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AP History of Unit Ten:

RISE OF

Prepared by: D. Darracott Plano West Senior High School

1 Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

IMPRESSIONISM

Edouard Manet. Luncheon on the Grass,

1863, oil on canvas

 Edouard Manet

 shocking display of

 rejection of academic principles

 development of the avant garde

at the des Refuses

 inclusion of a

 a “vulgar” nude for the bourgeois public

Edouard Manet. , 1863, oil on canvas

 Manet’s ties to tradition

 attributes of a prostitute

 Emile Zola

 a servant with flowers

 strong, emphatic outlines

 Manet’s use of black

Edouard Manet. Bar at the

Folies Bergere, 1882, oil on canvas

 a barmaid named Suzon

 Gaston Latouche

 Folies Bergere

 love of illusion and reflections

 champagne and beer

Gustave Caillebotte. A Rainy Day, 1877, oil on canvas

 great avenues of a modern

2

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

 informal and asymmetrical

composition with cropped figures

Edgar Degas. The Bellelli Family, 1858-60, oil on canvas

 admiration for Ingres

 cold, austere atmosphere

 beheaded dog

 vertical line as a physical and

psychological division

Edgar Degas. Rehearsal in the

Foyer of the Opera, 1872, oil on canvas

 Degas’ fascination with the ballet

 use of empty (negative) space

 informal poses along diagonal lines

 influence of Japanese woodblock prints

 strong verticals of the

and the dancing master

 chair in the foreground

Edgar Degas. The Morning Bath, c. 1883, pastel on paper

 advantages of pastels

 voyeurism

Mary Cassatt. The Bath, c. 1892, oil on canvas

 mother and child in flattened space

 genre scene lacking sentimentality

3

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

Claude Monet. Impression Sunrise,

1872, oil on canvas

 plein air

 catching the vibrating quality of

light with bold

 contrasting warm and cool colors

Claude Monet. Gare St. Lazare,

1877, oil on canvas

 image of a new, industrial world of change

Claude Monet. Cathedral:

The Portal (in Sun), 1894, oil on canvas

 one of 40 views in a series

 subject of light and fleeting

atmospheric effects

painting

 avoidance of black

Pierre Auguste Renoir. Luncheon of the

Boating Party, 1881, oil on canvas

 Pierre Auguste Renoir

 Restaurant Fournaise

 spontaneity of a snapshot

 trio to the right (Caillebotte,

Ellen Andre, and Maggiolo)

 Baron Raoul Barbier

 flirtatious touches of a bohemian lifestyle

4  glimpse of the river

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Nocturne in Black and Gold, 1874, oil on canvas

 James Abbott McNeill Whistler

 a falling rocket

 Oriental influences

’s criticism

 utilizing transparent properties of

POST IMPRESSIONISM

Georges Seurat. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886, oil on canvas

 pointilism or

 reaction against Impressionist

spontaneity

 use of repeated motifs

 mixture of classes

 Egyptian influence

 extensive preparation for a

monumental task

 a hard sell

Paul Cezanne. Mont St. Victoire,

1885-7, oil on canvas

 Paul Cezanne

 interest in abstraction

 adopting a holistic approach through

color and technique

5  admiration for Poussin

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

 formalism and the secondary role of subject matter

 unfinished areas to emphasize the process of painting

Paul Cezanne. The Basket of Apples, c. 1895, oil on canvas

 rejection of and organization

 restricted color palette

Vincent van Gogh. Bedroom at Arles,

1888, oil on canvas

 influence of Japanese prints

 strong outlines

 expressive use of color

 impasto brushwork

 ajar window

 paired objects

Vincent van Gogh. Starry Night,

1889, oil on canvas

 personal vision of nature

Paul Gaugin. , 1888, oil on canvas

 Jacob Wrestling with the Angel

 flat planes of unmodulated color

6

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

Paul Gauguin. Where Do We Come From?

What are We? Where are We Going?,

1897, oil on canvas

 Gauguin’s “escape” to Tahiti

 a final statement before an

attempted suicide

 to be read from right to left in

accordance to Eastern tradition

 references to religious beliefs

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

At the Moulin Rouge, 1892-1895, oil on canvas

 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

 fin de siecle

 tawdry environs

 use of dissonant color

 influence of Degas

SYMBOLISM and

Odilon Redon. The Cyclops, 1898, oil on canvas

 haunting, imaginary scenes

Henri Rousseau. The Sleeping Gypsy,

1897, oil on canvas

of the subconscious

James Ensor. Christ’s Entry into , 1888, oil on canvas

7  “Vive la Sociale”

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

 masks as metaphors for loneliness

 loss of individual identity in a crowd

 image of Christ

 military band in black

 strident color

Edvard Munch. The Scream,

1893, casein on paper

 an image of fear

Auguste Rodin.

The Burghers of Calais, 1886, bronze

 English siege of Calais in 1347

 rough, rugged surfaces

 varying reactions to fate

 without a traditional high base

Auguste Rodin. The Gates of Hell, 1880-1917, bronze

 inspired by Dante

 artful unfinished state

 The Thinker

 The Kiss

 plight of the human condition

Andre Derain. London Bridge, 1906, oil on canvas

 Andre Derain

 moving towards abstraction

8

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

Henri Matisse. Red Room

(Harmony in Red), 1908-9, oil on canvas

 lyrical, curvilinear style

 emphasis on flat patterns

Henri Matisse. The ,

1909, oil on canvas

 act of painting compared to

the liberating act of dancing

 undulating linear quality

 interlocking shapes emphasizing negative space

 “genius of omission”

Henri Matisse. The Snail, 1953, gouache on paper

 vibrant color with paper cutouts

 spiral shape

 use of and black

 use of

Pierre Bonnard. The Open Window,

1921, oil on canvas

 influence of the Nabis

 broken brushstrokes of color

 intimate domestic scene

Gustav Klimt. The Kiss, 1907-8, oil on canvas

 Gustav Klimt

 Secessionist group of bohemians

 flat, decorative quality

9  expressive hands

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

 enveloping, symbolic garments

 influence of Byzantine mosaics

 Sigmund Freud and the

exploration of sexuality

Oskar Kokoschka. The Bride of the Wind,

1914, oil on canvas

 transition from Symbolism to Expressionism

Ernst Kirchner. Street, ,

1913, oil on canvas

 Ernst Kirchner

 German Expressionism

 Die Brucke

 aggressive brushwork with harsh color

 deep admiration for German

 cry against materialism

Kathe Kollwitz. Death Seizing a Woman,

1934-6, lithograph

 Kathe Kollwitz

 art as a form of social protest

 expressive use of line to convey fear and terror

Franz Marc. The Great Horses, 1911, oil on canvas

 admiration for the animal kingdom

Wassily Kandinsky. Improvisation 28,

1912, oil on canvas

10  Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

 compositions and improvisations

 move toward nonobjective art

 “color is the keyboard”

Max Beckmann. Departure,

1932-33, oil on canvas

 Max Beckmann

 rise of the Nazis

 the fisher-king

 “”

 side panels of bondage

and torture

Alberto Giacometti.

La Place (City Square), 1948, bronze

 expressive distortion of

the human form

 bewilderment, loss, and

alienation in urban society

Jean Dubuffet. Vie Inquiete,

1953, oil on canvas

 Art Brut

11

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

Francis Bacon. Self-Portrait,

1973, oil on canvas

 Francis Bacon

 use of distortion and exaggeration in

depicting the human figure

 drips of paint

 convoluted (puzzling, confusing) division of space

Jacob Lawrence. Better Negro Education Facilities

 Jacob Lawrence

 racial division in the

 faceless figures

 stark contrast and flat shapes

Pablo Picasso. Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas

 Guernica and the Spanish Civil War

 mural at the International

Exhibition in Paris of 1937

 Cubist faces and a severed

 the anguished horse and the bull

 mother and child

 absence of color

 influence of Spanish masters

 “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth”

EARLY MODERN ABSTRACTION:

Pablo Picasso. , 1906, oil on canvas

 Pablo Picasso

 Gertrude Stein

12  a “primitive” portrait

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d”Avignon,

1907, oil on canvas

 a bordello on Barcelona’s

Carrer d’Avinyo (Avignon Street)

 influence of African masks

 Egyptian pictorial profile convention

 poses based on those of Venus

 Fauve preference for bold strokes

of color vs. chiaroscuro

 the face and back of the “squatter”

 sharp edges and angles

Georges Braque. The Portuguese, 1911, oil on canvas

 Analytic Cubism

 the studio and the café

 restrained, monochromatic color schemes

 flickering light

 “all-over” treatment of the picture plane

Robert Delaunay. Champs de Mars or The Red Tower, 1911, oil on canvas

 Eiffel Tower

 Cubist approach to space

Pablo Picasso. Still Life with Chair Caning,

1911-12, oil and pasted paper

 Synthetic Cubism

13  painting treated more as an object than as an image

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

Fernand Leger. , 1919, oil on canvas

 Fernand Leger

 belief in technology and the “machine”

 robotic men

 Cubist space used to define the modern city

EARLY MODERN ABSTRACTION:

Umberto Boccioni. Unique Forms of

Continuity in Space, 1913, bronze

 Futurism

 speed and dynamism of contemporary life

 convex concave form

 unconstrained liberty of the artist to create

Umberto Boccioni. ,

1910, oil on canvas

 blurred contours and restless movement

 Marinetti’s belief that “war is

the hygiene of civilization”

 nihilism

Giacomo Balla. Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, oil on canvas

 stationary observer (unlike the observer

in Cubist ) of motion

14

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

EARLY MODERN ABSTRACTION:

SUPREMATISM AND

Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist

Composition: Aeroplane Flying,

1915, oil on canvas

 formalism in art for a new society

 Russian Revolution and the avant garde

Vladimir Tatlin. Monument to the

Third International, 1919-20, in wood, iron, and glass

 Constructivism

 embracing art as a social, functional product

 model for a building of glass and iron

 huge cylindrical glass structure at the bottom

 cone-shaped structure in the center

 a cubic information center at the top

EARLY MODERN ABSTRACTION:

DeSTIJL (or NEOPLASTICISM)

Piet Mondrian. Composition with

Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930, oil on canvas

15  theosophy

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

 Neoplasticism

 self-imposed restrictions

 effect of Classical calm

 precise painting technique

Piet Mondrian.

Broadway Boogie Woogie,

1942-3, oil on canvas

 reference to city streets and dance

EARLY MODERN ABSTRACTION:

SCULPTURE

Constantin Brancusi. Bird in Space, 1928, bronze

 Constantin Brancusi

 search for the “essence of things”

 reference to flight with a reflective surface

 complement to industrial production

Constantin Brancusi. The Kiss, 1907, stone

 monolithic form vs. open form

Henry Moore. Recumbent Figure, 1938, stone

 abstraction in response to nature

 sensitive response to materials (media)

16

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

EARLY MODERNISM IN AMERICA

Georgia O’Keeffe. Jack in the

Pulpit IV, 1930, oil on canvas

 Georgia O’Keeffe

 enlarged view of flowers

and the 291 Gallery

Charles Demuth. I Saw the Figure

5 in Gold, 1928, oil on canvas

 a passing fire truck, a poem, and friends

 The Great Figure by

 numbers and letters as abstract shapes

 diagonal divisions of space

Marsden Hartley. Portrait of a German Officer,

1914, oil on canvas

 Karl von Freyburg

 use of symbols, emblems, letters, and numbers

Joseph Stella. Brooklyn Bridge, 1917-18, oil on canvas

 a modernist icon for an immigrant

17

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

EARLY

Joseph Paxton. Crystal Palace (London) 1851

 Joseph Paxton

 Palace of Industry

 prefabricated cast-iron building

 steel louvers

 glazing with large sheets of glass

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel Tower

(Paris) 1889, wrought iron

 Alexandre Gustave Eiffel

 designed for a great exhibition

 four giant supports

 impact of a view

Antonio Gaudi. Sagrada Familia (Holy Family)

Barcelona, Spain, 1884- present

 Antonio Gaudi

 unique religious conviction expressed

in an original, personal style

 three doorways

 four campaniles

 animated “pompom” finials

 undulating surfaces

Louis Sullivan. Guaranty (Prudential)

Building (Buffalo, NY) 1894-5

 form follows function

18

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

 elevation of Renaissance palace

transformed into a skyscraper

Frank .

Robie House, (Chicago, IL) 1907-9

 Prairie Style

 cantilevered roof

 importance of chimney and hearth

 raised first floor

 hidden entryway

 open planning

 Roman bricks

 window ornamentation and fenestration

Frank Lloyd Wright.

(, PA) 1936-9

 union of architecture and nature

 architecture defining space vs. mass

Gerrit Rietveld. Schroeder House

(Utrecht, ) 1924

 DeStijl

 overlapping planes

 balcony supports

 use of primary colors

 weightless suspension of abstract elements

 cornered window

19

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

Le Corbusier. Savoye

(-sur-Seine, ) 1929

 International Style

 piloti

 ribbon windows

 roof garden on a flat roof

 white exterior

 “machine for living”

Le Corbusier. Unité d’Habitation

(Marseilles, France) 1945-52

 vertical cities

 surrounded by a park

 growth of social planning

Le Corbusier. Notre Dame du Haut

(Ronchamp, France) 1950-55

 Corbusier’s late work

 curved and tapering walls

 sprayed with concrete

 interior roof elevated above walls

Walter Gropius. Bauhaus (Dessau,

Germany) 1925-6

 Bauhaus

 clear, cubic forms

 spread of Bauhaus ideals to the United States

William van Alen. Chrylser Building (New York) 1928-30

 William van Alen

20  and the Age

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

 age of the automobile

 glittering spire in a race to be the tallest

Impressionism Possible Essay Topics:  identify the characteristics of “Impressionism” and discuss how they are exemplified in either “known” or “unknown” works of art  compare and contrast the style and content of Japanese prints from the Edo period with Impressionist paintings from the nineteenth century  discuss the ways in which the French painter Edouard Manet defied academic tradition and embraced the “heroism of modern life” (while shocking the Parisian public at the same time)  discuss the influence of Japanese prints and on the work of the Impressionists, particularly that of Edgar Degas  discuss the importance of the “plein-air” approach to painting, the study of light and color, and the thick application of paint (impasto) in the work of the Impressionists painters, particularly that of Claude Monet  discuss the treatment of women in the works of the Impressionists, particularly in the works of Edouard Manet (Olympia, Bar at the Folies Bergere)

Post Impressionism Possible Essay Topics:  compare and contrast the work of Post-Impressionist artists with the works of Impressionists artists  discuss how the Post Impressionists artists Paul Cezanne and Georges Seurat impacted through their analysis of structure, form, and color  discuss how the Post Impressionists artists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin impacted modern art through their exploration of inner emotions through a subjective use of color and expressive content  discuss the role of the artist’s life and his persona in the development of the style and content of the work of Post Impressionist artists

Symbolism and Expressionism Possible Essay Topics:  identify the characteristics of “Symbolism” or “Expressionism” and discuss how they are exemplified in either a “known” or “unknown”  discuss how the work of Auguste Rodin breaks from the classical tradition of heroic  identify the characteristics of “Fauvism” and discuss how they are exemplified in either a “known” or “unknown” work of art  discuss the contributions (liberation of color, expressive use of line, etc…) Henri Matisse made to modern art in creating a body of work that expressed a “joie de vivre”  discuss the role of spirituality (especially theosophy) and music in the work of Wassily Kandinsky and how his art eventually became “nonobjective”  discuss how the rising fears of Fascism and totalitarianism in impacted the art of the German Expressionists and other modern masters (such as Picasso in his Guernica)  discuss some of the reasons how and why fear, anxiety, loneliness, and sexual repression became major themes in much of the work created by artists of the twentieth century (Ensor, Munch, Klimt, Bacon, etc…) 

21

Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism STUDENT NOTES

Early Modern Abstraction Possible Essay Topics:  identify the characteristics of “Analytic Cubism” and “Synthetic Cubism” and discuss how they are exemplified in either a “known” or “unknown” work of art  identify the characteristics of “Futurism” and discuss how they are exemplified in either a “known” or “unknown” work of art  identify the characteristics of “Suprematism” and discuss how they are exemplified in either a “known” or “unknown” work of art  identify the characteristics of “Constructivism” and discuss how they are exemplified in either a “known” or “unknown” work of art  compare and contrast the approach to color, technique, and composition as seen in the mature “DeStijl” or “Neoplastic” works of Piet Mondrian with the early Fauve works by Henri Matisse (such as The Dance)  discuss the social and political concerns connected with the work of Constructivist and Futurist artists such as Vladmir Tatlin and Umberto Boccioni  discuss the aesthetic concerns (such as “truth to materials”) of and the impact of nature on the abstract sculpture of Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore  discuss how modern technology (along with 20th century notions of progress) impacted the work of early abstractionists (such as Fernand Leger, Joseph Stella, Robert Delaunay, Naum Gabo, , etc…)  discuss some of the aesthetic and philosophical concepts that led to the creation of artwork that emphasized only its formal elements and rid itself of representational subject matter (such as in the work of Malevich and Mondrian)

Early Modern Architecture Possible Essay Topics:  discuss how Louis Sullivan’s dictum “form follows function” impacted the development of modern architecture in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century  identify the characteristics of the “prairie style” associated with the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright and discuss how his structures exemplify those characteristics  discuss how the term “international style” reflects not only the stylistic characteristics of modern architecture but also how the style itself met the needs of a progressive, technological modern society  compare and contrast structures built by architects who are interested in relating a building to its surroundings (or simply nature in general) with glass and steel structures built in the international style that appear to comply with Le Corbusier’s desire that architects should create “machines for living”  discuss the influence of the Bauhaus in terms of both art and architecture; explain also how that influence spread to the United States

22 Unit TEN: Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

A Edouard Manet. Luncheon on the Grass, 1863

Edouard Manet/ shocking display of Realism/ rejection of academic principles/ development of the avant garde at the Salon des Refuses/ inclusion of a still life/ a “vulgar” nude for the bourgeois public

1. “Born into an upper-middle-class Parisian family, [Edouard] Manet (1832-1883) studied in the early 1850s with the painter Thomas Couture (1815-1879), an academician with progressive leanings. Manet often quarreled with Couture and some of the models available to him, however, because he wanted the models to adopt more naturalistic poses and because he though that during the summer months studies should be done outdoors, under natural light” (Stokstad, 1009). “As part of his Baudelairean program to be „the painter of modern life,‟ Manet… remade… Giorgione‟s in the . What Manet intended by le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe remains unclear and a matter of considerable debate. One contested theory sees in the work a portrayal of modern alienation, not unlike Daumier‟s Third-Class Carriage. The figures in Manet‟s painting are distant in both their physical and their psychological relationships. Although the man on the right seems to gesture toward his companions, the other man gazes off absently while the nude turns her attention away from them and to the viewer. Moreover, her gaze makes us conscious of our role as outside observer… Manet‟s rejection of warm colors for a scheme of cool and greens plays an important role, as do his flat, sharply outlined figures, which seem starkly lit because of the near absence of modeling. The figures are not integrated with their natural surroundings, as in the Titian, but seem to stand out sharply against them, as if seated before a painted backdrop” (1010).

2. “One historian has argued that Manet may have intended to make a modern version of the popular Renaissance theme of sacred and profane love, a contrast between the higher spiritual love and that of the flesh. Several details in the picture suggest as much. For example, the man on the right makes a curious hand gesture, with his thumb pointing to the clothed woman in the stream and his index finger pointing to the nude. Above the woman in the water- itself a symbol of purity- is a bird, traditionally associated with the spirit. In the lower-left corner, next to the nude‟s discarded garments, is a frog, often an emblem of the flesh. With these hints, perhaps, Manet fulfills Baudelaire‟s mandate giving us not only „the passing moment‟ of a contemporary picnic but „all the suggestions of eternity that it contains.‟ It is worth noting in this regard that the „duality of man,‟ which would include the conflict between the sacred and the profane, is one of Baudelaire‟s central concerns in „The Painter of Modern Life‟ ” (1010-1011). “In 1863, Manet shocked the French public by exhibiting his Dejeuner sur l’Herbe. It is not a Realist painting in the social or political sense of Daumier, but it is a statement in favor of the artist‟s individual freedom, and challenges the viewer on several grounds. The shock value of a nude woman casually lunching with two fully dressed men, which was an affront to the propriety of the time, was accentuated by the recognizability of the figures. The nude, Manet‟s model Victorine Meurend, stares directly at the viewer. The two men are Manet‟s brother Gustave and his future brother-in-law, Ferdinand Leenhoff” (Adams, Art Across Time 754).

3. “The visual impact of the painting is partly the result of the shallow perspective. Rather than creating the illusion of a distant space, Manet, like Courbet and Eakins, builds up areas of color, so that the forms seem to advance toward the viewer. The final effect of this technique is a direct confrontation between viewer and image, allowing little of the relief, or „breathing space,‟ that comes with distance.” (755). Near the figures „lie the remains of a picnic: a small basket, cherries, a bread roll and an empty glass decanter. They have already drunk the wine it contained. Like a picture within a picture, the details of the picture make up a still life, a realist genre much despised by the leading Salon painters. It was one which Manet, however, painted all his life. „The still life is the touchstone of painting,‟ he later said to the beginner Jacques-Emile Blanche. „Bring a brioche with you; that‟s what I want you to paint.‟ Manet himself painted large brioches on a number of occasions; like most Parisian gourmets of his day, he seems to have had a penchant for this type of patisserie. A number of smaller brioches are still lying in the basket in the Dejeuner sur l’Herbe. Made with a sweet yeast dough and a lot of butter, they belonged to the more expensive category of pain de fantaisie. Unlike the cheaper pain ordinaire, whose weight was officially regulated and which in the 19th century formed a staple food of the poorer classes, brioches were not weighed by the baker. Together with the empty decanter, they introduce an element of cosmopolitan luxury into the natural setting. Their function is thus thoroughly realistic: they characterize the people in the painting” (Hagen and Hagen 3: 159).

4. “Since private galleries hardly existed and the museums only exhibited works from the past, painters and sculptors excluded from the Salon had no means of bringing their work to the attention of a wide audience. In 1866 the painter Jules Holtzappfel committed suicide in despair after his works had been denied inclusion in the Salon: „The jury has rejected me‟, he wrote, „so I must have no .‟ In 1863, and indeed most years, the artists whose works had been rejected protested against the tyranny of the jury- and this time something unexpected happened: the emperor himself ordered that the „refused‟ should be given the opportunity to show their pictures and in a separate exhibition to be held parallel to the official Salon. Manet was thus able to exhibit his Dejeuner sur l’Herbe in this Salon des Refuses. The large painting, measuring 208 x 264 cm, quickly found itself the center of attention. The public reacted with laughter, derision and hostility. „This picture‟, the emperor is alleged to have said, „offends the public sense of decency.‟ Manet‟s disappointment at the public‟s reaction was great… It was only with difficulty that Manet… had obtained his parents‟ permission to become a painter. In the bourgeois circles in which they moved, an artistic career was seen as synonymous with social inferiority” (158). “One reason for the painting‟s rejection was probably its way of making the spectator in the picture feel foolish, as if he has stumbled on a scene where he does not belong. The naked woman shows no shame or surprise, even though she is sitting in equally close contact with her two male companions. This bohemian behavior, and the bohemian dress of the man at the right of the picture, suggests the party may be artists and models. But the whole force of the painting depends on a curious twist. Once the real male spectator takes up the psychology of th e spectator in the picture, he is looking at a model who is present and „real‟. This means he is no longer able to persue the female body within the artwork from a comfortable distance, or to look at art from the safety of reality” (Paul Smith 46, 49).

23 Unit TEN: Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

B Edouard Manet. Olympia, 1863

Victorine Meurent/ Manet‟s ties to tradition/ attributes of a prostitute/ Emile Zola/ a servant with flowers/ strong, emphatic outlines/ Manet‟s use of black

1. “Manet created an even more direct visual impact in the Olympia, which also caused a scandal when first exhibited in 1865. Here again, Manet is inspired by the past- most obviously by Giorgione‟s Sleeping Venus and Titian‟s Venus of Urbino. But whereas the Italian Renaissance nudes are psychologically „distanced‟ from the viewer‟s everyday experience by their designation as Classical deities, Manet‟s figure (the same Victorine who posed for the Dejeuner) was widely assumed to represent a prostitute. As such, she raised the specter of venereal disease, which was rampant in Paris at the time. The reference to „Olympia‟ in such a context only served to accentuate the contrast between the social „reality‟ of nineteenth-century Paris and the more comfortably removed Classical ideal.” (Adams, Art Across Time 755-756). Titian had also relieved the viewer‟s confrontation with his Venus by constructing a space that receded into depth. In the Olympia, however, the back wall of the room approaches the picture plane, separated from it only by the bed and the black servant. Olympia is harshly illuminated in contrast to the soft light and gradual, sensual shading of Titian‟s Venus. Furthermore, she shows none of the traditional signs of modesty, but instead stares boldly at the viewer” (756) “Olympia is naked rather than nude, an impression emphasized by her bony, unclassical proportions. The sheets are slightly rumpled, suggesting sexual activity. The flowers that her maid delivers have clearly been sent by a client. Olympia‟s shoes may refer to „streetwalking,‟ and the alert black cat is a symbol of sexuality, no doubt because of the popular reputation of the alley cat. The term „cat house‟ is commonly used for a brothel” (755).

2. Olympia was “a common name for prostitutes in the era” (Stokstad, Art History 1010). “This painting was shown at the official Paris Salon of 1865, two years after it was painted. Manet was nervous about how it would be received, since his famous painting Dejeuner sur l’Herbe had already caused a scandal. Olympia caused a storm of outraged protest. It was seen, not as a modern interpretation of a respected theme, but as a crude parody of sacred tradition. It was obvious to everyone that the reclining woman was not a goddess, but a prostitute” (Cumming, Great Artists 76). “The servant brings in flowers- a gift from a previous admirer- but Olympia does not acknowledge her presence. She is ready and for her next client: the spectator of the painting. She makes direct eye contact with the viewer, as does the cat, which disturbed from sleep by our arrival” (77). “Black is one of the most difficult pigments for an artist to exploit as it can easily overwhelm and kill all other colors and qualities. Manet is the great master of black: he was able to use it to bring a rich tonality and stylish elegance to his work. Manet, who dressed with great care, habitually wore the black frock coat and silk top hat that were fashionable in his day” (77). “The candid style shows Manet at his best and suits the directness of the subject. He uses a bold composition with strong outlines to the forms. There is virtually no shadow or modeling with soft light. There is no fine detail, but the color harmonies are very subtle. Some critics saw this style as merely incompetent when compared with that of Ingres, and it was described as being crude „like the image on a playing card‟” (76). “Manet used mostly his family and friends to pose as models. Here he has employed a professional model, Victorine Meurent, aged 30. She became a painter herself but ended life as an alcoholic… The writer Emile Zola (1840-1902) was a friend and supporter of Manet, and his novel describes the rise and fall of a young woman like Olympia… When he was 18 years old, Manet began a longstanding affair with his piano teacher Suzanne Leenhoff, and a son was born in 1852. In public, they pretended that the child was Suzanne‟s brother and that Manet was his godfather. They married in 1863, when Manet‟s father died and he inherited money” (76-77). Manet was “fascinated by modern city and commercial life and enjoyed its benefits: café society, modern travel,… Sadly, however, he also suffered the penalties, dying in agony from syphilis, aged 51” (76).

3. “The handling of paint in Olympia is as discordant as its contents and composition. Whereas academically approved Salon painting was generally highly polished, with its brushstrokes invisible and its forms smoothly modeled, Olympia presents something of the appearance of an ébauche (preliminary, rough underpainting), with its clearly distinct touches of color and abrupt contrasts of tonality, as for example on the nude‟s shoulders, breasts, belly, and hips. In addition, the bedclothes, dressing-gown, nude body, and paper are all hard and angular, like the drapery in works by the early Flemish painters. The overall pictorial effect of this refusal of modeling and subtle chiaroscuro, as well as of the mechanically poised compositional elements and angularity, is a flatness and ungainliness such as found in „primitive‟ and children‟s art or in Epinal prints. Like Courbet, then, Manet has sought refuge and resource in the naïve and the popular: therein lies his avant-garde suit to the Salon public, one very different from the disingenuous entreaties of Academic and Official art. The times were inauspicious for popular art, however, and Manet‟s Olympia- exhibited alongside his Christ Mocked at the 1865 Salon- was lambasted by the critics” (Eisenman 241-242). “The practice of depicting „negresses‟ in art, though less common, was nearly as longstanding and revered as the representation of „fallen‟ women: black women began to appear in painting, sculpture, and the decorative in the middle of the eighteenth century as allegories of Africa or in order to signal the presence of illicit or animal-like sexuality. By the early nineteenth century, when racist theories of polygenesis (the notion of the separate biological origins of humans) prevailed, they represented lasciviousness and evolutionary retardation. Delacroix, for example, whose colorism and expressive style profoundly influenced Manet, had depicted a turbaned black African serving woman in his hothouse Women of . By the Second Empire, black women became almost ubiquitous in the Orientalist pictures of Ingres, Gerome, Chasseriau, and Eugene Fromentin, among others” (243). “She is not a grand courtesan paid to confirm the myths of masculine desire, but a proletarian who owned only her labor power and sex. And as such, critics argued, she was subhuman” „A sort of female gorilla… ape[s] on a bed,‟ wrote one, „a monkey,‟ wrote a second, and „a corpse… from the [working class] Rue Mouffetard,‟ stated a third. The repeated references to Olympia‟s blackness and simian aspect suggest that a critical elision between the nude and the West Indian maid has occurred. The body of the lower-class prostitute and the body of the Afro -Caribbean woman, according to Manet‟s interlocutors, were linked by their common degenerescence, that is, by their combined intellectual, physical, and moral depravity, morbidity, and inferiority. (Black women and prostitutes were widely understood, according to the science of the day, to possess congenitally deformed genitals that preconditioned them to hypersexuality.) Each was judged more grotesque than the other” (243).

24

Unit TEN: Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

C Edouard Manet. Bar at the Folies Bergere, 1882 a barmaid named Suzon/ Folies Bergere/ love of illusion and reflections/ champagne and beer

1. “Manet‟s famous picture is set in the Folies-Bergere, one of the celebrated café-concert venues of late 19th century Paris, much loved by artists. They were places in which to meet people from all social classes, to eat and drink, to entertain, and to see and be seen. The arrangement and composition of the picture is typical of Manet at his best: a simple and memorable structure within which the eye and the imagination are kept constantly alert. At the center stands the barmaid Suzon, lost in thought. At our left is a busy crowded scene, and at our right is what seems to be a reflection of Suzon talking to a customer. But is it? The more the picture is studied the more intriguing it becomes- like the daydream of Suzon herself” (Cumming, Annotated Art 90). “Manet loved playing with space. Note how he uses the mirror and bottles here to push space back, and uses them on the other side to do the exact opposite, that is, to pull space forward. The reflection of the bottles does not correspond with their arrangement on the top of the bar. Although Manet usually avoids any conscious or overt symbolism in his pictures, preferring instead to show modern life in a factual way, the bottles do contain nuances of meaning. Champagne, the drink of high society and the well-to-do, stands next to a bottle of English Bass beer, identifiable from the red triangle on its label, which is more often associated with the lower classes. The society of the cafe concert was similarly mixed: dandies (like Manet himself), workers, and prostitutes of the demi-monde rubbed shoulders with each other and enjoyed each other‟s company… The artist‟s signature and the date, 1882, appear on the label of the bottle in the far left corner of the painting” (90).

2. “Manet captures the brilliance of electric lighting, which was becoming popular in more exclusive venues. The brushwork defining the chandelier reflected behind Suzon complements the delicate lace in the sleeves and collar of Suzon‟s bodice… Logically, Suzon‟s reflection would not appear in this position, and her pose is different to that of the girl who gazes out of the canvas. The reflected Suzon is in conversation with a man whose presence we must imagine in our own viewing space in front of the picture. The images make sense only when they are looked at on a poetic level” (91). “In the top left corner are the pink-stockinged legs and bright green shoes of an acrobat who is providing the entertainment at the café-concert. But nobody, least of all Suzon, seems interested, and the acrobat‟s presence serves only to heighten the barmaid‟s air of sorrow” (90). “ of the auditorium, where the smarter members of the audience reserved loge seats, can be seen in the mirror behind the bar” (Hagen and Hagen 1: 166). “Girls like Suzon served in most of the capital‟s cafes and restaurants, or sold luxury goods behind the counter of the big Parisian department stores, whose era, at the time, had only just begun. According to the philosopher and historian Hippolyte Taine, serving behind the counter was every true Parisienne‟s dream: for it was the perfect opportunity to use her talent for twisting men round her little finger…. Cashiers, barmaids and sales-girls were paid miserable wages, however, and many were tempted to employ their „talents‟ more profitably. They would then join some 30,000 prostitutes in Paris who, preferring to stay clear of the brothels, solicited „on the sly‟, giving their „one night stands‟ the illusion of an excitingly unique adventure” (167). “The painting gives the spectator the strange feeling of being part of the scene: as if the spectator, in the image of the dandy reflected in the mirror at Folies Bergere, were looking at himself… Over half of the canvas is taken up by the background mirror; apart from the living, real figure of Suzon, practically everything is unreal, reflection, an illusion- an appropriate symbol for the night life and its manifold wiles… Manet was unwilling to leave his native town for any length of time. When his painting friends went to study plein-air painting in the country during the second half of the sixties, Manet stayed in the capital, taking afternoon strolls along the boulevards, frequenting the more fashionable cafes and –an elegant figure with his dandy‟s cane and black silk top hat- dropping in a the Folies Bergere in the evening” (169). “The French novelist Huysmans enthused over the Folies Bergere as the only place in Paris „that stinks quite as seductively of the makeup of hired affection‟… Women unaccompanied by men were only permitted in possession of a special card issued every two weeks to the prettiest, most elegant and most discreet prostitutes by the managing director himself” (167).

3. “Seeking to cushion themselves against the shocks of capital, or to carve out an identity in an environment increasingly bereft of social markers, a number of individuals, including the poet Baudelaire and the painter Manet, adopted the subcultural stance of the flaneur. The very embodiment of the modern male individualist „become more and more himself,‟ the flaneur was the perpetual idler, browser, or window-shopper who saw the city of Paris as a spectacle created for his entertainment, and judged commodities to be icons made for his veneration” (Eisenman 239). “In this painting, the spectator has no difficulty knowing who he is since his reflection in the mirror (at the right of the painting) tells him he is the flaneur approaching the woman at the bar. In contemporary parlance these women were known as „vendors of consolation,‟ not only because they dispensed alcohol but also because they often acquiesced in clients‟ sexual propositions: being a barmaid at the Folies-Bergere was badly paid, and the job only paid well if a woman took advantage of the „opportunities‟ it offered. There is some ambiguity, then, over what we, as the spectator in the picture, may perhaps be saying to the barmaid. The painting, however, gives our approach an explicitly critical inflection. While the barmaid is pert and attentive in the mirror, seen face-on she is withdrawn and melancholic- the two views do not match, as if to suggest her public face belies her true feelings. Indeed, everything in the mirror is glamorous but also false. It teems with elegantly dressed men on the lookout for available women, and women eyeing up possible clients. (In Maupassant‟s Bel Ami, one visitor was „hardly bothered with the spectacle on the stage, and kept his eyes fixed on the great gallery behind him, full of men and prostitutes.‟) And in Manet‟s painting, the insignificance of the show beside the spectacle of prostitution is indicated by the ironic placement of two tiny feet belonging to a trapeze artist in the top left corner. Therefore, the world in the mirror is no reflection of how things really are, but shows instead the superficial glamour that clothes prostitution, or gives it a respectable face. In effect, then, the mirror serves as a metaphor of the falsehood of appearance, and to provide a contrast with the subjective and more „real‟ experience of the barmaid. Manet quite deliberately underlined the discrepancy between her inner feelings and her public face by placing her reflection much too far to the right of the picture, implying that her two aspects do not belong together. The cumulative effect of these devices is to present the spectator with a choice that he must make physically by choosing his position in front of the picture: either he stands at the right, in which case he assumes the psychology of the predatory flaneur, or he stands in the center, to empathize with the barmaid” (Paul Smith 53-55).

25 Unit TEN: Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

D Gustave Caillebotte. A Rainy Day, 1877 E Edgar Degas. The Bellelli Family, 1858-60

Gustave Caillebotte/ great avenues of a modern Paris/ admiration for Ingres/ cold, austere informal and asymmetrical composition with cropped atmosphere/ beheaded dog/ vertical line as a figures physical and psychological division

1. A number of Impressionist 1. Edgar Degas (1834- paintings “position the spectator in 1917) “was born into a a particular physical and rich aristocratic family psychological relationship to the and, until he was in his scene they depict. They present 40s, was not obliged to the scene through the eyes of a sell his work in order to flâneur (or casual man of leisure) live. He entered the and asks the spectator to see it Ecole des Beaux Arts through the same eyes” (Smith in 1855 and spent time 33). Gustave Caillebotte (1849- in making copies 1893) here depicts “a junction of of the works of the spacious boulevards that resulted great Renaissance from the redesigning of Paris begun in 1852. The city‟s population had masters, acquiring a reached close to one and a half million by mid-century, and to technical skill that was equal to theirs” (Cumming, Great accommodate this congregation of humanity, Emperor Napoleon III Artists 78). “In this early, life-size group portrait, Degas ordered Paris rebuilt. The emperor named Baron Georges displays his lifelong fascination with human relationships Haussmann, a city superintendent, to oversee the entire project; and his profound sense of human character. In this case, it consequently, this process became known as „Haussmanization.‟ In is the tense domestic situation of his Aunt ‟s family addition to new water and sewer systems, street lighting and new that serves as his subject. Apart from the aunt‟s hand, residential and commercial buildings, a major component of the new which is placed limply on her daughter‟s shoulder, Degas Paris was the creation of wide, open boulevards. These great avenues, shows no physical contact between members of the family. whose construction caused the demolition of thousands of ancient The atmosphere is cold and austere” (78). “Gennaro, Baron buildings and streets, transformed medieval Paris into the present Bellelli, is shown turned toward his family, but he is seated modern city, with its superb vistas and wide uninterrupted arteries for in a corner with his back to the viewer and seems isolated the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Caillebotte chose to focus from the other family members. He had been exiled from on these markers of the city‟s rapid urbanization” (Kleiner, Mamiya, Naples because of his political activities… [Laure Bellelli] and Tansey 906). stares off into the middle distance, significantly refusing to meet the glance of her husband, who is positioned on the 2. “Caillebotte exhibited at five of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, opposite side of the painting. She found her husband from 1876 to 1882, but his style set him apart from many of his disagreeable and considered that he had no proper colleagues. Zola greatly disliked the works that Caillebotte exhibited at employment… Degas arranges his composition so that the the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876: „because of their precision, table leg, fireplace, candle, and mirror form a vertical line the paintings are entirely anti-artistic, clear as glass, bourgeois. The separating the Baron from his family” (78-79). mere photography of reality is paltry when not enriched by the original stamp of artistic talent‟” (Paul Smith 41). “Caillebotte, an engineer and 2. “Degas greatly admired Ingres for his draftsmanship and amateur painter,… designed a floating studio for Monet and when, in superb technical skills” (79). “The dog is cut off by the edge 1878, Monet was too poor and depressed to send in any paintings to of the picture. Degas increasingly employed the device of the fourth Impressionist exhibition, Caillebotte collected and submitted placing people and objects half in and half out of the twenty-nine of them. A friend to and collector of the Impressionists, he picture. It is an idea that was inspired by his interest in helped them financially and materially. After his death in 1894 he photography” (79). “Laure Bellelli is wearing a black dress bequeathed sixty-five works to the state… twenty-nine of the because she is in mourning for her father… The drawing on bequeathed works were rejected, and even as late as 1896 were the wall is by Degas. It is a portrait from life of his described by an academic painter as scum” (Bolton 101). “Zola greatly grandfather- a successful bank who built up the family‟s disliked the works that Caillebotte exhibited at the second prosperity. The portrait‟s proximity to Laure signals her Impressionist exhibition of 1876: „because of their precision, the fondness for her father” (78). The family “did not like their paintings are entirely anti-artistic, clear as glass, bourgeois. The mere temporary environment, which Laura called a „detestable photography of reality is paltry when not enriched by the original stamp country,‟ remarking that her husband hated to live in of artistic talent” (Paul Smith 41). “Caillebotte‟s two great Parisian „rented rooms‟. Furthermore, the relationship between the street scenes at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877, Pont de’ l”Europe parents was troubled, and his aunt complained about and Paris Street: Rainy Weather, illustrate his characteristically Gennaro‟s „immensely disagreeable and dishonest‟ individual use of plunging recession and firmly Realist choice of character” (Gruitrooy 20). “Although he apparently labored contemporary urban subject-matter” (Turner, From Monet to Cezanne over this project for several years, Degas does not seem to 54). “His representation of fleeting atmospheric changes never led him have regarded it with the same interest he displayed for his to sacrifice the permanence of forms and the rhythm of structures. He history paintings like Semiramis and Young Spartans was also always conscious of the unexpected, sometimes peculiar Exercising. After its completion he probably kept the angles that his chosen subject might offer” (55). “he organized the show painting rolled up in a corner of his studio. It was virtually of 1877 and made great efforts to restore the cohesion of the group by unknown when it reappeared at the studio sale of 1918 persuading Claude Monet to exhibit in 1879. Having inherited a large after his death, causing a great sensation. The painting was fortune from his parents, Caillebotte had no need to sell his pictures immediately purchased by the Louvre” (21). and could afford to provide crucial financial assistance for his artist friends” (54).

26

Unit TEN: Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

F Edgar Degas. Rehearsal in the Foyer of the Opera, 1872, oil on canvas

Degas‟ fascination with the ballet/ use of empty (negative) space/ informal poses along diagonal lines/ influence of Japanese woodblock prints/ strong verticals of the architecture and the dancing master/chair in the foreground

1. “The Impressionist whose work most severely tests the legitimacy of the label is Edgar Degas, who preferred to think of himself as a naturalist or a realist. For Degas the two terms were synonymous. The son of a Parisian banker, Degas was closer to Manet than to the other Impressionists in age and social background. He entered the Ecole des Beaux- Arts in 1855 but soon became dissatisfied with is conservatism, so he left to study on his own. His friendship with Manet, whom he met in 1862, and with the realist critics in his circle turned him gradually toward the depiction of contemporary life. After a period during which he specialized in psychologically probing portraits of friends and relatives, he turned his attention in the to a range of Paris amusements, including the music hall, opera, ballet, circus, and racetrack. Although a few of these works record the sadder aspects of the times, Degas began to think of art less as a mirror held up to the world than as a lofty form of entertainment that employed realistic elements” (Stokstad, Art History 1013-1014). “In his ballet pictures, Degas expresses a wide range of movement. His dancers rest, stretch, exercise, and perform…. He sketched ballerinas from the wings of the theater and in ballet studios… His interest in depicting forms moving through space led him to paint horseraces, acrobats, and other entertainers” (Adams, Art Across Time 775). “Although he made paintings of dancers on stage, Degas much preferred the more informal scenes of dancers rehearsing and relaxing. There are parallels between the activity of classical ballet and Degas‟ style and method of painting that help to explain his interest. Classical ballet is an art form of great precision and balance, and perfection is achieved only by constant repetition and practice. Degas‟ art is also one of the finest precision. Although he exhibited with the Impressionists, he achieved a sense of immediacy through his subject matter and composition rather than through the spontaneous brushstrokes typical of „true‟ Impressionists” (Cumming, Annotated Art 86). “Degas is bending realism in the interest of radical picture making, upholding his dictum that „all art is artifice and needs to be perpetuated with the cunning of a crime‟” (Bolton 100). “The basis of Degas‟ art is drawing: the seemingly spontaneous scenes often resemble quickly executed snap shots. Capturing, for instance, a moment at a ballet rehearsal, they are arranged in a solid linear network, the color areas contained by contrasting colors. In this respect Degas was following in the classical tradition of Ingres… His often eccentric compositions and perspectives reflect Degas‟ interest in photography, which was then gaining ground, and which Degas regarded as appropriate to the times, although not as an artform” (Krausse 72).

2. “Degas distinguished himself from his Impressionist fellow artists by his process of synthesis and constant research for what was a seemingly casual view of contemporary life. In his notebooks, which are of immense importance for the understanding of the artist‟s development, he confirmed his desire for the appearance of immediacy through careful study, resisting the temptation to „draw or paint immediately‟. At first Degas‟s new beauty of Realism was rejected by critics as a „murdering brush‟, which dissected reality into something ugly and repulsive” (Gruitrooy 80). “From the early 1870s Degas began to focus more and more on the theme of ballet dancers. He had already included some of them marginally in his orchestra paintings. Scenes of rehearsals or rather moments of relaxation during class were to become his favorite subject for a number of years. Rarely would he depict actual performances. Equally small in number are works showing individual dancers; the artist preferred to study the interaction of figures in space. The general reception of the dance paintings has been quite favorable from the beginning” (81). This scene “has a distinct „Parisian‟ look, as it is taking place in the rehearsal room of the old Opera on the Rue le Peletier. The dancers are about to move to the center of the room after having completed their exercises at the barre. The standing dancer on the left is about to do a reverse arabesque and awaits the sign from the ballet master. The chair in the foreground fills the void of the space seen obliquely across the room” (82).

G Edgar Degas. The Morning Bath. c. 1883, pastel on paper advantages of pastels/ voyeurism

1. As Degas‟ eyesight began to fail in the 1870s, he switched from oil to pastel, a powdered pigment in stick form like chalk. Pastels allowed him to draw and color at the same time, and he developed a highly original style, giving new strength to the medium. Degas was first to exhibit pastels as finished works rather than sketches and the only painter to produce a large body of major work in the medium” (Strickland 107).

2. “After 1886, Degas focused on pictures of women , seen, he said, as if „through a keyhole,‟ denoting the unposed quality of the works. As with dancers and subjects in the cafes, he did not idealize the figures. “I show them deprived of their airs and affectations, reduced to the level of animals cleaning themselves,‟ he said. This innovation – to portray nudes unaware of observation, engaged in strictly utilitarian acts like toweling dry or combing their hair- gives nakedness for the first time a practical function in a picture” (107).

3. To avoid stereotyped poses, Degas directed his models to move freely about the studio. He later fabricated a pose from memory, to convey a private but thoroughly natural attitude. “It is all very well to copy what you see, but it is better to draw only what you still see in your memory,‟ he said. “then you reproduce only what has struck you, that is to say, the essentials.‟ Surprisingly, for one who portrayed the nude so intimately, his pictures emit no sensual warmth. When asked why his women were ugly, Degas replied, „Women in general are ugly‟” (107).

27 Unit TEN: Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

H Mary Cassatt. The Bath, c. 1892 mother and child in flattened space/ genre scene lacking sentimentality

1. “Although he hated to admit a woman could draw so well, when Degas first saw Mary Cassatt‟s (1845-1926) work, he said, „There is a person who feels as I do.‟ Soon after they became lifelong friends, and Cassatt began to exhibit with the Impressionists. „I had already recognized who were my true masters. I admired Manet, Courbet, and Degas,‟ she said. „I hated conventional art. I began to live‟” (Strickland 108). “Cassatt also hated social conventions that forbade women from pursuing a profession. Born to a wealthy family, she left the United States as soon as possible to study art in Europe before setting in Paris. „How wild I am to get to work, my fingers fairly itch,‟ she said. It wasn‟t so simple, however, for Victorian women. Since they were not permitted to be alone with any man except a relation, Cassatt‟s only male subjects were her father, brothers, and Degas (she destroyed that canvas). Her trademark images were portraits of mothers and children” (108). “Inspired by Japanese prints, Cassatt adopted- in oils, pastels, and prints- their brightly colored, flat images and sharp designs. A gifted draftsman, like Degas she crisply and precisely outlined her figures and composed tautly calculated designs. Her figures typically dominate the picture space, crammed close to the surface, but are surrounded by expressive space, for Cassatt exploited the visual power of space between objects. She used the Impressionist palette of vivid hues, pale tints, golden light, and tinged with color” (108). “In her mother-and-child pictures (modern icons of maternity like Picasso‟s and Henry Moore‟s), the figures gesture realistically. In protective poses with faces close together, they touch, caress, and embrace. Keenly aware of restraints imposed on all women, Cassatt became both a socialist and supporter of women‟s suffrage. „After all give me France,‟ she said. „Women do not have to fight for recognition here if they do serious work.‟ As Gauguin observed, „Mary Cassatt has charm, but she also has force‟” (108).

2. “Though painting was viewed as an unsuitable occupation for a woman, … she was able to pursue her career as an artist because she was independently wealthy…Although she never married, maternity provided the thematic and formal focus of most of her work. The Bath is characteristic of her mature work around 1890. The oblique view, simplified color forms, and flat composition show the impact of her mentor Degas, as well as her study of Japanese prints” (Janson 716). “Cassatt spent most of her life in Paris, where she became a friend and colleague of Degas, Renoir, and other impressionists, with whom she exhibited regularly. Like Degas, she painted mainly indoors, cultivating a style that combined forceful calligraphy, large areas of modulated color, and unusual perspectives- the major features of the Japanese - with a taste for female subjects. Cassatt brought a unique sensitivity to domestic themes that featured mothers and children enjoying everyday tasks and diversions. Thus, like Manet, Cassatt secularized and updated an age-old, popular theme: that of mother and child. These gentle and optimistic images appealed to American collectors and did much to increase the popularity of impressionist art in the United States. Yet the so-called „Madonna of American art‟ preferred life in Paris to that in prefeminist America” (Fiero, 123).

I Claude Monet. Impression: Sunrise, 1872 Impressionism/ plein-air painting/ catching the vibrating quality of light with bold brushstrokes/ contrasting warm and cool colors

1. “Claude Monet (1840-1926) once said he wished he had been born blind and then gained his sight so he could, without preconceptions, truly paint what he saw… Monet began as a commercial artist and caricaturist but after roaming the coast of painting sunlit, water-drenched scenes, he became a leading exponent of recording nature directly to convey his immediate impression of a given moment. After studying by Constable and Turner in London, Monet contributed Impression: Sunrise to the first Impressionist exhibit in 1874, which summed up the new movement‟s theme and gave it its name forevermore” (Strickland 102). “Its lack of finish and crudity of color and execution were daring innovations in the 1870s. Monet was not to repeat this audacity until his waterlily series thee decades later. However, Impression: Sunrise has links with the past as well as the future… Monet‟s remark to a friend that he felt as though he were dying when the sun went down echoes Turner‟s dying words „the sun is God‟. Both men, in their observations of light on water created pictures which closely prefigure abstraction. The canvas visible through the paint, the evidence of brushwork and the thickness of the medium are all features which modern abstractionists have homed in on since they stress the supremacy of the execution of the work over the rendering of an object as the artist‟s principal aim” (Bolton 80). “The extensive industrialization and urbanization that occurred in France… made the world seem unstable and insubstantial. As noted French poet observed: „ is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent.‟ Accordingly, Impressionist works represent an attempt to capture a fleeting moment” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 904-905). “Impression: Sunrise is patently a ; but the painting says more about how one sees than about what one sees. It transcribes the fleeting effects of light and the changing atmosphere of water and air into a tissue of small dots and streaks of color - the elements of pure perception. To achieve luminosity, Monet coated the raw canvas with gesso, a chalklike medium. Then, working in the open air and using the new chemical (available in the form of portable metallic tubes), he applied brushstrokes of pure, occasionally unmixed, color. Monet ignored the brown underglazes artists traditionally used to build up form. And, arguing that there were no „lines‟ in nature, he refused to delineate forms with fixed contours; rather, he evoked form by means of color” (Fiero, Romanticism 114-115).

28 Unit TEN: Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

J Claude Monet. Gare St. K Claude Monet. : Portal in the Sun, 1894

Lazare, 1877 one of 40 views in a series/ subject of light and fleeting atmospheric image of a new, industrial effects/ impasto painting/avoidance of black world of change 1. “Unlike the Academic artists, Monet did much of his 1. “During the 1860s and 70s, Monet painting outdoors, in the presence of natural landscape, suffered appalling poverty, pawning rather than in the studio. As a result, he and the his possessions for paint. In 1869 a Impressionists were sometimes called plein air, or „open visitor reported that Monet was air,‟ painters” (Adams, Art Across Time 779). desperate: „completely starved, his wings clipped.‟ He only survived because Renoir brought him bread 2. “In studying the natural effects of light and color on from his own table. In 1875 he surfaces, Monet- like the Japanese artists and begged his friends for financial - painted several pictures representing one locale assistance, writing Zola, „We haven‟t under different atmospheric conditions. In 1895 he a single sou in the house, not even exhibited eighteen canvases of Rouen Cathedral. A anything to keep the pot boiling comparison of [the paintings] shows the changes in the today.‟ Monet pleaded with façade according to the time of day…. The myriad details of collectors to take his canvases at any a Gothic cathedral dissolve into light and shadow, which price and burned 200 paintings rather than let them fall into his are indicated by individual patches of color” (780). creditors‟ hands. By 1886, things were different. At the Impressionists‟ 3. “His series of , , , and the Rouen Cathedral show how first New York exhibit, Monet was an light and weather conditions define both form and color. In the cathedral sequence established success and could afford of more than thirty canvases, the Gothic stone building, dependent on fleeting to build a special studio to house his atmospheric effects recorded from dawn to twilight, virtually dissolves” (Strickland huge canvases” (Strickland 102). 102).

2. “Monet did make twelve paintings of the Paris Saint-Lazare station in 4. “Regardless of weather, he hauled thirty canvases to the field to record 1877 which show his impressions of haystacks, replacing one canvas with the next as the light changed. In winter he it under a variety of atmospheric planted his easel in the snow and waded through ice floes in hip boots, waiting effects…Monet was able to paint the patiently for just the right slant of light on the Seine. Once, when he painted on the rich effects of smoke and steam at beach during a storm, he was swept under by a wave” (102-103). Saint-Lazare only because he gave the impression to the station master 5. “Monet‟s style consisted of applying to the canvas small dabs of pigment that he was an important Salon corresponding to his immediate visual observations. Instead of the conventional painter. Accordingly, the station master had the trains get up steam gradations of tone, he placed vibrating spots of different colors side by side. In an especially for his „distinguished‟ effect called „optical mixing,‟ these „broken colors‟ blended at a distance. To visitor” (Paul Smith 97-99). “Monet represent shadows, instead of black Monet added the complementary (or opposite) was by no means the first painter to color to the hue of the object casting a shadow” (103). deviate from academic technique. In defining form, Constable had applied 6. “In the 1880s, Monet changed his handling of pigment. Rather than many specks color in rough dots and dabs, of paint, he lengthened his brushstrokes into sinuous sweeps of color. In his Delacroix had occasionally hundreds of water lily paintings of 1900-26, Monet eliminated outlines and juxtaposed complementary colors to increase brilliance, and Manet had contours until form and line almost disappeared in interwoven brushstrokes. often omitted halftones. But Monet Vibrant colors melt into each other just as flowers blend into water and foliage. No went further by interpreting form as image is the central focus, perspective ceases to exist, and reflections and reality color itself” (Fiero, Romanticism 115). merge in a hazy mist of swirling color…. Vision, for Monet was supreme. He painted his colorful visions until his death at 86. „Monet is only an eye,‟ Cezanne said. “But what an eye‟” (103).

7. “When Monet went to live in Giverny, 40 miles from Paris, in 1883, it was hardly what it would become- a living canvas he called „my most beautiful masterpiece.‟ At first he just planted a few flowers to provide still life subjects for rainy days. In 1890 Monet began to improve the garden, planting wisteria, weeping willows, and bamboo to create a „virgin forest of highly hued blossoms.‟ Each day a gardener removed weeds and insects from the pond and clipped lily pads and to keep the surface reflective. He even „bathed‟ the water lilies daily to increase their luster. “Aside from painting and gardening,‟ Monet said, „I am good for nothing‟” (103).

29 Unit TEN: Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

L Auguste Renoir. Luncheon of the Party, 1881

Restaurant Fournaise/spontaneity of a snapshot/ Aline Charigot/ trio to the right (Caillebotte, Ellen Andre, and Maggiolo) / Baron Raoul Barbier/ flirtatious touches of a bohemian lifestyle/ glimpse of the river Seine

1. “Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) believed, „A picture must be an amiable thing, joyous and pretty-yes, pretty! There are enough troublesome things in life without inventing others.‟ Renoir came by the prettiness naturally, for he began by painting flowers on porcelain. Even through years of struggle when he was „so poor,‟ as Bazille said, „that he used to pick up empty paint tubes and still squeeze something out of them,‟ Renoir kept his cheerful optimism. This joie de vivre makes him perhaps the most beloved, and accessible, painter ever” (Strickland 104).

2. “This is his last major work [in the style of Impressionism] before he returned to techniques more akin to the Old Masters. He was conscious that he had undertaken an ambitious work, and he pushed himself to his limits during a whole summer living „on site‟ at . The picture has no story line or symbolism, and in many respects its theme of youthful pleasure-seeking and love is simply a more modern version of Watteau‟s A Journey to Cythera. The setting is a famous restaurant on the Seine near to a bathing place, La Grenouillere, which was popular with young people” (Cumming, Annotated Art 88).

3. Standing at the far left, “M. Fournaise (in the straw hat) was the proprietor of the popular restaurant. Famed for its food and lively atmosphere, it was a popular meeting place for oarsmen… The gests at the luncheon party are Renoir‟s friends. The identities of most have been established from a photograph with their names written on the back.” (88). At the far left, “Aline Charigot, Renoir‟s girlfriend, coos at her little dog. Renoir married her the year after this painting was completed. She was a devoted wife, and it was a very happy marriage” (88). At the right, “the man in the straw hat is Gustave Caillebotte, a talented artist but better known as a patron. The girl is the actress Ellen Andre, who regularly posed for Renoir. The journalist Maggiolo stands behind her” (89). “The trio in the top right hand corner includes Lestringuez (in the bowler hat), a friend of Renoir‟s who was interested in hypnotism and the occult. Paul Lhote, wearing pince-nez glasses, flirts with the actress . He had a reputation as a ladies‟ man…. The man in the background wearing a top hat is , who was a banker. He was added later… Baron Raoul Barbier, a former cavalry officer and a close friend of Renoir‟s, sits with his back toward us. He helped Renoir organize his friends to sit for the painting. He is shown chatting to the proprietor‟s daughter Alphonsine, who leans on the railing of the balcony” (88-89).

4. “The painting seems as spontaneous as a snapshot. Renoir‟s favorite model, Angele, in the center of the picture, has been „caught‟ with a glass raised to her lips. Behind her, the proprietor‟s son casually smokes a cigar and converses with Charles Ephrussi…. Renoir was an accomplished still-life painter, and the debris of this meal is a sparkling achievement. The spontaneity is deceptive, since he constantly reworked the painting” (88-89).

5. “Despite the fundamental similarity of conception and the persistent combination of sensual brushwork and lush color, Luncheon of the Boating Party differs from earlier works in two fundamental respects. First, the elements, especially the figures, are more solidly and conventionally defined. The arm of the man seated in the foreground, for example, has a descriptive clarity and solidity not seen in Renoir‟s work since the late 1860s. Second, the composition, too, is more conservative. Beneath the apparent informality is a variation on the traditional pyramidal structure advocated by the academics. A small triangle whose apex is the woman leaning on the rail is set within a larger, somewhat looser one that culminates in the two men in the rear. Thus, instead of a moment quickly scanned in passing- an impression- Renoir creates a more stable and permanent scene” (Stokstad 1018).

6. “The direction signaled by this work was confirmed and further encouraged by Renoir‟s subsequent visit to Italy in late 1881 and early 1882. In particular, the paintings by that he saw there made him reconsider his commitment to contemporary themes. Renoir became convinced that, unlike the enduring themes of , his records of modern life were to bound to their time to maintain the interest of future viewers. He therefore began to focus on the nude, a subject more difficult to locate in a particular time and place” (1018).

The Avoidance of Misery M

1. “Ironically, while the Impressionists churned out their upbeat canvases full of light, Paris endured some of its darkest, most desperate days. In 1870 -71 during the Franco-Prussian War, France suffered one humiliating defeat after another. German troops besieged Paris, devastated the city by shelling, and prevented all supplies from entering. Citizens resorted to eating rats and animals from the zoo and stripped parks of trees for fuel. Thirty-six thousand people starved to death. Although Manet, Degas, Bazille (who died in the fighting), and Renoir (Renoir without seeing action) served in the Army, Sisley, Pissarro, and Monet fled to England to escape the draft. The only blood that every appeared in Pissarro‟s work was when Prussians turned his studio into a slaughterhouse, using his 1,500 painted canvases as aprons while butchering hogs” (Strickland 105).

30 Unit TEN: Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

N James Abbott McNeill Whistler. in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), c. 1875 a falling rocket/ Oriental influences/ John Ruskin‟s criticism/ utilizing transparent properties of paint

1. “In Paris, widespread public and critical condemnation made it difficult for the Impressionists to sell their work. In London as well, there were esthetic quarrels. One of these erupted into the celebrated libel trail between the American painter James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and the critic John Ruskin. In 1877 Ruskin published a scathing review of Whistler‟s Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), painted some two years earlier. The picture was on view at London‟s Grosvenor Gallery, and it threw Ruskin into a rage. He accused Whistler of flinging „a pot of paint… in the public‟s face.‟ Whistler, himself, Ruskin added, was a „coxcomb,‟ guilty of „Cockney impudence,‟ and willful imposture.‟ Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, and the case went to trial in November 1878” (Adams, Art Across Time 789).

2. “Ruskin, who was in the throes of a psychotic breakdown, could not appear in court, but his views were presented by his attorney. According to Ruskin, Whistler‟s picture was outrageously overpriced at 200 guineas, quickly and sloppily executed, technically „unfinished,‟ and devoid of recognizable form. Several of Whistler‟s other paintings were introduced as exhibits and declared equally „unfinished.‟ In particular, the opposing side pointed out, Whistler did not like Titian, whose works were „finished.‟ Ruskin also objected to Whistler‟s musical titles (in this case „Nocturne‟) as pandering to the contemporary fad for the incomprehensible” (789).

3. “Ironically, Ruskin had once used his critical genius to further the public reception of Turner, himself a rather „Impressionistic‟ artist. Equally ironic, Whistler was quite capable of producing clear and precise images as he did in his etchings, as well as in some of his portraits. The famous portrait of Whistler‟s mother, which has a combined musical and artistic title – Arrangement in Gray and Black- is a remarkable psychological portrait and also satisfies Ruskin‟s requirement that a painting appear „finished‟” (789).

4. “In court, Whistler countered Ruskin‟s position by stating what was essentially the formalist „art for art’s sake” view of art, namely that art did not necessarily serve a utilitarian purpose. Although designated a painting of fireworks on the Thames, Whistler‟s Nocturne was actually a study in light, color, and form. The atmospheric effects of the cloudy night sky are contrasted with gold spots of light from the exploded rocket. When questioned about the identity of the black patch in the lower right corner, Whistler replied that it was a vertical, placed there for purely formal reasons. In that response, he echoed Monet‟s view that a painted „tree‟ is not a tree, but a vertical daub of paint. On the subject of money, Whistler testified that he had spent only a day and a half painting the Nocturne, but was charging for a lifetime of experience” (789).

5. “The jury followed the judge‟s instructions and decided in Whistler‟s favor, but awarded him only a farthing in damages, When it was over, the trail was extensively ridiculed in the English and American press…. The author of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Whistler was known for his distinctive personality and biting wit. He dressed as a dandy, wearing pink ribbons on his tight, patent leather shoes and carrying two umbrellas in defiance of the inclement London weather” (788-789).

31 Unit TEN: Post-Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

A Georges Seurat. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-6 pointilism or divisionism/ reaction against Impressionist spontaneity/ use of repeated motifs/ mixture of classes/ Egyptian influence/ extensive preparation for a monumental task/ a hard sell

1. After his graduation from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Georges Seurat (1851-91) “devoted his energies to „correcting‟ Impressionism, which he found too intellectually shallow and too improvisational. In the mid-1880s he gathered around him a circle of young artists who became known as the Neo-Impressionists. The work that became the centerpiece of the new movement and made his reputation was A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (Stokstad 1035). “Seurat took a typical Impressionist subject, weekend leisure activities, and gave it an entirely new handling. An avid reader of scientific color theory, he applied his paint in small dots of pure color, known as , in the belief that when they are „mixed‟ in the eye-as opposed to being mixed on the palette- the resulting colors would be more luminous. His scientific approach does to painting does not work in practice, because his dots of color are large enough to remain separate to the eye. Other aspects of his rational approach to expression were also problematic. He though, for example, that upward moving lines and warm, bright colors created „happy‟ paintings. Many viewers, however, find the stiff formality of his figures inconsistent with such a mood” (1036-1037).

2. “Seurat himself called this technique „divisionism.‟… Seurat‟s divisionism was based on two relatively new theories of color. The first was that placing two colors side by side intensified the hues of each… The other theory, which is only partly confirmed by experience, asserted that the eye causes contiguous dots to merge into their combined color. Blue dots next to yellow dots, according to this theory, would merge and be perceived as vivid green. If the painting is viewed from a distance or through half-closed eyes, this may be true. It is certainly not true if the viewer examines the picture closely… True or not, such theories are characteristic of the search by nineteenth- century artists for new approaches to light and color, based on scientific analysis” (Adams, Art Across Time 797). “Degas nicknamed Georges Seurat „the notary‟ because the younger painter always wore a top hat and dark suit with precisely pressed trousers. Seurat was just as meticulous in his art. „They see poetry in what I have done,‟ Seurat once said. „No, I apply my method, and that is all there is to it.‟… Because Seurat‟s system was so labor-intensive, he finished only seven large paintings in his decade-long career” (Strickland 114). The painting “took him two years and forty preliminary ” (114).

3. “Many figures are shown in profile, reflecting the influence of ancient Egyptian art, which Seurat was studying at this period. He made many sketches from ancient Egyptian reliefs on his visits to the Louvre in Paris” (Cumming, Annotated Art 92). “In order to produce exactly the right optical effect in the eye of the spectator, Seurat has dispensed with the conventional gold frame and painted his own border, or „frame,‟ around the picture. This painted frame has been designed so that in any one section it contains the complementaries of the colors that are next to it in the painting” (92). “ fishing on the banks on the Seine have been identified as prostitutes, using the sport as a front for their real objective. The soldiers in the distance represent their potential „catches‟… Like Manet, Seurat shows a mixture of classes and types enjoying themselves together, innocently or otherwise. Here, a rough-looking oarsman sits near to a middle-class lady (her dainty fan striking a particularly incongruous note behind the lounging bulk of the boatsman). A dandy in a top hat sits close by” (92). “Capuchin monkeys were fashionable pets in Seurat‟s day. It has been suggested that the monkey represents licentiousness. The monkey on a leash indicates that the woman, a prostitute, successfully feigns respectability. Seurat was perhaps including a coded message about the hypocrisy that was a feature of French society at the time” (93).

