work in his small apartment, executing a portrait of a woman and her baby. A trash-can 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.

apple tree

Piet Mondrian Apple Tree, 1910 -tremendous role in shaping geometric abstraction -innovator of de stilj, influencer of painter sculpture and international style architecture -call for spiritual evaluation of abstraction amongst times of war and chaos -believed in universalizing ideas of THEOSOPHY. Like many of the spiritualist practices that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century, Theosophy COMBINED aspects of christian and Jewish mysticism with Eastern practices, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. Adherents to Theosophical beliefs hold that a FUNDAMENTAL HARMONY UNITES ALL THINGS, and this essential unity manifests itself visually in certain shapes, especially simple geometric forms like squares and circles -early work inspired by arbitrary colors of fauvists and strokes of van gogh -In Apple Tree (fig. 12.1), an image to which he devoted several paintings and drawings, Mondrian employed expressive, animated brushwork reminiscent of Van Gogh's, causing the whole scene to pulsate with energy. -recreated the image several times in various styles

Broadway Boogie Woogie

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1940 -heavily inspired by visuals of modern metropolis/city living. excitement of lights/skyscrapers and synasism of jazz -The impact of the city and music is most evident in Broadway Boogie Woogie, painted in 1942-43 (fig. 16.1). Here the artist departed radically from the formula that had occupied him for more than twenty years. There is still the rectangular grid, but the black, linear structure balanced against color areas is gone. In fact, the process is reversed: the grid itself is the color, with the lines consisting of little blocks of red, yellow, blue, and gray. The ground is a single plane of off-white, and against it vibrate the varicolored lines as well as larger color rectangles.

Composition in Color A

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Color A, 1915 -As early as 1912 the tree had virtually disappeared into a linear grid that covered the surface of the canvas -affected by the example of Cubism, but he gradually began to feel that the style "did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries: it was not developing abstraction toward its ultimate goal, the expression of pure reality. I felt that this could only be established by pure plastics (plasticism). -To him "plastic expression" referred to capacity of colors and forms to assert their presence, to affect the viewer. "Reality" or "the new reality" was the reality of plastic expression, or the reality of forms and colors in the painting. -"(a) in plastic art reality can be expressed only through the equilibrium of dynamic movements of form and color; (b) pure means afford the most effective way of attaining this." These ideas led him to develop a set of organizational principles in his art. Chief among them were the balance of unequal opposites, achieved through the right angle, and the simplification of color to the primary hues plus black and white. -During 1917 and later he explored another variation (fig. 12.2)—rectangles of flat color of varying sizes, suspended in a sometimes loose, sometimes precise rectangular arrangement. The color rectangles sometimes touch, sometimes float independently, and sometimes overlap. They appear positively as forms in front of the light background. Their interaction creates a surprising illusion of depth and movement, even though they are kept rigidly parallel to the surface of the canvas.

Tableau No. II

Piet Mondrian, Tableau No. II, 1920 -In 1920, with his first full-fledged painting based on the principles of Neoplasticism (meaning roughly "new image" or "new form"), Mondrian had found his solution to a long unsolved problem—how to express universals through a dynamic and asymmetrical equilibrium of vertical and horizontal structure, with primary hues of color disposed in rectangular areas. These elements gave visual expression to Mondrian's beliefs about the dynamic opposition and balance between the dual forces of matter and spirit, theories that grew out of his exposure to Theosophy.

The Spirit of Our Time

Raoul Hausmann, The Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head), 1920 Hausmann created a kind of three-dimensional collage. To a wooden mannequin head he attached real objects, including a metal collapsing cup, a tape measure, labels, and a pocketbook. Through his use of commonly found objects, Hausmann partook of the iconoclastic spirit of Duchamp's readymades and implied that human beings had been reduced to mindless robots, devoid of individual will.

Object, The Human Condition

Rene Magritte, Object, The Human Condition, 1930

the rape

Rene Magritte, The Rape, 1935 -FREUDIAN PHYSCO SSEXUAL -Magritte drew freely on the Freudian repertoire of sexual anxiety, a constellation of psychological experiences that presupposes a heterosexual male consciousness confronted with the alluring yet dangerous "eternal feminine." As is often the case with works by male Surrealists, Magritte's exploration of -unconscious drives posits a heterosexual male viewer confronted with an often violently distorted—even dismembered—female body. In the case of The Rape (Le viol) of 1934 (fig. 14.24), the instability of the image causes dis-orientation as it vacillates between a woman's limbless nude torso and an androgynous face.

Treachery of Images

Rene Magritte, Treachery of Images, 1930 -It portrays a briar pipe so meticulously that it might serve as a tobacconist's trademark. Beneath, rendered with comparable precision, is the legend Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("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. -EXPLORES THE ARTIFICE OF PAINTING

Just What Is It . .

Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It . . ., 1955 Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) defined Pop art in 1957 as "Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous and Big Business." -Hamilton's collage shows a "modern" apartment inhabited by a pin-up girl and her muscle-man mate, whose Tootsie Pop barbell prophesies the Pop movement on its label. Like Adam and Eve in a consumers' paradise, the couple have furnished their apartment with products of mass culture: television, tape recorder, an enlarged cover from a comic book, a Ford emblem, and an advertisement for a vacuum cleaner. -inspired by duchamp used assemblage mockery of consumerist coluture

Folk Musicians

Romare Bearden, Folk Musicians, 1940 With its simple modeling and consciously "folk" manner, the painting coincides with the prevailing Social Realist trends. The sophistication of Bearden's approach is nevertheless conveyed by his manipulation of space. --The loosely modeled figures appear flattened against the wall behind them, while the juxtaposition of strong complementary colors creates a sense of spatial expansion and movement. The spatial dynamism is further enhanced through Bearden's competing backgrounds: the brick wall suggestive of urban life gives way to reveal an expansive, rural landscape. !!!!!!--This juxtaposition suggests the interchange between urban and rural in the lives and culture of African-Americans, many of whom left their small southern hometowns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to seek opportunities in northern cities. -GREAT MIGRATION

Persistence of Memory

Salvador Dali, Persistence of Memory, 1930 --His detailed trompe l'oeil technique was designed to make his dreamworld more tangibly real than observed nature (he referred to his paintings as "hand-painted dream photographs"). He frequently used familiar objects as a point of departure—watches, insects, pianos, telephones, old prints or photographs—imparting to them fetishistic significance. -The space is as infinite as Tanguy's (see fig. 14.17), and rendered with hard objectivity. 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. --Throughout his career Dalí was obsessed with th MORPHOLOGY of hard and soft. Here, lying on the ground, is a large head in profile (which had appeared in several previous paintings) seemingly devoid of bone structure. Drooped over its surface, as on that of a tree and a shelf nearby, is a soft pocket watch. Dalí described these forms as "nothing more than the soft, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical Camembert cheese of space and time."

Design for sportswear

Stepanova, Design for sportswear, 1925 -wife of rodchenko who gave up painting in order to devote herself to production art. This did not mean traditional decorative arts but rather functional materials manufactured in an equal PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN ARTIST AND INDUSTRIAL WORKER -ART INTO LIFE AS CONSTRUCTIVIST RALLYING CALL - created striking fabrics in repetitive, geometric patterns suitable for industrial printing methods. She designed clothing, as did Rodchenko and Tatlin, for the new man and woman (fig. 9.39), with an emphasis on comfort and ease of movement for the worker. -displayed modernist design sensibilities

Card Players

Theo van Doesburg, Card Players, 1917 -----DE STILJ As much of Europe girded itself for war, artists living in neutral countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands continued their work, largely unimpeded. It was thanks to Dutch neutrality in World War I that the movement called de Stijl ("the style") was able to take root in the 1910s. Led by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, de Stijl embraced geometric abstraction and Constructivist ideas, free from the resurgence in classicism that led so many French avant-garde artists to retreat from abstraction. Constructivism in the hands of Western European artists like Van Doesburg and Mondrian must be understood as related but not identical to Russian Constructivism, which promoted a specific, Soviet-style socialism. Constructivism more generally can be understood as a movement in early twentieth-century modernism in which strong abstraction with a geometric basis is a defining element. -- This he found in his composition Card Players (fig. 12.5), based on a painting by Cézanne, but simplified to a complex of interacting shapes based on rectangles, the colors flat and reduced nearly to primaries. Fascinated by the mathematical implications of his new abstraction -did several variations at varying levels of deconstruction

Composition IX (Card Players)

Theo van Doesburg, Composition IX (Card Players), 1915 -Fascinated by the mathematical implications of his new abstraction, Van --even further reduced into simplistic monocromatic verticles and horizontals

City Building

Thomas Hart Benton, City Building, 1930 - where heroic workers 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. -cinematic motage effect between layered scenes

Model for Monument to the Third International

Vladimir Tatlin, Model for Monument to the Third International, 1920 -Like many avant-garde artists, Tatlin embraced the Russian Revolution. Thereafter, he cultivated his interest in engineering and architecture, an interest that saw its most ambitious result in his twenty-foot-high (over 6 m) model for a Monument to the Third International. it was a design for a building that would have been larger than the eiffel tower -The industrial materials of iron and glass and the dynamic, kinetic nature of the work symbolized the new machine age. -The tower was to function as a propaganda center for the Communist Third International, an organization devoted to the support of world revolution, and its rotating, ascending spiral form was a symbol of the aspirations of communism and, more generally, of the new era

Woman I,

Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950 --With this project, he embarked on a direct dialog with modernist predecessors like Manet, Matisse, Picasso, Kirchner, and many of the Surrealists, who made representations of the female body the locus of aesthetic experimentation. --Long characterized as a sort of homage to female beauty or a natural desire to explore the "eternal feminine," -- One current that De Kooning makes visible is the violence of such intense aesthetic scrutiny, his slashing strokes simultaneously evoking the work of a dispassionate anatomist as well as a frenzied attacker. The banal and the shocking coexist in Woman I, creating a striking aesthetic tension. -- A monumental image of a seated woman in a sundress is his repellent and arresting evocation of woman as sex symbol and fertility goddess. --At the same time, the strip of silver metallic paint along the right edge of the canvas insists on a decidedly quotidian setting—the aluminum edge of a screen door, perhaps, or other structure redolent of middle-class comfort—and anchors the sitter in the everyday world. --Although the vigorous paint application appears entirely improvisatory, the artist labored over the painting for eighteen months, scraping the canvas down, revising it, and, along the way, making countless drawings—he was a consummate draftsman—of the subject

, Heroic, Sublime, Man,

arnett Newman, Heroic, Sublime, Man, 1950 -is a mature, mural-size painting where the multiple Zips differ in hue and value, sometimes in stark contrast to the brilliant monochrome field, sometimes barely distinguishable from it. ---------------Newman wanted to maintain a human scale for his essentially life-affirming, humanist art. Indeed, his title for this work means Heroic Sublime Man, and his ubiquitous Zip has been read as a sign for the upright human being.

Guardians of the Secret

jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1945