Art History 136 midterm CSUF
Expressionism
Expressionism emerged as a response to a widespread anxiety about humanity's increasingly discordant relationship with the world and accompanying lost feelings of authenticity and spirituality. Was a reaction against Impressionism and academic art; encouraged the distortion of form and the deployment of strong colors to convey a variety of anxieties and yearnings. The classic phase of the Expressionist movement lasted from approximately 1905 to 1920 and spread throughout Europe. The arrival of Expressionism announced new standards in the creation and judgment of art. Art was now meant to come forth from within the artist, rather than from a depiction of the external visual world, and the standard for assessing the quality of a work of art became the character of the artist's feelings rather than an analysis of the composition. Expressionist artists often employed swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly executed brushstrokes in the depiction of their subjects. These techniques were meant to convey the turgid emotional state of the artist reacting to the anxieties of the modern world.
Arshile Gorky
Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism This artist's diverse body of work was crucial to the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. He adopted the biomorphic forms of the Surrealist painters, but further freed those forms through the process of painting itself by emphasizing more lyrical color and personal content. By means of his unique approach to color and form, he was able to communicate to the viewer the painful childhood experiences of the Armenian Genocide as well as the pleasant and nostalgic sentiments he felt toward his lost homeland. His work is also significant because it so directly reflects the cultural and historical milieu of New York in the 1940s, where avant-garde artists from both the United States and Europe converged, and of the postwar period in general. This philosophy proclaimed the absurdity of life at the same time as it called upon humans to take responsibility for creating their own meaning - which this artist did by creating beauty out of personal tragedy.
Louise Nevelson
Feminist Art This artist emerged in the art world amidst the dominance of the Abstract Expressionist movement. In her most iconic works, she utilized wooden objects that she gathered from urban debris piles to create her monumental installations - a process clearly influenced by the precedent of Duchamp's found object sculptures and "readymades." She carefully arranged the objects in order to historicize the debris within the new, narrative context of her wall sculptures. The stories embodied within her works resulted from her cumulative experiences. Her innovative sculptural environments and success within the male-dominated realm of the New York gallery system inspired many younger artists, primarily those involved in installation art and the Feminist art movements. This artist purposefully selected wooden objects for their evocative potential to call to mind the forms of the city, nature, and the celestial bodies. While the individual pieces had an intimate scale, they became monumental when viewed holistically within the combined environment of the assemblage.
Cubism
The artists abandoned perspective, which had been used to depict space since the Renaissance, and they also turned away from the realistic modeling of figures. These artists explored open form, piercing figures and objects by letting the space flow through them, blending background into foreground, and showing objects from various angles.
Roy De Carava
Was an American painter and photographer who resided in New York City. He was initially known for his early work chronicling the lives of African Americans and jazz artists in Harlem. He came to be known as a founder of fine art black and white photography separate from the "social documentary" style of his predecessors.
American Regionalism
Was an 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. It arose in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression, and ended in the 1940s due to the end of World War II and a lack of development within the movement.
Precisionism
Was the first indigenous modern-art movement in the United States and an early American contribution to the rise of Modernism. The style, which first emerged after World War I and was at the height of its popularity during the 1920s and early 1930s, celebrated the new American landscape of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories in a form that has also been called "Cubist-Realism."
Medici Slot Machine, 1942
We view this miniature world as though through a telescope lens - juxtaposing near and far distances. The spiral placed at the boy's feet evokes the spiral form found in the natural world - snails, roses, and DNA chromosomes. The spiral is also a metaphor for time and an allusion to life repeating itself in the cycle of the seasons. Spirals can also be found in the works of artists da Vinci and Duchamp. The space around the figure is fragmented into small segments that appear to be separate and yet together like in a kaleidoscope (a child's toy). But the black lines crisscross the surface to tie the various spaces together. The "slot machine" title captures the game theme Cornell was fond of while reinforcing the boy's youthful pursuits.