4. “George Seurat (1859-1891) shared Cezanne‟s aim to make Impressionism „solid and durable‟, but he went about it very differently. His goal, he once stated, was to make „modern people, in their essential traits, move about as if on friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonie s by color, by direction of the tones in harmony with the lines, and by the directions of the lines‟. Seurat‟s career was as brief as those of Masaccio, Giorgione, and Gericault and his achievement was just as remarkable. Although he participated in the last Impressionist show, it is an indication of the Post-Impressionist revolution that thereafter he exhibited with an entirely new group, the Society of Independents ” (Janson 740). “Seurat devoted his main efforts to a few very large paintings. He would spend a year or more on each of them, making endless series of preliminary studies before he felt sure enough to tackle the final version. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his greatest masterpiece, had its origin in this painstaking method. The subject is the kind that had long been popular among Impressionist painters. Impressionist, too, are the brilliant colors and the effect of intense sunlight. Otherwise, however, the picture is the very opposite of a quick „impression‟. The firm, simple contours and the relaxed, immobile figures give the scene a stability that recalls Piero della Francesca and shows a clear awareness of Puvis de Chavannes. In La Grande Jatte, modeling and foreshortening are reduced to a minimum. Moreover, the figures appear mostly in either strict profile or in frontal views, as if Seurat had adopted the rules of ancient Egyptian art. He has fitted them into the composition as tightly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle… Frozen in time and space, they act out their roles with ritualized solemnity, in contrast to the joyous abandon of the relaxed figures in Renoir‟s Luncheon of the Boating Party, , who are free to move about in the open air. Thus we read this cross section of Parisian society as timeless, despite the period costumes. No wonder the picture remains so spellbinding more than a century after it was painted” (740).

5. “Seurat adapted the laws of color discovered by Eugene Chevreul” (741). “Chevreul asserted that juxtaposed colors affect the eye‟s reception of each, making the two colors as dissimilar as possible, both in hue and value” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 920). Seurat was probably also familiar with the work of aesthetician Charles Blanc, who coined the term „optical mixture‟ to describe the visual effect of juxtaposed complementary colors. Blanc asserted that the smaller the areas of adjoining complementary colors, the greater the tendency for the eye to „mix‟ the colors, so that the viewer perceives a grayish or neutral tint” (920). “Seurat had grasped that there is something atomized, divided, and analytical about modernist awareness, and his work predicted the way in which art would come more and more to refer to itself. To build a unified meaning, in this state of extreme self-consciousness, meant that the subject had to be broken down into molecules and then reassembled under the eye of formal order” (Hughes, Shock of the New 118).

32

Unit TEN: Post-Impressionism STUDENT NOTES

B Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1886-7 interest in abstraction/ adopting a holistic approach through color and technique/ admiration for Poussin/ formalism and the secondary role of subject matter/ unfinished areas to emphasize the process of painting

1. “In 1874, a critic dismissed Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) as „no more than a kind of madman, with the fit on him, painting the fantasies of delirium tremens.‟… Although he began by exhibiting with the Impressionists (after being rejected by the Ecole des Beaux- Arts and the Salon) and was tutored in open-air painting by Pissarro, Cézanne was too much of a loner to join any group. Encouraged to come to Paris from his native Aix-en- by the novelist Zola, a childhood friend, Cézanne always felt alien in the city. Even among the Impressionists he was considered beyond the pale. Manet called him a „farceur‟ (a joke); Degas though he was a wild man because of his provincial accent, comical clothes, and unorthodox painting style” (Strickland 116). “Stung by ridicule, Cézanne retreated to Aix in 1886 and devoted himself tirelessly to his art. Obscure until his first one-man show in 1895, after which he was revered as a „Sage‟ by the younger generation of artists, Cézanne gained a reputation as an unapproachable hermit, almost an ogre” (116). “What made Cézanne‟s art so radical in his day and appreciated in ours was his new take on surface appearances. Instead of imitating reality as it appeared to the eye, Cézanne penetrated to its underlying geometry. „Reproduce nature in terms of the cylinder and the sphere and the cone,‟ he advised in a famous dictum. By this he meant to simplify particular objects into near-abstract forms fundamental to all reality. „The painter possesses an eye and a brain,‟ Cézanne said. „The two must work together‟” (117).

2. “In Mont Sainte -Victoire, a landscape he painted more than thirty times, Cézanne portrayed the scene like a geodesic pyramid, defining surface appearance through colored planes. To create an illusion of depth, he placed cool colors like blue, which seem to recede, at rear and warm colors like red, which to advance, in front. Cézanne believed that beneath shifting appearances was an essential, unchanging armature. By making this permanent geometry visible, Cézanne hoped to „make of Impressionism,‟ he said, „something sold and durable, like the art of museums, to carve out the underlying structure of things‟” (117). “Picasso, Braque, and others would later view this move from descriptive accuracy of evidence of Cézanne‟s revolutionary conception of painting as an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of colored forms on a canvas support, but that was never Cézanne‟s intention. Cézanne became the originator of what became known as abstraction, but he was an abstractionist in the literal sense of the term: Cézanne abstracted what he considered nature‟s deepest truth- its essential tension between stasis and change” (Stokstad 1035).

3. “His Mont Sainte -Victoire seen from Les Lauves strongly implies the hand of God at work in it. Its hierarchical arrangement (with the mountain dominating the scene) and its sheer richness of coloration all suggest a power at work in nature, organizing it vigorously and according to a purpose. Cézanne expressed precisely this idea in a letter to Bernard of April 1904, when he described the landscape as „the sight which the eternal, omnipotent Father spreads out before our eyes‟” (Smith 109-110). “For all its architectural stability, the scene is alive with movement. For all its architectural stability, the scene is alive with movement. But the forces at work here have been brought into balance, subdued by the greater power of the artist‟s will. This disciplined energy, distilled from the trials of a stormy youth, gives Cézanne‟s mature style its enduring strength” (Janson 737). “Cézanne eschewed the great subjects of the Salon painters, preferring landscape, portraiture and genre subjects” (Bolton 104). “When Cézanne wrote of his goal of „doing Poussin over entirely from nature,‟ he apparently meant that Poussin‟s effects of distance, depth, structure, and solidity must be achieved not by traditional perspective and chiaroscuro but in terms of the color patterns an optical analysis of nature provides” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 922). Like Poussin, “his method of working was … painstaking and slow, rather than quick and spontaneous” (Bolton 104).

4. “The idea of Cezanne as the father of is based on his remark that one must detect in Nature the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. What he meant by that is anyone‟s guess, since there is not a single sphere, cone, or cylinder to be seen in Cezanne‟s work. What is there, especially in the work of the last decade and a half of his life- from 1890 onwards, after he finally abandoned Paris and settled in solitude in Aix- is a vast curiosity about the relativeness of seeing, coupled with an equally vast doubt that he or anyone else could approximate it in paint” (Hughes, Shock of the New 18). “This process of seeing, this adding up and weighing of choices, is what Cezanne‟s peculiar style makes concrete: the broken outlines, strokes of pencil laid side by side, are emblems of scrupulousness in the midst of a welter of doubt. Each painting or watercolor is about the motif. No previous painter had taken his viewers through this process so frankly. But Ceaznne takes you backstage; there are the ropes and pulleys, the wooden back of , and the theatre- as distinct from the single performance- becomes more comprehensible. The Renaissance admired an artist‟s certainty about what he saw. But with Cezanne, as the critic Rose remarked in another context, the statement: „This is what I see‟, becomes replaced by a question: „Is this what I see?‟ You share his hesitations about the position of a tree or a branch; or the final shape of Mont Ste-Victoire, and the trees in front of it. Relativity is all. Doubt becomes part of the painting‟s subject. Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne‟s old age, is one of the keys to our century, a touchstone of modernity itself. Cubism would take it to an extreme”(18).

5. “As is so often the case with Cezanne‟s paintings, it is impossible to say what time of day, or what season, this picture depicts. The evergreen vegetation, the even, passionless light and the understated atmosphere make it impossible to ascribe it to a particular moment. It is as though Cezanne has removed any distractions which could make the subject of the painting unclear in any way, so that the reality of nature can speak for itself. This reality is not the reality of the moment, of a momentary „being thus‟, but rather one which embodies the experience of immutability and permanence, of simply „being there‟. This is what Cezanne meant when he said that he wanted to make Impressionism into something permanent, like art in museums” (Becks-Malorny 70, 72).

33

Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

A The Symbolist Movement

1. “Symbolism was particularly strong in France and in the late nineteenth century. It began as a literary movement, emphasizing internal, psychological phenomena rather than objective descriptions of nature. The English word „symbol‟ comes from the Greek sumbolon , or „token.‟ It originally referred to a sign that had been divided in two, and could therefore be identified by virtue of the fact that the two halves fitted together. A symbol thus signifies the matching part, or other half. It is something that stands for something else” (Adams, Art Across Time 809).

2. “Symbols derive from myth, folklore, allegory, dreams, and other unconscious manifestations. The Symbolists believed that, by focusing on the internal world of dreams, it was possible to rise above the here and now of a specific time and place, and arrive at the universal. It is no coincidence that the Symbolist movement in art and literature was contemporary with advances in psychology, most notably psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud” (809).

3. “In literature, the poets‟ „Symbolist Manifesto‟ of 1886 rejected Zola‟s Naturalism in favor of the Idea and the Self. The French poets Charles Baudel aire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and became cult figures for the Symbolists, as did the American writer Edgar Allan Poe and the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Their literature of decadence, disintegration, and the macabre shares many qualities with Symbolist painting. An erotic subtext, often containing perverse overtones, pervades and haunts the imagery” (809).

B Odilon Redon. The Cyclops, C Henri Rousseau. The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897 1898 landscape of the unconscious Symbolism/ haunting, imaginary scenes 1. “Although Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) worked largely during the latter part of the nineteenth century, his impact on Western art history must be seen in 1.“Odilon Redon (1840-1916), a French the context of the first half of the twentieth century. He has been called a naïve painter and gr aphic artist, developed still painter because he had no formal training, and spent most of his working life as another response to the modern world. a customs inspector near Paris- hence his nickname „Le Douanier‟ („customs He considered his visionary works his officer‟). He painted in his spare time, exhibited at the Salon des Independants, „revenge on an unhappy world‟” (Stokstad 1032). and in 1885 retired from his job to become a full-time painter. At first mocked by the critics, Rousseau was later much admired. In 1908 Pablo Picasso held a 2. “Since he was dealing with the unseen banquet in his honor at his Studio” (Adams, Art Across Time 815). world, Redon‟s technique focused on suggesting rather than describing his 2. “Actually, Rousseau believed his fantastic, childlike landscapes- full of subject. He relied on radiant color and strange, lurking animals and tree-sized flowers- were realistic paintings in to inform his erotic, perverse visions” academic style. He studied plants and animals at the Paris zoo, but his (Strickland 125). technical limitations were clear. He minutely detailed the lush, stylized foliage

3. “Redon‟s reputation until 1890 rested and meticulously finished the painting‟s surface so that no brushstrokes were entirely on work in black and white, but visible. Still, his figures were flat and the scale, proportion, and perspective he had been using color in unexhibited were skewed. Despite- or perhaps because of- these „flaws,‟ his stiff jungle landscape studies. From about 1890, he scenes have an air of mystery and otherworldliness to them” (Strickland 124). began to extend his use of color to works that repeat or develop the subject-matter 3. “‟We are the two of the [lithographs]… His innovations great painters of the were admitted by the Nabis and by some age,‟ he told Picasso. of the Fauves, including Matisse” (Turner 351). „You paint in the „Egyptian‟ style, I in the modern.‟ Picasso and the French avant- garde circle hailed Rousseau as „the godfather of twentieth century painting,‟ but one cannot be sure of Picasso‟s sincerity, since the professional artists who took up with Rousseau delighted in playing practical jokes on their vain, gullible colleague” (124). What do you think about Rousseau‟s work fascinated modern artists of the twentieth century?

38 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

D James Ensor. Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, 1888

Viva la Sociale”/ masks as metaphors for loneliness/ loss of individual identity in a crowd/ image of Christ/ military band in black/ strident color

1. “The Belgian James Ensor (1860-1949)shows Jesus making his entry not into Jerusalem, but into the capital of his own country. There are no palm branches and no clothes on the cobbles. Nor is there anything to be seen of the characteristic architecture of Brussels. And alongside the political slogans, Ensor records just one Christian‟s shout, on the right-hand edge of the picture: “Long live Christ, King of Brussels‟… Ensor made Jesus a contemporary. The citizens of Brussels carry the flags and banners commonly seen in Ensor‟s day, and are led by a military band. A representative of the authorities wearing a white sash stands on a green podium. It remains unclear, however, whether the crowd are really accompanying Jesus into the city, or whether Jesus hasn‟t accidentally got caught up in a carnival parade” (Hagen and Hagen 3: 181)

2. “‟Vive la Sociale‟ are the words written above the heads of the crowd: the banner reads almost like a caption and effectively means „Long live the social revolution.‟ Social legislation was in its infancy in Belgium. In 1886, two years before Ensor completed this huge painting, King Leopold II had declared that the lot of the working classes was „highly deserving of attention‟ and that the lawmakers should endeavor „to improve it with the greatest solicitude.‟ This royal proclamation had been preceded by months of strikes and uprisings. The unrest had started in mines. The miners had marched from pit to pit, from factory to factory, and had sparked a mass movement such as Belgium had never experienced before. The army was called in to squash it. People were killed, also in Ensor‟s native town in Ostend” (182).

3. “Almost none of Ensor‟s artist colleagues painted crowds so often and with such intensity. Ensor thereby pinpointed one of the major social developments of his day: the transition from rule by the few to rule by the many, and the recognition by the old elite that the working classes were „deserving of attention.‟ Belgium at that time had the greatest population density of any country in Europe and was its second most important industrial power” (182).

4. “Ensor never left Belgium for any length of time and- apart from his years at the Academy in Brussels- lived in Ostend all his life…As a youth, he experienced the transformation of the small fishing village into a cosmopolitan seaside resort. The flourishing economy made the middle classes rich; they sought rest and relaxation outside the rapidly-growing cities. Holidays by the sea became fashionable… Ostend was thus a leading seaside resort and a major international railway junction. The locals, however, possessed nothing of the cosmopolitan outlook of the visitors; they were not in the least bit ready for modern art. As Ensor wrote in a letter of 1895: „The Ostenders, a public of oysters, don‟t stir themselves; they don‟t want to see the pictures. Hostile public, crawling along the beach. The Ostender detests art. Sticky excrement winding itself into an oyster, eater of disgusting things, formless, mumbling sea creatures. Last year thirty Ostenders visited the exhibition, this year we will reach the figure of thirty-one‟”(183).

5. “Ensor‟s mother owned a souvenir shop in Ostend, from which the family lived. The woman with the white bonnet, white bow and black dress bears some of her features. The face to the left of her strongly resembles a portrait which Ensor made of his sister. The masked figure with the pointed white cap also appears in an earlier picture of a domestic scene: a man with a long false nose is seated at a table with a bottle; in front of him stands a woman with black eyes, a threatening expression and a stick in her hand. Ensor had often experienced confrontations of this kind, albeit unmasked. His father drank” (183).

6. “Ensor loved this father, an Englishman who had got stuck in Ostend, very much. He was well-read, multi-talented, and interested in the arts, but unable to turn his talents to professional use. He is absent from the crowd in Christ’s Entry. He had died the year before: passers-by had found him dead in the gutter. Son James was the second man whom his mother had had to support. She had sent him off to the Academy in Brussels in the hope that he would paint souvenir pictures which she could sell in her shop. He never did. He could hardly sell anything. When he painted Christ’s Entry, he had no studio, but worked in the attic of his parents‟ house” (183).

7. “Hanging and lying in his mother‟s souvenir shop were shells, dried fish and masks. These were the objects amongst which Ensor grew up. The Ostenders wore fancy dress primarily at carnival-time, which was celebrated in Ostend, it was said, on a particularly grand scale. Ensor, too, donned a disguise and took part… No other artist of his day gave such a central role to masks, whereby it is not always clear whether Ensor is portraying an actual mask itself, or whether he has coarsened and distorted real faces until they look like masks. For him, there was probably no real difference: the way he saw people, it was if they were masked, as if you couldn‟t get close to them, as if they were so terrifying that you had to run away from them… The information we have about his life confirms that he was mostly very lonely, and that he lacked understanding companions” (184).

8. “Bearing in mind Ensor‟s difficult relationships with other people, the many crowd scenes in his oeuvre take on a new significance. Crowds arouse fear. You can‟t talk to masks. Even the city official on the tribune stands helplessly by. Individual identity is lost in a crowd, just as behind a mask. Crowds and masks point to Ensor‟s social problems. It is true that, in his many crowd pictures, the artist recorded an importan t public phenomenon of his day; but the impulse to do so came from his very private inner world” (184).

9. “Alongside masks and crowds, another typical motif in Ensor‟s oeuvre is the figure of Christ. The faces of his Christs all resemble that of the artist: Ensor too had long hair and a short goatee beard. And on one of his , in place of INRI he has clearly written his own name. He identified himself with Christ: Ensor, who is bringing a new message to Belgium, is not recognized by the masses. In Christ’s Entry into Brussels, the viewer has to look hard to find the Christ. He is neither in center of the composition nor particularly emphasize through color, and his enormous halo might be part of a carnival costume” (184).

39

Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

James Ensor. Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, 1888 (CONTINUED)

10. “Equating himself with Christ might seem arrogant, but for Ensor it was no blasphemy. He was probably influenced by authors such as Ernest Renan (1823-1892), a French theologian extremely popular in Ensor‟s day. Renan interpreted the life of Jesus from a positivist angle, discounting all the miracles and rejecting the dogma that Jesus was the son of God. For Renan, Christ was simply an exemplary character with an unusual destiny. In his words: „Let us therefore place the person of Jesus at the pinnacle of human greatness.‟ Ensor felt there were close parallels between his life and that of Christ : he saw himself as someone who sacrificed himself to art and was crucified by his critics” (185).

11. “In the 1880s, meanwhile, Christ was also the subject of argument at a quite different level. In 1879 a liberal government had passed a law which decreed that every local authority had to run a „neutral and laical‟ school. Religious education was banned from the curriculum and teacher training was placed under the supervision of the State. This attack on Belgium‟s traditionally Catholic education system was intended to weaken the power of the Church. Even diplomatic relations with the Vatican were broken off. The controversy around education escalated into a war of religion. Soldiers drove teachers and pupils out of Catholic schools; people were killed. When the pro-Catholic parties regained the majority in 1884, they in turn booted out the newly-appointed teachers” (184).

12. “Much more clearly visible than the figure of Christ are the soldiers who are marching in front of him like a black wall. It says on their standard that they are „doctrinaire‟ and „toujours reussi‟- always successful. The members of the military band are in fact Christ‟s opponents, those who defend the existing system and fight against anything new. For Ensor, they were the art critics who, because they continued to base their judgments an old criteria, failed to recognize his achievements and thereby barred him from the major exhibitions. Meanwhile, the fact that the drum major marching at the front edge of the painting is a bishop indicates that Ensor also connected the soldiers with the influence of the Church” (184).

13. “If we look more closely, we can see that the space around Christ is devoid of people. As in the masks and the crowd, Ensor again reveals something of his own affliction: loneliness. To be able to bear his isolation more easily, he sublimates it and thereby thinks of Christ‟s abandonment. He also declared it a necessary precondition of all art, prophesying: „Only isolated, lonely and great, composed, measured and patient sufferers- will be great in art. The future belongs to the lonely!‟” (184).

E Edvard Munch . The Scream, 1893 an image of fear

1. “The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) went in 1889 to Paris, where he came into contact with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. The combination of Symbolist content with Post-Impressionism was particularly well suited to Munch‟s character. His mental suffering, like van Gogh‟s, was so openly acknowledged in his imagery and statements that it is unavoidable in considering his work. His pictures conform to Symbolist theory, in that they depict states of mind, emotions, or ideas, rather than observable physical reality. The style in which Munch‟s mental states are expressed, however, is Post-Impressionist in its expressive distortions of form and its use of non-local color” (Adams, Art Across Time 810).

2. “In his best- known painting, The Scream of 1893, Munch represents his own sense of disintegration in a figure crossing the bridge over Oslo‟s Christianafjord. The bright colors- reds, oranges, and yellows- intensify the sunset, with darker blues and pinks defining the water. Both sky and water seem caught up in an endless swirl that echoes the artist‟s anguish. His fellow pedestrians at the far end of the bridge continue on ahead, while he stops to face the picture plane, simultaneously screaming and holding his ears. The action of blocking out the sound pushes in the sides of his face, so that his head resembles a skull and repeats the landscape curves. Munch described the experience depicted in this painting as follows: „I felt as though a scream went through nature- I thought I heard a scream- I painted this picture- painted the clouds like real blood. The colors were screaming.‟ He thus joins the scream of nature as his form echoes the waving motion of the landscape” (810).

3. “When he was five, he witnessed his mother‟s death from tuberculosis, and in 1875 he nearly died of the same disease. Three years later his favorite sister hemorrhaged to death, just as his mother had. As an artist, he was rejected for his frank treatments of death and sex not only by the general public with no particular interest in art but also by progressive artists and critics- the members of the Berlin , who invited him to show his work in 1892, were so shocked by it they closed the exhibition” (Stokstad 1039).

4. “Munch was always an outsider, brooding and melancholy, who called his paintings „children‟ („I have nobody else,‟ he said). His neuroses sprang from a traumatic childhood: his mother and eldest sister died of consumption when he was young, leaving him to be raised by a fanatically religious father. Even as an adult, Munch was so afraid of his father that he ordered Puberty, his first nude painting, to be covered at an Oslo exhibit his father attended” (Strickland 123).

40 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

F Auguste Rodin. The Burghers of Calais, 1884-9, bronze

English siege of Calais in 1347/ rough, rugged surfaces/ varying reactions to fate/ without a traditional high base

1. “The most important sculptor of the Post-Impressionist era, as it has been broadly defined, is Auguste Rodin (1840- 1917), whose career dates from the mid-1860s but whose work has little in common with that of the five painters of Post- Impressionism narrowly defined. At the beginning of his career, Rodin was rejected three times by the Ecole des Beaux- Arts, and his works were attacked by the academic critics. Yet, his intensely muscular figures in unconventional poses, especially those produced after his 1875 trip to Italy, where he saw the dramatic art of Michelangelo, were increasingly admired by the general public” (Stokstad 1025).

2. “Rodin‟s status as the leading sculptor in France was confirmed in 1884, when he won a competition for Burghers of Calais, commissioned to commemorate an event from the Hundred Years War. In 1347 King Edward III of England had besieged Calais but offered to spare the city if six leading citizens (or burghers)- dressed only in sackcloth with rope halters and carrying the keys to the city- would surrender themselves to him for execution. Rodin shows the six volunteers marching out to what they assume will be their deaths” (1025).

3. “The Calais commissioners were not pleased with Rodin‟s conception of the work. Instead of calm, idealized heroes, Rodin presented ordinary-looking men in various attitudes of resignation and despair. He expressively lengthened their arms, greatly enlarged their hands and feet, and changed the light fabric he knew they wore into a much heavier one, showing not only how they may have looked but how they must have felt as they forced themselves to take one difficult step after another. Rodin‟s willingness to alter the human body for expressive purpose was a revolutionary move that opened the way for the more radical innovations of later sculptors” (1025).

4. “Nor were the commissioners pleased with Rodin‟s plan to display the group at close to ground level. Rodin felt that the usual placement of such figures on a high pedestal suggested that only higher, superior humans are capable of heroic action. By placing the figures nearly at street level, Rodin hoped to convey to viewers that ordinary people, too, are capable of noble acts. In its focuses on great historical events that address human themes, Rodin‟s work looks back to a long tradition that began with the Greeks. Burghers of Calais is thus atypical among the arts produced during the Post-Impressionist era or later. Although the sculptors and painters who followed him absorbed many of Rodin‟s specific stylistic innovations, their works increasingly responded to contemporary life rather than the past” (1025-6).

G Auguste Rodin. The Gates of Hell, 1880-1917, bronze inspired by Dante/ artful, unfinished state/The Thinker/ The Kiss/ plight of the human condition

1.“These gates originated with a government commission in 1880 to design a sculptural portal for the new Museum of Decorative Arts. Initially Rodin selected the theme of Dante‟s Inferno as his inspiration. He wrote: „I lived a whole year with Dante, drawing the eight circles of his Hell. At the end of the year… I began all over again… working with models. I abandoned my drawings from Dante.‟ The Dantesque themes are visible in several of the sculptures: the Three Shades at the top of the portal, Dante himself perhaps as the Thinker, Paolo and Francesca and Ugolino and his Sons in the lower left door panel. Those falling or sinking also call to mind Dante‟s Hell. Onto this theme Rodin grafted figures from the Christian world, which of course are the substance of much of Dante‟s work, and Classical mythology” (Bolton 117).

2. “As the Gates of Hell demonstrate, however, Rodin‟s true place is with the Symbolists. The original inspiration was literary- Dante‟s Inferno- and places Rodin in the long and distinguished line of illustrators of Dante, including Botticelli and William Blake. Originally the Gates had a practical purpose: they were to form part of a new Museum of Decorative Arts. Soon, however, the project became an end in itself. Rodin continued to work on it for the rest of his life, and the final version was not cast until 1926, some years after his death. The Gates led him in several directions: toward a swarming proliferation of images, and an intricate sinuosity reminiscent of ornament; and toward ambiguity- as the basic images changed shape, or were put together in different combinations, they acquired new meanings” (Lucie-Smith 436). How would you compare this work with another famous pair of doors, Ghiberti‟s Gates of Paradise?

41 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

H Andre Derain. London Bridge, I Henri Matisse. Harmony in Red, 1908-9

1906 lyrical, curvilinear style/ emphasis on flat patterns Fauvism/ moving toward abstraction 1. “Although Fauvism was short-lived, its impact, and that of 1. “In 1905 a new generation of artist Expressionism, laid the foundations of twentieth-century abstraction. exhibited their paintings in Paris at the [Henri] Matisse reportedly said that „Fauvism is not everything, but it is the Salon d’Automne . Bright, vivid colors beginning of everything.‟ As Matisse developed, he was influenced by seemed to burst from their canvases and abstraction without embracing it completely. His sense of musical rhythm dominate the exhibition space. Forms translated into line creates energetic, curvilinear biomorphic form. On the were built purely from color, and other hand, the shapes and spaces of Matisse that are determined primarily vigorous patterns and unusual color by color, and only secondarily by line, are more static and geometric. These combinations created startling effects. two tendencies- fluid line and flat color- create a dynamic tension that To a large extent, they were derived from persists throughout his career” (Adams, Art Across Time 829). Gauguin‟s Symbolist use of color. The critic Louis Vauxcelles noticed a single 2. “In Harmony in Red of 1908-9, Matisse goes beyond the thick, traditional sculpture in the room, and constructive brushstrokes and unusual color juxtapositions of his Fauve exclaimed, „Donatello parmi les fauves!‟ period. The actual subject of the painting, a woman arranging a fruit bowl („Donatello among the wild beasts!‟), on a table, seems secondary to its formal arrangement. Within the room, because the color and movement of the the sense of perspective has been minimized, because the table and wall are paintings reminded him of the jungle. of the same red. The demarcation between them is indicated not by a His term stuck, and the style of those constructed illusion of space, but by a dark outline, and by the bright still pictures is still referred to as „Fauve‟” life arrangements on the surface of the table. The effect is reinforced by the (Adams, Art Across Time 823). tilting plates and bowls. Linear perspective is confined to the chair at the left and the window frame behind it. But, despite the flattening of the form 2. “Andre Derain (1880-1954) was the by minimal modeling, Matisse endows the woman and the still life objects quintessential Fauve. He reduced his with a sense of volume” (829-830). brushstrokes to Morse code: dots and dashes of burning, primary colors exploding, he said, 3. “The landscape, visible through the open window, relieves the confined quality of like „charges of dynamite.‟ Derain pioneered the close-up, interior view. It is related to the interior by the repetition of energetic strong color as an expressive end in itself. His black curves, which Matisse referred to as his „arabesques.‟ The inside curves create bold, directional brushstrokes eliminated lines branch-like forms that animate the table and wall, while those outside form branches and the distinction between light and shade… and tree trunks. Smaller arabesques define the flower stems and the outline of the For the first two decades of the twentieth woman‟s hair” (830). century, Derain was at the avant-garde hub, a creator of Fauvism and an early Cubist. He 4. “The title Harmony in Red evokes the later turned to the Old Masters for inspiration musical abstraction of Matisse‟s and his work became dry and academic” picture. It refers to the predominant (Strickland 131). color, the flat planes of which „harmonize‟ the wall and table into a shared space. Matisse builds a second, more animated „movement‟ in the fluid arabesques harmonizing interior with exterior. Finally, the bright patches on the woman, the still life objects, and the floral designs create a more staccato rhythm composed of individual accented forms. Matisse‟s ability to harmonize these different formal modes within a static pictorial space represents a synthesis of three artistic currents: the Post-Impressionist liberation of color, the Symbolist creation of mood, and the twentieth-century trend toward abstraction” (830).

J An Art of Omission

1. “‟You were born to simplify painting,‟ Matisse‟s teacher, , told his pupil. It was as if Matisse put the overblown Salon style on a diet, stripping it down to bare bones. Throughout his long career, working 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, Matisse sought to eliminate nonessentials and retain only a subject‟s most fundamental qualities. „Condensation of sensations… constitutes a picture,‟ is how Matisse explained his technique. His preliminary sketches evolved from complex to simple, from particular to general, as one after the other he pared away extraneous details. A minimalist before the term existed, Matisse evoked sensual nudes in line drawings with barely a dozen strokes” (Strickland 134).

42 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

K Henri Matisse. The Dance (first version), 1909 act of painting compared to the liberating act of dancing/ undulating linear quality/ interlocking shapes emphasizing negative space/ “genius of omission”

1. “This elegant and pleasurable painting by [Henri] Matisse (1869-1954) is important in its own right, but also because it influenced the Russian collector Sergei Schukin to commission another version (Dance II) together with Music for his house in St. Petersburg. After seeing the ‟s painting he wrote to the artist: „I find your panel Dance of such nobility that I am resolved to brave our bourgeois opinion and hang on my staircase a subject with nudes‟” (Gendel 104).

2. “Matisse‟s painting is typically concerned with a scene of pure pleasure and hedonism, and it is said that he was influenced by seeing fishermen dancing the „sardana’ on the beach at Collioure in southwest France in 1905. The unity of the group and harmonious simplicity of their movements relies to a great extent on the reduced color scheme where just three tones are used, for expression rather than representation as Matisse explained: „When I put down a green, that doesn‟t signify grass; when I put down a blue, that doesn‟t mean sky… All my colors sing together, like a chord in music.‟ The audacious design he adopted also serves to compliment the movement of the dancers; the center of the composition is but a void around which the figures circle at the margins of the picture space” (104).

3. “In Dance I of 1909, it is the figures, rather than the arabesques, who dance. The black outlines define the dancers, who twist and turn, jump and stretch. Their rhythmic, circular motion has been compared, in its simplicity, to dancers on the surface of a Greek vase. Although the blue and green background is composed of flat colors, Matisse succeeds in creating a three-dimensional illusion in the dancers themselves. This is enhanced by the warm pinks that make the dancers appear to advance, while the cool background colors recede. Although the individual movements of the dancers vary, together they form a harmonious continuum” (Adams, Art Across Time 830).

4. “‟What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter,‟ he said- an art comfortable as an armchair after a hard day‟s work. Matisse came late to painting, having trained to be a lawyer to please his bourgeois father. While he was recovering from an appendectomy, his mother bought him a box of paints and a how-to book, and the world lost an attorney and gained an artist… Matisse left for Paris to study art, with his father shouting, „You‟ll starve!‟ as the train pulled out of the station” (Strickland 135).

L Henri Matisse. The Snail, 1953, gouache on paper

vibrant color with paper cut-outs/ spiral shape/ use of black and white/ use of complementary colors

1. “Matisse began his life as a painter in bed… In a curiously neat way, Matisse also ended his long career there, as an eighty-year old invalid, drawing portraits of his grandchildren on the ceiling above his bed with a pen attached to a long bamboo pole; or cutting rarefied, abstracted shapes out of hand-colored sheets of paper for his final, monumental and triumphant . These shapes were then pinned in placed by assistants working under his direction, to be stuck down later. For Matisse this procedure proved a liberation. It was the final resolution to a dilemma that had occupied him from the very beginning. That was, should he give priority to color or to line in his paintings? The two are distinct, but using this method Matisse could „draw‟ with his scissors directly into the colored paper, so the two became one. The Snail is one of the largest cutouts Matisse made. At first it seems almost abstract. However the spiral of colored shapes represents the shell, resting on a rectangular blue body. In fact Matisse only took up the scissors once he had drawn and held a real snail time and time again. This interlocking fan of complementary color, both organic, and ordered, was the result” (Parsons 106).

2. “The black shape is an essential piece of the overall design and mood. Take it away (cover it with your hand), and the intensity of color and strength of the design disappear… Behind the apparent simplicity of Matisse‟s creation lay endless hours of work and rework. He aimed always to achieve that final pure distillation of expression and visual balance in which nothing could be added or subtracted” (Cumming, Great Artists 99).

3. “The central design is surrounded by a continuous band of glowing . It frames the work and refers back to one of Matisse‟s earliest subjects: a view through a window onto a sunlit landscape… In many of Matisse‟s works he leaves bare patches of white canvas, often at the edges of flat areas of color, in order to allow colors to „breathe‟ and reach their full visual potential” (99).

43 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

M Pierre Bonnard, The Open N Gustav Klimt. The Kiss, 1907-8

Window, 1921 Secessionist group of bohemians/ flat, decorative quality/ influence of the Nabis/ broken expressive hands/ enveloping, symbolic garments/ influence of brushstrokes of color/ intimate Byzantine mosaics/ Sigmund Freud and the expression of sexuality domestic scene 1. “Fin-de-siècle Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was a city of 1. Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) “entered contradictions. The Hapsburg monarchy persisted amidst the growth of a liberal law school, but at the same time he bourgeoisie. Technology advanced against a backdrop of conservative nationalism… pursued art studies at the Academie The resistance to change in Viennese society was nowhere more evident than in its Julian, where he became friendly with attitude to . The were dominated by two institutions- the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste and the Künstlerhausgenossenschaft.. The former painters influenced by Gauguin, notably was Vienna‟s teaching academy, the latter a private society that owned the city‟s only Paul Serusier , painter of . exhibition space. Both were conservative, and in control of all exhibitions in Vienna, Soon he helped to found the group known as as well as of Austrian exhibits abroad” (Adams, Art Across Time 813). the Nabis (the Hebrew word for „prophet‟), whose young members sought to break down 2. “In 1897 a group of artists broke away and formed the independent Vereinigung barriers between easel painting and the Bildender Künstler Öesterreichs (Secession), known as the „.‟ This decorative arts” (Govignon 181). group did not champion any one artistic style, even though the Jugendstil was strongly represented. Its purpose was rather to provide a forum for diverse styles 2. “Bonnard‟s interests were wide-ranging, which shared the rejection of Academic naturalism. The leader of the Secession, and encompassing music, literature, and the its first president, was Gustave Klimt (1862-1918), an established painter in the theater. In 1891, he exhibited at the Salon for Academic tradition” (81). the first time and designed a poster for champagne that won him much attention. He 3. “One of Klimt‟s culminating explorations on the theme of human desire, The Kiss was much influe nced by the arabesques, shows man and woman separate but united, experiencing different sensations but unorthodox compositions, and striking color sharing joy while joined to the Earth and blossoming nature…The man and the combinations of - to such an woman wear highly decorated gold gowns that define their individuality, but there is extent, in fact, that his friends called him the a golden „envelope‟ that surrounds them both and goes beyond the description of „very Japanesy Nabi‟” (181). their gowns. This „envelope‟ symbolically unites the sexes” (Cumming, Great Artists 94). 3. “Bonnard depicted contemporary subjects set in the streets or in his own house. In 4. “The carpet of flowers and the use of gold is highly reminiscent of the mosaic 1893 he met the woman who would become decorations found in Byzantine churches. Klimt was influenced by the mosaics he his companion, Maria Boursin, who called saw in Ravenna in Italy, which he visited twice in 1903… Klimt always wanted to herself Marthe . She became his favorite create a union between the fine arts of painting and sculpture and the applied arts of model, and a constant in both his life and his design and decoration. The Secession focused increasingly on pure painting, and so painting” (181). Klimt broke away from the movement” (94).

4. “Around 1910 5. “The woman‟s features are highly reminiscent of Adele Bloch-Bauer, who was the Bonnard became wife of rich Viennese merchant and allegedly one of Klimt‟s lovers. She appears in interested in land- several of the artist‟s paintings in various guises… Klimt never married, but he had scape, leaving Par- many affairs and fathered at least four illegitimate children. He had a longstanding is with increasing relationship with Emile Floge that lasted 27 years. She was a beautiful woman who frequency for the owned a fashion shop in Vienna” (95). south of France, with its brilliant 6. “The man‟s gown is decorated with geometric light and dazzling „masculine‟ shapes in black and white, but colors. He was within it are curved and flowing patterns, which fond of taking long reflect those in the woman‟s gown and symbolize walks, during the female „anima‟ within the male essence… which he made The colorful flowers on the woman‟s gown unite pencil sketches of her visually and symbolically with the carpet of whatever struck flowers on which she kneels. Her gown also his fancy. While influenced by the light contains geometric elements that symbolize her palette of the Impressionists, Bonnard never union with the male” (95). “The touch of the painted in the open air, preferring to compose hands and the gestures in the figures are his landscapes with their plunging particularly expressive. Klimt was fascinated by perspectives and surprising croppings, in the hands, and they are often an important element studio. Working on unstretched canvas in his work. Faces are characteristically hidden tacked to the wall, he applied brilliantly hued or impassive” (94). pigment in short strokes. One of his favorite themes was the open window, which provided 7. “Klimt was a tireless worker. He rose early and worked in his studio all day. him with a clear structural framework and Although he was a man of few words, he frequented his favorite cafes, which were a allowed him to combine lush landscapes and vital part of the highly strung and emotional fin-de-siecle Vienna” (94). brilliant light with domestic interiors” (181).

44

Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

O Sigmund Freud P

1. “By the early twentieth century, it was evident 1. “Another painter of intense feelings was the Austrian Egon Schiele that a new revolution in scientific and intellectual (1890-1918). Schiele‟s father died insane when Egon was fourteen. After a thought was occurring. One revolutionary brief period of experimentation with the decorative style of Vienna‟s most thinker was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)” (Wren famous artist, Gustav Klimt, Schiele began to do many paintings and 2: 293). drawings of women that had sexual overtones. In 1912 he was jailed briefly for allowing neighborhood children to see some of this work. Even before this traumatic event, Schiele revealed in an extraordinary series of self- 2. “The founder of psychoanalysis, Freud was portraits a deep ambivalence toward the sexual themes of many of his born in Moravia, a province in Austria. As a child, works” (Stokstad 1039). he moved to Vienna, where he spent nearly his entire life. Although trained as a physician, Freud soon 2. “The art of Egon Schiele was heavily developed an interest in treating mental disorders. autobiographical, and self-portaits Freud‟s approach assigned primary importance to the featured largely in his output…. In non-rational, unconscious forces within the 1911 he had met the artist‟s model personality. His treatment was based upon the Wally Neuzil and had gone to live with analysis of his patient‟s discourse, which he her in the small town of Krumau. encouraged by creating relaxed settings for his However, the intolerance of the treatment” (293). conservative provincial community, which disapproved of an artist living 3. “His research and practice led Freud to develop a openly with his model, had forced him theory explaining the psychical apparatus of the back to Vienna and deepened his human mind. The primary mental apparatus he called perception of himself as an outsider” the id. Present at birth, the id is the unconscious self, (Bugler 55). which contains the instinctual drives and impulses repressed from consciousness. A second mental apparatus is the superego. The superego is the , the collection of conscious and Q Oskar Kokoschka. The Bride of the Wind, 1914 unconscious values derived from culture, which transition from Symbolism to Expressionism restricts and condemns the impulses of the id. The third mental apparatus is the ego. The ego is the 1. “A major Expressionist painter, Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) came conscious self, which tries to maintain a balance under the influence of Klimt, Schiele and the Secessionist movement while between the id and the superego, and, at the same he was a student at Vienna‟s School of Applied Art. His art, like theirs, was time, seeks to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. subject to extreme linear distortion, but it is less rarefied, possessing a Our mental health, according to Freud, depends on the unique nervous energy. As a portraitist he was not concerned with interaction of these three apparatuses. Too great a decoration or compositional harmony like Klimt, preferring to probe beyond conflict between the id and the superego is one cause superficial appearances and reach towards the inner torments of a person, for a mental breakdown. In addition, Freud argued bringing out their worries, angst and demons. In his private life he that unhealthy childhood relationships with one‟s cultivated a „bad boy‟ persona, shaving his head like a criminal to underline parents were a common source of mental illness” (293). his role as an opponent of bourgeois complacency” (Bugler 44).

4. “The most controversial aspects of Freud‟s ideas 2. “Kokoschka‟s most concern human sexuality. Freud viewed sexuality as a memorable work, The Bride of crucial determinant in either the normal or abnormal the Wind, celebrates his love development of an individual. He argued that sexual for Alma Mahler, the „muse‟ drives begin in infancy and end only with death. And who inspired so many of he cautioned that the strictures of rational thought and ‟s and Austria‟s traditional moral values, if too strongly enforced, could leading cultural figures… distort natural sexual impulses and cripple individuals Based on Romantic paintings and even entire peoples with guilt and neurotic fears” of Dante‟s tragic lovers Paolo (293). and Francesca, it was originally conceived as Tristan 5. “Not only was human sexuality discussed frankly by and Isolde after Wagner‟s Freud, it was also explicitly by Gustav Klimt…Six years opera but received its present younger than Freud, Klimt died in 1918, shortly before title from the poet Georg Freud had achieved general acceptance. At the end of Trakl. The awesome canvas is , European nations urgently needed to a monument of the power of implement humane methods of treatment for veterans love: echoing the impassioned brushwork, the entire universe resounds in a suffering from battle-induced mental breakdowns. great chord of exaltation at the pair‟s embrace” (Janson 774). Because Freud‟s approach avoided the utilization of drugs, verbal intimidation, and electric-shock 3. How does Kokoschka‟s painting exemplify a transition from Symbolism to treatments, which had previously been the standard Expressionism? techniques used on mentally ill patients, it won widespread adoption” (294).

45 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

R . Street, Berlin, 1913

German Expressionism/ Die Brücke/ aggressive brushwork with harsh color/ deep admiration for German medieval art/ cry against materialism

1. “The German counterpart to Fauvism was Die Brücke („The Bridge‟), which formed in the same year the Fauves were named. In 1905 three architecture students at the Dresden Technical College- Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976), Erich Heckel (1883 -1970), and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)- decided to take up painting and form a brotherhood. For the next eight years they lived and worked together. For the next eight years they lived and worked together. Their collective name was taken from a passage in Nietzsche‟s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) in which the prophet Zarathustra speaks of contemporary humanity‟s potential to be the evolutionary „bridge‟ to be a more perfect specimen of the future, the Ubermensch („beyond man,‟ but usually translated as „superman’)” (Stokstad 1043).

2. “In their art, however, the group demonstrated little interest in advancing the evolutionary process. Instead, their paintings, sculpture, and graphics suggest a Gauguinesque yearning to return to imaginary origins. Among their favorite motifs were women living harmoniously in nature…During the summer, Die Brücke artists actually did return to nature. They visited the remotest areas of northern Germany, such as Nidden. But in 1911 they moved to Berlin, perhaps preferring to imagine the simple life rather than live it. Ironically, the images they made of cities, especially Berlin, offer powerful arguments against living there. Kirchner‟s Street, Berlin, for example, forcefully demonstrates the isolation that can occur in cities. Although physically close, the well-dressed men and women are psychologically distant. And instead of becoming a larger formal unit, they are presented as a series of independent vertical elements, an accumulation of isolated individuals, not a tight-knit community. The angular, brittle shapes and the sharp contrast of predominantly cool colors formally underscore the message” (1043-1044).

3. “What made it possible for modernists like Kirchner to endure such conditions was their collective belief that they lived not in Berlin or Paris or New York but in bohemia, a cultural space uncontaminated by the ordinary conditions of those cities. The term bohemian was originally used during the 1830s in Paris to describe certain Gypsies (the Romany people, wrongly thought to have originated in Bohemia, a region of central Europe)_ who lived within a modern urban environment while maintaining a separate cultural identity. The term was then applied to young artists and writers who wanted the advantages of a cultural center without its crass, materialist, „bourgeois‟ (or middle-class) trappings. They were opposed to the new mass- produced thins, like the ready-to-wear suits in Atget‟s Magasin, Avenue des Gobelins, which they considered shoddy and ugly, as well as to what they believed to be the bourgeoisie‟s appalling lack of interest in the life of the spirit and the mind” (1044-1045).

4. “By 1900 these new bohemians in various European centers were committed to resisting both the social fragmentation of the modern city and what they considered the Puritanism of bourgeois life. Like Gauguin, many bohemians were attracted to the ideal of so-called primitive culture, imagining in it not only a less alienated society but also a more natural sexuality, free of inhibitions and learned restraints. But unlike Gauguin, who decided to return to what he thought of as a precivilized existence, the artists of Die Brücke attempted to „primitivize‟ bohemia. Uninhibited sexuality was often featured in one major subject of their art: the life of their studios” (1045).

5. The members of Die Brücke “modernized both the spiritual abstraction of medieval art, and the geometric esthetic of African and Oceanic art, by integrating them with the mechanical forms of the city. Expressionist color was typically brilliant and exuberant, and further energized by harsh, angular shapes” (Adams, Art Across Time 825).

S Art History and Esthetics in Early Twentieth-Century Munich

1. “Two important figures in the Munich art world, Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) and Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), were particularly influential. Wölfflin lectured on art history, while Worringer‟s esthetic theories supported the Expressionist movement” (Adams, Art Across Time 825).

2. “Wölfflin‟s most important work, which is still read by art students – The Principles of Art History – was first published in German in 1915. He devised a system of determining style by an analysis of its formal elements. Renaissance and Classical styles, for example, were distinguished from by five pairs of opposing characteristics. The classicizing Renaissance style was, according to Wölfflin, linear, whereas Baroque was painterly. Renaissance planes were constructed according the verticals and horizontals of linear perspective, while Baroque planes receded diagonally. Space tended to be open in Baroque, and closed in [the] Renaissance. Elements were multiple and clarity was absolute in the Renaissance style. In Baroque, elements were unified and clarity was relative” (825).

3. “What united Wölfflin with Worringer was their mutual emphasis on the viewer‟s experience of works of art. But whereas Wölfflin focused on past styles, Worringer championed the avant-garde- notably the German Expressionist movement… Expressionist paintings were accused to being decadent, self-indulgent, without form, finish, or depth. Worringer countered by pointing out the limitations of adherence to naturalism. He called for accessibility to new influences as a way of expanding artistic consciousness. Such infusions, particularly from non-European cultures, Worringer believed, would offer a new route to the spiritual core of creativity” (825).

46 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

T Kathe Kollwitz. Death Seizing a Woman, 1934-6, lithograph U Vassily Kandinsky. Improvisa- art as a form of social protest/ expressive line used to convey fear tion 28 (second version), 1912 and terror Vassily Kandinsky/ Der Blaue Reiter/ Concerning the Spiritual in Art 1. “Another German who was an important artist of this period is / compositions and improvisations/ Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (1867-1945). Raised in a socialist household, she also studied at the Berlin School of Art for Women move toward nonobjective art/ “color and at a similar school in Munich. In 1891 she married a doctor is the keyboard”/ Bauhaus who shared her leftist political views, and they settled in a working-class neighborhood of Berlin. Art for her was a political 1. “The Russian artist Vassily Kandinsky tool, and to reach as many people as possible, she preferred (1866-1944) was among the first to eliminate to other mediums. Although she made a number of recognizable objects from his paintings. He effective self-portraits, the main subject of her art is the poor, identified with the „Blue Rider‟ as the artist oppressed worker” (Stokstad 1045-1047). who would ride into the future of a spiritual non-figurative and mystical art… At the age of 2. “Unlike Millet, who in his „Gleaners‟ wanted us to sense the dignity of labor, she thirty, Kandinsky left where he was a saw no other way out but that of revolution. No wonder her work inspired many law student, and went to Munich to study artists and propagandists in the Communist East where it became much better painting. There he was a founder of the Neue known that in the West” (Gombrich 567). Künstler Vereinigung (New Artists‟ Association), or NKV, the aim of which was rebellion against tradition. A few artists split V Franz Marc. The Great Blue Horses, 1911 from the NKV to form the Blue Rider” (Adams, Art Across Time 827). admiration for the animal kingdom

2. “The name of the group, derived from the

1. Franz Marc (1880-1916), “a man of gloomy disposition, was born and visionary language of the Book of Revelation, trained in Munich. Over the course of his career he moved from naturalism was inspired by the millennium and the to expressionism, a process that culminated in 1910 when he met notion that Moscow would be the new center Kandinsky and became a member of his circle” (Stokstad 1047). of the world from 1900-as Rome had once been. „Blue Rider‟ referred to the emblem of

the city of Moscow showing Saint George (the 2. “Some years earlier Marc had turned to animals as subjects for his work. „Rider‟) killing the dragon” (827). In The Large Blue Horses, he shows three horses, each defined by the same colors and shapes, in a tight, homogeneous unit. The fluid neck contours of 3. “For Kandinsky, art was a matter of using the two horses in front, echoed in the shape of the third animal, reflect the harmony rhythmic lines, colors, and shapes, rather of their collective existence. With their billowing curves and graceful arabesques, the than narrative. Like Whistler, Kandinsky gave horses are also shown in perfect harmony with their surrounding” (1047). his works musical titles intended to express their abstract qualities. By eliminating 3. Marc was part of a group called “Der references to material reality, Kandinksy Blaue Reiter.” “The last of the major followed the Blue Rider‟s avoidance of the pre-World War I expressionist groups mundane in order to communicate the to come out of the crucible of late- spiritual in art. Titles such as Improvisation nineteenth century painting was evoked the dynamic spontaneity of creative formed in Munich around the Russian activity, while the Compositions emphasized painter Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) the organized abstraction of his lines, shapes, …“Der Reiter” was the popular name and colors” (827). for the image of Saint George, mounted and slaying a dragon, that appeared on the Moscow city emblem… Der Reiter was blue because Kandinsky and the group‟s co-founder, Franz Marc, considered blue the color of the male principle of spirituality” (1047).

4. Marc saw “blue as a masculine principle, robust and spiritual; yellow as a feminine principle, gentle, serene, and sensual; red as matter, brutal and heavy. In the mixing of these colors to create greens and violets, and in their proportions one to the other on the canvas, the colors-as-abstract shapes took on spiritual or material significance independent of the subject” (Arnason 128). 4. “In 1912 Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in which he explained his 5. “Yet Marc, even though working closely with Kandinsky and aware of his historic philosophy, according to which music was experiments, could never bring himself to abandon recognizable subject matter intimately related to art. Kandinsky was, by entirely. Only at intervals at the end of his brief life, in sketches that he made in the temperament, drawn to religious and notebook he carried until he was killed in the war in 1916, was there evidence finally philosophical thinking imbued with strains of of a move to abstraction. Although the animal theme arose in the first instance from mysticism and the occult, which can be his love of an imals, it soon became for him a symbol of that more primitive and related to a millenarian spirit reflected in the Arcadian life sought by so many of the Expressionist painters” (128). Blue Rider emblem” (827).

47

Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

W Kandinsky, Theosophy, and the Bauhaus

1. “The work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) is bound to present its admirers with problems, and these have to do with the nature of Kandinsky‟s own beliefs. He was, if not the „onlie begetter‟ of abstract art, certainly its outstanding pioneer; in the five years between 1909 and 1914, he labored to turn a speculation about the meaning of pure form into a system of language. These were also the years in which Kandinsky was attached, with an almost missionary zeal, to the doctrines of Theosophy. It is clear from his writings that he applied the kitsch -spiritualism of Madame Blavatsky to his art in a quite literal way. It was its philosophical armature, as St. Ignatius‟ Spiritual Exercises were for Bernini. The physical world was losing its importance; it should be seen as a stumbling block, since it occluded the realities of the spirit from men‟s eyes. Thus caught in the webs of maya, of attachment to objects of earthly longing, people could only drift in endless dissatisfaction. However, the Millennium was coming in the form of what Kandinsky called „The Epoch of the Great Spirituality.‟ On that day, History itself- the contingent pattern of human events- would stop. All political and social power would be subsumed in spiritual contemplation, and universal enlightenment would reign. This was Madame Blavatsky‟s version of a fantasy as old as Christianity itself: the Millennium, when Christ would come to earth for the second time, win a final victory over Satan, and establish a span of perfect earthly justice lasting one thousand years. Among the political spin-offs from this durable legend were the Marxist fantasy of the „withering away of the State‟ after the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Hitler‟s vision of the „Thousand-Year Reich.‟ Both presupposed the end of History, and so, in its harmless way, did Kandinsky‟s Theosophical faith” (Hughes, Shock of the New 299).

2. “Kandinsky started to paint fairly late- he was thirty in 1896, when he came to Munich to study art- and Russian folk art (bright inlaid patches of peasant textiles, colored decoration of log houses) had disposed him to work in flat areas of hue… In his Murnau landscapes of 1909, the shapes of hill, tree, and steam-train bear witness to the influence of Fauvism; but their odd energy of color, pointed towards the next stage of his work, in which color would gradually be detached from description. The Murnau landscapes present a lusciously colored and rather toylike world of well-being, and this romantic vision of innocence continued to haunt his work in the form of references to a Slavic fairy-tale past: riders, castles, spears, rainbow-bridges, and the like. But if color became more of an end in itself, it could discipline the too-easy associations of these images. Kandinsky feared the triviality of illustration as much as he abhorred the triviality of décor; he wanted his painting to describe spiritual states, the epiphanies of soul” (300-301).

3. “The traditional Russian idea that Moscow would be the „third Rome” was central to Kandinsky‟s work prior to World War I. The first center of Christianity had been Rome itself. The second Rome, according to Russian Orthodox tradition, had been Constantinople, the capital of the Christian world until 1453, when the Muslim Turks conquered it. The third and final Rome would be Moscow, according to the vision of a sixteenth-century monk, whose descriptive letter to the grand prince of Moscow led the prince‟s successor, Ivan the Terrible, to assume the title czar, Russian for „Caesar‟” (Stokstad 1048).

4. “In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Deutscher Werkbund („German Craft Association‟) was formed. Its aim was to improve the esthetic quality of manufactured goods and industrial architecture, to produce them more cheaply, and make them more widely available. This movement produced a number of important architects and designers, who had enormous international influence through the 1960s. Many who had worked together in Europe later emigrated to the United States to escape Hitler‟s persecutions during World War II. The leader of this community of Walter Gropius (1883-1969), who in 1919 became the first director of the Bauhaus, in Weimar. The Bauhaus (from the German Bau, meaning „structure‟ or „building‟, and Haus meaning „house‟) combined an arts and crafts college with a school of fine arts. Gropius believed in the integration of art and industry” (Adams, Art Across Time 854)

5. “Vassily Kandinsky was a prominent member of the Bauhaus faculty from 1922, and he remained until 1933 when it was closed by the Nazis. His paintings of that period reflect the geometric angularity he espoused as part of the Russian avant-garde in Moscow at the beginning of World War I” (854).

X Degenerate Art

“During the 1930s in Germany a serious political reaction against avant-garde art arose, and eventually a concerted effort was made to suppress it. One of the principal targets was the Bauhaus, the art and design school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, where , Vasily Kandinsky, , , and many other luminaries taught… As early as 1924, conservatives had accused the Bauhaus of being not only educationally unsound but also politically subversive. In order to avoid having the school shut down by this opposition, Gropius moved it to Dessau in 1926, at the invitation of Dessau‟s liberal mayor, but left soon after the relocation. His successors faced increasing political pressure on the school because it was a prime center of modernist practice, and the Bauhaus was again forced to move in 1932, this time to Berlin” (Stokstad 1081).

“After Adolf Hitle r came to power in 1933, the Nazi Party mounted an aggressive campaign against modern art. In his youth Hitler himself had been a mediocre academic painter, and he had developed an intense hatred of the avant-garde. During the first year of his regime the Bauhaus was forced to close for good… The Nazis also launched attacks against the German Expressionists, whose often intense depictions of German soldiers defeated in World War I and of the economic depression following the war were considered unpatriotic. Most of all, the treatment of the human for in these works, such as the expressionistic exaggeration of facial features, was deemed offensive. The works of these and other artists were removed from museums, while the artists themselves were subjected to public ridicule and often forbidden to buy canvas or paint. As a final move against the avant-garde, the Nazi leadership organized in 1937 a notorious exhibition of banned works. The „Degenerate Art’ exhibition was intended to erase modernism once and for all from the artistic life of the nation… Among the many artists crushed by the Nazi suppression was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner… The state‟s open animosity was a factor in his suicide in 1939” (1081).

48 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

Y Max Beckmann. Departure, 1932-5 Z Alberto Giacometti. La Place (or City Square),

New Objectivity/ rise of the Nazis/ the ”fisher- 1948, bronze king”/ “degenerate art/ side panels of bondage and expressive distortion of the human form/ torture bewilderment, loss, and alienation in urban society

1. After World War II, one European artist who received worldwide 1. “Max Beckmann (1884-1950), a robust descendent of Die Brücke artists, did not become an Expressionist until attention was Swiss-born Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), “who in the early 1930s was the leading sculptor in the Surrealist after he had lived through World War I, which filled him movement. Around 1935 he became dissatisfied with an art of with such despair at the state of modern civilization that fantasy and returned to working directly from the model. To his he took up painting to „reproach God for his own surprise, the figures he made became the antithesis of the errors‟”(Janson 804). classical ideal: small, frail and lumpy, their surfaces rough and crude” (Stokstad 1109). 2. Beckmann‟s triptych Departure is “a painting that 2. “Shown alone or in groups, as in City Square, these anonymous reflects his admiration for Grünewald. The right panel incorporates a blind man holding a fish, a lantern, and a men and women seemed to illustrate the existential philosophy of his close friend Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1908), who asserted mad musician. The left panel shows a scene of almost that humans are alone in a meaningless universe. Sartre unimaginable torture. What are we to make of these nevertheless maintained that this situation has a positive potential brutal images? We know from letters written by the because it leaves us free to decide our own fate. But Giacometti artist and a close friend that they represent life itself as conveyed only the bleaker side of Sartre‟s existentialism, a world endless misery filled with all kinds of physical and with small, lonely people wandering aimlessly” (1109). spiritual pain. The woman trying to make her way in the dark with the aid of the lamp is carrying the corpse of her memories, evil deeds, and failures, from which no one can ever be free so long as life beats its drum. The center panel signifies the departure from life‟s illusions to the reality behind appearances. The crowned figure seen from behind recalls the legendary Fisher King from the legend of the Holy Grail, whose health and that of his land is restored by Parsifal” (805-6).

3. “Departure proved remarkably prophetic. It was completed when the artist was on the verge of leaving his homeland under Nazi pressure. The topsy-turvy quality of the two wing scenes, full of mutilations and meaningless rituals, captures well the flavor of Hitler‟s

Germany. The stable design of the center panel, in AA Existentialism contrast, with its expanse of blue sea and its sunlit brightness, conveys the hopeful spirit of an embarkation for distant shores. After living through World War II in 1. “One response to the profound moral crises of the twentieth century was formulated by a group of intellectuals known as occupied Holland under the most difficult conditions, existentialists. Many existentialist thinks of the twentieth century Beckmann spent the final three years of his life in have rejected traditional religious structures. In the view of America” (806). existentialists, the universe, instead of being infused with a moral purpose, is chaotic and unordered, and human existence, instead of being guided by a supreme being, is unplanned” (Wren 2: 362).

2. “Since God does not exist, human beings must confront their existence by themselves. Therefore, honest human beings must confront their existence by themselves. Therefore, honest human beings recognize that they are terribly alone. They are hounded by despair and by the realization of the purposelessness of life. Nonetheless, the search by existentialists for morals and values is not a futile act. Thoughtful human beings recognize that they bear an inescapable responsibility for their own behavior. By making consistent choices and by committing themselves to courageous actions, individuals can define themselves in humane and noble terms. They can overcome the absurdity of existence and can give meaning to their lives” (362).

3. “As a member of the French Resistance movement against Hitler‟s forces, Sartre demonstrated a capacity to define an individual response to a contemporary moral crisis” (362).

49 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

BB Jean Dubuffet. Vie Inquiète, 1953 CC Francis Bacon. Self-Portrait, 1973

Art Brut use of distortion and exaggeration in depicting the human figure/ drips of paint/ convoluted (puzzling, “During the 1950s, while American Abstract confusing) division of space Expressionism was at its height, a more figurative kind of Expressionism developed in Europe. The French 1. “Another of the Europeans who drew international artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) was fascinated by the attention was the painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992), born art of non- Western cultures, of children and the in Dublin but a London resident after 1925. Trained as an insane, as well as by graffiti and the naïve painters. He interior decorator, Bacon taught himself to paint about 1930 but amassed a significant collection of such work, which he produced few pictures until the early 1940s, when the onset of World believed would provide a route to unconscious sources War II crystallized his harsh view of the world. His style draws on of creativity. The influence of these styles pervades his the expressionist work of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, as own paintings. Dubuffet‟s early canvases are thickly well as on Picasso‟s figure paintings. His subject matter comes from textured, dark, and often built up with granular a wide variety of sources, including post-Renaissance Western art” (Stokstad 1109). materials such as san. They tend to be muddy, composed mainly of browns and blacks- and to convey 2. “Bacon has always denied that his the rough textures of walls, doors, and pavements” work has anything to do with (Adams, Art Across Time 894) Expressionism- „I have nothing to express,‟ he once told a BBC interviewer, “Dubuffet‟s paintings were inspired by what he called with apparent sincerity- and certainly it shows no trace of the longing for spiritual art brut („raw art‟)- the work of children and the transcendence that was one of the main insane- which he considered „uncontaminated by features of Expressionism… All moral culture.‟ Like artists as diverse as Paul Gauguin, relationships are erased from the world of , and the Surrealists, Dubuffet his paintings” (Hughes, Shock of the New thought that civilization corrupts innate human 296). sensibilities” (Stokstad 1110). 3. “He disdained „naïve‟ source material, but liked taking didatic images out of “Dubuffet‟s celebratio n of crude, basic forms of self- context so that their intended meaning expression, including graffiti, contributed to the was either lost or blurred. On of the richest sources was a manual emergence of the most distinctive postwar European on oral disease, another a book entitled Positions in Radiology, and a artistic approach: art informel („formless art‟), which third Eadweard Muybridge‟s Animal Locomotion. What did such was sometimes called or books have in common? Detachment: the clinical gaze on the human (a tache bein g a spot or stain). Art informel was body as a specimen, all its privacy brushed aside. Bacon thought promoted by the exhibitions and writings of the French there was a strong analogy between the body‟s various availabilities- critic Michel Tapié, who opposed advocates of to inspection, sex, or political coercion. All three evoked different forms of abandonment, the condition of being a thing. Hence geometric formalism as the proper response to the Bacon‟s liking for environments that suggested a loss of will- the horrors of World War II. He insisted that and the grungy walls of rooms that might be detention-chambers, the two world wars had discredited all notions of humanity racklike beds and chairs that turn into grilles, the assemblies of as reasonable, thus creating a tabula rasa („clean vaguely medical-looking tubes. The closed rooms and unidentifiable slate‟) for society to invent a new and more authentic furniture, nasty in texture and color, lit by a single unshaded bulb, concept of our species. Relying heavily on Sartre‟s are an arena for violence; in them, sex becomes a doglike grappling ideas about human potential, Tapié encouraged artists and all emotions are equally subsumed in rage and its hangover, the to contribute to this rebuilding process by returning to sense of isolation. While it may be true, as Bacon has more than once said, that „you only need to think about the meat on your plate‟ the origins of human expression in the simple, honest to see a general truth about mankind in his paintings, no modern mark” (1110). artist has hammered with more repetitive pessimism at one corner of the human condition” (297-298).

4. “This distancing has enabled Bacon to master his gruesome and convulsive subject-matter, but it has also entailed a certain loss of pressure and even, on occasion, a surrender to the decorative. In the best of Bacon‟s art the paint has a dreadful materiality, as though the grainy, cellular structure of the pigment, swiped with a loaded brush across the canvas, were a smear of tissue. In its weaker moments, however, the tension between real paint and imagined flesh, between the oppressed energies of the bodies and the looping brushmarks that represent them, acquires a spectral lushness inappropriate to Bacon‟s main ambition: to be the Goya of modern history, a last painter of the tragic figure, telling a truth about human events that the camera could not” (298).

50 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

DD Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series No. 58: Better Negro Education Facilities, 1940-41 racial division in the United States/ faceless figures/ stark contrast and flat shapes

1. In the United States, “during World War I thousands of African Americans left the rural South for jobs in Northern defense plants. The Great Migration, as it is known, created racial tensions over housing a employment that in turn fostered a concern for the rights of African Americans. It produced as well a growing concern among African-American writers and artists with black experience and identity. Alain Locke, educated at Harvard and Oxford and an influential voice in the Harlem Renaissance, encouraged younger black artists and writers to seek their contemporary cultural identity in their African and African-American heritage” (Stokstad 1101-1102).

2. “It may be that the most powerful American work of art produced under the auspices of social commitment in the 1930s and 1940s was … a narrative series of sixty small paintings, done on store-bought panels through 1941 by an African- American artist, Jacob Lawrence (b. 1917)… His work was called the Migration of the Negro, later retitled The Migration Series” (Hughes, American Visions 454).

3. “Its subject was huge, and probably only a black artist could have handled it with the depth of feeling it required. The migration of blacks from the rural South to the industrial North of America in the first decades of the twentieth century was the biggest internal migration in American history and, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., „the largest movement of black bodies since slavery.‟ It involved at least a million people, due to defects in the records, the number will never be known. It went largely uncommemorated, except by historians and sociologists. No novel, in or out of the African- American tradition, has handled it on the scale that it deserved… No monuments commemorate it, no documentary films were made about it. Lawrence simply picked up the subject and made it his own” (454). 4. “The South was drained of its black proletariat, while the North acquired a new one, out of which grew a radically altered conception of black culture in America: distinctively urban, but still Southern in its origins and collective memory. This was the culture whose synthesis, in New York, produced the Harlem Renaissance; and through it, American blacks reinvented themselves” (455).

5. “Lawrence was one of them. Born in Atlantic City, he spent part of his childhood in Pennsylvania and then, after his parents split up in 1924, he went with his mother and siblings to New York, settling in Harlem. When years later he told an interviewer that „I am the black community,‟ he was neither boasting nor kidding. He had none of the alienation from Harlem that was felt by some other black artists of the 1930s, like the expatriate William Johnson. He trained as a painter at the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the New York Public Library‟s 135th Street branch. Younger than the artists and writers who took part in the Harlem Renaissance of the , Lawrence was also at an angle to them: he was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks- the Noble Negroes in Art Deco guise- that tended to be produced as an antidote to the toxic racist stereotypes with which white popular culture had flooded America since Reconstruction . Nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu- in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard-trained esthete (and America‟s first black Rhodes scholar) who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created b blacks which could speak explicitly to African-Americans and still embody the values, and self-critical powers, of modernism” (455).

6. “The series is notable for the language it does not use. Lawrence was not a propagandist. He eschewed the caricatural apparatus of Popular Front , then at its high tide in America. Considering the violence and pathos of so much of his subject matter- prisons, deserted villages, city slums, race riots, labor camps- his images are restrained, and all the more p iercing for their lack of bombast. When he painted a lynching, for instance, he left out the dangling body and the jeering crowd: there is only bare earth, a branch, an empty noose, and the huddled lump of a grieving woman” (456).

