Modernism

Introduction

The modern age had begun with the Industrial Revolution. Inventions and an avante guarde spirit lead artists to expand their understanding of their craft, imbuing it with an abstract, psychological, and philisophical underpinning. Authors such as John Ruskin describe the importance of aesthetics. The end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century has a settling of European nations as events such as the world's fair and the freer movement of trade brings the worlds ideas closer together. The influence of trade and colonialism becomes evident as artists look to and collect artifacts from Africa, China, and Japan. The aesthetics of these various cultures further influence artists by informing the different visual formal qualities that are available.

The shrinking world soon leads to growing political tensions that come to an explosive result with the Great War (World War I) and later World War II. World War I changed the way that mankind understood battle and the horrors of war as did the end of World War II with the dropping of Nuclear Bombs in Japan. Between these major wars, events such as the Great Depression also gave mankind a greater understanding of the impact of industrialism and the growing global economy.

Later in the twentieth century, social movements also became an influential drive for many with movements such as the Suffragist, Civil Rights, Feminism, among others. Social movements highlight the importance of the individual in society, and further the philisophical purpose of art throughout the Postmodern age.

Currently the world grows even smaller with the technological revolution and the beginning of the digital age. Cultures from all corners of the globe now become recognized and influential in visual culture. The lens of history also becomes difficult to focus as current trends are difficult to narrow down in relation to the earlier concept of the avante guarde and the often considered linear trajectory of historical trends.

Modernism

The nineteenth century was filled with industrialism and increased economic and political interaction world wide. This produced an increased faith in science. There was also an acute sense of Western cultures of the world’s lack of fixity or permanence due to the rapid expansion, faster modes of transportation, and increased social mobility. Also during this time, Darwin describes his ideas on evolution and Karl Marx emphasizes the nature of the continuing sequence of conflicts and resolutions forming a shifting reality.

The artistic direction referred to as modernism soon developed out of this changing world. Modernism is thus art created with the understanding of the impermanence of the world around them. Artists in this varied movement are aware of the relationship between their art and those of previous generations. Art is produced to call attention to art, the flat surface of canvas, the shape of the support, the properties of the media. Modern artists accepted their precedents, but rebelled against the Academies that focused on the tradition of art based on previous generations rather than creating new and unique visions. Many modern artists thus took ownership of the term, Avante' Guarde, referring to the French front line in a battle. Modernism thus refers to the many stylistic movements in art from the middle nineteenth century until the beginnings of the post-modern movement in the later twentieth century.

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

Paul Cezanne turned to impressionism to develop a more analytical style. His work was formed with a belief that impressionism lacked form and structure. His paintings thus attempt to “make impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums (Kleiner ?).”

Paul Cezanne Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-1904

Inspired partly by Japanese prints, Cezanne's paintings do not demonstrate truth in appearance, but of structures behind formless and fleeting visual information. Cezanne formally demonstrates order his presentation of the lines, planes, and colors that comprised nature. His paintings thus explored line, plane and color to create depth on a two-dimensional plane. Cezanne explores notions of color such as the phenomenon that cool colors recede while warm colors visually advance. He often used contrasting colors to provide intensity much like the Impressionists.

The series of paintings he did of Mont Sainte-Victoire were from a mountain near his home. These paintings demonstrate the change to plein aire based on many of the principles described by Monet. He exclaims,

Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that is a section of nature.. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air (Kleiner ?).

 

Paul Cezanne, The Basket of Apples, 1895

In Cezanne's The Basket of Apples, the apples loose much of their original character as they are simplified to cylinders and spheres. Cezanne was noted to have abandoned using real fruit because they tended to rot. The constant change of objects makes them seem to be depicted from differing vantage points. He often did many still-life paintings from various view points to understand forms in space. The paintings thus become an “architecture of color (Kleiner ?)." The methods never allow the viewer to disregard the two-dimensionality of the picture plane.

Avant-Garde

Each movement challenged the artistic conventions of the previous with greater intensity. The challenge to previous became known as “Avant-Garde” referring to cutting edge or “front guard.” The French front guard were the soldiers sent ahead of the army to make occasional raids on the enemy. The term was used to describe artists who were ahead of their time and transgressed the limits of established art forms. They often took a critical stance toward their respective media and increasingly disengaged themselves from a public audience and seemed to direct their attentions at one another as philosophers would. The Post-Impressionists considered the first true avant-garde artists but the term stretched to express other major movements throughout the 20th century.

Symbolist movement

Symbolists rejected the optical world as observed in favor of the fantasy world of forms they conjured in their free imagination. Each artists' technique was individual to their personal approach. In the themes of symbolist artwork, every element became symbols of personal emotion toward the outside world. These artists disdained the mere fact of realism as trivial and asserted that fact must be transformed into the symbol of the inner experience of that fact. They were, in essence, seeking a deeper reality than the one the world provided. The artists became prophets of insight, urging other artists to stand against materialism and conventions of industrial and middle class society. “Art for art’s sake” became their slogan. Their work also came at a time where Sigmund Freud began his psychoanalysis and a new age of psychiatry with his Interpretation of Dreams.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French artist who rejected realism and impressionism. He quickly became a prophet for the symbolists but never associated himself with them. His work demonstrated an ornamental and reflective art style steeped in neoclassical tradition due to the large influence of Greek Mythology on these artists.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes The Sacred Grove, 1884

The Sacred Grove demonstrates a composition of statueseque, classical figures. The poses seem timeless emphasizing their symbolic nature and rejection of capitalist materialism. His themes pushed toward civic and public art, stressing community.

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898)

Gustave Moreau Jupiter and Semele, 1875

Gustave Moreau created subjects as remote as possible from the everyday world. Jupiter and Semele is one of his rare finished works. In the painting, Semele, one of Jupiter’s loves, begged the god to appear to her in all his majesty and the sight was so powerful that she died from it. The painting depicts the richness and splendour based on the oriental, Byzantine, and other motifs that heightened the drama.

Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

Odilon Redon The Cyclops, 1898

Odilon Redon had been aware of an intense inner world since childhood and wrote of the “imaginary things” that haunted him. His paintings take on an Impressionist palette and stippling brush stroke. His work projects his figments as if they were visible. Many of his paintings represent classical themes born from a dreaming world.

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910)

Henri Rousseau also projects a sense of personal fantasy. He was an untrained amateur painter believing that art had it’s own style and a departure from the current artistic movements. His works demonstrate a talent for design and imagination of exotic images.

Henri Rousseau The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897

The Sleeping Gypsy demonstrates an uneasiness as one is vulnerable during sleep. In the painting, the viewer is left to question what is dream and what is reality?

Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

Edvard Munch felt deeply for the pains of human life. He had a belief that humans were powerless before the natural forces of death, love, and the emotions associated with them as these are conditions of “modern psychic life.” He believed that formal realist and impressionist techniques were inappropriate to capture such conditions and thus imbued his paintings with a high emotional charge.

Edvard Munch The Scream, 1893

The Scream is stated by Munch to be a comment on the growing industrial revolution and the human response to the changing world. The painting departs significantly from a visual reality with the intent of stressing the emotional response. Munch states regarding the painting,

I stopped and leaned against the balustrade, almost dead with fatigue. Above the blue-black fjord hung the clouds, red as blood and tongues of fire. My friends had left me, and alone, trembling with anguish, I became aware of the vast, infinite cry of nature.

The painting was originally titled Despair prior to the popular title now attached to the painting.

Sculpture

Sculpture was not a popular media by artist at the dime due to it’s solidity and permanence. Many of the sculptors come from a working class and still produced commissions due to the difficulty of paying for and selling fine art sculpture.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875)

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux Ugolino and His Children, 1865-1867

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux combined an interest in realism with a love of baroque sculpture and Michelangelo’s work. Ugolino and His Children is a sculpture based on a passage from Dante’s Inferno. The passage recounts Count Ugolino and his four sons shut up in a tower to starve to death. Ugolino states: "I bit both hands for grief. And they, thinking I did it for hunger, suddenly rose up and said, “Father”… and offered him their own flesh as food (Kleiner ?)." The sculpture recounts the earlier classical sculpture Laocoon. The sculpture also represents the realistic study from life. The theme and approach demonstrate the beginning of a sculptural turn away from the classical to the more Helenistic, emotional with reference to themes as allegories for modern time.

Auguste Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907)

Auguste Saint-Gaudens Adams Memorial, 1891

Auguste Saint-Gaudens used realism effectively in many of his portraits. Adams Memorial is a memorial to Mrs. Henry Adams. In the sculpture, Saint-Gaudens demonstrates a Classical mode of representation of a woman of majestic bearing sitting in mourning. The sculpture is symbolic of immobility of her form and eternal vigilance mixing an interesting an unique gesture that is contrary to the form of sculptures of this theme in the past.

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

Auguste Rodin is considered among the realists. He was fascinated by the human body in motion and the effect of light on the three dimensional surface. His works emphasize the medium and process, a modern artistic formal trait.

Auguste Rodin Walking man, 1905

Walking Man depicts a moment when weight is transferred across the pelvis from back to front. The sculpture is a study for his sculpture of Saint John the Baptist Preaching. Rodin often did many studies both drawn and sculpted to gain the factual essence of forms that he was commissioned to create and few actual finished works.

Auguste Rodin Burghers of Calais, 1884-1889

The Burghers of Calais is a monument commissioned to commemorate a heroic episode in the Hundred Years’ War. The theme depicts a moment where during the English Siege of Calais, six of the leading citizens offered their lives for the rest of the population. The sculpture vividly depicts the despair of the people. Rodin's choreographic placement of the figures who seem to wander aimlessly. The sculpture is roughly textured gaining an idea of the transitory nature of object and placed at ground level to connect with viewers. The Government found the realistic depiction and ground level display to be offensive and raised it on a pedestal at a different location, disassociating it from its original meaning.

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Auguste Rodin The gates of Hell, 1880-1917

Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts movement was headed by William Morris and the writings of John Ruskin. The movement was focused on a return to craftsmanship and aesthetics as a way to bring back emotion and quality to industrial objects.

William Morris (1834-1896)

William Morris Pink and Rose wallpaper design, 1890

William Morris advocated art “made by the people for the people as a joy for the maker and the user.” He looked to manuscript illuminations and handcraft while he condemned capitalism and industrialization. He and others from the Arts and Crafts Movement believed that aesthetics were lost in mass production and thus pushed to imbue functional objects with aesthetic value. Morris produced many textiles, patterns, and printed manuscripts where high-quality artisanship and honest labor were crucial.

Art Nouveau

Literally “New Art,” Art Nouveau was a design movement that stems from the Arts and Craft’s movement. The movement took on many different names, such as "Jugendstil" in Germany, but the main name came from a shop in Paris. The style was based on natural linear forms and an influence from celtic patterning.

Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898)

Aubrey Beardsley The Peacock Skirt, 1894

Aubrey Beardsley became well known for his Art Nouveau print designs. In The Peacock Skirt, the linear forms create an organic patterning that is both flat and decorative taking much influence from naturalism and Japanese prints. Beardsley banished realism and confines himself to simply black and white producing an interesting natural linear rhythm.

Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926)

Antonio Gaudi Casa Mila, Barcelona, 1907

Antonio Gaudi demonstrates the stretch of Art Nouveau into architecture as he demonstrates a sense of personal expression in the forms of his structures. Gaudi gains his inspiration from Moorish-Spanish architecture. In Casa Mila he conceived the building as a whole and molded it as a sculptor might create a sculpture. The building is an apartment house, but looks like a free-form, undulating mass suggesting naturally worn rock. Gaudi's works develop structures as if they were symbolic of living things.

Gustav Klimt (1863-1918)

Gustav Klimt The Kiss, 1907-1908

Works of flamboyance with unsettling undertones. The Kiss depicts a couple locked in an embrace, barely visible in the patterning. The use of patterning ties Klimt's work to Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts Movement, while also capturing some of the decadence of the time in theme and formal qualities of his work.

Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923)

Steel became available after 1860 and allowed architects to enclose larger spaces. Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel created architecture that dealt with the building’s purpose instead of disguising the function. He had a career designing exhibition halls, bridges and interior armature for the Statue of Liberty.

Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel Eiffel Tower¸ 1889

The Eiffel Tower was designed for a great exhibition in Paris as a symbol of modern Paris. The structure stands 984 feet tall and was the world’s tallest structure for some time. The structure further demonstrates an interesting interpenetration of interior and exterior space as it is mainly an armature with no walls. The materials create a new style of architecture which allows for a vertical movement and increased safety.

20th Century

At the turn of the twentieth century there were many intellectual developments. There was a reassessment of values and ideas developed in the scientific revolution of the 19th century. Most theories were based on scientific fact. Many artists developed artistic concepts which analyzed emotion. Science also added to different views of perception. The many advances in technology started to form the world we know today (airplanes, cars, radio, electric street lighting, home appliances).

There were also several intellectuals, philosophers, and psychologists that developed new opinions on the world. Friedrich Nietzche rejected the rational as he believed that Western society was decadent and incapable of any real creativity precisely because of its excessive reliance on reason at the expense of emotion and passion. He further blamed Christianity and religion for such barriers. Sigmund Freud wrote his text, Interpretation of Dreams (1900) he demonstrates his fundamental principles of psychoanalysis based on the unconscious and inner drives which control human behavior. Carl Jung described how therapists could understand the behavior and personality of an individual by identifying patterns in his or her dreams.The industrial revolution led way to industrial capitalism while Karl Marx and Marxism championed the working class.

These movements led to an era of uncertainty and anxiety leading quickly toward The Great War (World War I) and the Russian Revolution. World War I demonstrated a Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) vs. the Triple Entente (Russia, France and Great Britain). In July, 1914, the war began and the United states entered in 1917. The war demonstrated how the industrial revolution and its achievements can prove to be evil as war machines became ever more efficient at killing. In 1917, the Russians overthrew the provinsional government under Tsar Nicolas II with the Bolsheviks under Lenin which started the first communist regime and the Russian Revolution. The empire was officially renamed the soviet union in 1923.

Following World War I, the Triple Entente found themselves in a time of great success that quickly ended with the crash of the stock market in 1929 leading to the Great Depression. Economic depression lasts for about a decade where production plummeted in the United States alone by 50 percent. The world quickly moved toward another great war as World War II between the Axis powers of Japan, Italy and Germany and the rest of the world battled in the late 1930's until the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Naggasaki in Japan by the United States.

The beginning of the twentieth century led to a further evolution of Modernism. The challenges posed by many Avant-Garde artists before the 20th century pushed into the new century. Artists continue to question what art is and add their own interpretations. The artwork begins with an emergence of expressionism based on the expressionist qualities of post-impressionism, but many artistic movements, driven by differing artistic manifestos emerge throughout the first half of the twentieth centry.