Willem de Kooning
Abstract Expressionism After Jackson Pollock, This artist was the most prominent and celebrated of the Abstract Expressionist painters. His pictures typify the vigorous gestural style of the movement and he, perhaps, did more than any of his contemporaries to develop a radically abstract style of painting that fused Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism. Although he established his reputation with a series of entirely abstract pictures, he felt a strong pull towards traditional subjects and would eventually become most famous for his pictures of women, which he painted in spells throughout his life. This artist, while generally considered to be an Abstract Expressionist, never fully abandoned the depiction of the human figure. His paintings of women feature a unique blend of gestural abstraction and figuration. Heavily influenced by the Cubism of Picasso, he became a master at ambiguously blending figure and ground in his pictures while dismembering, re-assembling and distorting his figures in the process. His paintings, exemplify 'action painting' - they are like records of a violent encounter, rather than finished works in the old arts tradition of fine painting.
Mark Rothko, Blue, Orange, Red, 1961
Abstract Expressionism This artist moved through many artistic styles until reaching his signature 1950s motif of soft, rectangular forms floating on a stained field of color. Heavily influenced by mythology and philosophy, he was insistent that his art was filled with content, and brimming with ideas. A fierce champion of social revolutionary thought, and the right to self-expression, he also expounded his views in numerous essays and critical reviews. This artist's work was profoundly imbued with emotional content that he articulated through a range of styles that evolved from figurative to abstract. His early figurative work - including landscapes, still lifes, figure studies, and portraits - demonstrated an ability to blend Expressionism and Surrealism. His search for new forms of expression led to his Color Field paintings, which employed shimmering color to convey a sense of spirituality.
Barnett Newman
Abstract Expressionism This artist shared the Abstract Expressionists' interests in myth and the primitive unconscious, but the huge fields of color and trademark "zips" in his pictures set him apart from the gestural abstraction of many of his peers. He would later become a touchstone for both Minimalists and a second generation of Color Field painters. This artist's pictures were a decisive break with the gestural abstraction of his peers. Instead, he devised an approach that avoided painting's conventional oppositions of figure and ground. He created a symbol, the "zip," which is characterized by areas of color separated by thin vertical lines, or "zips."
Robert Motherwell
Abstract Expressionism Was well versed in literature, philosophy and the European modernist traditions. His paintings, prints and collages feature simple shapes, bold color contrasts and a dynamic balance between restrained and boldly gestural brushstrokes. They reflect not only a dialogue with art history, philosophy and contemporary art, but also a sincere and considered engagement with autobiographical content, contemporary events and the essential human conditions of life, death, oppression and revolution.
Isamu Noguchi
American Sculptor and Designer Surrealism This artist was a major American and Japanese sculptor and designer, who spent over six decades creating abstract works - largely in stone - based on both organic and geometric forms. Greatly inspired by traditional Japanese art, as well as by the biomorphic style of some Surrealist art, he became internationally known both for his artwork and his publicly accessible furniture and architecture. His ultimate objective, to create and enhance public spaces through sculpture, provided his career with a distinct direction and established him as a critical figure in the worlds of post-war art, architecture and design. Noguchi was socially and artistically connected to Abstract Expressionism, as evident in his large-scale works evoking abstracted forms. Yet, his sculpture retained a distinct sensibility in its use of natural materials and its distinct blend of Surrealist and Japanese influence.
Surrealism
Artists sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Disdaining rationalism and literary realism, and powerfully influenced by psychoanalysis, These artists of this movement believed the rational mind repressed the power of the imagination, weighting it down with taboos.
Number 1A, 1948, 1948
As with many of Pollock's paintings, he began it with a linear framework of diluted black paint which in many areas soaked through the unprimed canvas. Over this he applied more skeins of paint in various colors - lines thick and thin, light and dark, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical. The balance between control and chance that Pollock maintained throughout his working process produced compositions that can have as much calm tranquillity as some works by Rothko.
Stuart Davis
Ashcan School, Early American Modernism, Cubism One of America's first modern artists and a forefather of Pop Art, This artist began his artistic career with the Ashcan School before embracing European modernism following the Armory Show. The artist's abstract paintings, infused with jazz rhythm and bold, colorful abstractions of New York's urban landscape or household objects, offer a taste of European Cubism with an American twist. Whether painting in the style of realism or Post-cubist abstraction, his determination to convey something of American political and consumer culture was unwavering.