7. “There isn‟t a trace of the sentimentality that coats Picasso‟s Blue Period, or the work of most American Social Realists. Lawrence called his style „dynamic cubism,‟ though it wasn‟t notably dynamic, except when he used flamelike forms and pushy oppositions of structure; generally the paintings tend to an Egyptian stillness, friezelike even when you know the subject was moving. His debts to Cubism and to Matisse are obvious: the flat, sharp overlaps of form, the reliance on silhouette, and a high degree of abstraction in the color. But there is something more demotic behind those colors” (456-457). How does this particular work in the series, Better Negro Education Facilities, effectively demonstrate the struggle of African-Americans during the twentieth century?

51 Unit TEN: Symbolism and Expressionism STUDENT NOTES

EE Pablo Picasso. Guernica, 1937

Guernica and the Spanish Civil War/ mural at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937/ Cubist faces/ an anguished horse/ the bull/ the severed head/ mother and child/ absence of color/ influence of Spanish masters/ “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth”

1. This monumental work of 1937 was a powerful protest against the brutality of war and tyranny by Pablo Picasso (1881- 1973). “Consistent with its theme of death and dying, the painting is nearly devoid of color, though there is considerable tonal variation within the range of black to white. The absence of color enhances the journalistic quality of the painting, relating it to the news accounts of the bombing it protests” (Adams, Art Across Time 842).

2. “When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936 between the republicans and the fascists, Picasso turned the new Surrealist-inspired language away from his personal life to condemnation of the fascist leader, General Francisco Franco, and his German supporters. Picasso‟s most damning indictment of the fascists was Guernica, which Picasso produced for the Spanish Pavilion at the world‟s fair in Paris in 1937. Shortly after accepting the commission from the legitimate republican government, Picasso and the world were shocked by the world‟s first aerial bombing of civilians: German pilots fighting for Franco had bombed and strafed the peaceful Basque town of Guernica, killing hundreds of men, women, and children. Picasso‟s depiction of this incident is a stark, surrealistic nightmare focusing on the victims. Expressively distorted women, one with her dead child, wail at the carnage. Above a fallen, broken warrior is a screaming horse, symbolizing the suffering republic. To our left is a bull, thought to symbolize either Franco or Spain. An electric light and a woman holding a lantern suggest Picasso‟s desire to reveal the event in all its horror. The work is in black and white, however, like the newspaper photos that also publicized the atrocity” (Stokstad 1090).

3. “During World War II, which Picasso spent in Paris, a Nazi officer showed him a reproduction of Guernica and asked, „Is that you who did that?‟ Picasso is said to have replied, „No, it is you‟” (1090).

4. “Guernica is divided into three sections, a compositional structure that recalls the triptychs of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. There is a central triangle with an approximate rectangle on either side. The base of the triangle extends from the arm of the dismembered and decapitated soldier at the left to the foot of the running woman at the right. The dying horse represents the death of civilization, though it may be rescued by the woman with a lamp (Liberty) rushing toward it. Another expression of hope, as well as of the light of reason, appears in the motif combining the shape of an eye with the sun‟s rays and a lightbulb just above the horse‟s head. On the right, the pose and gesture of a falling woman suggest Christ‟s Crucifixion. On the left, a woman holds a dead baby on her lap in a pose reminiscent of Mary supporting the dead Christ in the traditional Pieta scene. Behind the woman looms the specter of the Minotaur, the tyrant of ancient Crete, whose only human quality is the flattened face and eyes. For Picasso, the Minotaur came to represent modern tyranny, as embodied by the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, who collaborated with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini” (Adams, Art Across Time 842).

5. “These apparently disparate motifs are related by form and gesture, by their shared distortions, and by the power of their message. Cubist geometric shapes and sharp angles pervade the painting. Picasso‟s characteristic distortions of the body and face emphasize the physical destruction of war. Eyes are twisted in and out of their sockets, ears and noses are slightly out of place, tongues are shaped like daggers, palms and feet are slashed. Although the integrity of the human form is maintained throughout, it is an object of attack and mutilation” (842).

6. “The figure on the right has his or her arms raised upward as if to ward off the bombs falling from the sky. But it is also the pose of the central figure in Goya‟s Third of May 1808. There is a similarity between the events that lead to both paintings- both were acts of savage brutality against innocent people” (Cumming, Annotated Art 99).

7. “The event that was the immediate catalyst for the painting was the destruction of the Basque capital of Guernica, on its market day, April 26, 1937. In broad daylight, Nazi planes, under the orders of General Franco, attacked the defenseless town. Of its 7,000 inhabitants, 1,654 were killed and 889 were injured” (98).

8. “There is little overt symbolism in the painting, and Picasso is not following any well-defined symbolic language. As in much modern art, the symbolism is private and personal, and can only be unraveled on this basis. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to read the single flower at the center of the picture as a symbol of hope that new life will continue to grow in spite of man‟s attempts to destroy it. The flower‟s poignant delicacy heightens the general horror of this chaotic scene” (99).

52

Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

A Pablo Picasso. Gertrude Stein, B Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

1905 a bordello on Barcelona‟s Carrer d‟Avinyo (Avignon Street)/ influence a primitive portrait of African masks/ Egyptian pictorial profile convention/ poses based on those of Venus/ Fauve preference for bold strokes of color vs. 1. “Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an chiaroscuro expatriate American art collector and writer. She moved to Paris in 1903, after studying 1. “Picasso‟s Iberian period culminated in 1907 in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The psychology at Radcliffe and medicine at painting is Picasso‟s response to Matisse‟s Joy of Life, exhibited the year before, and to Johns Hopkins. Her Paris apartment the French classical tradition that stood behind it, which to Picasso was embodied in became a salon for the leading intellectuals Ingres‟s harem paintings exhibited in a 1905 retrospective. Picasso began by of the post-World War I era, whom she substituting the bordello for the harem. The term demoiselles is a euphemism for dubbed the „lost generation.‟ Her most prostitutes, and Avignon refers not to the French town but to a street in the red-light popular book, The Autobiography of Alice B. district of Barcelona. In a preliminary study for the painting, Picasso had included two Toklas (Stein‟s companion), is actually her men with the five women. Several studies have suggested that the man on the left own autobiography” (Adams, Art Across holding a book is a student, the seated man a sailor: Picasso may have meant to Time 835). contrast the contemplative life of the student with the active life of the sailor. His

decision to eliminate the men was probably based on a number of considerations. For 2. “Stein and her two brothers were among one, the allegory they suggest detracts from the central issue of sexuality. For another, the earliest collectors of paintings by avant- their confrontation with the women on display makes the viewer a mere onlooker. In garde artists. History has vindicated her the final painting the viewer is a participant: The women now pose for and look directly judgment, for she left an art collection at the painter and us” (Stokstad 1051-1052). worth several million dollars. Ernest

Hemingway, in A Movable Feast, wrote that 2. “Picasso made a number of other changes. The women in the are he had been mistaken not to heed Stein‟s conventionally rendered in soft curves, but the only „feminine‟ curve in the finished advice to buy Picassos instead of clothes” painting is the line of the inner arm of the central figure. Elsewhere, there are either (835). sharp curves or angles. Picasso‟s central pair raise their arms in a conventional

gesture of open accessibility, but these actions are contradicted by their hard, piercing 3. “Picasso‟s 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein gazes and firm mouths. In working out his theme, Picasso completely reversed the is executed in the dark red hues that mark conventional male fantasy of easy access to willing women into a hostile confrontation. the end of his Rose Period, which followed Even the fruit displayed in the foreground, a traditional symbol of female sexuality, the Blue Period… The emphasis on color is seems hard and dangerous. Picasso flattened the figures and transformed the entire consistent with contemporary Fauve space into a turbulent series of blunt and jagged geometric forms” (1052). interests, but a comparison with of the Blue Period indicates that 3. “Les Demoiselles d’Avigon was also conceived in opposition to Ingres‟s Large more than color has changed. In the Odalisque and, in fact, to the Western tradition of erotic imagery since the Renaissance. Gertrude Stein , new spatial and planar Women, Picasso asserts, are not the gentle and passive creatures men would like them shifts occur which herald the beginning of to be… When Picasso showed the finished work to his friends, they were horrified. the development of Cubism” (835-6). Matisse, for example, accused Picasso of making a joke of modern art and threatened to break off their friendship. Only one artist, Georges Braque, eventually responded 4. “Gertrude Stein‟s right arm and hand, for positively, and he say in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a potential that Picasso probably example, are organically shaded and had not fully intended” (1052). contoured. Her left hand, however, seems flatter, and her arm looks as if it were 4. “On the far left, for example, the standing figure nearly constructed of cardboard. Picasso replicates the pose of ancient Egyptian kings. The left leg is reportedly needed over eighty sittings to forward, the right arm is extended and the fist is clenched. finish the picture, the main stumbling block Also borrowed from is the pictorial convention of being the face. In the final result, Gertrude rendering the face in profile and the eye in front view. Stein seems to be staring impassively from Picasso‟s two central figures, whose arms stretch behind behind a mask. The hair does not grow their heads, are based on traditional poses of Venus. Of all organically from the scalp, and the ears are the figures, the faces of the seated and standing nudes on flat. The sharp separations between light the far right are most obviously based on African and dark at the eyebrows, the black prototypes… Here Picasso has abandoned chiaroscuro in outlines around favor of the Fauve preference for bold strokes of color. The the eyes, and nose resembles the long, curved solid wedge of the mask‟s nose” (Adams, Art Across the disparity in Time 836). the size of the eyes detract 5. “Still more radical is the depiction of the body of the seated figure, the so-called from the im- „squatter.‟ She looks toward the picture plane while simultaneously turning her body in presssion of a the opposite direction, so that her face and back are visible at the same time. In this flesh-and-blood figure, Picasso has broken from tradition by abandoning the single vantage point of the face” (836). observer in favor of multiple vantage points along the lines pioneered by Cézanne” (837).

6. “Such distortion of the human figure is particularly startling because it assaults our bodily identity. Light, as well as form, is fragmented into multiple sources, so that the observer‟s point of view is constantly shifting” (837).

53

Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

C Georges Braque. The Portuguese, 1911

Analytic Cubism/ the studio and the café/restrained, monochromatic color schemes/ flickering light/ “all- over” treatment of the picture plane/ Guillaume Apollinaire

1. “In 1907 Picasso met the French painter Georges Braque (1881-1963), who had studied the works of Cézanne and been overwhelmed by the Demoiselles. Braque is reported to have declared, when he first saw the Demoiselles, that looking at it was like drinking kerosene. For several years Braque worked so closely with Picasso that it can be difficult to distinguish their pictures during the period known as Analytic Cubism” (Adams, Art Across Time 837).

2. “Braque was born in , France, and moved to Paris in 1900. There he joined the Fauves, and established a collaborative relationship with Picasso. They worked closely together until World War I and were jointly responsible for the development of Cubism. In 1908, on seeing a painting by Braque, Matisse reportedly remarked that it had been painted „with little cubes.‟ This was credited with being the origin of the term Cubism” (837).

3. “The first phase of Cubism proper, called Analytic Cubism (1910-12), is more complex than mere geometric reductivism. Hitherto, painting had represented objects from a single point of view and made them seem to recede into depth. Braque and Picasso rejected both of these assumptions, and instead tried to depict some of an object‟s hidden sides on a single plane, the idea being to paint not only what they saw of it, but what they knew about it. They renounced natural colors in favor of a simplified palette dominated by greens, browns, and grays. This phase was particularly decisive, for it marked a break with classical vision” (Govignon 160).

4. “In 1911, the climatic year of Analytic Cubism, Picasso and Braque succeeded in merging their styles to the point where truly the hand of one painter could scarcely be distinguished from the other. Now, just as this common mode seemed transfixed in a world of magical abstractions, Braque actually surpassed Picasso in his eagerness to assert the precise, if paradoxical, relation of his art to everyday experience. In The Portuguese, he achieved one of Cubism‟s great masterpieces and superimposed upon its fragile network of slivery planes an element of mundane reality even more blatant than that of the trompe-l‟oeil nail painted into the 1909-10 Violin and Palette. Again drawing upon his youthful training in the techniques of decorative and commercial art, Braque not only simulated short lengths of rope but also stenciled across the picture surface numbers and letters excerpted from the kind of poster typically found in bars where a Portuguese guitarist would play. Like the eye-fooling nail, these familiar shapes with their well-known meanings helped to identify and anchor increasingly complex and vaporous configurations to material and legible reality” (Arnason 163-164).

5. The text are “also signs and symbols, not images, and by using them in fragmentary form, Braque seemed to imply that the equally fragmentary geometries of his picture- the newly invented vocabulary of Cubism- have no more obligation to present the illusion of perceived reality than a word does to be the very thing it speaks of. A major innovation in , this assimilation into art of a certain kind of literal but nonillusionistic reality prophesied the move that the Cubists soon would make to transform their already highly conceptualized language into a still less imitative and more purely symbolic form of expression. Meanwhile, the numerals an letters, being absolutely flat and light-absorbent, draw attention, by analogy, the rigid, opaque, two-dimensional fact of the painting surface” (164).

6. “As the musician arranges sounds to make music, Braque arranged forms and colors to make art. Braque and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Picasso felt that subject matter could sometimes be just as incidental to art as it is to symphonic music… Braque began, as they always did, by setting up a still life on a table in the studio… Rather than copying these motifs, Braque took from them various shape elements (curves, angles, and lines) and areas of shadow, which he then carefully assembled on the surface of his work in a pyramidal fashion. „The goal,‟ as Braque said, „is not the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but the constitution of a pictorial fact.‟ His concern for classical balance is also evident in the even distribution of these elements on both sides of the central axis and in the frequent use of T- square elements aligned with the paper edge” (Stokstad 1054-1055).

D Kahnweiler and Apollinaire

1. “Braque‟s new paintings attracted Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, the dealer most loyal to the Cubists, and through him entered the circle of Picasso and Apollinaire” (Arnason 149). “Guillaume Apollinaire, the Symbolist poet and critic, was one of the most outspoken advocates of Cubism, particularly that of Picasso. “A man like Picasso,‟ he wrote in 1912, „studies an object as a surgeon dissects a cadaver.‟ According to Apollinaire, modern painters „still look at nature, [but] no longer imitate it… Real resemblance no longer has any importance, since everything is sacrificed by the artist to truth‟” (Adams, Art Across Time 838).

2. “When Braque submitted his new work to the progressive Salon d’Automne in the fall of 1908, the jury, which included Matisse, Rouault, and Marquet, rejected all his entries…Although two of his paintings were reclaimed by jurors Marquet and Guerin, Braque refused to exhibit any, and instead held a one-man show of twenty-seven paintings in November 1908, at the Kahnweiler Gallery, with a preface to the catalogue by Guillaume Apollinaire” (Arnason 151).

54 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

E Robert Delaunay. Champs de Mars or The Red F Pablo Picasso. Still Life with Chair

Tower, 1911 Caning, 1912 Eiffel Tower/ Orphism/ Cubist approach to space Synthetic Cubism/ painting treated more as an object than as an image 1. “At the other end of the spectrum was the radical painting of Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), who attempted to take a 1. “By 1910 Cubism was well established as an monochromatic, static, and antisocial Analytic Cubism into a alternative to Fauvism” (Janson 781). Picasso and Braque both initiated the next phase of Cubism, “which was even new, wholly different direction. By 1904 Delaunay had become a bolder that the first. Usually called Synthetic Cubism landscape painter, first in the Impressionist mode, then, after 1905, in because it puts forms back together, it is also known as the Fauvist vein. His insistence on the spirituality of color, which Cubism, after the French word for „paste-up,‟ the recommended him to Der Blaue Reiter, was first evident in the series of technique that started it all. We see its beginnings in paintings of a Gothic church interior he did in 1909” (Stokstad 1056). Picasso‟s Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912” (781).

2. “Beginning in 1910 he attempted to fuse Fauvist color with Analytic 2. “Most of the painting consists of facets. Because they Cubist form in a series of works dedicated to modern technology. One of were already abstract signs, the letters could not be these, Homage to Bleriot, is a tribute to the French pilot who in 1909 was translated into prismatic shapes. But beneath the still the first to fly across the English Channel… The airplane and the Eiffel life is a piece of imitation chair caning, which was pasted Tower were powerful symbols of both technological and social progress in onto the canvas, and the picture is „framed‟ by a piece of this period, and the crossing of the Channel was considered as evidence rope. This inclusion of found materials has a most of a new, unified world without frontiers and national antagonisms. The remarkable effect: the abstract still life appears to rest on arrangement of brightly colored circular forms that fills the canvas is a real surface (the chair caning) as if it were on a tray, more than an expressionistic record of Delaunay‟s excitement at this and the reality of the tray is further emphasized by the prospect. The circular shapes… are meant to evoke as well the great rose rope” (781). windows of Gothic cathedrals. By combining images of progressive science with those of divinity, Delaunay meant to suggest that progress is part of God‟s divine plan” (1056-1057).

3. “Critics labeled Delaunay‟s art Orphism for its affinities with Orpheus, the legendary Greek poet whose lute playing charmed the wild beasts.

Delaunay preferred to think of his work in terms of simultaneity, a vague and complicated concept he developed with his wife, the Russian-born artist -Terk (1885-1979), that centered on a faith in the great unity of opposites” (1057).

4. “Delaunay must have painted the Tower thirty times, and he was almost the artist to paint it at all- although it makes a modest appearance in an by Seurat, and crops up now and again in the backgrounds of the Douanier Rousseau. The Red Tower, 1911-12, shows how fully Delaunay could realize the sensations of vertigo and visual 3. “The idea of making a picture by cutting and pasting shuttling that Cendrars described. The Tower is seen, almost literally, as was not new. It had existed in folk art throughout the a prophet of the future- its red figure, so reminiscent of a man, ramping nineteenth century, and many middle-class nurseries had among the silvery lead roofs of Paris and the distant puffballs of cloud. their decorative screens covered in cherubs, animals, That vast grid rising over Paris with the sky reeling through it became his flowers, and the like, cut from patterns and magazines. fundamental image of modernity: light seen through structure” (Hughes, Picasso‟s originality lay in introducing collage techniques Shock of the New 38). into an easel painting. If he had used real chair-caning,

the effect might not have been so startling. By using a printed image of caning, Picasso was placing a product of mass manufacture in the midst of its traditional opposite, the hand-made object. Real chair-caning was at least a craft product, and came from the same order of things as a painting. But the oilcloth in this still-life of 1912 opened art to the industrial present in a quite unprecedented way” (Hughes, Shock of the New 32).

4. “For just as the first syllable of JOURNAL can stand for the whole word and signify, without actually reproducing, the newspaper likely to be present on a café table. It is a kind of pictorial synecdoche, wherein a part serves well enough to eliminate the need for illustrating the whole. With collage- the realization of a picture by means of assembling readymade fragments taken from the world outside the picture- Picasso could now make a still more searching exploration of the paradoxical nature of reality” (Arnason 165).

55 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

G Fernand Leger. The City, 1919 belief in technology and the “machine”/ robotic men/ Cubist space used to define the modern city

1. “Buoyant with optimism and pleasurable excitement, The City by the Frenchman Fernand Leger (1881-1955) creates a vision of a mechanized utopia that reflects his Communist political views. This beautifully controlled industrial landscape is stable without being static and reflects the clean geometric shapes of modern machinery. In this instance, the term abstraction applies more to the choice of design elements and their manner of combination than to the shapes themselves, since these are „prefabricated‟ entities, except for the two figures on the staircase” (Janson 794).

2. “Leger described the kingship between modern art and the city as follows: „The thing that is imaged does not stay as still… as it formerly did… A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an 18th century artist… The condensation of the modern picture… its breaking up of forms, are the result of all this. It is certain that the evolution by means of locomotion, and their speed, have something to do with the new way of seeing‟”(Adams, Art Across Time 844). 3. “Leger believed, as one cannot imagine Braque doing, that he could make images of the machine age that would cut across the barriers of class and education- a didactic art for the man in the street, not highly refined, but clear, definite, pragmatic, and rooted in everyday experience. Leger was the son of a Normandy farmer, an instinctive socialist who became a practicing one in the trenches of World War I” (Hughes, Shock of the New 34).

H Umberto Boccioni. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 Futurism/ speed and dynamism in contemporary life/ convex concave form/ unrestrained liberty of the artist to create

1. “Another of the twentieth century‟s isms, Futurism, emerged on February 20, 1909, when a controversial Milanese literary magazine editor, Filippo Marinetti, published his „Foundation and ’ in a Paris newspaper. An outspoken attack against everything old, dull, „feminine,‟ and safe, Marinetti‟s manifesto promoted the exhilarating „masculine‟ ex periences of warfare and reckless speed. Although the stated aim of Futurism was to free Italy from its past, the deeper purpose was to promote a new taste for heightened experience” (Stokstad 1058).

2. “In 1909 a number of artists and poets gathered around Marinetti in to create art forms for a modernized and revitalized Italy. Prominent among the artists was the sculptor and painter Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916). His major sculptural work, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space , is a powerful nude figure in full stride. The formal vocabulary of exaggerated muscular curves and countercurves was inspired by early Analytic Cubist still lifes and figure studies that he had seen in Paris in 1911. But whereas the Cubists had broken forms to integrate their compositions, here Boccioni dynamically stretches and swells them to express the figure‟s power and speed” (1058).

3. “The Manifesto sought to inspire in the general public an enthusiasm for a new artistic language. In all of the arts- the visual arts, music, literature, theater, and film- the old Academic traditions would be abandoned. Libraries and museums would be abolished, and creative energy would be focused on the present and future. Speed, travel, technology, and dynamism would be the subjects of Futurist art. Marinetti‟s language was apocalyptic in its determination to slash through the „millennial gloom‟ of the past. „Time and Space died yesterday,‟ he declared. „We already live in the absolute, because we have created the eternal, omnipresent speed… We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice‟” (Adams, Art Across Time 843).

4. “It extolled the beauties of revolution, of war, of the speed and dynamism of modern technology: „… a roaring motorcar, which looks as though running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.‟ Much of the spirit of Futurism reflected the flamboyant personality of Marinetti himself, and he in turn was an extreme case of the indignation that his generation felt over the cultural and political decline of Italy. The Futurism of Marinetti and his followers was rooted in the philosophies of Henri Bergson and and in the prevalent atmosphere of anarchism. It attacked the ills of a lopsided aristocratic and bourgeois society. In the field of politics it unfortunately became a pillar of Italian Fascism” (Arnason 181).

5. “The art of the Futurists extolled metropolitan life and modern industry. This did not result in a machine aesthetic in the manner of Leger, since they were concerned with unrestrained expression of individual ideals, with mystical revelation achieved through an orgiastic involvement in total action” (182). How does this sculpture exemplify the Futurist movement?

56 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

I Umberto Boccioni. The City Rises, 1910 J Giacomo Balla. Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912 blurred contours and restless movement/ stationary observer (unlike the observer of Cubist paintings) Marinetti‟s that “war is the hygiene of of motion civilization”/ nihilism 1. Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), “who was older than the other four 1. “With every reason, Marinetti called himself … members of the group, worked in Rome rather than in Milan. He „the caffeine of Europe.‟ The name „Futurism was pursued his own distinctive experiments, particularly in rendering a brilliant choice, challenging but vague; it could motion through simultaneous views of many aspects of objects. His stand for any anti-historical caper, but its central Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, with its multiplication of arms and idea- trumpeted forth over and over again by legs, has become one of the familiar and delightful creations of Marinetti and his group- was that technology had Futurist simultaneity. The little terrier scurries along on short legs created a new kind of man, a class of machine accelerated and multiplied to the point where they almost turn into visionaries, composed of Marinetti and anyone wheels” (Arnason 182). else who wanted to join. The machine was about to redraw the cultural map of Europe (as indeed 2. The Futurists “were intrigued by the new technique of X-ray it was, though not in the way the Futurists photography, which saw through opaque and so looked like Cubist hoped). Machinery was power; it was freedom transparency and overlap. But especially they drew on primitive from historical restraint. Perhaps the Futurists cinematography, and on the sequential photos which had been would not have loved the future so much if they taken in the 1880s by two pioneers, Eadweard Muybridge in did not come from a country as technologically England and Etienne-Jules Marey in France. By giving the backward as Italy” (Hughes, Shock of the New successive positions of a figure on one plate, these images 43). introduced time into space. The body left the memory of its passage in the air. Four centuries before, Leonardo had bought 2. “The most gifted of the young Futurist artists, birds in the Florentine market and let them go in order to observe Umberto Boccioni – soon to fall off his horse and die the beat of their wings close up for a few seconds. Now the during a cavalry exercise in in 1916, in the war cameras of Muybridge and Marey could describe this world of that he and Marinetti had praised as the hygiene of unseen movement; in fact, Marey went so far as to make what civilization- resorted to it on a heroic scale in The City might now be seen as a precursor of Futurist sculpture, a bronze Rises, 1910-11, his paean of joy to industry and heavy construction. Boccioni had frequented the outskirts of model of a bird‟s successive wing positions- long since lost. Some Milan, where new industrial construction was in full of Giacomo Balla‟s paintings were almost literal transcriptions of swing…Formidable is the word for The City Rises, with these photographs. Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, was a its muscular red horse dissolving under the power of its glimpse of boulevard life, possibly derived from a photographic own energy, in a shimmer of lambent brush-strokes; close-up, with a fashionable lady (or at least, her feet) trotting her the staining cables and twisting, mannered figures of dachshund- that low-slung, modern animal, the sports car of the workmen contain more than a memory of its apparent dog world- along the pavement. Its modesty and humor were not to source, Tintoretto‟s Raising of the Cross in the Scuola be repeated in the more ambitious paintings of moving that di S. Marco, Venice” (44). Balla made from 1913” (Hughes, Shock of the New 44).

3. “Boccioni and the Futurist architect Antonio Sant‟Elia were both killed in World War I. The Futurists had ardently promoted Italian entry into the war on the side of France and England. After the war, Marinetti‟s movement, still committed to nationalism and militarism, supported the rise of fascism under Benito Mussolini, although a number of the original members of the group rejected their radical values” (Stokstad 1058).

4. How would you compare this image of th city with that of Leger?

57 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

K Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915

Suprematism/ formalism in art for a new society/ the Russian Revolution and the avant garde

1. “Because knowledge of Analytic Cubism and Futurism arrived in Moscow almost simultaneously and because they were superficially similar, artists… tended to linked them. Thus, the style that evolved from them in the period 1912-1914 is known as Cubo-Futurism, even though it had less to do with Cubist than with Futurist values… The first Russian to go beyond Cubo -Futurism was Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935). After Goncharova and her husband, the artist (1881 -1964), left for Paris in 1915 to work for Diaghilev‟s , Malevich emerged as the leading figure in the Moscow avant-garde” (Stokstad 1061).

2. “By 1913 he was producing his own brand of Cubo-Futurism and his first truly abstract work. According to his later reminiscences, „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 on a white field.‟ Because he did not exhibit such a work until 1915, there is some question about the exact date of his first completely nonrepresentational work. Whatever the case, Malevich exhibited thirty-nine works in this radically new and highly controversial vein at the „Zero Ten‟ exhibition in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1915-16” (Stokstad 1061).

3. “Malevich called this art Suprematism, short for „the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.‟ Although he sometimes spoke of this feeling in terms of technology („the sensation of light... of metallic sounds.. of wireless telegraphy‟), a later essay suggests that what motivated these works was „a pure feeling for plastic [that is, formal] values.‟ By eliminating objects and focusing entirely on formal issues, Malevich thought that he was „liberating‟ the essential beauty of all great art” (1061).

4. “As with Kandinsky and his first abstract paintings, the creation of … [a] simple square on a white ground was a moment of spiritual revelation to Malevich, who was a devout Christian mystic. For the first time in the , he felt, it had been demonstrated that a painting could exist completely independent of any reflection or imitation of the external world-whether figure, landscape, or still life. Actually, of course, he had been preceded by Delaunay and Kupka in the creation of abstract paintings, and he was certainly aware of their efforts, as well as those of Kandinsky, who would move to largely nonobjective imagery in late 1913. Malevich, however, has an important claim to primacy in having carried abstraction to an ultimate geometric simplification- the black square of the drawing within the white square of the paper. It is tempting to reflect on the fact that the two dominant wings of twentieth –century abstraction- the of Kandinsky and the of Malevich- should have been founded by two Russians” (Arnason 187).

5. “After the Communist Revolution of 1917, Malevich was appointed Commissar for the Preservation of Monuments and Antiquities. By the late 1920s, the Soviet government under Stalin (d. 1953) was suppressing avant-garde art and asserting state control over all the arts. Sensing that further oppression was to come, Malevich traveled in 1927 to and Germany, where the Bauhaus published his book in German. He left some of his abstract paintings with German friends in order to protect them from Soviet officials. The Germans, in turn, would later have to hide them from the Nazis. In 1930, Malevich was arrested by the Soviets for artistic „deviation.‟ Three years later, he painted his last Self-Portrait which reflects his renunciation of the „deviant‟ avant-garde and his return to naturalism. Ironically, he represented himself as a „Renaissance man.‟ When he died his white coffin was decorated with one black circle and one black square, and a white cube with a black square on it marked the place where his ashes were buried. In 1936 the Soviets confiscated his remaining pictures; they were not shown publicly again until 1977” (Adams, Art Across Time 848-9).

58 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

L M Vladimir Tatlin. Monument to the Third

International, 1919-1920, model 1. “During a summer holiday in Finland in 1913, the writer Constructivism/ embracing art as a social, functional Kruchonykh, the painter and composer Matyushin, and product/ model for a building of glass and iron huge Malevich himself called together the First All-Russian Futurist Congress. They issued a manifesto that announced a cylindrical glass structure at the bottom performance of the opera Victory over the Sun, which was to break with all conventions. The public was divided, both 1. “The founder of Russian Constructivism was Vladimir euphoric jubilation and total rejection accompanying the two Tatlin. In 1913 he visited Berlin and Paris. He saw the paintings performances of the opera at the end of the year in St. in Picasso‟s studio in Paris and not only was affected by them, but Petersburg. Its two acts set forth how the sun is captured and also- and particularly- by the constructions in which Picasso was the empire of strong men begins” (Simmen and Kohlhoff 31). investigating the implications of collage for sculpture. The result, on Tatlin‟s return to Russia, was a series of reliefs constructed from 2. “The Futurist opera Victory over the Sun was to be a slap in wood, metal, and cardboard, with surfaces coated with plaster, the face for public taste. It celebrated technology overcoming glazes, and broken glass” (Arnason 189-190). nature. After the women in this play have been locked up, the final struggle against the life-giving sun takes place and the 2. “Tatlin had developed a repertoire of forms in keeping with what he empire of strong men is established. The „supersensory work‟ believed to be the properties of his chosen materials. According to is directed against „worn-out common sense.‟ It propounds a the principles of the „culture of materials,‟ or „truth to materials,‟ new form of reason that is devoid of all logic. The illogical each substance, through its structural laws, dictates specific form, language of Kruchonykh is combined with the music of such as the flat geometric plane of wood, the curved shell of glass, Matyushin, which consists of noises and cries” (32). and the rolled cylinder or cone of metal. For a work of art to have significance, Tatlin came to believe that these principles must be 3. “The stage sets and costumes were designed by Malevich. considered in both the conception and the execution of the work, Years later, the poet Lifschitz recalled that they had been the which would then embody the laws of life itself” (190). „shining focal point‟ of the opera. The costumes were reminiscent of the Cubo-Futurist pictures executed by 3. “As a dedicated materialist, Tatlin rejoiced in the Russian Malevich. Masks were often used in conjunction with them, Revolution and cultivated his natural interest in engineering and so that the human body totally disappeared. All the actors‟ architecture, an interest that saw its most ambitious result in the parts in the piece are rendered anonymous by titles such as artist‟s model for a Monument to the Third International. Had the full- the „Athlete,‟ the „New Man,‟ a „Malevolent One,‟ or „the Many scale project been built, it would have been approximately thirteen and One.‟ The costumes were made out of card and wire. The hundred feet high, the biggest sculptural form ever conceived by rigidity of the material used did not permit normal ease of man” (190). movement, so that the cast moved stiffly and woodenly in them. Nevertheless, they did not seem like robots because 4. “With the consolidation of the Soviet there was nothing of the machine about them. Due to the fact system in the 1920s, Tatlin readily that individual features of their costumes were highlighted in adapted his nature-of-materials color, they appeared to be more like carnival figures or armed philosophy to the dogmas of knights. Malevich used gleaming color tones and, for Utilitarianism, which held that in the preference, used primary colors and black and white. The classless society art should be practical, marking on the individual color surfaces is not arranged easily comprehensible, and socially according to the organic connections with human anatomy. useful. As this point of view became For example, part of an arm was highlighted or a leg, or dominant in the Soviet Union, along with paunch and mask become a single part of the body through the banalities of the mandated Social sharing a color. The wooden mobility and accenting of color Realist style, it worked tragically against lent dynamism to the figures, which was independent of their such spiritually and aesthetically physique. Their entry onstage was to be regarded as a ballet motivated artists as Malevich and of radiant color surfaces. This was a step towards an abstract Kandinsky, driving the latter out of pictorial logic” (32-33). Russia altogether and into the more liberal West” (190). 4. “Having already reduced the figures in the opera to sundry expanses of color, Malevich continued the same process in the 5. “The monument was to be a slanting tower, thirteen hundred feet stage sets and curtain. The curtain was not raised but torn in high- three hundred feet higher than the Eiffel Tower… To begin half. The stage was bathed in a harsh, flashing light, which with, the tower contained three chambers. A cubic hall at the lowest likewise fragmented the figures. They ‟lost hands, legs or level would house the legislative council of the Third International; it heads alternately,‟ Lifschitz wrote about the lighting of the would turn one degree every twenty-four hours, a complete rotation production. In terms of color, the stage was in overall black, every year. Above it, the pyramidal executive block would rotate once white, or green in the various acts. A green floor would also a month. Atop that, Tatlin placed a cylinder, meant to be an have green walls, while a black floor would have black or information center, turning once a day; and surmounting the whole, white walls. The stage backdrops of the individual scenes in a half dome. This structure, kept in perpetual motion by „special the two acts deny any illusion of space: they represent machinery‟- it would have had to be special, indeed- was housed in characteristically segmented Cubist spaces. In the fifth scene, an external grid, two spirals, soaring diagonally into the sky. The Malevich reduced the stage area completely to leave the whole tower would be built of iron and glass… As the immobility of background only as a diagonally divided rectangle. This the Pyramids reflected the stasis of monarchy, so the upward, anticipated his pioneering innovation in art, although at this perilous surge of Tatlin‟s tower would express the dialectic unfolding stage it was not formulated” (34-35). of the Revolution” (Hughes, Shock of the New 92).

59

Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

N The Russian Revolution of 1917

1. The rise of Communism was brought on by the Russian Revolution of 1917. “Precipitated by World War I, the revolution not only transformed Russia but also affected Europe, Asia, Africa , and Latin America. To admirers, the revolution seemed to promise the advent of Marx‟s socialist vision. To detractors, the revolution seemed to presage the triumph of dictatorship. To all, the revolution represented an experiment in creating a radically new kind of state and society” (Wren 2: 315).

2. “On March 8,1917 (or February 23 in the old calendar), rioting broke out in . Women thronged into the streets in demand of bread. Their spontaneous demonstration was joined by factory workers, disaffected bureaucrats and intellectuals, and mutinous troops. Ten days later, the last czar of the Romanov dynasty, Nicholas II (lived 1868-1918; czar 1894-1917), abdicated. A struggle between competing political factions ensued. The Bolshevik, or Communist, Party was led by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924). Involved with revolutionary movements in Russia…, Lenin spent three years as a political prisoner in Siberia and seventeen years as an exile in Europe. In April 1917 the Germans provided a sealed train for Lenin to return to Russia and to assume leadership of the Bolsheviks” (316).

3. “Lenin immediately attempted to incite an insurrection against the provisional government that had been established to provide a transition to constitutional rule. When his complicity in the plot was revealed, Lenin was forced to flee to Finland. In his absence, Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) organized a Bolshevik seizure of power on the night of November 6, 1918” (316).

4. “Many people expected that the new Russia would be ruled by democratically elected assemblies, called soviets. However, election results demonstrated that the Bolshevik Party had attracted fewer voters than the Social Revolutionary Party, an agrarian -populist and peasant-oriented party. Lenin, with Trotsky‟s assistance, reacted by repudiating majority rule and imposing dictatorial control. After two years of civil war, the Communist Party emerged as the victorious ruler of the Soviet Union” (316).

5. “In 1917 Lenin and Trotsky directed a small party that had only 23,000 members; within a few years they had led it to a dominant position in the largest country in the world. In 1922 Lenin suffered a severe stroke, and in 1924 he died. Expecting to succeed Lenin as premier, Trotsky found himself outmaneuvered by Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). In 1927 Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party, and in 1929 he was forced to leave the Soviet Union. Although he lived in Mexico in a house that was a virtual fortress, Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 by Stalin‟s agents” (316).

6. “Lenin and Trotsky believed that the Russian Revolution was only a local phase of world revolution- of the revolution of strict Marxist doctrine. The Bolsheviks gave all possible aid to the leftist socialists of Europe and even considered sending Russian troops in 1919 to support a revolutionary effort in Hungary. But the chief instrument of world revolution, created in March 1919, was the Third International, which was also known as the Communist International or Comintern” (319).

7. “The First International was founded by Karl Marx to promote worldwide unity of the proletariat. The Second International was founded in 1889. It represented socialist parties and labor organizations of all countries. When it refused to endorse violent revolution or to repudiate moderate socialism, Lenin founded the Third International. The first congress of the Third International met in Moscow in 1919. Within a year, the extreme leftist parties of thirty-seven countries were represented. The Russian party was supposedly only one component. Actually, it supplied most of the personnel and most of the funds. The Executive Committee of the Third International consisted almost entirely of members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Acting according to its directives, the Third International attempted to propagandize labor unions, to infiltrate armies, to discredit moderate socialism, and to disrupt elections. The goal of promoting world revolution was clearly stated in the First Manifesto of the Third International (1919)” (319- 320).

8. “Despite its stridency, the Third International met with little success. The organization became inactive in the late 19020s. In the mid-1930s the Third International changed direction and instructed all Communist parties in their respective countries to enter into coalitions with socialists and advanced liberals. During the Second World War, to placate its al lies, the Soviet Union abolished the Comintern entirely. But it reappeared for a few years, from 1947 to 1956, under a new name, the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform” (320).

9. “For much of the twentieth century the Communist Party in Russia tried to present itself as the leader of the world revolution and to exert control over Communist parties in other countries. Communist revolutions triumphed in China and Cuba. However, tensions within the Soviet system itself proved more effective in the breakdown of Communist power in the former Soviet Union than any opposition presented by capitalist or bourgeois forces” (320).

60 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

O Piet Mondrian. Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930 theosophy/DeStijl and Neoplasticism/ self-imposed restrictions/ effect of Classical calm/ precise painting technique

1. The leading artist of the („the Style‟) group in the Netherlands was Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). “In the Netherlands during World War I, he met , another painter who shared his artistic views, and in 1917 the two started a magazine, De Stijl, which became the focal point of a Dutch movement of artists, architects, and designers that lasted until van Doesburg‟s death in 1931” (Stokstad 1077).

2. “The de Stijl movement was grounded in the conviction that there are two kinds of beauty: a sensual or subjective one and a higher, rational or objective- „universal‟- kind. In his mature works Mondrian sought the essence of the second kind, eliminating representational elements because of their subjective associations and curves because of their sensual appeal. After about 1920, Mondrian‟s paintings, such as Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, all employ the same essential formal vocabulary: the three primary hues (red, yellow, and blue), the two primary values (white and black), and horizontal and vertical lines. The two linear directions are meant to symbolize the harmony of a series of opposites, including male versus female, individual versus society, and spiritual versus material” (1078).

3. “For Mondrian the essence of higher beauty was resolved conflict, what he called dynamic equilibrium. Here, as was typical in his work, it was achieved through the precise arrangement of color areas of different weight. The heavier weight of the red threatens to tip the painting to the right, but the placement of the tiny rectangle of yellow at the lower right prevents this imbalance by supporting the red‟s weight. The ultimate purpose of such paintings is not to provide aesthetic pleasure for a wealthy collector but to demonstrate a universal style with applications beyond the realm of art” (1078).

4. “If, instead of living in a state of nature, we lived in an environment designed according to the rules of „universal beauty,‟ we too, like our art, would be balanced, our natural instincts „purified.‟ For these reasons, Mondrian hoped to be the world‟s last artist. He felt that earlier art had provided humanity with something that was lacking in daily life; but if there were beauty in every aspect of our lives, we would have no further need for art… Mondrian so disliked the sight of nature, whose irregularities he held accountable for humanity‟s problems, that when seated at a restaurant table with a view of the outdoors, he would ask to be moved” (1078).

5. In his paintings, “representation is completely eliminated. Yet his canvases remain paintings in every sense of the term. Mondrian never hid his brushwork or the texture of the canvas, and the colors have surprising density. Like Kandinsky, Mondrian was affected by theosophy, albeit the distinctive Dutch branch founded during World War I by the mathematician M.J.H. Schoenmaekers. Unlike Kandinsky, however, he did not strive for pure, lyrical emotion. His goal, he asserted, was „pure reality,‟ which he defined as equilibrium „through the balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions,‟ especially between line and color. „Plastic‟ for Mondrian, as for many other early-twentieth-century artists, meant the formal structural relationships underlying both art and nature. The term Neo-Plasticism itself was coined by Schoenmaekers, for whom yellow symbolized the vertical movement of the sun‟s rays; blue, the horizontal line of the earth‟s orbit around the sun; and red, the union of both. He believed, „When we realize that equilibrated relationships in society signify what is just, then we shall realize that in art, likewise, the demands of life press forward when the spirit of the age is ready‟” (Janson 796).

6. “Looking again at Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, we find that when we measure the various units, only the proportions of the canvas itself are truly rational, an exact square. Mondrian has arrived at all the rest „by feel‟ and must have undergone endless trial and error. How often, we wonder, did he change the dimensions of the red rectangle to bring it and the other elements into self-contained equilibrium? Strange as it may seem, Mondrian‟s exquisite sense for nonsymmetrical balance is so specific that critics well acquainted with his work have no difficulty in distinguishing fakes from genuine pictures” (796).

7. Mondrian “was one of the last great painters to believe that his paintings could change the objective conditions of human life… Mondrian‟s convictions can justly be called religious. He saw art not as an end but as a means to an end- spiritual clarification. All his paintings are, on some level, about the disentangling of essence from attributes: the enunciation of what is central, and what peripheral, in his (and thus the viewer‟s) experience of reality. No view of Mondrian is more misleading than the idea that he was a detached formalist, working towards a purely aesthetic harmony. Mondrian was a devout man who wanted to make icons, and one difficulty his career presents is that he, like Kandinsky- who came to total abstraction from Expressionism, whereas Mondrian arrived there via Cubism- accepted as truth the woolliest nonsense that Theososphy could offer… Mondrian seems to have been utterly convinced by the Theosophical belief that matter was the enemy of spiritual enlightenment, and that all forms of material appearance in history were about to be swept away by a new age whose prophets were Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky. Nothing but abstraction could do justice to the imminent dawn of the spirit” (Hughes, Shock of the New 202).

8. How would you compare this work in terms of color, composition, and technique with Matisse‟s The Dance?

61 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

P Piet Mondrian. Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-3 reference to city streets and dance music

1. “At the beginning of World War II, Mondrian left Paris for London and then New York, where he arrived in 1940. He now began to give to his works such titles as Trafalgar Square or Broadway Boogie Woogie, which hint at some degree of relationship, however indirect, with observed reality. Broadway Boogie Woogie immortalizes Mondrian‟s fascination with the culture he found in America. The artist uses white and the three primary colors to signify radiant light. The play of color evokes with striking success the jaunty rhythms of music and light found in New York‟s nightclub district during the jazz age. As in medieval manuscript decoration, the composition relies entirely on surface pattern. Broadway Boogie Woogie seems as flat as the canvas it is painted on. Although Mondrian abandons his system of black lines, he has laid out his colored „tiles‟ along a grid system that closely resembles a city map” (Janson 797).

2. “Although he did not look like one, Mondrian in his sixties became an enthusiastic jazz dancer, though not (if reports are true) a very fluent one. His love of boogieing fused with his belief that the New York street grid was an ideal pattern, and out of the syncopated rhythms of both he distilled his late Manhattan paintings, such as Broadway Boogie Woogie. They are simply metaphors of New York. Still less can they be read as plans. But they are diagrams of the kind of energy and order that could and still be seen beneath the quotidian chaos of the great, flawed metropolis” (Hughes, Shock of the New 203-207).

3. “And why should Mondrian‟s last paintings still move us, whereas the Utopian city plans of architects do not? Partly, no doubt, because the space of art is the ideal one of fiction. In it, things are not used and they never decay; one cannot walk in a painting, as one walks along a street or through a building. The paintings are incorruptible. They are the real rudiments of Paradise, the building blocks of a system that has no relationship to all to our bodies, except through the ocular perception of color” (207).

Q Constantin Brancusi. Bird in Space, 1928, bronze search for the “essence of things”/ reference to flight with a reflective surface/ complement to industrial production

1. “Perhaps the principal modern artist to concern himself with healing images of idealized nature… was the Rumanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). His work celebrated the otherness of sculpture, its ability to appear self-contained and perfect, while still displaying (as metaphor) those principles of growth and structure which underlie real birds, fish, eggs, and torsos. If the Expressionist project meant saturating the non-human world with ego, Brancusi‟s was to endow its forms-suitably abstracted- with something of the clarity and finality of law. His style was clear as water. Its concern was the purity of carving. No other modern sculptor, not even Henry Moore, addressed himself quite so undeviatingly to how one cuts, rather than models or constructs, a form in space, developing a continuous surface that summons one‟s attention to the invisible core of the block” (Hughes, Shock of the New 306-308).

2. “Brancusi was a Theosophist, like Kandinsky and Mondrian- and it may say something about the state of religion in the twentieth century that no less that three of its greatest artists should have adhered to this sect, while not one appears to have been a practicing Catholic. His utterances on sculpture centered on the familiar division of essence versus attributes: „What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things… it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.‟ Yet Brancusi‟s sculpture seems far more anchored in reality than Kandinsky‟s painting, and not just because solidity seems more ‟real‟ than paint on canvas. Beyond that, Brancusi‟s treatment of sculpture as a piece of matter in the world, drawing so much of its expressive power from its eloquent material presence, contradicted what Expressionism expected art to do… His attitude would have been understood at once in , where a whole cultural context deriving from Buddhism lay ready for it: and in fact it was not a European but a Japanese-American named (b. 1904) who, after some years of apprenticeship to Brancusi in Paris, went on to become the finest lyric poet of stone and its qualities in late twentieth-century sculpture, perfecting a further combination between the Japanese ideal of wabi- „ultimate naturalness,‟ the right juncture of things-in-the-world- and the specific enterprises of modernism” (310).

3. “Bird in Space… is the culmination of Brancusi‟s art. It began as the figure of a mythical bird that talks, which he gradually simplified until it is no longer the abstract image of a bird. Rather, it is flight itself, made visible and concrete. „All my life I have sought the essence of flight,‟ Brancusi stated, and he repeated the motif in variants of ever greater refinements. Its disembodied quality is emphasized by the high polish that gives the surface the reflectivity of a mirror, thus establishing a new continuity between the molded space within and the free space without” (Janson 837).

4. “A trial held in in 1927 illustrates just how hard it can be to agree on what constitutes „art.‟ , a prominent American photographer, had purchased…Bird in Space.… [and] imported the sculpture to the United States, whose laws do not require payment of customs duty on original workds of art as long as they are declared to customs on entering the country. But when the customs official saw the Bird, he balked. It was not art, he said: it was „manufactured metal.‟ Steichen‟s protests fell on deaf ears… Later… Steichen appealed the ruling of the customs official. The ensuing trial received a great deal of publicity… The court decided in favor of the plaintiff. The Bird was declared a work of art, and Steichen got his money back” (Adams, Art Across Time 5).

62 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

R Constantin Brancusi. The Kiss, 1925 S Henry Moore. Recumbent Figure, 1938, stone monolithic form vs. open form abstraction in response to nature/ sensitive response to materials (media) 1. “The Cubist quality of The Kiss resides in its blocklike form, which Brancusi used to merge the 1. “In contrast to Giacometti, the British sculptor Henry Moore embracing figures. The arms overlap and, as seen (1898-1986) was drawn to massive, biomorphic forms. The from the front, appear shared equally between the traditional motif of the reclining figure was one of his favorite couple. The lips are formed into a little cube subjects. He himself related the image to the Mother Earth connecting the rectangular heads. As with many of theme and to his fascination for the mysterious holes of nature. Picasso‟s cubist faces after 1906, these can be read From the 1930s he began making sculptures with hollowed-out simultaneously as a profile and a front view. The spaces and openings, thereby playing with the transition focal point o f the face is the eye, the placement of between inside and outside, interior and exterior. Many of his which creates the multiple viewpoint, for it is both reclining figures are intended as outdoor landscape sculptures. two eyes rendered in profile and a single eye in a As such, their holes permit viewers to see through the work, as triangular face” (Adams, Art Across Time 849-850). well as around it, and thus to include the surrounding landscape in their experience of the sculpture” (Adams, Art 2. “In 1935,… Brancusi accepted a commission for Across Time 870-871). his native town of Tirgu Jiu, in . He agreed to design a peace memorial dedicated to those who 2. “Moore‟s habit of collecting the chance objects of nature, had died in World War I. In its final form, the such as dried wood, bone, and the smooth stones from memorial consisted of three structures – The Table of beaches, recalls the use of „found objects‟ in collage and Silence, The Gate of the Kiss, and The Endless ” (870). Column. The central feature, The Gate of the Kiss, was derived from a much earlier series of sculptures 3. “Moore took the human figure as his point of departure, entitled The Kiss ” (849). combining an avowed aim of „truth to materials‟ – in which the form of the work remains faithful to the specific, individual 3. “In the Gate of the Kiss, Brancusi persists in the properties of the medium- with a traditional commitment to use of cubic form, and also endows it with symbolic carving straight from the block. In this respect he invested his meaning. The lintel is decorated with incised, work with a sensual, haptic quality- that which can be geometric versions of The Kiss, and each supporting communicated through, and which invites, touch- which until post is decorated with four large, round „eyes.‟ The then had been marginalized within sculptural practice. It has ensemble implies that the notion of a kiss embodies been remarked that Moore‟s military service informed the love, which therefore „upholds‟ peace. The eyes, development of his sculptural vision, „its sub-themes of an combined with the rectangular opening, also injured and godless landscape, of man‟s inhumanity and of transform The Gate into a large face, which, like redemptive power of artistic form.‟ This may partly account for Janus of the ancient Roman gateways, watches those Moore‟s preoccupation with maternal symbols and the who come and those who go with equal attention” importance he attached to locating his sculpture in the open (850). air, as though the landscape might in some way be fructified by the nurturing presence of the Great Mother… The optimistic plenitude of Henry Moore‟s women- symbols of fecundity in the natural landscape- provided a stark counterpoint to the

existentialism of Giacometti, whose post-war bodies stood frail

and filamented like charred remains after some terrible conflagration” (Flynn 149-152).

4. How would you compare the organic forms of Henry Moore‟s sculpture with

the sculpture of

Constantin Brancusi?

4. How does Brancusi‟s The Kiss compare with The Kiss by Rodin?

63 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

T Georgia O’Keeffe. Jack-in-the-Pulpit IV, 1930

Georgia O‟Keeffe/ enlarged views of flowers

1. “Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), who was married to [Alfred] Stieglitz, is difficult to place within a specific stylistic category. But it is clear that she was influenced by photography and early twentieth-century abstraction, as well as by the landscape of the American southwest. She along with and other abstractionists, had exhibited at Stieglitz‟s 291 in the 1920s” (Adams, Art Across Time 879).

2. “O‟Keeffe is best known for her huge blowups of single flowers like irises and calla lilies. O‟Keeffe told why she magnified flowers: „Nobody has seen a flower- really- it is so small – we haven‟t time- and to see take time… I‟ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it.‟ O‟Keeffe evoked nature without explicitly describing it and approached the brink of abstraction” (Strickland 141).

3. “In 1916, Alfred Stieglitz was a famous New York photographer whose Photo-Secession Gallery (also called 291 after its Fifth Avenue address) was the hub of avant-garde activity in New York. Georgia O‟Keeffe was then a 28-year-old art teacher. „Finally a woman on paper,‟ Stieglitz supposedly declared when he saw her work. In 1917 he mounted her first public show, and they became lovers. Stieglitz documented every line of O‟Keeffe‟s body in nearly 500 photographs. Some are so sexually graphic, they have yet to be shown. The intimate nude studies caused curiosity-seekers to flock to her shows. She was the most celebrated woman artist in America” (141).

4. “After their marriage the couple set a new standard for sexual liberty. Each blatantly pursued numerous extramarital affairs, Georgia O‟Keeffe with both men and women. An FBI file described her as an ultraliberal risk. In their work, O‟Keeffe and Stieglitz were also risk-takers. He championed the latest trends in the arts and took landmark photographs. She was a pioneer of artistic liberty who once said, „Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are‟” (141).

5. “O‟Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together from 1920 and were married in 1924. Although they continued to reside in New York until his death in 1946, O‟Keeffe began in 1928 to make yearly visits to New Mexico, where she eventually settled” (Stokstad 1098).

U Charles Demuth. I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, 1928 a passing fire truck, a poem, and friends/ The Great Figure by William Carols Williams/ numbers and letters as abstract shapes/ diagonal divisions of space

1. Charles Demuth (1883-1935), a Pennsylvanian, was the third major figure of the first generation Precisionists, and, in his most developed paintings, the closest to the French Cubists. His first mature works were illustrations for books, as well as imaginative studies of dancers, acrobats, and flower or plant forms, free and organic in treatment, seemingly at the other extreme from a Precisionist style… In his late works Demuth expanded his exploration of the abstract or symbolic implications of the American scene in ways that have influenced younger artists since. He became interested in the advertising signs on buildings and along highways, not as blemishes on the American landscape but as images with a certain abstract beauty of their own” (Arnason 372).

2. “In this period Demuth also produced a series of poster portraits made up of images and words and lettering associated with friends. I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold is a tribute to the poet William Carlos Williams; in fact, it is based on Williams‟s poem The Great Figure, to which the painter may also have contributed: Among the rain/ and lights/ I saw the figure 5/ in gold/ on a red/ fire truck/ moving/ tense/ unheeded/ to gong clangs/ siren howls/ and wheels rumbling/ through the dark city” (372).

3. “The numerous references to Williams in the painting are explicit. The golden 5‟s radiate from the center in a Futurist dynamic; buildings tilt in space; and rays of color-light sweep across the middle distance and foreground, tying together perspective recession and picture plane” (372).

4. The poem by Williams is Imagist because „each line, a snap unit of meaning, is meant by its isolation to be perfectly clear, a pulse in itself, without narrative- suspended for contemplation, like elements in a painting” (Hughes, American Visions 379). “Around 1920 Demuth began with increasing confidence to explore what would become the major theme of his career: the face of industrial America. It may seem odd that Demuth, yearning for Paris, should have become obsessed with grain elevators, water towers, and factory chimneys. But as he wrote to Stieglitz in 1927: „America doesn‟t really care- still, if one is really an artist and at the same time American, just this not caring, even though it drives one mad, can be artistic material‟” )380-2).

64

Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

V Marsden Hartley. Portrait of a German Officer, 1914

Marsden Hartley/ Karl von Freyburg/ use of symbols, emblems, letters, and numbers

1. The great early influence on the life of Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) “was the poet Walt Whitman; through Whitman‟s work he learned that his turbulent homoerotic feelings did not set him apart from others” (Hughes, American Visions 366). “Stieglitz decided to get Hartley out of America. Over the next three years, one sees the young artist reacting to his first sight of Cezanne, Matisse, and the massive, bulging forms of 1909 Picasso; he was primed to go to Paris, and in 1912, funded by Stieglitz‟s friends, he left” (366).

2. “In Paris he was welcomed into the circle of the Steins… The great impact on him came from Wassily Kandinsky… The second thing that happened to Hartley in Paris was equally important. He was in a cosmopolitan wonderland, with a strong gay subculture in which his sexuality, driven underground in Maine, could now disport itself. And in the process he met two young German officers: a sculptor named Arnold Ronnebeck, and his cousin Karl von Freyburg, with whom Hartley began to fall deeply and sentimentally in love. It was the need for von Freyburg, quite apart from artistic considerations, that took him to Berlin” (366-7).

3. “The First World War, the apocalyptic conflict that was to end the nineteenth century and plunge Europe into the era of total war and mass death, broke out in August 1914. At first, with a naivete that now seems barely credible, Hartley welcomed it. Like some Italian Futurist, but more like the young German militarists he hung out with in Berlin, he proclaimed it „the only modern religious ecstasy,‟ and was completely on the Kaiser‟s side. (Anti-Americanism was not an issue, however; the United States did not enter the war for another three years.) He imagined a chivalric conflict between young knights. But very soon the reality burst in on him, for two months later Karl von Freyburg was killed. Hartley was inconsolable” (368).

4. “In Portrait of a German Officer, Harley assembles the „things that were,‟ the symbols and emblems worn by von Freyburg or marking his chivalric role. An Iron Cross on a green ground, with a triangle which symbolizes the friendship between three men: Hartley, von Freyburg, and Ronnebeck. (Von Freyburg had received the Iron Cross for gallantry the day before he was killed.) A scrolled red letter on a yellow ground, E, probably stands for Edmund, Hartley‟s unused first name. The numbered tabards indicate his lover‟s regiment; the red-white-and-black banner is that of imperial Germany; there are silver tassels and lance points, and von Freyburg‟s initials, K.v.F., appear on a red patch at the lower left” (368-370).

5. “It is a funerary memorial; that is implied by the black background. Being a portrait, it is also a „submerged‟ representation, which can be made out as a vertical, totemic figure composed of the emblems of von Freyburg‟s military profession: the triangle that bears the Iron Cross can be read as a head, for instance, and the twin waving black-and-white banners on either side as shoulders. One thinks of a mummy prepared for burial, wrapped not in linen but in flags and tabards… The pigment is dense, each edge defined, the overlaps explicit- you could almost pick it up and turn it around. Hartley in his grief is re-creating the absent body, the physical presence torn from him by war” (370).

6. “Numerous other mourning pictures followed, all featuring the same elements- the cavalry uniforms, flags, , ciphers, letters, and von Freyburg‟s initials. War had hurt him into poetic utterance, but it would do him no good in America. In 1915 Harley had to come home. He though of it not as home but as a second exile, which it was: the temper of New York had changed, for since the torpedoing of the Lusitania (a British liner, on which 128 Americans died) the United States had been cranking itself up into a hatred of all things German. At a time when performances of Mozart and Beethoven were banned and indignant citizens were stomping dachshunds to death on the pavements of Fifth Avenue, there was not going to be much chance for Cubist paintings with recognizable Iron Crosses and other signs of the Kaiser‟s presence in them” (370).

W Joseph Stella. The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Bridge, 1920-22 a modernist icon for an immigrant

1. “Giuseppe Michele [Joseph] Stella (1877-1946) was born in Italy‟s mezzogiorno, in a village southwest of Naples: and although his family was better off than most Italian immigrants, he too came through Ellis Island, in 1896” (Hughes, American Visions 374) After some time in Paris, Stella “returned to New York in 1912 and was welcomed into Stieglitz‟s circle at 291” (375).

2. Stella had “brought Paris‟s fascination with things American back to America with him” (376). “If there was a religious aspect to Stella‟s vision of the Electrical City in Coney Island, that sense of the sacred became the main theme of his paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge… He saw it through Walt Whitman‟s images too, mingled (in Stella‟s imagination) with the dark romanticism of Edgar Allan Poe- although Poe died more than forty years before the bridge was built. The bridge stood for the conjunction of old (Gothic stone mass) and new (steel cable); it collapsed the sacred into the secular by architectural quotation; it spoke of American unity, and still, thirty years after it was finished, it remained the most vivid and durable emblem of American technological aspiration” (377).

65 Unit TEN: Early Modern Abstraction STUDENT NOTES

X Alfred Stieglitz and the 291 Gallery

1. “The son of wealthy Jewish parents, [Alfred] Stieglitz was born in New Jersey in 1864, the last year of the Civil War, and died in New York in 1946. He first learned photography, of which he was to become a master, in Germany in the 1880s” (Hughes, American Visions 348).

2. “He regarded academic rules and prescriptions as effete, as a way of playing it safe with art that should be conduits of vitality. In particular he rebelled against the academic assumption that photography, though useful to the artist, was inferior to painting. The idea of art merely for art‟s sake, with all that it implied- a certain languor, a decorative bonelessness, and a gratin audience- repelled Stieglitz as much as any academic formulae. „My whole life in this country,‟ he wrote to a friend in 1914, „has really been devoted to fighting the terrible poison which has been undermining the American nation. As an American I resented the hypocrisy, the short-sightedness, the lack of construction, the actual stupidity in control everywhere.‟ He did not want an „activist‟ act, preaching political slogans; but, somewhat in the spirit of William Morris, he despised any art that was not engaged with the conditions of life, that would not challenge and refresh its viewers‟ responses to the world” (350).

3. “Stieglitz never bothered to paper over the changes in his thinking. The man who led the charge for autonomous value of photography in America began in the 1890s as a „Pictorialist‟- one who strove to give his photographs („pictures,‟ the public invariably called them) a resemblance to painting. There were two branches of , soft and hard; the soft was very soft indeed, seeking Barbizon-style blurs, romantic murk, and often cloying sentimentality, with much manipulation of focus, negative, and print. Steiglitz preferred the hard, in the sense that although he wanted the unfussed photographic character of the print to predominate, he allowed his images to evoke the character of paintings… But all is relative: Stieglitz‟s photographs, compared to most other Pictorialist ones, were- a word he valued – „straight.‟ Most of the time, when he spoke of pictorial photography, he meant photographs that stand on their own with value as works of art- not ones that aped , watercolor, or etching in their effects” (351-2).

4. “In 1902, with his younger friend the photographer Edward Steichen (1879-1973), he started the „Photo-Secession’ group and appointed himself its leader. The record of its ideas was a handsomely produced quarterly magazine, Camera Work, which began publication in 1903. The meaning of „Photo-Secession‟ was nebulous then and remains so still; it was cribbed from the Viennese and Munich Sezessionist art movements, which were for the new and against the academic. What Stieglitz‟s secessionists were seceding from was what they considered poor photography. The group included such photographers as Gertrude Kasebier, F. Holland Day, and Clarence White. Presently the Photo-Secession installed itself in a small permanent gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue; and after 1909, as Stieglitz began to lose interest in current photography and his attention shifted to painting and sculpture, this gallery, „the biggest small room in the world,‟ became New York‟s epicenter for the artistic avant-garde- the Ellis Island, as conservatives darkly thought, of bad foreign art” (352).

5. “The 291 Gallery, or simply 291 for short, had an amazing track record. Its 1905-7 seasons showed only photography, but its first show of drawings, which opened in January 1908, was by Auguste Rodin. Henri Matisse exhibited at 291 three months later. And from then on some of the major figures of European modernism were shown at 291: Picasso, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picabia, . Constantin Brancusi‟s display of eight sculptures there in March 1914 was his first one-man show anywhere, not just in America. True to his convictions, Stieglitz gave his band of American artists equal prominence. The first one to have his first painting show at 291 was (in 1910), and he was followed by Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Max Weber, Arthur Carles, Abraham Walkowtiz, and, in 1916, an unknown young woman named Georgia O‟Keeffe” (352).

Y The Brooklyn Bridge

1. “The industrializing countries, particularly the United States with its great distances, urgently needed better systems of transportation to keep up with the advances in communication and commerce. Rivers and ravines had to be crossed by roads and railroads, and this led to new developments in nineteenth-century bridge construction. Until the 1850s bridges had been designed according to the truss method of construction, which utilized short components joined together to form a longer, rigid framework. Wooden truss bridges used by the Romans to cross the River Danube, for example, are illustrated on Trajan‟s Column. By the 1840s, metal began to replace wood as the preferred material for such bridges” (Adams, Art Across Time 758).

2. “The principle of the suspension bridge had been known for centuries, from the bridges of twisted ropes or vines that had been used to cross ravines in Asia and South America. The superior span and height of the suspension bridge were appropriate for deep chasms or wide stretches of navigable water. Modern suspension bridges were built from the early 1800s using iron chains, but by the middle of the century engineers had begun to see the advantages of using flexible cable made of steel wire” (758).

3. “The greatest American bridge builders of the nineteenth century were J.A. Roebling (1806-65) and his son, W.A. Roebling (1837- 1926), who were responsible for the Brooklyn Bridge. Two massive towers of granite were constructed at either end of the bridge. They were linked by four huge parallel cables, each containing over 5,000 strands of steel wire. The steel, which was spun on the site, supported the roadways and pedestrian walkways. It was the first time that steel had been used for this purpose. Ironically, however, in deference to architectural tradition, the shape of the arches in the masonry was a return to the Gothic style” (758).

4. J.A. Roebling “died in 1869 of complications from a work-related accident just as construction was to begin, and the project was completed by his engineer son, Washington Augustus Roebling, who had assisted his father in earlier projects” (Stokstad 982).

66 Unit TEN: Early Modern Architecture STUDENT NOTES

A Joseph Paxton. The Crystal Palace, London, 1851

Palace of Industry/ prefabricated cast-iron building/ steel louvers/ glazing with large sheets of glass

1. “In 1851, the „Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations‟ was held in London. This was the first in a series of Universal, or International, Expositions („Expos‟) and World‟s Fairs which continue to this day. Architects were invited to submit designs for a building in Hyde Park to house the exhibition. When Joseph Paxton submitted his proposal, 45 designs had already been received and rejected. Paxton had started his career as a landscape gardener, and had built large conservatories and greenhouses from iron and glass. Not only was his proposal less expensive than the other designs, but it could be completed within the nine-month deadline. The design was subdivided into a limited number of components and subcontracted out. The individual components were thus „prefabricated,‟ or made in advance and assembled on the actual site. Because of its extensive use of glass, the structure was dubbed the Crystal Palace” (Adams, Art Across Time 757).

2. “There were many advantages to this construction method. Above all, prefabrication meant that the structure could be treated as a temporary one. After the exhibition had ended, the building was taken apart and reassembled on a site in the south of London. But one alleged advantage of iron and glass- that they were fireproof- proved to be illusory. In 1936 the Crystal Palace was destroyed in a fire, the framework buckling and collapsing the intense heat” (757).

3. “The triple-tiered edifice, dubbed a „crystal palace‟ by a journalist for a humor magazine, was the largest space ever enclosed up to that time- 1,848 feet long, covering more than 18 acres, and providing for almost a million square feet of exhibition space. The central vaulted transept- based on the new railway stations and, like them, meant to echo imperial Roman architecture- rose 108 feet to accommodate a row of elms dear to Prince Albert” (Stokstad 980).

4. “Horizontal bands of mechanically operated steel louvers allowed the controlled circulation of air. The glass roof was covered by retractable canvas awnings, sprayed with cool water in hot weather… Unprecedentedly large sheets of glass, over 4 feet long and 10 inches wide, were used to glaze the roof and upper sections of the walls” (Stevenson 68).