Fauvism

1905: 3rd Salon d’Automne in Paris a group of young painters under the leadership of Henri Matisse with extremely bright colors and were described as fauves (wild beasts). The artists demonstrated a directness of impressionism with intense color juxtapositions based on post-impressionists such as Gaugin and Van Gogh. Their belief was to liberate color from its descriptive function for both expressive and structural means. The group only lasted a few years before most of it’s artists moved in other directions.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954)

Henri Matisse Woman with the Hat, 1905

Henri Matisse realized color could play a primary role in conveying meaning and focused his efforts on this notion. In Woman with a Hat he paints his wife with arbitrary colors rejecting anything that imitated nature. These colors increased in luminosity in comparison to his contemporaries. Color thus became the main theme and almost the only form in the composition and the main conveyor of meaning.

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Henri Matisse Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908-1909

Red Room displays his studio with a feeling of flatness, and decorative color. Feeling of warmth and objects are simplified and flattened. Pattern emphasizes a flattened space.

German Expressionism

German expressionism is influenced by the boldness of the Fauves. These Expressionists influenced not only painting, but sculpture and film as well. They produced powerful canvases in the face of WWI. They were a group of artists led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner showed in Dresden in 1905. They believed they were bridging the old with the new (Die Brucke). These artists modeled themselves after Medieval craft guilds by living together and practising all the arts equally, and protested the materialistic decadence and the affects of industrialization.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Street, Dresden, 1908

Street, Dresden depicts the thriving German city before WWI. The expressionist style demonstrates a crowded street is off-putting much like Munch’s Scream as people seem ghoulish. The clashing colors emphasizes expressive impact.

Emil Nolde (1867-1956)

Emil Nolde Saint Mary of Egypt among Sinners, 1912

Emil Nolde centered his imagery on religious themes. His paintings focus on expressiveness of mark and color to provide emotive emphasis often relying on harsh colors and aggressively brushed paint.

Der Blaue Reiter

Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) was another German Expressionist group. They were formed in Munich in 1911 by Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. The group focused on feelings in visual form and visceral responses from the viewer.

Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

Vassily Kandinsky was a Russian who moved to Munich and painted among the German artists. He was one of the first artists to explore complete abstraction.

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Vassily Kandinsky Composition VII, 1913

Composition VII demonstrates his elimination of most representational elements and incorporation of theosophy (mystic, philosophical and religious belief). Explorations of atomic structure convinced Kandinsky that material objects had no real substance or true tangibility. He went on to write down his thoughts in the text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912: treatise expressing the spirit and innermost feelings by orchestrating color, form, line and space. The book also outlines blueprints for a more enlightend and liberated society emphasizing spirituality and a visual harmony paralleling musical rhythms.

Franz Marc (1880-1916)

Franz Marc was pessimistic about the state of humanity. He turned to the animal world as subjects as they were “more beautiful, more pure.” He also believed that animals contained a greater emotional intensity. For him, colors had specific symbolic connections: “Blue is the male principle, severe and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, happy and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy.”

Franz Marc Fate of the Animals, 1913

Fate of the Animals demonstrates tension as some apocalyptic event is destroying the animals. The painting alludes to World War I that had begun shortly after. Color dominates the work in an extremely emotive way. Marc himself died in battle in WWI (1916).

Abstraction

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Pablo Picasso mastered realist technique before entering the Barcelona Academy of Fine Art. He soon moved to Paris and always remained traditional in his expression by creating studies. He believed in constantly challenging himself and those around him and consistently changed from one style to another. He was also fascinated by Ancient Iberian sculpture, African art and the paintings of Cezanne.

Pablo Picasso Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906-1907

Gertude Stein was a friend and patron. Picasso had her sit more than 80 times for the painting and finally finished it without her present. He incorporated aspects from sculptures that influenced him. Stein found the work insightful and nuanced for its incorporation of these unique formal elements.

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Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, 1907

Picasso stated, “I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them.” His painting techniques opened the door to a new method of representing form in space. Les Demoiselles d' Avignondescribes a suggestion of forms as fractured shape that was similar to Cezanne’s metod of depicting space, but with even more ephasis on the 2d surface. The painting further expands a tension between representation and abstraction. In the faces there is obvious relation to the African sculpture that influenced him. Figures are depicted inconsistently with reference to different cultural forms: left refers to Iberian art, right to African art. Picasso further broke the bodies into planes suggesting a combination of views. The dramatic departure form the careful presentation of a visual reality. He kept the painting in his studio for several years before showing it. And influenced friends and artists who came to his studio leading to the formulation Cubism with Georges Braque in 1908.

Cubism

Cubism marks a radical turning point in the history of art. The formal style seeks a dismissal of the pictorial illusionism that dominated art. It rejected naturalistic depictions and preferred shapes and forms abstracted from the perceived world. The style is a continuation of the analysis of form in Cezanne’s art.

Cubism broke apart form and reassembled it to form an aesthetic object.

Authentic cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not form the reality of vision, but from that of conception. This tendency leads to a poetic kind of painting which stands outside the world of observation; for, even in a simple cubism, the geometrical surfaces of an object must be opened out in order to give a complete representation of it… Everyone must agree that a chair, from whichever side it is viewed, never ceases to have four legs, a seat and a back, and that, if it is robbed of one of these elements, it is robbed of an important part. (Guillaume Apollinaire)

Where Analytic Cubism dissected forms of the subjects and displayed across the painted surface in an analytical way.

 

Georges Braque (1882-1963)

Georges Braque The Portuguese, 1911

Braque painted the subject of The Portuguese from memory. The painting depicts a musician in a bar in subdued hues to focus on form rather than color. The painting thus focuses on the concepts of light and shadow. Flat shapes of letters contrast the painted surface to emphasize the 2d vs 3d. The painting anchors itself in the world of representation, but radically departs.

Robert Delaunay (1885-1941)

Robert Delaunay, another of The School of Paris produced a kind of an analytical cubist style where he attempts to incorporate color. His style was referred to as “Orphism” relating to the Greek god with musical powers.

Robert Delaunay Champs de Mars, or The Red Tower, 1911

Champs de Mars was one of his many paintings depicting the Eiffel tower. The painting breaks the monument up to describe it in the round or the experience of it. There is also a sense of push-and-pull in relation to the surface plane of the two dimensional space. Delaunay's work strongly influences the Futurists in Germany and Italy.

Synthetic Cubism

Synthetic Cubism didn’t rely on a decipherable relation to the visible world. The paintings and drawings were from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a subject.

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Pablo Picasso Still life with Chair-Caning, 1912

Still life with Chair-Caning utilizes real materials collaged into the painting. The painting challenges the understanding of reality as the chair-caning is printed material breaking the idea of what should be real whereas the rope is real material. The letters again break from the sense of 2d vs 3d. The painting is thus an experience of a still-life rather than an actual still-life.

George Braque Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe and Glass, 1913

Braque's similar painting, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe and Glass is produced with stuck paper and false wood to give a layering of flat planes. The painting enters into a visual game played by the artist on the viewer. Picasso stated about this style, “not only did we try to displace rality; reality was no longer in the object… In the papier colle… we didn’t any longer want to fool the eye; we wanted to fool the mind.” This style demonstrates Cubism’s attack on artistic convention was expanded by critics to encompass an attack on society’s complacency and status quo. In it there is a prevailing sense of anarchy.

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Pablo Picasso Guitar, 1912

Picasso's Guitar represents an intersection of 2d and 3d. It is an exploration through a quick media of cardboard in a cutaway view.

o Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973)

Jacques Lipchitz Bather, 1917

Bather represents the depiction of a bather in Cubist form in more permanent media. Lipchitz worked in clay before casting in bronze. The work is a direct parallel to the analytical cubist works.

Aleksandr Archipenko (1887-1964)

Aleksandr Archipenko Woman Combing her Hair, 1915

Similar to Lipchitz, Archipenko's Woman Combing her Hair depicts a genre image but in place of a head we have a void. Archipenko thus creates an interplay of interior and exterior. The sculpture is fairly representational but breaking from conventions.

Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942)

Julio Gonzalez Woman Combing Her Hair, 1930-1933

Julio Gonzalez was a friend of Picasso. His work explores the possibilities of new materials and methods such as direct metal sculpture. His sculpture makes use of ready-made industrial metals. Woman Combing Her Hair further emphasizes dynamic sculptures emphasizing lines, curves and planes forming a virtually complete abstraction of the subject.

Purism

Purism formalizes ideas formed by a Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). The style opposed Synthetic Cubism on the grounds that it was becoming merely a decorative art and out of touch with the machine age. The movement thus maintained that machinery’s clean functional lines and pure forms should direct the artist’s experiments in design.

Fernand Leger (1881-1955)

Fernand Leger was a French painter who worked with the cubists. He moved in his process to be more machine, as he liked the finished product to be based on such parts as pistons and cylinders.

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Fernand Leger Ballet Mechanique, 1924

In an attempt to bring the machine qualities to life, Leger not only painted but also experimented with film as an artistic medium. Ballet Mechanique focused on machines in a sort of dance. It also incorporated effects of modern posters and robotic movement with a suggestion of synthetic cubism.

Fermand Leger Mechanical Elements, 1920

In painting, Leger showed a similar focus on the industrial and machanical both in form and theme.

Futurism

The futurist movement was mostly an Italian movement. It began in 1909 with The Futurist Manifesto written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The movement began first as a literary movement but soon moved into all creative types. The futurists wrote several manifestos in which they aggressively advocated revolution in society and art. They glorified war as a means of doing away with a stagnant past stating, “We wish to glorify war- sole hygiene to the world.” In futurist work, similar to Purism, they focused on the speed and dynamism of modern technology while still stemming from the cubist analysis of form.

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Giacoma Balla Dynamism of a dog on a leash, 1912; Gino Severini Dynamic Heiroglyph of the Bal Tabarin, 1912; and Umberto Boccioni Unique forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

The three works by Severini, Balla, and Boccioni shown above describe the interest in motion. Movement is depicted as a fixed visual field with objects depicted simultaneously in several views over time on the fixed fields of both two and three dimensions.

Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916)

Umberto Boccioni Unique forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

Boccioni applied the idea of motion to sculpture. He states, “What we want is not fixed movement in space but the sensation of motion itself. Owing to the persistence of images on the retina, object in motion are multiplied and distorted, following one another like waves in space. Thus, a galloping horse has not four legs, it has twenty (Fineberg ?).” The sculpture, Unique forms of Continuity in Space depicts spatial effects of motion that blur with movement. It is inherently mechanical and demonstrates the modern age.

Europe after WWI

Neue Sachlichkeit

German expressionists focused on the war and its effects. They did so in a movement they described as the “New Objectivity.”

George Grosz (1893-1958)

George Grosz was noted as saying, “I am trying to give an absolutely realistic picture of the world.” He is often associated with the Dada movement but with a more harsh and bitter tone.

George Grosz Fit for Active Service, 1916-1917

Grosz many times depicts officers as incompetent and heartless based on personal experience. He was personally declared fit for service despite physical issues. His image, Fit for Active Service is meant to be direct and simple in a satirical nature.

Max Beckmann (1884-1950)

Max Beckmann Night, 1918-19

Max Beckman was like Grosz in that he depicts the irrational in war. Night depicts a cramped room where three intruders have entered and are raping and killing the family. It is a comment on the condition of the time much like Goya’s images of war. The ambiguity of the image and breaking of space and form emphasizes the drama taking from cubist and futurist ideas. The image itself is powerful and honest.

Otto Dix (1891-1959)

Dix embraced direct war imagery. He served as a machine gunner and aerial observer during WWI. He tried to find some redeeming value in the “depths of life” and the ideas of tearing down and rebuilding by Nietzsche.

 

Otto Dix Der Krieg (The War), 1929-32

Der Krieg (The War) depicts scenes of devastation. He shows himself in the right panel as the determined soldier dragging a comrade to safety. The triptych recalls Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. The piece is thus an altar to the results of war and meant for much the same purpose.

Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945)

Kathe Kollwitz Memorial Sheet of Karl Liebknecht, 1919-20

Kathe Kollwitz was an emotional and graphic art stimulated by Gaugin and Munch’s work in woodcuts and prints. She mostly worked in the print media. Her prints recall earlier religious motifs in stark expressive contrast. She demonstrates a personal connection to her themes as she demonstrates the grief that would come of such a situation.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881-1919)

Wilhelm Lehmbruck Seated Youth, 1917

Wilhelm Lehmbruck is an expressive figurative sculptor that produces similar themes to Kollwitz. Seated Youth is a figurative sculpture with strong emotive sensibility. The elongation of proportions emphasize a sense of anguish. The work was originally titled, The Friend in reference to the many friends that died in the war. Lehmbruck himself committed suicide in 1919 and the sculpture was placed as a memorial in the soldiers’ cemetery in Duisburg.

Dada

Following WWI many artists reacted to what they saw as an insane spectacle of collective homicide by the world’s societies. Dada is a made up word that deals with a state of mind. The movement believed that reason and logic were responsible for war so the only route to salvation was through anarchy, irrational and intuitive. It emphasized the absurd and random in everything including the name of the movement that was said to be a word chosen at random in the dictionary. The entire movement was an endless attempt to undermine the notions and assumptions about art- to destroy what art is. They had a visible contempt for everything traditional and established: iconoclasm.

Dada knows everything. Dada spits on everything. Dada says “knowthing,” Dada has no fixed ideas. Dada does not catch flies. Dada is bitterness laughing at everything that has been accomplished, sanctified… Dada is never right… No more painters, no more writers, no more religions, no more royalists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more police, no more airplanes, no more urinary passages… Like everything in life, dada is useless, everything happens in a completely idiotic way… We are incapable of treating seriously any subject whatsoever, let alone this subject: ourselves. Dada was a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the post war economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. It was a systematic work of destruction and demoralization… In the end it became nothing but the act of sacrilege.

Though violent, there are undercurrents of whimsy and satire while they also explored the unconscious and products of chance.

 

Hugo Ball

Hugo ball was at the heart of the Dada spirit with his manifestos, poetry, and cabaret performance art emphasizing randomness

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Dada Cabaret Voltaire, 1916

Jean (Hans) Arp (1887-1966)

Jean Arp Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-1917

Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance is a composition constructed by forms dropped haphazardly on a sheet of paper on the floor and glued in the resulting arrangement. The composition however seems to have been adjusted somewhat to a grid, but the placement of the forms became the chance. For Arp and other Dada artists, chance allowed for a primeval power lost in classicism and a turn toward anarchy.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

Marcel Duchamp became influential in all aspects of Dada art. In 1913 he exhibited his first “ready-made” sculptures. These sculptures were sometimes combined with other ready objects without any consideration of either good or bad taste.