Church Street El, 1920
Charles Sheeler created a series of carefully composed shots of Lower Manhattan by using simplified forms and eliminating textures to concentrate on rhythmic interplays of shapes and color, as well as patterns of light and shadow.
Migrant Mother, 1936
Dorothea Lange took this photograph in 1936, while employed by the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, formed during the Great Depression to raise awareness of and provide aid to impoverished farmers. This portrait of Florence Owens Thompson has achieved near mythical status, symbolizing, if not defining, an entire era in United States history; it is the "ultimate" photo of the Depression Era. Many of Lange's documentary photographs borrow techniques from the lexicon of modernism - dramatic angles and dynamic compositions - to produce startling and often jarring images of her subjects. They never overpower the subjects themselves, but instead subtly direct the viewer to a fresh appreciation of the individual's plight.
photograph from Household, 1964
Fashionable people did attend Kaprow's events - and this set popularised the term "happening" to describe something that was cutting edge or cool. Sol Goldberg's photograph of participants in Allan Kaprow's 'Women licking jam off a car,' from his happening.
Allan Kaprow
Happenings, Performance Art This artist was a pivotal figure in the shifting art world of the 1960s; his "happenings," a form of spontaneous, non-linear action, revolutionized the practice of performance art. While he began as a painter, by the mid 1950s his interest turned to the theoretical, based primarily on the shifting concepts of space as subjectively experienced by the viewer. "Art" was no longer an object to be viewed hanging on a wall or set on a pedestal; rather, it could now be anything at all, including movement, sound, and even scent. This artist was very clear that his works were connected with art and not theater. He stressed that his happenings were in the same category as the action painting of Abstract Expressionists and not with scripted scenes involving actors playing parts.
Kouros, 1944-45
In the 1940s, Noguchi made a series of interlocking slab sculptures, drawing on Surrealist-inspired biomorphic forms, organic abstractions, and traditional Japanese art. This sculpture, the largest work of the series and titled after the Greek word for "man," depicts a three-dimensional, fragmented human shape rendered in smooth, interlocking flat surfaces slotted and notched together in a tense balance. The aesthetic roots of Noguchi's sculpture reside in the beginnings of western culture, within ancient Greece and its veneration of the young male both in society and in statuary. The idealized Greek male represented the highest pinnacle of human beauty and perfection within western society up through the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century artistic ideals and racial politics. Noguchi's sculpture challenged the basis of Western art and society, remaking the ideal human form into solids and voids, a whole that can be disassembled and rearranged, just as Noguchi experienced his identity differently in various social and political situations.
Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, 1939
Is a mobile by American artist Alexander Calder. The sculpture suggests the movement of underwater life. From the 1930s on, Calder created non-mechanized hanging, standing, and wall-mounted mobiles, whose movement was driven by random air currents. Early versions often used scavenged bits of glass or pottery, while later ones were generally comprised entirely of flat metal shapes painted solid red, yellow, blue, black, or white. Calder succeeded in integrating natural movement into sculpture by assembling elements that balance themselves naturally by weight, surface area, and length of wire "arm." The basic equilibrium he struck guarantees compositional harmony among the parts, no matter their relative positions at any given moment.
Social Realism
Is an international art movement that encompasses the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working class and the poor. While the movement's characteristics vary from nation to nation, it almost always utilizes a form of descriptive or critical realism.
Kinetic Art
Is art that depends on movement for its effects - has its origins in the Dadaist and Constructivist movements that emerged in the 1910s. At its heart were artists who were fascinated by the possibilities of movement in art - its potential to create new and more interactive relationships with the viewer and new visual experiences. It inspired new kinds of art that went beyond the boundaries of the traditional, handcrafted, static object, encouraging the idea that the beauty of an object could be the product of optical illusions or mechanical movement.
Postmodernism
Is distinguished by a questioning of the master narratives that were embraced during the modern period, the most important being the notion that all progress - especially technological - is positive. By rejecting such narratives, these artists reject the idea that knowledge or history can be encompassed in totalizing theories, embracing instead the local, the contingent, and the temporary. Other narratives rejected by these artists include the idea of artistic development as goal-oriented, the notion that only men are artistic geniuses, and the colonialist assumption that non-white races are inferior. Thus, Feminist art and minority art that challenged canonical ways of thinking are often included under the rubric of postmodernism or seen as representations of it.