5. “Rapid expansion of the rail system facilitated the transport of components and materials, enabling collaboration between manufacturers for design and construction, and making possible a quick completion… Paxton used the analogy of a table covered by a cloth to explain the internal frame of cast-iron columns and cast- and wrought-iron trusses that provided a rigid „table‟ over which an external lightweight „cloth‟ of glass was draped, framed by timber glazing bars… Internally, the framework was painted in colors coordinating the structural tresses. The slender internal structural frame, cloaked with an external envelope of framed glass, provided an economical enclosure than admitted the maximum amount of natural light” (69).

B Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel Tower, 1887-1889 designed for a great exhibition/ four giant supports/ impact of a view

1. The centerpiece of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889 was “an enormous tower designed by civil engineer Gustave Eiffel (1832-1823), the winner of a competition fro the design of a monument that would symbolize French industrial progress. The Eiffel Tower, composed of iron latticework, stands on four huge legs reinforced by trussed bridges. The passenger elevators, themselves an innovation, allowed fairgoers to ascend to the top of what was then, at 984 feet, the tallest structure in the world” (Stokstad 1069).

2. “Although the French public loved the tower, most architects, artists, and writers found it completely lacking in beauty. Even before it was completed, several dozen of them signed a petition protesting it to the government: „This tower dominating Paris, like a gigantic and black factory chimney, crushing with its barbarous mass Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle… all our monuments humiliated… And in twenty years we shall see, stretching over the entire city… the odious shadow of the odious column built up of riveted iron plates.‟ The last part of their protest refers not to the literal shadow of the tower but to its metaphorical one, the negative influence many people anticipated it would have on the future of architecture in Paris” (1070).

3. “Named for its designer, the same Eiffel who engineered the framework for the Statue of Liberty, the tower was a metal truss construction on a base of reinforced concrete” (Adams, Art Across Time 760). “When the Exposition ended in 1909, the tower was saved because of its value as a radio antenna” (760).

67 Unit TEN: Early Modern Architecture STUDENT NOTES

C Antonio Gaudí. Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain, 1884-present unique religious conviction expressed in an original, personal style/ three doorways/ four campaniles/ animated “pompom” finials/ undulating surfaces

1. Art Nouveau, “a style that attempted to be modern without the loss of a preindustrial sense of beauty” (Stokstad 1070), developed at the end of the nineteenth century. “The Art Nouveau emphasis is … evident in the work of the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí y Cornet (1852-1926). The son of an ironworker, Gaudí … was familiar with the writings of Morris and the graphics of other English Arts and Crafts practitioners” (1071).

2. Gaudí “attempted to introduce the organic principle into the very structure of his buildings. In the Casa Mila apartment house in Barcelona, for example, the interior and exterior walls gently undulate like ocean waves. The building has no straight lines. Constructed around a steel frame, it is covered with cut stones hammered to give the surface a look of natural erosion, like beach cliffs. The organic effect is completed by the stylized ironwork, which seems to grow like foliage or seaweed on the balconies” (1071).

3. “The exalted scale and fantastical imagery of the Expiatory Church of the Holy Family (Sagrada Family) in Barcelona, Spain, are the vision of the architect Antonio Gaudí, who directed the project from 1884 until his death in 1926. Gaudí‟s unique architectural style was fueled by a deeply held religious conviction. The Sagrada Familia celebrates the Holy Family and the mysteries of the Catholic faith. The fluid manipulation of stone and concrete is achieved by a complex geometry of vaulted structures surrounded by the campanile towers of the main facades, which become increasingly fantastic, rising up to the polychromatic ceramic surfaces of the „pompom‟ pinnacles representing the Apostles. Though only partially completed, the building rivals in ambition and scale the cathedrals of medieval Europe. The continuation of the work during periods of political and social change symbolizes the vitality of Catalan culture” (Stevenson 72).

4. “Three doorways are dedicated to the themes of Faith, Hope, and Charity. The Doorway of Charity is flanked by the Doorway of Hope (left) and the Doorway of Faith (right)… Figures from the Doorway of Faith, and others on the Nativity façade, were modeled from photographs and plaster casts of sitters recruited from the streets of Barcelona in an attempt to represent the real world” (73).

5. “Four towers represent the four Evangelists, and 12 328-foot campaniles symbolize the Apostles. A central tower 591 feet high is to complete the final composition… The highly fluid forms are mathematically generated and subject to a rational means of analysis. This is needed to generate the geometry and undertake the construction- often by means of only simple drawings… Gaudí had an intuitive genius for structural form, influenced by his knowledge of Gothic architecture and traditional Catalan structures of brick, stone, and ceramic tile” (72).

6. “The highly animated surface of the façade leads to the color and decoration of the upper campaniles, inset with ceramic tiles and figures” (72). One of the „pompom‟ finials “of the western transept is symbolic of the bishop‟s miter, ring, and staff” (72).

7. How would you compare the Sagrada Familia with Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres Cathedral?

D Art Nouveau

1. “Art Nouveau (literally „new art‟) was an ornamental style composed of curvilinear, organic forms that was a European-wide response against industrialization and the prevalence of the

machine. In France, it was known as the Style Moderne, or “Modern Style,‟ in Germany as the Jugendstil („Youthful Style‟), and in Italy as the Stile Liberty (after Liberty of London, a store which imported Art Nouveau fabrics). The style is characterized by sinuous, asymmetrical linear patterns, which mainly influenced architecture and the decorative arts- especially glass, furniture, jewelry, and wrought-iron work” (Adams, Art Across Time 812-813).

2. “From 1892 to 1893 the Belgian architect (1861-1947) designed a house for the Tassel family of Brussels. His patron, Professor Tassel, typified the new generation that wanted to express its opposition to the tastes of the older aristocracy” (813). “The application of graceful linear arabesques to all aspects of design, evident in the entry hall of the Tassel House, began a vogue that lasted for more than a decade” (Stokstad 1070).

68

Unit TEN: Early Modern Architecture STUDENT NOTES

E The American Skyscraper F Louis Sullivan. Guaranty Building, Buffalo, New York, 1894-1895 1. “The evolution of the skyscraper depended on form follows function/ elevation of a Renaissance palace the development of these essentials: metal beams transformed into a skyscraper and girders for the structural-support skeleton; the separation of the building-support structure 1. “One of the drawbacks of masonry or brick construction is that the from the enclosing layer (the cladding); higher the building, the thicker the supporting walls have to be at the base. fireproofing materials and measures; elevators; This increases the cost of materials, the overall weight of the structure, and and plumbing, central heating, artificial lighting, the area that it occupies. The new material of structural steel and concrete and ventilation systems. First-generation reinforced with steel wire or mesh were stronger than traditional materials. skyscrapers, built between about 1880 and Their tensile strength (ability to withstand longitudinal stress) was also 1900, were concentrated in the Midwest, much greater, allowing flexibility in reaction to wind and other pressures. The power-driven electric elevator, invented by Elisha Otis in the latter half especially Chicago. Second-generation of the century, was another necessity for highrise construction” (Adams, Art skyscrapers, with more than twenty stories, date Across Time 760). from 1895. At first the tall buildings were freestanding towers, sometimes with a base, like 2. Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924) in his “Guaranty Building in Buffalo the Woolworth Building of 1911-1913. New states the lyric theme of all later skyscrapers- verticality. It was clearly York City‟s Building Zone Resolution of 1916 divided into three parts: base, shaft, and flat-roofed top, with a jutting introduced mandatory setbacks- recessions from cornice to finish the prismatic mass. Its visual surprise depends on the fact the ground-level building line- to ensure light that it does not seem layered or stacked. Sullivan underplayed his and ventilation of adjacent sites. Built in 1931, horizontals by recessing the face of the spandrels from the face of the piers. So the vertical piers dominate the pattern. They soar unimpeded to finish the 1,250 foot, setback-form Empire State in arches, and are emphasized by the brilliant, graphic accents of the round Building is thoroughly modern in having a top-floor windows. The structural grid and its pattern of implied stress streamlined exterior- its cladding is in Art Deco gives the building its visual motif” (Hughes, Shock of the New 173). style- that conceals the great complexity of the internal structure and mechanisms that make its 3. “But Sullivan‟s greater achievement (from the viewpoint of the height possible. The Empire State Building is architecture to come) was to make the grid as expressive as the height. A still one of the tallest buildings in the world” modular frame of I-beams is, in itself, neither „horizontal‟ nor „vertical‟ by (Stokstad 1065). nature. It is additive, like a honeycomb; more open rectangles can be added on to it, either upwards or sideways, without compromising its essence as

structure” (173). 2. “Many of the first iron-framed buildings of the mid-nineteenth century also had cast-iron façade 4. “The skyscraper, like other things American, intrigued the European elements. These structures were soon found to public; it seemed to be the American equivalent of the Eiffel Tower, and the have a fatal susceptibility to fire; exposed to Wolkenkratzer (or „cloud-scratcher,‟ as Germans called it) became an object intense heat, iron will warp, buckle, collapse, or of romance and fantasy. It was identified with Promethean democracy melt altogether. The solution was to encase the all’Americana, and in this Sullivan himself heartily concurred: „With me,‟ he internal iron supports in fireproof materials and return remarked, „architecture is not an art, but a religion, and that religion but a to masonry sheathing” (1064). part of Democracy.‟ The modular grid was the face of equality” (175).

3. “The perfection at this time of a technique for 5. Sullivan “coined the phrase „form follows making inexpensive steel (a more refined, stronger iron) function,‟ but to him it meant something very introduced entirely new possibilities for architecture. different from the modernist creed of the Steel was first used for buildings in 1884 by the young twentieth century: „It is the pervading law of all architects soon to be grouped under the label of the things organic, and inorganic, of all things Chicago School . These architects saw in the stronger, physical and metaphysical, of all things human lighter material the answer to both their desire for an and all things superhuman, of all true independent style and their clients‟ desire for taller manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the buildings. Interest in tall buildings was essentially soul, that the life is recognizable in its economic. By 1880 Chicago was the largest railroad expression, that form ever follows function.‟ junction in the nation and the hub of the biggest Clearly he intended a flexible relationship system of inland waterways in the world. Between between the two, not rigid dependence” (Janson 1860 and 1880 its population had risen from about 762). 100,000 to more than a million people. The rapidly rising cost of commercial property made its more 6. “From the beginning his geometry carried a spiritual meaning, derived efficient use a major consideration for business people. partly by the theosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, that centered on birth, Another technological development that made the tall flowering, decay, and regeneration. It was tied to a highly original style of office building feasible was the passenger elevator, the decoration embodying Sullivan‟s theory that ornament must give expression first of which was installed in 1857. The first electric to structure- not by reflecting it literally but by interpreting the same elevator dates from 1889” (1065). concepts through ” (763).

69

Unit TEN: Early Modern Architecture STUDENT NOTES

G Frank Lloyd Wright. , Chicago, Illinois, 1909

Prairie Style/ cantilevered roof/ importance of chimney and hearth/ raised first floor/ hidden entryway/ open interior planning/ Roman bricks/ window ornamentation and fenestration

1. “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most innovative developments in architecture took place in the United States. Following Louis Sullivan, who developed the skyscraper, the next major American architect was Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959). Wright had worked in Chicago as Sullivan‟s assistant before building private houses, mainly in Illinois, in the 1890s and early . But, whereas Sullivan‟s skyscrapers addressed the urban need to provide many offices or apartments on a relatively small area of land, Wright launched the Prairie Style, which sought to integrate architecture with the natural landscape” (Adams, Art Across Time 850).

2. “In 1908, Wright wrote that „the Prairie has a beauty of its own and we should recognize and accentuate this natural beauty, its quiet level. Hence… sheltering overhangs, low terraces and out-reaching walls, sequestering private gardens.‟ In his philosophy, Wright found affinities with , and its tradition of open internal spaces. He incorporated this tradition into a series of early twentieth-century, Midwestern Prairie Style houses” (850).

3. “The best-known example of Wright‟s early Prairie Style is the Robie House of 1909 in south Chicago. Its horizontal emphasis, low- pitched roofs with large overhangs, and low boundary walls are related to the flat prairie landscape of the American West and Middle West. At the same time, the predominance of rectangular shapes and shifting, asymmetrically arranged horizontal planes is reminiscent of the Cubist esthetic” (850). “Wright‟s insistence on creating a total environment inspired him, sometimes against the wishes of his clients, to design the furniture and interior fixtures of his houses. In the case of the Robie House, Wright even designed outfits for Mrs. Robie to wear on formal occasions so that she would blend with his architecture” (851).

4. “The ground floor of the Robie House contained a playroom, garage, and other service areas. The main living area was on the second floor, and the bedrooms were on the third. The second-floor plan illustrates the massive central core, which doubles as a fireplace and staircase, and is the focal point of the living quarters. Around the central core the living and dining rooms are arranged in an open plan. Verandas extend from the two main rooms. The huge cantilevered roof on the second floor shields the windows from sunlight… The system of cantilever construction is one in which a horizontal architectural element, projected in space, has vertical support at one end only. Equilibrium is maintained by a support and counterbalancing weight inside the building. The cantilever requires materials with considerable te nsile strength. Wright pioneered the use of reinforced concrete and steel girders for cantilever construction in large buildings” (852).

5. “Today-largely thanks to the immense influence of Wright, diffused through ranch-style suburban housing- we do think of houses as horizontal. It was less normal in the 1900s. The idea of „prestige‟ housing implied verticality, detachment from the raw line of earth. Upper Americans felt their homes should affirm the reign of culture over nature, looking like Greek temples or rising Gothic boxes. Certainly not like this ground-hugger with its wide, strong eaves and balconies, every line betokening kingship with the flat, flat earth of the Midwest. Fred Robie, the client, was an ideal one for Wright: a manufacturer of bicycle and auto supplies, who wanted the most modern and laborsaving house possible, free of „curvatures and doodads,‟ as he put it and rooms „without interruption.‟ Wright gave him all that, and even supplied a built-in vacuum-cleaning system, which worked fitfully” (Hughes, American Visions 396-397).

6. “None of the houses Wright built in the Prairie Style actually stood on a prairie, though the drawings in the 1910 Wasmuth edition of his works, which made his name famous among German architects, show them in the vast spaces of an imaginary Wild West…. The Prairie houses were all suburban, and mostly built on the outskirts of Chicago on sites that were not and never had been prairie grassland. Which hardly mattered: „prairie‟ was Wright‟s metaphor, not a location. It stood for a relation between architecture on the one hand, and American expanse and flatness on the other, interwoven with nostalgia for the lost frontier past” (396).

7. “While many of the Arts and Crafts architects had rejected the machine, Wright experimented with its potential for precision by incorporating highly finished surfaces, enriched by colored glass and polished timbers… The prow-like form of the window bay has a proudly nautical feel. Wright‟s style was likened to that of a steamship, a dynamic image of the Machine Age that Wright was happy to adopt” (Stevenson 78).

8. “The slender profile of elongated, or „Roman‟ bricks was originally accentuated by raked mortar courses, which set back the mortar from the face of the brick, creating a shadow line that reinforced the horizontality of the massing”(78). “The main living spaces are arranged on a raised first floor. The veranda and low walls form a series of tiered screens that provide both privacy and an open aspect from the house” (79). “The chimney provides an anchoring feature central to the plan and massing of the house” (79).

9. In what ways was Wright influenced by Japanese architecture?

70 Unit TEN: Early Modern Architecture STUDENT NOTES

I Frank Lloyd Wright. Fallingwater (or the Kaufmann House), Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1936-39 union of architecture and nature/ architecture defining space vs. mass

1. “The house that most fully shows the lyric and complicated Wright sought between culture and nature is several hundred miles from Chicago, in the woods of Pennsylvania. He built it, between 1936 and 1939, for a young department store heir named Edgar Kaufmann, who owned sixty acres of virgin mountainside forest a couple of hours south of Pittsburgh. Through it cascaded a stream called Bear Run, Between dramatic slabs of gray stone. Kaufmann approached Wright, who came to study the spot. They picked for the house a large hanging boulder, over which the stream poured in a waterfall. What Wright raised on it- or rather, out of it and above it- remains on of the most astonishing tours de force in all modern architecture. He named it Fallingwater” (Hughes, American Visions 398).

2. “You do not see it at first, from the winding approach paths in the woods. It does not announce itself like a mansion standing up on its green plinth of lawn in a park. Instead, through gaps in the green, you get partial views, tantalizing glimpses, like those of a Japanese teahouse… The house is cantilevered out over Bear Run on concrete supports, and its three terraces- concrete trays, in effect, seem to float in the air. Their apparent lightness is increased by the low parapets, which Wright designed to his own short stature, not for taller inhabitants. They are supported on a tall stone core wrapped around the kitchen, with bedrooms above (again, the Wrightian them of the hearth or kitchen as focus of the house). As all the supports, which he called „bolsters,‟ are anchored in solid rock and can only be seen from the back, the effect of levitation is magical at first view. The south walls, looking over and down the stream, are glass. The west and east walls are fieldstone, and seem to grow up out of the rock” (398-399).

3. “Wright used color subtly, neither camouflaging the house nor making it stark. The terraces are a warm, light peach tint, and the metal window framing is a sharp earth-red, which, when seen against the winter snows, has the same visual snap as the bare red branches of a Cornus elegantissima poking through the whiteness. In sum, this is a wonderful set of variations on themes: the liquid water surface and the hard skin of glass; the cut fieldstone masonry and the raw rock ledges; the sense that the bulk of the building is cradled in the rock while the balconies fly out into the air, working against gravity and the assuring grasp of the earth. All the opposites, held in a poetic synthesis. They make you forget- until you go inside- the perversity of Wright‟s idea of building a house over a waterfall that can‟t be seen from inside it, but only heard: a dull, continuous roar that, in spring-melt time, must have rendered life in Fallingwater nearly insufferable” (399).

J Gerrit Rietveld. Schroder House, Utrecht, Netherlands, 1924 De Stijl/ overlapping planes/ balcony supports/ use of primary colors/ weightless suspension of abstract elements/ cornered window

1. “In Holland, the International Style of architecture began as the De Stijl movement, of which Mondrian was a founder. The primary leader, however, was the artist Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931)…Several Dutch architects, attracted by Frank Lloyd Wright‟s work (which had been exhibited in Germany in 1910) joined Mondrian and van Doesburg in the De Stijl movement. They were idealists searching for ultimate, or universal style that would satisfy human needs through mass production. The spiritual goal of world peace, they believed, would also be fostered by the „equilibrium of opposites‟ that was part of De Stijl‟s credo” (Adams, Art Across Time 853).

2. “Typical of this new architecture is the Schroeder House in Utrecht, designed by Gerrit Rietveld. The flat roof and cantilevered balconies are similar to those in Wright‟s private houses. Whereas Wright emphasized horizontals, however, Rietveld preferred oppositions of horizontals and verticals derived from Cubism, which he integrated with a skeletal construction. There is no surface decoration to interrupt the exterior simplicity of the building. The many windows and balconies, with attached rectangular panels that seem to float in mid-air, create a sense of tension, paradoxically combined with weightlessness. Composed of predominantly white, flat planes and right angles, the Schroeder House is the three-dimensional equivalent of one of Mondrian‟s paintings of rectangles bordered by black outlines” (853).

3. “The windows, when open, are held at an angle perpendicular to that of the frame, expanding the geometric grid beyond the building envelope. The window, with the structural frame set back from the corner, pivots to reveal a clear opening at the defining edge of the building… Primary colors are used to distinguish isolated elements of the frame, highlighting them as coordinates in an expanding spatial grid. The house has an abstract sculptural composition, destroying the conventions of a rectilinear box… Walls meet is a series of overlapping planes, expressing the composition of separate forms… The steel joist provides necessary support for the concrete slab of the balcony, but is also an integral part of the sculptural composition, extending the fame of the building beyond the external walls” (Stevenson 83).

4. “The sculptural arrangement is continued throughout the interior. The principal areas for working, relaxing, and sleeping are on the second floor, in an ambiguous and flexible series of spaces temporarily defined by movable partitions” (83).

71 Unit TEN: Early Modern Architecture STUDENT NOTES

K Housing for the Masses L Le Corbusier. , Poissy, France, 1929-

1931 1. “During the 1930s, despite the Great Depression, Le Corbusier/ International Style/ piloti/ribbon windows/ Wright began to secure important commissions and also roof garden on a flat roof/ white exterior/ “machine for to make a contribution in the field of low-cost individual housing (the Usonian houses), as well as in city living” planning. During the period c. 1931-35, when commissions were few, he developed his plan for 1. “The best-known exponent of the International Style in France , an integrated and self-sufficient during the 1920s and early 1930s was the Swiss-born architect community of detached housing with built-in industries. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887- Like most such schemes, Broadacre City was never 1969). The Villa Savoye, a weekend residence built from 1928 to realized, but it did enable Wright to clarity his ideas on 1930 at Poissy, near Paris, is the last in a series of International city planning, further developing the idea of the garden town, with detached houses within ample natural Style houses by Le Corbusier. It is regarded as his masterpiece” surroundings” (Arnason 311). (Adams, Art Across Time 855).

2. “Le Corbusier, like Wright, had few major commissions 2. “The Villa Savoye is a grand version of what Le Corbusier during the 1920s, but he continually advanced his ideas described as a „machine for living.‟ It rests on very slender and his reputation through his writings and through his reinforced concrete pillars, which divide the second-floor visionary urban-planning projects. In 1922 he drew up a windows. The second floor contains the main living area, and it plan for a contemporary city of three million inhabitants, is connected to the ground floor and the open terrace on the third involving rows of isolated skyscrapers connected by vast highways and set in the midst of parks… His realization floor by a staircase and a ramp. The driveway extends under the of the variety of problems involved in the modern city house and ends in a three-car carport. This part of the ground went far beyond that of his models, and he made his floor is deeply recessed under the second-floor overhang, and suggested solutions even more specific in his so-termed contains an entrance hall and servants‟ quarters. All four Voisin plans for Paris. In these the emphasis was always elevations of the house are virtually identical, each having the on the control of indefinite outward expansion of the city same ribbon widnows running the length of the wall” (855-856). through the concentration of residential areas in isolated skyscrapers, set within parks but made easily accessible 3. “The last of his Purist , it culminated a line of thinking to one another by various classified systems of transportation” (316). that had begun in 1914 with the so-called domino construction system, in which ferroconcrete (concrete reinforced with steel 3. “Mass housing was a great social issue in Weimar bars) slabs were floated on six freestanding steel posts (placed at Germany, and hence, necessarily, for the Bauhaus. From the positions of the six dots on a domino playing piece). Over the 1924 onwards, with the Deutschmark stabilized and the next decade the architect explored the possibilities of the madhouse infla tion of 1923 curbed, the government could structure and in 1926 published „The Five Points of a New build; and no other country built as many flats, blocks, Architecture.‟ Its main claims were that houses should be and houses for its citizens over the next eight years. At elevated above the ground on pilotis (freestanding posts), that the peak of the Weimar building boom, more than seventy per cent of all new dwellings were built, in whole or in roofs should be flat for use as terraces, and that exterior and part, with government money- most of which came from a interior walls should be hung to allow for freedom of design (these fifteen percent tax on the rents of private landlords… The are known as curtain walls to distinguish them from supporting result was that classical form of social housing, the walls) and for the use of „ribbon windows‟( windows that run the Siedlung or „settlement,‟ beloved of the world‟s length of the wall)” (Stokstad 1080). Utopians… In real life the housing projects… all tended to share an extreme concern for what the Bauhaus called… 4. “Although none of these minimal housing. Thus Gropius felt no qualms about ideas was particularly new, putting the Siemens employees in rooms less than seven they were applied by Le feet high; after all, few German workers stood over six Corbusier in a distinctive feet, and the lighting fixtures were flush with ceiling. The fashion that combined two Siedlungen, in their well-meaning regimentation of living apparently opposed formal habits, marked the high tide of the intrusion of systems: the classical Doric bureaucratic master planning into German family life. architecture of ancient Only the fact that they had been designed for the hated Greece and the clear Weimar Republic by Communists or Jews, with precision of machinery. degenerate flat roofs like Arab villages instead of racially Such houses could be healthy pointed ones like German farms, prevented the effectively placed in nature, Nazis from applauding them. In all other ways they were as here, but they were impeccably totalitar ian, but one should remember that, meant to represent a however depressing these serried blocks now seem, they higher, transcendent synthesis, as their elevation off the ground and pure were much better than the nineteenth-century slums that white coloring suggest. Because of its beautiful play of curves and angles, spelled „workers‟ housing‟ before Weimar” (Hughes, Shock the Villa Savoye is more than a house; it is a beautiful piece of sculpture” of the New 195,199). (1080).

72

Unit TEN: Early Modern Architecture STUDENT NOTES

M Le Corbusier. Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, France, 1945-52 vertical cities/ surrounded by a park/ growth of social planning

1. “Architecture after World War II was necessarily preoccupied with the reconstruction of war-damaged Europe. It also, in the hands of social democratic governments, became the instrument of new ideas about the nature of society itself. Architectural planning became more important than the forms taken by single buildings. Sometimes, however, architectural planning and architectural form were fused into a single, indissoluble whole. This was the case with one of the most influential of all postwar constructions, Le Corbusier‟s Unité d’habitation at Marseilles” (Lucie-Smith 517).

2. “The building was a summary of the ideas Le Corbusier had put forward about urban living during the interwar period. It is a single vast slab, 450 feet long, 66 feet thick, and 200 feet tall. In it are nearly 340 apartments designed to house around 1,600 people. Incorporated into the buildings, about a third of the way up, is a two-story shopping street, and there is a communal roof-garden. This is a complete small town which also happens to form a single structure” (517).

3. “The conception of Unité was extremely influential- to architects and planners throughout Europe it seemed to offer the possibility of a new, healthier, more rational environment, less greedy for valuable building land. It was only later that the miseries of tower-block apartment living, and the social evils they engendered –isolation and crime- began to make themselves apparent” (517).

4. “The method of construction used for the Unité was also influential. There was a postwar shortage of skilled labor, and Le Corbusier chose the simplest, most direct form of building he could find. The basic material is béton brut- concrete poured into roughly made wooden formwork, which gave its own texture to the finished result. The result was in stark contrast to the kind of effects which Mies van der Rohe and his followers were achieving in America, using metal frameworks and glass curtain walls. There smoothness and precision of finish were crucial. At the Unité, roughness was part of the final effect. This method of construction became part of a moral statement about the architect‟s relationship to society” (517).

5. “There is little privacy in this nobly articulated beehive of raw concrete; the children‟s rooms are hardly more than cupboards (Corbusier had no children of his own and apparently disliked them); and the ideal of communal self-sufficiency left its fossil in the form of a „shopping mall‟ on the fifth floor so that, in theory, nobody would need to leave the building to go to market. As everyone in France except Le Corbusier knew, the French like to shop in their street markets. So, the „shopping mall‟ remained deserted” (Hughes, Shock of the New 190).

6. “Here Le Corbusier abandoned the original concept of concrete as a precisely surfaced machine material and presented it in its rough, primitive state. In doing so, he inaugurated a new style, almost a new age, in modern architecture, to which a name, the New Brutalism, was later given” (Arnason 536).

N Le Corbusier. Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamps, France, 1950-54 Corbusier‟s late work/ curved and tapering walls/ sprayed with concrete/ interior roof elevated above walls

1. “Le Corbusier‟s most revolutionary building from the mid-twentieth century is the church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp in eastern France, which is constructed of reinforced concrete. Rising like a medieval fortress from a hillcrest, its design is so irrational that it defies analysis, even with the aid of perspective diagrams. The play of curves and countercurves is here as insistent as in Gaudí‟s Casa Mila, though the shapes are simpler and more dynamic. The massive walls seem to obey an unseen force that makes them slant and curl like paper. And the overhanging roof suggests the brim of an enormous hat or perhaps the bottom of a ship split lengthwise by the sharp- edged buttress from which it is suspended” (Janson 877).

2. “This evocation of the dim, prehistoric past is quite intentional. Asked to create a sanctuary on a hilltop, Le Corbusier must have felt that this was the primeval task of architecture, placing him in a direct line of succession with the builders of Stonehenge, the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and the Greek temples. Hence he also consciously avoids any correlation between exterior and interior. The doors are concealed; we must seek them out like clefts in a hillside. To pass through them is much like entering a secret- and sacred- cave” (877).

3. “Only inside do we sense the specifically Christian aspect of Ronchamp. The light, channeled through stained-glass windows so tiny that they seem hardly more than slits or pinpricks on the exterior, cuts widening paths through the thickness of the wall” (877). “The interior is lit by windows of varying sizes and shapes that open up from small apertures to create focused tunnels of light” (Arnason 537).

4. “Instead of thin curtain walls, the church has thick, rough, masonry walls faced with whitewashed Gunite (sprayed concrete). The darker concrete roof is finished in a contrasting striated pattern. The upward lift of the roof recalls the vertical emphasis of medieval church architecture and responds to the winds that sweep across the hill. The building‟s organic, gently swelling curves, reminiscent of Henry Moore‟s sculpture, were inspired, Corbusier said, by a crab shell” (Stokstad 1135).

73 Unit TEN: Early Modern Architecture STUDENT NOTES

O Walter Gropius. Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 1925-6

Bauhaus/ clear, cubic forms/ spread of Bauhaus ideals to the United States

1. “The German expression of the International Style centered on the Bauhaus… In 1926 [Walter] Gropius relocated the Bauhaus from Weimar to Dessau, and planned its new quarters according to his International Style philosophy. Three blocklike buildings contained living and working areas, as well as the schools. They were linked by an elevated bridge containing offices. This conception differed radically from previous academic institutions, which were monumental, had a clearly marked entrance within a distinctive façade, and were usually Neoclassical in style” (Adams, Art Across Time 854)

2. “The workshop wing of the Bauhaus is typical of the International Style. It is entirely rectilinear, with verticals and horizontals meeting at right angles. The primary material is reinforced concrete, but, apart from two thin white bands at the top and bottom, the viewers see only sheet glass walls from the outside. Structurally, this was a logical extension of the steel skeleton system of construction which… relieves the outer walls of any support function. Formal affinities with Cubism are inescapable, although Gropius, like the members of the Dutch De Stijl, was motivated primarily by a philosophy of simplicity and harmony intended to integrate art and architecture into society. The Bauhaus exteriors, devoid of any regional identity, were an international concept translated into architectural form” (854- 855).

3. “The building is not strictly utilitarian, however. The asymmetrical balancing of the large, cubical structural elements is meant to convey the dynamic quality of modern life” (Stokstad 1081-1082). “The goal was the raining of a generation of architects dedicated to „a clear, , whose inner logic will be radiant and naked, unencumbered by lying facades and trickeries; we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast motor cars, an architecture whose function is clearly recognizable in the relation of its forms‟” (1081).

4. “Between 1930 and its closing in 1933 the Bauhaus‟s director was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), the leader of the avant-garde architectural school in Berlin after the war. Although Mies wrote little, one of his aphorisms crystallized the views of his modernist colleagues: „Less is more.‟ His great passion was the subtle perfection of structure, proportion, and detail using sumptuous materials such as travertine, richly veined marbles, tinted glass, and bronze” (1083).

P William van Alen. Chrysler Building, New York, New York, 1928-30 Art Deco and the Jazz Age/ age of the automobile/ glittering spire in a race to be the tallest

1. “The Art Deco „look‟ so characteristic of the New York skyline by the mid-1930s was actually an import. For Art Deco was the world‟s last universal decorative style. It spread worldwide at lightning speed, from Rio to Sydney. Its main root was in France, as its name proclaimed: „Deco‟ was short for the name of the pivotal exhibition in which it burst upon the world, the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. New York architects like William Van Alen saw it in Paris, brought it back, and morphed it into something American: an apotheosis, in the form of the decorated skyscraper” (Hughes, American Visions 406).

2. “The race for the sky began in 1926 with a project never built, the Larkin Tower, meant to top out at 1,028 feet, or 500 feet higher than the Woolworth Building. By 1928 it had settled into a race between William Van Alen‟s Chrysler Building at Lexington Avenue and Forty- second Street, and Craig Severance‟s Bank of the Manhattan Company at 40 Wall Street. Van Alen and Severance had been in partnership but fallen out, and the competition between their skyscrapers was a fierce grudge match. At one point it looked as though Van Alen was going to lose, because Walter Chrysler ordered him to trim the building by ten floors. But this was rescinded, and the skyscrapers went up neck and neck until Van Alen managed to bluff Severance into thinking the Chrysler would top out at 925 feet. So Severance finished his tower at 927 feet. Then Van Alen pulled the spike out of the hat. He had designed and, inside the fire shaft, secretly assembled a 185-foot steel spire. The press was primed, film crews stood ready, and Van Alen‟s „vertex‟ was hoisted into place in ninety minutes, emerging through the top of the pinnacle like a wasp‟s sting. At over a thousand feet, victory was his” (407).

3. “The signature of the Chrysler Building was, of course, its fantastically inventive finial- a stack of seven groined vaults, one atop the other, tapering to the sky, each of the twenty-eight outfacing arches (thinning from semicircular at the bottom to parabolic at the top) pierced by triangular windows that suggest the spokes of a wheel. These were not the only references embedded in the Chrysler Building to the cars that had made its owner rich. Van Alen designed, at the thirtieth floor, a frieze of Chrysler hubcaps running around the building; at each corner there were enormous „gargoyles,‟ sculpted out of welded stainless-steel sheet, in the form of eagles- the Chrysler radiator cap. In sum, Van Alen‟s masterpiece remains America‟s most successful example of building-as-corporate-logo. Nor was it just a billboard: Van Alen went to immense trouble (and expense) with the internal detailing, from the strange coffin shape of the black marble entranceways, to the ocherous glow of russet and yellow marble sheathing the lobby; from a now badly faded ceiling fresco full of aircraft, workmen building the tower, and a portrait of the tower itself, to the brilliant marquetry elevator cabs, each a one-off design in brass inlay and a dozen kinds of exotic veneer” (408).

74 Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism TIMELINE

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 1889 erection of the Eiffel Tower

1891 first movie camera patented 1819-1900 life of John Ruskin 1893 Henry Ford builds his first car 1837-1901 reign of Queen Victoria in 1896 Puccini‟s La Boheme England 1900 Sigmund Freud writes his 1844-1900 life of Friedrich Nietzsche Interpretation of Dreams 1853 Treaty of Kanagawa (Matthew Perry 1901-1910 reign of Edward VII in England opens up Japan to western trade) 1903 Wright brothers successfully fly a 1859-1870 unification of Italy powered airplane 1859 Charles Darwin publishes his On the 1904 Puccini‟s Madame Butterfly Origin of Species … 1905 Die Brucke group formed 1861-1865 American Civil War 1905-1915 Albert Einstein formulates his 1869 Wagner‟s Rheingold theory of relativity 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War; Paris 1907 Picasso‟s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Commune 1909 Futurist Manifesto written 1871 Verdi‟s Aida 1909 Louis Bleriot crosses the English 1872 opening of the Brooklyn Bridge Channel from Calais to Dover in an 1875-1961 life of Carl Jung airplane 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents the 1910 Arthur Evans excavates Crete telephone 1910-1936 reign of George V of England 1876 Heinrich Schliemann excavates 1913 in New York Mycenae 1914 assassination of the archduke Francis 1877 Edison invents the phonograph Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo; 1880 Edison and Swan independently World War I begins (1914-1918) devise the first practical electric 1917-1921 Russian Revolution lights 1919 Bauhaus founded 1884-1886 Seurat‟s Sunday on La Grande

Jatte

75 Unit TEN: Rise of Modernism TIMELINE

1922 writes and T. S. Eliot writes

1922 Benito Mussolini seizes power in Italy 1923 U.S.S.R. officially established

1929 stock market crash in New York begins the Great Depression

1934 Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of

1936-1939 Spanish Civil War 1940 Battle of Britain

1941 Japanese attack Pearl Harbor; the United States enters into World

War II

62

AP Unit Eleven:

ART OF THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY

Prepared by: D. Darracott Plano West Senior High School

1 Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

DADA

Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, 1912, oil on canvas

 Armory Show

 humorous attack on

Futurist proscriptions against

the Academic nude

Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel,

1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913) assemblage

 readymade (or assemblage)

 Dada

 raising questions of historic value and originality

Marcel Duchamp. The Bride Stripped

Bare by her Bachelors (or Large Glass)

1915-23, oil, lead wire, foil, dust, and varnish on glass

 machine aesthetic

 sexual metaphors

 broken while in transit

Marcel Duchamp. L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, color reproduction with pencil

 Dada art as “anti-art” (Nihilist philosophy)

 element of humor

 fine line between creation and destruction

Kurt Schwitters. Merz 19, 1920, paper collage

 Kurt Schwitters

 collage

 Merz

2 Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Giorgio de Chirico. The Soothsayer’s

Recompense, 1913, oil on canvas

and Nietzsche

 anachronistic elements

 melancholy theme of departure

Marc Chagall. I and the Village, 1911, oil on canvas

 elements of Expressionism,

Cubism, and Fauvism

 simple pleasures of folk life

 integrating circular shapes

 nature vs. civilization

 varied proportions used to suggest memory

SURREALISM

Max Ernst. Two Children are

Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924, oil on wood

 increased sense of absurdity

 a strange title

 Andre Breton and “le merveilleux”

Max Ernst. The Elephant Celebes, 1921, oil on canvas

 Surrealistic on machine aesthetic

 influence of assemblage art

3 Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Paul Klee. Twittering Machine,

1922, watercolor and pen and ink

 Paul Klee

 attachment to the Bauhaus

 metaphorical mechanized birds

 exploring the collective unconscious

 strong appreciation of children‟s art

Salvador Dali. The Persistence of Memory,

1931, oil on panel

 Salvador Dali

 technique of fifteenth century

Flemish painting employed

 limp watches, ants, and a fly

 infinite space

 “paranoic-critical method”

Meret Oppenheim. Object (Luncheon in Fur), 1936

 Meret Oppenheim

 “convulsive beauty”

Rene Magritte. The Treason of Images,

1928-9, oil on canvas

 dislocation of image and meaning

 interest in the ordinary

Rene Magritte. The Castle of the Pyrenees, 1959, oil on canvas

 Rene Magritte

 real space vs. spatial illusion

 painting technique used to suspend belief

 power of juxtapositioning

4 Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Joan Miro. The Harlequin’s Carnival,

1924-5, oil on canvas

 Joan Miro

 automatism

 lugubrious (gloomy) human (with mustache)

 whimsical, floating biomorphic shapes

 adolescent humor

Frida Kahlo. Self-Portrait with Thorny Necklace,

1940, oil on canvas

 a life of pain and illness

 a wreath of thorns with a dead hummingbird

 a cat and a monkey

TWENTIETH CENTURY REALISM

Robert Henri. Salome, 1909

 Ash Can School

Charles Sheeler. American Landscape,

1930, oil on canvas

 Charles Sheeler

 status of the human figure

 influence of photography

Thomas Hart Benton. Pioneer Days and

Early Settlers, 1936, State Capitol of

Missouri mural

 Thomas Hart Benton

5 Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

 stylistic conventions reminiscent of

Mannerism

Grant Wood. American Gothic, 1930, oil on beaverboard

 miniaturist style reminiscent of

fifteenth century Flemish painting

 Great Depression

 austere American icon

Edward Hopper. Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas

 asymmetrical composition of an urban landscape

 solitary strangers

 artificial light

 protestations against abstract art

Andrew Wyeth. Christina’s World,

1948, tempera on panel

 painstaking tempera technique

 reactionary or traditional

David Hockney. A Bigger Splash,

1967, acrylic on canvas

 David Hockney

 an American suburban Utopia

 use of acrylic paint

 controlled hard edges vs. a painted splash

6

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Wayne Thiebaud. Cakes, 1963, oil on canvas

 Wayne Thiebaud

 sensuous application of paint

 deadpan composition with rich, vibrant color

 celebration of consumerism

Richard Estes. Nedick’s. 1970, oil on canvas

 Richard Estes

 Photo-Realism

 a lonely street recalling the

work of Edward Hopper

 use of multiple photos to create

one painted image

 interest in reflections

Audrey Flack. Marilyn, 1977, oil over acrylic on canvas

 Audrey Flack

 return to the theme of the “Vanitas” still life

 glossy effects achieved with the use of an airbrush

 affection for kitsch

Chuck Close. Phil, 1969, synthetic polymer on canvas

 Chuck Close

 Philip Glass

 use of a grid format

 monumental Photo-Realism

 factual presence and impersonal surface

7

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Duane Hanson. The Tourists. 1970, polyvinyl, polychromed in oil with accessories

 Duane Hanson

 a remarkable sense of verisimilitude

 casting from live humans

 use of fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin

 a portrait of consumers

Alice Neel. Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia),

1967, oil on canvas

 Alice Neel

 a blend of expressionism and realism

 refusal to flatter

 lack of finish

Lucian Freud. Large Interior W11

(After Watteau), 1981-3, oil on canvas

 Lucian Freud

 an homage of malaise to Watteau

 interest in varied surfaced textures

 a return to the domain of the artist‟s studio

 a renewed interest in working from life

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Arshile Gorky. The Liver is the Cock’s Comb,

1944, oil on canvas

 Arshile Gorky

 a life fraught with anxiety

 influence of

8  blurred contours and biomorphic shapes

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Jackson Pollock. Rhythm, 1950

 Jackson Pollock

 Karl Jung

 all-over, holistic quality

 controlled spontaneity

 New York as a new artistic center

 Influence of Navajo Indian sand painting

Willem de Kooning. Woman and Bicycle,

1952-3, oil on canvas

 exploration of the overpowering female figure

 lack of purity in abstract painting

 art as an act of both creation and destruction

 a huge, double smile

Franz Kline. Chief, 1950, oil on canvas

 Franz Kline

 enlargement of black and white drawings

 a painting of heroic strokes and gestures

Robert Motherwell. Elegy to the Spanish Republic,

1953-54, oil on canvas

 Robert Motherwell

 a tragic sense of the history of the

Spanish Civil War suggested in painting

 influence of collage

9

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Mark Rothko. Ochre and Red on Red,

1954, oil on canvas

 Mark Rothko

 floating fields of color ( Painting)

 meant to engulf the viewer with color

David Smith. Cubi XVII, 1963, polished stainless steel

 David Smith

 industrial techniques (welding) and materials (stainless steel)

 equilibrium of strength and buoyancy (defying gravity)

 expressionistic surface combined with geometric forms

POP ART

Richard Hamilton. Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 1956, collage on paper

 Richard Hamilton

 Laurence Alloway and the birth of Pop

 influence of Duchamp

 products of mass culture

 low brow, middle brow, and high brow

 a traditional portrait next to a comic strip

 The Jazz Singer

Jasper Johns. Target with Four Faces, 1955, assemblage, encaustic and collage on canvas with objects

 encaustic paint

 element of impersonality

10  twentieth century anxiety

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Jasper Johns. Flag, 1954-55, encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric, mounted on plywood

 exploring the painting process

using a well-known symbol (object vs. image)

 an “anti-art” aesthetic

 an art of neutrality and impersonality

 absence of the artist‟s identity

Jasper Johns. Painted Bronze II: Ale Cans,

1964, painted bronze

 influence of Duchamp

 Leo Castelli

 use of banality and lack of

expression in sculpture

Robert Rauschenberg. ,

1955-59,

 combines

 influence of Dada and Abstract Expressionism

 a sexual pun

Robert Rauschenberg. Bed, 1955, combine painting

 nihilistic “anti-art” approach

 utilizing the „fake gesture‟ of Abstract Expressionism

Andy . 200 Campbell Soup Cans, 1962

 banality and American consumer culture

11  desire to eliminate the personal signature style of the artist

 repetitive routines of modern life

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Andy Warhol. , 1962, oil, acrylic, and silkscreen enamel on canvas

 cult of American celebrity

 silkscreening process

 fascination with death

 famous for fifteen minutes

Roy Lichtenstein. , 1963, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas

 enlarged printer‟s dots

 appropriated comic imagery

 en media res

 emotional narrative depicted with detachment

Claes Oldenburg. Clothespin, 1976, cor-ten and stainless steel

 Claes Oldenburg

 The Store

 magnifying the scale of ordinary objects

 debt to Duchamp‟s readymades

 a monument to consumer culture

Edward Kienholz. The Portable War

Memorial, 1968, mixed media

 Edward Kienholz

 Vietnam War

 Kate Smith singing God Bless America

 a war mentality seen as “normal”

 a Coke machine and a hot dog stand

12

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

TWENTIETH CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Photogram, 1939, gelatin silver print

 Lazlo-Moholy Nagy

 photogram

 inventing a “New Vision”

 influence of the Bauhaus

Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage,

1907, photogravure

 Alfred Stieglitz

 Photo-Secessionists

 aesthetics vs. social concerns

Lewis Wickes Hine. Power House Mechanic,

1920, gelatin silver print

 Lewis Hine

 in praise of the industrial worker

 role of the documentary photography

as a social reformer

Margaret Bourke-White. At the Time of the

Louisville Flood, 1937, gelatin silver print

 Margaret Bourke-White

 hunger and poverty in the country

with the “world‟s highest standard of living”

 white and black America

 LIFE Magazine

Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother, Nipomo,

California, 1936, gelatin silver print

13  Dorothea Lange

 Great Depression

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

 putting a human face on economic statistics

Robert Frank. Parade: Hoboken, New Jersey, from the series The Americans, 1953-57, gelatin silver print

 Robert Frank

 The Americans

 slice-of-life realism

 off-center casual framing

 the Beat generation

Andy Warhol. Big Electric Chair, 1967, synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas

 Andy Warhol

 photography vs.

 social activism or banality?

 photography and authenticity

Irving Penn. Large Sleeve (Sunny Harnett),

New York, 1951, gelatin silver print

 Irving Penn

 fashion photography

 elegance defined by austerity

 emphasis on craft

Robert Adams. Pikes Peak Park, Colorado

Springs, 1970, gelatin silver print

 Robert Adams

 man and his creations in the American West

 frank photography lacking in embellishments

14

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Diane Arbus. Child with Toy Hand Grenade,

New York, 1962, gelatin-silver print

 Diane Arbus

 rejection of elegance

 a confrontational portrait

COLOR FIELD AND

Barnett Newman. Vir Heroicus Sublimis.

1950-51, oil on canvas

 Barnett Newman

 belief in the spiritual content of abstract art

 use of “zips” placed against a void

 continued use of an overwhelming large scale format

Frank Stella. Jill, 1959, enamel on canvas

 methodical repetition

 removed from the inspired

action of the Abstract Expressionists

 “What you see is what you see”

Richard Diebenkorn. Ocean Park #105,

1978, oil and charcoal on canvas

 Ocean Park Series

 Move from representational

painting to abstraction

 Fields of color suggesting both structure and process

15

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Carl Andre. Equivalent VIII, 1978, mixed media

 Carl Andre

 Minimalism

 importance of the museum or gallery setting

 impersonal act of creating art

 preference for the machine made

object over the hand made object

 intrinsic vs. extrinsic value

Richard Serra. Tilted Arc, 1981, installed in

Federal Plaza, New York, cor-ten steel

 Richard Serra

 physical self-awareness of the viewer

in relation to the art object

 rusted steel surface

 Minimalism as a “public” art form

 controversial removal

Eva Hesse. Hang-Up, 1965-66, acrylic on cloth over wood and steel

 Eva Hesse

 humanizing of Minimalism

 introduction of the sexual and the anthromorphic

 an empty container

 “nonlogical” art

Donald Judd. Untitled, 1967, green lacquer on galvanized iron

 Donald Judd

 artless repetition

 interest in spatial relationship between modules

16  Marfa, Texas

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Agnes Martin. Friendship, 1963, incised gold leaf and gesso on canvas

 Agnes Martin

 use of a grid

 delicate hand-drawn lines

 a sense of infinite space

Robert Ryman. Institute, 1981, oil on linen with metal fasteners

 Robert Ryman

 working only with white

 sensitive to qualities of surface and touch

 hanging devices as an integral part of the work

 restricted square format

 references to Malevich

MID CENTURY ARCHITECTURE

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and .

Seagram Building (New York) 1954-58

 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

 “less is more”

 spread of the International Style

 set back from the street

 curtain wall of glass

 image of streamlined efficiency

Louis Kahn. Salt Institute (La Jolla, California) 1965

17  Brutalism

 Spartan surfaces and monastic spaces

 modular design

Unit ELEVEN: Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century STUDENT NOTES

Jorn Utzon and Hall, Todd, and Littleton.

Sydney Opera House, 1972

 Jorn Utzon

 Sail-like, roof shells

 use of “served” and “servant” spaces

 concept of “additive architecture”

18 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

A The Armory Show B Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending the Staircase No. 2, 1912 1. “The burgeoning styles of the early twentieth century in Marcel Duchamp/Armory Show/ humorous attack on western Europe did not reach the general American Futurist proscriptions against the Academic Nude public until 1913. In February of that year, the Armory of the Sixty-ninth Regiment, National Guard, on Lexington Avenue at 25 th Street in New York was the site of an 1. “The Armory Show caused an uproar. international exhibition of modern art. A total of 1,200 Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) submitted exhibits, including works by Post-Impressionists, Fauves, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which and Cubists, as well as by American artists, filled was the most scandalous work of all. It was eighteen rooms. This event marked the first widespread a humorous attack on Futurist American exposure to the European avant-garde” (Adams, proscriptions against traditional, Across Time 845). nudity. The image has a kinetic quality consistent with the Futurist interest in 2. “The Armory was a vast, high-ceilinged space, a roofed speed and motion. At the same time, the parade ground without internal walls that paintings could figure is a combination of Cubist form and be hung on. So the organizers used screens covered in multiple images that indicate the influence fireproof burlap, dividing the floor into eighteen octagonal of photography. She is shown at different rooms- a maze inside the cavernous hall. These were points in her descent, so the painting decorated with cut sprays of pine branches, with live, resembles a series of consecutive movie potted pine trees set here and there. The pine tree had stills, unframed and superimposed. Various been a symbol of Liberty in Massachusetts during the accounts published at the time ridiculed the American Revolution. It proclaimed both freedom from Nude’s debut in the United States. the past and a continuing American tradition. The trees Descriptions by outraged viewers included may have given visitors the impression that they stood on the following: „disused golf clubs,‟ an the disputed, unconquered frontier of art” (Hughes, „elevated railroad stairway in ruins after an earthquake,‟ „ a dynamited American Visions 355). suit of Japanese armor,‟ an „orderly heap of broken violins,‟ an „explosion in a shingle factory,‟ and „Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush 3. “No exhibition had ever had such a media blitz. For Hour in the Subway).‟ Duchamp recorded his own version of the Nude’s once, here was an art event that had the crunch of real place in the history of art: „My aim was a static representation of news, the latest murder or the newest political scandal. movement- a static composition of indications of various positions It provoked a torrent of , cartoons, and hostile taken by a form in movement- with no attempt to give cinema effects reviews. The French artists, in particular Matisse and the through painting‟” (Adams, Art Across Time 845-846). Cubists, bore the brunt of it” (356). “By the end of its run- it traveled to Chicago, where art students burned Matisse 2. “A dull-brown painting in a Cubist idiom, its overlapping planes were and Brancusi in effigy, and then to Boston- about three partly derived from the sequential images of the French photographer hundred thousand Americans had bought tickets to see who analyzed motion, Etienne Jules Marey. Its very title was ironic, the international Exhibition of Modern Art. almost insupportable. Nudes, in art, were not expected to move, let Unquestionably, many who came to scoff stayed to alone walk downstairs. They were meant to stand or lie still, to imitate wonder and went home to think. But since America is the chaste condition of statues. It suggested decorum fractured almost the country where enough bad reviews almost equal good to the verge of pornography, even though this nude had no detectable ones, as long as they create a critical mass of celebrity for sexual characteristics- not that the public didn‟t try to find them” their subject, one artist in particular benefited from the (Hughes, American Visions 357). “Because Americans actually love the Armory Show. This was Marcel Duchamp, and on the new and embrace it quicker that anyone else, they are especially fond basis of one picture: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, of this myth and have built cathedrals to it, known as museums of 1912. It became the freak star of the Armory Show- its modern art. In their cult of the problematic, as distinct from the bearded lady, its dog-faced boy. People compared it to an enjoyable, Marcel Duchamp is a saint, and this is one of his prime explosion in a shingle factory, an earthquake on the relics” (358). subway; Theodore Roosevelt, a shade more benignly, likened it to a Navajo blanket, which it did not resemble 3. While the Armory Show failed to promote the interests of its in the least” (357). organizers, it did “succeed in its goal of introducing a new cosmopolitanism into the American art scene. It also proved a success 4. “Linkages across the politico-cultural left made the with collectors, who bought an astonishing number of works from the Armory Show a doubly inviting target for conservative exhibition” (Janson 789). When Duchamp submitted his painting to critics, and they help explain why paintings like Henri the Salon des Independants, “it was coldly received. The Cubist painter Matisse‟s, which now strike us as invocations of an and theorist , who belonged to the hanging committee, Edenic order, were accused of „anarchism‟- along with all asked Duchamp‟s brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp- the Cubists works in the show” (358). “The idea of Villon, to have him „voluntarily‟ withdraw it. It did not conform to what „anarchy in art‟ meant something graver than mere the Cubist circle wanted for their representative exhibition. It seemed esthetic disorder to a newspaper reader in 1913. It too „Futurist‟ to them, since it contained movement. The Cubists suggested deliberate subversion, coming across the wanted to clarify and strengthen their position against other „isms‟ that Atlantic to derange its cultural polity and making were cropping up. Embarrassed and series, the elder brothers asked monsters or fools of real American artists. Fear of Duchamp to concede, which he did without making a fuss. However, „anarchism‟ fitted into the general matrix of suspicion of he was hurt. „[This affair] helped me to totally escape the past, my own the foreign immigrant. This ran strong and hot in 1910s personal past. I said to myself, „Well, if that‟s the way they want it, then America, toward the end of its first age of mass there‟s no question about me joining a group; one can only count on immigration” (358-359). oneself, one must be a loner‟”” (Mink 27).

19 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

C Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel, (third version made in 1951 after original of 1913), assemblage readymade (or assemblage)/ Dada art movement/ raising questions of historical value and originality

1. “With the war as a backdrop, many artists contributed to an artistic and literary movement known as Dada. This movement emerged, in large part, in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide. They clearly were „revolted by the butchery of the World War.‟ The international scope of Dada proves this revulsion was widespread; although Dada began independently in New York and Zurich, it also emerged in Paris, Berlin, and Cologne, among other cities. Dada was more a mind-set or attitude than a single identifiable style. As Andre Breton, founder of the slightly later Surrealist movement, explained: „Cubism was a school of painting, futurism a political movement: DADA is a state of mind‟. The Dadaists believed reason and logic had been responsible for the unmitigated disaster of world war, and they concluded that the only route to salvation was through political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. Thus, an element of absurdity is a cornerstone of Dada, even reflected in the movement‟s name. „Dada‟ is a term unrelated to the movement; according to an often repeated anecdote, the Dadaists chose the word at random from a French-German dictionary. Although dada does have meaning- it is French for a child‟s hobby horse- it satisfied the Dadaists‟ desire for something irrational and nonsensical (It should be noted, however, that this is just one among many explanations for the name selected for this movement.)” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1022-1023).

2. “In 1913, at a single stroke, the artist fathered two of the major innovations of twentieth-century sculpture: the mobile- sculpture that physically moves- and the readymade, or „found‟ object- sculpture made from or including existing objects, usually commonplace, here an old bicycle wheel mounted on an ordinary kitchen stool. It is always possible to argue that both concepts existed earlier, but Duchamp‟s introduction of them at this particular moment led to their being developed in subsequent movements- Dada, Surrealism, kinetic sculpture, „junk‟ sculpture, and ” (Arnason 229). “In the readymades, Duchamp found forms that of their nature raised questions regarding historic values in art. He has described the various stages of his discovery, and, as quoted by Richter in Dada, Duchamp tells that in 1913 he mounted a bicycle wheel on the top of a kitchen stool and watched it turn; bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, in which he inserted one red and one yellow dot at the horizon and gave it the title Pharmacy; bought a snow shovel in 1915 and wrote on it „in advance of the broken arm‟. About then he used the term „readymade‟ to designate this form of manifestation. The choice of these readymades was never dictated by aesthetic delectation, but rather it „was based on a reaction of visual indifference with a total absence of good or bad taste… in fact a complete anesthesia‟. The short sentence occasionally inscribed on the readymade was important, in that it was not intended as a title, but „to carry the mind of the spectator toward other regions, more verbal‟. Sometimes Duchamp added graphic details that, in order to satisfy his craving for word-play, he called „ready-made aided‟. Then, „wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and „ready-mades‟ I imagined a reciprocal ready-made: use a as an ironing board!‟ Because the readymade could be repeated indiscriminately, he decided to make only a small number yearly, since „for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit-forming drug and I wanted to protect by ready-made against such contamination‟. He stressed that it was in the very nature of the readymade to lack uniqueness, and nearly every readymade existing today is not an original in the conventional sense. Then, to complete this vicious circle, he remarked: „Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and ready-made products we must conclude that all paintings in the world are ready- mades aided‟” (229).

3. “Despite his antiaesthetic attitude, readymades, as he warned, did finally become works of art and have taken on a perverse beauty of their own. Younger artists have continued to make readymades or found objects, and the question of whether they are works of art at all is argued to the present time. Duchamp was clear on the matter: the conception, the „discovery‟, was what made a work of art, not the uniqueness of the object. In New York he began serious work on his Large Glass. To the 1917 exhibition of the New York Society of Independent Artists he submitted a porcelain urinal entitled and signed R. Mutt. When this entry was rejected, he resigned from the association, and the Fountain became one of the most notorious of all Duchamp‟s readymades” (229). “Duchamp had bought the urinal and simply placed it on its flat side so that it would stand „erect‟. He signed the based, right next to the hole for the plumbing: R. Mutt. Although the signature was inspired by the comic-strip characters Mutt and Jeff, and the „R.‟ stood for „Richard‟, French slang for „moneybags‟, the hanging committee probably though first of a filthy cur. But Duchamp was also playing on the real name of the company he bought it from, the „Mott Works‟ in New York, which he changed slightly, in the manner typical of him” (Mink 63, 67). Complaints were made when the work was rejected. Walter Arensberg “offered to buy Fountain to support the artist, but it couldn‟t be found. After a while the urinal was discovered behind a partition wall, where it had waited out the entire duration of the exhibition. Alfred Stieglitz was persuaded to take an almost ennobling photograph of Fountain, which appeared in the second issue of The Blind Man, a magazine published by Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and H.-P. Roche” (67). “Duchamp was not the first to kidnap everyday stuff for art; the Cubists had done so in collages, which, however, required aesthetic judgment in the shaping and placing of materials. The Readymade, on the other hand, implied that the production of art need by no more than a matter of selection- of choosing a preexisting object. In radically subverting earlier assumptions about what the artmaking process entailed, this idea had enormous influence on later artists, particularly after the broader dissemination of Duchamp‟s thought in the 1950s and 1960s. The components of Bicycle Wheel, being mass-produced, are anonymous, identical or similar to countless others. In addition, the fact that this version of the piece is not the original seems inconsequential, at least in terms of visual experience. (Having lost the original Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp simply remade it almost four decades later.) Duchamp claimed to like the work‟s appearance, „to feel that the wheel turning was very soothing‟. Even now, Bicycle Wheel retains an absurdist visual surprise. Its greatest power, however, is as a conceptual proposition” (Bee 87).

20

UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

D Marcel Duchamp. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (or the Large Glass), 1915-23, construction machine aes thetic/ sexual metaphors/ broken while in transit

1. “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass, was completed in 1923, as far as it could be completed. Whatever its state, the works seems the summation of the artist‟s dreams of a machine age, the mathematically derived love goddess, below whom swarm her bachelors, mere drones or empty malic molds being infused with the sperm or fluid constantly ground forth by the rollers of the chocolate machine. Large Glass can only be explained as a complex love machine full of sexual overtones that terminate in a curious pattern of sterility and frustration. Duchamp‟s machines were never intended to have a rational or logical solution, and his own exegeses add to the dimensions of the problems. After New York dust had fallen on certain sections for over a year, the artist had it photographed by ; then he cleaned everything but a section of the cones, to which he cemented the dust with a fixative. The final touch came when the Glass was broken while in transit and was thereby webbed with a network of cracks. Duchamp is reported to have commented with satisfaction, „Now it is complete‟. Since the cracks provide an unexpected transition between the Bride and her Bachelors, aesthetically he may have been right (and this he would deplore)” (Arnason 229-230).

2. “He made his first sketches for the piece in 1913 but did not begin work on it until he arrived in New York. Notes he made while working on it confirm that it is enormously complex in conception and operates on several esoteric levels. At the most obvious level it is a pessimistic statement of the insoluble frustrations of male-female relations. The tubular elements encased in glass at the top represent the bride. These release a large romantic sigh that is stimulating to the bachelors below, who are represented by nine different costumes attached to a waterwheel. The wheel resembles and is attached to a chocolate grinder, a reference to a French euphemism for masturbation. A bar separates the males from the female, preventing the fulfillment of their respective sexual desires. Furthermore, male and female are not only separated but fundamentally different. The female is depicted as a gas- the three strips of gauze in her sign punningly reveal this- while the males are represented as liquids. Duchamp not only contradicts the conventionally optimistic view of male-female relations found in much art but also reverses the conventional power roles of men and women. Unlike what is implied in Kirchner‟s Girl under a Japanese Umbrella, for example, Duchamp places the female in the dominant position, and the males merely react to her” (Stokstad 1085, 1087).

3. “So what is the Glass? A machine: or rather, a project for an unfinished contraption that could never be built because its use was never fully clear, and because (in turn) it parodies the language and the forms of science without the slightest regard for scientific probability, sequence, cause and effect. The Large Glass, carefully painted and outlined in lead wire on its transparent panes, looks explicit. But if an engineer were to use it as a blueprint he would be in deep trouble since, from the viewpoint of technical systems, it is simply absurd: a highbrow version of the popular „impossible machines‟ that were being drawn, at the time, by Rube Goldberg. The notes Duchamp left to go with it, collected out of order in the Green Box, are the most scrambled instruction manual imaginable. But they are deliberately scrambled. For instance, he talked about the machine in the Glass running on a mythical fuel of his own called „Love Gasoline‟, which passed through „filters‟ into „feeble cylinders‟ and activated a „desire motor‟- none of which would have made much sense to Henry Ford. But the Large Glass is a meta-machine; its aim is to take one away from the real world of machinery into the parallel world of allegory. In the top half of the Glass, the naked Bride perpetually disrobes herself; in the bottom section, the poor little Bachelors, depicted as empty jackets and uniforms, are just as perpetually grinding away, signaling their frustration to the girl above them” (Hughes, Shock of the New 55). “The Large Glass is an allegory of Profane Love- which, Marcel Duchamp presciently saw, would be the only sort left in the twentieth century. Its basic text was written by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900: „The imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus lends itself to symbolization by every sort of indescribably complicated machinery‟. But to Duchamp, who had reason to know, the male mechanism of the Large Glass was not a bit imposing. The Bachelors are mere uniforms, like marionettes. According to Duchamp‟s notes, they try to indicate their desire to the Bride by concertedly making the Chocolate Grinder turn, so that it grinds out an imaginary milky stuff like semen. This squirts up through the rings, but cannot get into the Bride‟s half of the Glass because of the prophylactic bar that separates the panes. And so the Bride is condemned always to tease, while the Bachelors‟ fate is endless masturbation” (55).

4. “In one sense the Large Glass is a glimpse into Hell, a peculiarly modern Hell of repetition and loneliness. But it is also possible to see it as a declaration of freedom, if one remembers the crushing taboos against masturbation that were in force when Duchamp was young. For all its drawbacks, onanism was the one kind of sex that could not controlled by the State or the Parent. It freed people from the obligation to be grateful to someone else for their pleasures. It was a symbol of revolt against the family and its authority. Its sterile and gratuitous functioning has made it a key image for an avant-garde that tended, increasingly, towards narcissism” (55-56). “The Large Glass is a free machine, or at least a defiant machine; but it was also a sad machine, a testament to indifference- that state of mind of which Duchamp was the master. Indeed, his finely balanced indifference was the divide between the late machine age and the time in which we live. The Large Glass was very remote from the optimism that accompanied the belief that art still had the power to articulate the plentitude of life, with which greater artists but less sophisticated men than Duchamp greeted the machine in those lost days before World War I” (56).

21 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

E Marcel Duchamp. LHOOQ, 1919, pencil F Kurt Schwitters. Merz 19, 1920, paper collage on print of Leonardo’s collage/ Merz Dada art as “anti-art” (Nihilist philosophy)/ element of humor/ fine line between 1. Although not admitted to Club Dada, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) “was the purest creation and destruction exponent of the Dada spirit to emerge from Germany, if not from the entire movement. 1. Duchamp “shared the Schwitters completed his formal training at Dada taste for word-play the Academy in Dresden and painted portraits and punning, which he for a living. Denied access to Berlin Dada, combined with visual Schwitters established his own variant in images. Delighting, like under the designation Merz, a word children, in nonsensical derived from Commerzbank. He was a talented repetition, Duchamp poet, impressive in his readings, deadly entitled his art magazine serious about his efforts in painting, collage, Wrong Wrong. The most and construction. These always involved a famous instance of visual degree of deadpan humor delightful to those and verbal punning in who knew him, but shattering to strange Duchamp‟s work is audiences. His collages were made of L.H.O.O.Q., which is rubbish picked up from the street- cigarette wrappers, tickets, reminiscent of Malevich‟s newspapers, string, boards, wire screens, whatever caught his fancy. The collage of 1914 that works (merzbuilder) he created were seriously studied as Cubist included the image of the structures, but different in essence from Cubist, Futurist, Dada, Mona Lisa. In contrast to Expressionist, or propagandist collages. Miraculously, he was able to the Malevich, Duchamp‟s transform the rubbish, the detritus of his surroundings, into strange and title is a bilingual pun. Read phonetically in English, wonderful beauty” (Arnason 241-242). the title sounds like „Look,‟ which, on one level, is the artist‟s command to the viewer. If each letter is 2. “Schwitters introduced himself to in a Berlin café in pronounced according to its individual sound in 1918 by saying: „I am a painter and I nail my pictures together‟. This French, the title reads „Elle (L) a ch (H) aud (O) au (O) description applies to all his relief constructions, since he drew no hard- cul (Q),‟ meaning in English „She has a hot ass‟. Read and-fast line between them and papier colles, but most Column or backwards, on the other hand, „Look‟ spells „Kool‟, Merzbau. He began the first one in his house in Hanover as an abstract which counters the forward message” (Adams, Art plaster sculpture with apertures dedicated to his Dadaist and Across Time 859). Constructivist friends and containing objects commemorating them: Mondrian, Gabo, Arp, Lissitzky, Malevich, Richter, Mies van der Rohe, 2. “When viewers do, in fact, look, they see that and Van Doesburg. The Merzbau grew throughout the 1920s with Duchamp has penciled a beard and mustache onto a successive accretions of every kind of material until it filled the room. reproduction of Leonardo‟s Mona Lisa, turning her into Having then no place to go but up, he continued the construction with a bearded lady. One might ask whether Duchamp has implacable logic into the second story. When he was driven from „defaced‟ the Mona Lisa- perhaps a prefiguration of Germany by the Nazis and his original Merzbau was destroyed, Schwitters graffiti art- or merely „touched her up‟. This dilemma started another one in . The Nazi invasion forced him to England, plays with the sometimes fine line between creation where he began again for the third time. After his death in 1948, the and destruction (The modern expression „You have to third Merzbau was rescued and preserved in the University of Newcastle” break eggs to make an omelet‟ illustrates the (242). Schwitter‟s “compositions were normally modest in size, made up connection between creating and destroying that is from a „palette of objects‟, lovingly culled from urban waste. His system of made explicit by the Dada movement.)” (859). composition was based on a firm Cubist-Constructivist grid; despite the contrast of materials, their edges, thicknesses, surfaces, and colours are 3. “Man Ray‟s and Duchamp‟s artistic irreverence and exactly calibrated, and the fragments of lettering serve much the same mischievous desire to challenge normative aesthetic ends as they did for Braque and Picasso- to introduce points of legible taste were associated with what came to be called New reality into the midst of flux” (Hughes, Shock of the New 64). “Their York Dada, whose parent movement had been born in common theme was the city as compressor, intensifier of experience. So Zurich in 1916 in response tot he atrocities of World many people, and so many messages: so many traces of intimate War I. „The beginnings of Dada,‟ as , one journeys, news, meetings, possession, rejection, with the city renewing its of its founders, remarked, „were not the beginnings of fabric of transaction every moment of the day and night, as a snake casts art, but of disgust‟. Revolted by the senseless carnage its skin, leaving the patterns of the lost epidermis behind as „mere‟ of a war waged in the name of reason, European rubbish” (64). Jean “Arp and Schwitters used these „nonart‟ materials Dadists sought to remove the veneer of rationalism and instead of oil on canvas „to avoid any reminder of the paintings which expose the fundamental irrationality of human seemed to us to be characteristic of a pretentious, self-satisfied world,‟ behavior. But their nihilistic stridency was completely Arp said” (Strickland 148). “Unlike most of the other Dadaists, Schwitters absent from New York Dada. Distanced from the war did not want to make anti-art and non-art, but remained true to a and comfortable in the private world of affluence that traditional of art. He was concerned with a law that obeyed its own rules, the Arensbergs provided, American initially took little that had its own effects. But, exactly like the Dadaists, he felt the interest in the Zurich group. Not until 1920, when starting point of his art was the catastrophe of the First World War. Picabia and Duchamp returned from visits to Europe, „Everything was broken, and it was important to build new things out of where they met Tzara, was there any concentrated the wreckage‟. So he turned to what was destroyed and functionless” collaboration between the Americans and the (Krausse 100). Europeans” (Haskell 125).

