ch 32 art history

formalist

(valuing form over content) *see text for full definition

Fig. 32-71 Tom Thomson THE WEST WIND

-A key figure in this movement was Tom Thomson (1877-1917), who, as of 1912, spent the warm months of each year in Algonquin Provincial Park, a large forest reserve 180 miles north of Toronto. -He made many small, swiftly painted, oil-on-board sketches as the basis for the full-size paintings that he executed in his studio during the winter. One such sketch led to the west wind (fig. 32-71). -This tightly organized composition features a vibrant stylized tree rising from a rocky foreground and set against a luminous but more subdued background of lake, hills, and sky. -The cropped, silhouetted form of a curvilinear tree set close to the viewer against a harmonious Canadian landscape in the distance was one of his favorite subjects.

Fig. 32-81 Arshile Gorky GARDEN IN SOCHI

-A series of paintings in the early 1940s called garden in sochi (fig. 32-81) transformed Gorky's memories of his father's garden in Khorkom, Armenia, into a mythical dreamscape. According to the artist, this garden was known locally as the Garden of Wish Fulfillment because it contained both a rock upon which village women, his mother included, rubbed their bared breasts when making a wish, and a "Holy Tree" to which people tied strips of clothing. -In this painting, the mythical garden floats on a dense white ground. Forms, shapes, and colors come together in a bare-breasted woman to the left and the Holy Tree to the center, as well as strips of clothing and "the beautiful Armenian slippers" that Gorky and his father wore in Khorkom. The painting suggests vital life forces, an ancient connection to the earth, and Gorky's vision of a lost world.

Fig. 32-87 Jean-Paul Riopelle KNIGHT WATCH

-Abstract Expressionism spread quickly to Canada. In his native Montreal, the French Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923-2002) worked with Les Automatistes, a group of artists using the Surrealist technique of automatism to create abstract paintings. -In 1947, Riopelle moved to Paris and in paintings such as knight watch (fig. 32-87) during the early 1950s, he began to squeeze paint directly onto canvas before spreading it with a palette knife to create bright swatches of color traversed by networks of spidery lines.

Fig. 32-25 Kazimir Malevich SUPREMATIST PAINTING (EIGHT RED RECTANGLES)

-After 1915, Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) emerged as the leader of the Moscow avant-garde. He later remembered, "In the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the burden of the object, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field." -The Black Square was one of the backdrops for Mikhail Matiushin's Russian Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun. At the "Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings: 0.10" held in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1915-1916, Malevich exhibited 39 works of art consisting of flat, assembled, geometric shapes in a style he termed Suprematism, defined as "the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art." -One of these works, suprematist painting (eight red rectangles) (fig. 32-25), arranges eight red rectangles diagonally on a white ground—a pure abstraction.

Fig. 32-30 Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q.

-After Duchamp returned to Paris, he challenged the French art world with a work that he entitled l.h.o.o.q. (fig. 32-30) and described as a "modified readymade." In 1911, a Louvre employee had stolen Leonardo's famous Mona Lisa (see fig. 21-1), believing it should be returned to Italy. -It took two years to recover it. While missing, however, the Mona Lisa became even more famous and was widely and badly reproduced in postcards, posters, and advertising. Duchamp chose to comment on the nature of fame and on the degraded image of the Mona Lisa by purchasing a cheap postcard reproduction and drawing a mustache and beard on its subject's famously enigmatic face. -In doing so he turned a revered cultural artifact into an object of ridicule. The letters that he scrawled across the bottom of the card, "L.H.O.O.Q.," when read aloud sound phonetically similar to the French slang phrase elle a chaud au cul, politely translated as "she's hot for it," thus adding a crude sexual innuendo to the already cheapened image. -Like Fountain, this work challenges traditional notions about what constitutes art and makes ridicule and bodily functions its central artistic content. As one of Dada's founders said, "Dada was born of disgust."

Fig. 32-55 Anni Albers WALL HANGING

-Although the Bauhaus claimed that women were admitted on an equal basis with men, Gropius opposed their education as architects and channeled them into what he considered the more gender-appropriate workshops of pottery and textiles. -Berlin-born Anni Albers (b. Annelise Fleischmann, 1899-1994) arrived at the school in 1922 and married the Bauhaus graduate and professor Josef Albers (1888-1976) in 1925. -Obliged to enter the textiles workshop rather than the painting studio, Anni Albers made "pictorial" weavings and wall hangings (fig. 32-55) that were so innovative that they actually replaced paintings on the walls of several modern buildings. -Her decentralized, rectilinear designs refer to the aesthetics of De Stijl, but differ in their open acknowledgment of the natural process of weaving. Albers's goal was "to let threads be articulate ... and find a form for themselves to no other end than their own orchestration."

Fig. 32-76 Amelia Peláez HIBISCUS (MARPACÍFICO)

-Amelia Peláez (1896-1968) left Cuba for Paris shortly after this manifesto was issued. When she returned home, she joined the anthropologist Lydia Cabrera to study Cuban popular and folk arts. -Her paintings focus on the woman's realm—the domestic interior—and national identity, as in hibiscus (marpacífico) (fig. 32-76). -Her visual language is Cubist, as seen in the flattened overlapping forms and compressed pictorial space, but it shows recognizable objects—a mirror, a tabletop, and local hibiscus flowers—whose heavy black outlines and pure color reflect the flat, fan-shaped stained-glass windows that decorate many Cuban homes.

Fig. 32-2 André Derain MOUNTAINS AT COLLIOURE

-Among the first major Fauve works were paintings that Derain and Matisse made in 1905 in the French Mediterranean port town of Collioure. In mountains at collioure (fig. 32-2), Derain used short, broad strokes of pure color, placing next to each other the complementary colors of blue and orange (as in the mountain range) or red and green (as in the trees) to intensify the hue of each. -He chose a range of seminaturalistic colors—the grass and the trees are green, the trunks are close to brown. This is recognizable as a landscape, but it is also a self-conscious exercise in painting. The uniform brightness of the colors undermines any effect of atmospheric perspective. -As a consequence, viewers remain aware that they are looking at a flat canvas covered with paint, not an illusionistic rendering of the natural world. This tension between image and painting, along with the explosive effect of the color, generates a visual energy that positively pulses from the painting. Derain described his colors as "sticks of dynamite" and his stark juxtapositions of complementary hues as "deliberate disharmonies."

Fig. 32-48 El Lissitzky PROUN SPACE

-Another artist active in early Soviet Russia was El Lissitzky (1890-1941). After the Revolution, he taught architecture and graphic arts at the Vitebsk School of Fine Arts, where Malevich also taught. -By 1919, Lissitzky was both teaching and using a Constructivist vocabulary for propaganda posters and for artworks he called Prouns (pronounced "pro-oon"), thought to be an acronym for the Russian proekt utverzhdenya novogo ("project for the affirmation of the new"). -Although most Prouns were paintings or prints, a few of them were early examples of installation art (fig. 32-48)—artworks created for a specific site, arranged to create a total environment. -Lissitzky rejected painting as too personal and imprecise, preferring to "construct" Prouns for the collective using the less personal instruments of mechanical drawing. -Like many other Soviet artists of the late 1920s, Lissitzky also turned to more socially engaged projects such as architectural design, typography, photography, and photomontage for publication.

Fig. 32-35 Marsden Hartley PORTRAIT OF A GERMAN OFFICER

-Another pioneer of American Modernism who exhibited at the Armory Show was Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), who was also a regular exhibitor at 291. Between 1912 and 1915, Hartley lived mostly abroad, first in Paris, where he discovered Cubism, then in Berlin, where he began to paint colorful Expressionistic art. -Around 1914, however, Hartley developed a powerfully original and intense style of his own in Portrait of a German Officer (see "Closer Look"), a tightly arranged composition of boldly colored shapes and patterns interspersed with numbers, letters, and fragments of German military imagery that memorializes Karl von Freyburg, a German soldier with whom Hartley had fallen in love.

Fig. 32-63 RUINS OF GUERNICA, SPAIN

-As Picasso pondered what he might create, on April 26, 1937, Nationalist-supporting German bombers attacked the town of Guernica in the Basque region of Spain, killing and wounding 1,600 civilians. -For more than three hours, 25 bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives on the town, while more than 20 fighter planes strafed anyone caught in the streets trying to flee destroyed or burning buildings. Fires burned in Guernica for three days. -By the end, one third of the town's population was killed or wounded and 75 percent of its buildings had been destroyed (fig. 32-63). The cold-blooded, calculating nature of the attack shocked Europe. -It seemed to serve no military purpose, other than to allow Franco's Nationalist forces to terrorize civilian populations, but the world's shock worsened with the revelation that the German commander had planned the massacre merely as a "training mission" for the German air force. Horrified, Picasso now had his subject for the Fair.

Fig. 32-9 Pablo Picasso BOTTLE OF SUZE (LA BOUTEILLE DE SUZE)

-At the center, assembled newsprint and construction paper suggest a tray or round table supporting a glass and a bottle of liquor with an actual label. Around this arrangement Picasso pasted larger pieces of newspaper and wallpaper. -As in earlier Cubism, Picasso offers multiple perspectives. We see the top of the blue table, tilted to face us, and simultaneously the side of the glass. -The bottle stands on the table, its label facing us, while we can also see the round profile of its opening, as well as the top of the cork that plugs it. The elements together evoke not only a place—a bar—but also an activity—the viewer alone with a newspaper, enjoying a quiet drink. -The newspaper clippings glued to this picture, however, disrupt the quiet mood. They address the First Balkan War of 1912-1913, which contributed to the outbreak of World War I. Picasso may have wanted to underline the disorder in his art by comparing it with the disorder building in the world around him, or to warn viewers not to sit blindly and sip Suze while political events threatened to shatter the peaceful pleasures this work evokes—or this may simply be a collage.