Pop Art
Is now most associated with the work of New York artists of the early 1960s such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg, but artists who drew on popular imagery were part of an international phenomenon in various cities from the mid-1950s onwards. Following the popularity of the Abstract Expressionists, This movement's reintroduction of identifiable imagery (drawn from mass media and popular culture) was a major shift for the direction of modernism. The subject matter became far from traditional "high art" themes of morality, mythology, and classic history; rather, these artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art.
Ashcan School
Known for its gritty urban subject matter, dark palette, and gestural brushwork, the Ashcan School was a loosely knit group of artists based in New York City who were inspired by the painter Robert Henri. The group believed in the worthiness of immigrant and working-class life as artistic subject matter and in an art that depicted the real rather than an elitist ideal. Henri and the other painters pursued authenticity in art, a quality associated with direct experience, immediacy of execution, and a new emphasis on the truth and validity of one's first impression. The works' sketchy quality, vigorous paint application, and sense of reportage came from the artists' training as newspaper illustrators who captured the spectacle of the expanding modern metropolis. The artists sought new forms of Realism to describe the rapid and great changes in urban life, commercial culture, and codes of social contact.
Turquoise Marilyn Monroe, 1964
Marilyn Monroe's tragic life and unforgettable career became a worldwide obsession. Fame-infatuated Warhol obtained one of the black-and-white publicity photos from her 1953 film Niagara and used it to create several series of similar images, discernible only in their color changes. This repetition of images remarked upon the way Marilyn's face had been, and would continue to be, printed ad infinitum in newspapers and magazines, elevating her to icon status. Warhol uses the commanding presence of a gold colored background to represent her legendary status within the communal psyche as one of the highest material value.
Diego Rivera
Mexican Painter and Muralist Social Realism Is widely regarded as the most influential Mexican artist of the twentieth century. This artist was among the leading members and founders of the Mexican Muralist movement. Deploying a style informed by dissimilar sources such as European modern masters and Mexico's pre-Columbian heritage, and executed in the technique of Italian fresco painting, Rivera handled major themes appropriate to the scale of his chosen art form: social inequality; the relationship of nature, industry, and technology; and the history and fate of Mexico.
Robert Rauschenberg
Neo-Dada Considered by many to be one of the most influential American artists due to his radical blending of materials and methods, this artist was a crucial figure in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to later modern movements. One of the key Neo-Dada movement artists, his experimental approach expanded the traditional boundaries of art, opening up avenues of exploration for future artists. He disagreed with many of the Abstract Expressionists' convictions and literally erased their precedent to move forward into new aesthetic territory that reiterated the earlier Dada inquiry into the definition of art.
Jasper Johns
Neo-Dada This artist represented common objects and images in the realm of fine art, he broke down the boundaries traditionally separating fine art and everyday life. He effectively laid the foundation for the Pop Art movement's aesthetic embrace of commodity culture with his playfully subversive appropriation of common signs and products. This artist's exploration of semiotics and perception also set the stage for both the Conceptual art movement and the Postmodern movement of the following decades, while his multimedia collaborations with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg ushered in the dominance of the performance art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than direct representation or abstraction, this artist made signs, like flags and targets, the main images in his works. The "things the mind already knows" were his ideal subject because of the host of varied meanings each carried with it. This fostered the perceptual ambiguity and semiotic play at the heart of his works.
Monogram, 1959
One of Rauschenberg's most famous works, this piece further merged painting and sculpture as the combine moved from the wall to the pedestal. While he began with traditional materials - an abstract painting executed in oil on stretched canvas - he abandoned tradition by adding an assemblage of found objects on top of the painting to create a canonical, three-dimensional combine painting. Rauschenberg often acquired materials for his artwork on his meanderings about New York City. Rauschenberg found and purchased a stuffed angora goat and later encircled it with a tire he encountered in street trash. He applied paint to the goat's snout in gestural brushstrokes that quoted Abstract Expressionism. On top of the canvas, Rauschenberg surrounded the goat with a pasture of more detritus strewn about its hooves - including a tennis ball, a wooden plank, and several found and reproduced images.