22 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

G The Cabaret Voltaire

1. “The emphasis on individuality and irrational instinct evident in the work of artists like Gauguin and many of the Expressionists did not die out entirely after World War I. It endured in the Dada movement, which began with the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich on February 5, 1916. The cabaret‟s founders, German actor and artist Hugo Ball (1886-1927) and his companion, Emmy Hennings, a nightclub singer, had moved to neutral when the war broke out. Their cabaret, in the neighborhood where Lenin then lived in exile, was inspired by the bohemian artists‟ cafes they had known in Berlin and Munich. It immediately attracted a circle of avant -garde writers and artists of various nationalities who shared in Ball‟s and Hennings‟s disgust with bourgeois culture, which they blamed for the war” (Stokstad 1083).

2. “The way Ball performed one of his sound poems, „Karawane‟, reflects the spirit of the place. His legs and body encased in blue cardboard tubes, his head surmounted by a white-and-blue „witch-doctor‟s hat‟, as he called it, and his shoulders covered with a huge cardboard collar that flapped when he moved his arms, he slowly and solemnly recited the poem, which consisted entirely of nonsensical sounds. As was typical of Dada, this performance involved two separate and distinct aims, one critical and one playful. The first, as Ball said, was to renounce „the language devastated and made impossible by journalism‟. In other words, by retreating into precivilized sounds, he avoided language, which had been spoiled by the lies and excesses of journalism and advertising. The second aim was simply to amuse by reintroducing the healthy play of children back into what he considered overly restrained adult lives” (1083).

H Giorgio de Chirico. The Soothsayer’s Recompense, 1913 metaphysical painting and Nietzsche/ anachronistic elements/ melancholy theme of departure

1. Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) “links nineteenth-century Romantic fantasy with twentieth-century movements in the irrational, Dadaism, and Surrealism. Born in Greece of Italian parents, De Chirico learned drawing in Athens. After the death of his father, a railroad architect, the family moved to Munich, where the artistic leanings of the elder son Giorgio (then seventeen), and the musical leanings of the younger son Alberto, could be advanced” (Arnason 221). “De Chirico constantly referred to the metaphysical content of his paintings, using the term loosely or inaccurately to cover various effects of strangeness, surprise, and shock” (221). “De Chirico‟s approach to art, during his early and most important phase- up to 1920- was to examine a theme as though to wring from it its central mystery. In 1912 and 1913 the artist painted a group of works incorporating a Hellenistic sculpture of a reclining Ariadne, of which The Soothsayer’s Recompense, one of the finest, presents Classical facades parallel to the picture plane, but the large clock and the train moving along the horizon are nineteenth-century elements having an anachronistic affinity with the architecture. Such anomalies are commonplace in Italian cities: a palazzo may become a nineteenth-century railway station suggesting the melancholy of departure (a title he used), a melancholy saturating the shadowed square in which deserted Ariadne mourns her departed Theseus. At times, the strange, sad loneliness of De Chirico‟s squares takes on a dimension of fear, of isolation in a vast, empty space” (Arnason 221-222).

2. “De Chirico‟s main source, however, was the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901), whose work he saw when he was an art student in Munich in 1906… His work was drenched in an atmosphere of nostalgia and melancholy whose ideal site was the ruins and seacoasts of Italy. DeChirico found in Bocklin the very qualities that Italian Futurism most hated- mystery, nostalgia for the past, and a tremulous feeling for what is history-bound, rather than „objective‟ or „progressive‟, in human character. What fascinated him in the squares and arcades of Ferrara and Turin- the cities from which most of his motifs came- was not their solid architectural reality but their staginess. The quality de Chiricio called „metaphysics‟ or „metaphysical painting‟ (pittura metafisica) would not have been recognizable as such to a philosopher. It was a question of mood, the sense of a reality drenched in human emotion, almost pulpy with memory. „I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness,‟ he wrote of the first moment he felt it, in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence as a youth of twenty-two, „ and I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent. In the middle of the square rises a state of Dante draped in a long cloak. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at these things for the first time…‟ The form of this „convalescent world‟ fills de Chirico‟s paintings after 1912. It is an airless place, and its weather is always the same. The sun has a late-afternoon slant, throwing long shadows across the piazzas. Its clear and mordant light embalms objects, never caressing them, never providing the illusion of well—being. Space rushes away from one‟s eye, in long runs of arcades and theatrical perspectives; yet its elongation, which gives far things an entranced remoteness and clarity, is contradicted by a Cubist flattening and compression- de Chirico had been in Paris just before the war, at the height of Cubism, and knew Apollinaire well enough to have painted his portrait. When the picture plane is flattened but the things on it are still wrenched out of reach by de Chirico‟s primitive and inconsistent one-point perspective, the eye is frustrated” (Hughes, Shock of the New 217).

3. “The sense of strangeness de Chirico could conjure with familiar objects and scenes recalls Nietzsche‟s „foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed‟” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1038). “Drawing on irrational childhood fears, De Chirico is known for his eerie with empty arcades, raking light, and ominous shadows. The skewed perspective and nearly deserted squares inhabited by tiny, depersonalized figures project menace. In fact, with these paintings as his best evidence, De Chirico was exempted from military service as mentally unstable” (Strickland 149).

23 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

I Benito Mussolini and Fascism J Marc Chagall. I and the Village, 1911 elements of Expressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism/ simple 1. “Fascism became an important ideological and pleasures of folk life/ integrating circular shapes/ nature political force in Europe between World Wars I and II. With its fusion of reactionary nationalism and political vs. civilization/ varied proportions used in suggesting authoritarianism, Fascism gained the support of a wide memory spectrum of the population, particularly in Italy and Germany” (W ren 2: 323). “Italy emerged World War I 1. Marc Chagall (1889-1985) “was with its national pride humiliated by military defeats born in Vitebsk, Russia, of a large and its economy jeopardized by wartime debts, and poor Jewish family. From his unemployment, strikes, and acute depression. Against background he acquired a wonderful a background of increasing social unrest, repertoire of Russian-Jewish parliamentary government broke down, and Benito folktales and a deep and sentimental Mussolini (live 188301945; premier 1922-43) rose to attachment to the Jewish religion power. A socialist ex-schoolteacher, Mussolini and and tradition. There was also inbred been interested in the Italian revolutionary movement in him a fairytale sense of fantasy. since his youth. He had also immersed himself in the Out of these elements emerged his pessimistic ph ilosophy of Nietzsche, which had led personal and poetic painting” him to believe that humanitarian ideals were the (Arnason 220). “In Paris, Chagall weapons of the weak and feeble, that violence was the entered the orbit of Apollinaire and fundamental element of social transformation, and that the leaders of the new Cubism, as Italy could be restored to greatness only by a plan of well as that of Modigliani, Soutine, vigorous action, even a „bath of blood‟, directed by a and Jules and Pascin. Chagall‟s strong leader” (323). Russian paintings had largely been intimate genre scenes, often 2. “He himself served in the trenches and was badly brightened by elements of Russian or wounded. Upon recovery, he began to organize ex- Jewish folklore” (220). soldiers into ant-socialist fascios to combat left-wing groups with strong-arm methods. Within two years, 2. “Painted the year after Chagall came to Paris, I and the Village evokes there were more than eight hundred branches of the his memories of his native Hasidic community outside Vitebsk. In the „black shirt‟ organization, the Fasci di village, peasants and animals lived side by side, in a mutual dependence Combattimento . In October 1922 the „March on Rome‟ here signified by the line from peasant to cow, connecting their eyes. The took place. Mussolini mobilized the Blackshirts for a peasant‟s flowering sprig, symbolically a tree of life, is the reward for their threatened coup, which ended when he became partnership. For Hasids, animals were also humanity‟s link to the premier. Opposition to his political reign as Il Duce, universe, and the painting‟s large circular forms suggest the orbiting sun, The Leader, was crushed by assassination, police moon (in eclipse at the lower left), and earth. The geometries of I and the terror, Fascist militia violence, press control, and, in Village are inspired by the broken planes of Cubism, but Chagall‟s is a 1928, the suspension of parliamentary government. personalized version. As a boy he had loved geometry: „Lines, angles, During the 1920s Mussolini tried to resolve Italy‟s triangles, squares,‟ he would later recall, „carried me far away to economic difficulties by increasing state intervention. enchanting horizons‟. Conversely, in Paris he used a disjunctive geometric During the 1930s Mussolini sought to expand Italy‟s structure to carry him back home. Where Cubism was mainly an art of political influence by invading Ethiopia, by aiding urban avant-garde society, I and the Village is nostalgic and magical, a Francisco Franco (1892-1975) in Spain, and by forming rural fairy tale: objects jumble together, scale shifts abruptly, and a an alliance with Germany. Il Duce waited until France woman and two houses, at the painting‟s top, stand upside-down. „For fell before bringing Italy into World War II in 1940. The the Cubists,‟ Chagall said, „a painting was a surface covered with forms in failure of his military campaign resulted in Mussolini‟s a certain order. For me a painting is a surface covered with temporary fall from power in 1943. Restored to power representations of things… in which logic and illustration have no by German forces, Mussolini had little support within importance‟”(Bee 63). Italy after the German defeat. In 1945 he was captured, tried, and executed by Italian partisans” 3. “In 1914, …, arranged an exhibition of Chagall‟s work (323). in Berlin. It had a great impact on the German Expressionists, one that extended well beyond World War I. The outbreak of war caught Chagall in 3. “Mussolini owed much to his rise to power to his Russia, where he then stayed until 1922. After the Russian Revolution, abilities as a spellbinding orator. In a speech delivered like Malevich and other avant-garde artists, he served for a time as a in Parma, Italy, on December 13, 1914, the young commissar of fine arts and formed a free art academy. Perhaps his most Mussolini not only advocated Italian entry into World fruitful work was for the Yiddish theater in Moscow, painting murals and War I but also derided the sentiments of „brotherhood designing settings and costumes. This opportunity to work on a large and love‟ and declared that war was of „divine origin‟… scale in the theater continued to fascinate him and to inspire some of his Like Mussolini, de Chirico was influenced by the most striking painting” (220). “Back in Paris in 1923, Chagall became philosophy of Nietzsche. In paintings such as increasingly active in the graphic arts, especially for the dealer Ambroise Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) and Mystery and Vollard. Over the years he continued to move from project to project with Melancholy of a Street (1914), de Chirico uses undiminished energy and enthusiasm. In 1945 he designed sets and exaggerated perspective to create a disturbing costumes for Stravinskky‟s Firebird. He made color lithographs, produced atmosphere. The silent and virtually empty city spaces sculptures and ceramics, designed a ceiling for the Paris Opera and became haunting images of loneliness and isolation. At murals for the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in New York. the same time, they realize Nietzsche‟s concept of art as Chagall‟s love of rich, translucent color, particularly the primaries blue, a symbolic vision” (323-324). red, and yellow, made stained glass a medium natural for him” (221).

24 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism Study Guide

K Max Ernst. Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924 increased sense of absurdity/ a strange title/ Andre Breton and “le merveilleux”

1. “The second European movement that resisted the rationalist tide of postwar art and architecture, Surrealism, was the creation of a French writer, Andre Breton (1896-1966), one of the many writers involved in the Paris Dada movement after the war. Breton became dissatisfied with the playful nonsense activities of his colleagues and wished to turn Dada‟s implicit desire to free human behavior into something more programmatic. In 1924 he published his „Manifesto of Surrealism‟, outlining his own view of Freud‟s discovery that the human psyche is a battleground where the rational, civilized forces of the conscious mind struggle against the irrational, instinctual urges of the unconscious. The way to achieve happiness, Breton argued, does not lie in strengthening the repressive forces of reason, as the Purists insisted, but in freeing the individual to express personal desires, as Gauguin and Die Brucke had asserted. Breton and the group around him developed a number of techniques for liberating the individual unconscious, including dream analysis, free association, automatic writing, word games, and hypnotic trances. Their aim was to help people discover the larger reality, or „surreality‟, that lay beyond the narrow rational notions of what is real” (Stokstad 1087).

2. The self-taught painter Max Ernst (1891-1976) “was born near Cologne, Germany, in a family headed by a stern disciplinarian father. Horrified by World War I, Ernst helped to organize a Dada movement in Cologne. In 1922 he moved to Paris and joined the Dada group there. When Paris Dada evolved into Surrealism, he participated in the search for new ways to free his imagination. One of the liberating techniques he developed was , the rubbing of a pencil or crayon across a piece of paper placed on a textured surface. Ernst found that these imprints stimulated his imagination. He discovered in them a host of strange creatures and places” (1088).

3. “In Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, a girl, frightened by the bird‟s flight (birds appear often in Ernst‟s work), brandishes a knife; another faints away. A man carrying a baby balances on the roof of a hut, which, like the work‟s gate (which makes sense in the picture) and knob (which does not), is a three-dimensional supplement to the canvas. This combination of unlike elements, flat and volumetric, extends the collage technique, which Ernst cherished for its „systematic displacement‟. „He who speaks of collage,‟ the artist believed, „speaks of the irrational‟. But even if the scene were entirely a painted illusion, it would have a hallucinatory unreality, and indeed Ernst linked this work of this period to childhood memories and dreams. Ernst was one of many artists who emerged from service in World War I deeply alienated from the conventional values of his European world. In truth, his alienation predated the war; he would later describe himself when young as avoiding „any studies which might degenerate into bread winning,‟ preferring „those considered futile by his professors- predominantly painting. Other futile pursuits: reading seditious philosophers and unorthodox poetry‟. The war years, however, focused Ernst‟s revolt and put him in contact with kindred spirits in the Dada movement. He later became a leader in the emergence of Surrealism” (Bee 105).

4. “For most of Ernst‟s images from the early twenties, however, there is no rational explanation and no hope of one. They seem to issue from a parallel world, a place of lucid dread, as if the dream world of de Chirico had lost all its yearning, melancholy, narcissism, and historical nostalgia, and become infused with unique and sharp-edged modern fears. Ernst could compress a great deal of psychic violence into a small space, the size of a booby-trapped toy- and maintain that pitch of intensity across a long run of images” (Hughes, Shock of the New 222). “One of the channels through which Ernst‟s aggression often ran was the idea of lost innocence seen, not nostalgically, but with a sort of icy derangement, as in Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. Parts of it look so innocuous; the house is as harmless as a cuckoo clock, the landscape pastoral. Why should a nightingale frighten anyone? And what kind of world could contain, as part of casual narrative, the idea of a „menacing‟ nightingale? What disturbs the viewer, knowing the title- Ernst‟s long, mystifying titles were an integral part of his work- is the utter disproportion between cause, the bird‟s song, and effect, the terror it inspires. One cannot know what is in this little world within the frame- nor, the collage implies, in the big one that includes the picture” (222).

5. “Surrealism‟s favorite way of evoking what it called “the marvelous”, that most prized quality of all experience, was by chance association. „The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful‟, Breton wrote, claiming that the perception of beauty belonged to the same order of experience as fear or sexual desire; there was nothing intellectual I it, it could not be duplicated, only found. It could lurk equally well in a picture postcard, a 1900 inkstand in the Flea Market, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, an electric sign, or a friend‟s suicide. Art could release it mediumistically, rather than deliberately create it” (225). “The fantasy is given peculiar emphasis b the elements in actual relief- the house on the right and the open gate on the left. Even the heavy, traditional frame introduces an oppressive note. Contrary to Ernst‟s usual sequence, the title of this painting came first. In his biographical summary, speaking in the third person, the artist noted: „He never imposes a title on a painting. He waits until a title imposes itself. Here, however, the title existed before the picture was painted‟” (Arnason 275).

6. “Here, Ernst displayed a private dream that challenged the post-Renaissance idea that a painting should resemble a window looking into a „real‟ scene rendered illusionistically three-dimensional through mathematical perspective. In Two Children Are Threatened the artist painted the landscape, the distant city, and the tiny flying bird in conventional fashion; he followed all the established rules of aerial and linear perspective. The three sketchily rendered figures, however, clearly belong to a dream world, and the literally three- dimensional miniature gate, the odd button knob, and the strange closed building „violate‟ the bulky frame‟s space. Additional dislocation occurs in the traditional museum identification label, which Ernst displaced into a cutaway part of the frame. Handwritten, it announces the work‟s title (taken from a poem Ernst wrote before he painted this), adding another note of irrational mystery… Viewers must struggle to decipher connections between the images and words” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1039).

25 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

L Max Ernst. The Elephant M Paul Klee. Twittering Machine, 1922, watercolor and pen and ink Celebes, 1921 attachment to the Bauhaus/ metaphorical mechanized birds/ exploring Surrealistic satire on machine the collective unconscious/ strong appreciation of children‟s art aesthetic/ influence of assemblage art 1. Paul Klee (1879-1940) “was born in Switzerland, the son of a musician” (Arnason 130). “He married a pianist and until his final illness played the violin for an hour every morning. “Other paintings from this stage of Although he was included in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition, Ernst‟s work are simply indecipherable in 1912, his involvement with the group was never more than in their strangeness, although one can tangential. It was not Der Blaue Reiter but a 1914 trip to still identify their sources. The shape Tunisia that inspired in his interest in the expressive potential of of the monster whose gross bulk fills color” (Stokstad 1048). “Klee shared the widespread modern the frame of The Elephant Celebes, apprehension about the rationalism driving a technological 1921, was inspired by a photograph of civilization that could destroy as much as construct. As do a Sudanese corn bin raised from the some psychologists, he sought clues to humanity‟s deeper ground on „legs ‟; his immediately nature in primitive shapes and symbols. Like Jung, Klee seems suggested, to Ernst, a waddling animal. to have accepted the existence of a collective unconscious that Its topknot obviously comes from de reveals itself in archaic signs and patterns and that is Chirico‟s assemblies of drafting everywhere evident in the art of so-called „primitive‟ cultures” instruments, and its title (according to (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1043). Ernst‟s lifelong friend, the leader of the English Surrealist group, Roland 2. After serving in the German army, “Gropius invited him to join the staff of the Bauhaus at Penrose) was extracted from a Weimar, and he remained affiliated with the school from 1921 to 1931. Becoming a teacher schoolboy rhyme whose anal humor forced him to examine the tenets of his own painting, something that he did in publications amused Ernst - „The Elephant of of the greatest significance for modern art and particularly for those aspects concerned with Celebes/ Has sticky, yellow bottom- expression of personal fantasy” (Arnason 329). “Like Mondrian and Kandinsky, Klee was grease‟. Moreover, the animal bears concerned in his teachings and his painting with the geometric elements of the work of art- some general resemblance, in profile, to the point, the line, the plane, and the solid. To him, however, these elements had a primary the outline of the Island of Celebes on basis in nature and growth. It was the process of change from one to the other that the map, only with its „trunk‟ in a fascinated him. To Klee the painting continually grew and changed in time as well as in different position (although other space” (329). “Klee thus was a Romantic, a mystic. He saw the painting, or rather the Surrealists though this island creative act, as a magical experience in which the artist was enabled in moments of resembled an anteater, and accordingly illumination to combine an inner vision with an outer experience of the world, in the visible gave it a high place in the roster of rendering of a truth that was not „truth to man or nature,‟ but was itself parallel to and countries of Surrealist interest)” capable of illuminating the essence of man or nature” (329). (Hughes, Shock of the New 222). 3. “Klee‟s works, such as Twittering Machine, are small and intimate in scale. A viewer must 2. “A huge „elephant‟ confronts a draw near to decipher the delicately rendered forms and enter this mysterious dream world. beckoning, headless, nude female The artist joined the ancient world of nature and the modern world of machines in this mannequin. The elephant has a horned picture. Four diagrammatic birds, like those in a cuckoo clock, appear forced into twittering head, but behind him is a set of tusks action- in this case, by the turning of a crank-driven mechanism… Klee linked the birds with suggests a second, or alternative permanently to the machine, creating an ironic vision of existence in the modern age. Each head. True to the nature of collage, bird responds in such an individual way that viewers may see all of them as metaphors for clues in the picture hinder rather than themselves- being trapped by the operation of the industrial society that either created or help the viewer‟s quest for maintain” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1044). “The „twittering‟ in the title doubtless refers understanding: the elephant is on solid to the birds, while the „machine‟ is suggested by the hand crank. The two elements are, grown, yet fish swim in the sky” literally, a fusing of the natural with the industrial world. Each bird stands with beak open, (Bradley 28). poised as if to announce the moment when the misty cool blue of night gives way to the pink glow of dawn. The scene evokes an abbreviated pastoral” (Bee 127). The birds “appear closer to deformations of nature. The hand crank conjures up the idea that this „machine‟ is a music box, where the birds function as bait to lure victims to the pit over which the machine hovers. We can imagine the fiendish cacophony made by the shrieking birds, their legs drawn thin and taut as they strain against the machine to which they are fused” (Bee 127).

4. Some observes think that the individual birds “may represent the four temperaments of the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance periods, while their loony appearance also features avian shapes capable of luring real birds into a trap in the rectangular trough at the bottom of the image” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1044). Paul Klee “made many pencil drawings that reveal his attraction to linear, childlike imagery, as well as the influence of Surrealist „automatic writing‟” (Adams, Art Across Time 864). “With a few simple lines, he has created a ghostly mechanism that simultaneously mocks our faith in the miracles of the Machine Age and our sentimental appreciation of bird song. It is the quality of the line itself that evokes the raspy sound made by this strange device. The little contraption is not without its sinister aspect: the heads of the four sham birds look like fishermen‟s lures, as if they might entrap real birds. It thus condenses into one striking invention a complex set of ideas about present-day civilization” (Janson 800-801). 26 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

N Andre Breton and the Surrealists

1. “The word Surrealism was coined in Paris in 1917 by the writer Guillaume Apollinaire. He used it to describe two instances of artistic innovation. The first of these was ‟s ballet Parade, which had a score by Eric Satie and a curtain and costumes by Pablo Picasso. In the programme notes, Apollinaire wrote that the artistic truth resulting from the evening‟s combination of elements was a truth beyond realism- „a kind of sur-realism‟. The second instance was Apollinaire‟s own play, Les Mamelles de Tiresias (The Breasts of Tiresias), which he subtitled „A Surrealist drama‟. Neither of these artistic events could be described as „Surrealist‟ in the sense in which we now understand it, but in 1924, in the Manifeste du surrealisme which launched the Surrealist movement, the writer Andre Breton and his friend Philippe Soupault adopted the word, and „baptized by the name of Surrealism the new mode of expression which we had at our disposal and which we wished to pass on to our friends‟” (Bradley 6).

2. “Breton‟s friends were primarily fellow writers, and Surrealism was initially a literary endeavor. No agenda was set for Surrealist visual artists until Breton wrote Surrealism and Painting in 1925, and no specifically Surrealist exhibition space existed until the Galerie surrealiste opened in 1926” (7). “In the case of the Surrealists, this new world was that of the unconscious mind; what they called the „merveilleux ‟, the marvelous. Surrealism sought communication with the irrational and the illogical, deliberately disorienting and reorienting the conscious by means of the unconscious” (9). “The marvelous was thought to occur naturally, in spaces where the curse of reason had yet to penetrate: in childhood, madness, sleeplessness and drug-induced hallucination; in so-called „primitive‟ societies whose members were thought to be closer to their instincts than to the learned sophistication of „civilization‟; and, crucially, in dreams, the conditions of which the painters attempted to reproduce” (9).

3. “The first visual artists came to Breton somewhat later than the first poets. The German artist Max Ernst‟s first Paris exhibition was in 1921, and was the result of an invitation from Breton, who wrote a preface for the exhibition catalogue. Ernst already knew of Breton from reading Littérature in Germany. In February 1924, Breton bought a painting by Andre Masson at an exhibition and met him a few months later. Masson was living and working on the rue Blomet and introduced Breton to his neighbor, Joan Miró. The two painters had adjacent studios and talked to each other through a hole in the partition wall” (9). “Throughout the 1920s, Surrealism was a riot of encounters, inaugurations, publications, and exhibitions. As well as the publication of the Manifesto, October 1924 also saw the establishment of the „bureau des recherches surrealistes‟, a bureau for Surrealist research which gave members of the group a base other than the café and which was responsible for distributing leaflets and printed Surrealist aphorisms („tell your children your dreams‟) around the streets of Paris” (9).

4. “For visual artists, attempting to find a place within a movement whose development since before 1919 had been entirely in the realm of spoken and written language, automatism meant placing their trust in the creative power of a purely visual language. Their medium was the mark rather than the word, and so they began with automatic drawing. Andre Masson, in particular, was very successful. He found that he was able to draw, or doodle, in an abstracted state of mind. His pencil called marks from out of his unconscious and onto the paper. Only then did he allow his conscious mind to shape forms out the marks” (21). “Sand painting was a successful technique discovered and practiced by Masson. He would drip or smear glue onto a piece of paper or canvas at random, sprinkle sand over the glue, and then use the resulting sand patches as pre-pictorial inspiration. Like the initial marks in an automatic drawing, the glue and sand gave him a starting point that was unaffected by either his rational mind or his artistic will. Miró had been recorded as working in a similar way, but from an even more arbitrary starting point: he is said to have once made a painting around the traces of a fallen blob of jam” (22). “Max Ernst developed a more or less automatic method of drawing which was translatable into . He would create a surface pattern by rubbing with pencil or charcoal on a piece of paper laid over a rough or interesting surface. This technique, similar to that of brass rubbing, he called „frottage‟. It could be adapted for painting by laying a thickly painted canvas over a similar surface while the paint was still wet, and scraping off layers of paint. Paint clung to the indentions of the material underneath so that, again, a pattern was created. This Ernst called „‟. Both frottage and grattage provided Ernst with involuntarily produced marks out of which he could develop finished works. He called the process of calling forth images from out of these textures „seeing into‟, and was inspired to do it by the childhood memory of an imitation mahogany panel” (22-23).

5. “Frottage, grattage, sand painting and automatic drawing are all techniques which seek to deny, or at least to defer until a later stage, the individual creativity of their practitioners. „In striving more and more to restrain my own active participation in the unfolding of the picture and, finally, by widening in this way the active part of the mind‟s hallucinatory faculties I came to assist as a spectator at the birth of all my works‟ (Ernst, Beyond Painting). Decalcomania was another widely used technique for achieving such detachment. It involved spreading gouache, ink or oil paint onto a smooth, non-absorbent surface such as glass. Paper or canvas was then pressed onto the coated surface and, when peeled away, retained the color of the paint in fantastically textured surfaces which could then be worked over. The surfaces themselves, like those of frottage, would suggest a direction for the finished work to take” (23-24). “Collaboration was a further way to produce images which defied the rational apparatus of the artist‟s individual, conscious mind. Dada artists had already experimented with working collaboratively… Surrealism, however, was a movement for which collaboration and collectivity were crucially important. The name of the movement itself had been coined during two separate instances of artistic collaboration (a ballet and a play), and its members included artists with widely varying methods of practice” (24).“The Surrealists invented the „cadavre exquis‟ or exquisite corpse, a collaborative verbal and visual game the results of which were regularly published in La Revolution surrealiste. Games were used by the group to catch out the conscious mind and to draw directly on the unfettered imagination. This particular game had similarities to the game of „consequences‟, and resulted in a sentence or a drawing of a figure being completed on a piece of paper passed around the group. Each player contributed an element (a noun or a head, for example), folded the paper down and passed it on. The game derived its name from one particular written result: „the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine‟. The „exquisite corpse‟ game is an example of the continuous interchange between the poetic and the pictorial which is one of the principal characteristics of early Surrealism. While experimenting with some of the techniques outlined above, Masson and Miró also pursued this interchange as a way of making Surrealist images which might unlock the secrets of the unconscious” (24).

27 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

O Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory, 1931 technique of fifteenth century Flemish painting employed/ limp watches/ ants and a fly/ infinite space/ “paranoic-critical method

1. “Among the writers and artists around Breton was the Spanish painter and printmaker Salvador Dali (1904-1989). In the early 1920s Dali had trained at the Academy in , where he quickly mastered the traditional methods of representation. In 1928 he took a taxi from Spain to see Versailles and meet Picasso in Paris. While there, he also met the Surrealists and quickly converted to their cause. For several years Breton considered him the movement‟s official painter. Dali‟s contribution to Surrealist theory was the „paranoic-critical method‟, in which the sane man or woman cultivates the ability of the paranoic to misread ordinary appearances in order to free himself or herself from the shackles of conventional thought. A good example of this method at work is The Persistence of Memory, which is set on the Bay of Rosas near his birthplace and based on a childhood memory of a doctor asking to see his tongue. The French words montrer („to show‟) and langue („tongue‟), according to the paranoic-critical method, easily become montre („watch‟) and langueur („languid‟). One of the soft watches drapes over a fetal image of the artist himself, who claimed to have a classic Oedipal love for his mother. The fetus belongs in the mother‟s womb, where Dali longed to return. The ants on the hard watch in the foreground are an expression of the anxieties that attended his Oedipal love, namely, the fears of the father‟s anger. Curiously, Dali chose a highly realistic style in order to make his irrational world seem more convincing” (Stokstad 1087).

2. “Surrealism had first come to New York in 1932, with the exhibition Surrealism at the Julien Levy Gallery. This exhibition both introduced the American public to Surrealist art and launched Surrealist artists onto the American art scene. Dali in particular was a great success. His The Persistence of Memory, his famous „soft watches‟, was shown in this exhibition for the first time, and in 1933 and 1934 he had solo shows with the same gallery. He became a star” (Bradley 62). “Increasingly, however, Dali became an ambassador for himself. He lectured at the Museum of Modern Art, was on the cover of Time magazine, and persuaded the cream of New York society into Dalinian costume for an „oneiric ball‟ given in his honor by Caresse Crosby. He was much in demand as a portraitist, painting rich and influential American patrons in Surrealist guise, performing feats of metamorphosis upon their distinctive profiles or chaining them to painted cliffs with their jewelry. Although throughout most of the 1932s Dali remained close to Breton‟s vision of Surrealism, by 1940 Breton had become impatient with what he perceived to be Dali‟s cheapening of Surrealism into portraiture, fashion, and fascist politics. Dali was fascinated by Hitler. His Mountain Lake of 1938 is part of a series of paintings inspired by Chamberlain‟s phone calls to Hitler which culminated in the Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938” (62). “It should be remembered that Surrealism was a revolutionary movement not only in literature and art but also in politics. The periodical founded by Breton in 1925 as the voice of Surrealism was named La Revolution surrealiste, and it maintained a steady Communist line during the 1920s. The Dadaists at the end of the war were anarchists, and many future Surrealists joined them. Feeling that government systems guided by tradition and reason had led mankind into the bloodiest holocaust in history, they insisted that non-government was better, that the irrational was preferable to the rational in art, and in all of life and civilization. The Russian Revolution and the spread of Communism provided a channel for Surrealist protests during the 1920s” (Arnason 289). “Dali shared the Surrealist antagonism to formalist art, from Neo-Impressionism to Cubism and abstraction. The Persistence of Memory of 1931 is a denial of every twentieth- century experiment in abstract organization. Its miniature technique goes back to the Flemish art of the fifteenth century, and its sour greens and yellows recall nineteenth-century chromo-lithographs. The space is as infinite as Tanguy‟s, but rendered with hard objectivity. The picture‟s frame comes largely from the presentation of recognizable objects in an unusual context, with unnatural attributes. The limp watches, in fact, have become a popular visual synonym for Surrealist fantasy” (292). “By 1930 Dali had left De Chirico‟s generalized dream world for his own world of violence, blood, and decay. He sought to create in his art a specific documentation of Freudian theories applied to his own inner world. He started paining with the first image that came into his mind and went on from one association to the next, multiplying images of persecution or megalomania like a true paranoiac. He defined his paranoic-critical method as a „spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon he interpretative-critical association of delirious phenomena‟” (292).

3. “Dali had been a member of the Paris Surrealists for five years when The Persistence of Memory was shown in a New York gallery, and ended up in the renowned Museum of Modern Art, New York. This saw the beginning of the Spanish artist‟s spectacularly contentious career as a big star, particularly in America. The soft clocks became one of the trademarks that he included in other paintings, graphic work and stage designs. In newspaper caricatures of the time they hang over the door-handle of his hotel-room, flow out from beneath his blankets or replace an out-stretched tongue” (Krausse 103). “The psychoanalyst Freud used a simple pair of concepts to describe the everyday workings of the human psyche: the „reality principle‟ ensures adaptation to one‟s surroundings, but is constantly infiltrated by the „pleasure principle‟. For Dali, clocks, normalized instruments of measurement, represented the reality principle, while soft, „edible‟ objects belonged to the pleasure principle. In addition, Dali‟s paintings show a connection between the perception of time and the perception of space. The clocks, flowing through space and time, prompt thoughts of the „flow‟ of time, and give the impression of a time and space of memory dissolving into the distance, a zone invaded by the inexplicable, and one which unconsciously influences the experience of the present” (103).“Hard objects become inexplicably limp in this bleak and infinite dreamscape, while metal attracts ants like rotting flesh. Mastering what he called „the usual paralyzing trick of eye-fooling‟, Dali painted with what he called „the most imperialist fury of precision,‟ but only, he said, „to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality‟. It is the classical Surrealis t ambition, yet some literal reality is included too: the distant golden cliffs are the coast of Catalonia, Dali‟s home. Those limp watches are as soft as overripe cheese-indeed „the camembert of time‟, in Dali‟s phrase. Here time must lose all meaning. Permanence goes with it: ants… represent decay… an approximation of Dali‟s own face in profile, its long eyelashes seem disturbingly insectlike or event sexual” (Bee 154). 28 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

P Meret Oppenheim. Object (Dejeuner en fourrure), 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon Meret Oppenheim/ “convulsive beauty”

1. “Meret Oppenheim frequently used to recount how her famous fur-lined cup came into being: it was a whimsical tale that even involved the magician Picasso. Despite her rapid success de scandale in the Paris of the 1930s- thanks to Man Ray‟s nude photographs of her- the young painter had to struggle to earn a living with fashion and decorative work. She had the idea of creating bracelets made of metal and covered with fur for Schiaparelli. These creations were much admired by the artists who used to frequent the Café de Flore, including Dora Maar and Picasso, and the latter began to speculate on other objects that could be covered in fur. „The saucer- and the cup too…‟ suggested Oppenehim, whereupon, inspired by the idea, she went out and bought a cheap cup, saucer, and spoon,, covered them with Chinese gazelle hide, and showed them in 1936 in two Surrealist exhibitions. The artifact reduced to a monster soon ended up in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, whose director, Alfred Barr Jr., realized that it was to become a milestone in 20th century art, an icon caught between Dada and Pop Art, in which artifacts were removed from their ordinary contexts and converted into aesthetic, demonized, ironic- and ultimately banal- objects through a process of alienation” (Tesch and Hollmann 96).

2. “ of an everyday artifact with pleasant associations into a hairy object with animal overtones, mocking its former purpose and implying a „function‟ of another kind, met with a mixture of shock, irritation, and annoyance- despite its playful, witty presentation. It triggered, of course, all sorts of tantalizing erotic associations, which Andre Breton subtly expressed in entitling it Dejeuner en fourrure (Breakfast in Fur), with its reference to Manet‟s frivolous paintings Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe and Sacher-Masoch‟s book Venus in Furs. Oppenheim‟s work during this period is full of socially critical overtones and psychological traps- often of a sexually pathological nature- that alternate between esprit, irony, poetry, and melancholy. The white, stiletto-heeled shoes served up like chicken thighs in paper frills and entitled My , or the Stone Woman on the beach, whose body continues into the water in the form of a , are Surrealist aphorisms that nevertheless offer wide scope for interpretation. Even in the later stages of her artistic development, Meret Oppenheim remained highly individualistic, independent, and mercurial. It was, therefore, all the more unfortunate that for decades the public associated her with the fur-lined cup. In 1970, when a gallery owner requested her to produce it in multiples, she made it into a kitschy souvenir- thus sardonically bridging the gap between Surrealism and Pop Art” (96).

“A small concave object covered with fur, Object may also have a sexual connotation and politic: working in a male-dominated art world, perhaps Oppenheim was mocking the prevailing „masculinity‟ of sculpture, which conventionally adopts a hard substance and vertical orientation that can be seen as almost absurdly self-referential. Chic, wry, and simultaneously attractive and disturbing, Object is shrewdly and quietly aggressive” (Bee 155).

Q Women and Surrealism

1. “During the 1930s, came to Surrealism in large numbers, attracted by the movement‟s anti-academic stance and by its sanctioning of art in which personal reality dominates. But they found themselves struggling toward artistic maturity in the context of a movement that defined them as confirming and completing a male creative cycle and that metaphorically obliterated subject/object polarities through violent assaults on the female image. Not surprisingly, most women ended by asserting their independence from Surrealism. Almost without exception, women artists saw themselves as outside the inner circle of poets and painters which produced Surrealist manifestos and formulated Surrealist theory. Most of them were young women just embarking on artistic careers when they came to Paris; many of them did their mature work only after leaving the Surrealist circle. Often they came to Surrealism through personal relationships with men in the group rather than shared political or theoretical goals. Yet they made significant contributions to the language of Surrealism, replacing the male Surrealists‟ love of hallucination and erotic violence with an art of magical fantasy and narrative flow ” (Chadwick 291-292).

2. “Surrealism‟s multiple and ambivalent visions of woman converge in its identification of her with the mysterious forces and regenerative powers of nature. Women artists were quick to draw on this identification, but they did it with an analytic mind and an ironic stance. Artists like Leonora Carrington (b. 1917), Leonor Fini (b. 1918), the American painters Kay Sage (1898-1963) and (b. 1912) and the Spanish- Mexican artist Remedios Varo (b. 1908) received varying degrees of formal training. Yet they meticulously built up tight surfaces with layers of small and carefully modulated brushstrokes. However fantastic their imagery, they often worked with precision and care of illustrators, as if their creative model was scientific investigation rather than Surrealist explosiveness” (292-293). “Women artists dismissed male romanticizing of nature as female and nurturing (or female and destructive) and replaced it with a more austere and ironic vision” (293). “Surrealism constructed women as magic objects and sites on which to project male erotic desire. They recreated themselves as beguiling personalities, poised uneasily between the worlds of artifice and nature, or the instinctual life. The duality of the Mexican Frida Kahlo‟s life (1907-54)… invests her painting with a haunting complexity and a narrative quality which disturbs in its ambiguity” (294). “For Kahlo, as for other women artists associated with the Surrealists, painting became a means of sustaining a dialogue with inner reality. Surrealism sanctioned personal exploration for both men and women; in doing so, it legitimized a path familiar to many women and gave new artistic form to some of the conflicts confronting women in early twentieth -century movements” (296).

29 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism Study Guide

R Rene Magritte. The Treason of Images, 1928-29 dislocation of meaning and image/ interest in the ordinary

1. In contrast to Dali, Rene Magritte (1898-1967) “has been called the invisible man among the Surrealists. George Melly, in he script for a BBC film on Magritte, wrote: „He is a secret agent; his object is to bring into disrepute the whole apparatus of bourgeois reality. Like all saboteurs, he avoids detection by dressing and behaving like everybody else‟. Thanks perhaps to the artist‟s anonymity, the works of Magritte have had gradual but overwhelming impact, like a glacial flow. After years of sporadic study at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts, Magritte, like Tanguy, was shocked into realizing his destiny when in 1922 he saw a reproduction of De Chircio‟s 1914 painting The Song of Love. In 1926 he emerged as an individual artist with a style based on that of De Chirico” (Arnason 294).

2. “The perfect symbol (except that Magritte disliked attributions of specific symbolism) for his approach is the painting entitled The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images. It portrays a briar pipe so meticulously that it might serve as a tobacconist‟s trademark. Beneath, rendered with comparable precision, is the legend Ceci n’est pas une pipe („This is not a pipe‟). This delightful work confounds pictorial reality. A similar idea is embodied in The False Mirror: the eye as a false mirror when it views the white clouds and blue sky of nature. This might be another statement of the artist‟s faith, for The False Mirror introduces the illusionistic theme of the landscape that is a painting, not nature. The problem of real space versus spatial illusion is as old as painting itself, but here it is imaginatively treated. Magritte‟s studies include many variations of the theme, the simplest of which shows an easel with a painted canvas in front of a window” (295).

3. “Surrealist paintings tend to be object based. In order to discredit and destabilize perceived normality, Surrealist artists manipulated recognizable objects, blurring the boundary between the real of the imaginary. Thus, Magritte‟s The Treason of Images confronts the viewer with an illusionistic pipe. At the same time, the picture‟s caption denies that it is a pipe. A brief moment of disorientation ensues until the contradiction is resolved- it is not a pipe, but rather a painting of a pipe. Neither the image nor the caption is lying to the viewer. The painting does, however, act out the warning implied by its title: the image is so illusionistic that it is treacherous, making us „see‟ something (a real pipe) that is not really there. Perhaps even real pipes are treacherous. The painting makes us doubt that we can rely on our perception of things. A notion of objects as untrustworthy is of course central to Surrealism: the marvelous, the dream and the unconscious mind are all places of incipient metamorphosis where objects, symbols of irrational desires, are subject to sudden mutation” (Bradley 41).

4. “In the midst of a movement which specialized in provocations, attention-grabbing stunts, political embroilments, sexual scandals, ruptures of friendship, and fervid half-religious crises, Magritte seemed uncommonly phlegmatic. He lived in respectable Brussels, and stayed married to the same woman, Georgette Berger, till his death; by the standards of the Paris art world in the thirties, he might as well have been a grocer. Yet this stolid enchanter possessed one of the most remarkable imaginations of the twentieth century. Magritte‟s work serves its modern audience rather as the sultans of Victorian narrative painting, the Friths and Poynters and Alma- Tademas, served theirs- as a source of stories. Modern art has been well supplied with myth makers, from Picasso to Barnett Newman. But it had few masters of the narrative impulse, and Magritte was its fabulist-in-chief. His images were stories first, paintings second, but the paintings were not slices of life or historical scenes. They were snapshots of the impossible, rendered in the dullest and most literal way: vignettes of language and reality locked in mutual cancellation. As a master of puzzle-painting, Magritte had no equal, and his influence on the formation of images- and on how people interpret them- has been very wide” (Hughes, 243).

5. “In 1923, Corbusier reproduced- in Towards an Architecture, as an emblem of plain functional design- a pipe. Five years later, Magritte painted his riposte to Corbusier‟s single-level rationalism in The Treason of Images, 1928-9. „This is not a pipe‟. But if not, then what is it? A painting, the painting answers; a sign that denotes an object and triggers memory. The phrase, „Ceci n’est pas une pipe‟, has become one of the catch-lines of modern art, a condensed manifesto about language and the way meaning is conveyed, or blocked, by symbols. No painter had ever made the point that „A painting is not what it represents‟ with such epigrammatic clarity before. Corbusier‟s pipe, as redone by Magritte, was the hole in the mirror of illusion, a passage into a quite different world where things lose their names or, keeping them, change their meanings. At one border, Magritte‟s field of action touched on philosophy; at the other, farce” (243-244). “With his dry, matter-of-fact technique, slowly acquired and without the least trace of the „natural‟ painter to enliven it, Magritte painted things so ordinary that they might have come from a phrasebook: an apple, a comb, a cloud, a hat, a birdcage, a street of prim suburban houses. There was not much on this list that an average Belgian, around 1935, would not have seen or used in the course of an average day. Magritte‟s poetry was inconceivable without the banality through, and on, which it worked. If they did not have a reportorial air, a denial of fantasy built into their very style, his paintings would be far less eloquent. And if his art had confined itself to the administration of shock, it would have been as short-lived as any other Surrealist ephemera. But his concerns lay deeper. They were with language itself, transposed into pictorial representation. Magritte was obsessed by the hold that language has on what it describes. When (in The Use of Words, 1928) he labeled two virtually identical and amorphous blobs of paint „Mirror‟ and „Woman‟s Body‟, he was not simply making a joke about narcissism, but showing the extreme tenuousness of signs” (244).

6. “Drawing on a rich source of ideas…, he wanted to prompt a though process in the viewer, at the end of which his understanding of the world would have changed. For Magritte, painting was primarily an „art of thinking‟. With his confusing pictures, the painter called the relationship between appearance and reality, between painting and depiction, into the consciousness- an idea, incidentally, that was picked up once again by the artists of the 60s, when Jasper Johns called a painting of the American flag, Is it a flag or is it a painting?” (Krausse 104).

30

UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

S Rene Magritte. The Castle in the Pyrenees, 1959 real space vs. spatial illusion/ painting technique used to suspend belief/ power of juxtapositioning

1. “Magritte‟s work before 1930 demonstrates two distinct tendencies, one toward the revelation of the psyche and the other toward surprising alterations of ordinary situations, often featuring unusual juxtapositions or changes in scale. It was in this latter mode that Magritte specialized after 1930, largely because he felt that it had a greater potential for public good” (Stokstad 1088). In so many of Magritte‟s works, “the painting‟s charm lies not simply in this visual and verbal puzzle but in the presentation itself; the beautifully simple, abstract design and the artist‟s way of subtly heightening reality while ultimately denying its plausibility” (Janson 799).

2. “Although there were traces of Magritte‟s fascination with rocks before and after, the period of his great imaginative productivity which concentrated on the process of petrification and on the properties of stone was the 1950s. It might be termed the artist‟s „Stone Age‟… A change occurred in 1953-54, with the disappearance of somber tones and an atmosphere of oppression. In 1958-59 particularly, Magritte was obsessed by the volume and weight of enormous rocks, but he altered the laws of gravity and disregarded the weight of matter; for instance, he had a rock sink or rise, or had it rest near a sleeping person” (Hammacher 116). “To his vision of a castle on a rock floating above the sea Magritte gave the title The Castle in the Pyrenees, apparently a play on the French expression „chateaux en Espagne‟- equivalent to „castles in the air‟. Magritte painted this work in blues, grays, and off-white, in that cool, finished manner by which he made the imaginary look real” (116).

T Joan Miró. The Harlequin’s Carnival, 1924-5 automatism/ lugubrious (gloomy) human (with mustache)/ whimsical, floating biomorphic shapes/ adolescent humor

1. “From his early youth, Joan Miró, the son of a Catalan goldsmith and clocksmith, showed signs of a taste for drawing. In 1907 he began business school, but at the same time he took courses at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. In 1911 he fell gravely ill and went to a farm owned by his family in Catalonia to recover. There he resolved to become a painter. Attracted by Fauvism and Cubism, he frequented the Gali academy in Barcelona (where he met the Dadaist painter Picabia), but in 1919 he set out for Paris. There he became friendly with Picasso and other members of the avant-garde, notably the Surrealists, whom he soon joined. This was a decisive step. Maintaining that painting had been in a period of decadence ever since the of the Lascaux caves, Miró‟s motto became: „Assassinate painting!‟ He began to use new materials such as metal, string, and wood, and to invent a playful, fantastic universe free of all constraint. Andre Breton, despite his admiration for DeChirico, considered Miró, a painter-poet, as „the most Surrealist of us all‟. In fact, Miró‟s inventive forms (most of which derive from either stains or arabesque lines), their freedom, his sense of spatial play, and his use of letters and words in his „picture poems‟ result in an art of great singularity” (Govignon 247).

2. “Miró‟s paintings of 1924-7 worked at an almost frenzied pitch of invention. By then his bestiary was in full session, and in works like The Harlequin’s Carnival, 1924-5, he became the heir to the Romanesque sculptors with their bestiaries and demons, even to Hieronymus Bosch himself. Later, Miró claimed that the hallucinations brought on by hunger and staring at the cracks in the plaster during those lean Paris years helped to loosen his imagery, as mescaline might. But the creatures that swarm and buzz in The Harlequin’s Carnival are too consistent to be entirely the product of reverie, for they emerge from the very specific, dense, and playful sense of nature that only a rural childhood can give. This bawdy animism of Miró‟s, expressed with a sharp, quizzical line that springs and chirrups like a grasshopper in Catalan dust, is a matter of detail and observation: getting the nose in and keeping it there (The word „Miró‟, on e is reminded, in Spanish means „he saw‟. )” (Hughes, Shock of the New 235).

3. “Harlequin’s Carnival, one of the first Surrealist pictures, takes place within the suggested confines of a room. The perspective of the window opening on the night gives an odd inversion of space. A wild party, rages inside, where only the human being is lugubrious, an elegantly mustached man with a long-stemmed pipe, staring sadly at the spectator. Surrounding him is every sort of animal, beastie, or organism, all having a fine time. There is no specific symbolism, simply a brilliant, fantastic imagination that has been given full rein. Certain favorite motifs recur in a number of paintings- the ladder with the ubiquitous ear, the eye, the man with the pipe, the arrow- bird- but the salient points of Miró‟s art are not iconographical or structural. One element is fantastic humor, of which he, Klee, Arp, and slightly later, are the modern masters. The other salient point is the vividness of Miró‟s unreal world. His organisms and animals, even his inanimate objects, all rendered as flatly abstract, biomorphic shapes, have an eager vitality that makes them more real to us than the crowds we pass daily” (Arnason 278). “Influenced by Catalan folk art, in his later works Miró developed poetic, symbolic abbreviations of suggestive form and color, which conceal a wealth of meanings. His paintings hover between figuration and abstraction; the flowing curves of his lines, little stars, circles and suns prompt fantasy and dreaming. The works are full of poetry and wit; they live off the colorfulness and the vitality of the lines. The picture elements seem to communicate with one another, to dance with one another” (Krausse 105). “ „I do not differentiate between painting and poetry,‟ Miró once said. The term „lyrical abstraction‟, sometimes applied to, say, the painting of Kandinsky, indeed seems to be particularly apt for Miró” (104).

31 UNIT ELEVEN: Dada and Surrealism STUDY GUIDE

U Frida Kahlo. Self-Portrait with Thorny Necklace, 1940, oil on canvas Frida Kahlo/ Diego Rivera/ a life of pain and illness/ a wreath of thorns with a dead hummingbird/ a cat and a monkey

1. “A number of women, Meret Oppenheim among them, were associated with the Surrealist movement. Today the best known is Frida Kahlo (1910-1954), who was first discovered by the poet Andre Breton during a visit to Mexico in 1938 and then rediscovered in recent years by feminist art historians. She owes her reputation as much to her troubled life as to her work, for they are inseparable. Her paintings are frankly autobiographical. However they are presented in such enigmatic terms and are so full of personal meaning that the exact circumstances must be known in order to understand their content. Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace is similar to traditional Mexican religious images. It was painted in 1940, when her tempestuous marriage to the painter Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was interrupted by divorce for a year. The necklace, an allusion to the crown of thorns worn by Christ during the Passion, is a symbol of her humiliation. From it hangs a dead hummingbird, a traditional amulet worn in Mexico by people seeking love. On her shoulders are two demons in the guise of the artist‟s pets: death, who appears as a black cat, and the devil, seen as a monkey. She is shown as a martyr to love hoping for a resurrection like the Lord‟s, as signified by the butterflies overhead. In context, it seems likely that Kahlo was thinking of suicide” (Janson 800).

2. “Married to the painter Diego Rivera, Frida lived at the center of events. It was a period cultural renewal, more a philosophical than a political renewal. The so-called Mexican renaissance, on which Rivera himself had the most formative influence, cannot of course be compared to the European one- in Italy, for example. The revolution that had taken place in the preceding years, even before the Russian Revolution, was also a different, entirely Mexican affair. There was no revolutionary Marxist or socialist theory here. The Communist Part was formed only after the revolution. Zapata hoped for a return to the pre-Columbian form of land distribution and the Aztec form of village organization, for a resurrection of a period that is much less distant in the past for Mexico than the period of the Romans and Greeks is for Europeans” (von Waberer 8). “Compared with the monumentality of Diego‟s immense frescoes, Frida‟s work is small in format, but it addressed the same concerns with which her husband and her period were so passionately involved. She did this in her own way. She lived in the shadow of a painter and ideologist, but never measured herself against him. His influence in her work is visible, but her influence on his art, an influence that is much more subtle, can also be recognized. Having personally experienced the end of the violent revolution herself, she still firmly believed in the necessity of changing social and political structures in Mexico. Her nationalist and anti-imperialist views shape her paintings‟ message” (9).

3. “Her father, a photographer, the son of Hungarian Jews from the German town of Baden-Baden, had married her mother, who was of Indian and Spanish extraction, in Mexico. Shortly afterward, they traveled together throughout the country, to photograph the ruins of Aztec temples. Frida, who as a child contracted polio, which left her right leg permanently weakened, suffered a serious accident at the age of eighteen that changed her life. The school bus she was traveling in was rammed by a streetcar, and a piece of iron tore into her pelvis and back. She would struggle with the effects of this accident and the pain it caused for the rest of her life. During the time she had to spend in hospital, she began to draw and paint. She joined the Communist Party and, through the photographer Tina Modotti, met Diego Rivera, whose paintings she had admired since she was a girl. They were married in 1929. Frida was twenty-two and Diego forty-two. After ten years of marriage, they became divorced, following a long separation, but they later remarried. They both had extramarital love affairs, some of Frida‟s being with women, but she found Diego‟s violent love affairs, including one with her younger sister, more and more difficult to bear. Diego and Frida were nevertheless famous as a couple. They formed the focus of an intellectual circle, and their Blue House, where they lived, attracted visitors and like-minded people from all over the world. Trotsky, too, spent some of his period in exile in their house” (10-11).

4. “During the early part of their marriage, Frida accompanied Diego on many journeys to America, but later she could no longer manage this. All her life she suffered from the injuries caused by the accident. She had to wear plaster jackets, underwent countless operations, and was often confined to bed for months on end. She was in constant pain. Against her doctors‟ advice, she tried to have a child, and suffered repeated miscarriages. Her illness meant that she was more and more noticeably thrown back on her own resources, and she was forced to withdraw more and more into an inner, private sphere. She painted obsessively and uninterruptedly, often while lying in bed or while hospitalized. To begin with, she gave her paintings away to friends, with no thought of selling them. Andre Breton, who visited her in 1938, „recognized‟ her as a surrealist, a label she did not agree to. „I paint my reality‟, she said. Breton nevertheless arranged for her first exhibition in New York in 1939 with Julien Levy, which was an immense success. During the 1940s, she taught students, who became known as Los Fridos. In the 1950s, her health increasingly deteriorated. In 1953, one of her legs had to be amputated. She died in 1954. The last photograph of her shows her in a wheelchair at a demonstration against CIA interference in the Guatemalan presidential election” (11-12).

5. “Frida lived in this cosmos of her own creation very much as a part of it. She wore Mexican folk costume and pre-Columbian jewelry, and combed her hair to match, adorning it with ribbons and scarves. Even when she was in the United States, she wore this Indian „masquerade‟, which Rivera liked to see her in, and she was amused to find herself influencing American fashion and appearing in Vogue. But even this disguise, and the eccentricity associated with it, was part of her artistic and political message. She stylized herself and her surroundings in the same way she stylized the still life, plants, and objects in her paintings, made them symbols of an attitude to life, and created a world in which to embed herself and her private story” (13). “Like folk art painters, she is little concerned in her paintings with proportion and perspective, and devotes loving attention to even the tiniest details” (14).

32 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

A Robert Henri. Salome, 1909

Robert Henri/ Ash Can School

1. “By the early 1890s the American author Hamlin Garland was calling for an end to European domination of American art and for the development of a purely American style and subject matter. Perhaps the artist most committed to this cause was Robert Henri (1865-1929). Henri studied between 1886 and 1888 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where conventional academic training was tempered by the realist conventions of the director, . By 1892 Henri had become the leader of a group of young Philadelphia realists, four of whom were newspaper illustrators: John Sloan (1871-1951), William J. Glackens (1870-1938), Everett Shinn (1866-1953), and George Luks (1867-1933). Henri spoke out against both the academic conventions and the Impressionist style then dominating American art. He advised his unofficial students: „Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you‟. Henri nevertheless turned to Europe for models, living in Paris from 1895 to 1900 and studying the great European realists, especially Diego Velazquez, , and Edouard Manet. He particularly admired the rapid brushwork of these artists, which he felt conveyed their fresh and immediate response to their subjects” (Stokstad 1093-1094).

2. “What mattered to him was not the European roots of this approach but its potential for American art. He felt, somewhat ironically, that by emulating it, American artists could free themselves from European conventions and express „themselves from European conventions and express „themselves in their own time and in their own land‟. He also thought that only realism would appeal to the American public and contribute to „the progress of our existence‟. Henri‟s efforts to liberalize the teaching and exhibition standards at New York‟s National Academy of Design, which had been founded as an American counterpart to the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts, put him at the center of a battle between progressives and conservatives there. When he was not reelected as a member of the Academy‟s exhibition jury in 1908, he responded by organizing an independent exhibition of eight artists. These artists were often thereafter referred to as The Eight, although they never all exhibited together again. Five of the The Eight were Henri and his earlier colleagues- Sloan, Glackens, Shinn, and Luks- who had moved to New York to be near him. The work of these five formed the core of what was known collectively as the , a name applied largely in response to the work of John Sloan” (1094).

3. The members of the Ashcan School “were fascinated with the teeming life of the city slums and found an endless source of subjects in the everyday urban scene, to which they brought a reporter‟s eye for color and drama. Despite the socialist philosophy that many of them shared, theirs was not an art of social commentary but one that felt the pulse of the city, in which they discovered vitality and richness while ignoring poverty and squalor. To capture these qualities they relied on rapid execution, inspired by Baroque and Post-Impressionist painting. This lends their canvases a sense of directness and spontaneous observation” (Janson 789). “Among the five who were committed to realism, Henri was to some extent isolated from the rest. He was more sophisticated, better educated, more articulate and more ambitious. In one sense, he saw himself as a direct heir of Thomas Eakins: he was indeed probably the first artist to understand Eakin‟s centrality to the American tradition, though this understanding may have come late” (Lucie-Smith, American Realism 61-62).

4. “Henri‟s admonitions accorded with contemporary calls for „masculine‟ renewal in American society to counter what some saw as the feminization of culture, a trend they feared would sap American vitality. Faced with new technologies, new leisure, and the accelerated pace of modern life, many Americans had become victims of psychiatric and emotional disorders characterized by chronic fatigue and lack of motivation- neurasthenia, it was called. Theodore Roosevelt‟s insistence on the „strenuous life‟ and the emphasis, within Henri‟s circle, on physical manhood and intense passions were part of a pervasive counteroffensive against this debilitating languor that seemed to loom over tired, nerve-shaken Americans” (Haskell 65). The painters of the Ashcan School “sought out painting subjects in unfashionable, ethnic neighborhoods because they believed that such sites offered an authenticity and vivacity absent from the world of wealth and privilege. Their desire to assault cultural codes of restraint, propriety, and the separated spheres of men and women, which had been the hallmark of Victorian culture, also led them to popular culture and to public sites of social pleasure and leisure activities. In allowing unsupervised encounters between men and women, popular entertainment satisfied the artists‟ quest for spontaneity and for freedom from the chafing restraints of Victorianism. Henri and his fellow urban realists were fascinated as Symbolist artists by the „exotic‟ and decadent, but they directed their romantic impulses toward the contemporary world of their own experience, rather than to the past” (65, 72).

B 1. “One artist who did not participate in the exhibition of the Eight at the Macbeth Galleries, but who is nevertheless always associated with the Ashcan School, is George Bellows (1882-1925). From 1904, Bellows was a pupil of Henri‟s at the New York School of Art, and Henri was the dominant influence in his early work; yet there was also, from the very start, a strong influence from Eakins. Things that Henri only paid lip service to, Bellows put into practice” (Lucie-Smith, American Realism 69).

2. “Of all the artists who were overtaken by the events triggered by the Armory Show of 1913 (and he participated in its organization in addition to exhibiting in it), Bellows was in certain respects one of the most unfortunate. Though he was still young, the Armory Show immediately relegated him to the position of begin a conservative, or at least a middle-of-the-road artist” (70). The subject of boxing was “also favored by Eakins. The use of underlying geometric forms is conspicuous, but more dynamic than similar compositional devices in the work of Eakins” (70). 33 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

C Charles Sheeler. American Landscape, 1930, oil on canvas Precisionism/ status of the human figure/ influence of photography

1. “Where as the Ashcan School dealt with people, usually in urban settings and often observed with a lively sense of movement, Precisionism was an art of stillness, whose main subjects were buildings and machines. The human presence is implied in Precisionist paintings, but usually not directly stated. If figures are present, they play a minor part in the composition. With its preternatural clarity, its smooth, undifferentiated surfaces and its ability to discover strong formal relationships beneath under ordinary appearances, the style marked a turning point in the development of the realist impulse in American art. Essentially, it was an attempt to reconcile three trends: the new Modernist spirit, which had originated in Europe and was not taking root in the United States; the influence of photography; and the ingrained American desire to confront reality directly” (Lucie-Smith, American Realism 73).

2. “The debt owed to photography by Precisionist painting is too obvious to need emphasizing. What does need to be emphasized is that this was a different kind of photography, more artful and more self-conscious than the material used by Eakins. During the period immediately before World War I, photography everywhere- but perhaps the most conspicuously in the United States- had been engaged in a struggle to be recognized as an independent art form. The Pictorialists, as they were called, used soft focus, deep shadows and brilliant highlights, and their work was often heavily manipulated during the printing and developing processes. What the camera saw was raw material, to be changed and altered by means of darkroom skills. Alfred Stieglitz, originally part of the Pictorialist movement, eventually became the leader of a revolt against it. He championed what was termed „pure photography‟, where the results were achieved chiefly through the careful selection of viewpoints and isolation of images. The photographs taken by Stieglitz and his followers tried to educate people to look at the world in a new way, and they made no pretence of being like traditional drawings and prints (as had often been the case with Pictorialist work)” (73).

3. Like so many American artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) “came from Philadelphia. He studied first at the School of Industrial Art, then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Anshutz was one of his teachers. Like Henri before him, he was thus in the direct line of artistic descent from Eakins, though at this point the latter‟s work did not interest him” (74). “ In 1913 Sheeler sent five mildly Cezannesque paintings to the Armory Show, and these were enough to place him firmly in the American vanguard. He was less impressed by this success than by the distance he felt between his own work and what was taking place in Paris” (75). “Soon, however, he began to think of photography as an artistic medium in its own right. His first photographic images made purely for their own sake featured details of a little house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which he and Schamberg had rented as a holiday retreat. Built about 1768, this modest dwelling was an excellent example of the simplicity and purity of American colonial architecture, all the more so because it had preserved intact many original details, such as iron hardware. Sheeler‟s landlord, a local landowner, was an enthusiast for early Americana, and drew the artist‟s attention not only to the merits of colonial architecture but to those of typical American artifacts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sheeler was to be a collector of these, and especia lly of Shaker furniture, all his life” (75-76).

4. Sheeler‟s conversion to industrial subjects “occurred in 1927, when he was hired by a Philadelphia advertising agency, N.W. Ayer and Company, to photographically document the newly opened Ford Motor Company plant on the Rouge River, which had been built to produce the Model A. Designed by Albert Kahn, the plant occupied over eleven hundred acres and included twenty-three main buildings, ninety-three miles of railroad track, and 75,000 employees. The advertising campaign launched to herald the plant was meticulously orchestrated to create a glamorous image for Ford by promoting the aesthetic side of industry. For Sheeler, the six weeks he spent at River Rouge, as the plant was informally called, marked a turning point in his career. Convinced that every age manifests itself by some external evidence, he came to view factory architecture as the modern equivalent of the religious architecture of the past and factories themselves as „our substitute for religious expression‟. Like those of vernacular architecture and skyscrapers, the forms of the huge River Rouge complex were beautiful to him because they „had been designed with their eventual utility in view‟. They fulfilled the requirement of great art: the parts worked perfectly together to achieve a consummate whole. In the thirty-two photographs Sheeler made of River Rouge, he joined the aesthetic of a mechanical instrument- the camera- with a machine subject” (Haskell 153-154).

5. “Sheeler‟s desire for an art that would mechanically express the mechanical age found even fuller expression in the River Rouge drawings and paintings he executed three years later. For these works, he used an opaque projector to translate his photographs onto the canvas surface. This allowed him to predetermine his compositions and eliminate the vagaries of spontaneous expression, bringing him closer to his goal of reproducing the inherent beauty of his subjects with as „little personal interference as possible‟. By transforming the art-making process into a machinelike set of operations, Sheeler endowed his compositions with a silent stillness. His subjects seem suspended in a vacuum, undisturbed by variations in light and atmosphere. Removed from history and time, they exude something of a newly secularized spiritualism. Sheeler‟s factories are idealized landscapes, exemplars of universal values of harmony, purity, and order. Absent from them is the harsh reality of the assembly line and the temporality of the human presence. To achieve this effect, Sheeler ignored the part of River Rouge that produced cars and concentrated instead on the part that transformed raw materials into steel. He created an experience of the technological sublime by aestheticizing industry, thereby rendering a vision of the utopian world order sought by European artists” (154). The painting American Landscape “holds no nature at all, except for the sky (into which a plume of effluents rises from a tall smokestack) and the water of a dead canal. Whatever can be seen is man-made, and the view has a curious and embalmed serenity, produced by the regular cylinders of silos and smokestack and the dark authoritarian arms of the loading machinery to the right. The sphere, the cube, and the cylinder are no longer things to be sought in nature, as Cezanne had once recommended: in the might abstraction of process and product, they have replaced nature altogether. The ancient tension between nature and culture is over. Culture has won It has colonized all the space in the American imagination that nature once claimed. The world of Thomas Cole is finally, irreparably, concreted over. One human figure remains, and you can hardly see him, or it, at first: a tiny, scurrying aant, on the tracks by the canal, between the uncoupled boxcars” (Hughes, American Visions 385-386).