Fig. 32-83 Rudolph Burckhardt JACKSON POLLOCK PAINTING(con)

-Autumn Rhythm is heroic in scale, almost 9 feet tall by over 17 feet wide. It engulfs the viewer's entire field of vision. According to Krasner, Pollock was a "jazz addict" who spent many hours listening to the explosively improvised bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. -His interests extended to Native American art, which he associated with his western roots and which enjoyed widespread coverage in popular and art magazines in the 1930s. Pollock was particularly intrigued by the images and processes of Navajo sand painters who demonstrated their work at the Natural History Museum in New York. -He also drew on Jung's theories of the collective unconscious. But Pollock was more than the sum of his influences. His paintings communicate on a grand, Modernist, primal level. In a radio interview, he said that he was creating for "the age of the airplane, the atom bomb, and the radio."

Fig. 32-90 Barnett Newman VIR HEROICUS SUBLIMIS

-Barnett Newman (1905-1970) also addressed modern humanity's existential condition in very large canvases, some painted mostly in a single brilliant color divided by thin, jagged lines in another color that he called "zips." -Newman claimed his art was about "[t]he self, terrible and constant." vir heroicus sublimis (Latin for "Man, Heroic and Sublime") (fig. 32-90) shows how Newman's total concentration on a single color focuses his meaning. -The broad field of red does not describe any form; it presents an absolute state of sublime redness across a vast, heroic canvas, interrupted only by the zips of other colors that threaten, like a human flaw, to unbalance it. -Newman wrote, "The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets. To that extent his art is concerned with the sublime."

Fig. 32-18 Vassily Kandinsky IMPROVISATION 28 (SECOND VERSION)

-Between 1911 and 1914, Kandinsky painted a series of works, including improvisation 28 (fig. 32-18), that, although they make clear references to landscape, architecture, and figures, initiate a progressive movement toward abstraction. In them, brilliant colors and veiled images leap and dance to express a variety of emotions and spiritualities. For Kandinsky, painting was a utopian force. -He saw art's traditional focus on accurate rendering of the physical world as a misguided, materialistic quest; he hoped that his paintings would lead humanity toward a deeper awareness of spirituality and the inner world. He asks us to look at the painting as if we were hearing a symphony, responding instinctively and spontaneously to this or that passage and then to the total experience. -Kandinsky further explained the musical analogy in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912): "Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul."

Fig. 32-7 Georges Braque VIOLIN AND PALETTE

-Braque's 1909-1910 violin and palette (fig. 32-7) shows the kind of relatively small still-life paintings that the two artists created during their initial collaborative experimentation in the gradual abstraction of recognizable subject matter and space. The still-life items here are not arranged in a measured progression from foreground to background, but push close to the picture plane, confined to a shallow space. -Braque knits the various elements—a violin, an artist's palette, and some sheet music—together into a single shifting surface of forms and colors. In some areas of the painting, these formal elements have lost not only their natural spatial relations but their coherent shapes as well. Where representational motifs remain—the violin, for example—they have been fragmented by Braque to facilitate their integration into the compositional whole.

Analytic Cubism

-Braque's and Picasso's paintings of 1909 and 1910 initiated what is known as Analytic Cubism because of the way the artists broke objects into parts as if to analyze them. In works of 1911 and early 1912, such as Picasso's Ma Jolie (see fig. 32-1), they begin to take a somewhat different approach to the breaking up of forms, in which they did not simply fracture objects visually, but also rearranged their components. -Thus, Analytic Cubism begins to resemble the actual process of perception, during which we examine objects from various points of view and reassemble our glances into a whole object in our brain. -Except Picasso and Braque reassembled their shattered subjects not according to the process of perception, but conforming to principles of artistic composition, to communicate meaning rather than to represent observed reality. -For example, remnants of the subject are evident throughout Picasso's Ma Jolie, but any attempt to reconstruct them into the image of a woman with a stringed instrument would be misguided since the subject provided only the raw material for a formal composition. Ma Jolie is not a representation of a woman, a place, or an event; it is simply a painting.

Fig. 32-91 David Smith CUBI

-David Smith (1906-1965) learned to weld and rivet while working at an automobile plant in Indiana. He trained as a painter, but became a sculptor after seeing reproductions of welded metal sculptures by artists such as Picasso. Smith avoided the precious materials of traditional sculpture and created works out of standard industrial materials. -After World War II, he began to weld horizontally formatted sculptures that were like drawings in space. The forms of the cubi series (fig. 32-91) were created from precut pieces of stainless-steel sheets fabricated to the artist's specifications. -The name for the series intentionally invokes the sculptures' visual similarity to the Cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso. -In photographs they sometimes look coldly industrial, but when observed outdoors as Smith intended, their highly burnished surfaces show the gestural marks made by the sculptor's tools and reflect the sun in different ways depending on the time of day, weather conditions, and the distance from which they are viewed. -Vaguely humanoid, like giant totemic figures, the sculptures are surprisingly organic when seen at close range.

Fig. 32-73 Diego Rivera THE GREAT CITY OF TENOCHTITLAN (DETAIL)

-Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was prominent in the Mexican mural movement that developed from these commissions. He enrolled in Mexico City's Academia de San Carlos at age 11, and from 1911 to 1919, he lived in Paris where he met Picasso and David Siqueiros (1896-1974), another Mexican muralist. -Both Rivera and Siqueiros sought to create a revolutionary art in the service of the people in their public murals. In 1920-1921, Rivera traveled to Italy to study Renaissance frescoes, and he also visited ancient Mexican sites to study indigenous mural paintings. -In 1945, he painted the great city of tenochtitlan (fig. 32-73) as part of a mural cycle in the National Palace in Mexico City that used stylized forms and brilliant colors to portray the history of Mexico. Rivera also painted murals in the United States.

Fig. 32-22 Gino Severini ARMORED TRAIN IN ACTION

-Gino Severini (1883-1966) signed the "Technical Manifesto" while living in Paris, where he served as an intermediary between the Italian-based Futurists and the French avant-garde. Perhaps more than other Futurists, Severini embraced the concept of war as a social cleansing agent. -In armored train in action (fig. 32-22) of 1915—probably based on a photograph of a Belgian armored car on a train going over a bridge—Severini uses the jagged forms and splintered, overlapping surfaces of Cubism to describe a tumultuous scene of smoke, violence, and cannon blasts issuing from the speeding train seen from a disorienting viewpoint.

Fig. 32-64 Pablo Picasso GUERNICA (symbolism)

-Guernica is a complex painting, layered with meaning. Picasso rarely used specific or obvious symbolism in his art, preferring to let individual viewers interpret details themselves. -What is beyond question, however, is that Guernica is a scene of brutality, chaos, and suffering. Painted in black, white, and gray, the image resonates with anguish. It freezes figures in mid-movement in stark black and white as if caught by the flashbulb of a reporter's camera. -Many of the subjects are clearly identifiable: an expressionistically reconfigured head of a bull in the upper left, a screeching wounded horse in the center, broken human forms scattered across the expanse, a giant lightbulb suggesting an all-seeing eye at the top, a lamp below it, and smoke and fire visible beyond the destroyed room in which the disjointed action takes place. -These images have inspired a variety of interpretations. Some have seen in the bull and horse symbols of Nationalist and Republican forces, variously identified with one or the other. -The lightbulb, javelin, dagger, lamp, and bird have also been assigned specific meanings. Picasso, however, refused to acknowledge any particular significance to any of these seeming symbols. Guernica, he claimed, is about the massacred victims of this atrocity—beyond that, its meaning remains fluid.

Fig. 32-32 Hannah Höch CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE DADA THROUGH THE LAST WEIMAR BEER-BELLY CULTURAL EPOCH IN GERMANY

-Hannah Höch (1889-1978) produced even more pointed political photomontages. Between 1916 and 1926, she worked for Ullstein Verlag, Berlin's largest publishing house, designing decorative patterns and writing articles on crafts for a women's magazine. -Höch considered herself part of the women's movement in the 1920s and disapproved of contemporary mass-media representations of women. She had to fight for her place as the sole woman in the Berlin Dada group, one of whose male members described her contribution disparagingly as merely conjuring up beer and sandwiches. -In cut with the kitchen knife dada through the last weimar beer-belly cultural epoch in germany (fig. 32-32), Höch combines images and words from the popular press, political posters, and photographs to create a complex and angry critique of the Weimar Republic in 1919. -This photomontage includes portraits of androgynous Dada characters, such as herself and several other Berlin Dada artists, along with pictures of Marx and Lenin, asserting the artists' solidarity with revolutionaries in opposition to the anti-Dadaists whose images are gathered in the upper right corner.