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Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1917

Probably the most influential due to the long lasting conversation surrounding the piece, Fountain is a urinal with the signature, “R.Mutt, 1917.” Duchamp did not select the object for any aesthetic qualities, rather the object itself. The piece was first rejected from the show that it was entered, but Duchamp quickly wrote a rebuttal to the dismissal of the piece stating, "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object." The object is thus placed in a new light, a new context, changing the meaning and highlighing the importance of context in the reading of an artistic piece.

Hannah Hoch (1889-1978)

Another artist of the Dada, Hannah Hoch, expressed herself though photomontage. Her images are often satirical and chaotic compositions meant as commentaries on the Weimar Republic of Germany.

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Hannah Hoch Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920

Cut with the kitchen knife demonstrates the importance of appropriation and use of mass media. She utilizes images of Marx, Lenin and other revolutionary figures to place them into “The great Dada world.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

Kurt Schwitters Merz 19, 1920

Kurt Schwitters was inspired by Cubist collage. He found visual poetry in the cast-off junk of modern society. Merz 32a is from a series of collages and a group which formed a publication under the same title. The term refers to a shortened version of the word for commerce. The aesthetic demonstrates the fact that junk and appropriation is a powerful weapon for artists.

America

Many of the new styles and conventions of Europe make their way into American culture. The art of America was quite varied until the dialogue between the modernists in Europe made its way to the states.

Armory Show, 1913

During a time where the popular style from America was the Ashcan School, the Armory Show in 1913 was a large scale endeavor organized by Walt Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies. The show included more than 1,600 artworks by contemporary American and European artists. It was the first show to truly expose American artists and the public the latest artistic developments. It quickly became a lightning rod for commentary and controversy and was even asked to be closed as a menace to public morality.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2, 1912

Duchamp's Nude Decending a Staircase depicts a figure in motion down a staircase. It is a painting much in line with futurist and cubist work rather than Dada ideals. The piece became an iconic image from this exhibition

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)

Alfred Stieglitz elevated photography through his gallery, “291.” His images focused on scenes of everyday life and shot everything as he carried his camera wherever he went. His images are described as “straight, unmanipulated” photographs. He went on a lifelong campaign to raise the importance of photography.

Alfred Stieglitz The Steerage, 1907

The Steerage provides a photographic emphasis on forms in space. It is further a message about humanity as the people depicted were immigrants turned away from the United States. The composition describes a mixture of pattern and human activity.

Edward Weston (1886-1958)

Edward Weston Nude, 1925

Another American photographer, Edward Weston, focused on straight photography but moved toward abstraction with his cropping. His process thus becomes a focus on reductive design and formal elements through photography.

Man Ray (1890-1976)

Man Ray Gift, 1921

Man Ray worked closely with Duchamp and retained a Dada spirit. He maintained a dedication to the psychological realm of human perception. A work such as Gift demonstrates his move to dislocate the ordinary thing from its preconceived notions.

Stuart Davis (1894-1964)

Stuart Davis Lucky Strike, 1921

Stuart Davis mixed the ideas of synthetic cubism with an American Jazz feel. Lucky Strike is what he called a "Tobacco still life." He was a heavy smoker and was fascinated by products and their packaging. The painting illusionistcally represented the forms rather than pasting them in place creating a rhythmic feeling inspired by many of the European artists.

Aaron Douglas (1898-1979)

Aaron Douglas Noah's Ark, 1927

Aaron Douglas was an African American artist working in the time of the Harlem Renaissance. His work takes on many aspects of modernist symbol and flatness while adding African imagery. Noah's Ark is one of seven paintings based on a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson called, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse.

Percisionism

Percisionism was an American artistic movement much like many other artistic movements in Europe at the time focusing on the art of the modern machine age as a style that was American. There was a fascination with the machine’s precision and importance. The formal qualities of this style relate to machine imagery and an emphasis on sharp planes as in cubism and futurism.

Charles Demuth (1883-1935)

Charles Demuth My Egypt, 1927

Demuth depicted the effects of expanding technology with a cubist fragmentation of space. His titles also accommodate differing readings.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)

During the 20’s Georgia O'Keeffe lived in New York and married Alfred Stieglitz. She always believed, "You have to live in today." She had a fascination with the fast pace of city life and many of her works move toward formal abstraction.

Georgia O'Keeffe New York, Night, 1929

New York, Night depicts soaring skyscrapers and moving lights. Reminiscent of the Percisionist movement and the aesthetics of Whistler, the painting demonstrates her strong desire toward design on a two dimensional plane.

Georgia O'Keeffe Black Place II, 1944

Later moving away from the city in search of more contemplative space, she moved to the Southwestern United States and began focusing on a more formal abstraction based on floral motifs and other still-life objects. She reduced subjects in their purist forms focusing on color, shape, texture and rhythm for a gracefully poetic vision.

Surrealism and Fantasy Art

The momentum of Dada and the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung lead to a group of artists that explore the inner world of the human mind. Andre Breton describes the Surrealistmovement as:

Pure Psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally in writing, or by any other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any esthetic or moral preoccupation… Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought… I believe in the future resolution of the states of dream and reality, in appearance so contradictory, in a sort of absolute reality or surreality (Kleiner ?).

 

The movement developed along two lines, Biomorphic and naturalistic surrealism. Biomorphic surrealism refers to automatism, the dictation of thought without control of the mind. From this abstract compositions developed with imagery that sometimes suggests organisms. Naturalistic Surrealists depicted recognizable scenes that have been changed into a dream-like image.

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)

Ariadne, 1913

Giorgio de Chirico is an artist who is a precursor of surrealism. His cityscapes and shop windows that form ambiguous spaces in a movement titled Pittura Metafisica or metaphysical painting. His compositions often seem sinister and dreamlike.

Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Originally a Dada activist, Max Ernst's work was in direct opposition to the artistic intent of Nazi Germany. He always sought a sense of the magical and psychic in his art often incorporating found objects. He started doing collages with an element of chance and then moved to paintings which held many of the same associations.

 

Max Ernst Two Children are Threatened by a Nightmare, 1924

Two Children are Threatened by a Nightmare resembles a private dream that deals with the idea that the painting is a window into a real world. The image includes alandscape and distant city with odd symbolism tied to each of the images in the landscape. The title comes form a poem that he had written right before this painting. The viewer is forced to decifer the connections as if they were a psychologist or psychiatrist.

Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

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Salvador Dali The Persistence of Memory, 1931

Dali used what he called a “paranoiac-critical method,” which aimed to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialistic fury of precision. The persistence of Memory is an allegory of empty space where time has ended. Time has stopped. The symbols are of irrationality. Dali further expresses his skill in his precise control and detail that is extremely glossy as if rendered from nature.

Rene Magritte (1898-1967)

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Rene Magritte The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images, 1928-1929

Rene Magritte focuses on the dreamlike dissociation of image and meaning. His paintings often subverted expectations based on logic and common sense much in kin to the Dada movement. The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images is a Trompe l’oeil painting of a pipe. Stating, “this is not a pipe” uses the viewer’s rationality against them.

Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985)

Meret Oppenheim Object, 1936

Meret Oppenheim further messes with the logic and reason of the viewer. Object refers to the idea of transformation. The piece was selected as a symbol to the surrealist vision.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

The Two Fridas, 1939

Frida Kahlo was married to Diego Rivera (Mexican Muralist). She is often discussed as surreal as she explores herself in her many autobiographical images filled with symbolic meaning. Her life was filled with health problems and stormy relationships. She also was deeply committed to her Mexican heritage as seen in her clothing.

Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Joan Miro Painting, 1933

Joan Miro developed his work using free creative process. He resisted formal association with any movement or group. His paintings depict elements of fantasy and hallucination. Often he began with a scattered collage with assembled fragments from a catalog for machinery. These forms were then reshaped into black silhouettes in solid and outline with accents of white and red. His method consisted of switching back and forth between unconscious and conscious in image letting the painting assert itself and take on its own life. The paintings thus become spontaneous and intuitive with deep psychological connections.

Paul Klee (1879-1940)

Like Miro, Paul Klee shunned formal association with groups. He had also a deep interest in the subconscious. He produced his images using primitive shapes and symbols stating, “art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible…” He often studied nature avidly analyzing growth and change and started an image by allowing the pencil or brush to lead him then respond to complete the idea.

Paul Klee Twittering Machine, 1922

Twittering Machine is simple with poetic nature. The theme and image remains ambiguous which allows the viewer to interpret the images he creates.

Suprematism and Constructivism

Following WWI, several movements look to utopian ideals of what society should be through geometric abstraction. These Russian movements deal with a communist ideal.

Kazmir Malevich (1878-1935)

Kazmir Malevich demonstrates an abstract style with the belief that the supreme reality in the world is pure feeling. His work is thus completely nonobjective in that the shapes are not related to forms in nature. His basis of all shapes is the square.

Kazmir Malevich Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915

In Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, shapes float in a white space in a particular relationship to one another. He believed in the universality of his images as they are not based on objects but on feeling that the shapes denote. The univerality thus promotes the concept of “practical art” vs the soviet realistic art that was perceived as understandable to a wide public.

See also: Disscussion on Context, Malevich Suprematist Composition: White on White.

Naum Gabo (1890-1977)

Naum Gabo is associated with a group of Russian sculptors known as Constructivists. He built up sculptures piece by piece in space instead of carving or modeling them in the traditional way. This process freed the artist to build on their volumes with a material thought rather than a preconceived notion of the end result. The focus of his work is often the relationship of mass and space.

Naum Gabo Column, 1923

Column demonstrates a senses of material and experimentation. It demonstrates his desire for creating interesting relationship of forms in space.

Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953)

Tatlin was another constructivist producing immediately following the Russian Revolution in 1917. He referred to his style as Productivism, which was influenced by cubism and the dynamism of futurism. He experimented with materials in a nonobjective manner as he too believed this to be the ideal to the new society. The goal for him was a living art working with society. Art should thus be functional.

Vladimir Tatlin Monument to the Third International, 1919-1920

In Monument to the Third International, Tatlin envisioned a huge glass building twice as tall as the empire state building to honor the Russian Revolution. The large-scale model was referred to as “Tatlin’s Tower.” The desire for the final project was a center for society spiralling around a central axis and project words on the clouds on an overcast day. The project was never realized but exists in idea and models.

De Stijl

De Stijl was a Dutch movement with similar utopian ideals as Constructivism and Suprematism. The style was based on the sturdiness of the vertical and horizontal. The concept was to produce balance and a new, plastic unity.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)

Piet Mondrian believed that the style was an underlying eternal structure of existence. He reduced his work to the simplest of forms. He was a noted Theosophist and preached his ideals whenever possible. His work actually began in an objective, cubist way and soon moved beyond it because he felt that it did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries.

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Piet Mondrian Composition No. II, With Red and Blue, 1929

In his compositions, he attempts to find the perfection and balance that lies within form. There is a dynamic tension created with the simplest of visual elements. He often produced hundreds of studies to come to any one final image.

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888-1964)

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld Schroder House, 1924

Rietveld's Schroder House demonstrates this De Stijl ideal in architecture. The form of the house deals with an essential relationship to nature in its open design and emphasis on the basics of architecture, the horizontal and vertical. There is a strong influence of Mondrian’s work seen in the design.

The Bauhaus

Walter Gropius (1883-1969)

Influenced by De Stijl, Constructivism and Suprematism, the Bauhaus was a school developed to the idea of total architecture. The curriculum was based on principles of composition (color and design), materials, a craft aesthetic (to bring back functionality) and the unity of art, architecture and design. They wanted graduates who could design environments that satisfied 20th century needs of industry and humanity with utopian principles. The faculty included such artists as Mondrian, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Itten, Breuer, Kandinsky, etc.

Josef Albers (1888-1976)

Josef Albers Homage to the Square, 1953

Josef Albers made major contributions to color theory and basic design. His paintings are an investigation of formal aspects of color and design throughout his career which he finished in the united states at Black Mountain College. Homage to the Square is a series of hundreds of paintings with the same composition and different color variations. In these paintings there is a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect. They relate to the concepts of the relativity of color perception. He also wrote books on these concepts that are still in use in color theory courses at all design institutions.

The Bauhaus moves from its original location to Dessau Germany where they design a factory-like structure to further their ideals. They continue the school by means of patents and manufacture of designs produced by instructors and students. The school also produces clearer goals:

• A decidedly positive attitude to the living environment of vehicles and machines
• The organic shaping of things in accordance with their own current laws, avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy
• Restriction of basic forms and colors to what is typical and universally intelligible
• Simplicity in complexity, economy in the use of space, materials, time and money

 

Marcel Breuer (1902-1981)

Marcel Breuer Tubular Steel Chair, 1925

Breuer's chair is inspired by bicycle handle bars. It takes on a simple, geometric look but takes into consideration material, economy and form vs. function.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

Mies Van Der Rohe eventually took directorship of the school and moved the Bauhaus to Berlin. He was an architect who believed that less is more (called his architecture “skin and bones”). In 1933, the Nazis take over Germany and occupy the Bauhaus and close it for good. Many of the artists and teachers move to the United States and other countries to continue their utopian ideals and artistic aesthetic which was shunned by the Nazi party.

International Style

As artists were forced around Europe and beyond, the styles and movements began to blend into a more pure style that spanned borders.

Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

Le Corbousier was the strongest advocate for the new, international style. He focused his architectural work on the concepts of functional living space. For him architecture was a “machine for living.”

Le Corbousier Perspective drawing for Domino House project, 1914

Le Corbusier's perspective for his Domino House project took advantage of new materials such as reinforced concrete slabs and steel to form both ceilings and floors. This design gave freedom to the architect to subdivide interior as desired by the occupant. It eliminates the need for a bearing wall allowing for a modular space between the pillars. This design is much like how many buildings are created and stems from designs by Walter Gropius and Peter Behrens.

Le Corbusier Villa Savoye, 1929

Villa Savoye is a country house that dominates the landscape with a modernist aesthetic. There is no traditional façade or entrance. There is an interesting penetration of interior and exterior space and a sense of balance between symmetry and asymmetry, simplicity mixed with complexity.

Art Deco

New, modern architecture rejected ornament, Art Deco embraced it especially in public architecture. The style sought to upgrade industrial design with a sense of fine art. There was a universal application to buildings, interiors, furniture, etc focusing on streamlined, symmetrical designs. The title of this style derived its name from the Exposition of Decorative and Modern Industrial Arts in 1925. The style is also often associated with Jazz Age flair and elegance of ocean liners.

William van Alen Chrystler Building, 1928-30

William Van Alen's Chryslter Building design demonstrates some aspects of the machined art deco style. The steel spire atop the Chrysler building is in line with Art Deco aesthetic. Millionaires and corporations began competing for the tallest buildings in the world. This building stands as a temple of commerce dedicated to the success of business before the great depression.