34

UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

D Henry Ford and the E Thomas Hart Benton. Social History of Missouri, 1935, Assembly Line mural from the Members’ Lounge of the Missouri House of Representatives, Jefferson City, Missouri 1. “It is difficult, today, to imagine Thomas Hart Benton/ Regionalism/ stylistic conventions reminiscent of the enthusiasm with which American (and especially American managers) in the 1920s embraced 1. “The Regionalist movement… was the idea of the machine as a model though of as celebratory by its participants, and regulator of working life. It a revival of the values of the Midwestern grew out of Henry Ford‟s use of heartland of America- this in spite of the the production line in mass car fact that the Midwesterners of the time were manufacture. Ford declared in 1909 often resistant to, and sometimes deeply that he was going to democratize the offended by, the way in which leading auto, that „when I‟m through everybody Regionalist artists chose to depict them” will be able to afford, and about (Lucie-Smith, American Realists 93). “The everyone will have one‟. He produce most vocal Regionalist, and the self- millions of identical cars in exactly the appointed leader of the movement, was same way, by breaking down each Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)… stage of their making into small Though he was a genuine Midwesterner by repetitive units of work, each of which origin- he was born in Missouri, the son of a could be performed, hundreds of times Democratic Congressman- his background a day, not by a craftsman but by an as an artist was cosmopolitan. He studied at the , then in Paris, ordinary worker in charge of a single, where he became associated with Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1974) and with the specialized machine. These work- latter‟s protégé, Morgan Russell (1886-1953), who were the founders of Synchronism, the molecules flowed into the river of the first genuinely avant-garde movement in American art” (93-94). “During the decade of the production-line, watched over by a 1920s he continued his flirtation with European Modernism. Gradually, he became hierarchy of managers. In 1914, the disillusioned with its lack of narrative content” (94). year full production-line assembly began at the Ford plant in Detroit, the 2. “Constitutionally restless, Benton spent much of his time in the 1920s traveling in the basic black Model T cost $490- a American heartland, painting and drawing. He visited the regions he had known as a quarter of what the cheaper sort of boy, Missouri and northwest Arkansas, then explored many parts of the South, especially American car had cost ten years before- Texas” (94). Back in New York, Benton was to “open a breach with the whole of the and 248.000 Fords were sold; by 1924 Modernist circle in New York by publishing an article in which he attacked Alfred. the car was down to $290, and in Stieglitz. Immediately afterwards, he embroiled himself in a quarrel with the whole of the 1929, on the eve of the Wall Street leftist faction led by his inveterate enemy, the abstract painter Stuart Davis, by crash, American automakers produced expressing indifference to the recent destruction of Rivera‟s unfinished mural at the 4.8 million units. The sales graph had Rockefeller Center” (97). gone almost vertical” (Hughes, American Visions 383, 385). 3. In creating a set of murals for the Missouri State Capitol building in Jefferson City entitled the Social History of Missouri, he “could not resist inserting details which were 2. “Ford, omnipotent crank that he bound to be controversial. At one point he showed a woman wiping a baby‟s bare was, believed that he had invented bottom- a sight still guaranteed to shock the prudish. In another scene, he attempted to something like a new religion, based on illustrate the links between machine politics and the Missouri business world. In it, Tom industry. It would lead to a United Prendergast, the notoriously corrupt local political boss, is shown listening to a speech States of the World, with himself- the made by a local businessman. In the front row of the audience, looking straight at complete antihumanist, serene and Prendergrast (who is placed on the platform behind the speaker), is a leading member of objective in his understanding of Kansas City‟s best-known banking family. The implication is that he and Prendergast are process, the literal deus ex machina- as allies. When finished, the murals were met by the usual outburst of controversy attracted its messiah. „The man who builds a by all Benton‟s large projects- the painter would have been disappointed if this had not factory builds a temple. The man who been the case. He must in any event have been prepared for a mixed reaction, since the works there, worships there‟. Even the murals had been painted in situ, and the public had been free to come and make defective human body, a meat comments. On one occasion Benton replaced a plow with one of different and sturdier machine, would in time be fixed with design, after an elderly farmer had criticized his original effort. At question-and-answer interchangeable parts. History, he sessions after the paintings were completed, he was happy to defend his own version of famously pronounced, was bunk, and realism” (97-98). „machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by 4. “While rejecting abstraction, Benton would stress the abstract basis of his preaching propaganda or the written compositions, often too much. The scheme of his bulging figures- usually worked out in word‟. And d oubters were to Ford- as advance through three-dimensional clay models- was based on the linea serpentinata, the skeptics about one-world „interactivity‟ twisting line, of sixteenth-century Mannerism. From Michelangelo, and from other are to Internet votaries today- Mannerist sources like Luca Cambiaso‟s block figures and ‟s posturing saints, contemptible Luddites, dust beneath Benton assembled a kind of „kinetic‟ composition in which nothing is at rest, everything the pneumatic tires of the certain strains and heaves against everything else. This incessant surge and flow would have future” (385). large effects on his pupil, Jackson Pollock, but in Benton‟s own paintings it mainly produced rhetoric” (Hughes, American Visions 444).

35 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

Thomas Hart Benton. Social History of Missouri, 1935, mural from the Members’ Lounge of the Missouri House of Representatives, Jefferson City, Missouri (CONTINUED)

5. “There is a certain irony in the fact that Regionalism, which was promoted as the very expression of American democracy, was the kissing cousin of both the official art of 1930s Russia and that of 1930s Germany. If both Stalinist and Nationalist meant images of rural production, green acres, new tractors, straw-haired children, and sinewy farmers breaking the sod of the homeland, so did the Populist/Capitalist Realism set forth by Benton and other Regionalists. All were arts of idealization and propaganda. In esthetic terms, little that Benton painted in the 1930s (or after) would have seemed out of place in the Moscow subway. When Benton saw himself on the cover of Time at the end of 1934, he realized that he was truly famous. And to clinch his celebrity, he decided to punish New York for not having appreciated him enough. He would leave, with the loudest possible hullabaloo. It took the form of an attack on the New York scene as a conspiracy of homosexuals. There had been he wrote in 1935, a „concentrated flow of aesthetic-minded homosexuals into the various fields of artistic practice‟… None of this could happen in the Midwest, whose citizens were „highly intolerant of aberration‟, subjecting the devious queer to „the scrutiny of strong prejudice‟. So back to Kansas the Michelangelo of Neosho would go, shaking the dust of Sodom from his feet. New York had had it, anyway: the big cities were dead. Only in the heartland could a real and virile American culture arise” (Hughes, American Visions 445).

6. “In fact, Benton was not to find the paradise of absolute heterosexuality that he had hoped for in the Midwest. Kansas City‟s newly founded Nelson -Atkins Museum of Art had just hired as its first director one Paul Gardner, a former dancer in Anna Pavlova‟s corps de ballet, who loathed Regionalist painting. Perhaps there were as many fairies per capita in Kansas as anywhere else. Was he, like Dorothy, not in Kansas anymore? But he was to turn from such somber reflections to an enormous mural commission, which he began in 1935. It is only one of his mural projects that survives undamaged in its original place. This was the decoration of the House Lounge in the state capitol of Missouri, in Jefferson City. Its theme was the social history of the state, from pioneer times to the present, the whole narrative spreading across four large walls and linked by the image of the Missouri River winding down through space and time. On getting the commission, he went at it with his usual thoroughness, reading voraciously about Missouri history, making innumerable sketches, building a clay model with relief figures twenty inches high and fifteen feet long, having it photographed and then checking the process of the painting against the photos” (445-446). “Nowhere else can you get a better sense of the man: his enormous rhetorical energy and equally enormous vulgarity, his worship of the late Renaissance and his cornball humor, his self- confidence and the anxiety that‟s written all over these huge posturing figures in the buckling space. Once Benton was done, this was no longer a lounge; as one aggrieved legislator complained, you couldn‟t settle down to a quiet game of cards with Jesse James about to jump off the wall onto your back. The Renaissance fresco the work most resembles- though this can only have been an accident- is Giulio Romano‟s room with The Fall of the Giants in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua; Benton‟s figures induce the same feeling of ill ease, through their instability. Some Missourians objected to its images, such as a homestead wife wiping his baby‟s butt with a pad of wool- not the right thing for the high deliberations of government. But they liked his vernacular and the bid cast of characters: Huck Finn and his black friend Jim, Davy Crockett, and even Frankie shooting Johnny for doing her wrong. A curiosity of this passage is that Frankie is firing her .44 right up Johnny‟s backside, as he sprawls in terror over the barroom table. Perhaps only a man who hated gays with Benton‟s consuming and pathological intensity could have produced such a remarkable image of anal rape, without knowing it” (446).

7. “The murals depict a collection of images from the state‟s true and legendary history, such as primitive agriculture, horse trading, a vigilante lynching, and an old-fashioned political meeting. Other scenes portray the mining industry, grain elevators, Native Americans, and family life. One segment, Pioneer Days and Early Settlers, shows a white man using whisky as a bartering tool with a Native American, along with scenes documenting the building of Missouri. Part documentary and part imaginative, Benton‟s images include both positive and negative aspects of Missouri‟s history, as these examples illustrate. Although Regionalists were popularly perceived as dedicated to glorifying Midwestern life, that belief distorted their aims. Indeed, Grant Wood observed, „your true regionalist is not a mere eulogist; he may even be a severe critic‟. Benton, like Wood, was committed to a visually accessible style, but he developed a highly personal aesthetic that included complex compositions, a fluidity of imagery, and simplified figures depicted in a rubbery distortion. Nor surprisingly, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Regionalist paintings had a popular appeal because they often projected a reassuring image of America‟s heartland. The public saw Regionalism as a means of coping with the national crisis through a search for cultural roots. Thus, people deemed acceptable any nostalgia implicit in Regionalist paintings or mythologies these works perpetuated because they served a larger purpose” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1069).

8. “The main criticism which the murals aroused locally was that they showed „crudeness and lack of feeling‟- in other words, that they were insufficiently idealized. The attacks they inspired were, however, mild in comparison to those aroused by Benton‟s hard-hitting autobiography, An Artist in America, published in 1937. This inspired a campaign, masterminded by one of his most persistent local critics, to get him fired from his teaching post, now up for renewal. The board of trustees of the Kansas City Art Institute at first failed to confirm his contract, then reluctantly did so after being subjected to considerable public pressure (1938). Benton continued to teach there for another three years, but in 1941 his position once again began to deteriorate- a new director had been appointed, and he and Benton did not get on. Then Benton fatally compromised himself by launching an attack on the staff of the local museum, the Nelson- Atkins Art Gallery, airing the obsessive hatred of homosexuality which was the least admirable aspect of his character. This gave Benton‟s detractors the opportunity they had long been looking for, and he was forced out. He never again did any regular teaching and, while he remained a celebrity, he was increasingly isolated on the American art scene, which was now being taken over by the rising generation of Abstract Expressionists” (Lucie-Smith, American Realism 98-99). Benton and this second wave of realists “put greater emphasis on the Americanism of their works, whether these were bitter attacks on the American political and economic system that had produced the sufferings of the Great Depression, or chauvinistic praise of the virtues of an actually declining agrarian America. Art reflected the spirit of isolationism that dominated so much of American thought and action after World War I. It became socially conscious, nationalist, and regionalist” (Aranson 373).

36 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

F Grant Wood. American Gothic, 1930 miniaturist style reminiscent of fifteenth century Flemish painting/ Great Depression/ austere American icon

1. “In 1930 a painting called American Gothic was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago‟s Forty- Third Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture. Reluctantly accepted by the jury, it was eventually awarded a bronze medal and a prize of $300. Later, the Friends of American Art of the Art Institute bought it for a further $300. It was not long before it had established itself as a national icon, symbol of a vanishing rural America. Its success marks the real beginning of the Regionalist movement in American art. American Gothic was the work of Grant Wood (1891-1942), a little-known artist from the small city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It is in many ways an ambiguous image. Does it celebrate its subjects or satirize them? Are they brother and sister, husband and wife, or father and daughter? Does it represent the present moment, or is it nostalgic? This last question is pertinent because the composition is obviously based on photographs of the kind made by itinerant photographers in the post-Civil War period. Such photographs not only used the same format, but often included emblematic objects, such as the pitchfork the man is holding” (Lucie- Smith, American Realism 93).

2. “Wood himself was always evasive about his intentions, once the picture had become famous. The most he would say was that it represented „types‟ known to him all his life, and that he had not intended to ridicule them by pointing to faults such as „fanaticism and false taste‟. Commentators have proposed a comparison with the writer Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), whose novel Main Street (1920) Wood illustrated, citing a similar power to create universally recognizable American types. Going further, they have even wanted to discover, in the Regionalist movement with which Wood became associated, a mirror-image of much the American fiction of the interwar years- not the work of expatriates such as and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but that of , and John Steinbeck. The further these comparison are pursued, the more strained they become. This stay-at-home fiction is critical and often pessimistic, not celebratory” (93).

3. What Grant “had meant to make was a version of one of the tintypes from his family album- an icon of Iowan ancestry. He got his sister Nan to pose as the woman, and recruited one B. H. McKeeby, a dentist from Cedar Rapids, as the man. He put each of them in period dress with a white collar and a cameo brooch at her neck- the head on the brooch, a goddess‟s, contrasting sharply with her own plain and worried look; he in stud-fastened collarless shirt, overalls, and black jacket, holding a pitchfork. He is the father defending the virtue of his not very alluring daughter against all comers. The pitchfork, Satan‟s archetypal tool for tossing souls into eternal fire, becomes the weapon against Satan. It rhymes neatly with the carpenter-Gothic window mullions above, which make the home the church of Virtue. It is also echoed in the seams of his blue overall front- no longer shining, menacing, and phallic, but worn and soft with age” (Hughes, American Visions 441).

4. “No more consciously constructed picture was ever painted by an American, though this is not a judgment on the esthetic merits of American Gothic . Today, one is inclined to see it, like so much of Wood‟s other work, as an exercise in sly camp, the expression of a gay sensibility so cautious that it can hardly bring itself to mock its objects openly. Was Wood poking a quarter of an inch of fun at the denizens of Iowa and their fetishized values of sobriety, moral vigilance, patriarchy, and the rest? Or was he, as millions of Americans have thought since the painting won a prize in Chicago in 1930 and was catapulted into national fame, actually praising those virtues? The answer, in a sense, is both: a mass audience was intrigued by the image because it couldn‟t quite decide, just as Grant Wood couldn‟t quite decide either. Generally, the assumption that American Gothic was a satire tends to increase in direct proportion to one‟s distance eastward from Cedar Rapids. But ogni dipintore dipinge se, as Leonardo once remarked: every painter paints himself. Of none is this truer than Grant Wood, who has had American Gothic hung around his neck ever since, as Leonardo had the Mona Lisa” (442).

5. “Unlike Benton…, Grant Wood remained throughout his career in the Midwest where he was born. In this sense, he was the most truly regional artist among them. Like them, however, he eventually fell from favor and was shabbily treated by those among whom he lived and worked. Until he found fame with American Gothic, Wood‟s career followed a pattern in which New York and the opinion- formers of the east Coast had played no part. Born on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa, Wood moved in 1901, after the death of his father, to Cedar Rapids. His training as an artist was fragmented, with the emphasis almost as much on craft and design as on fine art” (Lucie-Smith, American Realists 104). “After a brief period of war service, spent in Iowa and in Washington, DC, Wood returned to Cedar Rapids and took a job as an art teacher. For most of the 1920s he divided his time between teaching and trips abroad. During those trips he studied briefly at the Academie Julian in Paris (a rather Seurat-esque life study survives from this period), and also made numerous small landscapes in a conservative version of Impressionist style” (104). “In 1940, Wood involved himself in a bitter academic dispute. His department- greatly enhanced in reputation, thanks largely to his presence- was now populated by younger teachers, often from the East, who had been affected by the Modernist ideas current in New York. They were critical of Wood‟s hands-on, art-is-craft approach, and still more so of his inflexible teaching methods. Efforts were made not only to discredit him as a teacher but to undermine him as an artist. At the same time, Regionalism itself was in full retreat. World events had made a doctrinaire, pro- America, anti -European stance seem irrelevant it not actually intolerable. Wood was forced to take a year‟s leave of absence in 1940- 41, and during this period a messy compromise with his opponents was patched together by the university administrators. Before it could take full effect, he became ill with inoperable liver cancer… It was a measure of how far his reputation had fallen that after this there was no major museum show of his work until as late as 1983. Only American Gothic retained its fascination, for the public if not the critics. Deliberately archaic, even at the time it was painted, it continued to be accepted as an archetype of American rural life” (106-107).

37

UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

G Edward Hopper. Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas Edward Hopper/ asymmetrical composition of an urban landscape/ solitary strangers/ artificial light/protestations of abstract art

1. “The 1920 census had demonstrated that, for the first time in history, more Americans were living in urban centers than in rural area” (Stokstad 1101). “The Regionalists‟ argument received unintentional support from the so-called Urban Realists, who documented life in the American city. One of them, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) had trained with Robert Henri between 1900 and 1906. His work prior to about 1930, which includes many landscapes, is pleasant and unexceptional. After that date, however, he focused on the alienation of modern city life, especially that of New York City, where he lived. Hopper‟s most famous work is probably Nighthawks, which shows four people in an all-night . The painting seems to have been inspired by Ernest Hemingway‟s short story „The Killers‟, about two hired killers who spend several hours before a job waiting in such a diner. The title of Hopper‟s painting, with its reference to hawks- those who prey on others- seems to suggest this association. But Hopper‟s image projects none of Hemingway‟s air of suppressed violence. Instead, it is a study in loneliness and boredom. The anonymous man with his back to us is utterly alone. The couple, too, are just as separate. While the man chats idly with the waiter, the woman examines a book of matches. They seem as cold as the fluorescent light that bathes them and as empty as the streets and stores outside. The viewer, placed on the street, is made to share in their condition. By eliminating the door to the coffee shop, Hopper prevents us from enjoying event he little warmth and shelter it might provide” (1101).

2. “Edward Hopper was the quintessential realist painter of twentieth-century America. His images have become part of the very grain and texture of American experience… This can be true even if you have never seen a Hopper, because his paintings so affected popular culture. His isolated Victorian houses, with their porches and pediments and staring windows, were recycled by a host of illustrators and filmmakers: the house the comically sinister Addams family lived in is a Hopper house, and so is the mansion alone on the Texas prairie in Giant, and the house in Hitchcock‟s Pyscho- as have been innumerable stage sets and film sequences, particularly in noir movies, for the last fifty years” (Hughes, American Visions 422). “Hopper‟s realism had nothing to do with the prevalent realisms of the thirties and forties. That is to say, it had no persuasive content; it was free from ideology, either left or right. No hints of class conflict intrude on Hopper‟s vision of American society, which he painted one isolated person at a time. There are noble peasants, striving workers, moneybags plutocrats, or town meetings to be seen- no sense of collectivity. Though he had studied painting in New York under Robert Henri, no trace of the romantic anarchism with which Henri imbued many of his students rubbed off on Hopper” (423). “Henri had encouraged Hopper to go often to the theater, where, he thought, his student would be drawn into the vortex of ebullience the Ashcan artists so enjoyed: city life, fleshy, and energetic. The opposite happened. Hopper responded intensely to the theater- but as a spectacle of withdrawal and transparency, not of human closeness. An imaginary proscenium would frame almost everything he did from then on. A great Hopper always emits one moment of frozen time, literally a tableau, as though the curtain had just gone up but the narrative hadn‟t begun. It gives images of quite ordinary things- and everything, in Hopper, is on the face of it ordinary- their mystery and power. It may be that one of his more famous images, , 1930, was actually derived from a stage backcloth. Certainly it looks like one: a frontal view of a row of stumpy red brownstones somewhere in New York, too early for people to be up or traffic to be moving” (423-424).

3. “In Aschcan School painting, New York City was lush and solid; in Hopper it is much more abstract, the walls and windows sometimes being so schematic that they look paper-thin- just enclosures, boxes, space-frames. Abstraction is a sign for the emotional state of deracination, or not-belonging. In Nighthawks, 1942, the classic Hopper, this reaches an extreme: it is a sort of geometrical aquarium with four inscrutable fish init. Nothing can be told about the lives of the people at the counter, or the diner employee serving them: each person is locked within the self, and held like a specimen in the firm grip of Hopper‟s receding space, with its greenish light cast on the pavement and the ivory blaze of the inner wall” (427). “Hopper‟s peculiar mix of voyeurism- putting our gaze in the room- and discretion- not revealing what the people are doing are thinking- is the hook in the painting. He offers slices of an insoluble life, moments in a narrative that can have no closure” (427). “Much of the effect of Hopper‟s paintings is derived form his sensitivity to light- the light of early morning or of twilight; the dreary light filtered into the hotel room or office; or the garish light of the lunch counter isolated with in the surrounding darkness. Calling the United States a „chaos of ugliness‟, Hopper revealed some of the secret of enchantment present in his own art when he declared an admiration for Burchfield‟s ability to discover a „hideous beauty‟ in the vulgar, eclectic jumble of the American Scene, with its „fantastic roofs, pseudo-Gothic, French Mansard, Colonial, mongrel or what not‟” (Arnason 374-375).

4. “In Ashcan School painting, New York City was lush and solid; in Hopper it is much more abstract, the walls and windows sometimes being so schematic that they look paper-thin- just enclosures, boxes, space-frames. Abstraction is a sign for the emotional state of deracination, of not-belonging. In Nighthawks, 1942, the classic film noir Hopper, this reaches an extreme: it is a sort of geometrical aquarium with four inscrutable fish in it. Nothing can be told about the lives of the people at the counter, or the diner employee serving them: each person is locked within the self, and held like a specimen in the firm grip of Hopper‟s receding space, with its greenish light cast on the pavement and the ivory blaze of the inner wall” (Hughes, American Visions 427). 38 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

H Andrew Wyeth. Christina’s World, 1948, tempera on gesso panel Andrew Wyeth/ painstaking tempera technique/ reactionary or traditional?

1. “As television‟s power eclipsed radio‟s, it weakened American regionalism by giving all Americans the same images of desire through ads and the same fantasy images through narrative. In short, a huge administrated monoculture began to grow, and it started to blot out the earlier ideas of a Texan, a Virginian, a Californian, or a New York cultural ethos… The analogue of this process, in art, was the popularity of certain painters whose work evoked lost or fading Americas of one kind or another. There was Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961), Grandma Moses, the folk-primitive painter form Eagle Bridge, New York, with her copious and ever-charming vignettes of rural America. There was Andrew Wyeth (b. 1917), whose austerely dun-and-gray realist pictures of reclusive New Englanders, bleached frame houses, and open windows with lace curtains blowing a little spookily in the wind provided images of hardscrabble Puritan rectitude, tinged with close-lipped sentimentality: to this day, Christina’s World, 1948, his subtly ominous painting of a polio-crippled girl gazing at a distant house and apparently crawling toward it (according to Wyeth, though, she was picking berries) views with American Gothic in popularity” (Hughes, American Visions 507-508). “Immediately touched by the longing the figure expresses, as she looks up the long grassy slope towards the house in the distance, most spectators seem to remain more or less unaware of the situation the painting depicts. Christina is a cripple, physically unable to climb. Her plight is discreetly indicated by her skeletally thin right arm, while her useless legs are covered by her skirt” (Lucie-Smith, American Realism 155).

2. “In fact, both of Wyeth‟s main narrative series, one concerned with the lives of the Kuerners in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the other about the Olsons in Maine, are focused on enclosed, physically claustrophobic family situations. While Christina Olson is crippled, Karl Kuerner‟s wife Anna is mentally ill, as Wyeth‟s likenesses of her unflinchingly reveal” (156). “Wyeth is the product of a dominant father who was a practicing artist. N. C. Wyeth was the best-known American illustrator of his time. Wyeth‟s love and reverence for his father are amply recorded. So, too, is the fact that his own art was somehow liberated by N. C. Wyeth‟s death in an automobile accident in 1945. Karl Kuerner‟s farm is close to the unguarded railroad crossing where N.C. Wyeth died, and Wyeth admitted that this has something to do with the fascination he feels for Kuerner and his family” (156). “For all his extreme skill with long-established pictorial techniques, such as tempera and dry-brush watercolor, Wyeth‟s work is far less traditional than the great mass of his admirers assume. Indeed, one reason why they feel at home with his work may be that he has been much influenced by photography. His compositions often show the compressed space typical of the camera‟s monocular vision- the kind of thing Clement Greenberg noted in the work of Ben Shahn. However, Wyeth‟s links with photography are more specific than this. In his treatment of isolated fragments of rustic architecture, he sometimes comes close to the work of Walker Evans, and even closer to that of Charles Sheeler. The immediate ancestors of much of Wyeth‟s work are the photographs and paintings Sheeler made of buildings in rural Pennsylvania” (156). “In fact, the interesting thing about Wyeth‟s work is that, though cherished for its apparent familiarity, it is not at all reassuring. His paintings and watercolors often display extraordinary tension, and constantly deal in contradictions, social as well as psychological. While apparently evoking nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, he often points out how harsh and savage this way of living actually is” (157).

I Norman Rockwell

1. “Grandma Moses and Wyeth had owed much to mass reproduction of their work, but [Norman] Rockwell‟s fame was inseparable from it. From the day in 1916 the Saturday Evening Post hired him as an illustrator, he was greeted by nothing but recognition. Large-scale magazine color illustration was the TV of preelectronic America; by 1925 Rockwell was a national name, and by the end of the Depression he was an institution. In the 1950s he shared with Walt Disney the astonishing distinction of being one of the two American visual artists familiar to nearly everyone in the United States, rich or poor, black or white, illiterate or Ph.D. To most of them, Rockwell was a master: sane (unlike van Gogh), comprehensible (unlike Picasso), and perfectly attuned to what they wanted in a picture. A picture, not a painting. Practically none of his audience ever saw an original Rockwell. His work addressed its vast audience through reproduction alone. Its images had no surface. Its minute verisimilitude- as well as the exaggeration of every wink, scowl, grin, and pout on its characters‟ faces- had the depthless narrative clarity of TV. It offered Arcadia. In Rockwell‟s America, old folk were not thrust like palsied, incontinent vegetables into nursing homes by their offspring; they stayed basking in respect on the porch… Kids did not take Ecstasy and get pregnant; they stole apples but said grace before meals” (Hughes, American Visions 508).

2. “The great social fact was family continuity. It was a world unmarked by doubt, violence, or greed. The mountainous Thanksgiving that appears in Freedom from Want, 1943, is a symbol of virtuous abundance rather than extravagance, a Puritan tone confirmed by the glasses of plain water on the table. Norman Rockwell was homelier than apple pie, more American than the flag, gentler and more affirmative than Dad, and that was what the American public in the early 1950s wanted. What could younger artists do with the enormous, blank, and yet imperially demanding constructions of Middle American mass culture? They were right in the midst of them, affected, even formed by them. Some were fascinated by its icons but wary of their implications. They felt a compulsion to analyze and to reflect this new Americanism without being overwhelmed by it” (509). “Victory in World War II, possession of the Bomb, and a stupendous global economic expansion had all combined to confirm the long-standing belief in exceptionalism- that Americans were a unique and anointed people, enacting a sacred history on earth” (510).

39 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

J David Hockney. A Bigger Splash, 1967, acrylic on K Wayne Thiebaud. Cakes, 1963, oil on canvas canvas David Hockney/ an American suburban Utopia/ use of Wayne Thiebaud/ sensuous application of acrylic paint/ controlled hard edges vs. a painted “splash” paint/ deadpan composition with rich, vibrant color/celebration of consumerism 1. “Emerging within the same period as the Beatles, David Hockney (b. 1. “Wayne Thie- 1937)”-with his peroxide hair, granny baud (1920-), one glasses, gold lamé jacket, and easy of the senior charm- became something of a media figures associated event in his own right, a genial with Pop, had exponent of the go-go, hedonistic been a successful style of the 1960s. Symptomatically, commercial artist he celebrated his adventures during for a decade when, a 1961 visit to New York by creating at the age of thirty, a series of etchings entitled A Rake’s he began studying Progress. But in his Pop-like attempt for a degree in art history and painting at California‟s to close the gap between art and life, San Jose State College. A natural draftsman with a Hockney drew neither imagery nor flair for caricature, as well for film-making, sports, and style from the comics and the ads; academic administration, Thiebaud already had the instead he used his own life and independence to realize, soon after his arrival for a the lives of his friends and lovers- their faces and figures, houses and year-long sojourn in New York (1956-57), that the interiors- and rendered them with the slyest, most knowing means in attempts he and many others were making to be modern art, sometimes inspired by Picasso and Matisse, but often, in a „artful‟- to emulate the Abstract Expressionists- could delicate faux naïf manner, by children, or, again, by the rich Rubensian only leave him without a creative soul of his own. sweep of an admired older contemporary such as Francis Bacon. Gradually, as if in protest at their exclusion, simple Hockney loves to go out in the midday sun, especially in Southern vernacular forms began to bob up and stay afloat in the California where he has long maintained a residence. There the swimming swirling, abstract flood of his spattering brushwork. As pool became a central image in his art, complete with its cool, synthetic luck would have it, Thiebaud saw the vulgar intruders- hues and, often, handsome human flesh. This, however, has already slot machines, cigar boxes, gum-ball dispensers, pie disappeared below the surface in A Bigger Splash, a painting that servings, iced cakes- as universal, elementary shapes, combines Hockney‟s signature equilibrium of elegant Matissean flat- figurative equivalents of circles, squares, triangles, and pattern design and luxurious mood with something of Bacon‟s painterly crescents. By focusing exclusively on the motifs, virtuosity for the splash itself. As wittily deadpan as he is poetic, masking out their backgrounds, and presenting them Hockney has commented on his bemusement over the brevity of the as either single monoliths or repetitive, all-over water‟s leap into the air, contrasted to the extended time it took him to patterns, Thiebaud discovered that he could satisfy his paint the frozen effect. The sense of suspended animation prompted one need for both popular subject matter and modernist critic to describe the distinctive character of Hockney‟s art as the „epitome form” (Wheeler 154). of expectant stillness‟. This, along with the peculiar high-noon brightness- like an Ektachrome slide- was made possible by the artist‟s habit of 2. “But he retained his love of thick, buttery pigment, a working from photographs. Infaturated with the Polaroid, Hockney has strong, tensile line, and lavishly stroked surfaces, all of recently been using it to reexplore the riches of the space-time equation which combined with his rediscovered interest in investigated by Braque and Picasso in Analytic Cubism” (Arnason 450- allusion to make him look beyond the New York School 451). to the tradition of loaded-brush realism exemplified by Vermeer, Chardin, van Gogh, Eakins, Hopper, Morandi, 2. “Hockney made his first trip to at the end of 193, attracted and . Where Thiebaud gained his own identity by homoerotic magazines like Physique Pictorial, which originated there. was not solely in corner-drugstore iconography but also In January 1964 Hockney moved to Los Angeles and his work took a turn in the paradoxical way he rendered objects to seem toward greater realism. He also switched to acrylic paint at this time, a both palpable and abstract. Contributing to this medium that made the surface of his painting increasingly flat” (Fineberg illusion are the absence of modeling and the 242). “Like a Noel Coward Englishman in the midday sun, Hockney found contradictory presence of shadows treated, like himself enraptured by the brilliant light, the lush gardens and lawns, the everything else throughout the painting surface, as aquatic facilities and laid-back atmosphere of Southern California. While bricks of creamily impastoed medium. Another factor linking up with other distinguished expatriates, such as Christopher is the emphatic contouring, which defines forms as Isherwood, he also continued to express his enthusiasm for handsome solid while simultaneously flattening them. Much of human flesh, here disappeared below the surface and leaving a high, the painting‟s aura of quiet mystery radiates from those plume-like splash in its wake. But distinctive as the West Coast motif seams, as they periodically rupture to seep may be, it also looks as if viewed through European eyes, eyes schooled in underpainting whose brilliant colors contrast” (154- Matissean flat -pattern luxe, calme et volupté, albeit rendered with a 155). “Wayne Thiebaud‟s rich painterly style also deadpan poetry that may be the Pop equivalent of English reserve. As for derives from… Bay Area abstract expressionists. Yet the painterly brio of the eponymous splash, it seems to quiver with the unlike them, he did not subordinate his subject matter spirit of Francis Bacon, but not without a touch of wry humor, registered to the handling” (Fineberg 170). “The real motives by Hockney himself when he noted his bemusement over the brevity of behind Thiebaud‟s work are the direct pleasures of the water‟s leap into the air, contrasted to the extended duration required looking at things, of analyzing them into patterns, and to freeze the momentary image in paint” (Wheeler 159). of handling paint” (170).

40 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

L Richard Estes. Nedick’s. 1970, oil on canvas Richard Estes/ / a lonely street recalling the work of Edward Hopper/ use of several photos to create one painted image/ interest in reflections

1. “ has not found it easy to deal with the Photorealist episode in American painting, not least because the style found so little favor with established critics at the moment when it first emerged. Where it was condemned, it was seen either as a cynical sell-out to popular taste or as a bizarre, rather naïve continuation of Pop Art. Where it was welcomed, which happened much more rarely, this was because it was seen as a disguised extension of the kind of thinking which also went to create Minimalism and Conceptualism. The conceptual element, according to enthusiasts, was to be found in the fact that this style „raises questions about the way we see and reminds us of the many physical and psychological factors that alter, compensate, or diminish the things we look at‟. In fact, the motivating forces behind Photorealism seem to be more complex than either its detractors or its enthusiasts admit. The real message is neither a simple (or cynical) dependency on photographic imagery, nor an intellectual analysis of ways of seeing things dictated by the camera lens, but a hunger for figurative images that contain a strong emotional and subjective element. Despite critical and curatorial opposition, this affected a whole generation of American artists. These artists, in addition to looking at what the camera had to give them, looked back at much earlier American art. Their historical perspective included the work of Eakins, Harnett and Peto, and also that of the Precisionists (Sheeler‟s Rolling Power bears a particularly close relationship to typical Photorealist work). Yet another ancestor was Edward Hopper; some of the Photorealists shared his fascination with the melancholy ordinariness of American daily life” (Lucie-Smith, American Realism 189).

2. “If there is an art with the quintessential Photorealist look, it may well be that of Richard Estes, possibly because this painter is the least systematic and the freest of all those attempting to imitate photographic images. Estes, for instance, does not work from a single photo but rather from two or more, combining them in various ways until his own painting has the „feel‟ he wants, something more complex and thus more convincing than what could be mechanically recorded by camera. And not only does he paint with bristle brushes; he also wields them with swift assurance and a firm, structuring stroke almost worthy of Manet or Cezanne. Such may account for the glittering contrasts that bring the whole of his image alive, making it seem still more like a luminous transparency than the works of Photorealists who, striving for smooth transitions, abolish every symptom of personal „handwriting‟. In addition, Estes is a masterful, if covert, composer, or much of the heightened sense of reality- or superreality- generated by his pictures derives from subtle refinements of order and organization…which the camera can rarely find in the randomness of the natural or manmade world. All these qualities combine to make Estes seem the Vermeer or of the grotesquely urbanized Post-Minimal age. But he also belongs very much to modernism, for not only do his pictures have all the flat, planar qualities of their broad sheets of reflective glass, but those very surfaces, albeit transparent, reveal less what is in the depicted depth than what is forward of the painting surface, an inside-out world reflected from the viewer‟s own space” (Arnason 607).

3. “Reinforcing the sense of utter flatness is the uniformly sharp focus with which the artist, thanks to his photographic model, has been able to resolve upon the painting‟s two-dimensional surface every bit of a vast quantity of visual information, however far or near. The richness of such an image reveals the importance of the camera to this new variety of realism, for never would a painter, however virtuosic his skills, be able to render all that Estes has in a single work, or with such clarity and precision, merely by studying the subject directly. In the time required to complete the picture, everything would change- the light, the reflections, the weather, the season, the presence or absence of people and traffic, and certainly the commercial displays. The methods of traditional Realism could not possibly freeze a modern urban jumble to one split second of time. As for that scene, Estes is free enough to call it „hideous‟, adding: „I don‟t enjoy looking at the things I paint, so why should you enjoy it?‟ Still, for all their nuanced, breathtaking artistry and immense optical complexity, the pictures remain an icily beautiful vacuum, empty of overtly moralizing content. And none is needed, for having been so lucidly presented, the evidence is self-indicting” (607).

4. “Estes has never made any secret of his use of photographs as a basis for his paintings. It is also no secret that he alters the source material: „One evolves ways of doing this. A photograph is just values. It doesn‟t have line. When you use the photograph, you are using the values, but you are adding line and space and movement, coming from your experience. That‟s why, although I work from photographs, I like the subjects to be things I‟m really familiar with. I don‟t think I could use someone else‟s photograph of some place I‟ve never been to and make a painting. Although I could copy the photograph, I wouldn‟t really have a feeling for the place. You‟re always remembering, and the photograph is like a reference you use, a sketch‟” (Lucie-Smith, American Realism 199). “Estes is unabashed in proclaiming that he feels allied with all realist painters, and that he doesn‟t consider anyone a painter unless he is a realist. Because he totally dismisses abstract painting, I am inclined to call Estes a naïve painter. Self-taught, he has developed every aspect of his art of his own, if not quite in a vacuum, then close to it. He has never conceded to me the influence of any other artist, although he has named some he „sort of‟ respects. Disdainful of art that lacks craftsmanship, Estes thinks that the Abstract Expressionists were so involved with emotion and personal expression, as well as with the idea of abolishing all established rules of painting, that they abandoned all traces of craftsmanship” (Meisel 209-210).“In many ways, Estes‟s techniques and methods are unique among the Photo-Realist painters. Most of the others usually work from a single photographic image. Estes almost invariably uses two, three, or more photos. Several shots are taken at different lighting and focus settings; some are details of areas. Since neither the camera nor the eye sees exactly what Estes feels is „right‟, he combines photographs to make a painting” (210). “Color and tone gradation is attained by the placement of one solid color next to another. Estes can create an aluminum lamppost in several minutes with four to six vertical brushstrokes varying from very light gray on the lit side to very dark gray on the unlit side” (211).

41 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

M Audrey Flack. Marilyn, 1977, oil over acrylic on canvas Audrey Flack/ Marilyn Monroe/ return to the theme of the “Vanitas” still life/ glossy effects achieved with an airbrush/ affection for kitsch

1. “The first artist to paint a genuine Photrealist picture was Audrey Flack, who not only returned to illusionism, from her early career as an Abstract Expressionist, but also revived certain thematic concerns guaranteeing an emotional and psychological content remote from the cool detachment characteristic of Photorealist art. In one unforgettable series Flack created her own contemporary versions of the seventeenth-century vanitas picture. These are still-life compositions positively heaped with the jewels, cosmetics, and mirrors associated with feminine vanity, mixed, as in Old Master works, with skulls, calendars, and burning candles, those ancient memento mori designed to remind human beings of their mortality and thus the futility of all greed and narcissism. Flack also composes in a traditional way, assembling the picture‟s motifs and arranging them to suit her purposes. Only then does she take up the camera, make a slide, project it onto the canvas, and paint over the image with an airbrush. Although jammed and cropped like Mannerist still lifes. Flack‟s pictures possess a lushness of color, a spatial complexity, and a vastness of scale that speak clearly for the time and place in which they were executed” (Arnason 607, 609).

2. “Using an airbrush (a mechanical device often used in photo retouching that produces a fine spray of paint), she began to create paintings with colors of an even greater lushness that appealed to her for their emotional effect” (Stokstad 1142). “Many of these paintings, including Marilyn (Vanitas), feature imagery that relates specifically to women. The many vanitas reminders of time- watch, calendar, hourglass, and candle- are contrasted with conventional and popular objects of another kind of „vanity‟- mirror, jewelry, cosmetics- in what can be seen as a powerful comment on the human quest for love and beauty. The text in the book at the back of the painting, decorated b a traditional symbol of love, the rose, poignantly recounts the story of Marilyn Monroe, who could feel loved and satisfied only when she was made up and told she was pretty. Her lips rouged, Marilyn‟s face beams triumphantly from the book. Among the beautiful fruits with which Marilyn is identified is an opened peach, a traditional symbol of female sexuality. The peach pit, however, is a reminder that at her core was a hard, tough center. Near the middle of the painting is an old photograph, probably of Flack herself and her brother as children. This detail is not simply another reminder of the passage of time but a signal of Flack‟s identification with the film star‟s struggle against it. The drop of bright red paint at the tip of the artist‟s hovering magically above the open book is apparently meant to suggest that such paintings are invested with the artist‟s own lifeblood” (1142-1143).

N Chuck Close. Phil, 1969, synthetic polymer on canvas Chuck Close/ Philip Glass/ use of a grid format/ monumental Photo-realism/ factual presence and impersonal surface

1. “Ironically, a Photo-Realist canvas… may actually require weeks or even months to execute, a fact nowhere better illustrated than in the art of Chuck Close (1940-). When this one-time Abstract Expressionist found himself trapped in other people‟s painting styles, he broke free by formulating self-imposed restrictions that could not but force him into „new ways to make marks that make art‟. Like the Minimalists, Close would submit his painting to the control of a modular grid, and, like Process artists, he would also allow technique or procedure to assure paramount importance, to the point of becoming as much a subject as the image it renders. Still more radically, he sought to wean himself from stylistic dependency by deriving his process from photography and photomechanical printing, which introduced the discipline of a fixed model that told exactly what the picture should look like even before it had been started. In addition, Close decided to work exclusively from black-and-white images, thereupon cleansing his palette of sensuous color, and even to mime the smooth, impersonal surface of a photographic print or slide. To achieve this effect, he gave up bristle brushes and thick, luxurious paint, adopted the airbrush, and permitted himself only a few tablespoons of medium for each canvas, even though it retained the billboard scale made canonic by both Pop and Field painters. But however efficient photography may be as an image-making device, relative to the time-consuming observation and manual drawing practiced by older realists, Close recomplicated the situation and committed himself to the long, tedious, labor-intensive experience of transferring a standard-size, tightly grided photographic image and all its information to an enormous, similarly sectioned canvas on a ratio of about 1 to 10. In this way, he echoed the dot screen through which tonal variations may be achieved in industrial printing” (Wheeler 275- 276).

2. “In his inaugural series of eight identical, large-scale black-and-white paintings of 198-70, one of which was Phil, Close knew in advance exactly what the finished paintings would look like” (Sims 199). “He was fascinated by the neutrality and finality of the camera lens- so different from the human eye, which constantly refocuses and judges as it surveys. „The camera,‟ Close remarked, „is not aware of what it is looking at. It just gets it all down‟. For their verisimilitude, their lack of any obvious sign of their maker‟s hand, and their monumental scale, Close‟s early paintings inspire general awe and then intimate inspection. All depict his family or close associates. Although he later explained that he would not want to spend so much time with the face of someone he did not like, the quality of the photograph, as much as the friendship, determines which of his snapshots gets turned into art. Close prizes information above psychological interpretation. He considers his works paintings, before he perceives them as portraits” (199). “A connection can be made between Close‟s obsessive and stringent methodology and the early musical ideas of Glass, which are at once reductive and, through layered construction and repetition, aesthetically mesmerizing” (199).

42 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

O Duane Hanson. Tourists, 1970, polyvinyl, P Alice Neel. Mother and Child (Nancy and polychromed in oil with accessories Olivia), 1967, oil on canvas Duane Hanson/ a remarkable sense of verisimilitude/ Alice Neel/ blend of expressionism and casting from live humans/ use of fiberglass-reinforced realism/ refusal to flatter/ lack of finish polyester resin/ a portrait of consumers 1. “Another American artist 1. “Interviewed in 1970, four years after who never lost the Realist beginning the first of his extraordinarily faith was Alice Neel (1900- lifelike figurative sculptures, Duane 1984). After many years of Hanson remarked that „realism is best subsisting on the fringes of suited to convey the frightening mainstream art, Neel came idiosyncrasies of our time‟. Hanson‟s into late, but considerable, and social consciousness, like fame as a portraitist of such America‟s has softened somewhat in the searching psychologically intervening years. Whereas in the 1960s penetrating power that she he depicted the victims of poverty, war, seemed to be „stealing‟ the and violence, he currently commemorates very souls of her sitters” what Thoreau called the „quiet (Arnason 591-592). She “had been working figuratively desperation‟ in ordinary lives. Now the since the 1930s, but it was not until 1974 that she had pathos of aging, of being unemployed, or her first major museum retrospective. Refusing feeling unwanted and alone are Hanson‟s superficial pleasantries, her portraits are vigorous and chief concerns” (Sims 195). Hanson‟s direct. A series of paintings of pregnant women refused figures are “cast from life” and “he fills molds with plastic alloys, then to generalize the expectant female within the conventions paints the seamed figures, weaving human and artificial hair into the of fertility figures and earth mothers; instead, as Nochlin cast and using plastic eyes. He outfits the figures to convey his suggests, they dwell on the unnaturalness of pregnancy message and spends as much time selecting the right clothing and for modern urban women” (Chadwick 323). props as he does forming the bodies” (195). 2. “Neel collected people and preserved them on canvas. 2. “Hanson had been an abstract painter for many years when, at age Like an avid collector always looking for new specimens, forty-three, he began life-casting stereotyped Americans in fiberglass- she found them everywhere. She often stopped strangers reinforced polyester resin, a process designed to reproduce every on the street and asked them to pose, and she painted wrinkle, bulge, and boil with ruthless fidelity. He then painted the portraits of salespersons who came to her door. Her casts in Photo-Realist detail, complete with bruises, varicose veins, portraits are all unique- some smile, others frown, still and sunburn. Finally, he clothed the figures in the very readymade others seem as though they are about to speak. Some of attire the originals would themselves have worn. Initially, Hanson her portraits are done with great care and precision. conceived his effigies as participants in tableaux staged as stop- Others appear to be casually painted, reflecting perhaps action scenes of war, , or mob violence. Around 1970, the look and attitude of the sitters” (Mittler 567). however, he abandoned overt theatrics and allowed the drama of waste to unfold in recognizable American specimens presented alone 3. “Neel received solid academic training at the or in pairs, their bloated dishevelment and dull, unfocused look Philadelphia School of Design for Women in the 1920s. signaling an all-too-familiar history of junk-food binging and mental Reflecting a series of life crises, including the death in starvation. But along with Florida retirees came everyman images of infancy of one of her children and the abduction of workers, football players, and artists, counterfeit people who, by another by the child‟s father, Neel‟s early work featured virtue of their weary but dignified , often prove even more distorted, expressionistic images of children. Her style disturbing once the promise of warm-blooded, sentient life turns into softened after she moved to New York in 1932 and began something like rigor mortis. Just as the gap between art and life to specialize in frank and revealing images of the people appears to have closed with a loud snap, the chasm suddenly yawns she knew. She became, as she said, „a collector of souls‟. anew, right along a fault line that grows ever-more edgy as artifice The revival of in the early 1960s first assumes the artlessness of reality” (Wheeler 280). brought her to the attention of the New York art world, although her penetrating portraits were considered far too “Hanson‟s figures deploy that illusionism in the service of more subjective for the prevailing aesthetic. Her subjects now directed social commentary, the sheer plenitude of the resulting included well-known critics, curators, artists, and even figures becoming analogous to the material excesses of American an art historian, Linda Nochlin. Nochlin, then teaching consumerism. Neither De Andrea nor Hanson have managed, at , had recently inaugurated what would however, to pull their work entirely free of the negative comparisons quickly become known as feminist art history with two with wax-work displays. This, as we have seen, has dogged realist pioneering efforts. In 1971 she published an essay, „Why sculpture for centuries. Hanson‟s contribution to body realism finds Have There Been No Great Women Artists?‟ The following its echo in some of the work produced during the 1990s by young year she organized a session at the annual College Art contemporary artists such as the Chapman Brothers, Charles Ray, Association conference (the professional organization of Jeff Koons, and Abigail Lane, all of whom have adopted and artists and art historians), entitled „Eroticism and the subverted the in the service of the sexually shocking” Image of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Art‟, which (Flynn 156). “Hanson uses direct casting from live human beings the addressed the issue of sexism in art. Neel presents way super-Realist painters use photography, as a means of Nochlin as a warm, thoughtful woman, affectionately shortcutting the preparatory work so that the artist can devote the holding her daughter, a representative of all those other whole of his time and energy to virtually duplicating the look of the daughters whose future prospects Nochlin was devoted to model” (Arnason 609). enlarging” (Stokstad 1146).

43 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Realism STUDY GUIDE

Q The WPA and Women

1. “Federal ar ts projects, like the Works Progress (later Projects) Administration (WPA, 1934-39), supported women‟s struggles for professional recognition; a 1935 survey of professional and technical works on relief revealed that among artists receiving aid, approximately forty-one percent were women. The federal section of Fine Art, a non-relief program which funded murals for public buildings, awarded its commissions on the basis of anonymous competitions in which artist submitted unsigned sketches. Louise Nevelson, Lee Krasner, Isabel Bishop, and Alice Neel were first supported by such programs” (Chadwick 297).

2. “The new branch of the Works Progress Administration known as Federal Project Number One was set up in 1935 and lasted until 1943. It had four divisions, each with its own director” (Hughes, American Visions 451). “They distributed workfare, not welfare. Thus one of the enduring results of the Federal Writers‟ Project was a series of guidebooks to America, state by state, bringing together historians, cartographers, archaeologists, photographers, and writers of all kinds” (451).

R Lucian Freud. Large Interior W11 (After Watteau), 1981-3, oil on canvas Lucian Freud/ a homage of malaise to Watteau/ interest in varied surface textures

1. “Figurative imagery in general underwent a revival in the fifties, both in Europe and America… In Europe, the most outstanding traditional figure painter of the period was the Englishman Lucian Freud. Though directly engaged in the outward appearance of things, Freud wanted his „portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having the look of the sitter, being them‟. This powerful sense of the reality beyond the picture creates an uncomfortable intimacy between the viewer and the sitter. On the one hand the viewer feels a formal distance in not being able to divine the enigmatic relations between the figures (where there are more than one) or to know the true identity of the solitary subject. Yet the artist presses the viewer to intrude on an excruciatingly private scene” (Fineberg 162). “The grandson of Sigmund Freud, Lucian was born in Berlin and moved with his family to England in 1933. Inspired by the work of his friend Francis Bacon, he gradually loosened his style, beginning around 1960. Although expressionistic elements appear in his late work, he remained a realist. Freud took his subjects from a group of acquaintances. In his later work he usually portrayed them nude” (Stokstad 1150-1151).

2. “The decade when he achieved „a new dimension‟ began when the room used as a studio in his Holland Park flat became the setting for episode-long engagements with a few people, as many men as women. Freud began working over two uninterrupted stretches, frequently each of seven or eight hours duration, dawn until early afternoon and early evening until well past midnight. In recent years Freud has nearly always been occupied in making a large painting simultaneously with several smaller ones and his attempt to finish something ambitious has intensified the pressure overall. The way the people and furniture of his epic pictures move around the area of the large rectangular room, registering its walls, windows and doors, contributes to an even greater sense of life and, curiously, of imprisonment within the pictures. This happens in a mundane way as the long hours involve more „living‟ on the premises with breaks for eating, reading newspapers, and feeding the dog, as well as for the practical chores of painting, mixing colors and wiping brushes. Since the sitters are expending major parts of their lives in the studios, and the artist nearly all his, so they adjust their energy and emotion to each other” (Lampert 20).

3. “Strangely, the first large picture of the 1980s, the famous Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) 1981-83 has, and overcomes, the weaknesses of the other work with artificial content, Large Interior W9 1973. As Freud was arranging the five people, he did so in a way which exposed his influence over them, from the costumes they put on to the fact of sitting closely together on a bed and „sharing‟ their relationship with the artist standing a few paces away. The picture is most convincing when it is shown on its own, even in a slightly pretentious way as happened in the hushed room at Agnews where it appeared weeks after its completion. The proscenium effect of the floorboards contributes to the mirage-like effect, credible and vulnerable, whereas the plain functionality of the setting makes the costumes seem more like those from an attic trunk and an acknowledgement that the gathering was not an enchanted interlude. Indeed, insecurity spreads over the whole of Large Interior, from the people to the running water and the empty space” (20).

4. “Freud‟s gaze on the human body is infamous for its supposed detachment. Every burst of vein and inch of sagging flesh… is set forth, not „clinically‟, but stripped of narrative and sentiment. The image, in a favorite work of both Freud‟s and Auerbach‟s, compels assent by its „rawness‟. No modern nudes are more densely packed with bodily life. The ability to re-form the naked body in terms of clear, energetic shape while seeming not to lose a pore, not a hair, of its tensely scrutinized presence- as in Naked Portrait with Reflection, 1980, with its extraordinary drawing of the woman‟s breasts and thorax- seems to define Freud‟s idea of pictorial truth. The body is new every time, and the whole of it is a portrait. Because he wanted the body to carry the expressive force that the face would otherwise pre-empt, „I used to leave the face until last. I wanted the expression to be in the body. The head must be just another limb. So I had to play down expression in the nudes‟. There was no „formal system‟ in Freud‟s shapes- no sphere-cone-cylinder devices for making a reliable little pictorial engine out of that most unreliable, mutable, and fierce of pictorial objects, the human body” (Hughes, Shock of the New 417). “The painting conveys a sense of the irrevocable processes of age and the body‟s inevitable decay” (Stokstad 1151).

44

UNIT ELEVEN: Abstract Expressionism STUDY GUIDE

A The Abstract Expressionists

1. “The artists who would become known as Abstract Expressionists found inspiration in Cubist formalism and Surrealist automatism, two very different strands of modernism. From the Cubists they learned certain pictorial devices and a standard of aesthetic quality. From the Surrealists they gained a commitment to examining the unconscious and the techniques for doing so. But whereas the European Surrealists had derived their notion of the unconscious from Sigmund Freud, many of the Americans subscribed to the thinking of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961). His theory of the „collective unconscious‟ holds that beneath one‟s private memories is a storehouse of feelings and symbolic associations common to all humans. Abstract Expressionists, dissatisfied with what they considered the provincialism of American art in the 1930s, sought the universal themes within themselves” (Stokstad 1112).

2. “Having survived the most serious economic calamity and the greatest threat to civilization in all of history, the world now faced a potentially even greater danger: nuclear holocaust. This central fact conditioned the entire Cold War era, which came to an end only with the fall of Communism in Russia in 1985. Ironically, it was also a period of unprecedented prosperity in much of the West but not in the rest of the world, which, with the notable exception of Japan, struggled until recently to compete successfully. The painting that prevailed for about 15 years following the end of World War II arose in direct response to the anxiety brought on by these historical circumstances. The term Abstract Expressionism is often applied to this style, which was initiated by artists living in New York City” (Janson 812).

B Arshile Gorky. The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, 1944 Arshile Gorky/ a life fraught with anxiety/ influence of Surrealism/ blurred contours/ biomorphic shapes

1. “One of the first artists to bring these various influences together was Arshile Gorky (1904-1948). Gorky was born in Turkish Armenia, and his mother died of starvation during Turkey‟s brutal repression and eviction of its Armenian population. He emigrated in 1920 and moved to New York in 1925. In the 1930s his work went through a succession of styles that followed the evolution of modernism from Cezanne to Picasso to Miró. Three factors converge in his mature work of the 1940s: his intense childhood memories of Armenia, which provided his primary subject matter; his growing interest in Surrealism, first sparked by a major exhibition, „Dada, Surrealism, Fantastic Art‟, presented in 1936 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the many discussions of Jungian ideas he had with colleagues” (Stokstad 1112-1113).

2. “In 1942 everything came together in Gorky‟s painting; he clarified for himself what he wanted to paint and more or less how he had to do it. With this aesthetic self- assurance, the last six years of his life not only proved the most productive of his career but yielded work of uniformly brilliant quality, focused on a subject matter with highly specific referents to nature” (Fineberg 65). “The new compositions begun after 1942 successfully embody the deep resonances of Gorky‟s Armenian past in the describable present of his family in Connecticut. In an April 1944 letter to Vartoosh about The Liver is the Cock’s Comb Gorky wrote, „… it is as if some ancient Armenian spirit within me moves my hand to create so far from our homeland the shapes of nature we loved in the gardens, wheatfields and orchards of our Adoian family in Khorkom. Our beautiful Armenia which we lost and which I will repossess in my art‟. In The Liver a figure stands at the right edge of the canvas with a rooster‟s comb on his head and a feathered pelvis. One might speculate that a female figure stands in the center bent at the waist inspecting a variety of tall plants and that a dog lies at the bottom, right of center. Gorky‟s metamorphic figures seem to condense multiple images into one form, as in a dream. Drawings make such guesswork easier, though one is always uncertain about the precise identity of the images” (65-66).

3. “Gorky also conceived of the picture titles of the forties to link up closely with their subject, providing multiple meanings and references. Many ancient and medieval texts refer to the liver (not the heart) as the center of passion. The „cock‟s comb‟, at once the headdress and the elaborately feathered genitalia of the figure along the right side of the canvas, has to do with vanity and virility. On one level this invites the interpretation that the source of passion is physical lust, on another level that living itself is vanity” (66). “At this point there seems to be no doubt that Gorky had moved from Picasso to the early free abstractions of Kandinsky, the „original‟ Abstract Expressionist. The Surrealist sense of organic fantasy is, however, greater than in Kandinsky, which became particularly apparent in the drawings, where fantastic shapes are more explicit” (Arnason 388). “The enigmatic title suggests Gorky‟s close contact with the Surrealists during the war. Gorky developed a personal mythology that underlies his work; each form represents a private symbol within this hermetic realm. Everything here is in the process of turning into something else. The treatment reflects his own experience in camouflage, gained from a class he conducted during the war. The biomorphic shapes clearly owe much to Miró, while their spontaneous handling and the glowing color reflect Gorky‟s enthusiasm for Kandinsky. Yet the dynamic interlocking of the forms, their aggressive power of attraction and repulsion are uniquely his own” (Janson 812). “Gorky had great natural talent as a draftsman, and hone it to exquisiteness. His sense of drawing was bound up in the „speed‟ of a line, its whip and springiness, its ability to define an edge and suggest the volume behind the edge” (Hughes, American Visions 471). In early 1946, “a fire in his Connecticut studio destroyed most of the work he had prepared for his next exhibition. A mere three weeks later Gorky underwent surgery for cancer, in a hospital where he would return in June1948, now with a broken neck suffered in an automobile… When severe depression overcame the painter following this new disaster, his wife took their two little girls and departed. On July 21 Arshile Gorky hanged himself in a woodshed near his house in Sherman, Connecticut” (Wheeler 33-34).

45 UNIT ELEVEN: Abstract Expressionism STUDY GUIDE

C Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm, 1950, oil on canvas Jackson Pollock/ Action Painting/ Clement Greenberg/ Karl Jung/ Lee Krasner/ all-over, holistic quality/ controlled spontaneity/ New York City as an art center / influence of Navajo Indian sand painting

1. “Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the most famous of the Jung-influenced Abstract Expressionists, rejected much of the European tradition of aesthetic refinement- what he referred to as „French cooking‟- for cruder, rougher formal values identified with the Wyoming frontier country of his birth. In the context of World War II Pollock‟s rugged Americanism was much appreciated by New York critics. Pollock had come to New York in the early 1930s and studied with the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). Self-destructive and alcoholic, Pollock was introduced to Jung‟s ideas in 1939, when his family sent him to a Jungian therapist. Pollock was reluctant to talk about his problems, so the therapist tried to engage him through his art, analyzing in term of Jungian symbolism the drawings Pollock brought in each week” (Stokstad 1113). “Although the therapy had little apparent effect on Pollock‟s personal problems, it greatly affected his work, giving him a new vocabulary of signs and symbols and a belief in the therapeutic role of the artist in society. Jung maintained that the artist whose images tapped into „primordial‟ human consciousness would have a positive psychological effect on viewers, even if they did not understand the representations” (1113-1114).

2. “In the second phase of Abstract Expressionism, which dates from the late 1940s, two different approaches to expression emerged- one based on fields of color and the other on active paint handling. The second approach, known as action painting, or gesturalism, first inspired the label Abstract Expressionism. The term action painting was coined by art critic Harold Rosenberg (190-1978) in his 1952 essay „The American Action Painters‟” (1114). “Pollock began to replace painted symbols with freely applied paint as the central element of his work during the mid-1940s. After moving in 1945 to The Springs, a small, rural community on Long Island, New York, he created a number of rhythmic, dynamic paintings devoted to nature themes. The largest of these works were done on the floor of his upstairs studio because the room was too small to accommodate an easel. Pollock found this working method congenial, and when he moved his studio into a renovated barn in the fall of 1946, he continued to place his canvases on the floor and to work on his knees over and around them. Sometime in the winter of 1946-1947, he also began to employ enamel house paints along with conventional oils, dripping them onto his canvases with sticks and brushes, using a variety of fluid arm and wrist movements. As a student in 1936, he had experimented with this approach as well as with industrial paints in the studio of the visiting Mexican muralist David Siqueiros. He had no doubt been reminded of those experiments by the 1946 exhibition of small drip paintings of a self-taught painter, Janet Sobel (1894-1968), which he had seen in the company of his chief artistic adviser, the critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994)” (1114).

3. “Greenberg‟s view that the mainstream of modern art was flowing away from representation and easel painting toward abstraction and large-scale murals may have also influenced Pollock‟s formal evolution at this time, but his shift in working method was grounded in his own continuing interests in automatism and nature. The result over the next four years was a series of graceful linear abstractions such as Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” (1114-1115). “Many of the passages in his all-over works remind one of Monet. (In fact, it was Pollock‟s work that helped reawaken an enthusiasm for the late, „all-over‟ Monets among Americans, back in the sixties.) The title of his most ravishingly atmospheric painting, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950, sums this up. It has no compositional climax; it is a broad swatch of small incidents which melt into one another, the overlaid filaments of paint sometimes suggesting deep space only to deny it again. But this swarming gives it a delicacy that no reproduction can capture. He used the patterns caused by the separation and streaking of one enamel wet in another, tiny black striations in the dusty , to produce an infinity of tones. This is what imitators could never do, and why imitating Pollock was pointless. Did Nature disappear from such work? On the contrary; Pollock said that he wanted to „be nature‟, not just paint it, an aspiration similar to Kandinsky‟s. The mark of his greatest all- over canvases, like Lavender Mist or Autumn Rhythm, 1950, was their balance- between, on the one hand, the web of shallow space, so transparent to the eye and nuanced in its energy, and on the other the surface, with its puddles and blots and crusts of pigment. There is more than a mere memory in them of the epic space which nineteenth-century artists had found in American landscape: they are expansive, full of wind and weather, shifts of light, and ceaseless mutation. The life with which they are imbued is that of Nature, near and far” (Hughes, American Visions 486).

4. “This phase of Pollock‟s work did not last long. If the all-over paintings were the most abstract of his career, they only continued for four years; after that, Pollock interest in totems, eyes, and faces rose again, and perhaps if he had lived to seventy, dying (say) in the early 1980s, he would now be seen as a basically imagistic artist who had one abstract phase in his early middle age. But this is unknowable, because alcohol addiction and depression pulled him under. By 1954 he had almost ceased to paint, and in 1956 he crashed and died not far from his Long Island studio” (486, 488). “In 1949 Clement Greenberg had pronounced him to be the best living American artist, and this was taken up by the then enormously influential Life magazine, which splashed him and his paintings across several pages: this transformed his career and life even more than the cover of Time had altered the career of Thomas Hart Benton, who happened to have been Pollock‟s teacher. It was the first time that the American mass media had latched onto an abstract painter, and his celebrity was instantaneous. After his death, „Jack the Dripper‟ became one of the legends of modern art, and American culture never got over its surprise at producing him. This, it seemed, was the man who finally freed American painting from the grip of its own deference to Europe” (482). “Pollock‟s work exposes directly, in the process of painting, the changing facts of his creative experience. He transformed the obligation for social relevance, a pervasive current between the wars, into an unrelenting moral commitment to a search for the „self‟. The multiple impressions of the artist‟s own hand in the upper right corner of Number 1 stress the visceral immediacy of the artist‟s personal presence, and, by contrast, emphasize the vastness of the canvas as measured against them. A number of painters of the New York School used handprints in this way” (Fineberg 96-97).

46 UNIT ELEVEN: Abstract Expressionism STUDY GUIDE

Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm, 1950, oil on canvas (CONTINUED)

5. “Even when the final painting was hung on the wall, it bore evidence of its horizontal vector in the pooling and scabbing of paint congealed into tarry pockets or flowing bleeding rivulets. This reorientation, Pollock himself suggested may have been inspired by the paint-spattered floor of his studio or by the ceremonial sand paintings of the Navajo Indians he admired. Pollock also liberated line from any descriptive function of contour and form, instead of creating a calligraphy of fluid, undulating rhythms. An artist of great formal intelligence, he merged drawing and painting, line and color. The rhythmic layering of great skeins of color, plane over plane, represented a new way of depicting pictorial space. Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist colleagues contributed more than art to American culture in the 1950s. The premium they placed on originality, autonomy, and individual actions led to one of the most enduring myths of the decade- the idea of the artist as the romantic, alienated genius. Photographs of Pollock, particularly those of , have abetted this myth. In a remarkable sequence of still and filmed images, we see Pollock alone in his studio, confronting the canvas and, through his rhythmic actions, creating a painting” (Phillips 17). “The very photos of Pollock would have their effect on the esthetic of „‟ in the 1960s and avant-garde dance in the 1970s” (Hughes, American Visions 483).

6. The twenty -nine-year-old painter made his debut in the commercial world of New York galleries in “January 1941, thanks to John Graham, who organized an exhibition for McMillen Inc., the well-known interior design firm” (Wheeler 41). “The occasion also marked the beginning of the life-long relationship that Pollock would have with Lee Krasner, through whom he met other members of the future Abstract Expressionist group and learned still more about Cubism and Surrealism. Together the friends joined Motherwell, Baziotes, and their wives for evenings spent writing automatist poetry, while during the day Pollock did janitorial service at the Museum of Non- Objective painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), to make up for the slender stipend he lost when the WPA was terminated in 1943. Meanwhile, Motherwell introduced Pollock to , recently returned to New York from war-torn Europe and prepared to exhibit new American art alongside the Europeans‟ latest abstract and Surrealist works at her museum-gallery, Art of this Century . Towards the end of 1943 Guggenheim gave Pollock a year‟s contract and his first one-man show, two events that constituted the big career breakthrough to be realized by a member of the yet-to-be-named Abstract Expressionist group” (41).

D Clement Greenberg

1. “Modernism, so integral to art of the nineteenth century, shifted course in conjunction with the changing historical conditions and demands. In the postwar years, modernism increasingly became identified with a strict formalism- an emphasis on an artwork‟s visual elements rather than its subject- due largely to the prominence of the American Clement Greenberg (1909-1994). As an art critic who wielded considerable influence from the 1940s through the 1970s, Greenberg was instrumental in developing and articulating modernism‟s redefined parameters. For Greenberg, late-twentieth-century modernist artists were those who refined the critical stance of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernists. This critical stance involved rejecting illusionism and exploring each artist medium‟s properties. So dominant was Greenberg that scholars often refer to the general modernist tenets during this period as Greenbergian formalism. Although his complex ideas about art were modified over the years, certain basic concepts are associated with Greeanbergian formalism. In particular, Greenberg promoted the idea of purity in art. He explained, „Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art‟. In other words, he believed artists should strive for a more explicit focus on the properties exclusive to each medium- for example, two-dimensionality, or flatness in painting, and three- dimensionality in sculpture. To achieve this, artists had to eliminate illusion and embrace abstraction” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1075). “Greenberg avidly promoted the avant-garde, which he viewed as synonymous with modernism in the postwar years. Generally speaking, the spirit of rebellion and disdain for convention central to the historical avant-garde flourished in the sociopolitical upheaval and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. However, the acute sociopolitical dimension inherent in the avant-garde‟s early development had evaporated by this time (although many of the artists considered avant-garde aligned themselves with the Left). Thus the avant-garde (and modernism) became primarily an artistic endeavor. Still, the distance between progressive artists and the public widened. In his landmark 1939 article „Avant-Garde and Kitsch‟, Greenberg insisted on the separation of the avant-garde from kitsch (which Greenberg defined as „ersatz‟, or artificial, culture, such as popular commercial and literature), thereby advocating the continued alienation of the public from avant-garde art” (1075).