James Rosenquist
Pop Art A seminal figure in the Pop Art movement, this artist is best known for his colossal collage paintings of enigmatically juxtaposed fragmentary images borrowed largely from advertisements and mass media. Brought together and enlarged so as to cover entire gallery walls and overwhelm the viewer, these seemingly unrelated pictures of consumer products, weaponry, and celebrities hint at the artist's social, political, and cultural concerns. The billboard painter-turned-artist's early works are also considered emblematic of a burgeoning consumer culture in America during the 1960s.
Ed Ruscha
Pop Art For over 50 years, this artist has delivered wryly detached portraits of the ephemera of our lives, found deeply embedded within various subcultures, most notably that of Southern California. Through his lens, familiar imagery such as specific architectural gems, common motifs within consumer culture, or font-specific words elevated as objects are bestowed an iconic status. His fodder is often garnered from the environments in which he lives and works, pulling in a mixed bag of visuals from the film and advertising industries as well as a thriving vortex of trends and memes stemming from an area often noted for being the birthplace of "cool."
Detroit Industry (North Wall), 1932-33
Rivera made the painting of murals his primary method, appreciating the large scale and public accessibility—the opposite of what he regarded as the elitist character of paintings in galleries and museums. Rivera used the walls of universities and other public buildings throughout Mexico and the United States as his canvas, reinventing the concept of public art in the U.S. by paving the way for the Federal Art Program of the 1930s. This mural is a tribute to Detroit's manufacturing base and workforce of the 1930s and constitute the finest example of fresco painting in the United States. Here, Rivera takes large-scale industrial production as the subject of the work, depicting machinery with exceptional attention to detail and artistry
Blue, Orange, Red, 1961
Rothko later developed his "multiforms" by using symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary, colors, in which, for example, "the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce (to unite into a whole) out of the ground, concentrations of its substance. In this painting, the blue and orange appear to vibrate against the red around it, creating an optical flicker.
Dorothea Lange
Social Realism, Documentary Photography This artist's images of Depression-era America made her one of the most acclaimed documentary photographers of the twentieth century. She is remembered above all for revealing the plight of sharecroppers, displaced farmers and migrant workers in the 1930s, and her portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, Migrant Mother, has become an icon of the period. Since much of this work was carried out for a government body, the Farm Security Administration, it has been an unusual test case of American art being commissioned explicitly to drive government policy.
Report From Rockport, 1940
Stuart Davis was one of the first to consider jazz and swing music in conjunction with painting. His use of bright, pulsating colors, expressive lines, and repetitious shapes creates a visual rhythm in his paintings similar to the syncopation and improvisation of jazz music. Davis introduced a new post-Cubist approach to abstraction by dispersing shapes, throughout the canvas and balancing bold colors in such a way as to deny a central focal point.
Joseph Cornell
Surrealism, Assemblage Using the Surrealist technique of unexpected juxtaposition, This artist's best-known works are glass-fronted boxes into which he placed and arranged Victorian bric-a-brac, old photographs, dime-store trinkets, and other found elements. Generally referred to as "shadow boxes," the resulting pieces are dream-like miniature and striking incidental scenes that inspire the viewer to see each component in a new light. This artist often used the shadow boxes to address recurrent themes of interest such as childhood, space, and birds, and they represented an escape of sorts for their creator, who was famously reclusive. Among the earliest examples of assemblage, the shadow boxes also helped give rise to a host of other Modern and Contemporary This artist's signature art form is the shadow box. Infused with a dream-like aura, the shadow boxes invite the viewer into the artist's own private, magical world. Alternately known as "memory boxes" or "poetic theaters," the boxes evoke the memories associated with the items contained within, while also containing parallels with, or expressing reverence for, other art forms, such as theater, ballet, and film.
Happenings
This movement began as a challenge to the category of "art" initiated by the Futurists and Dadaists in the 1910s and 1920s came to fruition with the performance art movements. It involved more than the detached observation of the viewer; the artist engaged with these performances and required the viewer to actively participate in each piece. There was not a definite or consistent style for these, as they greatly varied in size and intricacy. However, all artists staging these performances operated with the fundamental belief that art could be brought into the realm of everyday life. This turn toward performance was a reaction against the long-standing dominance of the technical aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and was a new art form that grew out of the social changes occurring in the 1950s and 1960s.