Fig. 32-88 Helen Frankenthaler MOUNTAINS AND SEA

-Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) visited Pollock's studio in 1951 and began to create a more lyrical version of Action painting that had a significant impact on later artists. Like Pollock, she worked on the floor, but she poured paint onto unprimed canvas in thin washes so that it soaked into the fabric rather than sitting on its surface. -Frankenthaler described her process as starting with an aesthetic question or image, which evolved as the self-expressive act of painting took over. She explained, "I will sometimes start a picture feeling, What will happen if I work with three blues ... ? And very often midway through the picture I have to change the basis of the experience. Or I add and add to the canvas.... When I say gesture, my gesture, I mean what my mark is. -I think there is something now that I am still working out in paint; it is a struggle for me to both discard and retain what is gestural and personal." In mountains and sea (fig. 32-88), Frankenthaler outlined selected forms in charcoal and then poured several diluted colors onto the canvas. The result reminded her of the coast of Nova Scotia where she frequently went to sketch.

Fig. 32-38 Imogen Cunningham TWO CALLAS

-Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) followed in O'Keeffe's footsteps with a series of experimental photographs that emphasize the abstract patterns of plants by zooming in to extract them from their natural context. -In her photograph of two callas (fig. 32-38), Cunningham uses straightforward camera work to capture the forms and textures of her subjects accurately, if drained of their color. -But the artistic character of her photographic image depends not on the exacting detail recorded by the camera, but on the compositional choices and dramatic lighting controlled by the artist who used it.

Fig. 32-23 Umberto Boccioni UNIQUE FORMS OF CONTINUITY IN SPACE

-In 1912, Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) argued for a Futurist "sculpture of environment" in which form should explode in a violent burst of motion from the closed and solid mass into the surrounding space. In unique forms of continuity in space (fig. 32-23), -Boccioni portrays a figure striding powerfully through space with muscular forms like wings flying out energetically behind it. Many of Boccioni's sculptures made use of unconventional materials; this sculpture was actually made of plaster and only cast in bronze after the artist's death. -In keeping with his Futurist ideals, Boccioni celebrated Italy's entry into World War I by enlisting. He was killed in combat.

Fig. 32-37 Georgia O'Keeffe JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT, NO. IV

-In 1925, O'Keeffe also began to exhibit a series of close-up paintings of flowers, which became her best-known subjects. In jack-in-the-pulpit, no. iv (fig. 32-37) of 1930, O'Keeffe brings the heart of the flower to the front and center of the picture plane, revealing its inner forms and surfaces. -By painting the flower's hidden, organic aspects rather than the way it looks to a distant viewer, she creates from it a new abstract beauty, distilling the vigor of the plant's life force. Critics described O'Keeffe's flower paintings as elementally feminine and vaginal, and Stieglitz did little to dissuade viewers from this reading. -In fact, he promoted it—in spite of O'Keeffe's strong objections to this critical caricature and its implicit pigeonholing of her as a "woman artist." In 1929, O'Keeffe began spending summers in New Mexico; she moved there permanently in the 1940s, dedicating her art to evocative representations of the local landscape and culture.

Fig. 32-47 Aleksandr Rodchenko WORKERS' CLUB

-In 1925, Rodchenko designed a model workers' club for the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (fig. 32-47). -He emphasized ease of use and simplicity of construction; the furniture was made of wood because Soviet industry was best equipped for mass production in wood. -The high, straight backs of the chairs were meant to promote a physical and moral posture of uprightness among the workers.

Fig. 32-53 Walter Gropius BAUHAUS BUILDING, DESSAU

-In 1925, when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Gropius designed its new building. Although the structure openly acknowledges its reinforced concrete, steel, and glass materials, there is also a balanced asymmetry to its three large cubic areas that was intended to convey the dynamism of modern life (fig. 32-53). -A glass-panel wall wraps around two sides of the workshop wing of the building to provide natural light for the workshops inside, while a parapet below demonstrates how modern engineering methods could create light, airy spaces. Both Moholy-Nagy and Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928. -The school eventually moved to Berlin in 1932, but lasted only one more year before the new German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, forced its closure. -Hitler opposed Modernist art on two grounds: First, he believed it was cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic; second, he erroneously maintained that it was overly influenced by Jews.

Fig. 32-56 THE DADA WALL IN ROOM 3 OF THE "DEGENERATE ART" ("ENTARTETE KUNST") EXHIBITION

-In 1937 the Nazi leadership organized an exhibition called "Degenerate Art" of the work they had confiscated from German museums and artists. In it, they described avant-garde Modernism as sick and degraded, presenting the paintings and sculptures as specimens of pathology and scrawling slogans and derisive commentaries on the exhibition's walls (fig. 32-56). -Ironically, in Munich as many as 2 million people viewed the four-month exhibition of 650 paintings, sculptures, prints, and books, and another 1 million visitors saw it on its three-year tour of German cities. -Large numbers of confiscated works officially destined for destruction were actually taken by Nazi officials and sold in Switzerland in exchange for foreign currency. -The ownership of much of the surviving art is still in question. Many artists fled to neighboring countries or the United States, but some, like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose Street, Berlin (see fig. 32-13) appeared in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition, were driven to suicide by their loss. -Even the work of artists sympathetic to the Nazi position was not safe. The works of Emil Nolde (see fig. 32-12), who had joined the Nazi Party in 1932, were also confiscated.

Fig. 32-82 Jackson Pollock AUTUMN RHYTHM (NUMBER 30)

-In 1950, while Pollock painted autumn rhythm (number 30) (fig. 32-82), Hans Namuth filmed him and Rudolph Burkhardt photographed him (fig. 32-83). Pollock worked in a renovated barn, where he could reach into the laid canvas from all four sides. -The German expatriate artist Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) had poured and dripped paint before Pollock, but Pollock's unrestrained gestures transformed the idea of painting itself by moving around and within the canvas, dripping and scoring commercial-grade enamel paint (rather than specialist artist's paint) onto it using sticks and trowels. -Some have described Pollock's arcs and whorls of paint as chaotic, but he saw them as labyrinths that led viewers along complex paths and into an organic, calligraphic web of natural and biomorphic forms. Pollock's compositions lack hierarchical arrangement, contain multiple focal points, and deny perspectival space. -Art historians have referred to such paintings as "all-over compositions," because of the uniform treatment of the canvas from edge to edge and how this invites viewers to explore across the surface rather than to focus on one particular area. These self-contained paintings burst with anxious energy, ready to explode at any moment.

Fig. 32-80 Joaquín Torres-Garcia ABSTRACT ART IN FIVE TONES AND COMPLEMENTARIES

-In Buenos Aires, two groups of avant-garde artists formed immediately after the war—Arte Concreto-Invención and Madí, even though Argentina's fascist leader Juan Perón (1895-1974) disliked Modern art profoundly. -The best-known Latin American artist of the time was the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949), who established the "School of the South" in Montevideo, Uruguay's capital. Torres-García had spent 43 years in Europe before returning home after the war, but his art was deeply rooted in the indigenous art of the Inca (for example, see fig. 27-10); he believed ancient Uruguayan culture to be a fertile soil in which to grow a new national and cultural visual identity. -In abstract art in five tones and complementaries (fig. 32-80), Torres-García fused European ideas of abstraction and Modernism with Inca imagery and masonry patterns in a style that he named Constructive Universalism.

Fig. 32-79 Wifredo Lam ZAMBEZIA, ZAMBEZIA

-In Cuba, the abstract and Surrealist paintings of Wifredo Lam (1902-1980) embodied the violence and anguish of his country's struggle against colonialism. Lam was of mixed Chinese, Spanish, and African heritage and brought issues of identity and self-discovery to his art. -He studied at the National Academy in Havana, moved to Paris, where he knew both Picasso and the Surrealists, and was forced to return to Cuba when the Nazis invaded France. He found himself on the same ship as the Surrealist leader Breton; Lam disembarked at Havana, while Breton traveled on to New York. -Once home, Lam explored his African-Cuban heritage in the company of anthropologist Lydia Cabrera and novelist Alejo Carpentier. His work from the late 1940s reflects African-Cuban art and the polytheistic spiritual imagery of the African-Cuban religion Santería. -The jagged, semiabstracted forms of zambezia, zambezia (fig. 32-79) refer to European Modernism, but their source is in Santería religious ritual; the central figure is a composite Santería deity. "Zambezia" was the early colonial name for Zimbabwe in southeastern Africa, at this time a British colonial possession known as Rhodesia. -Much earlier, Zambezia had been a source for slaves who were brought to Cuba. Lam said, "I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country.... In this way I could act as a Trojan horse spewing forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters."

Fig. 32-77 Francis Bacon HEAD SURROUNDED BY SIDES OF BEEF

-In England, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) captured in his canvases the horrors that haunted him. Bacon was self-taught and produced very few pictures until the 1940s. He served as an air-raid warden during World War II and saw the bloody impact of the bombing of civilians in London firsthand. -In figure with meat (fig. 32-77), Bacon presents an anguished and insubstantial man howling in a black void as two bloody sides of beef enclose him in a claustrophobic box that contains his screams and amplifies his terror. -The painting was directly inspired by Velázquez's 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X and by Rembrandt's paintings of dripping meat. Bacon wrote, "I hope to make the best human cry in painting ... to remake the violence of reality itself."

ig. 32-16 Egon Schiele SELF-PORTRAIT NUDE

-In contrast to reclining mother and child, the 1911 self-portrait nude (fig. 32-16) of Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) challenges viewers with his physical and psychological torment. The impact of Schiele's father's death from untreated syphilis when the artist was just 14 led him to conflate suffering with sexuality throughout his life. -In many drawings and watercolors, Schiele portrays women in tormented poses that emphasize their raw sexuality and the artist's sense of its dangerous allure. In this self-portrait, Schiele turns the same harsh gaze on himself, expressing deep ambivalence toward his own sexuality and body. -He stares at us with anguish, his emaciated body stretched and displayed in a halo of harsh light, lacking both hands and genitals. Some have interpreted this representational mutilation in Freudian fashion as the artist's symbolic self-punishment for indulgence in masturbation, then commonly believed to lead to insanity.