“Natural Architecture” and total design

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)

Frank Lloyd Wright worked in a firm headed by Louis Sullivan. He believed in an “architecture of democracy” and took influences form educational blocks, organic unity of Japanese architecture, and a Jeffersonian belief in individualism. To him, architecture should be organic and natural and individuals have the right to move within a space in a non symmetrical way. His architectural works thus demonstrate a continuity of form from architecture to interior design to the environment it resides within.

Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House, 1907-1909

Robie house demonstrates a wandering plan with intricately joined spaces and a connection with interior and exterior recalling Japanese architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright Kaufmann House (Fallingwater), 1936-1939

Kaufmann House further demonstrates Wright's commitment to the relationship of building to site. There is an added emphasis on horizontal vs. Vertical in a natural way. He pays close attention to the material qualities of the forms. His ideas of architecture as well as the design of the interiors, even the furniture, becomes a strong influence on generations of architects as he liberated the design of architecture based on purpose.

Organic Sculpture

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957)

A Romanian, Copnstantine Brancusi's work emphasizes the organic and natural. His forms are often reduced to soft curving surfaces and ovoid forms. He emphasized materials and the base typically become a part of the form.

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Constantin Brancusi Bird In Space, 1928

Bird in Space simplified natural forms to their underlying essence. It is based on a machine age with smooth surfaces, often reproduced in Brass. He searched for underlying emotional chords and envisioned many of his works enlarged to enormous scales.

Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975)

Barbara Hepworth Oval Sculpture, 1943

Barbara Hepworth combined pristine shape with a sense of organic vitality. She states,

The forms which have had special meaning for me since childhood have been the standing form (which is the translation of my feeling towards the human being standing in landscape); the two forms (which is the tender relationship of one living thing beside another); and the closed form, such as the oval, spherical, or pierced form (sometimes incorporating color) which translates for me the association and meaning of gesture in the landscape… In all these shapes the translation of what one feels about man and nature must be conveyed by the sculptor in terms of mass, inner tension, and rhythm, scale in relation to our human size, and the quality of surface which speaks through our hands and eyes (Kleiner ?).

In sculpture, the use of the hole or void became an important part of her work and sculpture. The sculptures also are reduced to basic and universal forms with interesting since of space and negative space.

 

Henry Moore (1898-1986)

Henry Moore was an English sculptor who also emphasized the material. His work is similar to Hepworth in the use of the void while capturing the essence of his figures much like Brancusi.

Henry Moore Reclining Figure, 1939

Reclining Figure demonstrates a feeling of landscape and surrealist biormorphic forms. The hole connects one side to the other making it immediately three dimensional.

Political Statements

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Pablo Picasso Guernica, 1937

Picasso states, "Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy." This work was created during the Civil war in Spain during the 1930s. It was commission by the government in exile for the pavilion for the exposition in Paris. Picasso actually did not do any work on this painting until he had heard about Guernica on April 26, 1937. The event depicts Nazi bombers acting on behalf of the rebel general, Fancisco Franco destroying the city during the busiest hour of the market day, killing or wounding many of the 7,000 inhabitants.

There is no particular reference to the event in the work, rather a general outcry by the suffering. It maintains Cubist qualities with expressive effect. The focus is on light vs. shadow and reduced color pallet providing focus on the narrative and expressive gestures of the figures. Picasso did not allow the painting to be displayed in Spain while the government was under the control of Franco, thus it hung in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA) until the dictator’s death then moved to Madrid and hangs as a testament to the time. You can now often see the painting behind speakers at the United Nations

Dorthea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley, 1935

In 1929 the United States Stock Markets crashed beginning The Great depression. In 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) commissions artists under the Federal Art Project to keep them in their creative professions. Dorthea Lange was among those hired by the Resettlement Administration to photograph the situation of the rural poor. The images she took in Nipomo depict Migrant workers were starving because the crops had frozen in the fields. Migrant Mother took on an iconic status. As Lange states,

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I remember she asked me no question. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction… There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her and she seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me.

Within days of publication, food was rushed to the area by people touched by the image.

 

Jacob Lawrence "Migration of the American Negro" 1937 (Phillips Collection and MoMA)

Jacob Lawrence was the first African American artists to receive a one-person show in a prominent New York art gallery. While supported by the WPA, Lawrence was commissioned to produce a series describing the exodus of black labor from the South to the North following the First World War. He produced his work using a collage painting aesthetic influenced by cubisum and folk art and injected with personal experience. The series was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (even numbers) and the Phillips Collection (odd numbers) and published in Fortune magazine. Lawrence perhaps did not receive the recognition he deserved during his time due to his race. This is a similar issue that female artists had in that they were often categorized by these characteristics and not necessarily their artistic abilities.

Louise Bourgeois, "Untitled" 1950

Throughout the 1940's Bourgeois remained private with her art but was familiar with the artists of New York as she married art historian, Robert Goldwater following her artistic training in Paris. Her work demonstrates a modernist materialistic connection as her sculptures demonstrate her physical connection with the media. Her drawings also take on a similar design aesthetic, though her work adapts throughout the decades with infusions of post modern thought.

Regionalism

There were artists who, like Constable, turned against the city and machine aesthetic to focus on rural life.

Grant Wood American Gothic, 1930

American Gothic depicts a rural scene from Iowa where he was born and raised. The painting became an American icon. It simply depicts a farmer and daughter in front of their pristine house with the Gothic attic window. The figures take on a severe quality and many were convinced that he captured the spirit of America, There is a clear rejection of avant-garde styles in favor of realism. Many were even disturbed by the nationalistic associations of the painting in the light of Germany’s building national pride.

Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)

Thomas Hart Benton Social History of the State of Missouri, 1936

Thomas Hart Benton made a good career of mural painting, gaining many commissions throughout the United States. Social History of the State of Missouri provides many iconic and symbolic representations of the history of the state. The broken perspective and scale gives focus and separates different narrative elements. He demonstrates a commitment to a visually accessible style but injected with a personally fluid aesthetic. His work remained popular due to his reassuring images that helped moral during the time of depression.

Mexican Muralists

Between 1910-1920 was the Mexican Revolution. Muralists took on vast mural cycles in public buildings to validate the history of Mexico.

Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)

Jose Clemente Orozco Epic of American Civilization: Hiberno-America, 1932-1934

Orozco's mural depicts a heroic Mexican peasant armed for the revolution. The mural further includes symbolic figures of his oppressors: bankers, government soldiers, officials, gangsters, and the rich. He had previously been trained as an architect so he had command of the ideas of a wall space.

Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

Diego Rivera Ancient Mexico, 1929-35

Diego Rivera is probably the most well known Mexican muralist and did works both in Mexico and America. He was committed to creating a work that served the peoples needs. Ancient Mexico is a mural that resides among a series of murals for the National Palace in Mexico city. It shows scenes from Mexico’s history and the conflicts between the indigenous people and the Spanish conquistadors. It also shows the struggle for Mexican independence.

Shift of the Art World to New York

During the 1930’s with the beginnings of WWII, many European modernists begin emigrating to the United States further influencing the budding art world in the States. Following the war, New York City becomes the major art capital as Paris came under control of the Germans during the time of the war.

THE NEW YORK SCHOOL

Lee Krasner “White Squares” 1948

Described by critic Robert Coates as tying in with the idea of Expressionism in the tradition of Kandinsky.

“Except for Hofmann… the artists of the New York School faced many of the same formative cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic issues (of European Modernism). These issues included: the imperative of social relevance; existentialism; the surrealists’ interest in the unconscious mind leavened by an American matter-of-factness; the Mexican influence; and the formal vocabulary of European modernism – especially Kandinsky’s abstract expressionism of 1910 to 1914, Mondrian, Picasso’s Guernica, interwar cubismand abstract surrealism. From cubism they took the shallow picture space and the concern with the picture plane. The biomorphic forms and automatist elements came from surrealism and Picasso’s work of the thirties. Early Kandinsky inspired some of the freedom of brushwork and painterliness, and his moral tone fuelled the ethical seriousness of purpose. To these American artists of the forties Kandinsky represented romantic emotionalism and spontinaeity, as opposed to Mondrian, who stood for strict planning, the denial of personality, and intellect.” (Fineberg 32-33)

Though most all the artists incorporated these sources, each responded differently as they were all in a fairly developmental stage in the forties. All placed paramount emphasis on content or meaningful subject matter in their art which was predominantly abstract. Though they prized individuality, they still came together in a “movement” though all but Hans Hofmann were disappointed with the critics connection to expressionism as they saw themselves as separate from that.

The New York School stressed automatism and action in art. In the developmental phases of their styles, Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko and Gottlieb used automatism to develop their ideas through free association as the abstract surrealists had done. Pollock broke from the idea by using it as a device for objectifying an intense conscious experience as it was unfolding rather than a free association of unconscious material. Others also left such practices, and although they resemble such images of the surrealists, they do so through a different, more conscious search of the personal psyche. Surrealists lived in a theatrical, past, present and future. The New York School artists focused on their paintings as entirely in the present and the painting was a result of intensely felt experience.

The New York School also gained much of its influence from Existentialism. Harold Rosenberg Stated, “No part of the process in an action painting is purely technical; everything is a meaningful gesture inseparable from the artist’s biography.” Existentialists stressed the idea of individuality. Between 1945 and 1946 many “existentialist” writings came into print in English:

• Jean-Paul Sartre: action was the means of knowing oneself in relation to the world. “In a word, man must create his own essence; it is in throwing himself into the world, in suffering it, in struggling with it, that – little by little – he defines himself.”
• Kafka: demanded a fundamental rethinking of experience through his dull terror of the absurd.

Critics:

• Thomas Hess: More objective account of the artists.
• Clement Greenberg: Critic who attempts to lay down the law of artists, categorizing stylistic movements and attempting to change the direction of art.
• Harold Rosenberg: From more of a literary background, tended to defend intellectual values and had strong sympathies towards the struggling artist.
• Meyer Schapiro: influenced more as a teacher and critical eye for the artists. He made art seem important and worth you serious thought, often introducing artists to new ideas or directions for their artwork.

  Alexander Calder

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  Circus, 1929

  Alexander Calder is an American sculptor who showed inventiveness at an early age and was highly influenced by his child-like desire to play. Calder went to college for engineering by soon left that path to study art at the Art Students League in New York from 1923-26 before moving to Paris, still the capitol of the art world at the time. While in Paris, he became good friends with many of the modern artists such as Miro who's whimisical forms are similar in style to that of Calder's abstract work.

  Calder's earliest works were about interaction and entertainment, mostly influenced by the circus. The circus grew over his lifetime as he continually added more acts. It wasn't until Calder met Piet Mondriaan that he began to take a more serious attitude toward fine art. When visiting Mondriaan's studio, Calder exclaimed:

  It was a very exciting room. Light came in from the left and from the right, and on the solid wall between the windows there were experimental stunts with colored rectangles of cardboard tacked on. Even the victrola (record Player) which had been some muddy color, was painted red. I suggested to Mondrian that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate. And be, with a very serious counterance, said: "No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast."... This one visit gave me a shock that started things. Though I had often heard the word "modern" before, I did not consciously know for feel the term "abstract." So now at thirty-tow, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract (Fineberg 46).

  Calder's work quickly became more abstract, as he said, however the themes of engineering and whimsey still resided in his work.

   

   
  A Universe, 1934 and Object in Y, 1955

  Cosmic imagery, influenced from an earlier trip that he had had through the Panama Canal evolved out of his wire sculpture techniques. Using counterweights and suspending his sculpture from the ceiling, he was able to make his structures move. These planes and forms also moved through space, providing a differing experience for the viewer every time that they came to view the work. It was abstraction in motion. Marcel Duchamp, upon seeing these sculptures, suggested to name these moving sculptures "mobiles." Later, Calder produced more rigid pieces without motion that Jean Arp joked should be named "stabiles," a name that characterized much of Calder's other work:

  
  Flamingo, 1974

  Hans Hofmann

  
  Hans HofmannLandscape, 1941

  Hans Hofmann retains a European aesthetic to his artwork unlike other artists of the New York School. He was German and from 1904-1914 he painted in Paris and frequented the Café du Dome where he met many of the leading Parisian artists: Picasso, Braque, Pascin, Rouault, Picabia, Matisse, Leger. Although he didn’t have personal relations with German Expressionists, he stored some of Kandinsky’s paintings in his studio. In the Fall of 1931, he moved to New York City and taught at the Art Students League for two years and then opened his own school.

  Through his courses, he taught European Modernism and what the French call “belle peinture” (the beautiful handling of paint): nuances of handling paint and color based on firsthand experience with Kandinsky and Fauvism, an analytical approach to pictorial structure (based on cubism and Cezanne) and spirituality (also from Kandinsky’s romantic abstractions). Art had nothing to do with politics or social consciousness. Stressed drawing and lectured on pictorial structure, paint handling and inventive expression through materials.

  Theory: Hofmann wrote essays on art theory encompassing the spiritual ideas of Mondrian and Kandinsky. He states, “The artist’s technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit (Fineberg 54).” He separated this spirituality from the artists’ social aims, focusing on visual structure and an emotional dimension (“spirituality”). He also describes specific laws of painting emphasizing the notion of the picture plane:

  • essence=picture plane
  • The picture plane must be preserved in its two-dimensionality
  • “Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine), by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull.”
  • Push and pull= all movement within a painting necessarily implies a reciprocal movement in the opposing direction; movement into pictorial space demands a balanced advance toward the viewer.

   

  Jackson Pollock

  
  Hans Namuth Jackson Pollock in his studio,

  Willem De Kooning pointed out that “every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again (Fineberg 86).” Hofmann (who as we mentioned before taught a strict compositional structure taken from nature and European modernism) said of Pollock in 1942, “You don’t work from nature. You work by heart. This is no good. You will repeat yourself.” Pollock responds, “I am nature… Put up or shut up. Your theories don’t interest me (Fineberg 86).” Pollock was a stubborn artist and highly emotional as well as defensive.

  In 1930 Pollock headed for New York where he began attending classes with his eldest brother Charles at the Art Students League. There he studied under Thomas Hart Benton until 1933. Benton’s style and subject matter also dominated Pollock’s artwork until 1938. In 1936, Pollock worked in Siqueirous’s (El Duco) Union Square workshop. There he experimented with unorthodox materials and applications of paint such as splattering and dripping.

  An essay by John Graham in 1937 called, “Primitive Art and Picasso” also had a profound impact on Pollock’s development. In it Graham demonstrates a belief that the unconscious mind provided essential knowledge and creative power and that primitive art offered a direct access to this material. And most importantly, the Europeans arrived in New York around 1939 which provided further focus on the idea of the unconscious as a source for art.