Guardians of the Secret, 1943
This painting by Pollock is often interpreted as a metaphor for the emergence of unconscious impulses into conscious thought, represents a synthesis of the artist's sources. The imagery draws on African, Native American, as well as prehistoric art, yet there are also touches of Picasso. The abstract male and female 'guardians' have been interpreted in myriad ways: as Northwest Indian totems; Egyptian gods, and even as conflations of playing cards. They flank the sides, while along the bottom is a dog reminiscent of Anubis, the jackal-god of the ancient Egyptian underworld. An African mask, a scarab-like embryo, and a rooster, all line up like relics across the top. In the center of the composition is a tablet, covered in an hieroglyphic inscription reminiscent of ancient tombs.
American Gothic, 1930
This painting depicts a farmer standing beside a woman in front of a house with a Gothic-style window. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron evoking 19th-century Americana, and the man is holding a pitchfork. Elements of the painting stress the vertical that is associated with Gothic architecture. After seeing the works of 15th- and 16th-century German and Flemish masters, whose realism and attention to detail bowled him over, Grant Wood was determined to integrate their approach into his own work, abandoning his impressionist style.
Woman I, 1950-52
This painting is perhaps de Kooning's most famous painting. This painting is noteworthy not only for this process, but also because it embodies two major themes in de Kooning's work. The first is the depiction of the female figure. The woman depicted in Woman I is wholly unlike anything seen in Western painting - she is highly aggressive, erotic and threatening. Her frightening teeth and fierce eyes are not those of a stereotypically submissive, Cold war-era housewife. Secondly, the work is an important step in de Kooning's lifelong exploration of the relationship between figure and ground. He causes the woman's form to blend into the abstract background by using brushstrokes that draw the ground and figure together. He also used similar pigments(whites, and fleshy pinks) for both the upper body and the space surrounding it; hence the woman dissolves into the background, the setting of which, typically, is indiscernible - a space de Kooning described as a "no-environment."
Whaam!, 1963
This piece is based on an image from All American Men of War published by DC comics in 1962. Throughout the 1960s, Lichtenstein frequently drew on commercial art sources such as comic images or advertisements, attracted by the way highly emotional subject matter could be depicted using detached techniques. Transferring this to a painting context, Lichtenstein could present powerfully charged scenes in an impersonal manner, leaving the viewer to decipher meanings for themselves.
Dawn's Wedding Chapel, 1959
This room sized sculpture was created from stacks of boxes filled with fragments of carved wood, found objects, furniture pieces, etc. Nevelson gathered objects into a complex assemblage, then painted it white to obscure the identity of the original object, this had the effect of unifying it formally.
Neo-Dada
This term was applied to the works of artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Allan Kaprow who initiated a radical shift in the focus of modern art during the 1950s. These artists are known for their usage of mass media and found objects, as well as a penchant for performance. These artists rebelled against the emotionally charged paintings of the Abstract Expressionists that dominated the art world in the 1950s. By introducing mundane subject and emphasizing performance, these artists ushered in the radical changes modern art underwent during the 1960s and paved the way for Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism.
Flag, 1954-55
This, Johns' first major work, broke from the Abstract Expressionist precedent of non-objective painting with his representation of a recognizable everyday object - the American flag. Johns built the flag from a dynamic surface made up of shreds of newspaper dipped in encaustic - with snippets of text still visible through the wax - rather than oil paint applied to the canvas with a brush. As the molten, pigmented wax cooled, it fixed the scraps of newspaper in visually distinct marks that evoked the gestural brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists of the previous decade. The frozen encaustic embodied Johns' interest in semiotics by quoting the "brushstroke" of the action painters as a symbol for artistic expression, rather than a direct mode of expression, as part of his career-long investigation into "how we see and why we see the way we do."