Fig. 32-85 Willem de Kooning WOMAN I

-In contrast, Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) wrote that "Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure" and remarked "I'm still working out of doubt." A 1926 immigrant from the Netherlands who settled in New York, De Kooning befriended several Modernist artists. -His paintings were highly structured and controlled, and although aspects of his composition appear spontaneous, they are the result of much experiment and revision. De Kooning applied paint, scraped it off, and repeated the process until he achieved the effect he wanted. -In 1953, he shocked the art world by moving away from pure abstraction with a series of figurative paintings of women. woman i (fig. 32-85) took him two years to complete, and Elaine de Kooning estimated that he scraped and repainted it about 200 times. -The portrayal of the woman appears to many as hostile, sexist, and powerfully sexual, full of implied violence and intense passion. De Kooning described the paintings of women as images of goddesses like those he saw in the Woman from Willendorf (see fig. 1-7) and early Mesopotamian statuettes (see fig. 2-5), or as a composite of stereotypes taken from the media and film. He explored both figuration and abstraction throughout his career.

Fig. 32-27 Constantin Brancusi TORSO OF A YOUNG MAN

-In his 1924 torso of a young man (fig. 32-27), Brancusi distills the figure's torso and upper legs into three highly polished metal cylinders, a machinelike regularity that might relate to the works of Léger or the Futurists. -This bold abstraction carries a Classical gravity and stillness, especially when perched atop the elemental earthiness of the impressive pedestal Brancusi created for it in wood and stone. -On the other hand, although the sleek torso lacks a penis, the phallic nature of the displayed form itself transforms the ensemble into a sexually charged symbol of essential masculinity.

Fig. 32-33 Alfred Stieglitz THE FLATIRON BUILDING, NEW YORK

-In his own photographs, Stieglitz composed poetic images of romanticized urban scenes. In the flatiron building (fig. 32-33), the tree trunk to the right is echoed by branches in the grove farther back and by the wedge-shaped Flatiron Building to the rear. -The entire scene is suffused with a misty, wintery atmosphere, which the artist created by manipulating his viewpoint, exposure, and possibly both the negative and the print itself. Ironically, Stieglitz softens and romanticizes the Flatiron Building, one of New York's earliest skyscrapers and a symbol of the city's modernity. -The magazine Camera Work, a high-quality photographic publication that Stieglitz edited, published a reproduction of this photograph in 1903; it also featured numerous images of American and European Modernist art as well as some important American Modernist art criticism.

Fig. 32-28 HUGO BALL RECITING THE SOUND POEM "KARAWANE"

-It was here that Ball solemnly recited one of his sound poems, "karawane" (fig. 32-28) with his legs and body encased in blue cardboard tubes and a white-and-blue "witch doctor's hat," as he called it, on his head. He also wore a huge, gold-painted cardboard cape that flapped when he moved his arms, and lobsterlike cardboard hands or claws. -The text of Ball's poem—included in the photograph documenting the event—consists of a string of nonsensical sounds, renouncing "the language devastated and made impossible by journalism," and mocking traditional poetry. -He self-consciously abandoned the rationality of adulthood and created a new and wholly incomprehensible private language of random sounds that seemed to mimic baby talk.

Fig. 32-14 Käthe Kollwitz THE OUTBREAK

-Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) used her art to further working-class causes and pursue social change. She preferred printmaking because its affordability gave it the potential to reach a wide audience. Between 1902 and 1908, she produced a series of seven etchings showing the sixteenth-century German Peasants' War. -the outbreak (fig. 32-14), a lesson in the power of group action, portrays the ugly fury of the peasants as they charge forward, armed only with their farm tools, bent on revenge against their oppressors. -The faces of the two figures at the front of the charge are particularly grotesque, while the leader, Black Anna—whom Kollwitz modeled on herself—signals the attack with a fierce gesture, her arms silhouetted against the sky. Behind her, the crowded and chaotic mass of workers forms a passionate picture of political revolt.

Fig. 32-84 Lee Krasner THE SEASONS

-Lee Krasner (1908-1984) studied in New York with Hans Hofmann. She moved in with Pollock in 1942 and virtually stopped painting in order to take care of him. But when they moved to Long Island in 1945, she set up a small studio in a guest bedroom, where she produced small, tight, gestural paintings, arriving at fully nonrepresentational work with all-over compositions in 1946, at the same time as Pollock. -After Pollock's death in an automobile crash in 1956, however, Krasner took over his studio and produced a series of large, dazzling gestural paintings that marked her re-emergence into the mainstream art world. -Works such as the seasons (fig. 32-84) feature bold, sweeping curves that express not only a new sense of liberation but also her powerful identification with the forces of nature in bursting, rounded forms and springlike colors. -Krasner explained that "Painting, for me, when it really 'happens' is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon."

Fig. 32-54 Marianne Brandt COFFEE AND TEA SERVICE

-Marianne Brandt's elegant coffee and tea service (fig. 32-54)—a prototype handcrafted in silver for mass production in cheaper metals—is an example of the collaboration between design and industry at the Bauhaus. -While the Bauhaus was in Dessau, Brandt (1893-1983) also designed lighting fixtures and table lamps for mass production, earning much-needed revenue for the school. -After the departure of Moholy-Nagy and Gropius, Brandt took over the metal workshop for a year before she too left in 1929. As a woman in the otherwise all-male metal workshop, Brandt made an exceptional contribution to the Bauhaus.

Fig. 32-89 Mark Rothko UNTITLED (ROTHKO NUMBER 5068.49)

-Mark Rothko (1903-1970) had very little formal art training, but by 1940 he was already producing paintings deeply influenced by the European Surrealists and by Jung's archetypal imagery. By the mid-1940s, he began to paint very large canvases with rectangular shapes arranged in a vertical format in which he allowed the colors to bleed into one another. -Paintings such as untitled (rothko number 5068.49) (fig. 32-89) and Magenta, Black, Green on Orange (No. 3/No. 13) (see fig. Intro-1) are not simply arrangements of flat, geometric shapes on a canvas, nor are they atmospheric, archetypical landscapes. Rothko thought of his shapes as fundamental ideas expressed in rectangular form uninterrupted by a recognizable subject, which sit in front of a painted field (hence the name "Color Field painting"). -He preferred to show his paintings together in series or rows, lit indirectly to evoke moods of transcendental meditation.

Fig. 32-44 Mary Colter LOOKOUT STUDIO, GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK

-Mary Colter (1869-1958) expressed an even stronger connection to the landscape in her architecture. Born in Pittsburgh and educated at the California School of Design in San Francisco, she spent much of her career as architect and decorator for the Fred Harvey Company, a firm in the Southwest that catered to the tourist trade. -Colter was an avid student of Native American arts, and her buildings quoted liberally from Puebloan traditions, notably in the use of exposed logs for structural supports. She designed several visitor facilities at Grand Canyon National Park, of which lookout studio (fig. 32-44) is the most dramatic. Built on the edge of the canyon's south rim, the building's foundation is in natural rock, its walls are built from local stone, and the roofline is deliberately irregular to echo the surrounding canyon wall. -The only concession to modernity is a liberal use of glass windows and a smooth cement floor. Colter's designs for hotels and railroad stations throughout the region helped establish a distinctive Southwest style.

Fig. 32-3 Henri Matisse THE WOMAN WITH THE HAT

-Matisse was equally interested in "deliberate disharmonies." His woman with the hat (fig. 32-3) was particularly controversial at the 1905 Autumn Salon because of its thick swatches of crude, seemingly arbitrary, nonnaturalistic color and its broad and blunt brushwork. -For instance, the face of the subject—Matisse's wife Amélie, who was a milliner and probably sold elaborate hats like the one she wears here—includes bold green stripes across her brow and down her nose, as well as a blue rectangle between her lips and her chin. -The uproar, however, did not stop siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein, among the most important American patrons of avant-garde art at this time, from purchasing the work in 1905.

Fig. 32-86 Joan Mitchell LADYBUG

-Mitchell painted in a personal adaptation of Abstract Expressionism, visualizing her memories of natural and urban landscapes and how they affected her. In ladybug (fig. 32-86), she created energetic but controlled rhythms with gestural brushstrokes, setting the lyrical complexity of her distinctive color palette against a neutral ground in a seeming reference to the figure-and-field relationship of traditional painting. She explained, "The freedom in my work is quite controlled. I don't close my eyes and hope for the best."

Modernism

-Modernist art was frequently subversive and intellectually demanding, and it was often visually, socially, and politically radical. It seems as if every movement in early twentieth-century art chose or acquired a distinctive label and wrote a manifesto or statement of intent, leading this to be described later as the age of "isms." -Most Modern art was still bound to the idea that works of art, regardless of how they challenged vision and thought, were still precious objects—primarily pictures or sculptures. But a few artistic movements—notably Dada and some elements of Surrealism, both prompted by the horrors of World War I—challenged this idea. Their preoccupations built the foundation for much art after 1950.