  
  Autumn Rhythm, 1950

  These paintings take some cues from jazz according to Lee Krasner who said that Pollock thought jazz “was the only other really creative thing happening in this country.” Widely ridiculed throughout his life even though the implications of these drip paintings were recognized within the art world almost immediately.

   

  In 1949 Life Magazine did an article on Pollock, “Is Jackson Pollock the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” and in 1950, Hans Namuth made a short film of Pollock working:

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  Direct Link

  Barnett Newman

  
  Onement I, 1944

  Barnett Newman’s painting has to do with the notion of the sublime and contrasted “the Greek, plastic achievement.” Newman believed that through experience and intuition came spirituality and not the Greek aesthetic of physical beauty of the object. Newman organized an exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1947 called “The Ideographic Picture." An "Ideograph" is a written symbol that communicates an idea directly rather than through language or through the meditation of any symbolic form. Newman wrote about seeking the modern equivalent to “primitive” art in which the abstract shape itself is a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings that he (the Kwakiutl Indian) felt before the terror of the unknowable. The abstract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal “abstraction” of a visual fact with its overtone of an already known nature. Nor was it a purist illusion with its overload of pseudo-scientific truths. He also believed that the artist is a revolutionary in search of universal truths (Fineberg 99).

  Newman was left out of the Federal Art Project that most of the other abstract expressionists were a part due to his income teaching. He did not want to make something that a collector could acquire as an object without engaging its content. So he wrote about art and encouraged his friends until he could figure out his own painting as he developed slowly towards his own technique. During 1939-41, Newman studies science, especially botany and ornithology looking for ideas on the beginnings of life how it emerged and its orders developed, seeking an analog in genisis of though and the evolution of the human mind.

  “The Plasmic Image” Newman (1943-45): All artists whether primitive or sophisticated, have been involved in the handling of chaos. The painter of the new movement… is therefore not concerned with geometric forms per se but in creating forms which by their abstract nature carry some abstract intellectual content. There is an attempt being made to assign a Surrealist explanation to the use these painters make of abstract forms… (but) Surrealism is interested in a dream world that will penetrate the human psyche. To that extent it is an mundane expression… The present painter is concerned, not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality, but with the penetration into the world mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into the metaphysical secrets. To that extent his art is concerned with the sublime. It is a religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life which is its sense of tragedy… the artist tries to wrest truth from the void (Fineberg 100).

  In his painting, Onement I, we begin to understand what Newman is alluding to. All of these ideas took a long time to come to fruition in an image that seemed “right”. He found his direction in a this small painting. It was a painting that had sat unfinished in his studio and he could never bring himself to touch it and he couldn’t figure out why until he sat and worked out the imagery of it.

  Newman referred to the line straight down the middle as a “zip” The zip creates a symmetry which reduces the problem about composition, and forced the viewer to read into the underlying ideas of the painting rather than viewing it simply as an art object. These zips allude to how Newman ranked knowledge on three levels:

  • Data and rules learned without any reference to the intellect.
  • Things learned by deduction or logic.
  • Immediate knowledge, using reason, but obtained through direct intuition to the essence of things, an insight that went beyond reason, “The Sublime”

  Newman was after an epiphany where he tries to relate all the ideas of nature, spirituality, creation into one ideogram.

   

   
  Onement IV, 1949 and Onement V, 1952

  After Onement II, Newman began painting prolifically using this notion of the zip. Although the zip is not placed in the center every time, it is structured around a mathematical structure premeditated. Though premeditated, these paintings have an affinity with action paintings of the time due to their experience of immediacy. Newman also began painting on a larger scale. As Motherwell said at the time:

  The large format, at the one blow, destroyed the century long tendency of the French to domesticize modern painting, to make it intimate. We replaced the nude girl and the French door with a modern Stonehenge, with a sense of the sublime and the tragic… One of the great images should be the house-painter’s brush, in the employ of a grand vision dominated by an ethical sensibility that makes the usual painter’s brush indeed picayune (Fineberg 102).

   

  Alberto Giacometti

  As early as 1932, Giacometti began working on figurative sculpture, but after five years of work from life, he failed to finish any sculpture and was never satisfied with his ability to portray what was before him. Until 1945 he struggled until, through drawing he came to the belief that he was only capturing a likeness when he made his people tall and slender.

   
  Small Nude, and Grande Femme IV

  Giacometti exhibited these tall thin figures in 1948 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in NY. It was his first one-man show in fourteen years.

  Existentialism stresses a radical reduction to the essence or beginning of things. Giacometti’s work was more involved with the process of discovery than with the final result or any aesthetic objective. (Pollock and de Kooning). Giacometti pushed aside training to portray what was in front of him. He found this impossible and thus began again and again until someone would finally come to his studio and remove the work for show. His works make reference to ancient Greek sculpture as well. A new sort of ideal. Much like action painting, the figures deal with the intimate presence of the artist. Later in his life, he began giving his figures real presence and identity.

  Francis Bacon

  Francis Bacon emerged at the end of WWII with images of figures transformed through the unconscious. He would begin, like Giacometti, to paint as he saw the object and then transform it using what he also saw in the object and the processes from his unconscious mind.

  
  Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

  Bacon's painting demonstrates a claustrophobic space, pressure of vertical strokes close in uncomfortably while the figure blurs out anonymously. His approach goes beyond surrealism in its adherence to the overt subject matter and comes closer to Freud. This painting couples the painting of Pope Innocent X with the screaming nurse on the Odessa Steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin. The film shows the nurse’s face with her mought wide open and blood streaming from her eye. He also used the contemporary photographs of Pope Pius XII for such details as the glasses. Bacon specifically states,

  I’d bought that very beautiful hand-colored book on diseases of the mouth and, when I made the Pope screaming, I didn’t want to do it in the way that I did it – I wanted to make the mouth, with the beauty of its colour and everything, look like one of the sunsets… of Monet.(Fineberg 144)

  
  Self Portrait

  In his self portrait, the artist seems imprisoned behind a mask, but there is a painterly beauty much like a cubist or futurist rendering.

  
  Painting, 1946

  In Painting, the figure with slabs of meat behind him on a glass top table was inspired by a process of free association from images of WWII of Hitler and Mussolini speaking. Bacon describes,

  I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field. And… suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture… It was like one continuous accident. (Fineberg 144)

  This painting however shows many of the repeated images for his work, the tubular table (from the time he spent designing furniture), the flayed beef hanging as though crucified, closed blinds with dangling cords, in a claustrophobic room, umbrella obliterating the eyes, an open mouth with exposed teeth, more raw meat on the table, and an oriental rug on the floor. Bacon further states,

  I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There’ve been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don’t know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they’re so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this whole thing of the Crucifixion. (Fineberg 144)

  The painting deals with the horror of life and how one thing lives off another and how there is no escape.

   

  Jean Dubuffet

  
  Jean Dubuffet,Childbirth, 1944

  Jean Dubuffet lived in Paris in the 1940s. He left his wine business and started painting in 1942 during the German occupation. Dubuffet depicted mostly ordinary views of daily life. He painted in a very child-like style influenced directly by graffiti and the art of children. The surfaces are thick with paint and many times the lines are scratched into this texture much like the graffiti of the time.

   

  Dubuffet, 1946: "It is the man in the street that I am after, whom I feel closest to, with whom I want to make friends and enter into confidence and connivance, and he is the one I want to please and enchant by means of my work.” (Fineberg 131)

   

  Dubuffet’s search for a style that would be understood by everyman brought him to the idea of the primitive. His work breaks from the “Greek Plastic” as Barnett Newman would say. He wanted to appeal to everyman, but also to make a fresh unconventional exploration of such grand philosophical themes as the origins of thought and the evanescence of the individual instead of the prejudices of the culture surrounding him. The threat of disintegration into the environment and ultimately into the universe of undifferentiated matter is a pervasive theme. Dubuffet looked to the art of children Stating,

  My persistent curiosity about children’s drawings, and those of anyone who has never learned to draw, is due to my hope of finding… the affective reactions that link each individual to the things that surround him and happen to catch his eye. (Fineberg 131)

  Children’s rendering of experience is less dominated by cultural norms. Dubuffet’s method resembles automatism in the sense that he allows the painted truth to come out as the painting progresses on the canvas.

   

  Willem de Kooning

  
  Willem and Elaine de Kooning in the studio, Photograph by Hans Namuth

  Willem de Kooning’s inability to “finish” paintings made him legendary. He would talk about his large Woman paintings by saying, “Its not finished, but it’s a good painting.” The fact that his work seems unfinished is what makes it great. De Kooning once said, “There is no plot in painting, it’s an occurrence which I discover by and has no message (Fineberg 74).” His open-ended thought process of approaching a painting allowed him to be coupled with the action painters of the forties as he would constantly create and destroy his images. De Kooning actually admitted that he felt a deep engagement with old masters such as Rembrandt and Titian more than the modernists as he continuously reverted back to the figurative image.

  De Kooning studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques which stressed craftsmanship in the classical sense. Because of this training, de Kooning had many technical tricks which became useful to other artists trying to emulate styles and effects. He joined the Federal Art Project like many artists during the depression and enjoyed the income gained during this time, though he didn’t show much of his work, he fell into the circle of artists and intellectuals of the time.

  Around 1939, the trademarks of de Kooning’s style began to emerge (Slide: de Kooning: Seated Woman), this painting shows the artist’s method of working, which also provides a very unfinished look. This comes from what de Kooning referred to as a “frozen glimpse” where his visible changes of mind or pentimenti become directly evident in the finished work. Unlike previous artists’ work (Picasso and the moderns), de Kooning’s painting is less refined as it refrains from hiding such changes or process.

  
  Pink Angels, 1945

  As time progressed, de Kooning’s paintings of women broke apart more and more as his trial and error process gave way to multiple layers of thought. These figurative forms gave way to more chaotic compositions as de Kooning began multiplying figurative shapes, sometimes tracing them from other works creating vast layers of figurative abstraction. De Kooning believed that all abstract shapes had to have a likeness or familiarity and the figure provided that for him.

  
  Excavation, 1950

  By 1950, de Kooning’s figurative abstractions had gotten to a point much like Pollock’s expressive drip paintings. It is said that this painting represents a “no environment” where forms change scale throughout the composition as the impressions of New York City had done for de Kooning. Though a large canvas, it engages the viewer with detail as something to be read over time in the fashion that it was painted.

  Mark Rothko

  
  Hans NamuthMark Rothko in his studio with the Rothko Chapel series,

  Most people know of Mark Rothko’s large rectangular clouds of color. Rothko relates his structure to a means of “dealing with human emotion with the human drama as much as I can possibly experience it. His works deal with the complex and turbulent mind, plagued with depression, but also a desire to express profound content in his works. Like Newman, Rothko’s work deals with the simplicity that sets value and ideas in the fore and resembles a primitive force of the absolute epiphany.

  
  No. 2, 1951

  By 1949, Rothko had settled into a mature style with his color field works. His large geometric forms gave way to an allover compositional structure that read instantly and rejected memory. In teaching art to children at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, Rothko found an interest in how children dealt with the ideas of space: The scale conception involves the relationships of objects to their surroundings – the emphasis of things or space. It definitely involves a space emotion. A child may limit space arbitrarily and then heroify his objects. Or he may infinitize space, dwarfing the importance of objects. It becomes evident in his color choices and scales of his color forms that he is making choices similar to these children as he develops a universal idea with wich to contemplate.

  
  Untitled, 1953

  Rothko admitted to being reluctant to remove himself from figural representation in any way, but he said that “Shapes have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms. He was attempting, like Newman to remove associations to specific decisions on life and express a more universal truth.

   

  David Smith and Sculpture

  
  David Smith Aerial Construction, 1936

  In the same way painters shifted from tradition to an existential introspection, many sculptors did the same, most notably David Smith. Smith used a process of welding which allowed for free association of forms and constant change without conviction about the piece of sculpture. Welding also allowed for the artist’s hand to be viewed in the work unlike bronze casting. Smith also saw the material of metal and machine as a heroic, masculine endeavor, characterized by aggressiveness which he linked to the primitive and essential nature of “art”.

  After 1950, Smith turned exclusively to welding and created several landscape images keeping a single viewing position in mind and little actual depth. This combines the pictorial illusion of a shallow cubist space within a three dimensional object.

  Throughout the early 1950’s, Smith also moved to the existential views of totemic imagery. He freely associated metallic objects to create “tanktotems” referring to the idea of steel (tank) and the totemic (totem) images. During this time he also began embarking on the idea of series which drove him on to the end of his career with three major series, Voltri and Cubi and Zig.

  
  Cubi Series, 1962-64

  After seeing some of Giacometti’s forgings which were indicative of anthropromorphic figures and totemic images, he recalls that art is not divorced from life and figural imagery should still be evident in his work. At this time he also attempted to place his sculpture in real space by removing or incorporating the bases of the object as an integral part of the sculpture. They were not objects to be placed on a pedestal, but within the viewer’s space. In 1961, Smith began working on his Cubi series.

  The stainless steel made it more difficult for free association as he did not have the tools to cut such steel. He had to work geometrically and often had many of these geometric shapes lying around the studio so that he had the options for free association. Many times he would create these sculptures using cardboard or other box material and then order the steel later. The Cubi series retains a sense of the figural and his flattening of space. The sculptures require a fixed viewing angle as if created two dimensionally.

   
  Votri Series, 1962

  In 1962, Smith was asked to Italy for a summer arts festival and was allowed a space in an abandoned steel factory in Voltri. He created about 27 sculptures in one month as he was allowed to use anything he found. Many evoked the idea of train cars from the nearby tracks and the idea of larger scale pieces. He then returned back to his studio in Bolton Landing to create more of his Cubi series. He focused on large scale and rough finish of his welds to represent the spontinaety of the welding action.

  
  Zig,

  Smith liked the way that the stainless steel reflected the light, but he would rather have had a more spontaneous look as in his Zig series done around this same time. The zigs are all painted steel which relates more to a hand-worked quality. He found it intriguing to “reduce the human form to cubes – exploited by Cambiaso” who had also done the same in his sixteenth century mannerist drawings of figures. The geometric forms are also indicative of Henry Moore’s sculpture where the figure is also reduced classically into these geometric/morphing forms.

  Minimalism

  In an important essay of 1965 entitled “ABC Art” Barbara Rose wrote about the emergence of “an art whose blank, neutral, mechanical impersonality contrasts so violently with the romantic biographical abstract expressionist style which preceded it that spectators are chilled by its apparent lack of feeling or content (Rose 58).” Minimal art as it came to be known gravitated toward geometric forms or modular sequences especially in sculpture which was placed not on pedestals but on the floor or wall to stress its continuity with real space.