The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, 1944
Though abstract to a great degree, this work nevertheless reveals Gorky's fondness for organic forms loosely based in nature and the sumptuous colors that would prove to be essential to his mature style. The work of Pablo Picasso and others provided strong influences on Gorky's painting practice. This painting has been praised for its combination of nature and reality, filtered through memory and feeling. Its contents were also discussed; pointing out the rooster-headed figure with the feathered groin at the right as the vain fool. The liver was once thought of as the seat of the passions (love and lust), thus punning on the "cock's comb" part of the title, and could also be construed as "one who lives," therefore asserting that life itself is vanity and all in vain.
Folk Musicians, c. 1941-42
Three musicians, one with a guitar in hand, dominate this scene painted in rich browns and blues; Bearden's lavish use of the color blue, in fact, suggests the blues, the singular African-American folk music. Bearden was influenced by the Social Realists of the Great Depression, along with the Mexican Muralists such as Diego Rivera. Bearden has flattened the pictorial space and rendered the figures with Cubist block-like forms that overlap and are compressed within the shallow space, enlarging the trio's hands to indicate their humble working origins. The brick wall behind the blues musicians serves to move them into our picture plane, so that we can more closely observe their faces and other details.
Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51
Translated as "Man, heroic and sublime," Vir heroicus sublimis was Newman's largest painting at the time it was completed, although he would go on to create even more expansive works. He intended his audiences to view this and other large paintings from a close vantage point, allowing the colors and zips to fully surround them. In this piece, which is more complex than it initially appears, Newman's zips are variously solid or wavering, creating a perfect square in the center and asymmetrical spaces on the perimeter. Its scale and color created a new kind of contact between the artwork and the viewer.
Abstract Expressionism
Was never an ideal label for the movement which grew up in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. It was somehow meant to encompass not only the work of painters who filled their canvases with fields of color and abstract forms, but also those who attacked their canvases with a vigorous gestural expressionism. Most of the artists associated with this movement matured in the 1930s. They were influenced by the era's leftist politics, and came to value an art grounded in personal experience. Few would maintain their earlier radical political views, but many continued to adopt the posture of outspoken avant-gardists protesting from the margins. Having matured as artists at a time when America suffered economically and felt culturally isolated and provincial, they were later welcomed as the first authentically American avant-garde. Their art was championed for being emphatically American in spirit - monumental in scale, romantic in mood, and expressive of a rugged individual freedom.
Jackson Pollock
Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism The famous 'drip paintings' that he began to produce in the late 1940s represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century. At times they could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man's entrapment - in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world. This artist spent years painting realist murals in the 1930s showing him the power of painting on a large scale; Surrealism suggested ways to describe the unconscious; and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space. This artist's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.
Romare Bearden
American Painter and Collagist Cubism, Collage, Harlem Renaissance This prominent American artist created dazzling work celebrating the black American experience, which he integrated into greater (predominantly white) American modernism. After working several decades as a painter, during the politically tumultuous 1960s Bearden found his own voice by creating collages made of cut and torn photographs found in popular magazines that he then reassembled into visually powerful statements on African-American life. The artist's subject matter encompassed the urban milieu of Harlem, traveling trains, migrants, spiritual "conjure" women, the rural South, jazz, and blues musicians, and African-American religion and spirituality.
Grant Wood
American Regionalism Painted with close attention to sharp, crisp detail. In the Regionalist aesthetic, the everyday lives of working people are the highest subjects of art; modern ideas of abstraction are often considered elitist and decadent. The artist therefore mainly depicted scenes of everyday Midwestern life in a fresh and sometimes stark manner.
Alexander Calder
American Sculptor Surrealism, Kinetic Art This American artist redefined sculpture by introducing the element of movement, first though performances of his mechanical, motorized, and finally, with hanging works called "mobiles." In addition to his abstract mobiles, he also created static sculptures, called "stabiles," as well as paintings, jewelry, theater sets, and costumes.
Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th St, NY, 1966
Arbus photographed people on the fringes of American postwar society.
210 Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962
By the 1960s, the New York art world was in a rut as Abstract Expressionism's explosion of the 1940s and '50s had grown stale. Warhol was one of the artists hungry to reintroduce imagery to his work. Because Warhol was already an extremely successful consumer ad designer, he used the techniques of his trade to create an image that was both easily recognizable and visually stimulating. He was well versed in the concepts of the advertising industry, which was currently invading the American psyche with its promise of happiness through abundant consumerism.