Fig. 32-50 Piet Mondrian COMPOSITION WITH YELLOW, RED, AND BLUE

-Mondrian's later paintings are visual embodiments of both Schoenmaekers's theory and De Stijl's artistic ideas. In composition with yellow, red, and blue (fig. 32-50), for example, Mondrian uses the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), two neutrals (white and black), and a grid of horizontal and vertical lines in his search for the essence of higher beauty and the balance of forces. -Mondrian's opposing lines and colors balance a harmony of opposites that he called a "dynamic equilibrium,"which he achieved by carefully plotting an arrangement of colors, shapes, and visual weights grouped asymmetrically around the edges of a canvas, with the center acting as a blank white fulcrum. -Mondrian hoped that De Stijl would have applications in the real world by creating an entirely new visual environment for living, designed according to the rules of a universal beauty that, when perfectly balanced, would bring equilibrium and purity to the world. -Mondrian said that he hoped to be the world's last artist, because when universal beauty infused all aspects of life, there would no longer be a need for art.

Fig. 32-12 Emil Nolde MASKS

-Nolde regularly visited Parisian ethnographic museums to study the art of Africa and Oceania, which impressed him with the radical and forceful visual presence of the human figure, especially in masks. His painting masks (fig. 32-12) of 1911 seems to come both from what he saw in Paris and from the masquerades familiar to him from European carnivals (see fig. 31-44). -By merging these traditions, Nolde transforms his African and Oceanic sources into a European nightmare full of horror and implicit violence. The gaping mouths and hollow eyes of the hideously colored and roughly drawn masks taunt viewers, appearing to advance from the picture plane into their space. -Nolde also uses the juxtaposition of complementaries to intensify his colors and the painting's emotionality. Nolde stopped frequenting Die Brücke's studio in 1907 but remained friendly with the group's members. On the eve of World War I, Nolde accompanied a German scientific expedition to New Guinea, explaining that what attracted him to the "native art" of Pacific cultures was their "primitivism," their "absolute originality, the intense and often grotesque expression of power and life in very simple forms."

Fig. 32-11 Erich Heckel STANDING CHILD

-Not surprisingly, among their favorite motifs were the natural world and the nude body—nudism was also a growing cultural trend in Germany in those years, as city dwellers forsook the city to reconnect with nature. -Erich Heckel's three-color woodcut print standing child (fig. 32-11) of 1910 presents a strikingly stylized but powerfully expressive image of a naked girl—whose flesh is the reserved color of the paper itself—isolated against a spare landscape created from broad areas of pure black, green, and red. -The girl stares straight out at the viewer with a confident sexuality that becomes more unsettling when we learn that this girl was the 12-year old Fränzi Fehrmann, a favorite of Die Brücke artists who, with her siblings, modeled to provide financial support for her widowed mother.

Fig. 32-64 Pablo Picasso GUERNICA

-On May 1, 1 million protesters marched in Paris, and the following day Picasso made the first preliminary sketches for his visual response to this atrocity. -Picasso had been trained in the traditions of academic painting, and he planned guernica (fig. 32-64) as a monumental history painting detailing the historic, and ignoble, events of the attack. -During ten days of intensive planning he made several sketches (esquisses) to develop the composition before moving on to canvas. He worked at the painting itself—changing figures and developing themes—for another month.

Fig. 32-31 Kurt Schwitters MERZBILD 5B (PICTURE-RED-HEART-CHURCH)

-One example of this is the work of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who worked in Hannover and met Huelsenbeck and other Dadaists in 1919. Schwitters used discarded rail tickets, postage stamps, ration coupons, beer labels, and other street trash to create visual poetry. -He called the resulting two- and three-dimensional works of art Merzbilder (German for "refuse pictures"). In these works Schwitters combined fragments of newspaper and other printed material with drawn or painted images, incorporating them into an overall visual structure that recalled Cubism. -He wrote that garbage demanded equal rights with painting. In merzbild 5b (fig. 32-31), Schwitters's collage includes printed fragments from the street with newspaper scraps to comment on the postwar disorder of defeated Germany. One fragment describes the brutal overthrow of the short-lived socialist republic in Bremen.

Fig. 32-68 Jacob Lawrence THE MIGRATION SERIES, PANEL NO. 1: DURING WORLD WAR I THERE WAS A GREAT MIGRATION NORTH BY SOUTHERN AFRICAN AMERICANS

-One of the best-known artists to emerge from the Harlem Community Art Center was Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). -Lawrence's early works often depict African-American history in series of small narrative paintings, each accompanied by a text. His themes include the history of Harlem and the lives of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture and American abolitionist John Brown. Lawrence created his most expansive series in 1940-1941. -Entitled the migration series, 60 panels chronicle the Great Migration, a journey that had brought Lawrence's own parents from South Carolina to Atlantic City, New Jersey. -In the first panel (fig. 32-68), African-American migrants stream through the doors of a Southern train station on their way to Chicago, New York, or St. Louis. Lawrence's boldly abstracted silhouette style, with its flat, bright shapes and colors, draws consciously and directly—like that of Douglas—on African visual sources.

Fig. 32-34 Arthur Dove NATURE SYMBOLIZED NO. 2

-One of the most significant early American Modernists was Arthur Dove (1880-1946). Dove studied the work of the Fauves in Europe in 1907-1909 and even exhibited at the Autumn Salon. After returning home, he began painting abstract nature studies at about the same time as Kandinsky, although each was unaware of the other. -Dove's nature symbolized no. 2 (fig. 32-34) is one of a remarkable series of small works that reveals his beliefs about the spiritual power of nature. But while Kandinsky's art focuses on a spiritual vision of nature, Dove's abstract paintings reflect his deeply felt experience of the landscape itself; he said that he had "no [artistic] background except perhaps the woods, running streams, hunting, fishing, camping, the sky." Dove supported himself by farming in rural Connecticut, but he exhibited his art in New York and was both well received by and well connected to the New York art community.

Fig. 32-69 Grant Wood AMERICAN GOTHIC

-Other artists, known collectively as the Regionalists, developed Midwestern themes during the 1930s. In 1930, at the height of the Depression, Grant Wood (1891-1942) painted american gothic (fig. 32-69), which was purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago and established Wood's national fame. -This picture embodied all that was good and bad about the heartland in the 1930s. Wood, who later taught at the University of Iowa, portrays an aging father standing with his unmarried daughter in front of their Gothic Revival framed house. -Even for the time their clothes are old-fashioned. Wood's dentist and his sister Nan—wearing a homemade ricrac-edged apron and their mother's cameo—posed for the figures, and the building was modeled on a modest small-town home in Eldon, Iowa. -The daughter's long, sad face echoes her father's; she is unmarried and likely to stay that way. In 1930, husbands were hard to come by in the Midwest because many young men had fled the farms for jobs in Chicago. -With its tightly painted descriptive detail, this painting is a homage to the Flemish Renaissance painters that Wood admired.

Fig. 32-69 Grant Wood AMERICAN GOTHIC

-Other artists, known collectively as the Regionalists, developed Midwestern themes during the 1930s. In 1930, at the height of the Depression, Grant Wood (1891-1942) painted american gothic (fig. 32-69), which was purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago and established Wood's national fame. -This picture embodied all that was good and bad about the heartland in the 1930s. Wood, who later taught at the University of Iowa, portrays an aging father standing with his unmarried daughter in front of their Gothic Revival framed house. -Even for the time their clothes are old-fashioned. Wood's dentist and his sister Nan—wearing a homemade ricrac-edged apron and their mother's cameo—posed for the figures, and the building was modeled on a modest small-town home in Eldon, Iowa. -The daughter's long, sad face echoes her father's; she is unmarried and likely to stay that way. In 1930, husbands were hard to come by in the Midwest because many young men had fled the farms for jobs in Chicago. With its tightly painted descriptive detail, this painting is a homage to the Flemish Renaissance painters that Wood admired.

Fig. 32-10 Pablo Picasso MANDOLIN AND CLARINET

-Picasso employed collage three-dimensionally to produce Synthetic Cubist sculpture, such as mandolin and clarinet (fig. 32-10). Composed of wood scraps, the sculpture suggests the Cubist subject of two musical instruments, here shown at right angles to each other. Sculpture had traditionally been carved, modeled, or cast. -Picasso's sculptural collage was a new idea and introduced assemblage, giving sculptors the option not only of carving or modeling masses to sit within space, but also of constructing three-dimensional works from combinations of found objects and unconventional materials, assembled in such a way that each part maintains its own identity while at the same time contributing to a new, combined form

Fig. 32-5 Pablo Picasso FAMILY OF SALTIMBANQUES

-Picasso joined a larger group of Paris-based avant-garde artists and became fascinated with the subject of saltimbanques ("traveling acrobats"). He rarely painted these entertainers performing, however, focusing instead on the hardships of their existence on the margins of society. -In family of saltimbanques (fig. 32-5), a painting from his Rose Period (so called because of the introduction of that color into his palette), five saltimbanques stand in weary silence to the left, while a sixth, a woman, sits in curious isolation on the right. All seem psychologically withdrawn, as uncommunicative as the empty landscape they occupy. -The harlequin figure to the far left is commonly identified as a self-portrait of the artist, suggesting his identification with the circus performers as marginalized and melancholy illusionists. By 1905, Picasso had begun to sell these works to a number of important collectors.