2. “The specifically modern notion of the mainstream arose from the way the Enlightenment philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770- 1831) reformulated these old ideas about progress. In his „Lectures on the Philosophy of History‟, Hegel argued that history is the gradual manifestation of divinity over time. It is, in other words, the process by which the divine reveals itself to us. As one modern writer succinctly put it, history is thus „the autobiography of God‟. The important men and women who seem to shape events are actually the vehicles by which the divine „Spirit‟ unfolds itself. Hegel‟s conception of history as the record of large, impersonal forces struggling toward some transcendent end had a profound effect” (Stokstad 1116). “In the period after World War II the critical discussion of what constituted the modernist mainstream, which had remained largely unstated earlier, was encouraged and shaped by the critical writings of Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), whose thinking was grounded in a Hegelian concept of the development of art since about 1860. In essence, Greenberg argued that modern art since Edouard Manet involved the progressive disappearance of both pictorial space and figuration because art itself- whatever the artists may have thought they were doing- was supposedly undergoing its own „process of self-purification‟ in reaction to a deteriorating civilization. Although Greenberg‟s conception of the mainstream was rejected by members of the art world during the Abstract Expressionist era, it was embraced by a powerful group of American critics and historians, the so-called Greenbergians, who began to express themselves around 1960” (1116). “In the 1950s, Greenberg also started to support a group of artists who he felt were extending the possibilities Pollock had presented in his drip paintings by merging material and support. These artists- Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland- were the leading practitioners of what is called Color Field Painting, or stain painting, as it was also known” (Phillips 55).

47 UNIT ELEVEN: Abstract Expressionism STUDY GUIDE

E Willem de Kooning. Woman and Bicycle, 1952-3, oil on canvas Willem de Kooning/ exploration of the overpowering female figure/ lack of purity in abstract painting / art as an act of both creation and destruction/ a huge, double smile

1. “The work of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), another prominent member of the group and a close friend of Gorky, always retains a link with the world of images, whether or not it has a recognizable subject” (Janson 814). “De Kooning was born and raised in Rotterdam, where his father, Leendert de Kooning, was a liquor distributor, and his mother, Cornelia Nobel- reputedly a woman of fearsome toughness- ran a sailor‟s bar on the waterfront. In the 1920s he went to study art at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts, an undistinguished school. His main interest, as a youth, was in commercial art, shopwindow design and illustration; these skills, rather than a classical „fine arts‟ training, were what he got at the Academy. The idea that de Kooning had a rigorous education as a formal draftsman comparable, say, to Mondrian‟s is a myth. His ambition was to do the kind of illustrations he had seen in American magazines, but „I had no talent for it‟, This early background helps explain the irrepressible fondness for popular culture- cigarette ads, Marilyns, and so forth- that kept surfacing in his work in the 1950s, to the annoyance of some American critics: de Kooning was never a pure „high‟ artist, partly because he was not trained to be one. And in any case, the one thing he wanted was to get to America, the cornucopia of dreams across the sea from Rotterdam. He did so in 1926, by working his way on a steamer and then jumping ship into America without papers. He settled in New York, an illegal immigrant” (Hughes, American Visions 475).

2. “De Kooning shocked the New York art world in the early 1950s by returning to a figurative focus with a series of paintings of women. The paintings were also shocking because of the brutal way he depicted his subjects. The images in the paintings in this series dramatically veered away from the conventionally pretty women common in American advertising. What emerged is not the elegant companion of Madison Avenue fantasy but a powerful adversary, more dangerous than alluring. The first of the series, Woman I, took him almost two years to paint. His wife, the artist Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989), said that he painted it, scraped it, and repainted it at least several dozen times. Only the soft pastel colors and luscious paint surface give any hint of de Kooning‟s original sources, and these qualities are nearly lost in the furious slashing of the paint. Critics repeatedly questioned de Kooning‟s feelings toward women, „Women irritate me sometimes‟, he said. „I painted that irritation in the Woman series‟. But he also added: „I was painting the woman in me‟” (Stokstad 1116).

3. “Willem de Kooning‟s Woman and Bicycle is a dozen different paintings superimposed on one another. Patches of raw canvas lie at the bottom edge of the composition adjacent to geometric forms in flat green, resembling the backgrounds to his seated women of the early forties” (Fineberg 74). “Here and there a sense of the figure comes into focus and quickly out again. „Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash‟, the artist explained. The enormous fleshy breasts bulge forward, then they are a flat cutout that clings to the surface of the picture plane. A second grinning mouth hangs around the neck like a glittering necklace; it remains from a previous position of the head, an earlier composition, now largely crossed out. This is a painting in perpetual state of redefinition. No passage is more than a temporary point en route to a new approximation. The inherently „unfinished‟, always „in process‟ character of de Kooning‟s work makes this canvas seem as freshly painted today as it did when the artist made it nearly half a century ago” (74). “In Woman and Bicycle he created extreme spatial oppositions: the breasts read alternately as a flat pattern and as fully rounded forms; the energetic brushwork creates an expansive surface plane that provides a background for the figure while at the same time absorbing it; this active surface in turn seems to hover in front of yet another plane of flat background implied at the bottom edge. De Kooning heightened the disconcerting effect of the figure-ground relationships by constantly dissolving and reformulating contours and forms. All these expressive oppositions serve to create a figure that is simultaneously menacing and sensuous” (74). “De Kooning read widely in philosophy and literature, and he particularly liked Kierkegarard‟s idea that everything necessarily contains its opposite” (74). “Woman and Bicycle belongs to de Kooning‟s famous series of slightly over life-sized women, painted in the early fifties. The style itself is an attack on closed systems, finality, and any fixed way of looking at things. „There is no plot in painting‟, de Kooning told Harold Rosenberg. „It‟s an occurrence which I discover by, and it has no message‟. So de Kooning used the act of painting to examine things around him, keeping all possibilities open and maintaining an atmosphere of uncertainty” (74). “Woman and Bicycle, part of the series but not a numbered work within it, was the second largest of the group. It is notable for the clarity of the woman‟s features, her two mouths, and swollen breasts. The lower mouth (retained from an earlier placement) hangs like a ghoulish necklace or a souvenir of a Dracula-like attack. These frozen expressions of pleasure are arresting details within an intense and frenzied composition. The circular slashes of paint in the lower left signify the wheel and handlebar of the bicycle in the title. The Action Painting manner of execution both establishes and demolishes a dialogue between the drawn figure and the gestural ground” (Sims 123).

4. “What seemed, at the time, particularly disturbing about the Women was their balance between atavism and kitsch. On one hand, they invoked a long string of archaic goddesses, harpies, and dominatrixes, from the Venus of Willendorf to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner‟s Berlin streetwalkers. But on the other, their origins were American: the smile on the face of de Kooning‟s women had begun in advertising, when he cut out a picture of the „T-Zone‟- the mouth and throat of a happy model- from an ad for Camel cigarettes and pasted it into a drawing. The cute red fifties mouth became the eye of a hurricane of anxiety, figured in paint. By the late 1950s de Kooning was surrounded by imitators. There was a gestural de Kooning „look‟, easily reduced to parody” (Hughes, American Visions 479). “Some critics, including Clement Greenberg, felt that after 1950 de Kooning‟s work declined… Greenberg is said to have told de Kooning that at this point in history (meaning forty-five years ago) you couldn‟t paint a human face. Sure, said the artist, and you can‟t not paint one either- meaning, by this laconic koan, that no matter how abstract your painting gets, people will always read images into it, like seeing faces in the fire. So why not come right out with the figure? Even more than Pollock, de Kooning was fated to disappoint those who wanted him to be purer than he was. Just as Pollock‟s „all-over‟ paintings would be less intense if they weren‟t landscapes too, so the ghosts of Dutch and Flemish baroque figure painting kept jolting de Kooning‟s elbow” (477-478). De Kooning “emigrated to the United States in 1926, but did not have his first one-man show until 1948” (Adams, Art Across Time 890). 48 UNIT ELEVEN: Abstract Expressionism STUDY GUIDE

F Franz Kline. Chief, 1950, oil on G Robert Motherwell. Elegy to the Spanish Republic, canvas 1953-54, oil on canvas Franz Kline/ enlargement of black and Robert Motherwell/ tragic sense of history of the Spanish white drawings/ a painting of heroic Civil War suggested in painting/ influence of collage strokes and gestures 1. Unlike his colleagues, Robert Motherwell 1. “Born to a German- (1915-1991) “was held to be rich; in the 1940s American father and an he received an unprincely fifty dollars a week English mother in from a trust fund set up by his father, a San Wilkes-Barre, Penn- Francisco bank president who was disappointed sylvania, six-year-old that his son hadn‟t the sense to be a banker or a Franz Kline entered broker. Family money gave him a broad Girard College in education: a B.A. in philosophy at Stanford, a Philadelphia, a free prewar tour of Europe, and a Ph.D. studies in boarding school for philosophy at Harvard, abandoned in 1940 in favor of an art history course orphaned boys, after his father committed suicide in at Columbia given by the art historian Meyer Schapiro. It was Shapiro, a 1917. At the age of fourteen, however, Kline rejoined political radical with the finest of antennae, who persuaded Motherwell to his mother, brother, sister, and new stepfather in stop doing art history and become a painter. But he never ceased to write, Lehighton, a railroad and mining center in eastern lecture, and edit: his Documents of Modern Art series in the 1940s was the Pennsylvania whose wintry, snow-laden slopes first to provide of crucial texts of European modernism to an sectioned by coal-blackened industrial structures American audience. He was, in short, a rare type in America: the painter as would find a permanent place in Kline‟s mature art” intellectual. And as such, he was suspected of being „too French‟. (Wheeler 38). “True to an alternate name for Abstract Motherwell read French and spoke some, and he soon became conversant Expressionism, „action painting‟, Kline‟s pictures with the exiled Surrealists in New York. They clicked, at first because often suggest broad, confident, quickly executed Motherwell had common ground with them: his literary culture, based on an gestures reflecting the artist‟s spontaneous impulses. enthusiasm for French Romantic and Symbolist poetry, from Baudelaire to Yet Kline seldom worked that way. In the late 1940s, Mallarmé and beyond to Paul Eluard. The Symbolist idea of direct chancing to project some of his many drawings on correspondences between sound, color, sensation, and ideated memory the wall, he found that their lines, when magnified, struck Motherwell as one of the supreme achievements of Western culture gain abstraction and sweeping force. This discovery and the key to modernist painting. He had never agreed, and never would, inspired all of his subsequent painting; in fact many that painting could feed only on theory or Utopian fancy. It had to be canvases reproduce a drawing on a much large scale, located in the world of feeling, of feeling about the world” (Hughes, American fusing the improvised and the deliberate, the Visions 495). miniature and the monumental” (Bee 205). 2. “The series for which Motherwell is best known- though, in fact, it makes 2. “„Chief‟ was the name of a locomotive Kline up only a small fraction of his output- is the Spanish Elegies. They remembered from his childhood, when he had loved completely represent what Motherwell had in mind when he thought about the railroad. Many viewers see machinery in Kline‟s „the subjects of the artist‟. At the time he began them he had never been to images, and there are lines in Chief that imply speed Spain, but there were several reasons that this subject bore on him. The and power as they rush off the edge of the canvas, first was a general and political one: that the fate of Spain, in losing swelling tautly as they go. But Kline claimed to paint democracy to the dictator Franco, was an emblem of a larger European „not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that struggle for freedom. The second was that Motherwell wanted to generalize looking‟, and Chief is abstract, an uneven framework from the historical event: to paint a meditation on death, loss, and of horizontals and verticals broken by loops and sexuality. And third, he needed a constant theme and a general format in curves. The cipherlike quality of Kline‟s which he could test himself, see the way his automatism worked. The configurations, and his use of black and white, have Spanish Elegies provided that. Their color, for the most part, is restricted to provoked comparisons with Japanese calligraphy, white and black… Occasionally there is a patch of ocher or a flare of but Kline did not see himself as painting black signs crimson and yellow (the colors of the Falangist flag but also, more anciently, on white ground; „I paint the white as well as the those of the Catalan resistance), but these are basically monochrome black‟, he said, „ and the white is just as important‟” paintings, their absent color an undisguised homage to the journalistic (205). black-and-white of Picasso‟s Guernica and the tragic tonal intensity of Goya‟s Caprichos” (495-496). The work presents “the sharpest of contrasts: 3. “Having translated the wrist action of intimate vitality (white) against death (black), living forms (the ovoids) imprisoned or drawing into the full-arm action of mural-size crushed between the black bands” (496). “The execution of the Spanish painting, Kline endowed both black and white not poet, Garcia Lorca, by the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War of the thirties only with raw energy but also with an aggressive, all- became a symbol of injustice. For many artists and intellectuals it over up-frontness quite alien to Chinese and embodied the modernist confrontation with established cultural values. As Japanese ideographic writing. On his uniformly Motherwell once remarked, the theme of all the „Elegies‟ is the „insistence activated field, where positive and negative join that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot‟. The term „elegy‟ together as uneasy coefficients of one another, itself means a funeral dirge or lament” (Fineberg 70-71). Lorca‟s poem variety emerges from the acrobatic juggling of the „Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias‟, a line of which Motherwell used as a large, simple shapes, as well as from abrupt shifts in title for another painting At Five in the Afternoon, “concerns a heroic the velocity, direction, and texture of the strokes that bullfighter who is gored in the ring, and three symbolic colors create auras give them life” (Wheeler 39). “While riding the crest around the key images of the poem- the red blood, the bleaching white light of his long-delayed success, Kline suffered a heart of the sun, and the blackness of death and shadows” (70-71). “The contours attack and died at the age of fifty-two” (40). and drips were modulated at the end of the painting process, and it is these areas that carry the most intense expressive content” (71).

49 UNIT ELEVEN: Abstract Expressionism STUDY GUIDE

H Mark Rothko. Ochre and Red on Red, 1954, oil on canvas Mark Rothko/ floating fields of color (Color Field Painting)/meant to engulf the viewer with color

1. “During the 1950s de Kooning dominated the avant-garde in New York. Among the handful of modernist painters who resisted his influence were Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and Barnett Newman (1905-1970). By 1950 these two had evolved individual styles that relied on large rectangles of color to evoke transcendent emotional states. Because of the formal and emotional similarities of their work, they were soon referred to collectively as Color Field painters. The third painter usually included in this grouping is the -based Clyfford Still (1904-1980), who developed his style outside of New York and earlier than his two colleagues and whose example of greatly influenced Rothko‟s turn to Color Field” (Stokstad 1116- 1117). “Rothko discovered Still‟s work in the summer of 1947, when the two taught together at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. By the end of the summer Rothko was producing a soft- edge version of Still‟s work, freely painted color abstractions lacking any clear organizational structure. By 1948 he was beginning to organize his colors into rectangular units. And by 1950 he had evolved his mature format, which typically involved two to four soft-edge rectangular blocks of color hovering one above another against a monochrome ground” (1117).

2. With these paintings, “he hoped to express the sense of aw and numinous presence which had once been associated with the depiction of gods in art- but do it without the human figure. He was an esthete to the fingertips, and wanted to employ the vocabulary of Symbolism- the presence of Mallarmé‟s „negated object‟, the indeterminate space, the refined and sensuous color- to render the patriarchal despair and elevation of the Old Testament. That Rothko had a religious vision of some kind is not in doubt. There was a deeply rabbinical streak in his character. But he was struggling, as a Jew, to do what only Christian iconography could achieve, and the vital relationships between myth, dogma, symbol, and personal inspiration that had carried religious art from Cimabue to William Blake we3re denied him by the reductive trajectory of modernism itself” (Hughes, American Visions 490). “Their emotional range is wide, from foreboding and sadness to an exquisite and joyous luminosity. But was this enough to constitute a major religious utterance? One can only answer, without skepticism, that it was not. The evidence is in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, commissioned by the de Menil family in 1964, finished in 1967, but not installed until 1971, a year after Rothko‟s suicide. These gloomy black-and-dark-red canvases, inscrutable and immobile, seek to extend the viewer‟s response time; the eye searches for the form (a near-black rectangle on a purplish red ground) and then, in the diminished light of the chapel- muted daylight being part of the theatrical effect- seeks its nuances. But the expected epiphany does not come. Rothko‟s work could not, in the end, support the weight of meaning he wanted it to have. He and other „field‟ painters- Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman- were given to describe their ambitions in terms of the „Sublime‟, as set forth by Edmund Burke in 1757. What, Burke enquired, produced that sense of overwhelming awe that characterized „sublime‟ emotion in the face of Nature and Art alike? Unity, vast size, boundlessness, emptiness, and darkness; in the presence of these, „the mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other‟, and the work of art becomes self-sufficient. Rothko believed in the possibility of such painting but often doubted that he had realized it. But Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman seem to have had no doubts that they had” (490-491).

3. “Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Lithuania. He received a Talmudic education as a boy, and his early childhood was scarred by memories of mob violence against Jews. Persecution forced his mother to immigrate with her children to America, where they settled in Portland, Oregon. Rothko grew into a touchy, academically gifted scholarship boy, fiercely attached to radical causes; right up to 1970, the last year of his life, he would maintain that he was still an anarchist. In 1921 he went to Yale, but left in his second year and fetched up in New York studying painting with Max Weber” (488). “Another artist who deeply affected Rothko‟s growth was Adolph Gottlieb, with whom he came to share the Jungian hope that painting might extract from cultural memory archetypal and mythic symbols with a relevance to the present day” (489). “Rothko consciously sought a profound harmony between the two divergent human tendencies that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) called the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The rich color represents the emotional, instinctual, or Dionysian (after the Greek god of wine, the harvest, and inspiration) element, whereas the simple compositional structure is its rational, disciplined, or Apollonian (after the Greek god of light, music, and truth) counterpart. In his paintings Rothko pursued transforming this fundamental human duality into a consonant and deeply satisfying unity” (Stokstad 1117). “He was convinced of Nietzsche‟s contention, which he reread many times, that the modern individual was „tragically divided‟. Thus, the surfaces of Rothko‟s paintings are never completely unified but remain a collection of separate and distinct parts. What gives this fragmentation its particular force is that these elements offer an abstraction of the human form… The vertical paintings, usually somewhat larger than life, therefore present the viewer with a kind of mirror image of the divided self. Thus the dark tonalities that Rothko increasingly featured in his work emphasize the tragic implications of this division. The best of his mature paintings maintai n a tension between the harmony they seem to seek and the fragmentation they regretfully acknowledge” (1117, 1119). “In Rothko‟s work form 1949 to 1970 the very simplicity of the radically paired down structure provides an awe-inspiring material embodiment of a „single tragic idea‟. A Rothko painting „is not a picture of an experience, it is an experience‟. Rothko‟s compositional format maintains a tense equilibrium between the forces of disintegration and precise definition” (Fineberg 115).

4. “By the 19 60s Rothko had achieved financial security and a prodigious reputation. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson invited him to their inauguration festivities and to dinner at the White House; in 1961 the Museum of Modern Art gave him a major retrospective; and in the fall of 1963 the prestigious Marlborough Gallery took him on. Still he felt trapped and restless. In of 1967 he sunk into a deep melancholy and a year later he had an aneurism of the aorta. His mood was black. During his last years he did many brilliantly colored works, though the somber tone of the Houston murals prevailed, and after his heart attack in 1968 he started painting predominantly with acrylic on paper. Rothko‟s marriage and emotional life steadily deteriorated during this period and finally on February 25, 1970 he took his own life” (115). “The obstinate, immovable presence of Rothko‟s paintings pushes the viewer out on his or her own, face to face with fundamental, unresolved, ontological questions” (115).

50 UNIT ELEVEN: Abstract Expressionism STUDY GUIDE

I David Smith. Cubi XVII, 1963,polished stainless steel David Smith/ industrial techniques (welding) and materials (stainless steel)/ equilibrium of strength and buoyancy (defying gravity)/ expressionistic surface combined with geometric forms

1. “Like the painters of the New York School, the sculptors also shifted their focus in the late forties to the implications of surrealist automatism and to existentialism” (Fineberg 115). “The major American sculptor of the New York School was David Smith (1906-1965). Born in Indiana, Smith learned metalworking when, at nineteen, he worked as a riveter in the Studebaker automobile plant in South Bend. Concentrating initially on painting, he turned to sculpture in 1933 after seeing a reproduction of a welded metal sculpture by Picasso and Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942). Smith‟s early sculpture is diverse, ranging from social commentary to a three-dimensional version of automatist drawing. During the 1950s he produced his Tank Totem series, a group of works that seems to look back to the sculpture of Picasso and Gonzalez. The title of the series combines a reference to army tanks with the concept of a totem, an animal or plant that serves as an emblem for a clan. As a totem for himself, the tank may reflect Smith‟s belligerent streak as well as his experience as a welder helping to produce tanks during World War II” (Stokstad 1119). “During the last five years of his life, Smith turned from human and organic themes to formalism. The shift was inspired largely by the artist‟s discovery of stainless steel. Smith explored both its relative lightness and the beauty of its polished surfaces in the Cubii series, monumental combinations of geometric units inspired by and offering homage to Cubism, the painting style that helped give birth to formalism. Like the Analytic Cubist works of Braque and Picasso presents a finely tuned balance of elements that threaten to collapse at the slightest provocation. The viewer‟s aesthetic pleasure depends on this tension and on the dynamic curvilinear patterns formed by the play of light over the burnished surfaces. The works were meant to be seen outdoors in nature, not only because of the gleaming sunlight but also because of the way natural shapes and materials complement the inorganic ones of his work” (1120).

2. “Placing sculpture outdoors, in natural light, came to matter greatly to Smith by 1957, when he embarked on a sequence of pieces in stainless steel: first the Sentinels, and then his last series, the Cubis. At first he had divided feelings about outdoor siting, since he felt it was „historic or royal and has nothing to do with the contemporary concept‟: landscape all around seemed to diminish the work; „far away it makes less demand on the viewer‟. But then he realized that, especially with the highly reflective material of stainless steel, one could bring sunlight and color into the work to develop the illusion of surface and depth” (Hughes, American Visions 504-505). “The silvery planes of the Cubis, scribbled with stuttery, glittering lines by the rapid „drawing‟ of a power grinder- a freehand texture over the architectonic blocks of form- respond better to sunlight or starshine than to the static lighting of a museum. They create a grand architectural presence, with overtones of portals and sacrificial altars or even, as in Cubi XVII, 1963, something on a more intimate scale written large- a still-life table, the gueridon of Cubism, with canted corner-welded blocks flying above it. Such a range of expression, culminating in the Cubis, had never been seen in American sculpture before and has not reappeared since. Smith was to the twentieth century what Augustus Saint-Gaudens had been to the nineteenth” (505).

3. “In the Cubis, neutralization began with the component parts, sleekly reductive „boxes‟ and „cushions‟ welded together from precut lengths of gleaming stainless steel. But having thus distanced his material, Smith simply refocused the search for paradox or discontinuity by assembling his solid geometries in balances so eccentric as to suggest that event eh slightest adjustment would bring them crashing down. And set against this tense yet perfect equipoise, with is alternating play of sculptural silhouettes, is the excited dazzle of the surfaces. Wire-brushed in wild, swirling patterns, the variously angled metal planes catch the light and scatter it, optically dissolving the blocky volumes while also drawing into the sculpture a fiery, refracted illusion of the colorful world without. If the gesturalism of the surface treatment seems akin to Action Painting, the arrangement of the clean-edged masses often suggests abstract still lifes on tabletops, hence the intimist realm of earlier Cubism. But while the Cubis‟ simplified vocabulary derived more directly from Cubism‟s later , more radical Constructivist phase, it is, in certain works, scaled to the august proportions innovated by postwar American art. Here scale combined with Platonic formalism seems to yield intuitions of the sublime already seen in Abstract Expressionist painting. For some viewers, this transforms the tabletop still-life assemblages into symbolic monstrances or sacrifice- laden altars, while the two-legged towers become totemic figures and the more earth-rooted „gates‟ grand portals leading to mysterious infinity” (Wheeler 117-118).

4. “At the end of the thirties Smith began to integrate real tools- pliers, wrenches, washers- into his abstract sculptures. The tools had an evocative significance as emblems of the industrial world. Yet their presence only exacerbated the critics‟ hostility toward welding as a new fine-art technique” (Fineberg 118). “In the early forties Smith experimented with metamorphic abstraction, indebted to Picasso‟s and Miro‟s figures of 1927 to 1933. Like them Smith preserved a clear connection to sources in the external world. Yet he used the unconscious as a tool to transform the subject, and the impact of surrealist dream imagery is evident” (118). “Smith completed 250 sculptures between 1950 and 1960, two-and-a-half times the number he made over the preceding decade. He drove himself as if he had to live up to Greenberg‟s prediction of 1943, that he would be the greatest sculptor in the United States. But the personal sacrifices were great. His ambition had made him increasingly difficult to live with, his uncontrollable temper had gotten worse, and he had been having an affair with a student” (122). “Jean Freas, the woman Smith had begun to see at Sarah Lawrence in 1949, was twenty when they met, Smith was forty-three. They married on April 6, 1953 and had two daughters (in 1954 and 1955); in 1958 this marriage too came apart. By this time the momentum of Smith‟s work and career had accelerated, despite his reputation of being difficult to deal with. In 1957 the Museum of Modern Art gave him a one-man show of thirty-four sculptures, and by the end of the year his income had quadrupled” (122-123). “Smith created all but one of the twenty-eight works in the „Cubi‟ series- the most celebrated series of his career- during the last three years of his life. By and large the „Cubis‟, like much of Smith‟s work, imply one viewing position” (125). “The „Cubis‟ also toy with the viewer‟s perception by creating ambiguities that encourage a reading of the actual volumes as two- dimensional depictions” (125-126). 51 UNIT ELEVEN: Pop Art STUDY GUIDE

A Richard Hamilton. Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 1956, collage on paper Richard Hamilton/ Lawrence Alloway and the birth of Pop/ influence of Duchamp/ products of mass culture/ low brow, middle brow, and high brow/ a traditional portrait next to a comic strip/ The Jazz Singer

1. “Pop Art actually began in London in the mid-1950s with the Independent Group of artists and intellectuals. They were fascinated by the impact on British life of the American mass media, which had been flooding England ever since the end of World War II. The first work that can be called an outright statement of Pop Art was a small collage made in 1956 by Richard Hamilton (b. 1922), a follower of Marcel Duchamp. It already incorporates most of the subject matter that was taken up by later artists: comic strips, cinema, commercial design, nudes, cheap décor, appliances- all tokens of modern materialistic culture. Hamilton wrote that „popular culture abstracted from Fine Art its role of myth-maker. If the artist is not to lose much of his ancient purpose, he may have to plunder the popular arts to recover the imagery which is his rightful inheritance. Pop-Fine- Art… upholds a respect for culture of the masses and a conviction that the artist in twentieth-century urban life is inevitably a consumer of mass culture and potentially a contributor to it‟. It is not surprising that the new art had a special attraction for America and that it reached its fullest development there during the following decade. In retrospect, Pop Art in the United States was an expression of the optimistic spirit of the 1960s that began with the election of John F. Kennedy and ended at the height of the Vietnam War. Unlike Dada, Pop Art was not motivated by despair or disgust at contemporary civilization. It viewed commercial culture as its raw material, an endless source of pictorial subject matter, rather than as an evil to be attacked. Nor did Pop Art share Dada‟s aggressive attitude toward the established values of modern art” (Janson 827-828). The English critic “who first spoke of „Pop Culture‟ and then coined the phrase „Pop Art‟” was Lawrence Alloway (Wheeler 122).

2. “The main impetus of English Pop came out of discussions, from 1952 onwards, between writers like Alloway, John McHale, and the architectural critic Reyner Banham, and such artists as Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton. This group put on a pioneering exhibition at the London Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in 195, called „This is Tomorrow‟- a quasi-anthropological, semi-ironic, but wholly enthusiastic look at the mass imagery of the early electronic age. Hamilton exhibited a small but densely prophetic collage called Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956. In it, the word „Pop‟ makes it first appearance in art, emblazoned on the hilarious phallic sucker the muscle-man is holding. Moreover, all the chief image sources of later Pop art are compressed into the collage: a literally framed Young Romance comic on the wall (Lichtenstein), the packaged ham on the table (Rosenquist), the TV set, brands like the Ford logo on the table lamp, the movie theatre with its cut-off kneeling Al Jolson billboard visible through the window, the brand-new vacuum cleaner and tape recorder, the harsh motel bed with its premonition of Oldenburg‟s zebra-striped motel suite of the sixties, and the Health and Beauty couple displaying their lats, pects, and tits as Product. This collage fulfilled almos t to the letter what Hamilton wrote down as the desiderata of Pop art in 1957, an art which did not yet exist except as uncoalesced subject-matter. Pop, he declared, should be „popular (designed for a mass audience), transient (short-term solution), expendable (easily forgotten), low-cost, mass-produced, young (aimed at youth), witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business…‟ Such an art could not be made by the people; it was not folk art. It came out of what Hamilton would later call „a new landscape of secondary, filtered material‟. Pop art, far from being „popular‟ art, was made „by highly professionally trained experts for a mass audience‟. It was done to the people. It grew by analogy to what it admired, advertising and the media through which advertisements were replicated. And it grew dandyistically, casting itself in the role of the detached, amused, lenient, but inflexibly ironic spectator at the vast theatre of desire and illusion which the mass media of the twentieth century had erected. By far the most powerful of these was television” (Hughes, Shock of the New 342, 344).

3. “More than four decades ago Walter Benjamin, dazzled and fascinated by the crude, tentative beginnings of mass culture as we have it today, wrote that it was going to be hard and perhaps even impossible for any child raised in the howling blizzard of signals to find his way back into the „exacting silence‟ of a book. How racially would a culture of distraction alter all discourse within it? Benjamin died in 1940, but wh at he feared from radio, movies, and advertising came a thousandfold truer with mass television” (344). “Hamilton described this collage as „Instant‟ art from the magazines. The collage (made for the catalogue of the „This is Tomorrow‟ exhibition) is a representation of a list of items considered relevant to the question of the title. The image should, therefore, be thought of as tabular as well as pictorial. Thus he meant the work to be read like a text cataloging the concerns of the exhibition” (Fineberg 238-239). “For the ceiling of the room in his collage Hamilton used a telescopic photo of the surface of the moon: the nubbly carpet was made b blowing up a Weegee photograph of people on the beach at Coney Island (randomization perhaps?); and with the movie marquee advertising Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer Hamilton provided a charged metaphor for his entire semiotic endeavor, for The Jazz Singer was the first film to synchronize spoken words and cinematic images” (239).

4. “The use of popular imagery implied an attack on the traditional division of „high‟ and „low‟ art, which in turn embodied an assault on the social hierarchy in Britain. The use of American popular imagery carried a consciously radical, social message. The prominence of black people in American popular music particularly struck these Europeans, who lived in a more racially and culturally homogeneous environment with little social mobility. In addition, pop music had a special connection with pop art and with the British art schools, which offered one of the few mechanism for lower-class students to cross over the usual social divisions. Many important English pop musicians of the sixties- including John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Cat Stevens (an American expatriate in England), Pete Townshend, and Keith Richards - went to art schools on government grants. The art schools provided them with both a haven and a platform from which they developed their early musical careers” (239). “If Duchamp could draw a moustache on Leonardo‟s Mona Lisa, suggesting that for art to remain vital the sacred must b e mixed with the profane, then Hamilton would hang a portrait of John Ruskin on the wall of „today‟s home‟, whence the 19th century aesthetician might at least find favor with the smooth and subtle way in which Hamilton has integrated his public and private spaces, his Mannerist variety of scale” (Wheeler 123).

52 UNIT ELEVEN: Pop Art STUDY GUIDE

B Jasper Johns. Target with Four Faces, 1955, assemblage, encaustic and collage on canvas with objects Jasper Johns/ encaustic paint/ element of impersonality/ twentieth century anxiety

1. Inspired by the example of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) “produced conceptually puzzling works that seemed to bear on issues raised in contemporary art. Art critics and art historians, for example, had praised the evenly dispersed, „nonhierarchical‟ or „all-over‟ quality of so much Abstract Expressionist painting, particularly Pollock‟s. The target in Target with Four Faces, an emphatically hierarchical, organized image, can be seen as a reference- more of repudiation than affirmation- to this discourse. The image also raised thorny questions about the difference between representation and abstraction. The target, although arguably a representation, is flat, whereas representational art is usually identified with three- dimensional space. The target therefore occupies a troubling middle ground between the two kings of painting then struggling for dominance in American art” (Stokstad 1126-1127). “Johns‟s works are more than a simple reaction to the emotional and autobiographical dimensions of Abstract Expressionism. They also had a psychological dimension for Johns, providing him with a way literally to cover certain personal anxieties and fears, some of which can be vaguely discerned in the collage materials partially buried beneath the thick encaustic paint. Here, for example, the outline of a lone man in a trench coat is discernible in the lower left. Johns‟s sense of loneliness and emptiness is perhaps also evident in the faces at the top of the work, which have been cut off at eye level, a move that both depersonalizes them and prevents them from connecting with the viewer. Moreover, the faces are as blank and neutral as the target below. One historian has recently suggested that there may also have been a private reference to the fact that, as a homosexual in the homophobic climate of postwar New York, Johns felt like a target” (1127).

2. “In painting Jasper Johns formulated a pointedly nonintrospective style that stressed the complex semiotics of the art object (in other words, how it means what it means). For example, the painted targets by Johns are so intractably literal that they almost are targets; at the same time the artist is ambiguously presenting them as painterly works of art, explicitly rendered in artistic materials. This substantially closed the gap between the thing and its representation. Moreover, the proximity of the target as a painting to the functional target brings to light the role of artistic intention in defining an object as a work of art. The detailed working of the surface and the restriction of the palette to the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue also foregrounds the artist‟s concern with analyzing the basic structural elements of the language of painting” (Fineberg 207). “The visible newsprint that Johns used as a foundation for the thin layers of encaustic in a work like Target with Plaster Casts has prompted some writers to attempt to „decode‟ the texts. However, as in the work of Rauschenberg, the evidence does not support an iconographic reading. Johns has said that „whatever printing shows has no significance to me. Sometimes I looked at the paper for different kinds of color, different sizes of type, of course, and perhaps some of the words went into my mind; I was not conscious of it‟. Rather, the newsprint fragments attracted him because they convey the semiotic complexity (the sense of information overload) of media superimposition, as if one were watching two films running over one another” (207).

3. “Through the 1950s, and especially during the McCarthy years, American hatred of homosexuality ran particularly hot. The idea that homosexuality was not only unnatural and repulsive in itself, but hat (in officials and bureaucrats) it constituted a security risk to the American state, and the it had secret affinities with Communism, went virtually unquestioned. Indeed, if you did question it, that said something about you. Jasper Johns was a reserved, closeted gay. Target with Four Faces is all about threat and concealment; its impassive, identical plaster casts of faces are contained in boxes with hinged doors, small „closets‟ in a row above the ominous target. Your gaze, in looking at the target, is assimilated to the eye of the inquisitor, hunting out what is concealed. It is a pessimistic and, above all, defensive work” (Hughes, American Visions 514-515). “The submerged text in Johns‟s target paintings connects to the stresses of Cold War America. To begin with, the whole nation felt it was a target. Magazines, newspapers, television, and politicians‟ speeches repeated this theme unceasingly, pounding it into the collective imagination like a ten-inch spike. There, over in Russia, were countless ICBMs in their silos, pointing their nuclear tips at you, and you, and you. Since the patriotism of World War II, no collective emotion in America had exceeded- or perhaps ever will exceed-the mingling of fear and denial at the unimaginable prospect of all-out thermonuclear war between the United States and the USSR. The diffused sense of being a target in mutual apocalypse is the inescapable background to Johns‟s targets. In 1958, the year in which his show at the Leo Castelli Gallery made him famous, he told an interviewer from Newsweek that „I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world . I don‟t think that‟s a painter‟s business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason‟. One need not believe this mask. There is no more self-conscious American artist than Johns” (514).

4. “At first glance the brushwork in these Jasper Johns works seems at odds with the literalness of the imagery. Not only did the artist use a sensuously tactile, gestural style, but the encaustic technique (heated wax mixed with pigment) further accentuates the individual identity of each ; since the hot wax solidifies almost instantly, it allows every touch of the brush to retain its identity without smearing under the pressure of the succeeding one. Nevertheless the beautifully applied surfaces of these paintings do not convey the charged introspective mood of an abstract-expressionistic canvas. They have a surface sensuality, making the artist seem more receptive to the world around him; he is engaged in experiencing and understanding what is there rather than recording an act of introspection. In this respect, the gestural handling also functions as an emblem of psychic expressivity rather than a vehicle for psychic expression. The handling reifies the gestural mark and thus normalized action painting” (Fineberg 208). “In becoming what „other people weren‟t‟, Johns enjoyed the advantage of being largely unburdened by a conventional art-school education. Born in Augusta, Georgia, but reared in various small South Carolina towns by one relative or another, Johns grew up without ever seeing a museum-quality picture. Still, his grandmother painted, and somehow he always knew that art would be his life. After attending the University of South Carolina for a year and a half, Johns spent six months at a commercial art school in New York City, but withdrew upon learning that he would receive a scholarship simply for reasons of hardship, despite the lack of merit the dean saw in his work” (Wheeler 134).

53

UNIT ELEVEN: Pop Art STUDY GUIDE

C Jasper Johns. Flag, 1954-55, encaustic, oil, D Jasper Johns. Painted Bronze II: Ale Cans, and collage on fabric, mounted on plywood 1964, painted bronze exploring the painting process using a well-known influence of Duchamp/ Leo Castelli/ use of symbol (object vs. image)/ an “anti-art” aesthetic/ an banality and lack of expression in sculpture art of neutrality and impersonality/ absence of the artist‟s identity 1. “Painted Bronze provokes the viewer to wonder at first whether

the ale cans are really what they 1. One night in 1955, by his seem to be. Are they works of art own account, Jasper Johns or common objects? „I like that “had a dream of painting a there is the possibility that one large American flag, and the might take one for the other‟, following morning he got up Johns explained, „but I also like and began to do so. He would that with a little examination, it‟s play with the flag motif for very clear that one is not the several decades more, other‟. He deliberately gave these rendering the Stars and sculptures a hand-crafted look when viewed at close range, Stripes in wax encaustic paint despite the initially effective trompe l’oeil; he cast each ale can on newspaper collage, in oil and the base as separate objects and rendered the labels in a on canvas, in bronze, pencil, lithography, and Sculpmetal. Johns‟s largely illegible, painterly style. The subject was in part fascination with the flag came, in part, from his very nuanced and chosen for its familiarity. Ballantine Ale was not only Johns‟s ironic feelings about the function of art, particularly in American regular beer, but the bronze color of the can added an extra and most especially after Abstract Expressionism. American measure of alluring ambiguity to the bronze casting” (Fineberg abstract painting had been full of displays of transcendentalist 212). ambition, not tied in any clear way to the specifics of contemporary

American culture; its „field‟ painters in particular shunned any 2. “By taking a coffee can filled with , or two beer embrace of what could be recognizably American. It had also, in cans, and casting them in bronze, he immortalized the its followers, created an academy of „authenticity‟, sign of the hot, commonplace. Again, the motivation of Johns was somewhat tragic and inventive sensibility. Johns wished to work with different from other Pop artists‟ in that he continually seemed something that was not invented, something so well known, as he to be concerned with the creation of a work of art, no matter put it, that it was not well seen. Hence the flag. In real life, after what the subject may be” (Arnason 455-456). “Once again it Johns, the flag continued to be the communal property of all was commonplaceness that provided the occasion, chanced Americans, the climax of their stock of public symbols. But in the upon in a casual aside about Leo Castelli. „Somebody told art world it belonged almost entirely to Johns; it became his sign. me,‟ Johns remembered, „that Bill de Kooning said that you Other artists would include flags in their work in a spirit of protest could give that son-of-a-bitch two beer cans, and he could sell and provocation. Johns never did; his flags had a beautiful and them. I thought, what a wonderful idea for a sculpture‟. troubling muteness. They were cooler than the culture wanted Working in plaster of paris, casting some parts, modeling them to be in the midst of the Cold War” (Hughes, American others, recasting the whole in bronze, and then hand-painting Visions 511-512). the final form, Johns used every technique at his considerable

command to create the illusion of two Ballantine Ale cans, one 2. “The mature work of Jasper Johns began in 1954 with his open and the other still inviolate, resting side by side on a slab of the American flag as his prime pictorial motif. base. Throughout, however, he remained confident that the The single flag, and later the target, numbers, and the alphabet, work would ultimately disclose the process of its own creation became the essential subject matter of these early years of his art. and thus betray itself as an aesthetic object, not a By treating the flag outside of its traditional context, he divested it manufactured one” (Wheeler 137). of symbolic associations. The visual components of the flag became data for examining perception, ambiguity, and the 3. “At the same time that he was making sculptures, Johns meaning of art itself. In the gestural paint strokes of Johns‟ flags, had also begun to attach ordinary objects to his canvases. the vocabulary of geometry- triangulated stars and rectangular This new development enabled him to contrast and interrelate stripes- reentered American art. The combination of painterly the realities of both the flat painting surface and three- surface richness (produced by his encaustic medium) with the dimensional things, the illusionism with which artists have quintessential American icon signaled the transition from Abstract long attempted to fill the gap in between, and the various Expressionism to Pop Art” (Sims 171). modes of perception the three different systems entail. Since

the objects chosen for incorporation were such rudimentary, 3. “In a work such as Flag, he presented the image-as-object… The ubiquitous items as cups, forks, brooms, paint brushes, or flag‟s iconic form corresponds to its depicted shape. Johns‟ Flags, rulers, they arrived freighted with so many associations in life and the Targets as well, are thus spatial equivalents of their as to become virtually empty of specific personality, like the images. By rejecting the traditional figure-ground relationship in canvas the artist started with. Thus, meaning arises not from painting- the relationship of a depicted form to the space it the sub-art appropriations but rather from the internal inhabits- Johns upset cherished notions about illusion versus relationships they establish with the facts of painting and the reality: are we seeing a rendering of a flag, or a flag? He artist‟s manipulations of them” (138). “Johns put his questioned what an object is and how we know it, and what an thumbprint on the base of Painted Bronze. Like the painterly image is. His paintings stand as an inquiry into the paradoxical lettering, this emphasized the hand-made character of the relationship between the object represented and its representation. sculpture in contrast to the machine-made object (the real Johns would later use broad painting strokes- streaks, smears, can). But it also revealed a new emotional intimacy that drips- in a variety of colors as images themselves to parody entered Johns‟s work at this time” (Fineberg 212). Abstract Expressionist heroics” (Phillips 92).

54 UNIT ELEVEN: Pop Art STUDY GUIDE

E Robert Rauschenberg. Monogram, 1955-59, combine painting Robert Rauschenberg/ combines/ John Cage/ influence of Dada and Abstract Expressionism/ a sexual pun

1. “Because of their early friendship, and because both men emerged as stars at the same time, Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) is habitually bracketed with Johns. But in fact, they had very little in common as artists beyond a love of popular culture, an intense interest in the iconography of America. Johns was elusive, cool, withdrawn; his work declined to give anything away. Rauschenberg was effusive, hot, and generous; he had difficulty holding anything in reserve. Rauschenberg breathed out, Johns breathed in. Johns was a masterly curator of his own reputation, partly because the linguistic conundrums embedded in his work were catnip to the higher 1960s criticism. But Rauschenberg had a much more direct effect on other artists. It was largely to his prancing, careless, and fecund talent that America in the 1960s and 1970s owed a basic cultural assumption that a work of art could exist for any length of time, in any material (from paint to silk to a stuffed goat to a patch of earth to a live human body), anywhere (onstage, on a video screen, on the surface of the moon, underwater, or in a sealed envelope), for any purpose (invocation, threat, amusement, contemplation, or sexual turn-on) and find any destination it chooses, from the museum to the trashcan” (Hughes, American Visions 515).

2. “Milton, later Robert, Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, a shabby, humid oil-refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico. He was part German and part Cherokee Indian. The closest thing to art he saw as a child were the cheap religious chromolitho cards pinned up in the family living room: the memory of these would later surface in his work in the 1950s. His education was haphazard, his grades poor. He enlisted in the US Navy and spent the last years of World War II as a mental-hospital nurse. Discharged in 1945, he decided to study art, and set off- where else? – for Paris. It was a mistake; he spoke no French and felt queasy and disoriented, surrounded b y an already academized modernist tradition that he could not grasp” (515). “Back in America by 1948, he enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where the painter Josef Albers- a veteran of the Bauhaus, held in awe as a theorist and disciplinarian - ran the art department. Albers despised Rauschenberg‟s efforts (years later, when his ex-pupil was famous, the old maestro of the painted square pretended not to remember him at all), but Rauschenberg got two essential things from him. The first was a sense of discipline, or at least the need for it. The second was Albers‟ habit of sending the students out to find „interesting‟ objects, anything from an old tin can to a stone, and bring them into class as examples of accidental esthetic form. This laid the ground for Rauschenberg‟s later scavenging” (516).

3. “Moreover, Albers was not the only charismatic figure at Black Mountain. The composer John Cage and his friend the dancer- choreographer were living there too, and if advanced American art through the 1950s and early 1960s had one single native guru, that man was Cage, the Marcel Duchamp of music, who erected combinations of silence and random sound into esthetic strategies. It was Cage‟s example that prompted Rauschenberg to make his much-quoted remark that „painting relates to both art and life… I try to work in the gap between the two‟. And when he moved back to New York in the fall of 1949, the first sense he had of a community of artists came, not so much from painters, as from the group of dancers and musicians gathered around Cunningham, Cage, and the composer ” (516). “In New York he was in the midst of a junk-crammed environment. An afternoon‟s stroll gave him a complete „palette of objects‟, as he called it, to make art with: cardboard cartons, striped police barriers, sea tar, a stuffed eagle, a broken umbrella, grimy postcards. These relics were sorted out in his studio, glued to surfaces, punctuated with slathers of paint. They emerged as large-scale collages, which he called „combines’. Of course, their roots are fixed in the history of Dada and Surrealist collage, and particularly in the work of Kurt Schwitters” (516-517).

4. “Like his friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp, he was also given to embedding a kind of ironic lechery in his combines- the best example being Monogram, 1955-59. Monogram remains the most notorious of Rauschenberg‟s combines: a stuffed Angora goat (glimpsed and then bought for thirty-five dollars in a failing office-supply store on Eighth Avenue), girdled with a tire. The title is self- fulfilling: it is Rauschenberg‟s monogram, the sign by which he is most known. But if one asks why it became so famous, the answer can only be found in its power- funny but unsettling too, especially thirty years ago- as a sexual fetish. The lust of the goat, as William Blake remarked, is the glory of God; and this one, halfway through the tire, is an image of anal sex, the satyr in the sphincter” (517- 518). “Enigma solicits decipherment, which the critic has provided by referring to the biography of the artist, who had suffered a childhood trauma when his father destroyed a pet goat. Thus the beast in Monogram, like the numerous stuffed fauna incorporated whole into Rauschenberg‟s combines, becomes „a mute emissary from Eden- a survivor of Nature in a flood of Culture, an innocent witness to events before the Fall‟” (Wheeler 131).

5. “Further merging collage with painting, Rauschenberg‟s later three-dimensional Combines, Monogram, Satellite, and , spill into the viewer‟s space, offering an experience of multiplicity and random order. Rauschenberg brought the world into his art, in content as well as form. His was an inclusive vision- generous, engaging, and physically extroverted” (Phillips 83). Rauschenberg had learned much from Cage, whose aesthetic derived in part from Zen Buddhism. Zen philosophy valued chance over structured sequence and rejected the polarities of good and bad, ugly and beautiful. Everything is subsumed by ultimate oneness. Hierarchies and judgments are irrelevant because nothing is better than anything else. This holds true for art as well: instead of being a privileged activity different from life, art becomes an act within life” (83, 86). “No object was too lowly for his art. The cast-off and the discarded were redeemed through his energetic combinations and overlays that celebrated memory as well as the raw sense of everyday life. A shirt, a sock, a tire, a quilt, a parachute, a street sign, a Coca-Cola bottle, a stuffed goat- each found its way into his hybrid constructions. These works were a far cry from the iconic distillations of Abstract Expressionism. In this spirit of redefinition, Rauschenberg had erased a de Kooning drawing in 1953, an act of tribute and oedipal defiance that wiped the slate clean. He had already executed a series of white paintings designed to register the play of shadows rather than make a pictorial statement. These works were shown at his first one-artist exhibition, at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1951” (83). 55 UNIT ELEVEN: Pop Art STUDY GUIDE

F Robert Rauschenberg. Bed, 1955, G Andy Warhol. 200 Campbell Soup Cans, 1962 combine painting banality and American consumer culture/ desire to nihilistic “anti -art” approach/ utilizing the eliminate the personal signature style of the artist/ repetitive “faked gesture” of Abstract Expressionism routines of our modern life

1. “Rauschenberg, despite his 1. “Andy Warhol (1928-87), having affirmative rather than iconoclastic been „damned as America‟s greatest stance, generated quite as much charlatan and praised as its greatest scandal as Duchamp‟s first ready- visionary‟, may for that very reason be mades when, in 1958, he showed the most representative Popster of the Bed, a combine created after the cool yet turbulent sixties” (Wheeler artist ran out of canvas and 150). “Andy Warhol was born outside spontaneously decide to substitute Pittsburgh in 1928 to working-class the bedding from his own cot. The Czech immigrants. After graduating in work confused, outraged, and graphic design from Carnegie Tech in challenged viewers, for the very 1949, he moved into an apartment in good reason that while stretched, New York with his classmate Philip Pearlstein and quickly achieved success painted over, and hung on the wall as a commercial artist. Warhol‟s delicate drawings of shoes of I. Miller and like a picture, the image is Company in the New York Times brought him particular acclaim, and by unmistakably that of a life-size 1959 he was one of the highest-paid commercial artists in the city, earning bed, moreover a bed whose pillow, nearly $65,000 a year. Warhol continued to make his living in advertising sheet, and turned-back blanket until the end of 1962, but from the beginning he also had aspirations as a still bear the impress- the ghost- of the body that fine artist, making fanciful drawings and collages of shoes- personified as once slept in it. In addition, the red-dominated paint „portraits‟- as well as simple line drawings of other subjects” (Fineberg 251). dribbled over the patchwork quilt‟s own found colors and patterns seems to transform the bed into a lurid, 2. “Warhol not only wanted to turn the trivial and commonplace into art, Bacon-like scene of sadomasochistic mayhem” but also to make art itself trivial and commonplace. He not only transforms (Wheeler 131). mass-produced objects and information from the mass media into art, but turns his own art into mass produced objects. Whatever is lowerst comes 2. “He framed a well-worn pillow, sheet, and quilt, out on top in Warhol‟s work, and vice versa: he knocks elitist „high‟ art off scribbled them with pencil, and splashed them with its pedestal and drags it down into the slough of everyday life; sub-cultural paint, in a style derived from Abstract phenomena, on the other hand, become socially acceptable. American art Expressionism. In mocking the seriousness of that had already begun to approach the themes of everyday life and social habit ambitious art, Rauschenberg predicted an attitude in the work of the Ash Can School, for which Warhol had great respect” more widespread among later generations of artists” (Osterwold 167). “When well-meaning critics chose to see a canvas painted (Bee 207). “Legend has it that the bedclothes in Bed like a wall neatly and solidly stacked with Campbell‟s varieties as an are Rauschenberg‟s own, pressed into use when he indictment of consumer glut, Warhol subverted their sociology by saying lacked the money to buy a canvas. Since the artist that the subject interested him because he „used to have the same soup himself probably slept under this very sheet and lunch every day for twenty years‟. While some viewed the tow upon row of quilt, Bed is as personal as a self-portrait, or more Coke bottles as a cynical put-on, others perceived them as an entertaining, so” (207). “Although the materials here come from a but nonetheless savage, commentary on the base level, depersonalized bed, and are arranged like one, Rauschenberg has standardization of contemporary American society. Warhol, however, hung them on the wall, like a work of art. So the bed simply admitted to being fascinated by the prospect of making art from the loses its function, but not its associations with sleep, kind of monotonous repetition that he had long known in the commercial dreams, illness, sex- the most intimate moments in world. To him, the Coke bottles and their serried duplication were as life. Critics have also projected onto the fluid- legitimate a subject for art as the apples that Cezanne painted over and drenched fabric connotations of violence and over. „I painted things I always thought beautiful,‟ he said, „things you use morbidity” (207). The work “includes striped every day and never think about‟. Here, then, is what Warhol meant when toothpaste and fingernail polish as well as a pillow he averred that „Pop Art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and quilt” (Fineberg 176). and put it inside‟. For whereas Abstract Expressionism had offered a refuge from hamburger stands, girlie magazines, advertising, and television, “Rauschenberg‟s art recast the existentialist Warhol and his fellow Popsters not only refused to ignore the hard reality of discovery of the self as a discovery of the meretricious but overwhelmingly popular culture” (Wheeler 151). environment from which the self takes its form. Where de Kooning and Pollock pursued the 3. Warhol‟s paintings of Campbell‟s soup cans” stress the uniformity and refinement of a known artistic identity through ubiquity of the Campbell‟s can. At the same time, they subvert the idea of introspection, Rauschenberg attempted to deny that painting as a medium or invention and originality. Visual repetition of this there was a fixed core to identity at all, and put kind had long been used by advertisers to drum product names into the forward a relative definition. He tried to push his public consciousness; here, though, it implies not energetic competition but artistic persona into continual flux, so that he could a complacent abundance. Outside an art gallery, the Campbell‟s label, perpetually reinvent himself through an acutely which had not changed in over fifty years, was not an attention-grabber but sensitive response to the prevailing climate. „I don‟t a banality” (Bee 260). With Warhol, “you no longer need to be hot and full of want my personality to come out through the piece,‟ feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror. Not that Rauschenberg explained. „…I want my paintings to Warhol worked this out; he didn‟t have to. He felt it and embodied it. He be reflections of life… your self-visualization is a was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which reflection of your surroundings‟”(176). celebrity… had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity” (Hughes, American Visions 539).

56 UNIT ELEVEN: Pop Art STUDY GUIDE

H Andy Warhol. Marilyn Diptych, 1962, oil, acrylic, and silkscreen enamel on canvas cult of the American celebrity/ silkscreening process/ fascination with death/ famous for fifteen minutes

1.“Warhol painted the soup cans and newspaper headlines of 1961 and 1962 by hand, but toward the end of 1962 he discovered how to transfer a picture photographically on to a silkscreen and immediately switched over to this technique, eliminating all vestiges of the artist‟s touch and creating a more mechanically detached image. Moreover, he increasingly relied on assistants to make his paintings. In June 1963 he hired Gerard Malanga to work full-time on the silkscreen paintings and gradually others joined the payroll too, in addition to the occasional help that he always had around. Warhol managed his assistants like the staff in a graphic design office, using them as his tools” (Fineberg 253). “Warhol made a style of his non-involvement: „Somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me‟, he remarked in 1963. „The reason I‟m painting this way is because I want to be a machine. Whatever I do, and do machine-like is because it is what I want to do. I think it would be terrific if everybody was alike‟. Nevertheless, Warhol could have contracted the works out if he had really wanted a perfectly commercial look. Instead, he preferred the human error reflected in the misregistration of the screens, the uneven inking, and the occasional smears” (253). “A number of these values may be discerned in the Marilyn Diptych, even in its industrial mode of production. The painting, produced in Warhol‟s studio called , is one of the first in which Warhol turned from conventional modes of hand painting to the assembly-line technique of silk-screening photo-images onto canvas. The method was faster and quicker and thus more profitable, and Warhol could also produce many versions of the subject- all of which he considered good business. The subject of the work is also telling. Like so many Americans Warhol was fascinated by American movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe. The strip of pictures in this work suggests the sequential images of film, the medium that made Monroe famous. The face Warhol portrays, taken from a publicity photograph, is not that of Monroe the person but of Monroe the star, since Warhol was interested in her public mask, not in her personality or character. He borrowed the diptych format from the Byzantine icons of Christian saints he saw at the Greek Orthodox church services he attended every Sunday. By symbolically treating the famous actress as a saint, Warhol shed light on his own fascination with fame. Not only does fame bring wealth and transform the ordinary into the beautiful (Warhol was dissatisfied with his own looks), it also confers, like holiness for a saint, a kind of immortality” (Stokstad 1129). “Warhol attempted to keep his personal motives from showing through too clearly in his works, however, and preferred to leave their meaning open to the viewers‟ interpretation. The success of the Marilyn series, in particular, has depended in great measure on viewers‟ ability to reflect onto Warhol‟s images their own feelings and ideas about the tragedy of her life” (1129-1130).

2. “Significantly, Warhol does not show Monroe‟s body in his portraits. Her reputation as a sex goddess is expressed by his synecdochic focus on her face, an indirect means of depicting sexuality that adhered to the mass media‟s self-censorship in the early sixties, when the media still professed a puritanical ethos. In the mainstream media conservatism about the publication of sexual imagery remained strong, often resulting in highly seductive but veiled images. Yet a shift in the media‟s attitudes toward sexuality. And nudity had been foreshadowed by the erotic poses and décolleté dresses that Hollywood and Life had parlayed into the pinup phenomenon during World War II. Other early suggestions of a new attitude included Life’s publication of a nude calendar photo of Monroe in its first photospread on the starlet in 1952” (Stich 137). “Warhol captures the media‟s ambivalent approach to sexuality by chastely showing only Monroe‟s face but overemphasizing her doe eyes, sensuous lips, and blazing blond hair. Even more telling is his tight closeup of her mouth in Marily Monroe’s Lips (1962), which exaggerates into parody both the mass media‟s titillating mode of sexual expression and Madison Avenue‟s image of the all-American girl with her full smile and shining white teeth” (137).

3. “Like his other paintings, these works emphasize the commodity status of the subjects depicted. Warhol created Marilyn Diptych in the weeks following the tragic suicide of the move star in August 1962, capitalizing on the media frenzy her death prompted. Warhol selected a publicity photo of Monroe, one that provides no insight into the real Norma Jean Baker. Rather, all viewers see is a mask- a persona the Hollywood myth machine generated. The garish colors and the flat application of paint contribute to the image‟s masklike quality. Like the Coke bottles, the repetition of Monroe‟s face reinforces her status as a consumer product, her glamorous, haunting visage seemingly confronting viewers endlessly, as it did to the American public in the aftermath of her death. The right half of this work, with its poor registration of pigment, suggests a sequence of film stills, referencing the realm from which Monroe derived her fame. Warhol‟s own ascendance to the realm of celebrity underscored his remarkable and astute understanding of mass culture‟s dynamics and visual language. He predicted that the age of mass media would enable everyone to become famous for fifteen minutes. His own celebrity lasted much longer, long after his death at age fifty-eight in 1987” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 1096).

4. “Warhol was a Polish Catholic, devout by nature, however much his devotion got skewed toward the secular sainthood of celebrity. It is a curious fact that America, even though it is one of the most religious countries on earth, has produced very little in the way of original religious art. Warhol‟s Marilyn is close to that condition, in its distanced and sleazy epiphany. You could imagine the whole career of the as yet unborn pop star Madonna being deduced from this Evita-Marilyn-Madonna. This brazen image reminds you that, somewhere near the heart of Pop, moribundity lurked. The artists, for the most part (Rosenquist and Oldenburg excepted), were dealing with a vanishing world, one closer to their youth than to their maturity. What they along with all other Americans had in the present, by the end of the 1960s, was different and more troubled. American self-confidence was in poor shape. Not even the amazing feat of putting Americans on the moon could convince other Americans that all was well on earth. The space program, that vast symbol of American power, was returning little or nothing to the public that paid for it. John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy were all dead, assassinated. The war in Vietnam was stalled, perhaps unwinnable. Huge splits of race and gender, class and belief were opening in the American polity, and the clamp of the Cold War could no longer hold them together” (Hughes, American Visions 541).

57 UNIT ELEVEN: Pop Art STUDY GUIDE

I Roy Lichtenstein. Drowning Girl, 1963, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas Roy Lichtenstein/ enlarged printer‟s dots/ appropriated comic imagery/ en media res/ emotional narrative depicted with detatchment

1. “The most popular of the Pop artists was, and still is, Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923). His images, coming originally out of mass reproduction, slide back into it with the utmost ease, filling memory with tiny Lichtenstein clones. And then you have to reckon with their effect on advertisements, on packaging, on T-shirts, posters, show-window design, on the whole party- amusing and even joyous at first, and then, like most parties, a drag- that the American commercial world threw to welcome back the images and techniques that Lichtenstein took from it and put into an artier form, ripe for reuse as „quality‟ stuff. There was nothing quality-ridden about the artist‟s original sources- a smudgy one-column figure of a girl with a beach ball advertising a resort in the Poconos, a moony frame from a romance comic. But by the time such things had been run through the loop from ad to art and back to ad again, they had become as invested with glamour as a Vogue photo by Richard Avedon. The sheer omnipresence of Lichtenstein‟s style rivals and perhaps exceeds that of Warhol‟s, even though, unlike Warhol, he kept his own distance from the mass-media ad industry and never offered himself to it as a celebrity” (Hughes, American Visions 525-526). “Lichtenstein painted Drowning Girl in a remarkably impassive style. He also shaped the individual forms with studied elegance- the waves recall the prints of Hokusai. Once Lichtenstein had planned his subject, he focused his attention on the formal refinement of the composition and details. „I think of it as an abstraction. Half the time they are upside-down anyway, when I work‟, he said. Lichtenstein was trained in fine art rather than in commercial art and from the outset drew sustenance from art history. Whereas Warhol took no liberties with his subject matter, Lichtenstein subtly reshaped and recomposed his. Moreover he used his comics style to create a distance from the existential authenticity and immediacy of abstract expressionism” (Fineberg 263).

2. “Lichtenstein made stencils to imitate the commercial printing technique of screening flat color areas into regular patterns of what are called Ben Day dots. However, with small holes and heavy pigment Lichtenstein‟s screens frequently clogged up, so that he had to touch up sec tions of the painting by hand to enhance the mechanical look! In addition, he often contrasted these dot-patterned areas with flatly painted patches to achieve the crass, visual punch of popular media imagery” (261, 263). “Although there is an edge of nostalgia in Lichtenstein‟s use of comic-strip sources from the fifties, his romance and war imagery reflect the situation of the early sixties: the fantasy and collapse of Camelot, and the resurgence of the Cold War. The saga of the glamorous Kennedy family, its triumphs and tragedies, seemed almost the stuff of fiction, and the president‟s style showed a real penchant for theater. At the same time assertions of American and Soviet military might aroused the specter of global conflict” (Stich 158). “Although a scene of adult anxiety or teenage passion and perturbation might be believable within the context of a full comic-strip episode, when taken out of context such scenes seem stilted and ludicrous. Moreover, Lichtenstein‟s images defy the pervasive idealism of traditional American comics, the mythic sense of the American dream in which things go well or at least end well. In his compositions, malaise and an unresolved uncertainty prevail. This tone, heightened by expressions by fear and danger, also characterizes the paintings based on war comic strips” (156-157). “Lichtenstein selects a moment of crisis and tension, turmoil and destruction, a flash of thundering expletives and explosions. There is no indication that good will triumph over evil, or that peace will be attained. By not presenting the happy ending or even offering a small sign of hope, the imagery invokes a vision quite distinct from that common to pre-World War II war paintings” (157-158).

3. “Lichtenstein‟s pictures aim to de-individualize and objectivise emotions and gestures. His paintings look as if they have been produced mechanically. They appear to be perfect and quite anonymous, as if made by a graphic designer. He likes to clean away the „record of my hand‟- errors, imprecisions, alterations, for instance- or to „erase‟ them with ground paint: by doing this he is able to „remove any stain marks‟. This is the prosaic tone in which Lichtenstein describes his perfectionism in an interview with John Coplans in 1967 (in 1961 he was still leaving his corrections undisguised). Lichtenstein develops his artistic strategy in parallel with his artistic technique. He depicts his artistic strategy in parallel with his artistic technique. He depicts the content of his pictures in the same manner as a comic or commercial artist whose composition begins with both a preconceived notion of average perceptive powers and a special purpose in mind. But Lichtenstein‟s point of departure is quite a different one, so that he changes the functional context of the comic and the other media he uses. He redeems their superficial effects and coherence from their unequivocal nature. What was hitherto vacuous, suddenly becomes suggestive and meaningful” (Osterwold 183-184).

4. Lichtenstein “pointed out that the motifs he chose were those which seemed to him to be merely classical archetypes of the genre, rather than meaningful in any way. He used these motifs as a means of reaching an almost classical form, emphasizing their timeless, impersonal and „mechanical‟ qualities. He described comics themselves as an area in which to experiment with the stimulation of the imagination. By removing his subject from the sequence of pictures in which it occurs in the original and thus depriving it of its narrative logic, Lichtenstein gives the scene he is depicting a new and quite unfamiliar meaning. The picture now confronts our viewing habits, our structured patterns or perceiving and reading, as if it were something foreign. At the same time, the new, large format of the pictures heightens the commonplace triviality of the original” (184). “The sobriety and severity of his systematic approach lead to the leveling of all content. His subjects are stereotyped through abstraction so that they conform to popular taste, but, at the same time, the heightened drama of the trivial reinstates them within the context of a tensely open painting. In building a picture, Lichtenstein transcends the restraints of secondhand contents, much as Cezanne transcends nature. His persistence in this project, which he has continued to refine, is a consequence of his intensive artistic and intellectual development. Lichtenstein was brought up and educated in a middle-class milieu and became acquainted with the problems of contemporary art at a relatively early age. He studied natural science, the humanities and art history and worked on the side as a designer” (190).