  This artform Shocked the viewers who were accustomed to the visual complexities of gesture painting. It was aggressively authoritarian, a “displaced will to power,” and in particular white male power. (after the fascist movement) This style required a large amount of supporting writings to reveal the motives behind the apparently simple works. Much like Clement Greenberg’s formalism, the simple object might generate the most complex theories. Ironically, Greenberg disliked the minimalists’ work even though they pursued his theoretical prescriptions for modernism with greater rigor. Greenberg discounted minimalism as contrived, “something deduced instead of felt or discovered (Fineberg 294).” Reinhardt attacked references in art and proclaimed the new academy of art would have twelve rules: no texture, no brushwork, no drawing, no forms, no design, no color, no light, no space, no time, no size or scale, no movement, and finally no object.

  Frank Stella

  
  Frank Stella, Untitled, 1960

  Stella’s work stems from Johns’ idea of the painting as an object. He singled out formal ideas from paintings of Johns one by one and followed them to a logical extreme in abstract terms. He eliminated the subject and the painterly touch and gave them greater scale. There is no detail and the canvas can be viewed all at once. This gave way to a shaped canvas which made it feel even more like an object than a painting. Stella often endowed his paintings with emotional titles and made the shallow space of abstract expressionism seem old fashioned. He had posed and solved the problem of the painting’s presence as an object, a question posed since Cezanne.

  
  Frank Stella Firuzabad III, 1970

  Later, in the Mid sixties, Stella moves to Day-Glo colors and studio assistants increasingly work on his painting for him to emphasize the painting as an object.

  Donald Judd

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  Judd fulfills Tatlin’s machine-age prescription for “real materials in real space.” However, Judd has no social message behind his art, it is purely formal. If an image suggested three dimensions, the three dimensions existed and were not illusions or representations.The viewer would immediately recognize any pattern in the work instead of it’s compositional elements. They eliminate any idea to composition and allow for more complex form. Geometry could be used in a non-Neo-Plastic way, an impure way without the purity that geometric art seemed to have. Mondrian, though really great, is too ideal and clean. In another way, Reinhardt is too. That was not a believable quality for me. Stella’s painting had a possibility that became evident of an impure geometric art.

  
  Donald Judd, Untitled, 1966-68

  By the mid-sixties, Judd made enough money through his art to have it machine fabricated rather than hand tooled giving it an even more materialisticly minimal quality. The object becomes the object, and can be seen as a whole, seemingly repeated infinitely through commercial/industrial processes.

  Tony Smith

  
  Tony Smith, Die, 1962

  Born 1912 and was a part of the abstract expressionist generation and taught several of the minimalists. His main contribution to art was his calibrated scale of his works to their site. He undercut the notion of monumentality by making them responsive to the architectural or natural setting. Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer? Someone asked Smith about “Die” (6’ black steel cube (1962)) I was not making a monument. The observer then said: Then why didn’t you make it smaller so the observer could see over the top? Smith replied: "I was not making an object (Fineberg 301)."

  
  Tony Smith, Amaryllis, 1965

  Smith explored the idea of a holistic image, an image that could be viewed all at once as a single form. Minimal art emphasizes the “gestalt” where they expect that the viewer could continue the form with the preconceived notions as to what is given to them.

  Dan Flavin

   
  Dan Flavin, Untitled, 1964-1970

  Began working exclusively with new industrially fabricated florescent tubes and fixtures in 1963. He choreographed light from the tubes investigating the idea of space as a sculpture rather than form. Each piece becomes dependent on sight rather than the piece itself, and any piece can be recreated by anyone willing to go to a hardware store to pick up the materials to make it. The light indicated the sublime as if a modern technological fetish. Much like Newman, his lights are simple, and carry a holistic quality.

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  Sol LeWitt

  
  Sol LeWitt, Corner House, 1976

  Sol Lewitt applied the minimalists’ system of logic and literalness to the creations of his work without much care for the literal object. He separated the process from the object itself. In 1967 LeWitt demonstrates that the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes, and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman. The underlying concept was referred to as its “grammar”

  
  Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing, 1968

  The Wall Drawings begun in 1968 involved this set of predetermined procedures listed by LeWitt and carried out by assistants directly on the wall of the gallery. Broke the conventions of the art object because of the way they can be removed and re-created according to the instruction without the need of the artist. Sometimes he emphasized this by having the instruction written on the wall next to the piece.

  Postmodernism

  This concept of randomness, chance, appropriation, and questioning the preconceptions of the world and viewer's world views is what characterizes much of the artwork coming from this decade. These concepts run counter to the concepts of modernism as modernism is based on formal design concepts. Artworks created with these new intentions are thus described as post-modern as each modern definition is questioned and turned on its head in search of a wider spectrum of meaning. Artists working under these principles thumb their nose at critics such as Greenberg, though utilize formal elements established in art to begin their framework.

  Postmodernism is a revolt against the normalizing functions of tradition questioning the concepts of objectivity or truth, the mainstream, and the possibility of fixed meaning as in language. Both images and concepts are radically polyvalent. The artist is allowed to reconfigure one’s experience as seen with artists such as Duchamp, Johns, and Cage. Postmodernism contains a lack of historical referents in context of an image, often by removing an object from it’s “normal” place, or the use of advertising without regard to previous intent. This appropriation creates an inclusive aesthetic that cultivates incoherence and was influenced throughout the 60’s by the randomness of TV and media. Niel Postman describes that in this era, "All assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply disappears (Fineberg 365)."

  Materials, Eccentric Abstraction, and Post Minimalism

  The detatched objectivity of the Minimalists and the disengagement of Pop and formalism pushed some artists to seek a way back to the individual. Louise Bourgeois, Lucas Samaras, and Lynda Benglis pioneered an expressionism of organic forms and unusual materials such as plastics and latex at the beginning of the 1960’s. The materials gave the sculptures a vivid sensation of touch. The amazing fact was that they succeeded in this formalist and pop oriented art world. The work was formal in that it embodied minimalism, but the materials gave these artists a more intimate touch that involved their own body experience.

  One attribution to their success was a show called “Eccentric Abstraction” where Lucy Lippard (Lippard Discusses her Curatorial Career) grouped them together in 1966. The need to make something that felt real and present was what drew these artists to their materials.

  Eva Hesse

  
  Eva Hesse, One More than One, 1967

  Hesse used whatever materials were available to give her works a human presence that embodied her own feminine tortures. The breast-like forms are expressive of minimalism: "I feel very close to Carl Andre, I feel, let’s say, emotionally connected to his work. It does something to my insides. His metal plates were the concentration camp for me (Fineberg 312)." Hesse had a troubled life as she fled persecution from Nazi Germany during WWII and ended up in the United States for her short life.

    
  Eva Hesse, Hang Up, 1966, Contingent, and Untitled (Rope Piece), 1970

  Her work later shifts away from the overtly sexual imagery to a simplicity that is embodied in the materials themselves rather than the form. She turned to Fiberglass and latex in 1968 because of the tactile quality much like skin. She states,

  Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn’t a thing in my life that has happened that hasn’t been extreme – personal health, family, economic situations… absurdity is the key word… It has to do with contradictions and oppositions. In the forms I use in my work the contradictions are certainly there. I was always aware that I should take order versus chaos, stringy versus mass, huge versus small, and I would try to find the most absurd opposites or extreme opposites (Fineberg 313-314).

  Untitled Rope Piece undermines the notions of fixed scale and gives a three dimensional gestural field much like Pollock. In 1969, Hesse collapsed from a brain tumor and died the following year.

   

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  Bruce Nauman

  
  Bruce Nauman, Untitled, 1965

  Nauman looks inward but not in a psychological sense like Hesse. He focuses on Literal presence, although the process becomes more important in many cases than the final result, much like LeWitt. All of his work deals with his curiosity about the nature of immediate experience through questioning, and he uses any medium at his disposal to answer such questions.

     
  Bruce Nauman, Artist, Clown Torture, Neon Templates of the Left Half of my Body, and Self Portrait as a Fountain

  Nauman sets up tasks for himself like Morris just to see what would happen, in order to find things out. He would do things that you don’t particularly want to do, putting yourself in unfamiliar situations, following resistances to find out why you’re resisting, like therapy. In works such as his corridor pieces he actively involves the viewer to take part in the experience.

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  Richard Serra

  Richard Serra Reconcieved the anti-illusionism of minimal art as an aesthetic of direct physical experience. He concentrates on the quality of the materials and on the improvisational process of making sculpture. The significance of the work is in its effort not in its intentions. And that effort is a state of mind, an activity, an interaction with the world.

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  In his splash pieces, the process is more important than the final product as he splashes molten lead on the wall. The piece becomes a permanent fixture, or would have to be destroyed in order to move it. It takes its form from the procedure and takes on a specific shape due to the space making the viewer aware of that space, the time involved in process, and the materials used.

   
  Richard Serra One Ton Prop- House of Cards, 1969 and Prop Sculpture 1968

  The propped lead pieces give the viewer a sense of danger as the pieces are simply propped in place, and the slightest force could send a 500 lb sheet of lead falling on top of you… It gives a sense of presence of the materials again. Serra did many outdoor pieces, most notably, due to it’s controversy was Tilted Arc, that was placed in Federal Plaza in NYC. These are monoliths that are made with Cor-ten Steel and simply give a sense of weight and presence.

   

  

  Jasper Johns

  
  Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts 1955

  The author, Marshall McLuhan became a celebrity in 1964 and asserted that “The medium is the message.” This article stressed that the meaning is linked directly to the structure of advertising more than the subject of that advertisement. In Painting Jasper Johns stresses the structure of the art object in much the same way, focusing on how it means what it means.

  The targets stress this point in the fact that they are objects created in an artistic way. The medium is the message, and the target brings the viewer to such a realization. In Target with plaster casts, Johns also brings a sense of human relationship to this symbol of the target through box lids which open to view these casts. The newspaper clippings are also not meant to be read literally. They are a material that was meant to add to the complexity of the piece. A sense of information overload which adds to the texture and quality of the action of the piece as Johns includes his everyday world.

  
  Jasper Johns, Flag 1954-55

  The Flags are based on a formally flat scheme rather than a unique physical object. The paintings become objects in themselves rather than depictions of objects. The paint handling becomes the subject, although the imagery ties into mass production and popular consumerism.

  Johns, unlike many of the modern artists, did not intend to create paintings that had transcending views of nature or seeing. He enjoyed the object for the object, and thus questioned the meaning of that object and its perception by the viewer. His earlier work from 1954 shows an interest in assemblage or the “junk-art” aesthetic that was much like the time, but when someone had pointed this out to him, Johns destroyed everything and started new. Throughout most of the beginning of his career, he attempted to remove any indication of what others had done from his work as he wanted his work to be a “negation of impulses. To find out what he was and how it was different from other artists.”

  Robert Rauschenberg

  Rauschenberg is an artist who continually reinvented himself. Stemming from the existentialist traditions of questioning one's place in the world, his artwork continually comments on the influences surrounding him. Rauschenberg studied art at Black Mountain College where he was influenced by John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Josef Albers. Albers was quoted as saying that he "had nothing to teach" Rauschenberg (Fineberg 178). This education was likely the influence for Rauschenberg's early White Paintings that demonstrated a sensitivity to concepts of color and Cage's theories.

  Early in his career he became known for his "combine" paintings which were an alternative label to what most consider "assemblage" or the assembly of multiple media. Rauschenberg's "combines" combine sculpture with painting, the three-dimensional with the two-dimensional. His work attempts to de-construct and then reconstruct images, providing narrative and meaning that is all present in the visual result.

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  Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955

  Bed is one of Rauschenberg's first combine paintings. The painting includes may materials that were found in the environment around him including even toothpaste. The attack of materials on the surface is extremely personal and alludes to the popular abstract expressionists of the time, but includes more of a post-modern development of appropriation.

   
  Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959 and Odalisk 1955

  Rauschenberg's combine paintings lasted throughout the 1950s. The objects were found in the trash, junk shops, and the mass of kitch that could be readily obtained in the streets of New York. Though these objects were found, they were found through lived experience, gathered from the course of his natural activity forming personal associations without formal analysis as the surrealists tended to have with their predetermined compositions.

  The combines were also sculptural as demonstrated in Odalisk. The name derives from a commentary on the traditional monument structure and the sexual imagery contained in the painted surface. By the time they were displayed at Leo Castelli's gallery, the Abstract Expressionists openly mocked Raushenberg's work and discredited it for its lack of aesthetic purpose.

  Pop Art

  
  Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55

  Jasper Johns’ integration of everyday icon and his displacement of the painted canvas as an object led the way for many artists after him to further stretch these concepts. Two main movements stem from many of the ideas of Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s work of the 1950’s, the concepts behind those working with what is later labelled "excentric abstraction," and the movement titled "Pop."

   
  Eduardo Paolozzi, Real Gold, 1950 and Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, 1956

  Eduardo Paolozzi was a member of what became called the “Independent Group” in England. This Independent Group focused on many of the same topics of the Nuveaux Realistes, as they focused on the byproducts of society. Since the mid forties, Paolozzi made collages using images of consumer goods, technology, and popular culture taken from books and magazines. He combined images of everyday culture in a way that was freely associated, but with some form of meaning much like Rauschenberg had done in his work.

  As the consumerism of US culture seeped into England, British artists commented more and more on the topic of popular culture for which they coined the term “pop art.” (Genuine appreciation for the imagery of the commercial environment and a rejection of the distinction between highbrow and popular culture). There was a serious concern for the direction in which the world was headed. “We still have no formulated intellectual attitudes for living in a throw-away economy” (Reyner Banham, “But today we collect ads” 1956)

  Richard Hamilton worked in advertising during the forties. In his collage, What is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? he marked a turning point in art with his use of commercial graphic design techniques and imagery from popular media. He approached a sophisticated system of visual symbols to express his answer to his question. He described it as “instant art” due to the use of popular imagery. This implied an attack on the traditional division of “high” and “low” art as expressed in Clement Greenberg’s “The Abstract and Kitch”

  The influence that TV exerted on increasing numbers of people was a major subject for the pop artists of the early sixties. For a brief time John F. Kennedy raised the spirits of America and Europe. He was the first TV President, and the public identified with him because of TV. His “New Frontier” culture also became a popular priority. And his establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts and Jackie Kennedy united fashion and culture with her media image.

  Pop artists typically worked in a passive detachment from the spiritual. They commented on everyday life in a very morbid sense, not connecting emotionally with their art. The fluxus movement, the beat poets, and the combines of Rauschenberg foreshadow this movement and the way that the Pop artists treated what came into view. They, like Rauschenberg replaced found objects with the found images of magazine culture. They cultivated impersonality and developed commercial techniques in order to evoke the ideas of mass-production as will become clearer when we begin to talk about the artists involved.