Fig. 32-8 Pablo Picasso PORTRAIT OF DANIEL-HENRY KAHNWEILER

-Picasso's 1910 Cubist portrait of daniel-henry kahnweiler (fig. 32-8) depicts the artist's first and most important art dealer in Paris, who saved many artists from destitution by buying their early works. -Kahnweiler (1884-1979) was an early champion of Picasso's art and one of the first to recognize the significance of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. -His impressive stable of artists included Picasso, Braque, Derain, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris. Since he was German, Kahnweiler fled France for Switzerland during World War I; the French government confiscated all his possessions, including his stock of paintings, which was sold by the state at auction after the war. Being Jewish, he was forced into hiding during World War II.

Fig. 32-19 Robert Delaunay HOMAGE TO BLÉRIOT

-Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and his wife, the Ukrainian-born Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), took the relatively monochromatic and static forms of Cubism in a new direction. -Fauvist color had inflected Delaunay's early work; his deep interest in communicating spirituality through color led him to participate in Der Blaue Reiter exhibitions. In 1910, he began to fuse his interest in color with Cubism to create paintings celebrating the modern city and modern technology. -In homage to blériot (fig. 32-19), Delaunay pays tribute to Louis Blériot—the French pilot who in 1909 became the first person to fly across the English Channel—by portraying his airplane flying over the Eiffel Tower, the Parisian symbol of modernity. -The brightly colored circular forms that fill the rest of the painting suggest the movement of the airplane's propeller, a blazing sun in the sky, and the great rose window of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, representing Delaunay's ideas of progressive science and spirituality. This painting's fractured colors also suggest the fast-moving parts of modern machinery.

Fig. 32-20 Sonia Delaunay CLOTHES AND CUSTOMIZED CITROËN B-12 (EXPO 1925 MANNEQUINS AVEC AUTO)

-Sonia Delaunay produced Orphist paintings with Robert, but she also designed fabric and clothing on her own. She created new fabric patterns and dress designs similar to her paintings and exhibited a line of inexpensive ready-to-wear garments that she called Simultaneous Dresses at the important 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. -Delaunay also decorated a Citroën sports car to match one of her ensembles for the exhibition (fig. 32-20). She saw the small three-seater as an expression of a new age because, like her clothing, it was produced inexpensively for a mass market and was designed specifically to appeal to the newly independent woman of the time. Sadly, there are only black-and-white photographs of these designs.

Fig. 32-36 Georgia O'Keeffe CITY NIGHT

-Stieglitz "discovered" Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986)—born in rural Wisconsin, and already studying and teaching art between 1905 and 1915—when a New York friend showed him some of her charcoal drawings. Stieglitz's reported response was "At last, a woman on paper!" In 1916, he included O'Keeffe's work in a group show at 291 and mounted her first solo exhibition the following year. -O'Keeffe moved to New York in 1918 and married Stieglitz in 1924. In 1925, she began to paint New York skyscrapers, which were acclaimed at the time as embodiments of American inventiveness and energy. But paintings such as city night (fig. 32-36) are not unambiguous celebrations of lofty buildings. -She portrays the skyscrapers from a low vantage point so that they appear to loom ominously over the viewer; their dark tonalities, stark forms, and exaggerated perspective produce a sense of menace that also appears in the art of other American Modernists.

Fig. 32-21 Fernand Léger THREE WOMEN

-Technology also fascinated Fernand Léger (1881-1955), who painted a more static but brilliantly colored version of Cubism based on machine forms. three women (fig. 32-21) is a Purist, machine-age version of the French academic subject of the reclining nude. -Purism was developed in Paris by Le Corbusier (b. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965) and Amédée Ozenfant in a 1925 book, The Foundation of Modern Art, that argued for a return to clear, ordered forms and ideas to express the efficient clarity of the machine age—a desire commonly understood as a reaction to the chaotic horrors of World War I. -In Léger's painting, the women's bodies are constructed from large, machinelike shapes arranged in an asymmetrical geometric grid that evokes both cool Classicism and an arrangement of interchangeable plumbing parts. -The women are dehumanized, with identical, bland, round faces; the exuberant colors and patterns that surround them suggest an orderly industrial society in which everything has its place.

Fig. 32-51 Gerrit Rietveld SCHRÖDER HOUSE, UTRECHT

-The architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) applied Mondrian's principles of dynamic equilibrium and De Stijl's aesthetic theories to architecture and created one of the most important examples of the International Style. Interlocking gray and white planes of varying sizes, combined with horizontal and vertical accents in primary colors and black, create the radically asymmetrical exterior of the schröder house in Utrecht (fig. 32-51). -Inside, the "red-blue" chair (fig. 32-52) echoes this same arrangement. Sliding partitions allow modifications in the interior spaces used for sleeping, working, and entertaining. The patron of the house, Truus Schröder-Schräder, wanted a home that suggested an elegant austerity with basic necessities sleekly integrated into a balanced and restrained whole.

Fig. 32-74 Frida Kahlo THE TWO FRIDAS

-The art of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is more personal. Breton claimed Kahlo as a natural Surrealist, although she herself said, "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." That reality included her mixed heritage, born of a German father and Mexican mother. -In a double self-portrait—the two fridas (fig. 32-74)—Kahlo presents an identity split into two ethnic selves: the European one in a Victorian dress and the Mexican one wearing traditional Mexican clothing. -The painting also reflects her stormy relationship with Diego Rivera, whom she married in 1929 but was divorcing in 1939 while painting this picture. -She told an art historian at the time that the Mexican image was the Frida whom Diego loved, and the European image was one he did not. The two Fridas join hands; the artery running between them begins at a miniature portrait of Rivera as a boy held by the Mexican Frida, travels through the exposed hearts of both Fridas, and ends in the lap of the European Frida, who attempts without success to stem the flow of blood. -Kahlo had suffered a broken pelvis in an accident at age 17, and she endured a lifetime of surgeries. This work alludes to her constant pain, as well as to the Aztec custom of human sacrifice by heart removal.

Fig. 32-67 Augusta Savage LA CITADELLE: FREEDOM

-The career of sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962) reflects the myriad difficulties faced by African Americans in the art world. Savage studied at Cooper Union in New York, but her 1923 application to study in Europe was turned down because of her race. -In a letter of protest, she wrote, "Democracy is a strange thing. My brother was good enough to be accepted in one of the regiments that saw service in France during the war, but it seems his sister is not good enough to be a guest of the country for which he fought." -Finally, in 1930, Savage was able to study in Paris. On her return to the United States, she sculpted portraits of several African-American leaders, including Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois. -Inspired by the story of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 following the Slave Revolt (see fig. 30-40), she portrayed a female figure of freedom in la citadelle: freedom (fig. 32-67) raising her hand to the sky and balancing on the toes of one foot while she flies through the air. -La Citadelle was the castle residence of one of Haiti's first leaders of African heritage. For Savage, it represented the possibility and promise of freedom and equality.

Fig. 32-46 Vladimir Tatlin MODEL FOR THE MONUMENT TO THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL

-The case of Vladimir Tatlin is fairly representative. In 1919, as part of his work on a committee to implement Russian leader Vladimir Lenin's Plan for Monumental Propaganda, Tatlin conceived the Monument to the Third International (fig. 32-46), a 1,300-foot-tall building to house the organization devoted to the worldwide spread of communism. Tatlin's visionary plan combined the appearance of avant-garde sculpture with a fully utilitarian building, a new hybrid form as revolutionary as the politics it represented. -In Tatlin's model, the steel structural support, a pair of leaning spirals connected by grillwork, is on the outside rather than the inside of the building. He combined the skeletal structure of the Eiffel Tower (see fig. 31-1)—which his tower would dwarf—with the formal vocabulary of the Cubo-Futurists to convey the dynamism of what Lenin called the "permanent revolution" of communism. -Inside the steel frame would be four separate spaces: a large cube to house conferences and congress meetings, a pyramid for executive committees, a cylinder for propaganda offices, and a hemisphere at the top, apparently meant for radio equipment. Each of these units would rotate at a different speed, from yearly at the bottom to hourly at the top. -Although Russia lacked the resources to build Tatlin's monument, models displayed publicly were a symbolic affirmation of faith in what the country's science and technology would eventually achieve.

Fig. 32-41 Frank Lloyd Wright FREDERICK C. ROBIE HOUSE, CHICAGO

-The frederick c. robie house (fig. 32-41) is one of Wright's early Prairie Style masterpieces. A central chimney, above a fireplace that radiated heat throughout the house in the bitter Chicago winter, forms the center of the sprawling design. -Low, flat overhanging roofs—dramatically cantilevered on both sides of the chimney—shade against the summer sun, and open porches provide places to sleep outside on cool summer nights. Low bands of windows—many with stained glass—surround the house, creating a colored screen between the interior and the outside world, while also inviting those inside to look through the windows into the garden beyond.

Fig. 32-41 Frank Lloyd Wright FREDERICK C. ROBIE HOUSE, CHICAGO

-The frederick c. robie house (fig. 32-41) is one of Wright's early Prairie Style masterpieces. A central chimney, above a fireplace that radiated heat throughout the house in the bitter Chicago winter, forms the center of the sprawling design. -Low, flat overhanging roofs—dramatically cantilevered on both sides of the chimney—shade against the summer sun, and open porches provide places to sleep outside on cool summer nights. -Low bands of windows—many with stained glass—surround the house, creating a colored screen between the interior and the outside world, while also inviting those inside to look through the windows into the garden beyond.

