“The Artist’s Perspective” Painting, Process, and Subject Matter Timothy Quigley Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Question Recall a situation or time when you thought you knew what was happening, when you were confident in what you were doing. And then, somehow, everything changed and things didn’t turn out as you assumed they would. Everything has suddenly different. What was that like for you? And how did you respond? Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman About twenty-five years ago [1945] for me painting was dead. Painting was dead in the sense that the...world situation, was such that the whole enterprise as it was being practiced by myself and by my friends and colleagues seemed to be a dead enterprise. There was the war and Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Britain, and painting, you might say, existed in three phases. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970. Photo: Winston Churchill inspecting bomb damage in Battersea, South London, 10 September 1940. (Getty Images) Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman There was the kind of painting that was trying to make the world look beautiful.... Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970. Pierre Bonnard, Siene near Vernon, c. 1911 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman There was also the kind of painting that was trying to be pure, based on cubism, where the actual world didn’t exist and the so-called paradise of pure forms functioned. It seemed to me that these things were futile enterprises.... On the one hand, you had these cubist purists. On the other hand, you had the folklore artists who were doing the old oaken bucket: Tom Benton and all those fellows out west. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970. Georges Braque, Glass on a Table, 1909-10. Thomas Hart Benton, Over the Mountains, 1924-26 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman The surrealists were also kind of beating a dead horse, because they were creating an imaginary world, although it was actually more relevant than anything else in terms of my experience. They were at least painting or showing the possibility that you could paint something that was meaningful... Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970. Max Ernst, Napoleon in the Wilderness, 1941 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman What it meant for me is that I had to start from scratch as if painting didn’t exist, which is a special way of saying that painting was dead. I felt there was nothing in painting that was a source that I could use, and at the same time I felt that the whole situation was such that we had to examine the whole process. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970. Barnett Newman, Gea, 1944-45 Barnett Newman, Pagan Void, 1946 Barnett Newman, Euclidian Abyss, 1946-47 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman I felt the issue in those years was: What can a painter do? The problem of the subject became very clear to me as the crucial thing in painting. Not the technique, not the plasticity, not the look, not the surface: none of these things meant that much. The issue...was: What are we going to paint? The old stuff was out. It was no longer meaningful. These things were no longer relevant in a moral crisis, which is hard to explain to those who didn’t live through those early years. I suppose I was quite depressed by the whole mess. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970. Beauty Form Form Expressive Content Meaning Subject Matter Subject Moral Crisis Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art The “loss of the object” in abstract painting was celebrated by many artists during the first half of the 20th Century — Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich (for a time), and El Lizzitsky, to name just a few. Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1921 Kasimir Malevich, Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions, 1915 El Lissitzky, Proun 2 (Construction), 1920 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Other painters, such as Pablo Picasso, never left the figure. Pablo Picasso, The Studio, 1927-28 Pablo Picasso, "Ma Jolie" , 1911 Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art And still others worked both figuratively and non-figuratively throughout their lives. Willem de Kooning summed up his position in the following way: [T]hey attacked me for that [painting the Women series], certain artists and critics. But I felt this was their problem, not mine. I don’t really feel like a non-objective painter at all…. In a way, if you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody’s nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear that I’ll have to follow my desires. Willem de Kooning, Zurich, 1947 Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1952 Willem de Kooning, Woman, 1944 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art The value of “representational art” and “the figure” was also challenged by critics, such as Clement Greenberg. Shape, line, and color were all that mattered. Everything else was “literary”, not pictorial, and had no place in avant-garde painting. Hans Hofmann, Delight, 1947 Franz Kline, Untitled, 1948 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art But many abstract painters insisted that their non-representational work had meaning and content — a position eloquently defended by the art historian Meyer Schapiro, who distinguished the subject of a work from the objects in it, and argued that expressive content depends on form. Mark Rothko, Untitled,1949 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art In addition to the internal struggles going on over abstraction, there were also attacks coming from the public and the cultural “rear- guard” who dismissed modern art entirely. Afterall, the critic would ask, isn’t abstract art simply another way of avoiding the material realities of life? Barnett Newman, Dionysius, 1949 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Regionalism We can no longer turn away from the significance of the subject-matter of art. America lies before us, stricken with economic pains, but eager for the voice of criticism, and in desperate need of spiritual consolations. Shall we face the situation like honest workmen; or shall we hide in the dark tower and paint evasive arabesques on an ivory wall? Again and again, with all the temper at my command, I have exhorted our artists to remain at home in a familiar background, to enter emotionally into strong native tendencies, to have done with alien cultural fetishes. And at this critical moment, I repeat the exhortation. Thomas Craven, Modern Art, 1934. "The principal ideologue of the American Scene" [Matthew Baigell] Alexandre Hogue, Drouth Stricken Area, 1934 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Regionalism Thomas Hart Benton, Over the Mountains, 1924-26 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Regionalism Thomas Hart Benton, Arts of the West, 1932 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Regionalism Jackson Pollock, Going West, ca. 1934-1935 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Regionalism Reginald Marsh, 20-cent Movie, 1936 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Realism There were other competing artistic forces at work in the U.S. throughout the 1930s and ‘40s. Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Realism Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Social Realism [Social Realism is a] term used to refer to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and film makers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions. [Source: Oxford University Press] Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry, North Wall, 1932–33 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Social Realism Arnold Genthe, José Clemente Orozco, 1932 José Clemente Orozco, "The Struggle in The Occident", 1930-1931 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction The Subjects of Modern Art Socialist Realism [T]he official art form of the USSR, which was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934, and later by allied Communist parties worldwide. [Source: Oxford University Press] Boris Vladimirski, Roses for Stalin, 1949 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis The Postwar Context By the mid-1940s, artists in the U.S. were in the midst of a cultural crisis — searching for subject matter to express their common feelings. Several turned to what was then referred to as “primitive art”.