  Andy Warhol

  "If you want to know all about Andy Wahrhol, Just look at the surface of my paintings and films, and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it." - Warhol

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  Throughout the 1950’s, Warhol worked as a graphic designer and illustrator which became extremely profitable for him. He was earning nearly $65,000 a year by 1959. By 1962, Warhol decided to dedicate himself to fine art. Warhol settled on the subject matter of comics, cheap ads, and headlines from pulp tabloids to drive his artwork stemming from his advertising experience. Eventually he moved towards “no comment” paintings which were very coldly handled. The look was mechanical, and the subject matter was the direct opposite of what “high art” expects as individual and expressive. Warhol states:

  What’s great about this country is America started a tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All Cokes are the same and all Cokes are good. (Fineberg 252)

   

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  Andy Warhol, Cambells' Soup Cans, 1962

  Warhol’s first gallery show was in 1962 of an installation of 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans all 16x20 inches. Warhol was always alert to the latest trend in art and these may have been painted in response to Johns’ Painted Bronze.

  
  Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze, 1960

  These works however surpass Johns in the inexpressive literalness of the way they were presented. They are images of cans of soup, a commercial thing that everyone can buy.

  By the end of 1962, he had a desire to remove his hand from painting and began hiring assistants to create his work, much like a design firm. Warhol states, "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 (Fineberg 253). He could have contracted out his work, but he chose to still have the hand-done look and embraced imperfection.

  
  Andy Warhol, Maryilyn Monroe's Lips, 1962

  The Repetition of images forces an image into an anonymous decorative pattern while the particularlising features of each unit continue to assert themselves, creating an expressive difference between the individual and the machine. Warhol drives into the viewer the popular image, emphasizing it’s iconic quality, and the layers behind said icon. Warhol loved Hollywood and all it stood for. “I love Los Angeles, I love Hollywood, They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic… I want to be plastic.”

  Roy Lichtenstein

   
  Roy Lichtenstein, Blam, 1962 and Drowning Girl, 1963

  Lichtenstein wanted to “look programmed or impersonal,” mirroring the impersonality of mass culture as America entered the sixties. He states, "I don’t really believe I’m being impersonal when I do it (Fineberg 259).” Rather than a concern with asserting his identity he explored his imagery and style.

  His style of rendering objects resembles their presentation in simple linear sketches of inexpensive product catalogs and advertisements in newspapers. He abandoned easily identifiable images in favor of anonymous comic strips, often soap opera romance or action themes. He was not painting things but signs of things. His true subject is not the embracing couple, the jets in a dog fight, but rather the terms of their translation into the language of media and the implications of that metamorphosis. This turned everything into a form that could be reproduced. One image can be substituted for another. He paid attention to the formal qualities of the reproduction more-so than the subject matter.

  One of the things a cartoon does is to express violent emotion and passion in a completely mechanical and removed style. The detachment becomes the subject. His background differs from Warhol in that he was a fine artist and not a commercial artist and drew from the history of art rather than commercial culture.

  Claes Oldenburg

  Chaes Oldenburg was interested in the power of his imagination to alter the shape and meaning of real things. He edefined the found object in his own image stating, "What I see is not the thing itself but – myself – in its form."

   

  
  Claes Oldenburg, "Empire" ("Papa") Ray Gun 1959

  The Ray Gun became a prevalent icon for his work. Ondenburg states that if form in nature analyzes down to geometry, content (or intent) analyzes down to erotic form (Fineberg 197). The ray gun is personified as Oldenberg’s alter ego.

  
  Claes Oldenburg, Pie A La Mode 1962

  In 1961, Oldenburg rented a store front at 107 East Second Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In it he created visually tactile, and optimistically humorous sculptures of everyday objects. The manipulation of form took precedence over any significance of the subject. He stated, "I wanted to see if I could make significant form out of a pair of ladys pantys." He continues to describe the experience:

  I have made these things: a wrist watch, a piece of pie, hats, caps, pants, skirts, flags, 7 up, shoe-shine, etc., all violent and simple in form and color, just as they are. In showing them together; I have wanted to imitate my act of perceiving them, which is why they are shown as fragments (of the field of seeing), in different scale to one another; in a form surrounding me (and the spectator), and in accumulation rather than in some imposed design (Fineberg 198).

   

  People loved these works, but he sold very little. After two months, Oldenburg closed The Store and Richard Bellamy (Green Gallery) gives Oldenberg a show for fall of 1962. Oldenburg thus creates his Ray Gun Theater which he uses his actors as objects in his store front.

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  Claes Oldenburg, Floor Cake 1962

  The Green Gallery show scheduled for September 1962. Oldenburg was faced with a challenge to fill a much bigger space than he had previously with The Store. Previously, his largest object was 3 feet square. His inspiration came from a car showroom and how the cars filled the space. He thus enlarged his objects to the size of cars and made everyday objects out of canvas, and vinyl stuffed with foam, cardboard and other material. Oldenburg moved to California the next year to get away from the mental craziness of NYC, continuing his soft sculptures and doing very engineered diagrams of these objects with thorough notes as to his specifications and ideas.

    
  Claes Oldenburg, Dormyer Mixer 1965 and "Ghost" Dormyer Mixers 1965

  Being soft and flesh-like, these sculptures took on a human essence to them that resembled the sexuality of the Ray Gun. Oldenburg’s notebooks reiterate this fact through free association of his objects to lifelike forms. He was obsessed with Freudian psychology which emphasizes the fact that humans unconsciously imbue inanimate objects with sexual significance. He states, "Basically, collectors want nudes, so I have supplied for them nude cars, nude telephones, nude electric plugs, nude switches, nude fans…The erotic or the sexual is the root of art (Fineberg 200)."

  
  Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument for Central Park North, New York City: Teddy Bear 1965

  In 1965, Oldenburg begins designing proposals for monumental sculptures. About this transition Oldenburg describes,

  One day I combined landscapes and objects, only I didn’t change the scale. I had a drawing of a vacuum cleaner and another of Manhattan – and I just superimposed them. The result was automatically a “giant vacuum cleaner” because the city held its scale – it didn’t become a miniature city. Somehow it worked (Fineberg 202).

   

  In 1964, Christo was Oldenberg’s neighbor and had been thinking up such monumental ideas for his sculpture as well, creating proposals for sites before having permission of funding to create such monumental works of art. The proposal ideas that Oldenberg would come up with were based on a spirit of the proposed location.

  
  Claes Oldenburg, Clothespin 1976

  After marrying Coojse Van Bruggen (a Dutch museum curator) he began creating many larger monumental sculptures while collaborating with architects and his wife. Clothespin is in Philadelphia’s city center. Oldenberg continued to work in this manner into the nineties where he would continue to recreate these ordinary objects in monumental sizes.

  Photorealism

  Photography became an important vehicle for dissemination of an idea and soon became the focus of many painters following in line with Richter. Artists used projectors to create images that seemed technically precise. Photorealism fed on the detachment of 60’s art (Johns, Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual art).

  Richard Estes

    
  Richard Estes Grants, 1972, Telephone Booths, 1968, and Downtown Near Broadway, 2003

  Richard Estes turned to Photorealism in 1967. He claims that he was "an old-fashioned academic painter trying to paint what I see… Nor do I have any verbal theories behind the work (Fineberg )." His work demonstrates a uniformly sharp focus, equalized a variety of textures.

  Chuck Close

    
  Chuck Close Big Self Portrait, 1967-68 and Self Portrait, 1997

  Chuck Close became famous for his large portraits measuring over 9 feet tall. He used Photographs and enlarged them using commercial art techniques including grids. When he went to color he first created his images by overlying four monochrome versions as in printing. His work is thus extremely calculated and speaks to his exploration of photographic and artistic reproductive processes.

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  Duane Hanson

      
  Duane Hanson Janitor, Museum Guard IV, Supermarket Lady, Queenie II, and Tourists II, 1970-1988

  Hanson's work brings photorealism into a three-dimensional realm. He produces life-like sculpture like Madame Tussad’s effigies. These figures produce a realistic presence often highlighting popular culture and stereotypes in America.

  Feminism

  Feminism as a formal political movement took hold as female artists sought recognition within the realm of art history. The concepts of personal identity based on physical reality was important to not only women, but people of race as well. Their positions in society had been repressed for centuries, and artists saw this as a time to express such differences and bring light to such issues.

  Judy Chicago

       
  Judy Chicago The Dinner Party, 1979 (Brooklyn Museum Elizabeth a Sacler Center for Feminist Art

  Judy Chicago's work highlights feminism. Her famous piece, Dinner Party is a collaboration by more than 400 women completed between 1974 and 1979. It demonstrates a discourse for women in art and the record of history. Symbolic of women’s achievements and struggles with inscriptions of women’s names on the floor and the table runner. The plates are designed with vaginal motifs.

  Ana Mendieta

   
  Ana Mendieta Tree of Life Series, 1977

  Mendieta is a Cuban born artist who focused on her own body in nature expressing her sensuality of experience. In her Tree of Life Series (1977), Mendieta places herself literally into nature. In her work, the female body is a primal source of life and sexuality like the Palaeolithic Venuses. There is a literal transformation of body to nature by covering herself and becoming one with the landscape similar to personifications of nature and the occult practices that came to the Caribbean with the Yoruba slaves in the sixteenth century. There are many feminist issues that play an important role in interpreting this work as well as the sense of the materials in nature while photography documents and communicates the artistic vision.

  Jenny Holzer

   
  Jenny Holzer Murder has its Sexual Side and Private Property Created Crime

   
  Jenny Holzer Protect me from what I want and The Future is Stupid

  Holzer was able to creat “truisms” beginning in 1997 by painting and later by gaining access to billboards, and electronic signage.

  Barbara Kruger

   
  Barbara Kruger I shop therefor I am and You are not yourself

   
  Barbara Kruger Your body is a battleground and Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face

  Kurger combines slogans with images creating trendy graphic design based on her eleven years of graphic design experience. She recently produced a grand installation at theHirshorn Museum in Washington DC:

  Guerilla Girls

  
  The Guerilla Girls Posters

  The Gurilla Girls are a group of women artists that came together after the “International Survey of Contemporary Art” in 1984 at MOMA where very few women artists were represented. They appeared on television, advertised, distributed leaflets and poster, and now have a web-page to bring attention to race and gender discrimination in the art world.

  Cindy Sherman

    
  Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills 21 and 13 and Untitled 92, 1978 and 1981

  Cindy Sherman uses appropriation creating intimate narrative fragments in her photographs to create many layers of readings implied through costume and setting. In 1977, she began photographing herself in 50’s outfits and other costumes and settings. These are not self-portraits in an ordinary sense as she explores a wide range of roles for women but based on the prefabricated roles of movies and media.

  Her work challenges the idea of fixed identity and has had a large impact on encouraging younger artists (women) in the nineties to use photography in this personal way. Sherman states about her work that "They’re not at all autobiographical, yet the pictures should trigger your memory so that you feel you have seen it before (Fineberg 471)."

  Consumerism

  Mass Market consumerism in itself offered imaginative possibilities. The commodification of art – art treated as an item for sale and consumption thus became a subject for several artists.

  Jeff Koons

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  Jeff Koons Michael Jackson and Bubbles and Pink Panther, 1988 and Puppy, 2000

  “The New,” was the principle series of work by Jeff Koons throughout the 1980's. In it, newness or a sense of pristine newness that accompanies the acquisition of consumer goods provokes a strange excitement in people. Koons loved the aphorism, “the hat makes the man” as his work deliberately moved to kitsch and also into explicit pornography making cynical consumer icons for the rich that were shocking for their commercial ambition and the confrontation with prevailing values of those who had dome to “own” culture in America.

  
  Jeff Koons String of Puppies, 1988

  Koons has had to defend his use of appropriation and satirization in his work against multiple copyright lawsuits. The most famous, Rogers v. Koons. with regard to String of Puppiesin which Koons lost the case and was forced to destroy his artworks. For more information on his court battles, this article by Owen, Wickersham, and Erickson Law Firm is a great resource. And for more on artistic copyright, this handout by John Mason provides some specifics about the law.

  Check out the recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum

  Environmental

  Robert Smithson

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  Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty, 1970

  Robert Smithson explored nature with a darker tone as he questions his personal identity, good and evil, and Christianity. Science Fiction and Geology provided a means of escaping these issues and working with nature. He creates a lot of Non-sites, literally displacing the sites by means of photographs and taking elements (rocks, earth, etc) from the place to the gallery.

  Many of his works, although site specific, can be re-created in similar locations. Spiral Jetty (1970) is Smithson’s best known work because of it’s temporary nature and idea of order and life in general. It is located in a remote corner of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It has been destroyed through time by the fluctuations in the lake.

   

  The work's well documented history gives a sense of time and space. It was a momentary, site specific work, but has persisted through other media. It was placed in an industrial area that seemed like something out of science fiction future. The salt from the water outlined the rock and earth, and the organisms gave the water a red color.

  Christo and Jeanne-Claude

  With increasing frequency, the words and images with which a problem is described limit the range of possible solutions one can see, as demonstrated in the events stemming from the revolutions in Paris. By symbolically attacking the status quo, and by appropriation made change seem possible to artists.

  Art in Real Events demonstrated that appropriated political insight with aesthetic beauty could create a mass critical debate on values. The first artist to communicate on a scale that enabled him to compete with corporations in shaping public perception of events was Christo. His work undermines convention by changing the context of how we see an object. In producing a Christo artwork, everyone finds themselves doing their usual job for something that has no practical purpose which is the truth of situationist methodology as described by Guy Debord. The irrationality of the situation and scale causes everyone to re-evaluate the world around them.

  Christo explains,

  The project is teasing society and society responds, in a way, as it responds in a very normal situation like building bridges, or roads, or highways. What we know is different is that all this energy is put to a fantastic irrational purpose, and that is the essence of the work (Fineberg 357).

  Without the cooperation of the public, they could never gain the permits or sell the drawings, collages, prints, and other developmental tools which finance the work. This is all due to the architectural scale of his pieces.

   

    
  Christo and Jean-Claude Surrounded Islands, 1983

  Although he had begun ideas for several sites in the 1970’s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were not able to gain permission to wrap the Reischstag in Berlin or the Pont Neuf in Paris or do their “gates” project in Central Park. In 1980, they are asked to do a major project for a government-sponsored Festival of the Arts in Miami. They rejected the commission, but went out on their own to create it after essentially rejecting the government funding.

  The site was a bay in Miami that in 1936, The Army Corps of Engineers had dredged the bay to create a channel for ocean going ships and placed the excavated material in 14 piles creating a chain of islands between Miami and Miami Beach. Christo and Jeanne-Claude studied environmental issues and engineering logistics in order to gain permission for their vision. They scientifically tested everything.