Charles Sheeler
Early American Modernism, Precisionism Used both photography and painting to capture the function, abstraction, and the human element of the American industrial and urban age. His work revealed how the American pioneer spirit had transferred from exploring natural frontiers to the technological and industrial progress of the nation.
Diane Arbus
Modern Photography Is an American photographer known for her hand-held black and white images of marginalized people such as midgets, circus freaks, giants, transgenders, as well as more normalized subjects of suburban families, celebrities, and nudists. Her work can be understood as bizarre, fantastical, and psychologically complex all at once - either way, she took documentary photography a step further. This photographer became internationally known for her provocative imagery, and remains one of the most unique Post-Modern American photographers. Although she is often criticized for objectifying her subjects, the power of her images remains.
Roy Lichtenstein
Pop Art, Postmodernism This artist was one of the first American Pop artists to achieve widespread renown, and he became a lightning rod for criticism of the movement. His early work ranged widely in style and subject matter, and displayed considerable understanding of modernist painting. However, the mature Pop style he arrived at in 1961, which was inspired by comic strips, was greeted by accusations of banality, lack of originality, and, later, even copying. His high-impact, iconic images have since become synonymous with Pop art, and his method of creating images, which blended aspects of mechanical reproduction and drawing by hand, has become central to critics' understanding of the significance of the movement.
Andy Warhol
Pop Art, Video Art, Postmodernism This artist was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began to make art destined for galleries. Nevertheless, his screen-printed images of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans, and sensational newspaper stories, quickly became synonymous with Pop art. He emerged from the poverty and obscurity of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh, to become a charismatic magnet for bohemian New York, and to ultimately find a place in the circles of High Society. For many his ascent echoes one of Pop art's ambitions, to bring popular styles and subjects into the exclusive salons of high art. His elevation to the status of a popular icon represented a new kind of fame and celebrity for a fine artist.
F-111, 1965
The most ambitious of Rosenquist's collage paintings, this piece encompasses a viewer's entire field of vision. The painting depicts a full-scale, 73 foot long F-111 fighter plane interrupted by assorted images derived from billboards and advertisements of the day rendered large and in clashing, day-glo colors. Among the fragmentary advertisements are a tire, a cake, air bubbles, spaghetti, a light bulb, and a young girl using a hair dryer that resembles a missile head. Disturbingly, there is also a beach umbrella juxtaposed onto an atomic explosion, making reference to a particular military euphemism used at the time: "nuclear umbrella." Rosenquist created this piece during the Vietnam War, F-111 mixes fragments of consumer advertising with military imagery.
Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943
This artwork is a direct reference to a photograph that Motherwell encountered of the murdered revolutionary, Pancho Villa. The work straddles the line between referential painting and the style that would become Abstract Expressionism, and includes several thematic relationships that appear throughout the artist's oeuvre (The sum of the lifework of an artist). In its allusion to the Mexican revolution, this work also prefigures the themes that would drive Motherwell's seminal Elegy to the Spanish Republic series.
Performance Art
This is a genre in which art is presented "live," usually by the artist but sometimes with collaborators or performers. It has had a role in avant-garde art throughout the twentieth century, playing an important part in anarchic movements such as Futurism and Dada. The most significant flourishing of performance art took place following the decline of modernism and Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s, and it found exponents across the world. This art form of this period was particularly focused on the body, and is often referred to as Body art. This reflects the period's so-called "dematerialization of the art object," and the flight from traditional media.
Graduation, New York, 1949
This photograph is one of 140 photographs published in The sweet flypaper of life, a collaborative endeavor that teamed photographer DeCarava with poet and novelist Langston Hughes. The publication was a commercial and critical success. Hughes's fictional account of life seen through the eyes of Sister Mary Bradley gives us a character whose commentary reflects social and historical changes in Harlem.
Documentary Photography
This term usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit.
American modernism
Was an artistic and cultural movement in the United States beginning at the turn of the 20th century, with a core period between World War I and World War II. Like its European counterpart, the movement stemmed from a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, seeking to better represent reality in a new, more industrialized world.
Harlem Renaissance
Was the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. Many had come from the South, fleeing its oppressive caste system in order to find a place where they could freely express their talents.