Fig. 32-78 Wols (Wolfgang Schulze) PAINTING

-The informal leader of Art Informel was Wolfgang Schulze, called Wols (1913-1951), who lived through the dislocation and devastation experienced by millions in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Germany, Wols left his homeland in protest when Hitler came to power, first settling in Paris, where he worked as a photographer for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. -When the Germans occupied France, he fled to Spain but was arrested, stripped of his passport, and deported to spend the rest of the war as a stateless person in a refugee camp in southern France. -When the war ended, Wols returned to Paris and resumed painting, producing passionate pictures by applying paint with whatever came to hand, scraping his heavy surfaces with a knife and allowing the paint to drip and run. -painting (fig. 32-78) represents a disease-ridden and violent world in which the semiabstracted forms resemble either infected cells or dark, muddy bacterial growths. Wols was temporarily supported by the French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, but died of food poisoning in 1951.

Fig. 32-42 Frank Lloyd Wright COLOR RECONSTRUCTION OF THE DINING ROOM, FREDERICK C. ROBIE HOUSE

-The main story is one long space divided into living and dining areas by a free-standing fireplace. There are no dividing walls. Wright had visited the Japanese exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and was deeply influenced by the aesthetics of Japanese architecture, particularly its sense of space and screenlike windows (see Architectural Animation). -Wright's homes frequently featured built-in closets and bookcases, and he hid heating and lighting fixtures when possible. He also designed and arranged the furniture for his interiors (fig. 32-42). -Here, machine-cut components create the chairs' modern geometric designs, while their high backs huddle around the table to form the intimate effect of a room within a room. Wright integrated lights and flower holders into posts near the table's corners so that there would be no need for lights or flowers on the table.

Fig. 32-40 Le Corbusier VILLA SAVOYE, POISSY-SUR-SEINE

-The most important French Modernist architect in France was Swiss-born Le Corbusier, whose villa savoye (fig. 32-40), a private home outside Paris, became an icon of the International Style (discussed later this chapter) and reflects his Purist ideals in its geometric design and lack of ornamentation. -It is also one of the best expressions of his domino construction system, introduced in 1914, in which slabs of ferroconcrete (concrete reinforced with steel bars) rest on six free-standing steel posts placed at the positions of the six dots on a domino piece. -Over the next decade Le Corbusier further explored the possibilities of the domino system and in 1926 published "The Five Points of a New Architecture," in which he proposed raising houses above the ground on pilotis (free-standing posts); using flat roofs as terraces; using movable partition walls slotted between supports on the interior and curtain walls (non-load-bearing walls) on the exterior to allow greater design flexibility; and using ribbon windows (which run the length of a wall). -These became common features of Modernist architecture. Le Corbusier believed that a modern house should be "a machine for living in," meaning that it should be designed as rationally and functionally as an automobile or a machine. After World War I—like his fellow Modernist architects—Le Corbusier developed designs for mass-produced, standardized housing to help rebuild Europe's destroyed infrastructure.

Fig. 32-66 Aaron Douglas ASPECTS OF NEGRO LIFE: FROM SLAVERY THROUGH RECONSTRUCTION

-The painter Aaron Douglas (1898-1979) moved to New York City from Topeka, Kansas, in 1925. He developed a silhouette style that owes much to African art and had a lasting impact on later African-American artists (see fig. 33-69). -He painted aspects of negro life: from slavery through reconstruction (fig. 32-66) for the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library under the sponsorship of the Depression-era Public Works of Art Project. -To the right, slaves are celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, from which radiate concentric circles of light. At the center, an orator gestures dramatically, pointing to the United States Capitol in the background as if to urge all African Americans, some of whom are still picking cotton in the foreground, to exercise their right to vote. -To the left, Union soldiers leave the South after Reconstruction, while Ku Klux Klan members, hooded and on horseback, charge in, reminding viewers that the fight for civil rights has only just begun.

Fig. 32-66 Aaron Douglas ASPECTS OF NEGRO LIFE: FROM SLAVERY THROUGH RECONSTRUCTION

-The painter Aaron Douglas (1898-1979) moved to New York City from Topeka, Kansas, in 1925. He developed a silhouette style that owes much to African art and had a lasting impact on later African-American artists (see fig. 33-69). He painted aspects of negro life: from slavery through reconstruction (fig. 32-66) for the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library under the sponsorship of the Depression-era Public Works of Art Project. -To the right, slaves are celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, from which radiate concentric circles of light. -At the center, an orator gestures dramatically, pointing to the United States Capitol in the background as if to urge all African Americans, some of whom are still picking cotton in the foreground, to exercise their right to vote. -To the left, Union soldiers leave the South after Reconstruction, while Ku Klux Klan members, hooded and on horseback, charge in, reminding viewers that the fight for civil rights has only just begun.

Fig. 32-75 Tarsila do Amaral THE ONE WHO EATS (ABAPORÚ)

-The painter who most closely embodies this irreverent attitude is Tarsila do Amaral (1887-1974), a daughter of the coffee-planting aristocracy, who studied in Europe with Fernand Léger (see fig. 32-21), among others. -Her painting the one who eats (abaporú) (fig. 32-75) shows an appreciation of the art of Léger and Brancusi (see figs. 32-26, 32-27), which Tarsila collected. But she also inserted several "tropical" clichés—the abstracted forms of a cactus and a lemon-slice sun. -The subject is Andrade's irreverent cannibal, sitting in a caricatured Brazilian landscape, as if to say: If Brazilians are caricatured abroad as cannibals, then let us act like cannibals. -As Andrade wrote in one of his manifestos, "Carnival in Rio is the religious outpouring of our race. Richard Wagner yields to the samba. Barbaric but ours. We have a dual heritage: The jungle and the school."

Fig. 32-4 Henri Matisse THE JOY OF LIFE (LE BONHEUR DE VIVRE)

-The same year, Matisse also began painting the joy of life (le bonheur de vivre) (fig. 32-4), a large pastoral landscape depicting a golden age—a reclining nude in the foreground plays pan pipes, another piper herds goats in the right mid-ground, lovers embrace in the foreground, and others dance in the background. -Like Cézanne's The Large Bathers painted in the same year (see fig. 31-59), The Joy of Life is academic in scale and theme, but avant-garde in most other respects—notably in the way the figures appear "flattened" and in the distortion of the spatial relations between them. -Matisse emphasized expressive color, drawing on folk-art traditions in his use of unmodeled forms and bold outlines. In the past, artists might have expressed feeling through the figures' poses or facial expressions, but now, he wrote, "The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. -The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.... The chief aim of color should be to serve expression as well as possible."

Fig. 32-13 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner STREET, BERLIN

-Their images of cities, especially Berlin, are powerfully critical of urban existence. In Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's street, berlin (fig. 32-13), two prostitutes—their profession advertised by their large, feathered hats and fur-trimmed coats—strut past a group of well-dressed bourgeois men whom they view as potential clients. -The figures are dehumanized, with masklike faces and stiff gestures. Their bodies crowd together, but they are psychologically distant, ambiguously related to one another. The biting colors, tilted perspective, and forceful brushstrokes make this a disturbing Expressionistic image of urban degeneracy and alienation.

Synthetic Cubism

-This second major phase of Cubism is known as Synthetic Cubism because of the way the artists created complex compositions by combining and transforming individual elements, as in a chemical synthesis. -Picasso's bottle of suze (La bouteille de Suze) (fig. 32-9), like many of the works he and Braque created from 1912 to 1914, is a collage

Fig. 32-49 Vera Mukhina WORKER AND COLLECTIVE FARM WOMAN

-Vera Mukhina (1889-1953) was a member of AKhRR and is best known for her 78-foot-tall stainless-steel worker and collective farm woman (fig. 32-49), a powerfully built male factory worker and an equally powerful female farm laborer with hammer and sickle held high in the air—the same two tools that appeared on the Soviet flag. -The figures stand as equals, partners in their common cause, striding into the future with determined faces, their windblown clothing billowing behind them.

Rejection of The Fountain

-When Fountain was rejected, as Duchamp anticipated it would be, the artist resigned from the Society of Independent Artists in mock horror. An unsigned editorial in a Dada journal (which could have been written by the artist himself) detailed what it described as the scandal of the R. Mutt case. -It claimed, "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and bridges," and added, "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. -He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object."

Fig. 32-72 Emily Carr BIG RAVEN

-With the Group of Seven, Carr developed a dramatic and powerfully sculptural style full of dark, brooding energy. big raven (fig. 32-72), painted in 1931 from a 1912 watercolor, shows an abandoned village in the Queen Charlotte Islands where Carr found a carved raven on a pole, the surviving member of a pair that originally marked a mortuary house. -In her autobiography Carr described the raven as "old and rotting," but in the painting she shows it as strong and majestic, thrusting dynamically above the swirling vegetation, a symbol of enduring spiritual power and national pride.