  Surrounded Islands (1983) so closely resembled the preliminary sketches that people had an odd sense of deja-vu. The work blended into the visual surroundings of the flora and deco atmosphere. It was experienced mostly through the media as it was difficult to get a good view of the entire thing from the ground. This also allowed for a connection with a mass audience and a creation of a mass dialogue. Christo states,

  I think the project has some kind of subversive dimension and this is why we have so many problems. Probably all the opposition, all the criticism of the project is basically that issue. If we spend three million dollars for a movie-set there would be no opposition. They can even burn the islands to be filmed and there would be no problem. The great power of the project is because it is absolutely irrational. This is the idea of the project, that the project put in doubt all the values (Fineberg 364).

  The success of this venture allowed Christo and Jeanne-Claude to soon wrap Pont Neuf in Paris and complete their other envisioned projects.

   

  Further Reading: Smarthistory, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates, 1979-2005. I also encourage you to visit their website as it contains an archive of images and video information.

  Performance Art

  Performance art took on new levels stemming from the Fluxus movement, happenings and the Judson Dance Theater.

  Fluxus

  Between 1962 and 1964, George Maciunas, Wolf Vostell, and Nam June Paik founded this group in Wiesbaden, West Germany which took off from the ideas of Cage. The fluxus movement was a Duchampian reaction against the expressionistic and symbolic aspects of happenings. They included minimalists such as George Brecht who created a work called “Chair” which consisted a white painted wicker rocker that encouraged interaction and viewer experience.

  Fluxus was an undefined group. Many artists such as Joseph Beuys and Christo had vague connections with it. The two main talents were Nam June Paik (who made significant video and television art later in his career) and Joseph Beuys (who was greatly influenced by their theatrical orientation).

  Nam June Paik

  Nam June Paik was an artist of the Fluxus movement. His work investigates sensations of the body in real time juxtaposed with the notion of collapsed and recombinant time as with television (time that can be reconfigured at will). He states, "We are moving in TV away from high fidelity pictures to low fidelity, the same as in painting. From Giotto to Rembrandt the aim was fidelity to nature. Monet changed all that. I am doing the same (Fineberg 352)." His work demonstrates a change from content-level perception to process level perception. How we see and what we see simultaneously. The works collage music, performance, and sculpture.

  
  Nam June Paik TV Bra, 1969

  TV Bra (1969): In an effort to integrate sex into music and our perceptions through media.

  
  Nam June Paik Video Fish, 1975-79

  Noveaux Realistes

  
  Noveaux Realistes Manifesto, October 27, 1960

  The Noveaux Realistes movement was much like the junk art aesthetic in New York. Jean Tinguely was probably most notable of the artists of this group who’s manifesto was signed October, 27, 1960 in Yves Klein’s apartment.

   

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  Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York 1960

  Tinguely's Homage to New York, is a sculpture that took itself apart was constructed twice. The first time for this exhibition, the second time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it was a disaster as things came apart, the fire department came in and had to take care of the mess. Tinguely however found this to be a successful piece because of it. Duchamp announced around this time, "Ill tell you what’s going to happen, the public will keep on buying more and more art, and husbands will start bringing home little paintings to their wives on the way home from work, and we’re all going to drown in a sea of mediocrity (Fineberg 231)." Maybe Tinguely and a few others sense this and are trying to destroy art before it is too late.

  Joseph Beuys

  Joseph Beuys was the first artist to emerge in postwar Germany and achieve international celebrity based on the exploration of his German identity. There is a strong closeness with nature that is evident in German Culture and this comes out in his work. His work often refers to a particular event in his life, a reawakening: The story is of a plane crash in 1943 when he was part of Hitler’s army. He crashed during a snowstorm over Crimea (between Russian and German fronts). He was left for dead, but a group of nomadic Tartars rescued him, covered him in layers of animal fat and felt to raise his freezing body temperature and gave him a new life.

  Animals take on a symbolism of a direct connection with the beyond. He believed that modern science and technology had missed out on some mystical route in nature that he was trying to express.

  Graffiti Art

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  Borofsky opened the door for a Graffiti aesthetic within the art world as a wave of expressionist graffiti bombed the New York Subway in the 1980’s. The writers were not naïve and their style turned towards gestural abstraction during a time of postmodernism. Although they had little formal education, Rammellzee wrote a manifesto of 1979-1986 called IONIC TREATISE GOTHIC FUTURISM ASSASSIN KNOWLEDGES OF THE REMANIPULATED SQUARE POINT ONE TO 720Degrees RAMMELLZEE . John Carlin describes this as “reads like Jacques Derrida on acid linking the biophysical structure of the universe to the shape and evolution of letters. The thrust of the treatise is the ability of symbolic creation to undermine institutional control. It sets fort a symbolic war wherein the artist’s ability to manipulate letters will change the reality structure.

  Most graffiti art is attributed to the early seventies to an alias named TAKI 183 who began “Tag ups” as he wrote his name on the streets where he hung out. In the Eighties, the Renaissance of graffiti, the writers were able to take on the whole outside of subway cars creating elaborate murals inspired by comics and politics.

  Keith Haring

  
  Kieth Haring Drawing in the New York Subway, 1981

      
  Keith Haring Untitled Works, 1980-85

  Kieth Haring is probably the most well known of the "writers" as he was able to appropriate his work into the art gallery setting. He was a graduate from The School of Visual Arts in New York, so Haring was a trained artist focusing on political themes. At 22 he began working in a style that was inspired by the graffiti writers as he noticed the black patches where the subway would cover old posters and began drawing in these spaces with simple white line. He passionately created more than 5,000 of these drawings between 1981 and 1985 gaining considerable attention and was arrested several times as it became a war between him and the transit authority.

  Haring created icons of mass culture to which everyone could relate using the same devices as advertising: repeated trademark images with simple instantly understandable messages. He saturated the public with his images, playing off the media and consumerism as he created them on any surface and opened the “Pop Shop” (a location still in existence on Lafayette) in 1986 in SoHo, much like Oldenberg had done with his works. Haring unfortunately died of AIDS in 1990, only 31 years old and in the prime of his career.

  90’s

  The 1990's was a decade in which the easy millionaires of the 80’s lost their fortunes and started looking for jobs. Many hoped there would be a similar trend for the careerist fine artists and that art would be more about ideas again. The overnight millionaires of the computer and entertainment industries came to the fore and global consumerism continued. Big corporations became larger, and smaller ones disappeared. Main Street is replaced by the sameness in shopping malls, airports, and commuter traffic lines. Everyone bought cell phones, had the Internet, and were increasingly becoming tied into this technological age. The world becomes smaller with the advances in communication, transportation, and world politics, meanwhile people begin to loose a sense of identity.

  Return to the body

  The feminists of the 70’s made it clear how the introspective look at the body could bring identity to the artist. Many artists begin to look back to the body to express their own forms of identity.

  Robert Gober

    
  Robert Gober Untitled, 1989-91 and Sink, 2000

  Robert Gober began making legs, in a fetishized manner. He states, "I was in this tiny little plane sitting next to this handsome businessman, and his trousers were pulled above his socks and I was transfixed in this moment by his leg (Fineberg 480)." His work is oddly dissociated from the “normal” relations between things and the world. Creates a tension between the public and private identity.

  Kiki Smith

  
  Kiki Smith Women with Sheep, 2009

  Kiki Smith is the daugther of Tony Smith and uses tactile materials in a figurative way to bring a visceral quality to her representations of the human form.

  Matthew Barney

     
  Matthew Barney Cremaster (Stills), 1994-2003

  Barney graduated from Yale College in 1989. He began using prosthetics and make-up in the 90’s to create human/creatures for abstract films. Sexual but ambiguously gendered. Coloring is simplified and exaggerated. His performances mix drama, the sense of the happening, music, and theology. His performances are done specifically for video and are seen as if paintings. Below you will find one of the Cremaster performances:

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  Cultural Identity

  Like those who turned to the body, many minority artists turned to older, stylistic representations of cultural identity. They focused on aspects of life that may be overlooked otherwise to bring a sense of social presence to their culture.

  Yinka Shinobare

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  Yinka Shinobare How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies), 2006 and Odile and Odette

  Yinka Shinobare expresses the post colonial culture through fashion, installation, and performances mixing African and Victorian motifs. His work is an expression of identity but also often a social critique.

  Ai Weiwei

    
  Ai Weiwei Dropping, 1995, Snake, and Sunflower Seeds

  Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist who finds unique methods for commenting on his identity and Chinese culture. He produces sculpted installations and films fully utilizing media to aid in his expressive result often ending in controversy and even arrest.

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  Takashi Murakami

   
  Takashi Murakami Hiropon and Gero Tan

  Takashi Murakami has blown up in the contemporary art scene with his appropriation of Japanese Manga aesthetic while commenting directly on Japanese culture and the aesthetic itself.

  Kehinde Wiley

  
  Kehinde Wiley Triple Portrait of Charles I, 2007

  Wiley is an African American artist in Brooklyn, who utilizes the traditions of portraiture to highlight individuals of African decent.

  Art as Controversy

  A new generation of British artists focused on a body of art in that “truth” arose from the conversation around the work rather than from what was represented in it or even directed by it.

  Dameon Hirst

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  Damien Hirst A Thousand Years, 1990, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 and This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home 1996

  Dameon Hirst blends uncomfortably visceral materials and explores media sensations. He escalates the shock value of his works, but still maintains a strong ideology in order to justify such practices.

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  Other Videos About Hirst

  Rachel Whiteread

      
  Rachel Whiteread House, 1993-94, Ghost, 1990, Untitled (Library), 1999, Twenty-five Spaces, 1995, and Water Tower, 1998-2000

  Whiteread used controversy to push her artwork’s message. House was produced in the last remnant of a torn-down block of Victorian row houses in East London through poured concrete. The press started on the piece and before the month was out, she was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize, but on the same day the local council voted to demolish the project. The controversy stems from the felling one gets in this detail of other record of a human situation, the lives that were lived in the space left in the cast. It is like a tombstone or a memorial with the prevasiveness of death, and that thought can be quite unsettling.She later continues with this idea and creates works such as Ghost, and Library which a similar one was done as a memorial fro Holocaust victims for Vienna.

  Fashion

  Vanessa Beecroft

    
  Vanessa Beecroft Shows, 1998-2001

  Beecroft made paintings influenced by fashion design drawings. She also produced performances in which nude and semi-nude fashion models are placed in public spaces. She structures her shows in a way that the models become more like mannequins, overtly sexual, but depersonalised in structural arrangement and engagement with the viewer. The grids or structures in which she places the figures are similar to the commodification of previous artworks such as those by McCollumn.

  Mariko Mori

   
  Mariko Mori Play With Me and Subway, 1994

  Mariko Mori is a New York and Tokyo based artist who graduated from fashion design school and was a fashion model. She often uses makeup and photography to create a total fantasy world around herself in installations. In Japan, she dressed as a sexy cyborg and put herself into public for photos similar to the works by Cindy Sherman. In Play with methere is a double meaning, connecting her to the toy store, and the sexual availability in a utopia of pure unemotional sexuality. She states that "when you wear clothes, you become a personality, you become the clothes (Fineberg 495)."

  
  Mariko Mori Pureland, 1996

  Mori's photo prints are done on a massive scale (10 x 12 feet) creating a panoramic reality. In 1995, she sifts to experimenting with computer manipulation to create 3-D Virtual Reality videos that are accompanied by 20 ft wide images.

  
  Mariko Mori Wave UFO, 2003

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  Mariko Mori: Oneness from UM Stamps School of Art & Design on Vimeo.

  Postmodern Conceptualism and the Postmodern Self

  Much of the 90’s is based on a conceptual model in which the artist readily shifted back and forth form one medium to another seeking the most appropriate form in which to express a particular idea. The idea in turn often derived from a structural concept or regime rather than following a more traditional formal development. Artists were working in sculpture one minute, then painting the next basing their media to follow a concept (“The Media is the Message”). Corporate conformity and the expansion of consumerism and marking left less and less mental space for a cohesive sense of self.

  The Internet begins to become a main mode of communicating, shopping, transferring data, and “surfing” a sea of news and information without time, distance, or boundaries. The Internet went from 0 to universal in a little over a decade and it’s effect on personal consiousness is what has become a key issue at the turn of the century. Books such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) have started to become a reality as humans fuse with computers and communicate mainly digitally.

  Ebon Fischer

  
  Ebon Fisher Nervepool

  Fischer turned to the web to create social utopias that integrate art, design, and social philosophy. He teams together with designers to create web-based programs, digital art with no fixed materiality.

  William Kentridge

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  William Kentridge is a South African artist who specializes in film and animation. His works are surreal and strong images of social commentary produced using a unique method of drawing and erasing.

  Further Reading: Rose, Josh."William Kentridge's Drawing form Tide Table (Soho in Deck Chair)." SmartHistory, Khan Academy. Web. 2014.

  Conclusion

  In the year of Kandinsky’s first abstract paintings and the most experimental moment of Picasso’s cubism, a Munich critic brought out a book called The Death of Art in which he complained that art is dying of the masses and of materialism… for the first time we have entered a period without direction, without an artistic style, without a young revolutionary generation. The most important avant-garde art has always been difficult to recognize or understand. It requires work from the serious viewer and baffles people usually making them uncomfortable and angry. It embodies an individual’s struggle to come to terms with his or her inner thoughts and identity in relation to the constantly changing facts of existence in the world.

  Freud pointed out in Civilization and its Discontenents, a permanent tension exists between the individual and society and the alienation that this tension engenders perpetuates an avant-garde as the expression of an enduring human need. Art contributes to the ideals and models of thinking about important issues in a culture. We need to look beyond market influences and beyond the intellectual fashions of academia to see this spiritual dimension, because artists enter their ideas into the world, not just into books and art history classes (Fineberg, 504).

   

  Challenge

  It is now on to you to find artists that demonstrate a contemporary spirit, push boundaries, and contribute to the future of art. You have been given a glimpse at an array of different talents, directions, and theories on art. As the art world progresses, it is important to keep an eye open to artistic events and consider how these new artists contribute.

  I urge you now to use what remaining weblinks and questions to suggest artists that you find. Artists that are currently displaying their work in some fashion and explore areas of art that we may not have covered in these lessons.

  Notes

  This module was produced by Professor Josh Yavelberg utilizing a mixture of open educational resources and notes from:
  Kleiner, Fred. Gardner's Art through the Ages: The Western Perspective,|. Vol. 2. Boston: Cengage Learning, Print, 2013. 
  Feinberg, Jonathan. Art Since 1940. Third Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Print, 2012.