58 UNIT ELEVEN: Pop Art STUDY GUIDE

J Claes Oldenburg. Clothespin, 1976, cor-ten and K Oldenburg’s Store stainless steel Claes Oldenburg/ The Store/ magnifying the scale of 1. “In June 1961 Oldenburg ordinary objects/ debt to Duchamp‟s readymades/ a rented a storefront at 107 East Second Street, on the monument to consumer culture Lower East Side, and in

December he opened The 1. “Swedish-born Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) took Store. The sensuality, both a more critical and a more humorous attitude optimism, and humor of the toward his popular subjects than did his colleagues work on display reflected an Warhol and Lichtenstein. Oldenburg‟s objections to appreciation for the bustling, the increasingly impersonal and sanitized nature of tactile and visual variety of Western life are evident in his crude, sloppy plaster the neighborhood- the cheap clothing on Orchard Street, versions of ordinary American foods and products, the arrays of food on Second Avenue, the boxes, which were meant to render more „human‟ what he wrappers, and signs, and all the energetic buying and called the „hostile objects‟ of commerce. Oldenburg‟s selling. The Store was a friendly, overfilled room of humor- a fundamental part of his project to hamburgers and tennis shoes, prepackaged shirt-and-tie reanimate a dull, lifeless culture- is most evident in combinations, and reliefs of Pepsi signs and sewing … large-scale public projects” (Stokstad 1130). machines- all made of brightly enameled plaster- with a

delicious vulgarity that celebrated „the poetry of 2. “The first permanent Oldenburg monument in America was installed everywhere‟, as he put it” (Fineberg 197). “People loved in Philadelphia in 1976: the Clothespin. It is forty-five feet high, and at Oldenburg‟s work and yet he sold very little. The Store first you read it as a colossus on two legs. It shows the various, even closed after two months with a net loss of $285, which contradictory, meanings Oldenburg could pack into a single image. Richard Bellamy (director of the Green Gallery on 57th Being made of steel, and held together by a tension spring, you may at Street) picked up when he offered Oldenburg a show for first read it as a stiff authority figure. But it also alludes to another the fall of 1962. IN February 1962 Oldenburg shifted his sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, not far way: Brancusi‟s attention to developing Gun Theater, and for Kiss, with its pair of blockish troglodytic lovers bound together in each about five months he organized performances for capacity other‟s arms, as the spring holds the two halves of the clothespin audiences in this tiny storefront. Like the objects in The together. So it has a sensuous and intimate undercurrent, not just a Store Oldenburg‟s happenings derived from an overriding „heroic‟ one. Meanwhile, the shape of the spring combines the numbers interest in using his aesthetic though processes to „7‟ and „6‟, evoking 1776, the year of the American Revolution, in which integrate his experience of the real environment. The Ray Philadelphia played such a part” (Hughes, American Visions 532). Gun Theater „seeks to present in events what the Store “Coosje van Bruggen, a Dutch museum curator, whom Oldenburg presents in objects,‟ Oldenburg explained. „It is a theater married in the early seventies, became an increasingly important of real events (a newsreel)‟. In this theater of things, collaborator in the realization of such huge civic projects, and in the Oldenburg even used his actors like objects, rejecting late eighties they entered into collaboration with the Los Angeles dialog and plot. The artist‟s power to defamiliarize the architect Frank Gehry to carry Oldenburg‟s monumental aspirations objects he made, as well as the cathartic character of the into functional architecture” (Fineberg 204). performances, reflected a faith in the force of mind over

matter that may have its roots in his Christian Science 3. This sculpture then “became a cathedral reaching toward the skies. upbringing” (197-198). With its new, colossal dimensions, this otherwise inconspicuous little object ascended zestfully in an upward sweep and became the conveyor 2. “The Store was a parody of an art gallery, too- a low of a dynamic design, opening up the ornamentality of its inner form like shop with low art in it. Out of canvas and plaster, resin a façade” (Osterwold 193). “To Oldenburg, making something means and rags and papier-mache, all covered with shiny house transforming „symbols‟ and giving them back to the public in the form enamel, he made burgers and slices of pie, a sewing of new and challenging obstacles; or it means erecting architectural machine, stockings, knickers, shirts, and shoes- all devices which act as question marks and point to exhaustion, unwearable, all absurd, plaques of rough papier-mache decadence and cynicism in society” (193). whose ragged edges suggested that they had been ripped

from their context in life” (Hughes, American Visions 529). 4. “One way of thinking about Oldenburg‟s monuments- most of them “But then he changed the scale and material. Hard unbuilt, and existing only as drawings- is to see them as monstrous things went soft; soft ones, hard. Objects swelled up to parodies of that situation, betokening (and inducing) anxiety. In 1965 Brobdingnagian size: a cloth burger or a baked potato the he dreamed up a monument for upper Central Park in the form of a size of a couch, a three-way electric plug monopolizing giant teddy bear; partly inspired by the balloon animals in the Macy‟s the corner of a room. Central to Oldenburg‟s restless, Parade, this woebegone and helpless image was, for Oldenburg „an inventive fantasy was the idea that human things could incarnation of white conscience‟… Unsurprisingly, it was never built. yield metaphors for the human body; this first emerged in Neither was a giant pair of scissors meant to replace the Washington his soft sculptures, which developed out of props that he Monument, whose blades would ponderously open and close, and his wife, Patty, made for performances in the Store. reminding visitors of the divisions in American society. Nor was a The softness of the objects, their malleability, recall the prodigious windshield wiper for in Chicago, slapping back soft toys of childhood and their promise of infantile and forth between two long rectangular pools: these would be comfort in contact with another body. They emit swimming pools for the city‟s children, who would nonetheless have to Oldenburg‟s desire to touch and be touched… You watch the descending blade and get out of the water before they were immediately connect the soft sculptures to the diffuse hit” (Hughes, American Visions 531). image of the body” (Hughes, American Visions 529-530).

59 UNIT ELEVEN: Pop Art and Twentieth Century Photography STUDY GUIDE

L Edward Kienholz. The Portable War Memorial, 1968, mixed media Edward Kienholz/ Vietnam War/ Kate Smith singing God Bless America/ a war mentality seen as normal/ a Coke machine and a hot dog stand

1. “In the 1960s, as the quagmire of Vietnam deepened and American society was increasingly riven by protest against the war- protests which, because they originated among the young in academic centers like Berkeley, California, soon took on the rhetorical character of class war based on age, between the young and the old- it became difficult for some artists to remain „above‟ the political. The results, in terms of art, were uneven and often incoherent, but some of the best work that wad done came out of the West Coast rather than the East: the savagely mutated ceramic busts of the sculptor Robert Arnason, for instance, or the work of the man who did much to create an artistic identity for the centerless sprawl of Los Angeles in the 1960s, Ed Kienholz (1927-1994). Kienholz‟s last work was his burial, which took place outside his hunting cabin on a mountaintop in Hope, Idaho. A heart attack felled him at age sixty-seven, and now his corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front seat of a brown 1940 coupe. There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him, and the ashes of his dog Smash in the trunk. He was set for the afterlife” (Hughes, American Visions 606-607).

2. “As Kienholz himself said, writers „always have difficulty finding a box to put me in‟. Sometimes he would be classified with the American Pop artists, but he didn‟t fit: his angry earnestness threw out everything Pop saw as benign in mass culture. To Kienholz, the TV set was both America‟s anus and its oracle. He was a history artist, but more explicitly than Rauschenberg, combining the bile of twentieth-century political expressionism ( or ) with the nineteenth-century public scale of Emanuel Leutze, in a real-things-in -the-real-world vernacular which was, by turns, scabrous, brazenly rhetorical, and morally obsessed” (607). “Even the silver GIs in his great antimilitarist piece The Portable War Memorial, 1968, have a spectral Hopperish sadness as they raise the Iwo Jima flag on a patio table. To the left, the patriotic singer Kate Smith, represented as a trash can on legs with a head sticking out the top, emits a continuously taped rendition of the unofficial national anthem, Irving Berlin‟s „God Bless America‟. The GIs are faceless- mere units in the military machine- and behind them is the most famous of all American recruiting posters, James Montgomery Flagg‟s World War I Uncle Sam with his bony finger pointing at you. To the right is a blackboard, a sort of funerary stela on which are scrawled the names of 475 nations that no longer exist because of wars. But beyond that, a couple eat their hot dogs at a fast food counter, beside a Coke machine. Their bulldog‟s a killer, but they don‟t even notice the GIs. Kienholz is saying that America is so tied into a war mentality, a vast militarist economy- as indeed it was, as never before in its history- that it seems quite ordinary by 1968, in the twentieth year of the Cold War, with Vietnam raging. It‟s just business as usual, taken for granted, as addiction becomes „normality‟ to the junkie” (607 -608).

A Laszlo Moholy -Nagy. Photogram, 1939, gelatin silver print Laszlo Moholy -Nagy/ photogram/ inventing a “New Vision”/ influence of the Bauhaus

1. “During the nineteenth century, photography struggled to establish itself as art but failed to find an identity. Only under extraordinary conditions of political upheaval and social reform did it address the most basic subject of art, which is life itself. In creating an independent vision, photography would combine the aesthetic principles of the Secession and the documentary approach of photojournalism with lessons learned from motion photography. At the same time, modern painting, with which it soon became allied, forced a decisive change in photography. Modernism undermined the theoretical assumptions of photography and challenged its credentials as art” (Janson 888). “The photogram does not take pictures but makes them. Objects are placed directly onto photographic paper and exposed to light. This technique was not new. For Talbot had used it to make negative images of plants, which he called „photogenic drawings‟. The Dadists‟ photograms, however, like their photomontages, were intended to alter nature‟s forms, not to record them, and to substitute impersonal technology for the handwork of the individual. Since the results in the photogram are so unpredictable, making one involves even greater risks than does a photomontage” (900).

2. “Laszlo Moholy -Nagy (1895-1946), a Hungarian teaching at the Bauhaus, was deeply affected by Constructivism. He successfully combined the best features of both approaches in his photographs. By removing the lens to make photograms, he transformed his camera from a reproductive into a productive instrument. In theory if not in practice, photography could now become a technological tool for fostering creativity in mass education. Like many of the Russian artists in the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy also saw light as the embodiment of dynamic energy in space. The effects created by the superimposition and interpenetration of forms in his photographs are fascinating. We feel transported in time and space to the edges of the universe. Here the artist‟s imagination gives shape to the play of cosmic forces” (901). “Moholy-Nagy did not believe that the art of the past was relevant to modern times, but through the use of machines man could forge a new language to represent his own day and age. Ironically, he never considered himself a photographer, but rather a painter. In Berlin he became acquainted with Lissitzky and accepted a position teaching at the Bauhaus, where he became founder and director of the photographic department” (Johnson, Rice, and Williams 517). “Moholy-Nagy called his photomontages „fotoplastiks‟, referring to what he viewed as the pliant nature of the medium” (520). “Advocating a „New Vision‟ in photography, Moholy- Nagy wrote: „it cannot be too plainly stated that it is quite unimportant whether photography produces „art‟ or not. Its own basic laws, not the opinions of art critics, will provide the only valid measure of its future worth‟. The 80 works by Moholy-Nage in the Eastman House collection are an important holding, most of them acquired from the artist‟s second wife” (521-522).

60 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Photography STUDY GUIDE

B Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907, photogravure Alfred Stieglitz/ Photo-Secessionists/ aesthetics vs. class concerns

1. “The founder of modern photography in the United States was Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). From his involvement with the Photo-Secession onward, he was a tireless spokesman for photography-as-art, although he defined this more broadly than did other members of the movement. He backed up his words by publishing the magazine Camera Work. He also supported the other pioneers of American photography by exhibiting their work in his New York galleries, especially the first one, known as ‘291’. Most of his early work follows Secessionist conventions by treating photography as a pictorial equivalent to painting. During the mid-1890s, however, he took some pictures of street scenes that are forerunners of his mature photographs. His classic statement, and the one he regarded as his finest photograph, is The Steerage, taken in 1907 on a trip to Europe. Like Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England, painted more than a half-century earlier, it captures the feeling of a voyage but does so by letting the shapes and composition tell the story. The gangway bridge divides the scene visually, emphasizing the contrasting activities of the people below in the steerage, which was reserved for the cheapest fares, and the observers on the upper deck. If the photograph lacks the obvious sentiment of Brown’s painting, it possesses an equal drama by remaining true to life. This kind of ‘straight’ photography is deceptive in its simplicity: the image mirrors the feelings that stirred Stieglitz. For that reason, The Steerage marks an important step in his evolution and a turning point in the history of photography. Its importance emerges only in comparison with earlier photographs… The Steerage is a pictorial statement independent of painting on the one hand and free from social commentary on the other. It represents the first time that documentary photography achieved the level of art in America. Stieglitz’ shaped the American school. It is therefore ironic that Stieglitz, with Steichen’s encouragement, became America’s first champion of abstract art. He attacked the Ash Can School, whose paintings were often similar in subject and appearance to his photographs. The resemblance is misleading. For Stieglitz, photography was less a means of recording things than of expressing his experience and philosophy of life, much as a painter does” (Janson 892).

2. The journal “brought Stieglitz into contact with photographers Gertrude Kasebier, Edward Steichen, Eva Watson- Schutze, and Clarence White. In March 1902 Stieglitz organized an exhibition of pictorial photographs for the National Arts Club in New York, which he titled American Pictorial Photography, Arranged by ‘The Photo-Secession’. The name derived from his desire to secede from the dominant amateur communities of the camera clubs and to align with photographic art splinter groups such as the British Linked Ring Brotherhood. With the early writings of Emerson as an unofficial guide, the Photo-secessionist movement was born. In 1902 Stieglitz resigned from Camera Notes, and in December of that year he published the first issue of Camera Work, one of the most influential publications in the history of photography” (Johnson, Rice, and Williams 391). His most famous image, ‘The Steerage’, made on board a ship traveling from New York to Europe, was published in both Camera Work and 291” (394).

C Lewis Wickes Hine. Power House Mechanic, 1920, gelatin silver print Lewis Hine/ in praise of the industrial worker/ role of the documentary photographer as a social reformer

1. “In 1904 Lewis Wickes Hine, a teacher at the progressive Ethical Culture School in New York City, began to make photographs of immigrants as part of the school’s teaching program. He continued to photograph at Ellis Island until 1909 and returned there after he became a professional photographer” (Johnson, Rice, and Williams 574). “At the turn of the century, the United States was experiencing a period of Progressive social reform that permeated almost every layer of educated thought in the country, ranging from social and educational theory to political reform in all levels of government. Hundreds of public and private agencies and organizations were established to confront the social problems arising from the new industrialized urban environment. This new social activism found its voice in pursuits as diverse as putting flower pots in tenement windows to the work of international organizations such as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army” (574).

2. “From 1904 to 1920, Hine’s photography focused on the human predicament in the industrialized world, which gave his work a deeply humanistic cast based on social reform. In later years, Hine’s photography underwent a substantial change, in large part due to the nature of his clients whose assignments had more to do with promotional documentation of an agency’s programs than revealing social ills” (580). “It is abundantly clear from his writings, his personal history, and his choice of profession that Hine deeply believed his work could provide change in a world in desperate need of social reform. It is equally clear that he was morally outraged about the conditions he photographed, that the sight of five-year-old children working 12-hour days in unsafe and unsanitary factories offended him and roused his sympathy. Hine never presented the subjects of his photographs as victims. The weary children are always allowed their dignity, allowed to face the camera on their own terms, to present their own sense of self, no matter what the circumstances. Throughout his career, Hine’s photographs were affirming images, even when he photographed dehumanizing situations” (580, 583). “He received commissions from labor unions and industry alike. His eye-catching portraits of master mechanics working amid the bold forms and dramatic surroundings of heavy industry won him prizes and awards, and his work was exhibited in art clubs and reviewed in art magazines- new artistic and public venues for him. However, the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression severely cut his income, and he began to experience financial difficulties. In May 1930 Hine was offered a commission to photograph the construction of the Empire State Building.” (584). “In 1932 the Empire State photographs were gathered together in the critically acclaimed book Men at Work” (586). 61 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Photography STUDY GUIDE

D Margaret Bourke-White. At the Time of the Louisville Flood, 1937, gelatin silver print Margaret Bourke-White/ hunger and poverty in the country with the ‘world’s highest standard of living’/ white and black America/ LIFE magazine

1. “Margaret Bourke-White began her career as an advertising and industrial photographer in Cleveland in 1927. She developed a modernist approach, with dramatic use of perspective, light, and shadow on hard-edged industrial shapes, to create photographs that merged fact with the potent language of abstraction. In contrast to many American photographers who documented the world of industry, Bourke-White infused a grandeur in her images, forging a personal style that was wholly contemporary and dramatic. Her photographs, born of an aesthetic appreciation for machinery that led her to claim that ‘a dynamo is as beautiful as a vase’, lent a sense of power, authority, and glamour to structures previously viewed as unsightly or destructive. The work was immediately appreciated among her clientele of corporate industrialists” (Johnson, Rice, and Williams 588).

2. “From 1929 to 1936, Bourke-White worked in New York City jointly as an advertising photographer and as a photographer for Fortune. In November of 1936 Henry Luce, encouraged by the success of his earlier magazines Time and Fortune, introduced a photographically illustrated weekly magazine named LIFE. The first issue’s cover and lead story were by his ace photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, who had transferred from its sister journal to become one of the first four staff photographers for LIFE. The lead story for the inaugural issued was to be about the building of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, but Bourke-White confounded expectations…. The first issue of LIFE exceeded even the most hopeful expectations; the magazine became a publishing phenomenon” (Johnson, Rice, and Williams 590).

3. “In the mid -1930s, Bourke-White adapted her style to changes in photo-journalistic practices and thought, working in a more socially committed documentary mode. She replaced the heroic grandeur found in her earlier images of booming industrial power with a candidness born of her contact with the homeless and poor during the Great Depression. For example, in the LIFE photograph, ‘At the Time of the Louisville Flood, 1937’, Bourke-White depicts with great irony a line of hungry, displaced people waiting for food in front of a billboard pronouncing the United States’ status as having the ‘world’s highest standard of living’. Throughout her career, Margaret Bourke-White was an integral force in the rising tide of photojournalism as it defined its role as both a specialized discipline and a legitimate form of mass communication” (591-592).

E Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936, gelatin silver print Dorothea Lange/ Great Depression/ putting a human face on economic statistics

1. “Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) played a major role in the formation of the FSA photography program. After studying photography in 1917 at Columbia University in New York City, she opened a studio in San Francisco as a freelance photographer and portraitist. Distressed by the Depression, she began photographing the city’s poor and unemployed. After seeing some of these photographs in 1934, Paul S. Taylor, an economics professor at Berkeley, asked her to collaborate on a report on migrant farm laborers in California. The report, which helped convinced state officials to build migrant labor camps, was also influential in the federal government’s decision to include a photographic unit in the FSA. Lange was hired as one of the first photographers in the unit in 1935. Perhaps her most famous photograph is Migrant Mother; Nipomo, California. The woman in the picture is Florence Thompson, the thirty-two year old mother of ten children. Two of her children are shown leaning on her for support. She looks past the viewer with a preoccupied, worried look. With her knit brow and her hand on her mouth, she seems to capture the fears of an entire population of disenfranchised people” (Stokstad 1103).

2. “In the early 1930s Dorothea Lange ran a small portrait studio situated on a busy street in San Francisco. She said that as the Depression deepened she could see the tide of homeless, jobless men as they aimlessly drifted by her windows. Like many other artists of the time, Lange began to shift her art-making practices in response to the hardships overwhelming the country. Dorothea Lange was soon working out in the streets, photographing the homeless” (Johnson, Rice and Williams 597-598). “In 1935 Paul S. Taylor, an economics professor at the University of California, was asked by the State of California to create a report of the state’s pressing migratory labor program. He hired Lange to make visual records to support the field studies his team was conducting. She was placed on the payroll as a typist, since there was no provision for a project photographer. Together, Taylor and Lange complied a scientifically directed study on this social problem, complete with statistical figures and analyses, quotes from the migrants, and moving, powerful, and convincing photographs depicting the new difficulties that many migratory workers were experiencing. This new amalgam tying together scientific records and humanistic, expressive photographs that ‘put a human face on the statistics’ proved to be the model for future practices of the Farm Security Administration photography unit and a great many other documentary efforts for decades to come” (598). “When Migrant Mother, California was published in a news story about their plight, the government rushed in food, and eventually migrant relief camps were opened. More than any Social Realists or Regionalist painting, Migrant Mother, California has come to stand for that entire era. Unposed and uncropped, this photograph has an unforgettable immediacy no other medium can match” (Janson 899).

62 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Photography STUDY GUIDE

F Robert Frank. Parade: Hoboken, New Jersey, from G Andy Warhol. Big Electric Chair, 1967, the series The Americans, 1953-57, gelatin silver synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on print canvas Robert Frank/ The Americans/ slice-of-life realism/ off- Andy Warhol/ photography vs. fine art/ social center casual framing/ the Beat generation activism or banality?/ photography and authenticity 1. “The birth of a new form of straight photography in the United States was 1. “For a period in the mid- largely the responsibility of one man, 1960s, Warhol utilized scenes Robert Frank (b. 1924). His book The of destruction or disaster Americans, compiled from a cross-country taken from press photographs journey made in 1955-56, created a and presented them with the sensation upon its publication in 1959. It same impersonality, expressed the same restlessness and suggesting that these also are alienation as On the Road by his traveling companion, the Beat poet aspects of the current scene Jack Kerouac , published in 1957” (Janson 903). “The photographers to which familiarity breeds grouped in what is often called the New York School of photography, indifference. In such gruesome pictures of automobile which paralleled the development of New York School painting in the wrecks the nature of the subject makes the attainment of postwar years, also had an unromanticized view of life and took to the a neutral attitude more difficult. Electric Chair, taken from streets in search of the ‘real’ America. Although they built on the an old photograph, shows the grim, barren death methods of documentary journalism, they rejected its anecdotal chamber with the empty seat in the center and the sign descriptiveness, instead of forging a style that mingled the spirit of SILENCE on the wall. Presented by the artist either existentialism with Hollywood film noir. And in place of the formal singly or in monotonous repetition, the scene becomes a pretensions of earlier photographers, they developed a ‘snapshot chilling image, as much through the abstract austerity of aesthetic’ analogous to the found materials of assemblage art and Beat its organization as through its associations” (Arnason writing. Their work, too, expressed the isolation, alienation, 469). “The chair is an awesome, ominous presence, a abrasiveness, and social malaise of the contemporary urban reminder of American crime and a decidedly American experience” (Phillips 78). means of retribution. No other country electrocuted offenders, and many industrial nations had abolished 2. “Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, William Klein, Lisette capital punishment. Although the death penalty was Model, Helen Levitt, and Weegee took spontaneous and candid shots of imposed less frequently after World War II, in the fifties street and crime scenes, city subways, circus freaks, and Coney Island. 717 Americans were executed, and 181 executions took Individually and together, their works portray the diversity of urban place between 1960 and 1964” (Stich 180). life, from high style to squalor” (78). “The Swiss-born Robert Frank, although based in New York in the 1950s, surveyed the entire expanse 2. “Caryl Chessman’s case had stirred worldwide public of America with the blunt candor of his lens. In 1955, Frank received a interest during his twelve years of appeals and eight stays Guggenheim Fellowship to travel across the country, documenting of execution. Many of Chessman’s supporters did not America’s people. The resulting book (and series of photographs), The question his conviction for robbery and rape, but objected Americans (1958 -59), is a brilliant portrait of the real life of America to the application of a kidnapping statute that carried the that celebrates the beauty in the everyday: the noble and sophisticated, death penalty. Others were unequivocally opposed to the rich and poor, the common and exotic, the mix of races, the rural capital punishment under any circumstances. National desolation and urban anomie. Frank crisscrossed the country, and international press coverage of the case mounted catching Yom Kippur in New York, a political rally in Chicago, a movie during the fifties, spurred by Chessman’s own statements premiere in Hollywood, a navy recruiting station in Butte, Montana. in numerous articles, a moving autobiography, and three His camera took in the transition from the old- log cabins and coal other books. On the eve of the execution, protestors mining towns - to the new- juxeboxes and drive-ins. The candid rallied outside San Quentin and in several foreign character of Frank’s photographs, their slice-of-life realism, owes much capitals” (180). to the off-center, seemingly casual framing of each image, a technique some photographers regarded as a violation of professional 3. “Warhol’s 1963 paintings of a falling suicide victim photographic standards- just as assemblage and Beat literature extracted the underlying dread in its rawest form. The violated the purist norms of art” (78, 81). contemporaneous electric-chair pictures, likewise played with the stark juxtaposition of fullness and void, marking 3. “Frustrated by the pressure and banality of the various news and the point where the brutal fact of violent death entered fashion assignments on which he had been working, Frank packed his the realm of contemporary politics. The early 1960s were family into a used car in 1955 and undertook a yearlong photographic seeing, in the wake of the Chessman execution, agitation tour of the United States. From more than 28,000 images, he selected against the death penalty grow to an unprecedented 83 for a book published first in France as Les Americains in 1958 and a intensity. Answering the same moral imperative as the year later in an English-language edition as The Americans, with an outspoken Kienholz, Warhol gave these images the introduction by the beat writer Jack Kerouac. The book was poorly collective title Disasters, and thus tied a political subject received. The photographic community was disturbed by Frank’s often to the slaughter of innocents in the highway, airplane, haphazard style - by the way some elements were purposefully out of and supermarket accidents he memorialized elsewhere. focus, sloppily cropped, and disorganized” (Stokstad 1139). “What He was attracted to the open sores in American political comes through in The Americans is a critical, disillusioned portrait of a life, the issues that were most problematic for liberal culture with profound problems that contradicted the contented, self- Democratic politicians such as John and Robert Kennedy, satisfied view many in the United States had of their country in the and the elder Edmund Brown, the California governor 1950s.” (1139-1140). who denied clemency to Chessman” (Crow 86-87).

63 UNIT ELEVEN: Twentieth Century Photography STUDY GUIDE

H Irving Penn. Large Sleeve (Sunny Harnett), New York, 1951, gelatin silver print Irving Penn/ fashion photography/ elegance defined by austerity/ emphasis on craft

“A fashion photograph aims to describe an ideal, one that we, as consumers, might aspire to. It is the creation of an illusion. In this picture, the curved forms- the woman’s mouth, her neck, the shape of her hat, her left sleeve and, of course, her beautifully deployed right sleeve- are so exquisitely balanced that we accept as inevitable the photographer’s daring cropping of the model’s head. Penn came into prominence as a photographer of fashion in 1950. His signature style, at once austere and elegant, swept away the elaborate theatrical trappings of the past. His pictures seemed to embody a new American confidence and taste for clarity in the aftermath of World War II. As times and fashions changed, however, the pictorial economy and rigorous craft of Penn’s work- the poise and grace of his pictures- did not. Over the course of half a century, his stubborn pursuit of perfection has indeed given us something to aspire to” (Bee 228).

2. “In the 1950s, the body as defined by photography, at least in the United States, began to change. This was in part the result of a change in social and economic conditions. During the Second World War, women had been called into jobs that previously had been off limits to them, hired by factories to replace a male workforce now serving in the armed forces. Some women took on support roles within the armed forces themselves. The fictional character of Rosie the Riveter, a figure in the US government’s wartime propaganda, epitomized the new role that women had found in society. In the years following the war, however, women lost this new freedom and responsibility. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the American economy was expanding, but not fast enough to keep women in the workplace and absorb servicemen returning home to reclaim old jobs. Women were encouraged to stay home, to free up jobs for men and to help stimulate the economy by releasing a demand for consumer goods, with every family needing a car, a refrigerator, a washing machine, and countless other consumer durables. Through this strategy the Eisenhower administration hoped to maintain full employment by replacing military production with a strong civilian market. The body and photography came together around this issue most obviously in fashion photography. Having already largely replaced hand-drawn illustrations in the 1920s and 1930s, photography was used to illustrate fashion in mass-marketed magazines during the Second World War and in the post-war era. Fashion photographs enticed women away from the utilitarian clothing appropriate to the workplace and rekindled in them a desire for finery. It was in early post-war period that Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, among others, came to dominate the world of fashion photography, creating fantasy bodies, clothed and constructed through all the newest styles” (Pultz 101-103).

I Robert Adams. Pikes Peak Park, Colorado Springs, 1970, gelatin silver print Robert Adams/man and his creations in the American West/ frank photography lacking in embellishments

1. “Vacationers often turn their cameras away from the crowded highway toward a pristine mountain range, taking care to exclude power lines and other tourists from the beautiful view. They are performing a ritual of homage to the ideal of the American West, and to its grand tradition in photography. In the late 1960s, Adams, an inhabitant of the West, pioneered an alternative landscape tradition, which included man and his creations in the picture. ‘We have built these things and live among them,’ his photographs seem to say, ‘and we need to take a good, hard look at them’. Photography had never before been so plain and brittle, so lacking in embellishment and seduction. Yet the very aridness of Adams’s early style introduced to the medium a new kind of beauty, rooted in the frankness of his acknowledgment that what we see in his photographs are our own creations, our own places” (Bee 298).

2. “Robert Adams wrote that his hope as a photographer was ‘to discover a tension so exact that it is at peace’. ‘Tract House, Westminster, Colorado’ is not critical of its subject but rather seeks to find beauty in what is before the photographer, even the cookie-cutter, vernacular architecture of late-20-century suburban sprawl. In 1975 the New Topographics exhibition at George Eastman House introduced this aesthetic, and even more lasting, the label that was aptly applied to this body of work that examined the new American landscape. The Eastman House exhibition featured, among others, the work of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, and Stephen Shore” (Johnson, Rice, and Williams 696).

J Diane Arbus. Child with Toy Hand Grenade, New York, 1962, gelatin-silver print Diane Arbu s/ rejection of elegance/ a confrontational portrait

1. The photographer Diane Arbus (1923-1971) “rejected the concept of the elegant photograph, discarding the niceties of conventional art photography during the 1950s- she and her husband, Allan Arbus, had been Seventeen magazine’s favorite cover photographers- but mostly because she did not want formal concerns to distract viewers from her compelling, often disturbing subjects” (Stokstad 1140). “’A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,’ Diane Arbus once noted. Arbus’s uncanny ability to empathize with her subjects and thus extract startling moments of honesty from them produced some of the most confrontational and compelling portraits in the history of the medium” (Johnson, Rice, and Williams 667).

2. In photographs such as this one, Arbus “provides no visual escape or relief for either subject or viewer. In its stark frontal exposition, the photograph challenges the comfortable notion of blissful childhood to reveal its real terrors and fears” (667). 64 UNIT ELEVEN: Color Field and Minimalism STUDY GUIDE

A Barnett Newman. Vir Heroicus Sublimis. 1950-51, oil B Frank Stella. Jill, 1959, enamel on on canvas canvas Barnett Newman/ belief in the spiritual content of abstract Frank Stella/ methodical repetition/ art/ use of “zips” placed against a void/ continued use of removed from the inspired action of Abstract an overwhelming large scale format Expressionists/ “What you see is what you see” 1. “So radically distilled was the Color-Field painting of 1. “In the flag Barnett Newman (1905-70) paintings of that, before the advent of Jasper Johns the Minimalism in the early objects themselves 1960s, few could appreciate are the image, and either the pictures’ daring this made a purity or the agonized powerful impact moral and aesthetic choices on Frank Stella that had produced them. And this was true even though the genial when, as a senior Newman, a native New Yorker with a sophisticated, cosmopolitan in college at intellect, had been, from the start, an active member of what became the Princeton, he saw Abstract Expressionist group, forever visiting studios and sharing ideas, the 1958 Johns advising dealers, organizing exhibitions, writing catalogues, and offering show at the Leo combative, articulate support for the new art on every conceivable front. Castelli Gallery. However, Newman, by reason of his anarchist politics and the slight Indeed, the economic advantage in found in substitute teaching, had never worked in thickness of the the WPA Art Project, where the real bonding seems to have occurred stretcher made a within the developing avant-garde. Moreover, for years, until around Johns flag more object-like than a real flag… In 1944-45, the artist had systematically destroyed his work almost before addition, the flags provided an example of making a the paint could dry, convinced that he had failed to meet the challenge of painting from clearly set out, preconceived ideas” his calling” (Wheeler 51). (Fineberg 297).

2. “A principal characteristic of the Color Field painters and their many 2. “Filling the canvas according to a methodical followers is concentration on and continual reworking of a specific theme. program, Stella suggests an idea of an artist as laborer Perhaps the most extreme examples of this tendency are to be found in or worker. (He also uses commercial paint- black the mature works of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. Newman in the enamel- and a house-painter’s brush.) The systematic mid-1940s was working in a pattern of loose vertical-horizontal geometry quality of Stella’s Black Paintings decisively departed with a predominance of vertical lines or color areas, broken at the edges from the ideas of inspired action associated with and alternating with circular or spheroid shapes. By the end of the Abstract Expressionism, the art of the preceding decade he had simplified his formula to a unified color field interrupted generation, and anticipated the machine-made Minimal by a vertical line- a ‘zip’ as the artist called it- or, rather, a narrow, art of the 1960s. But many of them, like this one, are vertical contrasting color space” (Arnason 396). subtly personal: Stella worked freehand, and

irregularities in the lines of the stripes reveal the slight 3. “The phrase Vir Heroicus Sublimis came as a spontaneous, if erudite, waverings of his brush. His enamel, too, suggests a response to a radio announcement that President Truman had fired bow to the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, who General MacArthur from his Korean command, an action the artist had also used that paint” (Bee 233). heartily applauded. But topical as the occasion for it may have been, the

Latin title, like the monumental picture itself, nonetheless expresses a 3. Stella featured black “not because it appealed to his deeply rooted, personal conception of man’s essential nature as heroic or taste or expressed his mood but because it signifies the elevated and a determination on the part of Newman to convey his theme absence of color pigment, its denial. The rectangular in appropriately sublime, poetic language, visual or verbal” (Wheeler 53). design elements derive from the shape of the canvas “The Latin title means ‘man, heroic, and sublime’. The hidden square in itself… What Stella achieved was a group of artworks the middle- described by the two zips- emphasizes the perfection of the whose features refer not to the artist or the outside center, around which he ordered the canvas. The color field evokes the world but to the physical aspects of the art object itself. universe, the infinite, and completely lacks any texture or sense of human The individual paintings are therefore hermetically intervention. The zips, on the other hand, convey the painter’s presence sealed from everything beyond their edges except other and spatially establish the relation of the individual to the wider order of paintings of the series. In that sense they are ‘pure’” things” (Fineberg 103). (Stokstad 1132). “Nevertheless, while subject, content,

and aesthetic worth might be sought solely within 4. “The extraordinary scale of the eighteen-foot-long Vir Heroicus and painting’s demonstrable plastic attributes, not even other pictures of this time made it practically impossible for all but a few Frank Stella, who notoriously insisted that in his collectors or galleries to hang them, much less buy them” (105). “Newman Minimal paintings ‘what you see is what you see’, could wanted to rid the painting of its physicality as an object in order to altogether escape the metaphoric or expressionist emphasize its meaning. But many have misread his work as a formalist implications of his work” (Wheeler 182-183). “Stella’s statement, because of his concern with measurement and placement. art was polemical, argumentative. It helped set a tone Tony Smith recounted an incident in which a curator came to see the Vir for other artists. Minimalism was very dogmatic. Heroicus Sublimis and told Newman that he ‘finally understood it; it was Leading Minimalists believed they were riding the train just a relationship of shapes- Bauhaus!’ Newman growled that the only of History itself, and said so with unabashed things in the picture that ‘count’ are the stripes” (105). truculence” (Hughes, American Visions 561). 65 UNIT ELEVEN: Color Field and Minimalism STUDY GUIDE

C Richard Diebenkorn. Ocean Park D Carl Andre. Equivalent VIII, 1978, mixed media #105, 1978, oil and charcoal on Carl Andre/ Minimalism/ importance of the museum or canvas gallery setting/ impersonal act of creating art/ preference for Richard Diebenkorn/ Ocean Park the machine made object over the hand made object/ intrinsic Series/ move from representational vs. extrinsic value painting to abstraction/ fields of color suggesting both structure and process 1. “Other artists soon to be grouped under the label of Minimalism were equally prepared to rely 1. Living in the Bay upon prefabricated components from the Area of California in industrial sector, among them Dan Flavin (b . the 1950s, Richard 1933) and Carl Andre (b. 1935). The early careers Diebenkorn (1922- of both had been much like that of Robert Ryman: 1993) “at first had living on the fringes of the burgeoning New York made abstract pictures avant-garde, teaching themselves, absorbing ideas with strong emphasis more than techniques, dabbling in concrete poetry, and generally specializing on landscape imagery, in cheap, ephemeral work on paper” (Crow 142). “In Andre’s case, after a their directional tentative start using rough-hewn pieces of timber (a careless friend mistakenly brushstrokes and burned his first efforts as firewood), the defining moment came with his swelling forms a adoption of standard mass-produced bricks, simply lined or stacked on the homage to de Kooning, gallery floor as his signature material. Later he added to his repertoire arrays as was their high of adjacent, identical square metal plates, which took possession of the space palette of pinks, yellows, ochers, and blues. But beneath the feet of the spectator. As with Judd and Flavin, his arrangements by 1957-58 he had begun a sequence of brusquely presents one simple, unmistakable shape to the onlooker; he went one step rendered figure paintings, generally of women further toward eliminating artifice in that gravity did all the work in holding seated in transparent interiors, looking out on a these pieces together: when an exhibition was finished, the components were landscape through an architectural grid. The stacked, crated, and hauled away. Andre was not alone in believing that such prototype for these was Henri Matisse, to whom practice carried an edge of social criticism, even of political dissent. There was Dienbenkorn felt a strong filiation” (Hughes, a laconic eloquence in the Minimalists’ preference for everyday materials, American Visions 549). which carried with them a certain common-man poetics; more than this, refusal of a fine-art ‘look’ was deemed a subversion of the gallery as a 2. “The other influence on Diebenkorn was Edward marketplace for rare and precious goods; and compositional qualities of Hopper, whose traces lie not only in the woman’s anonymity, repetition, and equality of parts continued to supply basic abstracted reverie but also in the diagonal cuts of metaphors for altruism and egalitarianism in politics” (142-143). highway berms in the background; Diebenkorn loved Hopper’s diagonals, and they would become 2. “The essential difference between any sculpture from the past and Carl a steady element in his mature series of paintings, Andre’s Equivalent VIII, 1978- which was ridiculed by the English press when the Ocean Parks , which he began in 1967 and it entered the Tate Gallery but now seems one of the classic objects of its time- named after the beachside section of Santa is that Andre’s work depends entirely on the museum. A Rodin in a parking Monica, California, where he lived. These large, lot is still a misplaced Rodin; Equivalent VIII in the same lot is just bricks. The clear paintings are essentially abstract, and yet museum alone provides the etiquette that identifies it as art, slotting the you cannot walk the Santa Monica esplanade bricks into the formal debate about contexts which enables them to be seen as without recognizing their elements in the real part of an art movement called ‘Minimalism’. The paradox of such works was landscape. Diebenkorn tended to keep the ‘action’, that they staked everything on the institutional context for their effect, while the polyphony and intercutting of small forms, at claiming the density and singularity of things in the real world” (Hughes, the verges of the canvas, reserving the center for Shock of the New 369). “After Happenings and , it represented a firm large areas of pale, silky cobalt and green, which return of the experimental artist to the confines of the commercial gallery and recall the stretch of the Pacific seen from above pristine museum. While these artists may have set out to upset the normal and Santa Monica’s tracts of municipal grass; conduct of such spaces, they were not blind to their dependence on them; in sometimes the blue is vaporous and foggy with an art without significant internal relationships, it was necessary to dominate gray scumbling, tuned by cuts of line. The a context of sufficient order and clarity to make a light-fixture or a stack of subsidiary forms suggest others present in the bricks register as an art event. The gallery, moreover, was replacing the landscape: cuts of gable, white posts by the sea, studio as the space in which the work was actually brought into being: if the sudden drop- offs of hill or throughway. There is a Minimalists were interrupting the supply of rare, portable objects, they were kind of light on Diebenkorn’s coastline-mild, high, conferring an importance on the traditional space of display- and on curatorial and (when smog doesn’t descend) ineffably clear” activity in general- that no one had ever witnessed before” (Crow 143-144). (550-551). “It took time- too much time- for the “Carl Andre met Frank Stella in 1958 and worked in Stella’s studio while magnitude of Diebenkorn’s achievement to be fully Stella was making the black paintings of 1959. It was under this influence recognized in New York. For entirely figurative that Andre arrived at the basic principle of anaxial symmetry in which any artists, of course, it was harder still” (551). “The part of a work can replace any other part” (Fineberg 301-302). “Over the next work uses the components of Piet Mondrian’s three years Andre gradually abandoned carving and the assemblage of found mature art, but escapes the form of geometry that materials in favor arranging his sculptures from modular units… The clear Mondrian had adapted from Cubism to learn more geometry relates to Frank Stella’s early shaped canvases, while the overall from the less confining structures, and the structure implies infinite continuation as in Brancusi’s modular series of breathing surfaces, of Barnett Newman and Mark ‘Endless Columns’” (302). “Lever was Andre’s first site-specific piece, Rothko” (Bee 291). consisting of 137 fire bricks laid side by side in a line on the floor at the ‘Primary Structures’ exhibition of 1966” (302).

66 UNIT ELEVEN: Color Field and Minimalism STUDY GUIDE

E Richard Serra. Tilted Arc, 1981, installed in Federal Plaza, New York, cor-ten steel Richard Serra/ physical self-awareness of the viewer in relation to the art object/ rusted steel surface/ Minimalism as a “public” art form/controversial removal

1. “The most powerful body of work made by an American sculptor in direct answer to Minimalism came from Richard Serra (b. 1939). He wanted to find a way past Minimalist purity by invoking the human body and its anxieties in weight, mass, and hard work with heavy materials” (Hughes, American Visions 567). Serra “was a manual worker, intimately involved with the process of making and the logic of materials, such as the propensity of steel to rust and produce surfaces whose markings, seen in isolation, can be argued to be as beautiful as those of travertine or bronze. He lifted stiff sheets of industrial rubber and let them slump. He dumped arrays of metal on the floor. He propped steel plates together. He spattered molten lead into corners, producing heavy molds of a part of the room. The act of throwing lead seems cognate with Jackson Pollock’s practice of throwing skeins of liquid paint, but Serra denies that he had Pollock in mind” (567-568). “What did concern him was the weight of sculpture, its presence in the world- something to set against the abstraction of ideas, and even against the idea of ‘style’. He wanted to make large sculpture that would be explicitly itself, with none of the character of either ‘failed architecture [or] three- dimensional painting’. (Even earthworks, Serra felt, tended to be viewed ‘pictorially’: ‘It is no coincidence that most… are photographed from the air’.) Architecture was stable, constructed; Serra would make large sculpture with no connectors, not welded or bolted but held together by gravity, the elements leaning or stacked- in a word, rigged, not built” (568).

2. “The possibility of being crushed by it is part of its sculptural effect. It addresses the body through anxiety, and this is a thoroughly legitimate though long-repressed function of sculpture at its most archaic level. You skirt his steel walls and walk through the curving spaces they define with a degree of dread. However, in America at least, this raised problems for Serra in the domain in public sculpture. Hence the controversy over his Tilted Arc, which for a time became the most famous nonexistent sculpture in the country. Commissioned by the General Services Administration, a branch of the federal government, it was installed in 1981 on the plaza of a federal building in downtown Manhattan. The GSA cannot have been under any illusion about what kind of sculpture Serra made, how confrontational it was. It wasn’t expecting a nice bronze of Peter Pan. But it was not prepared for anyone to actually object to this 124-foot, curved, tilting wall of steel plate. Provoked by vehement objections from federal workers in the building, who thought Tilted Arc menacing and couldn’t see why their already ugly plaza should be made worse by a steel wall that cut it in half, public hearings were held. At them, Serra testified with equal passion that the work could not be removed because it was ‘site-specific’, designed for a given spot. Remove it, he said, and you would utterly destroy it- reducing it to the meaningless array of rusty metal its opponents said it already was” (568-569). “In fact, the world’s museums are full of formerly ‘site-specific’ art, from the Elgin Marbles to any number of displaced frescoes, tombs, and statues, which were diminished but did not die when moved. However, the matter is now moot; Tilted Arc was dismantled and moved to storage, where it remains. Serra’s supporters compared this to Hitler’s book burning, called it an act of censorship, and predicted that it would start an iconoclastic stampede against public art in America. And indeed, as we will see, there was such an attack- wide-ranging, vehemently moralizing, and deadly effective- against publicly funded art some ten years later, but the fate of Tilted Arc had nothing to do with it. In the meantime, it exemplified the fact that a sculpture may have genuine and even deep merit as a work of art, and yet fail in the public realm” (569-570).

F Eva Hesse. Hang-Up, 1965-66, acrylic on cloth over wood and steel Eva Hesse/ humanizing of Minimalism/ introduction of the sexual and the anthropomorphic/ an empty container/ “nonlogical” art

1. “The one important exception to the Minimalist urge to avoid self-expression is the work of Eva Hesse (1936-1970). After graduating from the Yale School of Art in 1959, she painted self-portraits, and in 1964 she began to produce abstract sculpture that used the vocabulary of Minimalism for that same purpose. In that sense, Hesse was one of the first artists to move beyond the austerity of Minimalism. Instead of sleek surface, her work shows the actual process of art making, which included such malleable techniques as sewing, lacing, and bandaging. In her mature work, like Hang Up, contradictions abound- the self-contained and the protruding, the regular and the organic, order and chaos. The tragic absurdity in Hesse’s art may reflect the inner conflict within the artist, who died young” (Stokstad 1133). “Eva Hesse, a German-born Jew, narrowly escaped the concentration camps in 1939, when she fled with her sister to at the age of two. After two months in an orphanage Hesse and her sister were reclaimed by their parents, who took them to New York. But shortly thereafter the parents divorced and in 1946 Hesse lost her mother to suicide. This early history left severe anxiety and depression related to issues of intimacy, abandonment, and self-image that Hesse continually explored in her art” (Fineberg 311-312).

2. “In early April 1969 Hesse collapsed form a brain tumor and then underwent three operations before she finally died in May 1970 at the age of thirty -four. The fact that she had already developed a system of working with assistants in 1968 made it possible for her to continue working right to the end” (314). “Backing away from its ‘male’ rigidity, which included the high-style rhetoric of Minimalism, she allowed her fascination with the ‘female’ and the inward, including what was grotesque and pathetic, to enlarge… Both tube and frame are wrapped in cloth, like bandaged parts of a patient… Even in absence, the body is somehow there, as an ironically suffering presence; the title phrase ‘Hang Up’, means both what you do to pictures and … a mental block” (Hughes, American Visions 578). 67 UNIT ELEVEN: Color Field and Minimalism STUDY GUIDE

G Donald Judd. Untitled, 1967, green lacquer on galvanized iron Donald Judd/ artless repetition/ interest in spatial relationships between modules/ Marfa, Texas

1. “Stella’s interests were shared by the sculptor Donald Judd (1928-1994). Convinced along with Greenberg and others that Abstract Expressionism had deteriorated into a set of techniques for faking both the subjective and the transcendent, Judd began around 1960 to search for an art free of falsehood. By the early 1960s he had decided that sculpture offered a better medium than painting for creating literal, matter- of-fact art. Rather than depicting shapes, as Stella did- which Judd thought still smacked of illusionism and therefore fakery- he would create actual shapes. In search of a greater simplicity and clarity, he soon evolved a formal vocabulary featuring identical rectangular units arranged in rows and constructed of industrial materials, especially anodized aluminum and Plexiglas” (Stokstad 1132).“Judd liked industrial materials because they had the crisp ‘certainty’ he sought, were more impersonal than organic materials, and were imbued with their own color, thus minimizing his need to choose a color for them. His later boxes, like those in Untitled, are always open, to avoid any uncertainty about what might be inside. He arranged them in rows- the simplest, most impersonal way to integrate them- and avoided sets of two or three because of their potential to be read as representative of something other than a row of boxes. Judd provided the viewer with a set of clear, self-contained facts, from which the viewer detects the contrast between the work’s conceptual clarity and the messy complexity of the real world” (1132-1133).

2. “Sculpture must always face gravity, and the stack- one thing on top of another- is one of its basic ways of coping. The principle traditionally enforces a certain hierarchy, an upper object being not only usually different from a lower one but conceptually nobler, as when a statue stands on a pedestal. Yet in Judd’s stack of galvanized-iron boxes, all of othe units are identical; they are set on the wall and separated, so that none is subordinated to another’s weight (and also so that the space around them plays a role in the work equivalent to theirs); and their regular climb- each of the twelve boxes is nine inches high, and they rest nine inches apart- suggests an infinitely extensible series, denying the possibility of a crowning summit. Judd’s form of Minimalism reflected his belief in the equality of all things. ‘In terms of existing’, he wrote, ‘everything is equal’. The field of Minimalist objects, however, is not an undifferentiated one- Judd also believed that sculpture needed what he called ‘polarization’, some fundamental tension. Here, for example, the uniform boxes, their tops and undersides bare metal, suggest the industrial production line. Meanwhile their fronts and sides have a coat of green lacquer, which, although it is auto paint, is a little unevenly applied, and has a luscious glamour” (Bee 289).

3. “He attempted to fulfill Tatlin’s machine-age prescription for ‘real materials in real space,’ but unlike Tatlin, Judd had no social message, no Utopian aspiration expressed in the work. Judd insisted that his objects lacked any significance beyond what was literally there. If an image suggested three dimensions, the three dimensions existed; they were not illusions or representations. Barbara Haskell pointed out that Judd’s training in philosophy as an undergraduate at Columbia and in particular his affinity with the writings of the eighteenth -century Scottish empiricist David Hume confirmed an intuitive disposition toward concrete experience. Judd’s rejection of abstract expressionism derived in part from his belief in the dialectical progress of ideas in art (making abstract expressionism outmoded) and from his insistence on experientially verifiable truth (which excluded existential introspection)” (Fineberg 299).

4. “Lavishly underwritten by the Dia Foundation, Judd in the last twenty years of his life acquired some thirty-two buildings on Fort Russell, an abandoned military site near Marfa, a cattle town in southwest Texas. The main ones were two artillery sheds, in which he set up a series of boxes, a hundred per shed, each three feet by four by six, each with a different internal structure, and all factory- made of polished three-eighths-inch aluminum sheet which reflects (through the glass walls) the big sky, the flat landscape, and the changing light outside, as well as the softly gleaming surfaces of their neighbors. This temple of esthetic fanaticism epitomizes Judd. His work was hard to like because the reduction he sought was a kind that most people don’t want in sculpture. No figure, no parts. No relationships, except the accidental ones produced, at Marfa, by mutual reflection of light. No movements, no metaphors, no secrets: just the thing in itself, and a completely inexpressive thing at that. None of which excluded the fact that the work could be beautiful, in an anxious, muffled-Utopian way. It is in the world but tells us nothing about the world. Buts it denial of the sensuous is deeply American. You think of the purity of Shaker furniture, the spareness of Puritan meetinghouses- boxes with God’s word in them. Except that Judd’s work, in its utter secularity, represents only the husk of the beliefs behind such earlier American creations” (Hughes, American Visions 564-565).

5. “Only the object counted: an uncommonly mute object, a thing among other things in the world, which distinguished itself as art to the extent that, as Donald Judd put it, it was ‘interesting’- that is, presented some sort of challenge to taste. Not that being ‘interesting’ implied any exoticism. Rather, Judd pointed to the vapidity of the things Americans surrounded themselves with as a source of inspiration: ‘most modern commercial buildings, new Colonial stores, lobbies, most houses, most clothing, sheet aluminum’. In short, there was something in common between Minimalism and Pop art: a coldness, an attachment to the novel and the technical no matter what form the results might take. The Pop artist closest to the Minimalist sensibility was Andy Warhol, with his admission that he’d like to be a machine, his pseudo-industrial way of producing pictures in series by silk screen” (563). “In rejecting imagery, Minimalist art rejected nature, and yet it could sometimes play very well against a landscape as its mysterious other- something that might have been left by extraterrestrials, without a user’s manual (except, of course, for the precepts of American critics of the 1960s, sternly enjoining the art audience to accept the ‘bracing’ esthetic of boredom). From this point of view, the ultimate Minimalist work appeared on film and not in real life: it was the black slab interred on the moon by long-departed aliens in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey” (563).

68 UNIT ELEVEN: Color Field and Minimalism STUDY GUIDE

H Agnes Martin. Friendship, 1963, incised I Robert Ryman. Institute, 1981, oil on linen with gold leaf and gesso on canvas metal fasteners Agnes Martin/ use of a grid/ delicate hand- Robert Ryman/ working only with white/ sensitive to drawn lines/ a sense of infinite space qualities of surface and touch/ hanging devices as an integral part of the work/ restricted square format/ 1. “Among the Minimalists, the references to Malevich senior painter remains Agnes

Martin, who refined her art over 1. “When Ad Reinhardt, in 1960, many years, during which she declared his black-square painting to be progressed from rather the ultimate picture, and thus painted it traditional still lifes to Gorky- repeatedly for the remainder of his life, he like biomorphic abstractions, did not reckon with Robert Ryman before arriving in the early (1930-), who took white to be the point of 1960s at her mature, mandarin no return for pictorial art, yet discovered distillations of pure form. This so many ways to vary it through process occurred in New York City, that his oeuvre as a whole has become an where the artist had moved from New Mexico, taking with endlessly fruitful investigation of the her a haunting memory of the desert’s powdery air and spectral reality that, far from neutral, light. This she evoked by the improbable process of honing white is the embodiment of all color. Ryman narrowed his palette to and purifying her means until they consisted of nothing but white because, as one of Minimalism’s paragons, he ‘didn’t want large square canvases gridded all over with lines so anything in the paintings that didn’t need to be there’, and what truly delicately defined and subtly spaced as to suggest not could not be done without, as long as the issue remained painting, austere, cerebral geometry but trembling, spiritual became more manifest once all specific colors had been banished. vibrations” (Arnason 520). For Ryman, the irreducible essential of painting was the act of laying

on medium, as he made pellucidly clear in his most oft-quoted 2. “A grid connotes regulation and regularity, and therefore statement’ ‘There is never a question of what to paint, but only how the human hand: natural forms as uniform as these to paint. The how of painting has always been the image- the end patterns of evenly space horizontal and vertical straight product’. With this Ryman seemed to place himself at polar variance lines are seldom visible to the unaided eye. In Friendship with the Abstract Expressionists, who had insisted that how they and other works, however, Martin draws a grid that painted derived from what and why they painted. Yet a funny thing somehow both softens the firm lines of geometry and seems happened on the way to pictorial concreteness, for the more Ryman to open onto a space far wider than the human sphere. Her systematically emptied painting of all ineffables- the better to assert art, she has said, ‘ is about what is known forever in the its most material conventions- the more the work appeared to be mind’- perfection, the transcendent reality spoken of in preeminently about such ineffables as light, the unavoidable product Eastern religions. For her, the grid evokes not a human of white, and touch, the unavoidable, particular technique used for measure but a supernal one, a boundless order” (Bee applying white. Indeed, Ryman developed the how of painting to 268).“Like many Abstract Expressionist artists (her such a fine and complex degree that, in his art, reductivism appears chronological contemporaries), Martin honors the spiritual to have yielded a variety of subtle re-elaboration. Not only has he potential in art, but none of those painters approached the explored the effects of various media (oil, baked enamel, paper, vinyl spiritual through symmetry. The organization of Friendship acetate emulsion) combined with different brush widths and shares more with the Minimal art of a later generation, but supports (canvas, linen, cotton, wood, paper, cardboard, steel, the lines Martin has hand-scored into that shimmering copper, aluminum, Mylar, fibgerglass, Plexiglas); he has even plane of gold have a unique delicacy. From a distance, too, considered the how of hanging works as part of the picture. Thus, they fade, structuring the field almost subliminally. The when Ryman used bolts and brackets to hold a painting an inch or result is a sense of an infinite space with a mysterious more away from the wall, it was as if he wanted to literalize the vitality. Indeed the experience Martin says she wants from illusion of floating that the great ‘silent’ white squares seem always to a painting is ‘the simple, direct going into a field of vision as produce” (Wheeler 207). you would cros s an empty beach to look at the ocean’”

(268). 2. “’To make’ has often figured in Ryman’s conversation, for he

considers ‘making’ a matter of knowing the language of his 3. “Clearly, the presence sought and rhapsodically achieved materials… and of exploiting its syntax so that paintings come alive by Martin had little to do with physical or optical impact; with their own story- how a dumb object among other objects become rather, it drew energy from the same deep, meditational a thing of rare aesthetic coherence. Thus in Ryman’s art, sources that had nourished such generational peers as monochromatic reductiveness has resulted in a subtle Rothko and Newman” (Wheeler 206). “Owing to the faint recomplication, paradoxically arising from the artist’s sensibility to dissonance between the format and its interior design and a means and his consequent inability to take painting’s support for subtle tremor in the ruled drawing… the entire field appears granted. He romances the latter endlessly, covering it with white so to have come alive as a luminous atmospheric shimmer… nuanced that monochromy seems almost to break up into a rainbow According to Thomas Hess, a visitor to Martin’s New Mexico array of chromatics, and then determining the support in relation to studio reported that one evening, while glancing our a a whole of network of physical factors, among them the size of the window, he saw the sky and the desert assume the precise wall and the height at which the painting is to be hung. By such configuration and colors of her paintings. ‘She’s a realist’, rigorous reconsideration and elevation of material detail and issues he exclaimed. Though anything but naturalistic, Martin’s of optical perception, as well as by the magical beauty of his painting reserved yet authoritative works nonetheless signify explicit touch, Ryman invests his pictures with a lyrical presence, all the moods engendered by the desert world to which the artist while that he has pursued a stern Minimalist program of returned in 1967” (206-207). deconstruction and purification” (Arnason 520).

69 UNIT ELEVEN: Mid-Twentieth Century Architecture STUDY GUIDE

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Seagram Building, New York, 1954-58 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe/ “less is more”/ spread of the International Style/set back from the street/ curtain wall of glass/ image of streamlined efficiency

1. “The 1960s was a watershed period in the history of modern art. Little of the earlier modernist faith in the transformative power of art is evident in the works produced during the decade. Although the Minimalists continued to believe that the history of art had a coherent, progressive shape and that art presented a pure realm outside ordinary ‘bourgeois’ culture, the purity, honesty, and clarity of their art were not meant to change the world but to retreat from it. To the next generation, by contrast, the concepts of artistic purity and the mainstream seemed naïve. In fact, the entire generation that grew to maturity around 1970 shared little faith in either purity or progress that marked earlier generations. Precisely how and why this loss of faith happened are matters of debate, but among the contributing factors were a widespread sense of disillusionment that followed in the wake of the political protests and social reform movements of the 1960s and the growing awareness that the material improvements brought by industrial technology had a high environmental cost. In short, the utopian optimism that ha d characterized the beginning of the modernist era and had survived both world wars gave way to a growing uncertainty about the future and about art’s power to influence it” (Stokstad 1134).

2. In 1937, Mies van der Rohe “who had designed the Barcelona Pavilion, was named director of the Armour Institute in Chicago, which later became Institute of Technology. Whether designing schools, apartments, or office buildings, like the Seagram Building in New York City, Mies used the same simple, rectilinear industrial vocabulary. The differences among his buildings are to be found in their details. Because he had a large budget for the Seagram Building, for instance, he used custom-made bronze (instead of standardized steel) beams on the exterior, an example of his love of elegant materials. Mies would have preferred to leave the steel structural supports visible, but building codes required him to encase them in concrete. The ornamental beams on the outside thus stand in for the functional beams inside, much as the shapes in a Stella painting refer to the structural frame that holds the canvas. The tall, narrow windows emphasize the verticality of the thirty-eight-story building, helping it compete for attention with surrounding skyscrapers. The building is set back from the street and rises quickly and impressively off pilotis from a sunlit plaza with reflecting pools, fountains, and, originally, beech trees (the city air killed them)” (1134).

3. “The dark glass and bronze were meant to give the Seagram Company a discreet and dignified image. The building’s clean lines and crisp design seemed, in fact, to epitomize the efficiency, standardization, and impersonality that had become synonymous with the modern corporation itself- which, in part, is why this particular style dominated corporate architecture after World War II. Such buildings were also cheaper to build. For Mies, however, the goal was to find a suitable architectural style not only for American businesses but also for modern humanity. He believed that the industrial preoccupation with streamlined efficiency was the dominant value of the entire age and that the only legitimate architecture was one that expressed this modern zeitgeist (‘spirit of the age’)” (1134). “While business leaders, in particular, were embracing the International Style, a number of critics both inside and outside the architectural profession were growing increasingly hostile to it, not least because it had become so identified with the prevailing corporate zeitgeist. These critics called for an architecture that would provide the starved modern sensibility with the spiritual nourishment it so badly needed” (1134-1135). This building ”uses the techniques developed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe’s great predecessors in Chicago, to extend the structure to an enormous height. Yet the building looks like nothing before it. Though not quite a pure box, it illustrates Mies van der Rohe’s famous saying that ‘less is more’. This alone does not explain the difference, however. Mies van der Rohe discovered the perfect means to articulate the skyscraper in the I-beam, its basic structural member, which rises continuously along nearly the entire height of the façade. (The actual skeleton of the structure remains completely hidden from view.) The effect is as soaring as the responds inside a Gothic cathedral- and with good reason, for Mies van der Rohe believed that ‘structure is spiritual’. He achieved it through the lithe proportions, which create a perfect balance between the play of horizontal and vertical forces. This harmony expresses the idealism, social as well as aesthetic, that underlies in architecture” (Janson 875).

4. “It is to Mies that the modern corporation owes its face; glass was the essence of the skyscraper, and the skyscraper has become the essence of the modern city- a parade of thin films hung on steel skeletons. No more load-bearing walls. And Mies seemed to be the epitome of reason - straight lines, rational thought, and extreme refinement of proportion and detailing. If an architect copied him, he would not be copying a style but emulating revealed Truth; and this was the secret of Mies van der Rohe’s extraordinary influence on two subsequent generations of designers” (Hughes, Shock of the New 180). “Not one of Mies’s designs was ever successfully prefabricated, because he insisted on tolerances that mass production, as it existed for architecture, could not handle. He was a stonemason’s son and his background lay in traditional craft, in the refining, shaping power of the hand on ‘noble’ materials. Indeed, by 1930 he had recoiled from his praise of the machine-process ideal” (181). “When he came to design the curtain wall of the Seagram Building in New York, 1956-8, Mies could have used steel or aluminum. But there was a particular quality of color and shadow that he wanted, the darkness of grooves laid into a warmer surrounding darkness, and this- so he concluded- could only be achieved in bronze. The result was the most expensive curtain wall ever hung on a steel frame, but the most elegant as well- the elegance of the Void, an architecture of ineloquence and absolute renunciation. In his desire for a universal grammar of architecture, Mies van der Rohe was apt to sweep aside questions of meaning within the buildings themselves; they interfered with the perfect Zero that he struggled to approach. The idea that his Gallery of the Twentieth Century in Berlin could be seen as ‘functional’ is absurd, for he was so anxious to preserve the integrity of his ideal form, the gridded glass block, that he refused to equip its main floor with any walls on which a picture could be hung” (181, 184). 70 UNIT ELEVEN: Mid-Twentieth Century Architecture STUDY GUIDE

B Louis Kahn. Salt Institute, La Jolla, C Jorn Utzon and Hall, Todd, and Littleton. California, 1965 Sydney Opera House, 1972 Louis Kahn/ Brutalism/ Spartan surfaces and Jorn Utzon/sail-like, roof shells/ use of “served” and monastic spaces/ modular design “servant” spaces/ concept of “additive architecture”

1. “Louis I. Kahn (1901- 1. The Sydney Opera House “was 1974) developed a less designed in 1956 by the Danish radical antimodernist architect Jorn Utzon (b. 1918), who architecture. Trained in had worked briefly under Aalto and conventional Beaux-Arts Wright in the years right after World methods at the University War II. From the former he acquired a of Pennsylvania in the respect for local materials and early 1920s, he did not traditions and from the latter a fully develop his own fascination with organic forms based theories until he on nature. Nervi perceptively called the encountered the architecture of ancient Egypt, Greece, and shell roofs, which bear no relation to Rome during a year spent at the American Academy of Rome the auditoriums, ‘the most straightforward anti-functionalism form in 1950-1951. What struck him about this architecture was the point of view of statics and well as construction’, something the way it translated clearly conceived functions into boldly that might be said as well of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. They simple structures. He returned to the United States committed required the most advanced engineering of the day, which was to finding a modern equivalent to those early Mediterranean provided by Ove Arup (1895-1988). Second only to Nervi as an styles. Rejecting the modernist preoccupation with a single, innovator, Arup was to work as a consultant on some of the most uniform style, he sought to tailor the form of each building to important modern and postmodern buildings. Indeed, the its intended use. He viewed a building as a living organism structure has sometimes been called a forerunner of postmodernist and maintained that like an organism, its form should architecture… Built on an abandoned wharf as part of a larger port efficiently integrate its functioning parts” (Stokstad 1135). and urban renewal plan, it became an instant classic. The opera house is justly famous throughout the world as a symbol of 2. “For the Salk Institute of Biological Studies on the shores Sydney, as instantly recognizable as the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California, Kahn designed a of Liberty. Utzon intended it to sit in splendid isolation as a large laboratory building and two rows of student and faculty gateway to the harbor. Today there are plans to develop the jetty housing on a severe courtyard leading to the sea. The commercially with apartments and shops, which will destroy the modular housing units, whose regularity is both punctuated building’s unique character” (Janson 881). and relieved by the abrupt diagonal juts in the facades, are formed with concrete slabs, which he preferred to thinner “The building employs three important elements: a hovering roof industrial materials because of the assertive way they defined structure facilitating public functions; a podium housing the space. The windows and balconies are simple geometric cuts support facilities; and a terraced concourse incorporating the in the walls, although the harsh contrast of solid and void is processional routes that link the spaces designed for social somewhat softened by around the façade openings. gathering. The sail-like, floating roof shells, which rise from the Kahn, who asked himself what institutional housing ‘wanted’ massive, tiered podium, seem to emerge dramatically from the to look like, seems to have decided that it should look as if it water and are reminiscent of the waterside Gothic churches of housed a community of equals. Although Kahn based his Utzon’s native and the yachts in full sail that fill Sydney ideas on what he viewed as the simple functionalism of Harbor” (Stevenson 92). ancient architecture, his spare design for the Salk Institute’s housing seems consistent with the Minimalism of 3. “Jorn Utzon was born in , Denmark. He worked for contemporary painting and sculpture” (1135). two influential modern Scandinavian architects: Gunar Asplund (1885-1940) and Alvar Aalto. Utzon’s designs are characterized by 3. “Louis Kahn, the foremost representative of Brutalism in clear and conceptual statements that generate simple solutions- the United States, used bare concrete to great effect in the often from a ‘family of related objects’. This concept became known Jonas Salk Institute of Biological Studies in La Jolla. Salk, as Additive Architecture” (93). “The main concert hall is enclosed inventor of the first polio vaccine, had been deeply impressed within the highest shell section. Originally, the proposed called for by his visit to Assisi and conceived of the center as similar to a dual-purpose hall that could accommodate both orchestral and the Franciscan monastery there. Kahn, who was in complete operatic performances” (93). “The interlocking shell clusters are sympathy with his patron’s views, carried out this scheme generated from segments of a single sphere, providing a common brilliantly. He treated the offices as a series of monastic cells curvature and helping to simplify the complex resolution of joints attached to the central work spaces formed by the and cladding components” (92). “Utzon uses the device of served laboratories- or, as he put it, servant and server spaces. With and servant spaces (characteristic of late modern architecture) in its Spartan surfaces, concrete expressed the asceticism of this the design of the building. Servant areas within the podium, such scientific retreat. Like so many others, the ambitious project as kitchens and offices, provide functions that sustain the proved too costly (it included, among other things, separate activities within the prominent served areas of the building, such living quarters for the scientists and their families) and was as the walkways, auditoriums, and foyers” (93). “The precast- halted before it could be completed. It nevertheless remains concrete rib vaults are clad in a combination of over one million the fullest statement of Kahn’s principles” (Janson 877). glazed and matte ceramic tiles. The tiles accentuate the radial pattern of the building and glisten in the light like fish scales” (93).

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