Fig. 32-43 Frank Lloyd Wright FALLINGWATER (EDGAR KAUFMANN HOUSE), MILL RUN

-Wright had an uneasy relationship with European Modernist architecture; he was uninterested in the machine aesthetic of Le Corbusier. -Although he routinely used new building materials such as ferroconcrete, plate glass, and steel, he tried to maintain a natural sensibility, connecting his buildings to their sites by using brick and local wood or stone. fallingwater (fig. 32-43) in rural Pennsylvania is a prime example of this practice. -It is also the most famous expression of Wright's conviction that buildings should not simply sit on the landscape but coordinate with it. -Fallingwater was commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store owner, to replace a family summer cottage on the site of a waterfall and a pool where his children played. To Kaufmann's surprise, Wright decided to build the new house right into the cliff and over the pool, allowing the waterfall to flow around and under the house. -A large boulder where the family had sunbathed in the summers was used for the central hearthstone of the fireplace. In a dramatic move that engineers questioned (with reason, as subsequent sagging has shown), Wright used cantilevers to extend a series of broad concrete terraces out from the cliff to parallel the great slabs of natural rock below. -Poured concrete forms the terraces, but Wright painted the material a soft earth tone. Long bands of windows and glass doors offer spectacular views uniting woods, water, and house. Such houses do not simply testify to the ideal of living in harmony with nature; they declare war on the modern city. When asked what could be done to improve city architecture, Wright responded: "Tear it down."

action painting

-an abstract painting in which the artist drips or splatters paint onto a surface like a canvas in order to create his or her work *jackson pollock -Time magazine described Pollock as "Jack the Dripper," and two years later, Rosenberg coined the term Action painting, in an essay, "The American Action Painters." -Describing the development and purpose of Action painting Rosenberg wrote, "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined."

Fig. 32-70 Dorothea Lange MIGRANT MOTHER, NIPOMO, CALIFORNIA

-migrant mother, nipomo, california (fig. 32-70) shows Florence Owens Thompson, a 32-year-old mother of seven representative of the poverty suffered by thousands of migrant workers in California. Lange carefully constructed her photograph for maximum emotional impact. -She zoomed in very close to the subject, focusing on the mother's worn expression and apparent resolve. The composition refers to images of the Virgin Mary holding the Child Jesus (see fig. 21-6) or perhaps sorrowful scenes in which she contemplates his loss (see fig. 21-14). -Lange chose to eliminate from this photograph the makeshift tent in which the family was camped, the dirty dishes on a battered trunk, trash strewn around the campsite, and, most significant, Thompson's teenage daughter—all documented in her other photographs of the same scene. -Lange decided to focus here on the purity and moral worth of her subject, for whom she sought Federal aid; she could not allude to the fact that Thompson had been a teenage mother or even that she was Cherokee. -Migrant Mother (then unidentified by name) became the "poster child" of the Great Depression, and her powerfully sad, distant gaze still resonates with audiences today, demonstrating the propaganda power of the visual image. -In 1960, Lange described the experience of taking this photograph, writing, "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. -She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it." (Popular Photography, February. 1960)

Fig. 32-29 Marcel Duchamp FOUNTAIN

-remains one of the most controversial works of art of the twentieth century. It incites laughter, anger, embarrassment, and disgust by openly referring to private bathroom activities and to human carnality and vulnerability. -But more significantly, in it Duchamp questions the essence of what constitutes a work of art. How much can be stripped away before an object's status as art disappears? Since Whistler's famous court case (see "Art on Trial in 1877"), most avant-garde artists had agreed that a work of art did not have to be descriptive or well crafted, but before 1917, none would have argued, as Duchamp does in this piece, that art was primarily conceptual. -For centuries, perhaps millennia, artists had regularly employed studio assistants to make parts, if not all, of the art objects that they designed. On one level, Duchamp updates that practice into modern terms by arguing that art objects can actually be mass-produced for the artist by industry. -Duchamp creates a commentary simultaneously about consumption and about the irrationality of the modern age by claiming that the "readymade" simply bypasses the craft tradition, qualifying as a work of art because of its human conceptualization rather than its human making.

Fig. 32-15 Paula Modersohn-Becker RECLINING MOTHER AND CHILD

-she made four trips to Paris after 1900 to view recent developments in Post-Impressionist painting and was especially attracted to the "primitivizing" tendencies of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings (see fig. 31-41). Many of her most powerful works were painted during 1906, her last year in Paris. reclining mother and child (fig. 32-15) highlights a monumental mother who encloses her young (perhaps nursing) child within a protective embrace. -Coordinated curves and rhyming poses knit the two frankly naked figures together into a composition of interconnected flesh with no hint of glamour or allure. This iconic portrayal of motherhood becomes even more poignant with the knowledge that the artist herself was to die the following year, soon after giving birth to her first child.

Assemblage

Artwork created by gathering and manipulating two- and/or three-dimensional found objects.

Fig. 32-17 Franz Marc THE LARGE BLUE HORSES

By 1911, Marc was mostly painting animals rather than humans, rendering them in big, bold forms and highly saturated colors. He felt animals were more "primitive" and thus purer than humans, enjoying a more spiritual relationship with nature. In the large blue horses (fig. 32-17), the animals—painted in blue, a color that the artist considered spiritual—merge into a homogeneous whole. Their sweeping contours reflect the harmony of their collective existence and echo the curved lines of the hills behind them, suggesting that they live in harmony with their surroundings.

Fig. 32-68 Jacob Lawrence THE MIGRATION SERIES, PANEL NO. 1: DURING WORLD WAR I THERE WAS A GREAT MIGRATION NORTH BY SOUTHERN AFRICAN AMERICANS

Entitled the migration series, 60 panels chronicle the Great Migration, a journey that had brought Lawrence's own parents from South Carolina to Atlantic City, New Jersey. In the first panel (fig. 32-68), African-American migrants stream through the doors of a Southern train station on their way to Chicago, New York, or St. Louis. Lawrence's boldly abstracted silhouette style, with its flat, bright shapes and colors, draws consciously and directly—like that of Douglas—on African visual sources.

Fig. 32-26 Constantin Brancusi THE NEWBORN

For Brancusi, the egg symbolized the potential for birth, growth, and development—the essence of life contained in a perfect, organic, abstract ovoid. In the newborn (fig. 32-26) of 1915, he conflates its shape with the head of a human infant to suggest the essence of humanity at the moment of birth. I

Fig. 32-39 Adolf Loos STEINER HOUSE, VIENNA

In Europe, a stripped-down and severely geometric style of Modernist architecture developed partly in reaction to the natural organic lines of Art Nouveau. In Vienna, Adolf Loos (1870-1933), one of the pioneers of European architectural Modernism, insisted in his 1913 essay "Ornament and Crime" that "the evolution of a culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects." For Loos, ornament was a sign of cultural degeneracy. Thus his steiner house (fig. 32-39) is a stucco-covered, reinforced concrete construction without decorative embellishment. The rectangular windows, for instance, are completely plain, and they were arranged only in relation to the functional demands of interior spaces. Loos argued that the only purpose of a building's interior was to provide protection from the elements.

Fig. 32-65 James Van Der Zee COUPLE WEARING RACCOON COATS WITH A CADILLAC, TAKEN ON WEST 127TH STREET, HARLEM, NEW YORK

James Van Der Zee (1886-1983), a studio photographer who took carefully crafted portraits of the Harlem upper-middle classes, opened his studio in 1916, working as both a news reporter and a society photographer. couple wearing raccoon coats with a cadillac (fig. 32-65) captures a wealthy man and woman posing with their new car in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. The photograph reveals the glamour of Harlem, then the center of African-American cultural life.

primitivism

The borrowing of subjects or forms, usually from non-European or prehistoric sources by Western artists, in an attempt to infuse their work with the expressive qualities they attributed to other cultures, especially colonized cultures. *used in Picasso's work

abstract expressionists

The influential Formalist (valuing form over content) critic Clement Greenberg urged the Abstract Expressionists to consider their paintings "autonomous" and completely self-referential objects. The best paintings, he argued, made no reference to the outside world, but had their own internal meaning and order. -Some early Abstract Expressionist artists were also deeply influenced by the theories of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961), who described a collective unconscious of universal archetypes shared by all humans; many early Abstract Expressionists aspired to create works that embodied such universal symbolic forms. -As the 1940s progressed, however, the symbolic content of some paintings became increasingly personal and abstract. By referring to "primitive," mythic imagery and archaic, archetypal, and primal symbolism, some artists hoped to make a connection among all people through the collective unconscious; several used biomorphic forms or developed an individual symbolic language in their paintings; all made passionate and expressive statements on large canvases. The Abstract Expressionists felt destined to transform art history. -Though their paintings project a personal vision, the Abstract Expressionists shared a commitment to two major projects: (1) an interest in the traditional history of painting, but a desire to rebel against it, including the recent ideas of European Modernism and (2) a desire to treat the act of painting on canvas as a self-contained expressive, even heroic, exercise that would communicate universal ideas.

Fig. 32-65 James Van Der Zee COUPLE WEARING RACCOON COATS WITH A CADILLAC, TAKEN ON WEST 127TH STREET, HARLEM, NEW YORK

captures a wealthy man and woman posing with their new car in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. The photograph reveals the glamour of Harlem, then the center of African-American cultural life.

Fig. 32-24 Natalia Goncharova ELECTRIC LIGHT

painted in 1913 by Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), shows the brightly artificial light from a new electric lamp fracturing and dissolving its surrounding forms like an analytical Cubist force. Goncharova turned to mixtures of Russian folk art and Modernist abstraction in costumes and sets she designed for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes stagings, including Le Coq d'Or (1914), Night on Bald Mountain (1923), and the revival of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird (1926).